She couldn’t answer her brother. She felt the pressure of his hand on her arm but couldn’t look his way. She couldn’t take her eyes off James, or believe, despite the silly game of hope she had just played with herself, that he was truly here.
He’d cut his hair. That was the first thought she was able to fix in her mind with any coherency. He’d been tying it back as they had neared Jamaica, it had grown so long, and with that golden earring flashing, he’d looked more like a pirate than ever to her adoring eyes. But he looked nothing like a pirate now. His tawny mane of hair was as flyaway as ever, as if he’d just come in out of a violent storm, but as it was a style other men spent hours trying to achieve, it looked perfectly in order. The locks that fell over his ears concealed whether he still sported the golden earring.
He could have been walking into a ball given for royalty, he was so finely turned out in velvet and silk. Had she thought he looked stunning in emerald? He looked positively devastating in dark burgundy, the nap of the velvet so fine, the many lights in the rooms cast it in jewel tones. His silk stockings were as snowy-white as the stylish cravat at his throat. A fat diamond winked there, so big it was surely drawing notice if the man himself wasn’t.
Georgina had noticed all this when her eyes first swept him, before they locked with his riveting gaze, a gaze that was sending off warning signals that should have had her running for her life. She’d seen James Malory in many different moods over the weeks she’d spent with him, several of those moods quite dark, but she’d never actually seen him truly angry, enough to lose his temper—if he even had one. But what she saw now in his eyes could have frozen a hot coal. He was angry all right, so angry, she couldn’t begin to guess what he might do. For a moment, all he was doing was letting her know.
“Doyouknow him, too?”
Too? Oh, that was right. Boyd thought he looked somehow familiar. He was obviously wrong. But before she could comment at all, if she could manage to get a word past the tightness in her throat, James started to walk toward her in a deceivingly lazy stride.
“George in a dress? How unique.” His dry voice carried across the space to her and everyone around her. “It becomes you, though, indeed it does. But I must say I prefer your breeches. Much more revealing of certain delectable—”
“Who are you, mister?” Boyd demanded aggressively, stepping in front of James to cut off his derogatory flow of words as well as his path.
For a moment it looked as if James would just brush him aside, and Georgina didn’t doubt that he could. They might be of a height, but where Boyd was lean and hard like the rest of his brothers, James was a brick wall, broad, solid, and massively muscled. And Boyd might be a man to reckon with at twenty-six years of age, but next to James, he looked a mere boy fresh out of the schoolroom.
“Bless me, you’re not actually thinking of interfering, are you, lad?”
“I asked who you are,” Boyd repeated, flushing under the amused condescension he detected, but he added, with a measure of his own derision, “Aside from being an Englishman.”
All signs of amusement instantly dropped. “Aside from being an Englishman, I’m James Malory. Now be a good chap and step aside.”
“Not so fast.” Warren moved next to Boyd to block James’s path even more. “A name doesn’t tell us who you are or what you’re doing here.”
“Another one? Shall we do this the hard way, George?”
He asked it even though he could no longer see her with Warren’s towering shoulders as an obstruction. But she didn’t have the least little doubt of James’s meaning, whether her brothers did or not. And she found she could move after all, and quite quickly, to come around their protective wall.
“They’re my brothers, James. Please don’t—”
“Brothers?” he cut in sneeringly, and those frigid green eyes were back on her. “And here I thought something entirely different, with the way they were hovering over you.”
There was enough insinuation in his tone for no one to mistake his meaning. Georgina gasped. Boyd flushed beet-red. Warren just threw his first punch. That it was deflected with ease disconcerted him for a moment. In that moment, Drew arrived to prevent Warren from swinging again.
“Have you lost your senses?” he hissed in an embarrassed whisper. “We’ve got a room full of people here, Warren. Guests, remember? Hell, I thought you’d gotten it out of your system this afternoon when you laid into me.”
“You didn’t hear what that son of a—”
“Actually, I did, but unlike you, I happen to know that he’s the captain of the ship that brought Georgie to Jamaica. Instead of beating him to a pulp, why don’t we find out what he’s doing here, and why he’s being so…provoking?”
“Obviously drunk,” Boyd offered.
James didn’t deign to answer that charge. He was still staring down at Georgina, his expression keeping her from showing any joy that he was here.
“You were absolutely right, George. Yours are quite tedious.”
He was referring to her brothers, of course, and the remark she had made about them that first day on his ship, when she admitted she had other brothers—besides Mac. Fortunately, her three siblings didn’t realize that.
Georgina didn’t know what to do. She was afraid to ask James why he was here, or why he was so obviously furious with her. She wanted to get him away from her brothers before all hell broke loose, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be left alone with him. But she’d have to.
She put her hand on Warren’s arm and could feel how tense he was. “I’d like a private word with the captain.”
“No,” was all he said.
From Warren’s expression, she knew there’d be no getting around him, so she appealed for help from a different quarter. “Drew?”
Drew was more diplomatic. He merely ignored her, keeping his eyes on James. “Why exactlyareyou here, Captain Malory?” he asked in a most reasonable tone.
