When he nodded in understanding, she sighed and ran her finger around the rim of her wineglass. “Even with just myself to worry about, it became increasingly hard to hide what I was. I claimed a bad reaction to sun on my skin to explain why I avoided it, but I still needed to slip away to hunt every night, which was much more difficult than I’d expected. .” She blew out a breath and shrugged. “We were only together a year or so before the duchess had to die.”
“How did you manage that?” Harper asked quietly.
“Oh, Uncle Lucian helped me out,” she said wryly. “The man always seems to show up when you need him. It’s like a sixth sense with him or something.”
“I’ve heard that about him,” Harper said and asked curiously, “What did he do?”
“He arranged for a message claiming that Stephano was deathly ill and asking for me at a time when my husband was expected at court. Lucian assured him he’d see me safely there and had booked passage up the coast on a ship. Then he bought a ship, manned it with immortals, and my husband rode with us to port to see us off.
“It was surprisingly emotional,” she admitted with a frown. “I mean, I knew I wasn’t going to die, but I would be dead to him and never see him again, and I was quite overwrought. Of course, he put it down to concern for my brother and was very sweet and tender. He stayed to watch us sail off.” She fell silent as she recalled that morning, and found herself having to blink away a sudden, surprising well of tears. She had been fond of many mortals over the ages, but Roberto had been a special man. She’d loved him dearly and for years had regretted that he hadn’t been a possible life mate.
Shaking her head, she finished quickly, “Uncle Lucian had purchased the ship with the sole purpose of sinking it. The ship went down, supposedly with all hands on board, and I, along with everyone else, was presumed dead.”
“And then you were back to living with your brother,” Harper said with a grimace that suggested he knew how little she would have enjoyed that.
“Not for terribly long,” she said with satisfaction. “Just long enough to decide what I wished to do next.”
“Which was. .” He paused, apparently going back through his memory to the list she’d rattled off earlier, and then said uncertainly, “Pirate?”
Drina chuckled. “I was a privateer really, but it’s the same thing, just that it was sanctioned by the government. As captain, I had a letter of marque allowing me to attack and rob vessels belonging to enemies of Spain. Royal permission to plunder.”
“You were the captain?” he asked with a smile. “And were you Captain Alexander or Alexandrina?”
She smiled. “Alexander, of course. Well, just Alex. But they thought me a man, or most of them did. As you can guess, few Spanish men would have worked a boat with a female captain, so I dressed as a man. I was very butch,” she assured him with a teasing light in her eyes, and then wrinkled her nose. “Or at least I thought I was. It was most disheartening when I read in their minds that most of them thought me fey and probably gay.”
Harper threw his head back on a laugh loud enough to draw several glances their way. Drina didn’t care, she just smiled.
“I imagine you were a very good pirate,” he said finally, and she chuckled.
“I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not.”
“A compliment,” he assured her. “You’re clever enough, and had the fighting background for it.”
Drina nodded. “Yes, we were very successful. But I eventually grew tired of watching my men die.”
Harper arched an eyebrow as he picked up his wineglass.
She shrugged and picked up her own glass. Turning it in her hands, she said, “They were all very skilled, of course, and I insisted they train daily, but they were mortal. They weren’t as fast or strong, and didn’t have the “healthy constitution” or quick healing I enjoyed.” She sighed. “I lost a lot of good men over the years, and finally decided enough was enough. It was time anyway. They were aging, I wasn’t, and I had taken a wound or two that should have been fatal but wasn’t.” She grimaced. “When the fighting comes from every side, it’s impossible not to take injury.”
Harper nodded in understanding. “How did you explain that away?”
“It was pretty tricky,” she said wryly. “The first wound I took was a sword to the back. One of the buggers snuck up behind me while I was dealing with two others and-” She shrugged. “Fortunately, it was near the end of the battle, and one we won. I woke up in my cabin with One-eye, the ship’s cook, sitting beside me, his mouth scrunched up as if he’d sucked a lemon.” She laughed at the memory. “He’d dragged me from the battle while my first took over leading the men to finish the battle. He’d carried me to my cabin, stripped away my jacket and shirt to tend my wound and discovered I had breasts. He was more horrified by that than the length and depth of the wound,” she said dryly.
Harper laughed.
“One-eye didn’t admit this,” she continued, “but I read his mind, and it seems he was so sure he must be seeing things when my breasts were revealed that he grabbed me through my pantaloons in search of my ‘equipment.’ Much to his dismay, there wasn’t any,” she said wryly, and Harper’s laughter deepened.
“How did you handle that?” he asked finally, as his laughter waned.
Drina smiled wryly. “Well, it took some talking and a bit of mind control, but I managed to convince him not to tell anyone. I suppose I could have just erased the memory and sent him off the ship, hired another cook, but he was a good man. A bit older than the others, more wizened, but a good man.
“Fortunately, he felt I was a good captain, so agreed to keep the secret, and the whole thing was so upsetting to him that he didn’t seem to notice that I should have died from the wound.
“One-eye kept an eye on me after that, though, watched my back in battle and wouldn’t let anyone else see to my wounds on the rare occasion that I took one.” She took a sip of wine, and then added, “I only ever let him bind me if I couldn’t manage myself, and then only once directly after receiving the wounds. It was to be sure he didn’t notice how quickly I healed. He, however, thought it was because I was shy of his seeing my body, and I let him think that.
“For the first few wounds, he was so flustered by tending a woman that he practically closed his eyes while he did it.” She chuckled. “Actually, he was surprisingly missish about it for a pirate. I think it was only because I was his captain.” She shrugged. “But eventually he got more used to it, and then I took another wound that would have been fatal to a mortal, and that time he did notice.”
“How did you explain it?” Harper asked.
“I didn’t. What could I say? I just muttered that I’d always been strong and a fast healer and left it at that, but he started watching me more closely and started putting things together.”
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that I stayed in my cabin all day, leaving the helm to my first, and came out to man the helm myself only at night, doing so with an unerring sense of direction, as if I could see through the darkness,” she said dryly. “That I only approached ships at night to attack them. That I was uncommonly strong, especially for a woman, and that I was as nimble in the rigging at night as they would be during the day, while they had to feel their way blindly in the dark.
“Ah,” Harper said with a grimace.
She nodded. “Then he followed me down into the hold of the ship one night when I went to visit the prisoners in search of blood to replace what I’d lost from a wound.”
Harper didn’t appear surprised by her words. Before blood banks, all of them had been forced to feed on mortals. Still, she felt she had to explain, and said, “I tried never to feed on my own crew, and even with prisoners I was careful not to take too much blood, feeding on several rather than one or two. I wiped their memories that I was ever in the hold, and our prisoners were always treated well. I was careful.”