His Stolen Innocent's Vow
Autorzy
Marcella Bell
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17,2K
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CHAPTER ONE
HELENE COSIMA D’TIERRZA, inheritor of the great d’Tierrza fortune and titles—including the duchy—and seventh in line for the throne of Cyrano, stood unsteadily before the marble statue that dominated her family’s private courtyard.
Her silver-blond bangs feathered across her brow, swaying in time with her body’s slight motion, while her normally sharp sapphire-blue eyes glared with unfocused intensity at the carved figure’s face. Her dress was a long column of azure. Strapless and simple, it emphasized the elegant length of her figure rather than the unexpected muscle tone of her arms and chest. The dress flared gently at its base to provide what she supposed was a generous allowance for walking...if one minced.
Disgust curled her lips, the effect all the more striking for the fullness of her wide mouth.
Today might be the one day of the year she conceded to wearing a dress, but she never minced.
It was also the one day of the year when she drank.
Both the dress and the drink contributed to the uncharacteristic wobble in her stance.
With her arms crossed in front of her chest and a half-empty flute of champagne loosely clasped in one hand, angled at a slight tilt, she was also uncharacteristically alone. She had no one to guard and no staff lingered in the shadows. They were occupied with the guests gathered in the large seascape courtyard who mingled and drank, all in the dubious name of her father’s legacy.
The king and queen, two of her most constant companions, were in attendance, as was her fellow queen’s guard, Jenna Moustafa, who was on solo duty with backup from the king’s guard while Hel played dress-up.
The crease between her eyebrows deepened. She should be out there with her friends, alert and ready to back up Moustafa should the need arise. It would certainly be a better use of her time than standing in front of her father’s likeness, once again engaged in the silent battle of wills that hadn’t so much as ended with the end of his life, as become unwinnable. Not that she ever had a chance when he’d been alive. No one stood a chance against Dominic d’Tierrza.
Hel wouldn’t be the one to throw in the towel, though. Her father didn’t deserve the satisfaction.
Not even in death.
Instead, she sneered at the statue. “You’ve really outdone yourself this year, Papa. Already raised two million and we haven’t even had dinner yet.”
He said nothing in response.
He wouldn’t have, had he been alive, either. Speaking about money was gauche and two million a paltry sum. He would have raised four by this point in the afternoon had he been around to run things. His permanently raised eyebrow said as much.
Not up to the standard of the d’Tierrza name.
Though just a memory, the oft-repeated words remained an acid refrain.
Her father had been old-fashioned, autocratic and hateful. She’d only learned the last in her teens. He cared about the family line and that alone.
A daughter was a bargaining chip to be played to the family’s best advantage, nothing more. A wife past childbearing years, even less.
He had encouraged Helene, named after the beautiful cause of the Trojan War, to be lovely and amenable, a prize all men would covet.
So she had become loud and opinionated and learned to fight.
She’d also gone out into the world and gotten involved, gotten dirty, done everything she could to prove that Helene d’Tierrza was the furthest thing from the marriage material her father wanted her to be as was possible.
It hadn’t been enough.
Nothing, not even truly diverging from her “correct” path to become a royal guard, had truly been enough to get back at him, to balance the scales. Not when he’d been alive and certainly not now that he was dead.
Not when he still cast such a long shadow over her life. Over her mother’s.
She couldn’t even believe they were doing an event in his name. There was nothing honorable about her father’s legacy—it was only criminal.
She could literally recite a list of crimes.
But she never did, merely carried it around with her—a small penance for the ills he wrought on the world, and the only one she’d been allowed. On the point that the d’Tierrzas were important to national security, it seemed the world agreed with her father.
She and her mother kept their dirty laundry hidden in the dark and everyone benefitted. And maybe if she dedicated every living and breathing moment to serving justice, it might make up for the lie...if not the actual sins of her father.
Besides, the money they raised went to charities across the entire island nation.
That wouldn’t have mattered to her father, though. Only the d’Tierrza name mattered to him. Nothing else. No other name, not even that of the royal family, could be allowed to outshine it.
God help you if you had the misfortune to be born with that name.
The charities mattered to her, though. People mattered to her. She was related to him in name only, and if she’d at first cultivated heart and honor just to spite him, in the end, those qualities had been too pure to pollute and had instead molded her. Including the voice that told her all of this was wrong.
Hel broke her stare, unfolded her arms and lazily downed the remainder of her champagne. Effervescent and smooth, it bubbled gently down her throat while she contemplated the perfect crystal stem twirling between her fingers. Then, without turning her gaze back to the statue, she stopped twirling the glass and flicked her wrist, the action decisive and controlled.
The glass sailed toward her father’s likeness, spinning end over end in a perfect circle, before it crashed into the marble statue, shattering on impact. Bright clear pieces of crystal caught the light as they fell, filling the space with her own personal rainbow, all to the sound of tiny brittle stars cracking on the ground.
Suddenly, she heard a throat clear and the scuffing of feet on the paving stones behind her. In an instant, she snapped into full alertness, her wobble and dead father abandoned.
Behind her, the stranger quickened. She moved faster, feinting to the right and dropping into a crouch, before a large hand came around to catch her around the mouth. Her dress seam split as she executed the move, but she ignored it, spinning around to shoot her heeled foot out at the shin of her would-be abductor.
The person anticipated the move, though, jumping out of both her reach and sight. She tried to leap upright but lost precious time, slowed down as she was by her torn evening gown. Their arms, large and strong, came around hers, holding her tight in an iron grip.
This was exactly why she refused to wear dresses. She wouldn’t have been caught if she’d had pants on.
She slammed her head back toward her attacker’s face, but once again the stranger anticipated her move and shifted their head to the side in time to avoid her. Arms tightened around her. She lifted her feet, surprising them with her entire body weight. There was a grunt behind her, but the person held on, the powerful grip loosening only a fraction.
The fraction was all she needed.
She twisted down and out of the hold, dropping to the ground at the same time as she swept his feet out from under him. She could see that he was a man now. He landed well, but the move managed to give her enough time to put space between them and take a reasonable, if narrow, fighting stance.
He leaped from the ground effortlessly and advanced toward her, and for an instant, she was frozen.
He was stunning.
Well over six feet tall, his skin shone a rich, dark brown. His suit was impeccably tailored but not of Cyranese cut or style. Instead, it nodded toward their Sidran neighbors to the south with a long jacket and short collar.
In all her life, she had never been stopped short by another soul, and yet this man had paralyzed her. It wasn’t his clothing, though it fit him flawlessly, highlighting his perfect proportions. The bulk of the people who inhabited her world had been wearing bespoke couture since they could first toddle. It wasn’t his height. Her father had been a tall man and her cousin, the current king and her lifelong best friend, was a towering man.
The man was older than she was, his trim beard lightly salt and peppered, though his skin was as smooth as marble. His eyebrows were thick and black, and low over his eyes.
Those eyes. Something about them grabbed at her and pulled, urging her to move closer, as if she was his prey, helplessly ensnared.
He smiled, the expression filling his deep brown eyes with an arrogant gleam. The smile drew her eyes to his mouth, which was full. Her lips parted, dry suddenly, and she licked them.
“It seems I might have underestimated the difficulty I’d face in convincing you today...” he mused in Cyranese, his low whisper a skin-tingling bass that caressed her ears.
She shivered, breath hitching, as her body kick-started systems she’d been certain were defective after years of being dormant.
And then his words sank in.
He knew the effect he was having on her. And he thought he could use it against her.
Heat flooded Hel’s face, a combination of irritation at his arrogance and embarrassment at her stupefaction—because that’s the only thing it could be called, as stupid as it was—but this time she didn’t let her reaction to him slow her down.
In one smooth motion, she reached down, took off a heel and hurled it at his face, quickly repeating the motion with the other shoe before bolting toward the courtyard’s exit.
He avoided the first shoe, but not the second, giving her precious seconds of advantage.
They weren’t enough.
Beating her to the archway, he blocked the way and she halted, not willing to get within arm’s reach again. Without taking her eyes off him, she grabbed the ripped seam of her dress and ripped it farther.
His cocky grin returned. “Eager, are we?”
She flipped him a rude gesture and he threw his head back and laughed. The sound hummed through her bones before coming to a heated rest at her core, though she resisted the urge to press her legs together.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Not who you expected to meet here?” he asked with mock surprise, the laughter in his voice setting off inner fires she didn’t know could burn.
The heat from her core made its way up her neck to merge with the bright blush spots on her cheeks until her normally cool, pale skin burned a bright red across her entire body.
“This is a private courtyard.”
He nodded. “I know.”
“What are you here for?”
He tilted his head in a chiding fashion that somehow reminded her of her mother, as if he knew she could do better. “To speak with you. Isn’t it rather obvious?”
“Normally, people who wish to speak with me approach from the front,” she observed.
He shrugged, the movement fluttering his jacket. “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve come at things from a different angle.”
She laughed, unable to help herself in the face of his blasé attitude. “What did you want to talk about?”
A wicked spark came to his eyes as he took in her partially exposed body, beginning at her bare feet and traveling slowly up, lingering at her breasts, before his gaze locked on hers.
She felt the look like a caress, making her breathing go short and heavy.
“Many things—reunions, new unions...” he said, the words trailing off slow like honey.
“We’ve never met.” She spoke casually as she shifted her weight to the balls of her feet.
Something like pain flashed across his eyes, but was gone by the time his words came out, his voice entirely nonchalant as he said, “The two of us? No. But we’ve known each other our whole lives.”
His words were intriguing, a siren mystery tempting her to ponder his meaning instead of thinking through her next move, but she wasn’t going to bite. She couldn’t afford the time it would take. She’d only requested one day off, no matter how fascinating the stranger who dangled the lure.
With shocking speed, she pivoted on her heel and erupted into a sprint, wincing as she dashed barefoot through the shards of broken champagne glass along the way.
And it was her own fault. Her father always said her rashness would come home to roost.
Her would-be kidnapper was on her tail alarmingly quickly, but she had the advantages of a head start and greater familiarity with the terrain.
Running right at the statue, she leaped, her feet planting squarely on her father’s nose with an ominous crack as she used it to spring onto the tiled rooftop surrounding the courtyard. She landed hard, sliding slightly as she dislodged the tiles, sending some falling to crack on the marbled floor below.
Once she caught her balance, she scrambled toward the top bar of the roofs—the only place where running was actually feasible.
A loud thud behind her and a quick glance over her shoulder confirmed that her pursuer had not yet given up. That was fine. She hadn’t, either.
She ran across the roof, her bare feet finding easy purchase on the familiar old wood. She followed the same route she and her cousin had taken as young daredevils looking for a bit of fun and a chance to terrify their tutors.
With any luck, the old trick would work on the man behind her, because his long strides were rapidly closing the space between them.
In the distance, she could hear the tasteful music and muffled chatter of the party. There was still time to veer right and head in that direction. Moustafa and the king’s guard wouldn’t hesitate to provide backup. However, there was a chance that the man was actually coming after her in an effort to get near to the king and queen. In which case, protecting them meant keeping him away. Besides, she could just imagine the horror on her mother’s face when her daughter literally dropped into the middle of her party wearing nothing but a tattered evening gown.
But then again, maybe her mother wouldn’t mind. The party would certainly be talked about long afterward.
She had promised her mother that she would settle down, though, and—her profession notwithstanding—for the most part, she had.
After her father’s death, the need to tarnish the family name had lost its sense of urgency.
Her mother, her companion in the trenches, understood her motivation for upsetting the family wheelhouse and cared little for what gossip surrounded her daughter. Their relationship was close and open and far too strong to be shaken by rumor. But her behavior could still impact the way her mother was treated in society, whom she was allowed to see, what services she could solicit. Hel knew her mother would say it saved her from frequenting with fools, but hearing that her mother had been denied an appointment at her salon after Helene joined the royal guard had triggered the protective response that years of living with her father had developed in her. She wouldn’t do anything that might limit her mother’s hard-earned freedom.
So rather than seek backup, Hel stayed her course, nearly to the spot that she and her cousin had named The Leap of Death.
They’d discovered it when they were eleven, once again illicitly exploring the ducal palace’s roof.
“If you jump from here you would land in the deep pool,” Zayn had said with a frown on his face, the one young Helene recognized as his figuring face. She’d looked, gauged the necessary arch, then given him a wide grin. He’d shaken his head. She’d taken a running start and jumped.
He’d been right. Thankfully.
After that, The Leap of Death had become the preferred method of testing the mettle of each and every educator and mentor assigned to bring them to heel. With the exception of one, none had realized the jump was safe until their charges returned hours later.
Hel was banking on the phenomenon that watching her leap to her death at sea would have the same demoralizing effect on the man chasing her as it had on so many of her would-be educators.
Meanwhile, she could swim into the natural caves, then take the path back up to the palace and figure out who in the hell the guy was. And she could do it with pants on.
She made the final turn on the roof, a sharp left that angled her toward the sunrise balconies—it was the turn that would lead her to the leap.
The man remained close on her heels.
Abruptly, she sprang off the beam, her body arching into a perfect dive, her blood singing a thrilling song she hadn’t heard in too long.
Blood rushed in her ears as she angled toward the water, her body lighting to the experience like a long-lost friend.
Laughter bubbled out of her underwater.
She needed to do this more often.
She’d entered the water as slick as a seal, her momentum taking her another thirty yards before she surfaced.
Breathing heavily, she looked up at the corner of the roof she had jumped from, taken, as always, by how small and far away it looked. Her pursuer was nowhere to be seen. A wide grin spread across her face. The Leap of Death had come through once again.
She set a leisurely pace swimming back toward the caves, entering their shadowed depths quietly, her feet appreciating the cool and cleansing sting of the salt water after running through the broken glass.
And then she heard the sound of something large landing in the water.
Spinning around, she treaded water as she squinted in the direction of the sound. For a moment, all she saw was gently waving sea.
Then he surfaced.
She turned back to the cave, swimming furiously now, but he cut through the water behind her like some kind of sinister merman.
As she pushed deeper into the cave, a large shape took form, and she stopped in her swim. Once again treading water, her gasp was magnified and echoed by the curvature of the cave’s walls.
There was a ship anchored in the cave.
Masculine laughter broke out behind her, swirling around her, surrounding her in the high-ceilinged space.
Mere feet separated them in the water. She considered her next move. There was no way she could outswim him. She sensed it without a doubt, not needing to test the hypothesis.
There was something about him, his aura somehow half sea creature. Or maybe it was the fact that he seemed completely at one with the water, despite the fact that he swam in soaking-wet formal wear.
Of course, even against impossible odds, it never hurt to try.
Darting away from him, she put all her energy into speed and zoomed with a mad burst through the water.
And it worked. Shooting yards ahead of him, she felt the exhilaration of defeating a worthy opponent. It was certainly a better way to spend her father’s birthday than pretending to love and honor him.
At that moment, the strength of her surge circled back to bite her. Swimming with enough speed to retain her lead required her full power, all of her energy driving ahead...straight into a tangle of net.
Caught in thoughts and swimming through churning waters, she’d missed it, floating in the water ahead of her.
Her momentum sent her into the net in a tangle of limbs before the heavy waterlogged ropes, now knotted around, began to drag her below the surface. She struggled, but only tangled herself further.
He was on her in seconds, securing her around the waist with the iron band of his arm. He was treading water while untangling the ropes from her limbs with the other arm.
The water was his ally, accepting him as one of its own while he worked smoothly, as if they weren’t bobbing in a cove.
Smoothly, until the palace alarm sounded above them.
Her absence had been noted.
Cursing under his breath, he made quick work of the last of the grasping ropes before pulling them with fast strokes toward the ship.
“None of this is going according to my plan.” He sounded like a weary grandfather.
She ignored him, aiming for a casual tone, though it was strained. “At least this answers how you got in.”
The whole experience was turning out to be enough to throw her off balance. It wasn’t every day a handsome stranger snuck his ship into her harbor and beat her at sparring. She was usually the one who won.
“I assume that’s your ship?” she asked, as if the answer was of no importance.
He laughed, the sound once again echoing in the chamber of the cave, but said nothing.
They were nearly to the hanging rope ladder that would carry them onto the ship. She was exhausted, with welts beginning to form on her skin from her bout with the fishing net, and she blamed it on the dress.
If she hadn’t been wearing a dress, they wouldn’t have even made it to the harbor. She would have easily subdued the mesmerizing man in the family courtyard, learned what he wanted and ended the day nestled snugly in her childhood bed. It was becoming clearer and clearer to her that he had never intended to kidnap her, and that, as he carried them up the ladder with a slight huff to his breath and a new, more serious intensity now that the alarm had sounded, it might have actually made things more inconvenient for him.
Pondering all of this meant she didn’t fight as he scaled the rope ladder with one arm and climbed aboard, his other arm holding her all the while.
Men and women of assorted shapes and sizes milled about on the deck, but no one seemed to bat an eye as he carried Hel aboard. A few even paused in what they were doing to wave and nod in greeting.
He acknowledged them with the briefest nod en route to wherever they were going.
The cabin he took her into was like walking into a Moroccan library—bright, airy and warm, with blindingly white walls lined with sleek bookshelves made from a honey-colored wood and large-sized porticos and skylights that drenched the room with sunbeams. It was utterly masculine, with its streamlined, low-profile decor, with soft, low-profile furniture, and each and every surface bare and clean enough to eat from. Each bookshelf was quite full and had a small lip. The lip, she presumed, was to keep the books where they were meant to be in the event of turbulent seas. The immense collection, she presumed, was for show, though the tradition was to pretend otherwise. In her lifetime, Hel had observed that men of action were rarely readers. Readers spent their evenings at home, not out at sea.
Yet, looking closer, she noticed signs of wear and tear—and not light—marking each volume: cracked spines, slightly bent covers, warped lines.
His books had not just been read. They’d been loved soft.
Despite the utter maleness of the room, no one would have called the space sterile or aggressive. Instead, it was warm and natural. Rich, vibrant-hued upholstery—goldenrod-yellow suede leather for the accent chair and deep burgundy silk for the matching sofa—and the woven wool throw pillows made the room homey. At their feet was a handwoven rug in a black-and-white Berber style on gleaming hardwood whose honey tones matched the bookshelves. Centered on the rug was a large, single-slab driftwood table, three inches thick and gleaming in the room’s natural lighting, unabashedly gorgeous in all its Technicolor wood-grain glory.
So unless she was mistaken and this was not the wealthiest vessel she’d ever stumbled upon, the absolute lap of luxury, boasting subtle features here and there that even an aristocrat like herself might have trouble getting her hands on, this man was not hurting for cash.
Beneath the room’s warmth, however, were signs she was dealing with a professional.
Surveillance cameras whispered in the corners of the room and there were items cleverly designed to look like pieces of the room that she was certain were weapons—a bookend, the unique detachable legs of a globe stand and an evil eye that hung on a long slender cord that she would have called a garret, if it hadn’t been attached to one of the few pieces of decor in the cabin. There was a safe camouflaged among the books. It was one of the best jobs Hel had ever seen.
The man had money, a ship and he was paranoid. Putting the three things together, she could come to just one conclusion.
He was a pirate.
Hel had been kidnapped by pirates.
But why would a pirate kidnap her? Tierrza, her estate, was a port, but she didn’t have any problems with pirates. They’d never truly had pirates, just smugglers, and her ancestors had dealt with them long ago.
But modern pirates still plagued the Mediterranean.
Just not usually Cyrano.
Hel quirked her lips, the private joke sliding across her mind that it was a sign her cousin, King Zayn, was succeeding in putting their island nation on the map. The fact that she was once again the one making jokes, even if just privately and in her mind, felt like a sign she’d only momentarily lost her groove—a brief blip in what was otherwise a perfect record.
Well, no one would really ever call her record perfect, but she was a damn good guard.
“Are you done with your tour? Forgive me if not, it just seemed like you had moved on.” His voice was dry, filled with a joke just for him, leaving Hel with the strangest sense of being left out...and caring about it.
Hel’s eyes narrowed, but she was determined to meet him head-on, even if she was barely clothed. “It’s all right, some nice stuff in here, but it’s just one room.” She paused and looked around again, exaggerating the whole thing, then added with a disappointed frown, “And it’s kind of small.”
He let out a bark of laughter and she started, the sound entrancing her momentarily, a real-life version of the Pied Piper’s flute. “Size doesn’t matter, it’s the motion of the ocean.” His eyes laughed as he delivered the line with no shame, his open palm gesturing at the open sea around them through the porticos.
Hel forced herself to look away, following the path of his hand to stare hard at the water and grumbled, “That’s not the ocean.”
She didn’t know what was wrong with her, but it was certainly not helping her regain her accustomed advantage. It was hard to maintain discomfiting nonchalance, the strategy that seemed to most put her opponents off balance, when her breath kept catching every time her eyes snagged on this man’s form, carrying her away with reactions and...staring, rather than cool observation.
Thinking while she could, while the strange distraction of him was out of sight, she reviewed what else she knew. Based on the level of luxury of the cabin, the obvious wealth it required to create such a space, let alone what might lie behind the two doors in the room, indicated this was the cabin’s quarters. She could be wrong, of course, but she doubted it. She didn’t know many people with the kind of wealth that could outfit a passenger or crew cabin so well. Very few were that rich, and she knew most of them.
Pirates were a rare thing in this day and age—in the Mediterranean or elsewhere, for that matter.
Incredibly wealthy pirates even less so.
In fact, there was only one who fit the bill that she knew of, and it was, fortunately to the present context, her job to know things, but he wasn’t a pirate. He was a privateer, and his name wasn’t whispered with fear, but called out for in desperation.
Hel’s stomach fluttered and it dawned on her that this is what people meant when they said they had butterflies, but she turned back to face him. Caught all over again by his arresting beauty, it took her a moment to speak, but when she did, despite the strength and steadiness of her voice, the strange absurdity of her words was enough to almost turn them into a question. Because in no scenario in all of the world did it make sense for a man famous through the entire Mediterranean for fighting human trafficking to be kidnapping her, she thought, as she said, “You’re the Sea Wolf.”
