His Wicked Kiss Part 22

"Jack, don't change the subject."

He rolled his eyes. "Eden-"

"There's something that I have to tell you." Her face was set; desire's blush had dimmed in her cheeks. "I read your sister's letters."

He froze. "What?"

"That first day you found me on the s.h.i.+p, when you locked me up in your cabin. I was bored, Jack. There was nothing to do. I found them and I-I got engrossed," she said with a penitent shrug.

He stared at her, appalled.

"I know it was wrong, and I'm sorry-but the point is this. From everything your sister wrote, I'm sure your family loves you. You should see them again when we reach London. Try to make things right."

"Make... things right?" he echoed in utter shock, which promptly turned to fury. "You are unbelievable! And for your information, I am not the one who made things wrong!"

"I never a.s.sumed that you were!" she a.s.sured him. "Jack, I'm only trying to help. Whatever bad blood lies between you and your siblings, I don't want to see you let it ruin your life."

"Ruin my life? Don't be absurd!" He scoffed. "My life, it so happens, is better than most people's wildest fantasies. Do you know how much I'm worth?"

"I'm not talking about your money, I'm talking about you. I think I know what you're worth, Jack. The question is, do you?"

He turned away with a low curse, but she persisted, tenacious as ever.

"Is that why you work so hard, because you think you are worth nothing without all your wealth and power?"

"Leave me alone. This conversation is tedious." His tone was merely irked, but inside he was trembling. "I can't believe you read my private correspondence." He pinned her with an angry glance. "I trusted you."

"I wanted to know more about you, that's all. Jack, I could have concealed what I did, you know, but look how I told you flat out. You can trust me. I'm concerned about you. You have a problem and I want to help."

"I don't have a problem and I don't need your help. I don't need anybody's help. Never have." He glared at her. "Never will."

She took an impatient step toward him. "I want you to hear what I have to say: Stop wasting time."

"What are you talking about?"

"They're your family, Jack. If I had one more day with my mother, I would pay a king's ransom for that, but I can't. She's gone. And someday, you're going to know how that feels."

"Well, I was never adored by my family as you were, and you're never going to know how that feels!"

She dropped her gaze and let out a low exhalation eloquent of a feminine struggle for patience. "I just don't want to see you end up alone."

He let out a rude bark of a laugh and turned away from her. "Why not? I'm used to it! Gets a little dull sometimes, perhaps, but at least this way no one can stab me in the back."

"Is that what happened?" she asked softly. "Did someone betray you?"

"Stay out of it, Eden. It's none of your affair."

"Maybe you're afraid that I'll betray you, too. But I won't, Jack, I promise. I can prove it, if you'll give me a chance. Talk to me."

No, he realized in reluctance, he did not feel that Eden would stab him in the back. But he still didn't want to tell her anything.

Did he?

He swallowed hard, his heart pounding violently. He closed his eyes with a faint wince. He never explained himself to anyone. Certainly, he had never attempted to explicate how he had sacrificed himself for his brothers and his little sister. To this day, n.o.body even realized. To h.e.l.l with them.

"Jack?"

"In a family at war," he said slowly, his back to her, "the rest can make peace if one becomes the scapegoat. A common enemy against whom the others can rally." His face was stony. "I became their villain. A d.a.m.ned lightning rod for all the wrath and anger under that roof-it all came down on me. I was the only one strong enough to bear it. But after a time, I got lost in the role." With his back to her, she could not see his taut grimace. She could never know how alone he had been in that house. Nay, in that world. Shunned by all. "Finally, I knew I had to leave." He thought of Maura. Her petty betrayal. "There was no reason left for me to stay."

He heard the rustle of her skirts as she edged closer. "But that's just it, Jack. You're not a villain. You may have convinced the world of that and even yourself by now, but you never fooled me. Not for a second." He felt her light touch on his back-so gentle it made him flinch. A blow would have been easier to take. "I felt drawn to you from the first moment I saw you at the ball in Jamaica. I think Papa sensed the way I noticed you. That's why he pulled me away. He didn't want to lose me to you. You see, Jack, I've got very good instincts. Maybe I don't know much about the way of the world, but I know my own heart. And it tells me that behind these dark fictions you've raised up around yourself, you are one of the... the kindest, n.o.blest human beings I've ever known."

He pulled away and whirled around with a glower. "The h.e.l.l I am!"

"It's true." Her eyes were huge and full of light; her youthful face was somber.

He backed away from her. "And you've met a total of, what-eight, nine human beings in your entire life, hidden away out there in the jungle?" he bit out sarcastically. "Don't tell me about instincts. It's experience that counts, and the more experience you gain, my love, the more you'll see the jungle's everywhere." He shook his head. "This life is nothing but a struggle to survive. Well, guess what? Surviving is the one d.a.m.ned thing I'm good at. And you, you don't know bad when you see it, because all you've got in you is good. That's all you're able to see because you're looking at everything through the crystal-clear prism of who you are, Eden. But all of your purity cannot make me good."

She was staring at him with tears in her eyes. "You learned to believe in a lie a long time ago, Jack, a lie you still believe to this day."

"Ah, so I am deceived?"

"In a sense, yes." She blinked her tears away. "Everything that you just said is rubbish. You are good. What kind of a man risks his freedom and his whole life's work to help the cause of freedom? A villain? Who sends twelve s.h.i.+ploads of food and water to a city ravaged by an earthquake? Who takes a naive stowaway under his wing and protects her instead of treating her as she deserves? You are no villain, and I will not tolerate you speaking about yourself that way again."

"Oh, well, pardon me."

"I know now why you steer clear of humanity-"

"Have you looked at humanity lately?"

"You sound like Papa."

"Except that I'm sane."

"I can only imagine what you were subjected to when you were the Nipper's age that made you believe these things, but I would never treat you that way. You must know that."

"I could comment if I had any idea what in Lucifer's name you were talking about."

"Jack-I know about your father."

His next sarcastic comment withered on his tongue.

He felt as though he had just been run through with a lancer's pike, but while his face drained of every drop of color, she charged on.

"I understand now why you think everyone's against you, why you're so angry. Why you keep to yourself and don't trust anyone. All those locks on your door, oh, my darling..."

He backed away from her, shocked and rather horrified that she'd heard of his mongrel origins. Reading the letters was one thing. But this was something else. He knew what came next.

He knew.

From experience.

"Don't be angry. I'm on your side, Jack. It doesn't matter to me, your parentage. Please, I only want to help. Is that the reason you weren't allowed to wed Lady Maura?"

At that traitor's name, the one person he had believed for a while had really cared about him back in those days, the past rushed back like a swarm of bats, flapping around him with t.i.ttering ghoulish laughter at all he'd accomplished for the past twenty years, reducing it to nothing. Negating in the blink of an eye all his efforts to show them he'd make something of himself, after all.

No, these memories could only remind him that he'd always be the Irish b.a.s.t.a.r.d, nothing more, not fit to a.s.sociate with his own brothers. A bad influence. No good.

No good to the core.

"Jack?" Eden whispered, and through the wave of pain, he was dimly aware of her staring at him in alarm.

All of a sudden, he let out a deafening roar that shook the gla.s.s in the stern windows. With a violent motion, he swept the contents off his desk-charts and papers, pencils and ledger books crashed chaotically onto the floor.

Eden watched them fall, then looked at him in wide-eyed fright.

Her fear grounded him once more in what he was. Why should he fight it? The darkness in him was always there. It made him good at what he did.

The crew above must have heard his howl, too, for the usual beat of footsteps across the deck halted.

Jack prowled toward her, his expression black.

Eden looked terrified, but his little jungle redhead held her ground even when he leaned down to glare in her face.

"Who told you?"

She gulped, bending back a bit. "He didn't mean to, Jack. I-It just slipped out."

His eyes narrowed to angry slashes. "Brody."

"He spoke of you only in pride, I swear! Jack-" She touched his cheek, but he knocked her hand away.

"Don't touch me."

Without another word, he pulled away and walked out.

Chapter.

Ten.

More days pa.s.sed.

If there was any way to make the s.h.i.+p go faster, Jack would have left Eden at his Irish estate and simply let her drop out of his life, sailing away on his mission.

But there was not.

He was stuck with her in a cramped cell in the middle of an endless ocean. There was nowhere to escape from her, and nowhere to escape from his bleak certainty that no one was ever going to love him, no matter how rich he got or how many companies he owned; and no matter how many times he told himself that he didn't give a d.a.m.n, it was always going to hurt.

As The Winds of Fortune crept higher into the north lat.i.tudes, autumnal temperatures above the equator gave way to winter, cold and gray.

They'd be there soon.

Eden was having a terrible time with her sewing. As night descended, the winter's early twilight encroaching, she worked by candlelight in the stateroom, seated on the red leather window bench. Her hands were wobbly with the needle until she even p.r.i.c.ked her finger.

"Ow!" She threw her work down, popped her finger in her mouth, and noticed herself feeling seasick.

She a.s.sumed at first that the ill, shaky feeling in her stomach was due entirely to being upset over her fight with Jack, who had barely spoken to her since his explosion. Without his friends.h.i.+p, the sea had become a very desolate place. He had taken to sleeping in a hammock in the stateroom, leaving Eden to lie awake alone in his berth, fearing to contemplate what could happen to her in this elemental s.h.i.+pboard world with her protector angry at her. But when she heard the low whistling of a draft blowing in through the cracks around the closed jib door, and noticed the fine brandy slos.h.i.+ng about in its crystal decanter atop the mahogany cabinet, she realized there might be another explanation for her touch of mal de mer.

Turning to gaze out the bank of stern windows, her breath formed steam on the gla.s.s; she saw that the wind had picked up and the sea had turned choppy. Whitecaps showed here and there atop the dark waves. Farther out, the indigo line of the horizon seesawed a bit more distinctly. The s.h.i.+p was so big that its rocking most of the time was nominal, but now she could feel its motion. Perhaps they were in for a gale.

Wonderful. A storm brewing outside, and a human hurricane at the helm, cold and dark and unpredictable...

That man.

She considered going topside to ask the captain what was happening, but on second thought, that sounded like a recipe for more hurt, since he clearly wasn't speaking to her anymore-even though she had said she was sorry. Even though she had only been trying to help.

With a sigh, Eden leaned against the wooden bulkhead and drew her slippered feet up onto the leather bench, wrapping her arms around her bent knees.

She was a little angry at him for being angry at her. Perhaps it was time to revisit her visions of das.h.i.+ng Town dandies in coats from Savile Row. Elegant men. Cultured men.

Pirate-barbarian-beasts who yelled in her face had never been part of the plan.

Still, it was strange to think that under that facade of rock-hard invulnerability, Black-Jack Knight was exactly what she had said he was from the start: a big, howling lion beset by a nasty thorn in his sensitive paw pad.

Why, he's just a big baby, she thought in simmering mutiny, especially when she recalled the day he had first found her aboard his vessel and had forced her to strip. Oh, not for lascivious reasons, she understood now.

The man was, sadly, expert at controlling his l.u.s.t. He had given the order because he had known it would symbolically reduce her to complete vulnerability-and why should he want that? she thought. Because he trusted no one. Not even a harmless stowaway.

He had wanted her naked before him in every sense of the word, not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, as well. He had wanted to stare into the deepest regions of her soul, and she had let him-Why? she thought again. Because I have nothing to hide.

Ah, but let her get a peek at him without his steely armor on, that tough, bad, need-n.o.body aura of his, and this was how he behaved. Thundering at her and slamming about like a huge, terrifying barbarian.

Just then, a pattering of footfalls reached her from beyond the stateroom's door. The Nipper burst in. "Miss Edie! Miss Edie! Up on deck! Quick, hurry!"

"Phineas, what is the matter?"

Barreling over to her, the boy grabbed her hand. "Come on, hurry, I'll show you!"

"Let me get my pelisse-"

"No, you'll miss it!" He was already pulling her out of her seat. "Come on!"