Lady Derring Takes a Lover - Julie Anne Long Page 0,16

survived. Like cockroaches, when dispersed, they ran for the baseboards, the cracks of England: the tunnels, the byroads, the tributaries, the caves. And recongregated.

But they were no match for a commander who’d survived his first ten years in St. Giles slums. He was fueled by a cold hatred for those who preyed on the defenseless. In St. Giles he’d known terror and ugliness; withstanding them was the foundation of his own courage. He’d learned to fight, to hide, to steal, to strategize. And while he’d never known his father and he’d been orphaned when he was eight, from one or both parents he’d inherited a conscience and a wily intelligence and perhaps, after a fashion, luck: he’d stumbled into a position as a naval captain’s assistant when he was ten years old. He rose ceaselessly in the ranks from that point on. The navy knew what they had in him.

Hardy had nearly broken the back of smuggling gangs in England.

All save one.

He stared out at the water now, black and oily smooth, at the ship he’d arranged to buy before Lord and Lady Millcoke’s house had burned to the ground, killing them and their young children. All because Millcoke had refused to allow the Blue Rock gang to conscript their horses to transport contraband cigars.

He’d sent Massey back to the Stevens Hotel to get some sleep and to await further orders from him.

“I’ll have a word with Derring’s solicitor. And we might as well try to track down his widow, too,” he’d told him.

Massey had told him he was going to stay up for a few more hours trying his hand at writing a poem about his sweetheart.

Tristan had furrowed his brow. “What is your sweetheart’s name?”

“Emily, sir,” Massey had told him tolerantly.

Tristan knew her name, of course. Emily Emily Emily Emily Emily Emily. For God’s sake. That was the whole of Massey’s conversation when they weren’t catching smugglers.

He did like to tease his very patient and literal lieutenant.

“Sometimes it’s too much, sir, the feelings, and you just have to try to write a poem,” Massey said earnestly.

Whatever on earth that meant. Sticky sentiment was a foreign language to Tristan. His own carnal education had taken place at the hands of generous whores and willing widows, and his one foray into actual courtship had been an illuminating lesson in how one’s heart, loins, and social status could conspire to hand him a rare and shocking defeat. He was, he understood now, much better off. And much wiser.

“Do not inflict that poem upon me if you do write it,” he warned Massey.

“Of course not, sir,” Massey soothed. He’d tried that once before. He’d learned his lesson.

Massey was a brutally talented soldier and a loyal right-hand man, and after a fashion, a friend.

But he, too, dreamed of the next part of his life.

Which is what Tristan was doing here at the East India docks, staring at the Zephyr, the ship he intended to purchase. Staring into the abyss—or rather, the Thames—helped him think.

He quirked the corner of his mouth humorlessly. And to think, he’d decided last year that by this time in his life he’d be a dull, respectable merchant, running respectable cargo—silks and spices—with his own ship. It hadn’t seemed unreasonable. After all, hadn’t he nearly ground the smuggling trade into dust?

Instead he was tracking cigars.

One. By. Bloody. One.

He would do it as long as it took. But it was making him, and all his men, restive. They were designed for a different sort of action.

It was a wonder the water below him didn’t begin a slow boil, such was his focus.

Because of all the fatal mistakes the Blue Rock gang had finally made—the fire set in a barn meant to intimidate an aristocratic family into allowing them the use of their horses but which had gone horribly wrong; incurring the rage of the king, who had a soft spot for Lady Millcoke, an old lover; and igniting a cold, vengeful wrath in a certain Captain Tristan Hardy—the cigars were probably the biggest.

Because they were singular. Staggeringly expensive. A unique sop to the vanity and boredom of wealthy men, and wildly profitable for the smugglers. They arrived already rolled and needed to be transported quickly. Typical smuggled cargos—tea, tobacco, spirits—were so undistinguished as to be difficult to trace, if they got past the blockade men at all. And since Tristan had become commander, they simply didn’t get past the blockade.

But those cigars—created somewhere in France, by God knows who—were as distinctive