The woman he had been searching out for two years.

Sailors flanked her protectively, casting soft, liquid glances at her and scowls at Jin and his mate. She stood a head shorter than her guard, coming to about Jin’s chin. Garbed in loose trousers and a long, shapeless coat of worn canvas, a thick bundle of black neck cloth stuffed beneath her chin, a sash with no fewer than three mismatched pistols hanging from it, and a wide-brimmed hat obscuring her face, she didn’t particularly resemble her sister. But Jin had spent countless nights in ports from Cape Cod to Vera Cruz drinking sailors and merchants under the table and bribing men with everything he had at hand in search of information about the girl who had gone missing a decade and a half ago. That she looked less like a fine English lady than any woman he’d ever seen did not mean a damned thing.

Violet la Vile was Viola Carlyle, the girl he had set out from Devonshire twenty-two months earlier to find. The girl who, at the age of ten, had been abducted from a gentleman’s home by an American smuggler. The girl all except her sister believed dead.

The brim of her hat rose slowly through the rain. A narrow chin came into view, then a scowling mouth, a slight, sun-touched nose, and finally a pair of squinting eyes, crinkled at the corners. They assessed Jin from toe to crown. A single brow lifted and her lips curved up at one side in a mocking salute.

“So this is the famed Jinan Seton I’ve heard so many stories of? The Pharaoh.” Her voice drawled like a sheet sliding through a well-oiled block. Thick lashes fanned down, then back up again, taking him in this time with a swift perusal. She wagged her head back and forth and her lower lip protruded. “Disappointing.”

Mattie made a choking sound.

Jin’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know who I am?”

“Your crewmen. Boasting of you even as they were losing the fight.” A full-throated chortle came forth and she plunked her fists onto her hips and pivoted around to the sailors gathering about. “Lookee here, boys! The British navy sent its dirtiest pirate scum to haul me in.”

A cheer went up, huzzahs and whistles across deck. Seamen crowded closer with toothless grins and crackling guffaws, brandishing muskets and cutlasses high. She raised her hand and silence descended but for the whoosh of waves against the brig’s hull and the patter of rain on canvas and wood. Her gaze slued back to Jin, sharp as a dirk.

“Guess I should be flattered, shouldn’t I?” Her voice was like velvet. For a moment-a wholly unprecedented moment-Jin’s throat thickened. No woman should have a voice like that. Except in bed.

“Why did you sink my ship?” The steely edge he had learned as a lad came to his own voice without effort. “She was the fastest vessel on the Atlantic. What kind of privateer are you, putting a prize like that under water? You could have kept her, or sold her. She would have taken a fine price.”

She screwed up her brows.

“It’s true, I could’ve kept her, Master Brit. Or sold her. But I’d a feeling the master of the Cavalier wouldn’t allow his ship into another’s hands. Was I right?” She grinned. “Of course I was. Then when you found your freedom you’d be pestering to get her back until I’d have had to sink another of your ships until you left my coast alone. No thank you kindly.” Her eyes glinted.

“Our countries are no longer at war. You should have released us when you realized who we were.”

“You didn’t give me much choice, swarming aboard my vessel without invitation.”

He shook his head in astonishment. “You were making to board us. What are you doing sneaking around like pirates in the rain?”

“Looking for fools bent on glory,” she said with infuriating ease. “What kind of idiot attacks a pirate vessel?”

The sort that had seen firsthand a man’s feet nailed to planking and other unique freebooter tortures. The sort that had once been as merciless, and now spent his days trying to atone for those sins. He would never again allow a pirate ship to sail free.

“Anyway”-she shrugged-“it was such fun seeing the mighty Cavalier go down, I couldn’t resist.”

Red washed across Jin’s vision. He tried to blink it away. His gut hurt. Damn and blast, he wanted a cutlass and pistol more than life at this moment. Or perhaps just a bottle of rum.

She smirked.

Two bottles. They said she was a fine sailor for a woman, but no one said she was mad.

“What will you do with my crew?” His voice sounded uneven now. Damn and blast.

A single brow arched high again. “What do you think I’ll do with them? Trade them for profit?”

Jin’s spine stiffened. “You would not. You couldn’t sell more than half, if you did.” The half with brown skin.

“Of course I won’t, you heathen.” Her tone did not alter from the satin.

“What then?”

A gust of breeze blew the misty rain sideways. The ship leaned and the woman widened her stance. She pursed her lips.

“I’ll put you off tonight when we come into port. They’ll take you into the jail there and the constable will decide what to do with you.”

“Constable?” Mattie grunted.

“What, big fellow? Afraid of the law? Do you want to stay aboard?” She cast him a crooked grin. “I could use a brute like you around here. You’re welcome to remain if you wish, and leave Lord Pharaoh here to rot behind bars with the others.”

Mattie’s cheeks went beet red. Jin’s fist ached to slam right into his helmsman’s meaty jaw. Mattie was a fool about women.

But he took a measured breath instead. With that speech she had given away all he needed. She had given away proof of her origins.

In his twenty-nine years Jin had sailed from Madagascar to Barbados. He had drunk with men from Canton to Mexico City, and he had heard nearly every language on earth. No single utterance had ever sounded so sweet to him as Violet la Vile’s West Country long A. The woman was Devonshire born and bred or Jin wasn’t a sailor. It did not matter that he had lost the Cavalier. He had found his quarry.

His crew believed she was yet another bounty to be collected, a quarry assigned to him through his work for the government. She was not, rather his own private mission. With Viola Carlyle’s return to England, his debt to the man who had saved his life would be repaid at last.

“Thank you, mum.” Mattie ducked a jerky bow against his bonds. “I’ll be staying with me mates.”

“Suit yourself.” She eyed Jin. “I suppose you expect me to have you untied, pirate.”

“I do. Quickly.”

“Not a pirate no more, miss,” Mattie grunted. “Not for two years now.”

Her eyes glinted. “It gives me pleasure to call him one.” She lifted a brow. “He doesn’t like it, obviously. He is as arrogant as they say.” She sauntered toward him, halting inches away. She tilted her head back, her hat brim hovering just above his nose as she scanned his face slowly with her squinting eyes. Unusual color. So dark blue they could be called violet. Thus her false name, no doubt.

Up close her skin shone warm from sun even under the canopy of rainclouds, nothing like an English lady’s delicate pallor. Her mouth was fuller than he had first thought, lips chapped at the bow, a small, flat mole on one side riding the curve of her lower lip. Freckles dusted her pug nose.

Not pug. Delicate. Almost ladylike.

He gave her stare for stare.

She wrinkled the almost ladylike appendage.

“Arrogant.” She sighed on a rough whorl of air. “And still disappointing. I’ll admit I expected more of the legend.”

“I can give you more, if you wish.” And he would. As soon as he got free of these bonds he would give Viola Carlyle exactly what she should have had fifteen years ago.

He would give her family back again.

Viola chuckled. “Oh can you?”

“I can do you damage even with my hands tied behind my back.” His voice was gravelly, ice blue eyes intense.

In all the stories Viola had heard of the infamous pirate-turned-British privateer, no one ever mentioned those eyes. But sailors were a pack of fool men and never noticed details like that. Every member of her crew could tell her the exact direction the wind blew across Nantucket Sound in December, or the difference between a rolling hitch and a double sheet bend. But she wagered none of them could state the color of her hair if she stood hatless before them, and she’d captained them for almost two years and known them fifteen. Most sailors weren’t observant in that fashion.

Pity she wasn’t most sailors. Jinan Seton was a fine specimen of masculinity.

She grinned. “I’d like to see you try.” Taunting a man bound to a mast with ropes wasn’t gracious. But it was fun, especially when the man was too handsome for his own scoundrel good.

“Would you like that?” The ice glittered.

“Talk bluster-cock all you want, pirate.” Viola ignored her abruptly dry throat, gesturing to the ropes strapped about him. “My boys know how to tie a fine knot.”

“I have no doubt they do.” His voice was deep. Relaxed. Far too confident. “Are you daring me?”

“Surrounded by sixty of my men, with yours all tied up just like you?” She waggled her brows. “Why not?”

His teeth snapped. Her nose exploded in pain.

She wrenched free and leaped back, slapping a hand to her face.

The hulk roared with laughter. “Guessing you haven’t heard all the stories about Cap’n Jin after all. Aye, miss?”

She glared, dropped her hand, and pushed her face up to Seton’s again. Whiskers shadowed his jaw, nearly black, all of him wet just like everything aboard her ship. It had been raining for three days, the downpour thick as fog, and she hadn’t meant to sneak up on the Cavalier at all. It had just been good luck.

Seton’s eyes looked hard as crystal.

Or perhaps not such good luck.

She gritted her teeth. “Don’t you dare do anything like that again.” She poked her finger into his soaked waistcoat. Muscle beneath. Hard muscle. But that was typical enough for a sailor. “Or I’ll have you strapped to the hull in less than an instant.”

“You dared, in point of fact. Faulty judgment.” The cool blue glimmered now. He was enjoying himself. His gaze, so close, slipped to her throbbing nose, then returned to her eyes. His voice rumbled like a summer storm, low and mildly threatening. “I could have taken off the tip.”

“Done it before,” the hulk grunted cheerfully. “Earlobes too. A bloke’s finger one time.”

Viola couldn’t drag her attention from the icy eyes. “I retract the Pharaoh sobriquet. You are an animal.”

“And you are standing far too close for your own good.” With his dark hair plastered to the bridge of his nose and high cheekbones, his eyes looked preternatural and uncannily knowing. A long nose and a strong jaw lent him an aristocratic air. And he spoke with the accents of an educated man, but with a foreign timbre. He was not fully English. In ports from Boston to Havana, they called him the Pharaoh for good reason.

A gleam of white showed at the crease of his mouth. Teeth. Deceptively sharp teeth. She should move away from them.

She did not-not only because she had never backed down from an opponent in front of her crew. She was, quite frankly, rapt. His lips were perfect, the most decadent dusky shade curving in wonderfully sensuous dips and rises. Flawless masculinity. Viola tried to conjure Aidan’s lips in her memory. She couldn’t. It’d been months since she last saw him, true, but she was in love with Aidan Castle. Ten years in love. She should surely remember his mouth.

Seton’s perfect lips curved into a slow smile. His breath tickled her face, mingling with the rain. Her gaze crept up. He leaned slightly forward and murmured as intimately as though they were lovers sharing a bed, “I will do it again if you do not move away.”

“I suspect you will.” Her insides shivered, the betrayal of a grown woman too long in command of a bunch of scabrous salties. But her father had always told her she was hot-blooded. “But then I would have to kill you, and neither of us want that, do we?”

“Move away, or we will find out.”

“Don’t tempt me. The dirk at my hip likes the taste of pirate blood.”

“Not a pirate no more, miss,” the hulk mumbled.

“It seems to me, madam”-Seton bent his head, tilting it so that those perfect lips hovered a mere sliver of damp air above hers-“that you are ignoring an important message here.”

He smelled of salt, rain, and wind. And something else. Musky and male, but not filthy, sweaty male sailor. Rather, male man. A scent that ran right through her like a little flame.

Viola willfully shut off her nostrils.