LITMIR.BIZ

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sent him a silent message. Withdraw your support.

      Nick looked away.

      “When I received news of this bill,” Katherine answered.

      “Why did you not return sooner?”

      “There was business to attend to.”

      “Why not return the moment you were able, Lady Dunscore?” De Lille asked sharply. “Before you had any ‘business’ to attend to?”

      James tensed and fixed his eyes on Katherine.

      “I had just spent four years in captivity, your lordship. I preferred to have my ostracism on my own terms.” She smiled, but mirthlessly. “I do not play the pianoforte and I’ve never been good with a needle, and there are only so many books a young woman can read.”

      Her answer was met by scowls and a few raised brows.

      “I know at least one young woman who would beg to differ with you on that point,” Linton remarked wryly, bringing a grunt from Marshwell and a sharp look from De Lille.

      “How remarkable that you’ve never mastered the pianoforte, Lady Dunscore,” De Lille said, “yet you’ve apparently grown proficient at captaining a sixteen-gun brig.”

      Katherine raised a brow at him. “Is it, your lordship? I suspect if you ask Captain Warre, you’ll find he has the same affliction.”

      Good God. “Indeed,” James told them. “I confess I couldn’t plunk out a minuet even on my best day.”

      At one side of the table, Winston sat casually in his chair. “So instead of returning home to your family,” he said to her, “you chose to captain a ship.”

      “Yes.”

      “What funds did you use to purchase the ship?”

      “I had a trade route between Egypt and Venice. I bought the Possession with the proceeds.”

      Ponsby sat forward. “The Possession was not your first ship.”

      “No.”

      “Lady Dunscore,” Gorst said evenly, “it does not help this committee if you do not explain yourself fully. Tell us how you came into possession of a ship after escaping from captivity. You did escape, did you not? You were not released?”

      She didn’t answer immediately. James stretched his fingers. Forced himself to relax. It wasn’t as though he didn’t already know she’d been through hell.

      “My captor passed away in the nighttime,” she finally said. “Chaos went up in the household, and I went into the city.”

      “Alone? Unseen?”

      Her nostrils flared almost imperceptibly, and a delicate cord in her neck tightened. “Forgive me, Lord Gorst,” she said, “but I fail to see what the details of that night have to do with the issue at hand.”

      “Agreed,” Edrington said, and a few others muttered a general concurrence.

      Gorst scowled across the table. “I am trying to ascertain how it could be possible that a woman held captive in a Barbary state could find her way aboard a ship.”

      “There were ships anchored in the harbor,” Katherine told him evenly. “Ships the corsairs had taken as prizes. It was simple enough to take one of the longboats tied to the docks and row out.”

      James frowned. There could have been nothing simple about that at all. The currents would likely have been strong and the harbor far from empty.

      “Row out in the harbor at Algiers?” Ponsby asked incredulously. “A woman alone?”

      “I was dressed in men’s clothes. And it was after midnight.”

      Good God.

      “And in fact, you were not alone, were you, Lady Dunscore,” De Lille said. “You were with Sir William Jaxbury.” He shifted his attention to the back of the room, where Jaxbury stood with a group of onlookers. “I presume you were the force behind such a suicidal escape?”

      “Only if by ‘force’ you mean oarsman, Admiral,” Jaxbury said. “Lady Dunscore is a most determined woman, and braver than I.”

      All eyes shifted back to her. Then again to Jaxbury. “I understand you were in captivity, as well, Sir Jaxbury.”

      “Yes,” he said darkly.

      “And I presume you escaped from your captor, as well.”

      “Yes.”

      “And the two of you met where, on the streets of Algiers?”

      “Yes.”

      A stark scenario coalesced in James’s mind. Katherine, alone and with child on the nighttime streets, dressed, most likely, in the clothes of one of her captor’s male slaves. She crosses paths with Jaxbury. The two of them scrape by on whatever they can, ducking into doorways and avoiding the sultan’s henchmen, plotting a way out of the country, toward which end Jaxbury draws on his experience at sea to suggest a dangerous plan.

      “And the two of you, alone, snatched a prize out from under the corsairs’ noses?” Winston asked. “I find that exceedingly difficult to comprehend.”

      “It was a small prize,” Katherine told him. “Only eight cannon.”

      “Lady Dunscore,” Nick said, finally speaking. “You will understand, of course, that some of my colleagues are concerned about a member of the peerage who has demonstrated a tendency toward the unlawful.”

      “Unlawful?” she said. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

      “You deny you have taken ships unprovoked?”

      “I certainly do not deny it. But I was always justified.”

      “By the promise of silks and spices? That smacks mightily of piracy, Lady Dunscore.”

      “By the knowledge that my prey had come by its spoils by being a predator.”

      “A questionable activity at best,” De Lille interjected.

      “But one that resulted in the liberation of more than one Englishman, as this committee well knows. My prize-taking activities have been strictly limited to ships far more questionable than mine. As for my present circumstances, rest assured I know nothing about robbing stagecoaches or burgling slumbering widows.”

      “Relieved to hear it, Lady Dunscore,” Rondale declared from the end of the table.

      “At least our travelers and widows may rest easy,” Edrington said, glancing down the table at Winston, “even if gentlemen hopeful of producing children may not.” Uneasy laughter went up from the gallery.

      “I have only the deepest respect for Lady Dunscore’s skill with a cutlass,” Winston replied with a half smile.

      De Lille tucked his chin and assessed Katherine over the top of his spectacles. “What of your plans to marry, Lady Dunscore?” he demanded. “Certainly you do not plan to manage an estate the size of Dunscore alone.”

      Around the room, half the men both on and off the committee had turned their attention to Katherine, no doubt salivating at the thought of having both her wealth and her body at their disposal.

      James’s blood ran cold.

      But Katherine merely offered that smile he was becoming too familiar with, one he’d seen night after night watching her fend off every lecher in the ton. “What a creative suggestion, Lord De Lille. My only regret is that you are not unattached.”

      A member three seats away erupted in a fit of coughing. Lord De Lille’s face dove into a wrinkled scowl.

      “Perhaps Croston ought to marry her,” Winston suggested, shifting his attention to James. “He seems to take her in hand well enough.”

      Damn

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