“Ahem,” a masculine voice murmured nearby, and Silence suddenly remembered where she was.
She clutched Mary Darling to her breast and whirled to face Mickey O’Connor. “Thank you. It’s most—most kind of you to have given her back to me. I really can’t thank you enough.” Silence took a step backward, afraid to take her eyes from Charming Mickey’s face. “I-I’ll just be leaving—”
Mr. O’Connor smiled. “Oh, certainly, sweetheart, do as you wish, but the little one will be a-stayin’ with me, I think.”
Silence froze. “You have no right—!”
The pirate lifted one inky eyebrow and reached out to finger Mary Darling’s black curls. His hand was large against her little head. “Oh, don’t I?”
“Bad!” Mary Darling glared at Mickey O’Connor, dark eyes meeting dark eyes, black curls framing a face that might’ve been a feminine miniature of Mr. O’Connor’s own.
The resemblance was quite devastating.
Silence swallowed. Mary Darling had been abandoned on her doorstep eleven months ago. At the time she’d thought that the baby had been left with her because her brother ran the Home for Unfortunate Infants and Foundling Children. Now she wondered if there had been a much more diabolical reason.
“You don’t love her,” she tried.
“No.” Mickey O’Connor let his hand drop. “But I’m a-thinkin’ that doesn’t matter all that much when you do, Mrs. Hollingbrook.”
Silence felt the breath catch in her throat. “Let me leave with her.”
“No.”
Mary Darling squirmed again, with one of those mercurial shifts of moods that toddlers are prone to. “Down!”
Silence let her slip from her arms, watching as the little girl carefully stood against one of the huge trunks of booty. “Why are you doing this? Haven’t you done enough to me in this lifetime?”
“Oh, not nearly enough, me darlin’,” Mickey O’Connor murmured. Silence felt more than saw him reach out his hand toward her hair. Maybe he meant to fondle her hair as he had Mary Darling’s.
She jerked her head out of his way.
His hand dropped.
“Why, then?” She folded her arms and faced him, though she kept Mary Darling within sight.
He shrugged, the movement making his shirt slip further off one tanned shoulder. “A man in my position has many an enemy, I fear. Nasty, mean creatures who don’t let the thought of innocence or youth stop them from doin’ terrible, murderous things.”
“Why take her now?” Silence asked. “Are these enemies new?”
His mouth curved into another smile, this one entirely without humor. “Not at all. But me enemies have become more… er… persistent in the last month or two, you understand. It’s merely a matter of business, one that I hope to soon tidy up. But in the meantime, should my enemies find the wee child…”
Silence shivered, watching as Mary Darling grabbed for a dark fur and pulled it half out of the trunk. “Damn you. How could you have put her in this danger?”
“I didn’t,” he said without any signs of conscience. “I gave her to you, remember.”
She shifted her gaze to him and was disconcerted to find him only a foot away. The room was big, and besides Harry and the sweetmeats boy, a gang of pirates sat around Mr. O’Connor’s throne. Was he worried they’d be overheard?
“Then let me keep her,” Silence whispered. “She doesn’t know you, doesn’t love you. She’s been safe with me for nearly a year. If you have any decency in you at all, you’ll let her go with me.”
“Ah, love.” Mickey O’Connor tilted his head, long inky locks of hair slithering over his broad shoulders. “Don’t you know by now that decent is the last thing anyone would be a-callin’ me? No, the lass stays with me and me men, here where I can keep me eye on her night and day until I can see to this bit of bother.”
“But she thinks me her mother,” Silence hissed. “How can you separate us when—”
“An’ who said anything about separatin’?” Mr. O’Connor asked with feigned surprise. “Why, darlin’, I said the babe had to stay with me, I never said you couldn’t as well.”
Silence inhaled and then found she had trouble letting the breath out again. “You want me to come live with you?”
Mr. O’Connor grinned as if she were a pet dog that had finally learned a trick. “Aye, that’s the way of it, sweeting.”
“I can’t live with you,” Silence hissed furiously. “Everyone would think…”