“I don’t care about your scars, but there is one thing that concerns me. I have no doubt but that you had something of a harem, Griffin. I will not tolerate it here. You’ll need to stay on the right side of the law, and out of other women’s beds.”
His smile threatened to burst out, but he reined it in. Damn, but she was a tough woman. It was thrilling. “There will never be another woman for me, Phoebe. Not even if I finally meet a woman named Poppy. And I don’t find theft interesting in itself.”
She nodded, and he held out his hand to bring her to her feet. It wasn’t that he hadn’t had women in the last fourteen years, because he certainly had. But not one of those women had moved him like Phoebe.
It must be some odd thing attached to a marriage license.
“Would you like me to go with you to visit your father? As a buffer, as it were?”
That was rather unexpected. “No need,” he said. “I imagine you have things to do here, with the children.” Clearly, she was nothing like his mother. He had been lucky to see the viscountess once a fortnight, if that. Not that he had missed her; how can one miss someone of whom one knows nothing?
“Nanny is more than capable of handling bedtime.”
“I’ll be home for supper,” he repeated.
He shifted his stance, and for once it wasn’t a response to pain. He was hard as rock, for no good reason other than that his wife was looking at him as if she were worried about him.
“Must we do that tonight?” she asked, swallowing again.
Griffin’s mind was filled with images of himself tumbling her onto the bed and tearing off floaty layers of clothing. But even as his mind offered a dozen reasons why he should take her with dispatch, like any self-respecting pirate, her eyes stopped him.
They were dark with strain. Of course she didn’t want to fall into bed with a burly stranger who strode into her house and declared himself her husband.
He could wait. They had a lifetime ahead of them.
He wanted to earn a place here, in this warm, happy house, full of illegitimate children, nursemaids, and one beautiful woman with a stubborn chin. Not to steal it, or force it.
He wanted that—her—more than he had ever wanted anything in his life.
NINE
Biddulph Barry, Viscount Moncrieff, lived in Walford Court, an hour or so from Phoebe’s house. It had been the country seat of the Barrys for generations, the place where Griffin grew up.
Sitting decorously in a carriage—because the very idea of slinging a leg over a horse made him feel faint—Griffin kept thinking about the fact that Phoebe didn’t know his father well. It sounded as if the viscount had not embraced his son’s wife.
He was unsurprised. His father was obsessed by the rituals and traditions of the nobility. It had undoubtedly nearly killed him to realize that he would either have to sell his son to a merchant’s daughter or lose the ancestral estate.
Unfortunately Griffin had lusted after a life in which titles had no meaning, where a man earned honor from use of his own strength and wit.
He and his father had spent his childhood at loggerheads. Consequently, he wasn’t all that bothered when he woke to find himself at sea, under the command of a disreputable scoundrel named Captain Dirk.
Piracy was a perfect revenge . . . an antidote to his father’s vainglorious love of the aristocracy.
In fact, he hadn’t even bothered to write to his father for years after he left England, not until James’s father, the old duke, died. That death had been a shock for both of them, but especially for James, who knew damn well that his father had died wondering whether his only son was dead or alive.
It gave a man to think. Griffin’s father knew he was alive because he had instructed his agent to reassure his family on a regular basis. And he had sent home gold as well. His father had been compelled to sell his son to a merchant; Griffin’s money ensured that his younger sisters did not have to suffer the same fate.
But when James ascended to the duchy in absentia, Griffin realized that perhaps he should be in closer touch with his father. So he had written him a letter, telling him bluntly that he had become a pirate, even though by then Griffin and James were de facto privateers. He