“I need to know…” How could he put it? How could he ask for forgiveness without seeming weak, needy or vulnerable? Perhaps all three?
“Need to know what?” Captain Germaine grew nervous, moving closer to his ladylove as though he needed to protect her from him.
Darius swallowed uneasily, the long years of guilt lodging in his throat. “I need to know that I’ve atoned for my actions all those years ago. That there is no ill feeling or thoughts of retaliation between us?”
“You did this, you kidnapped my daughter—”
“—from her kidnapper. At the time I honestly thought I was saving her.”
“You did all of this to apologise for a decades-old mutiny?”
Darius was rather confused about the turn of events himself. When he’d been a mischievous pirate on the high seas, he’d known when to stay and when to leave with his hide intact. He seemed to have lost the life-saving ability on the crest of a wave somewhere between Boston and Scotland. “You once intimated there was something I could do to make it up to you but you failed to say how.”
“Why now? Why not five years ago? Six?”
“I mean to build a life for myself, a real life, and I don’t need old ghosts tracking me down. I mean to make friends now, no more enemies.”
The captain shook his head and rubbed his neck. “Always were a strange lad. Is this the last time we’ll be seeing you?”
Darius nodded and stood slowly.
“Well then I’d say we are even, you and I.”
“No hard feelings?” Darius’s outstretched hand was enveloped in a much larger, more weathered one, shook once, twice, a third time. Freedom, the very air almost whispered. But it was more than a word for him. It was a promise.
“What will you do now?” Germaine asked.
“I have business in England.” Darius walked to the door, stopping only to look back one more time as the captain still shielded his ladylove with his body, offering her his protection as well as his heart. And she was a lady, this one, right down to her toes. An English rose.
How he longed for someone to protect, to give his heart to. But he was a bastard. He had no name other than the one he’d given himself and no English lady would give her heart into his keeping. His past was not only splattered with blood, it was drowned in it, along with piracy and worse. Eventually he would take a bride but not from the English. He only craved a peaceful, easy existence in Boston with a woman who cared nothing for names, for titles, for society. There they cared a lot less about who you were. As long as a man worked hard and paid his way, he was accepted. Darius could live with that.
“Business for Montrose?” Germaine prodded.
He drew a deep breath. Hastily scrawled words written on tattered paper flashed across his mind as he shook his head. “No. Not for Montrose.” He bid a quick farewell and closed the door behind him.
He was on his own now. This time it was personal, a matter of pride, of honour and perhaps revenge.
As his fingers twitched once more to hold his weapon, Darius thought it might even be about death. About decades-old hurts and more recent deceptions giving him reason enough to eliminate the Earl of Wickham, his despicable sire, from his life, and this world, once and for all.
Chapter One
The ex-pirate known half the seas over only as Darius crashed through thick, snow-burdened foliage with several curses. Words that would blister the skin off a sailor had there been one around to hear. Not that there was.
He cursed again.
His coat fit like a second skin yet ice-cold water sought its way in to trickle down his back, adding yet more layers to his misery and frustration. How the hell did a man get lost on his own land? For two hours he’d been fighting his way through dense plantations, the thick pine beginning to feel as though it reached out to slowly strangle the life from him.
His first mate, now in the implausible position the English labelled a valet, had warned him to get his bearings right before setting off to survey what was now his. The house he could finally, after so many years, call home. He’d laughed in Wiggins’s face. Darius had grown up running this land. He knew it as well as the back of his now tanned and scarred hand.
At least he thought he did.
With little sense of direction surrounded by trees and soil, having been at sea for over a decade, and no familiar landmarks to save him, he was thoroughly lost. To make matters worse, he would be late for lunch. The men—his men—would come to find him and rescue him.
They were going to roast him alive. Lord Lost they would call him for the foreseeable future. It would be unbearable.
After the third time walking past what looked suspiciously like the same still, snow-covered giant, he decided drastic action was necessary. Shrugging off his thick overcoat, Darius dropped it onto the frozen undergrowth and then stood back to gauge the best way up. If he climbed high enough, he might just glimpse the old slate roof of the house and be home within the hour.
His hand stopped mid-air near the first branch.
Home.
He’d never thought to call any house he slept in home but from the moment he’d walked through the door two days before, he’d felt it. It was a right he’d been denied as a child. Privilege, power, even a warm bed, a hot meal and a kind word had been out of reach for the bastard son of an earl. An earl who should have met with an unfortunate accident rather than a title, lands and gold. His grandfather had always tried to make Darius feel welcome, to feel at home, to help him to find peace and belonging
