He quirked the corner of his mouth humorlessly. And to think, he’d decided last year that by this time in his life he’d be a dull, respectable merchant, running respectable cargo—silks and spices—with his own ship. It hadn’t seemed unreasonable. After all, hadn’t he nearly ground the smuggling trade into dust?
Instead he was tracking cigars.
One. By. Bloody. One.
He would do it as long as it took. But it was making him, and all his men, restive. They were designed for a different sort of action.
It was a wonder the water below him didn’t begin a slow boil, such was his focus.
Of all the fatal mistakes the Blue Rock gang had finally made—the fire set in a barn meant to intimidate an aristocratic family into allowing them the use of their horses but which had gone horribly wrong; incurring the rage of the king, who had a soft spot for Lady Millcoke, an old lover; and igniting a cold, vengeful wrath in a certain Captain Tristan Hardy—the cigars were probably the biggest.
Because they were singular. Staggeringly expensive. A unique sop to the vanity and boredom of wealthy men, and wildly profitable for the smugglers. They arrived already rolled and needed to be transported quickly. Typical smuggled cargos—tea, tobacco, spirits—were so undistinguished as to be difficult to trace, if they got past the blockade men at all. And since Tristan had become commander, they simply didn’t get past the blockade.
But those cigars—created somewhere in France, by God knows who—were as distinctive as animal scat, and just as trackable.
And Tristan and his men knew the Blue Rock gang was smuggling those particular cigars.
But they didn’t know how the gang was getting them to London from the Sussex coast. Which maddened them, because they had all but choked off the flow of any contraband along that route.
And despite watching all the docks along the Thames, they’d been unable to discover how the cigars were being distributed in London, or how they wound up in the hands of the likes of Lord Kinbrook, in White’s.
Which probably meant someone considered untouchable, who could move outside the usual confines of a smuggler’s world, was funding or abetting them.
In short: some aristocratic bastard.
They’d located a few merchants who sold them in Piccadilly. Both claimed they hadn’t had any new ones in at least a fortnight.
At least three of the smug, entitled, aristocratic bastards he’d had the displeasure of charming, cajoling, threatening, or coercing revealed that Lord Kinbrook always had more than one on hand.
And they’d finally learned that Kinbrook had purchased his cigars from Derring.
Only to learn that Derring was dead.
Bloody.
Fecking.
Hell.
But it made sense, somehow: the flow of cigars seemed to have stopped right about when Derring died. Which could be coincidental. Except that he didn’t believe in coincidences.
He also wasn’t accustomed to grasping at such wispy, ephemeral evidence.
Then again, he’d learned to trust his instincts.
It was just that so many people were trusting his instincts at this very moment.
The king was on his neck. And the king behaving in a kingly way was unusual, but when his stomach and his penis were involved, he took matters quite seriously. In fact, he was, Tristan understood, a man of feeling and intelligence in the wrongest possible job for him.
But he represented a country Tristan loved and believed in.
And the king had offered Tristan a reward if he could bring those bastards in.
He didn’t really need the reward. He’d bring those bastards in, no matter what.
But in a future he could read as clearly as he could read the murky ocean below, money—earned honorably—of course couldn’t hurt.
For either him or his men, who would get their share—who were counting on him to lead them to this victory, too.