Pirate Wolf Trilogy (48 page)

“Because of
me?” Beau gasped.

“
Thanks
to you,
my love. Moreover, her ladies will suffer to remove all of the
mirrors from her sight so as not to allow too harsh a comparison to
her wrinkled skin and painted white complexion. The courtiers will
all be springing out of their codpieces like schoolboys. I will be
forced to defend my claim a thousand times ere this night is
over.”

Beau laughed
and curled her arms around his shoulders, coming to him in an
irreverent crush of silk and velvet. “Be silent, fool. Or put your
mouth to better use.”

“Gladly.” He
bowed his head, kissing her with a lusty vengeance that left her
lips redder than any rouge wash could have done.

When he
released her, she continued to stare up at him, her eyes so round
and compellingly flecked with gold, he laughed and kissed her
again. “Here? Now? What of all the hard work your maids have
done?”

“I would not
give it a moment’s thought,” she breathed honestly.

Well”—he gave
her a husbandly peck on the cheek— “I would. Once I come out of
this stuffed peacock’s costume, I stay out of it.”

Beau grinned.
“I would not—”

“—Give it a
moment’s thought, yes. I know. And if that is the case, I shall
have to occupy your mind with other things. What were you asking me
when you came into the room? You thought something was
missing?”

She stood
back and ran her fingers over her bodice. The cut was so snug, her
breasts compressed so flat, there seemed to be far too much
plumping of flesh over the squared edge of the neckline. “I tried
pulling up the ruff and pull down on the strands of the necklace,
but there still seems to be too much of me to cover.”

Dante
tried not to smile. “It is the newest French cut, I will admit, and
probably too scandalous for a court of English
Protestants.”

“Then why did
you put me in it?”

He feathered a
fingertip over the mounds of tender flesh. “So I can ease my
boredom over the next few hours by imagining the pleasure of taking
you out of it.”

“And in the
meantime? If I bend over?”

“If you bend
over, mam’selle,” he murmured. “The Court will be more than simply
scandalized.”

The suddenly
very young and not very assured Comtesse Isabeau de Tourville
sighed and pressed her cheek against his broad shoulder. “I wish we
were a thousand miles away, with a deck beneath our feet and canvas
over our heads.”

Dante wrapped
his arms around her briefly, then straightened with a smile.
“Perhaps I can make your evening a little easier to bear by giving
you your gift now.”

“Gift? What
gift?”

He kissed her
on the tip of her nose and led her to the window. “You have to
understand she isn’t quite finished. Pitt still has to put in her
teeth and Lucifer has to do something with rooster gizzards that
I’m not altogether certain you want to know.”

Beau
frowned and looked out the window. Dante’s London house sat on the
banks of the Thames, giving him a mariner’s view of the busy river.
Lying at anchor in the deeper water midcourse was a new ship, so
closely resembling the golden replica of the
Virago
, it sent a small shiver down Beau’s spine. There
had been some slight changes made in the design. Her lines were
cleaner, her castles almost level with the main deck, allowing
space for an extra sail on the mizzen and fore.

“
I had
ordered her keel laid before we left for Vera Cruz,” he explained
softly. “I just hadn’t thought of a name for her yet.”

Beau
followed the gracious sweep of the ship's bow and found the carved
figurehead beneath. It was a woman’s head, as shockingly familiar
as the one she saw in the mirror each morning, but below, it was
the body of a swan with her wings outspread to catch the
wind.

“
My other
magnificent
Black Swan”
he
said. “Do you like her?”

“Like her?”
Beau whispered. “She looks … like she could fly.”

“Indeed,
mam’selle, I am told she can … with a firm enough hand to guide
her.” He waited until the large golden eyes turned to him before he
added, “You once told me you would not marry a man who tried to
take you away from the sea. How do you feel about having married
one selfish enough to want you as much for your skills at the helm
as for your skills at rescuing him from his own foolish pride?”

Beau opened her
mouth to reply but words, for once, failed her.

They did not
fail the Queen, however, when she was in receipt an hour later of
another note embossed with the De Tourville coat of arms. It seemed
the comte’s fever had returned with a vengeance, and, as he advised
His Most Gracious Majesty, it would not be safe for either him or
his wife to attend Court until all risk of a relapse was out of his
system.

THE END

or just the
beginning?

read on for
book two....

THE IRON ROSE

Marsha Canham

Original Copyright 2003 © Marsha Canham

Ebook copyright 2011 © Marsha Canham

ISBN 978-0-9877023-2-6

This Ebook version is dedicated to my three
munchkins,

Austin, Payton, and Carter.

PROLOGUE

August,
1614

As she had
often heard her father say in the moments before the first
broadside was fired: it was a fine day to die. The sun was a
searing white eye in a sky so blue and clear it pained the soul to
stare upward too long. Staring anywhere for even the briefest split
second was not an option, however, for in the blink of an eyelash
there was another flash of cold steel, another shock of contact as
the two blades clashed together, sliding their full length in a
shower of blue sparks.

Juliet was
beginning to feel the strain in her wrist. She withstood her
opponent’s enraged offense as long as she could then broke away,
spinning and crouching low in one fluid motion, letting instinct
take over where strength was failing. A second shadow loomed behind
her, the face bloodied but the eyes focussed with lethal intent,
and Juliet cursed. She sprang to the side but found herself
cornered, the flames of a burning spar on one side, the fat barrel
of a twenty-four pounder demi-culverin on the other. The two
Spaniards, desperate for their own lives moments before, saw her
predicament and closed rank, crowding her against the rail. One of
them muttered under his breath and grabbed his crotch. The other
laughed and licked the filthy tips of his fingers in agreement.

Juliet’s sword
slashed out in a brilliant flare of sunlight. The laughing Spaniard
saw those fingers fly off his hand and land with a skitter of red
splashes on the deck. While he was busy finding the breath to
scream, she swung on his cohort and cut a wider grin on his face,
one that went from ear to ear and severed the jugular clean
through. She used her boot to kick him aside when he started to
fall forward, then leaped gracefully over the twitching body as
another snarling attacker rushed to take his place.

Juliet raised
her sword, her slender body braced to meet a mighty downward stroke
intended to cleave her skull in half. The impact shuddered through
her arms and jarred her shoulders, bending her back over the
gunwale. The savagery of the blow drew a grunt, then a curse, but
she was able to deflect the blade long enough to reach into her
belt with her left hand and unsheathe her dagger. The blade was
eight inches long, sharp as a needle, and it went through the
Spaniard’s leather doublet like a finger through lard.

Juliet barely
had time to regain her balance when she caught the glint of a
steel-pot helmet. The arquebusier stood just out of reach of a
sword thrust, calmly balancing his weapon on a handy length of
broken timber, the fuse smoking, the trumpet nose aimed squarely
between her eyes.

Trapped against
the gunwale, she could do little but watch as his finger squeezed
the trigger to release the mainspring. She saw the serpentine lock
trip forward and touch the fuse to the priming pan. The powder
ignited with a small puff of smoke, lighting the main charge and
sending the two ounce iron ball exploding down the barrel.

Out of nowhere,
a streak of lavender violet and silver lace cut across Juliet’s
path. A slash of steel knocked aside the snout of the blunderbuss
just as it discharged its round and the shot went wild. The
stranger’s sword glittered again, finding a vulnerable gap between
the arquebusier’s iron cuirass and the exposed band of skin beneath
his helmet, and the Spaniard heeled backward in a gout of bright
red blood. Juliet saw the flash of a grin as her rescuer turned and
extended a gloved hand to lift her away from the rail.

“Are you all
right, boy?”

Juliet found
herself staring into the deepest, darkest blue eyes she had ever
seen. They were partly shadowed by the brim of an elegant
cavalier’s hat, the one side cocked up at a jaunty angle, topped by
a plume dyed the same shade of purple as his doublet and
breeches.

“Boy?”

Instead of
answering, Juliet drew a pistol out of her crossbelt and fired it,
her finger squeezing the trigger before the surprise could register
on the stranger’s face. The shot was propelled past a broad,
lavender-clad shoulder and thudded into the chest of the Spaniard
who was about to slay one of her crewmen at the opposite side of
the deck.

The midnight
blue eyes followed the shot, then flicked back to Juliet. The grin
reappeared, wide and very white through a neatly trimmed moustache
and imperial.

“A fine shot.
And yes, I can see you are very much all right.”

He touched the
brim of his hat in a salute, then was gone, leaping over what was
left of the taffrail to rejoin the melée taking place on the main
deck. He was not two heartbeats out of her startled sight when a
massive, ear-shattering explosion rocked her off her feet and threw
her hard against the barrel of the cannon.

Juliet averted
her face as a blast of heat laden with particles of stinging debris
swept across the deck. A huge pillar of red and orange flame rose
to the sky, and the accompanying screams of the men caught in the
open seemed to take the last of the Spaniard’s resolve with them.
By twos and threes the soldiers began dropping their weapons and
spearing their arms upward in surrender. Some fell onto their
knees, others raised their steepled hands to pray for mercy.

Juliet
scrambled to her feet and ran to the rail. The waist of the galleon
was a shambles, with bodies littering the deck from stem to stern.
The explosion had not come from the Spaniard’s powder stores, as
she had initially feared, but from the deck of the much smaller
English carrack that was bound to the galleon’s hull by grappling
lines.

It was
this distraction, when the Spaniard had closed for the kill and
boarded the English merchantman, that had allowed Juliet’s ship,
the
Iron
Rose
, to emerge almost
unseen from the banks of haze and drifting smoke. She had come in
under full sail and poured a series of crippling broadsides into
the exposed side of the galleon before snaring it within her own
cobweb of thick cables. A cry of "up and over" had sent the crew of
the privateer swarming eagerly over the side to join the fray. The
crew of the beleaguered English vessel, perilously near the brink
of defeat, had rallied as well and now, despite the fact that the
two smaller vessels were shockingly outmanned and outgunned by the
behemoth warship, the Spaniards were surrendering!

CHAPTER
ONE

“We were lucky
this time, lass. Dead lucky. There’s a brace o’ mortars in the
stern that would’ve ripped our guts out sure as they ripped out the
guts o’ the Englishman, given half the chance. Sheer bloody luck o’
the devil it was, an’ I’d be damned to believe it if I hadn’t seen
it with me own eyes.”

Nathan
Crisp was quartermaster on board the
Iron Rose
. He stood all of five foot tall, which put his
eyes on level with Juliet’s chin, but he had the neck and shoulders
of a bulldog, and could lift a man twice his size without straining
a muscle. What he did not know about the sea, about guns, about
sailing in fair weather or foul did not bear knowing, and despite
being crusty as a barnacle at times, Juliet trusted him as
implicitly as she trusted her own instincts.

“How badly is
the English ship damaged?”

Crisp shook his
head. “I’ve yet to go on board and have a good look, but she’s well
down below the waterline an’ the only thing holdin’ her up are the
cables attached to this bloody galleon. That last explosion took
out her magazine an’ half the upper deck.”

Juliet scanned
the hazy line of the horizon. “We have but a few hours of daylight
left and a great deal to do before we can get underway. Where do
you suppose the captain of this beast is hiding?”

“He scuttled
below like a rat when this lot began to throw down their
swords.”

Juliet’s eyes
were pale, silvery blue, and at Crisp’s words, they sparked with
darker flecks of anger. “Hell and damnation! He’ll be after
throwing his manifests and logs overboard before we can see
them.”

The hatchway
leading below to the captain’s quarters was locked from the inside,
but a few strokes of a battleaxe reduced the escutcheon to a
decorative scrap of iron on the deck.

Juliet,
holding two loaded pistols before her, led the way along the narrow
passageway to the great cabin. As on most Spanish galleons, the
captain’s quarters assumed the entire breadth of the stern and
Juliet stood aside while Crisp smashed through the heavy oak door.
In the instant it took for all the crimson velvet and gilded
furniture to register on her senses, she saw two officers standing
by the ruined mass of cherrywood that had once been a magnificently
appointed escritoire. The
capitán de mar
, identified by the ornamented breastplate and wide,
pleated neck ruff, was swabbing his forehead with a lace
handkerchief while the officer beside him was stuffing papers and
ledgers into a bulging canvas sack. The latter wore a cuirass
dented from battle damage, his face was streaked black with soot
beneath the curved rim of his cone-shaped helmet.