That was what her husband had been referred to, and his father before him. The merchant fleet was legitimate. The pirate business was not. The House of San Miguel had made a good deal of money in shipping, from all over the Mediterranean, but that was only part of their empire. The other part was the fleet of pirate ships that roamed the coasts, sacking towns and burning those who resisted. Stealing from those who had paid them for shipments. They knew where all of the big and valuable shipments were going, and once their merchant ships delivered them, the pirates would come in behind them and clean up. Her husband had let her in on that little secret after they were wed. He ran the legitimate shipping business while Arnaldo headed the pirate venture asEl dios del mar.
Only he wanted it all.
And Astria had tried to take from him.
Astria hadn’t only wanted the merchant business. She’d wanted the pirate business too, because when she’d married Armand, the merchant business was close to floundering. His marriage to a royal bride had breathed new life into the merchant business because everyone wanted to do business with the man who had married a princess.
Then came the pirate business.
Astria wasn’t stupid. She understood economics because that was the one thing her father had done for her—he’d wanted his children to understand the economics of a country. She had applied those principles to the shipping business and then to the pirate business, which Arnaldo completely resented. He and his father had a terrible argument about it, and Arnaldo was exiled for a couple of years because of it. That was when Astria took over the pirate business and grew it. But Arnaldo eventually came back, killed his father, and inherited everything.
But Astria wasn’t willing to readily give up that which she had built.
Even if it technically wasn’t hers.
That was the situation when Maude overtook the two vessels Astria had been in command of. They weren’t her ships, but Arnaldo’s, because Astria had stolen them from Palma and was quite sure Arnaldo wanted them back.Thatwas the dark little secret that she knew and Maude didn’t—Arnaldo wasn’t coming to rescue his stepmother. He was coming for his ships. Astria was quite sure that he would thank Maude for capturing her.
He wouldn’t care at all about the fate of his stepmother.
So… if she escaped, where would she run to?
She literally had nowhere to go. But if she married a certain Scottish earl who would protect her, from Arnaldo mostly, perhaps this is the best that she could hope for. So why had she been trying to escape so badly from Maude for five straightmonths? Because she didn’t want to be turned over to Arnaldo when he caught up to them.
And that was the truth.
“Ye dinna run.”
The voice came from the darkness behind her. Astria wasn’t startled by it. Somehow, she thought he might find her, eventually, because he seemed like the attentive type. Slowly, she turned to look at him, noticing that he seemed out of breath.
“You were running after me,” she observed.
He shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “I knew I would find ye out here.”
“Then you must always breathe hard when you are calmly walking into a livery yard.”
“I do, in fact.”
“Why?”
“Because I find it exhilarating.”
Astria had to fight off a laugh at the man trying to pretend he wasn’t breathless because he had been preparing to chase her down. She turned away, returning her focus to the pirate encampment in the distance.
“Shall I tell you what just happened?” she said.
“With what?”
“You.”
“I told ye nothing happened.”
She shook her head. “I think you went to the chamber you left me in and when you saw that I was gone, you thought I’d escaped,” she said. “You came running out here to find a horse to go in pursuit.”
He snorted. “That shows how much ye dunna know.”
Astria shrugged. “That is probably true,” she said. “I do not know half as much as I probably think I know. But one thing is for certain.”
“What is that?”
