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

smiles.
    “Congratulations, Mr. Smythe.” He bowed as though Jin were actually the gentleman he pretended to be when he did business at the bank. “You and three of your men may go free.”
    Back on the docks with the late-spring morning sun shining through masts and rigging onto worn planks, he told Matouba, Mattie, and Billy to take themselves off until he needed them. The boy and Matouba went off bickering as usual. Mattie cast Jin a dark look, then lumbered away as well.
    He walked down the quay, scanning the scene already busy with the traffic of carts, sailors, and merchants, and found what he sought: a sparkling new vessel, the railings not yet even affixed. The sounds of hammers smacking at wood echoed from atop. A pair of boys sanded the main deck, still fresh wood without varnish or tar.
    She was not the Cavalier . Nothing would ever be the Cavalier . But she was a beauty, small and fast, just as he’d heard she would be when he passed through Boston six months earlier and saw the plans for her. She would suit his needs perfectly.
    But a man could not purchase a ship appearing as though he’d spent the night in jail. He turned and made his way toward his bank.
    T wo hours later, freshly shaved and clothed, Jin folded the letter that had awaited him at his bank these four months, and tucked it into his waistcoat. He nearly smiled. The Admiralty occasionally managed to send him correspondence via commanders in the field. This letter, however, had not come from the navy.
    Viscount Colin Gray was still looking for him.
    For years Jin had labored on behalf of another servant of the crown than the Admiralty, a secret organization buried deep in the Home Office, known to only those who required its assistance. The Falcon Club.
    The Club had disbanded the previous year—rather, nominally so. Only five of them to begin with, four yet lingered. Jin’s fellow agent and sole contact with the Club’s shadowy director, Colin Gray, had not given up on the organization’s mission, a mission dedicated to seeking out lost souls and bringing them home. Not any lost souls, though; the Falcon Club’s quarries were those whose disappearance, even existence, threatened the peace of the kingdom’s most elite and whose absence and recovery must not become public knowledge. For the safety of England.
    Jin had not quit—not in so many words. But for the present, he hadn’t the time or inclination to humor either Gray or the Admiralty. He had finally found the quarry he had chosen for himself two years earlier. Another lost soul. A woman gone for so long that she no longer knew she was lost.
    Moving along the quay, he came to the ship that had brought him into port. Resting in her berth like a swaybacked carriage horse in the traces, the April Storm had to be twenty years old if she was a day, a mid-sized brig, square rigged for speed but too heavy in the hull for true maneuverability.
    His gut ached. Having been taken by such a ship after outrunning nearly every other vessel on the Atlantic was nothing short of travesty.
    His gaze alighted on a girl working at a pile of rope on the dock beside the ship, and his jaw relaxed. She bent to her work, her back to him, revealing a backside perfectly rounded for a man’s hands. Snug breeches encased thighs that stretched sweetly to shapely calves. A white linen shirt pulled at her shoulders as she worked, defining delicate bones and slender arms.
    His boot steps sounded on the planking and she glanced over her shoulder. She paused. Then, straightening, she drew off her hat and passed the back of her hand across her damp brow.
    Jin’s blood warmed with the appreciation of a fine woman, all too infrequently enjoyed these days since he had bent to his current mission. Her brow was high and clear, dark eyes large and shaded with long lashes, nose pert, and her mouth a full, rosy invitation to pleasure. Strands of richly brown hair curled upon her brow, the rest of the long, satiny mass