Not the words he’d expected and he took each one as if a blow to his chest. “Did you honestly think I would just let you go? You had been captured by a pirate.”
She raised her brow but ignored his words and went on. “Now half this town will think Amelia’s baby a bastard.”
“Unless she married in the last six months, that baby is a bastard, Mother.”
“That’s not the story we put around, though.” Her fingers twisted in her lap until the skin on her knuckles went white.
“We?” he asked, trying to have a care for her obvious nerves but frustration was tipping him to intense anger.
“’Twas my idea, lad,” Germaine told him. “How about we start at the beginning rather than at the end, though, before you get all red in the face and think to knock me down again. Won’t happen a second time.”
“Richard,” his mother warned him in a low tone. “We need him to listen.”
“You are the woman he is going to marry. Aren’t you?” One of the pieces fell into place. He nearly vomited. Right there on the toes of her shoes. His stomach was a whirling storm and little beads of sweat coated his palms.
His mother nodded. “We have spoken of vows, yes.”
“I don’t believe this.” James stood and resumed his pacing. He only stopped to get Hobson to fill him another glass.
“It isn’t what you think, Lasterton. None of it.”
“He’s right, son. I don’t know how it went so far as it did. I thought I would write you a letter and you would forget about us for a time.”
He stopped dead in his tracks, incredulous, injured. “Forget you? The only family I have left in this world? What kind of man do you take me for?”
Germaine stood and wobbled on one leg; James’s mother reached her hand out to support him. James looked away before he could see if the older man took it.
His mother went on with her story. “Amelia came to me and confessed she was with child—”
He stopped pacing again, fell into his chair. “Before you left?”
“It’s the reason we left. Neither one of us could face the scandal. Not after your brother and your father… You’d worked so hard to lift us out and she was too afraid and ashamed to plunge you back in.”
“You should have come to me. She should have come to me.”
“She barely knows you, James. You were gone for so many years and when you came back, you were changed. Even I didn’t know you anymore.”
But… But… He loved his sister. They had been so close. She had to know he would do anything for her. Had the Butcher nonsense scared her or had it indeed been his manner, his nightmares, his grumpiness?
“So your option was to run away? Where does he come into the story?”
“It seems the ship we paid for passage on was not as she seemed. Only two days out and she began to sink. If Richard hadn’t come across us, we would have been lost.”
James emptied his glass again. He breathed hard for a few moments as the liquid burned all the way to his soul and then he asked, “So you rescued them? You didn’t take them to get at me?”
“Get at you for what, lad? I don’t even know you.”
James looked into the captain’s eyes, saw the confusion there, the blankness. “I was the one who took your leg.”
“You were?” they both said at the same time, the rough pirate captain and his genteel mother as one. He cringed.
“It was my men on the ship that day, the one you tried to take in the Channel. We fought, I stabbed you.”
“I killed that man,” Germaine said with a shake of his head. “My sword cleaved him in two before I pushed him into the water.”
“A flesh wound. I figured my odds were better in the water than on the ship.”
Germaine sank back into his seat with another shake of his head. “I don’t believe it. So you thought I took the women as what? Revenge?”
“To punish me, perhaps, for your lost ransoms. When Daniella told me about your leg—” he winced but went on “—then yes, it did seem as though you might wish for revenge.”
His mother spoke next. “Why do you travel with Daniella? You said she was your wife.”
“I’ll bet she trapped you in one of those schemes of hers.”
“You’ve heard about them?” James couldn’t believe it. Her father had known all along but never put a stop to them?
“Of course I have. I bet you came here to get out of it? To give her back?”
“Would you take her?” It wasn’t the best question but after the look the captain had given her earlier, he wanted to know what her fate would be if he did decide to let her go. As if he even had any say in it anymore.
“I’d have to now, I suppose.” He sighed. “I wanted better for her. I thought together with my money and Anthony’s title, it would be enough to make some forget her past.”
“Why not let Daniella live here with you, in retirement? You could have found her a nice husband and seen her happy.”
Germaine shook his head. “It was never my plan to live here at all. The men and I were to disappear, to live in isolation and only sail for the pleasure of it. I wanted Daniella to have the glittering balls and the privilege. I wanted her to be safe from further persecution.”
“Let me understand,” James said, trying as hard as he could to keep his temper in check. “You knew Daniella was ruining her chances at a match, but you did nothing? I don’t understand.”
“I knew she would rebel, but I thought she would settle. I would have sent word to her but the storm rolled through and the ships were all too damaged to sail. And as Amelia nears her time, I can’t leave them. Daniella is a woman
