‌By the time we arrived at Lord Cutler’s quarters, my nauseating terror of forty men had trickled into the uncertain fear of one.‌

Cutler was only a single threat. But he was the strongest, most powerful of them all, and I didn’t have an inkling what he meant to do with me.

At the cabin door, a blue-coated soldier stood rigidly at attention. Armed to the teeth with pistols and blades, he was assigned to guard the life of the most valuable man on the ship.

“Sergeant Smithley.” Cutler gripped my elbow and yanked me against his side. “This prisoner will be staying in my quarters. She’s under my protection, and at no time will you thwart her actions or engage with her in any way. Do I make myself clear?”

Tingling jolts hit my circulation. From the heat of his hand on my arm? Or was it the unexpected order he gave his sergeant? Surely, he didn’t expect me to behave just because he’d rescued me from Madwulf?

Staring straight ahead, the guard didn’t shift his gaze. Didn’t choke in surprise. Didn’t move anything except his lips. “Yes, my lord.”

None of this made sense.

“What if I attack him? Would he not defend himself?” I jerked my arm from Cutler’s grip.

He released me. “If you harm a single hair on any of my men, you’ll return to the hold with your friends.”

“Yes. Right. Let’s discuss that. Your timing down there was—”

Cutler entered his quarters, leaving me standing there talking to myself.

Outrageous.

I charged after him and staggered into a huge, moonlit dining cabin.

Already dusk?

An adjoining day cabin and sleeping chamber lay just aft. I craned my neck, taking in the three spaces that made up the commodore’s private domain, which took over the entire stern of HMS Blitz’s upper deck.

I knew royal quarters like this existed but had never seen one. I tried not to be impressed.

He lit a lantern, then several more, illuminating charts and maps and papers stacked neatly on the table. The room said so much about him. And nothing interesting.

He liked maps. He liked to read. He lived to work. Did his dullness never cease?

I didn’t see bottles of rum, tobacco, whips and chains, or trunks filled with showy, impractical finery. Though he must have an elaborate wardrobe somewhere in here with large doors and drawers to store his embroidered coats and buckled footwear.

“As I was saying…” I ambled around the table, absently picking through the papers. “Your timing in the hold was impeccable. Deliberate. You waited until the very last moment to…”

He put toe to heel and slipped off his shoes, kicking them aside.

I blinked in confusion. “Were you watching the cage from around the corner? Waiting for that animal to put something other than his fingers inside me?”

His blue frock and white shirt came off next. He draped both over a nearby chair.

Muscles? Yes, he had bricks of them. He wasn’t as thickly built as Priest, but sharp outlines and flat hairless surfaces fashioned his masculine form as if hewn with a chisel.

I ate him up with my eyes, heating with female appreciation, clenching my hands, and losing my train of thought.

“You’re staring.” He removed his weapons—two blades he used on Madwulf—and set them on the table.

“Why did you put me in the hold with them if you knew what would happen?”

“I wanted you to know what would happen. Let it serve as a warning.

Next time, I won’t intervene.”

Next time.

My pulse accelerated. There was no mistaking his meaning.

I was on probation. If I made him angry, he would throw me back in the hold with forty hot-blooded pirates who now blamed me for their captain’s embarrassment.

Good thing I chose the beard.

Cutler’s eyes—darker and deeper blue than mine—roamed over me, cutting, calculating. “You’re tougher than you look.”

Seeing him shirtless and shoeless in all his godlike beauty, a woman could misconstrue that statement.

But he wasn’t Priest. He wasn’t vulgar in mind. Wasn’t trying to charm his way between my legs. I guessed he wasn’t even thinking about fornication.

“What are you saying?” I crossed my arms.

“I’ve never met a siren, but you must be of the same ilk or nature. Unchristian, mysterious, dangerously enticing… If you think to lure me with those eyes and enchant me to shipwreck, you have the wrong sailor.”

My eyes? I blinked them slowly, stunned speechless. Perhaps I didn’t know his mind after all.

Sirens were carnal, sensual, beautiful beings. How could he possibly compare me to…? Wait. Sirens weren’t even real.

I glanced at his snug-fitting breeches, the only thing he still wore. My stomach flipped. “Why did you remove your clothes?”

“I know things. I know them before anyone else. What I don’t know, I figure out.”

What an evasive, baffling response. And what did he know exactly?

Did he know about Priest? Or my plan to escape? Or my father’s compass? No, he didn’t know the important things.

My gaze snagged on the bowl of apples on the table, prompting my stomach to growl. I should have eaten the orange I’d rubbed on my chest this morning.

Mother of God, that seemed like so long ago. Even longer since I’d had a meal.

“So…” I leaned against the wall behind me, attempting a casual pose. “What do you know, Cutler?”

“You were born in the colonies, but England is in your blood.” My breath hitched. “Lots of people are English.”

“Perhaps. But the blood that flows in your veins is beau monde. It’s in your speech, your bone structure, the regal beauty you try so hard to conceal beneath sun-freckled skin and a wild mane of uncombed hair.” He bent over the opposite side of the table, hands braced on the surface, head cocked, studying me too closely. “Nobility has been trained into your bearing, the way you hold your shoulders, your spine…” His gaze centered on my mouth before dipping just beneath it. “The lift of your chin.”

I forced my expression to remain as blank as his, despite the panic pounding beneath my skin.

“As a twenty-year-old lady of breeding,” he said, “you understand the importance of addressing me by my military rank and ennobled title.”

“I’m twenty and one.” I squinted at him. “And I’ll call your thirty-year- old arse whatever I damn well please.”

“I’m four years past thirty.” He regarded the large fit of Priest’s shirt on my body. “You have a husband.”

Ice hit my veins. He guessed this by what I wore? Or had someone exposed my secret?

“Wrong.” My throat constricted and relaxed. “A lover, then.”

“I have many.”

“Whore.” He spat the word while somehow maintaining his stoic mien. “Don’t shame me for being liberated. I’m a sexually transgressive

woman, doing just as a man does. It’s my prerogative to do it with whomever I like as often as I like.”

That used to be my habit. Then I met Priest. After two lonely dry years, it was about time I started enjoying life again. But not here, and not with Lord Prude.

“Where I come from,” he said, “you’re a ruined woman.” “Are you married?”

“No.”

“Have you ever sheathed yourself inside a woman?”

His eyes screwed down to slits, and from across the table, I felt the heat of them on my lips. Veins throbbed in his temples and throat. Not in outrage. His body language remained calm. But he was positively trying to shield a reaction. While thinking about sheathing himself in a woman? Who? Certainly not me.

“Yes.” He licked his lips. “I’ve shared my bed.”

“Whore.” I gasped in mock displeasure. “I mean, if you were a woman, of course. You would be an embarrassment to your family. Scandalized. Exiled. Ruined.”

“If you have a point, make it.”

I released an exasperated breath. “You seem like an intelligent fellow, Ashley. Surely, you see the hypocrisy in your social traditions.”

“I don’t make the rules.”

“You just follow them. Marvelous. Because I have some rules of my own.” I rounded the table, stopped beside him, and leaned a hip against the edge. “My enjoyment in carnal relations doesn’t mean I welcome it with everyone. Would you like to know what happened to the first lord who greeted me with his unwelcome prick?”

“Enlighten me.”

“In hindsight, I should have castrated him before I gutted him. But I was only fourteen. Such a shy maiden, that poor girl.”

“I doubt you were ever shy.”

“Just so. I hadn’t yet learned the art in creative, prolonged torture. Did you know a man can still maintain an erection when the skin is flayed from his genitals?”

“You’re a vile creature.” “Thank you.” I smiled sweetly.

It was true that I’d skinned a man who had made a habit of violating women. Only once, though. I didn’t have the stomach to attempt it again.

“A woman…” His gaze slid to my lips. “Commanding a fifty-gun galleon. When did the gates of hell break open?”

“I think I liked you better when you didn’t speak.” I snapped my fingers in front of his unblinking eyes. “Stop looking at my mouth.”

“I can’t seem to make sense of you.”

“It’s easy, Commodore. Just think of the smartest man you know, remove all the hauteur and bigotry, and add a larger pair of testicles.”

“Disturbing.”

“The world is disturbing.”

I swore I saw the shadow of a smile on his starched face. But in the next breath, I was certain I hadn’t. The gunmetal jaw that was level with the top of my head went rigid, and his entire body hardened as if preparing for battle.

“Since your father was a known savage,” he said, “it can be reasoned by deduction that your mother is a peer of the realm. Or was? Where is she now? No longer among the beau monde. They would’ve banished her the moment she became round with her bastard daughter.”

Red-hot anger spiked as I tilted my chin up to meet him squarely in the eye. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Edric Sharp destroyed your mother, didn’t he? The selfish, uneducated brute deserved to hang. I wish I would’ve been there to witness it.”

My arm moved on its own, swinging swiftly, furiously, careening knuckles across his nose with a wet, blood-spewing crack.

He blinked, and I found myself looking up into a face that was too relaxed to be bleeding. But his hot blue eyes told a different story, one I didn’t register until his fist crashed into my jaw.

The strike hit hard enough to send me flying backward. My arms and legs whirled to remain vertical as hair tumbled into my face. Gasping, choking for air, I crumpled over my knees. By the time I righted again, the throb in my cheek had spread into my entire skull.

Outrage, exhilaration, and pure, unadulterated joy rushed through me. Nothing made my blood sing like a man who wasn’t afraid to fight a woman.

With a high-pitched shrill, I charged. He met me mid-air, our fists crashing into flesh. We hit and kicked with the force of lightning, losing our footing, and wrestling each other to the floor.

The pain wouldn’t surface until later. For now, all that existed was the ferocity to hurt him until he understood that no man used my father as an insult.

His muscled forearm connected with my throat. I threw a leg, an elbow, spluttering for air, and cursing him through each strike.

There was a lot more movement and effort on my end. Meanwhile, he seemed to be deflecting, redirecting, and flowing punches like a trained fighter with the veins in the backs of his hands and arms standing out like blue rivers.

He wasn’t going easy on me. He just didn’t have to try as hard, for he had the advantage of weight and brawn. But he couldn’t match my determination.

If he needed proof of that, it came in the form of my foot in his groin. I kicked him with all the strength I could gather and waited for his roar.

But I was only met with silence. I wasn’t sure he was breathing. Then he did.

In a breath that arrived in a blur, he slammed me onto my back and collared my neck with steel fingers.

“Oh, darling.” He ran the tip of his nose along my throbbing jaw and whispered in my ear, “You’re going to regret that.”

His other hand wrapped around my tangled curls, and he dragged me across the floor by my hair. I kicked and spat and thrashed into the legs of passing furniture as he hauled me aft through the length of his private quarters.

“What are you doing?” I clawed at the fist in my hair, my eyes watering from the agony of the strands ripping from my scalp. “Let me go!”

He dumped me onto an outdoor balcony that overlooked the endless black ocean. Before I could scramble away, his knee came down onto my throat. The other landed across my thighs, effectively pinning me to the planks.

A thick length of rope appeared in his hands, the end of which he efficiently tied around my wrists. I fought him, demanding answers, and cursing him to hell and back.

He didn’t give me his gaze until he’d perfected the knot around my arms. Then he lifted his head.

Blue eyes blazed down at me, and God help me, those gorgeous, hypnotizing features… He had not one feeling among them. He didn’t blink. Didn’t scowl. Didn’t smile.

I’d been captured by an inhuman, unfeeling non-smiler.

Tailwind blew off the warship’s wake, rustling his black hair and crusting my wheezing inhales with salt.

He lifted me in his arms and stepped to the balcony rail. “Do you know what happens right before the world starts spinning?”

My pulse went wild.

“No.” With my wrists tied and the waves crashing beyond the rail, I definitely did not want to know.

“You fall.”

“No!” My heart stopped as I grappled him with bound hands. But it was no use.

He raised me over the edge and hurled me into the sea.