How to Be a Proper Lady: A Falcon Club Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

to her room. She couldn’t afford extravagance, but Mrs. Digby kept her in reasonable comfort.
    In her chamber she stripped off wool and linen thick with rain and salt and sweat. The serving girl came to make up the fire and Viola gave her a penny, then stood in a tin basin with a pot of hot water to wash. Before the hearth she dried her hair, finger combing out the knots, then fell into bed. She would sleep till Sunday if she didn’t have to rise early the following morning to see to the April ’s cargo.
    Before her eyelids fluttered closed, her gaze rested on a tiny statuette on the table beside her bed. Her most prized possession except for her ship.
    Her father had traded a whole set of silver plate he’d taken off a Dutch merchantman for this treasure, her thirteenth birthday present. About the length of her forefinger, it was intricately carved and painted with graceful precision. Gold, red, blue, green, yellow. A tiny figure of an Egyptian king.
    A pharaoh.
    Years later, when she first heard of a pirate with that name—a sailor so brutally successful even Spanish buccaneers feared to cross him—she wanted to meet him, to see with her own eyes the man who was bigger than life. A real legend. Recently, when talk at dockside taverns said the Pharaoh had turned to wrecking pirate vessels exclusively , she wanted to meet him even more.
    Now she had.
    And because of her, a mere woman, the mighty Pharaoh was sleeping in a jail cell tonight. Also because of her, come the morning, he would be free. If he kept that gorgeous mouth shut.
    She fell asleep smiling.
    J in awoke shivering.
    He clamped down on his body’s reflexive reaction. Not to the cold. To the iron bars hovering before his eyes.
    He shrugged up straighter against the wall, pulling in long, chest-deep breaths, willing away the crawling damp of his flesh and the throb of panic weakening his limbs. Dawn light filtered through the tiny square of a window just above a man’s head in the ten-by-ten cell. About him and in the adjoining cage his crew slept or slumped on the musty floor. The lot of them rested soundly anywhere. So could Jin. Usually.
    He hadn’t been behind bars in twelve years, since he was seventeen. On that occasion, two men had paid for his liberty. At his hands. With their lives.
    Eight years before that, with wrists in irons, he’d been dragged fighting onto an auctioneer’s block in the blaze of the Barbadian sun. That time a boy had paid for Jin’s freedom. With gold. A twelve-year-old boy to whom Jin owed his life. Each day of freedom since then still seemed like a stolen gift.
    A steady, muted click turned his head. In a corner of the cell across the way, Little Billy knocked a battered wooden die against the wall. His neck craned up and he flashed a quick grin.
    “Mornin’, Cap’n.” At sixteen, Billy had not yet outgrown his name; short, skinny, gangly, and grinning like a lad. “Ready for the judge?”
    “There will be no judge, Bill.” Jin ran his gaze along the walls and bars of the port jail cell, searching for weakness in the structure. Out of habit. He needn’t. They would be released within hours. He had already heard it from the harbor officer the night before when the fellow delivered the rags Jin and his crew now wore in lieu of their own clothes. The April Storm ’s master had lied to the port master about him and his ship.
    She was mad. He would be taking a madwoman back to her respectable family in England.
    Beside him Mattie expelled a great cavernous yawn. Lifting hands as big as hams, he rubbed them up and down his face and shook his heavy head, then set a glowering look on Jin.
    “What’s the plan, Cap’n?”
    “I am working on it.”
    “Why don’t you just pays these fellas for her, Cap’n?” Little Billy scuttled toward them and gestured to the ceiling, apparently intending to indicate the coastal officials. “Take her off their hands, like?”
    “You ain’t thinking straight.” Mattie slugged