My Saving Grace
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be sold, copied, distributed, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or digital, including photocopying and recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of both the publisher, Oliver Heber Books and the author, Danelle Harmon, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
COPYRIGHT 2020 © Danelle Harmon
Edited by Christine Zikas
Published by Oliver-Heber Books & Gnarly Wool Publishing
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Praise for Danelle Harmon
"One of my all-time favorite authors!"
JULIA QUINN, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of The Bridgertons
"Provocative and passionate!"
LISA KLEYPAS, New York Times Bestselling Author
"Danelle Harmon's style is as bold and sexy as her unforgettable characters!"
LORETTA CHASE, New York Times Bestselling Author
To you, EI-LBT, my beloved partner in beating aerophobia. Flying high again ... but in a far different sky. Thank you for all that you gave me, all that you taught me, and all that you helped me to overcome. I will never, ever forget you, my beautiful friend.
St. Brendan
2014-2020
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Master of My Dreams
By Danelle Harmon
Prologue
Also by Danelle Harmon
About the Author
Prologue
Sussex, England, 1790
The ancient Celtic cross that hung from their mother’s neck was a source of awe and mystery for all of Deirdre O’Devir Lord’s children.
Gathering in a circle for story time was a bedtime ritual, and it had been so for as long as any of them could remember. Tales of her homeland in faraway Connemara. Tales of green pastures and brooding gray skies, windswept mountains, rocky cliffs and barren wastelands of limestone. Tales of the sea, of life in a small cottage, of a land far, far away from the stately English manor house the children knew as home. And most fascinating, tales of Irish heroes, heroines and saints vividly brought to life with each retelling. Finn McCool. Cu Chulainn. St. Patrick. St. Brendan the Navigator. Brigid and Aoife and Queen Maeve of Connacht. All well and good, but she always saved the best for last.
Grace O’Malley.
Or rather, as their mother called her, Gráinne Ní Mháille.
They’d push their way closer, tightening the circle and staring up at her with wide eyes as she began to reach for the chain around her neck that held the cross. Shhhushing each other for quiet. Upturned faces rapt with attention. Squirming. Waiting. And then, she would begin the story of Ireland’s fierce and famous lady pirate who had lived during the time of Queen Elizabeth so long, long ago and to whom the ancient relic had belonged. The story never changed, though over the years, the children’s ages did. Colin, fair-haired and handsome, the image of their English father. The four girls, born one after another and each, like Colin, a pale blonde.
And finally, Del. Sensitive and serious, he was the youngest of Admiral Christian and Deirdre Lord’s brood and the only one to inherit the wild black curls of their mother.
He sat now, quietly waiting his turn to hold the heavy cross of beaten gold and raw emeralds as it began to make the round of their circle. Colin, the oldest, preparing to go off to sea under the watchful eye of their uncle Elliott, quickly passing it to the sister beside him with a shrug, as though such childish things were now quite beneath him. Niamh, Kathleen, Brigid and Tara, each fingering it with wonder and reverence before passing it to the child on her right. Del waited his turn. He knew what to expect. But today...
Today was different.
Beside him, Tara stared down at the relic while their mother told the familiar tale of their ancestress, the formidable Gráinne, sea-queen of Ireland’s wild western coast.
“Her blood runs through your veins,” she murmured, speaking in her native Irish—a language she had taught each of the children. “And every so often—” her voice softened, grew so low that the children had to lean forward to hear her— “Gráinne returns for the sake of one of her descendants. Someone that she herself chooses, someone she takes a fancy to, someone that needs her protection. Her wisdom. Her guidance.”
Tara passed the heavy cross to Del. He had held the relic many times before, had felt its metal against his palm, the heavy chain falling over his fingers. What stories could it tell? What things had it seen? Did it still bear a trace of the salt spray it must have gleaned as it had hung from around the neck of Gráinne herself?
Wonder. That had been all he’d ever felt.
This time was different.
He closed his hands around the ancient metal, and something moved in his blood. At just five years old he couldn’t identify it, but it was there all the same and he felt it in a way that was raw and physical. A quickening. Something ignited. Awakened. He couldn’t put words to it but it made him uneasy, aware, and he was quick to pass the cross to the last person in the circle, his mother.
She took it from him, smiled, and fastened it around her own neck, tucking it back beneath the bodice of her gown so that it rested near her heart. Storytelling was over. It was time to go to sleep. She listened as each child recited their prayers, helped them into their beds, kissed foreheads and tucked blankets around little shoulders and finally blew out candles, taking her stories and her warmth and the cross, which was suddenly no longer mysterious but frightening to little Del, with her.
He lay there in the darkness of this room he shared with Colin, whose soft breathing he could hear from the curtained bed nearby. Colin, who seemed a million miles away. Colin, whose dreams would surely be of ships and the sea and girls, most particularly the Honourable Miss Jane Drury of the neighboring Rathmore House. Colin, who had fallen asleep quickly, not a care in the world.
But Del was afraid to go to sleep.
Afraid to close his eyes, and be all alone with himself.
He had felt shaken and somehow different since holding the cross tonight, but as the stars wheeled in the heavens above, passing in and out behind the clouds scudding across the Hampshire sky, and rain fell gently against
the heavy, lead-paned windows from a very English night, his young eyelids grew heavy. It was probably raining in Ireland, he thought. The Ireland of Grace O’Malley, a place he had never seen but which, thanks to his mother’s stories, lived vividly in his imagination. Rain and mists, seabirds and rock, church ruins and lonely wind and restless, wandering spirits...
The wind hit him, and pelting rain, and he realized he was on a boat. Not a massive, stately square rigger such as the one his father was off commanding, but a primitive, many-oared vessel like those he’d seen in ancient paintings. The boat was empty save for one person.
A woman.
She stood there near a long tiller, feet braced against the motion of the sea and arms folded across her bosom, her head thrown back and her very stance commanding and bold.
She was about his mother’s age and her hair was wild and dark and long, dull with sea mist and spray, lashing her cheeks and mouth. Her eyes were fierce beneath slashing black brows, her nose strong and her lips full and smiling. She wore strange clothes, partly masculine, partly feminine, but he recognized the good serviceable sea-boots and the dagger in a heavy belt at her waist, the easy way her body absorbed the wild roll of the ship as though she were born to it.
“Delmore,” she said, and greeted him warmly in Irish.
He spoke Irish, of course. Spoke it as well as he did English. He understood.
He reached up to clutch the shrouds, steadying himself against the vessel’s pitch, sea-spray as cold as ice soaking his clothes as the galley’s bow dipped, rose, and flung it aft in a hissing shower of foam that spattered the woman’s long skirts and the mannish coat she wore over it, belted at her waist.
“Do you not speak, young man?” she asked, humor in her bold eyes. Her voice was strong. Father would call it a quarterdeck voice. Again, she spoke in Irish.
“I don’t know what to say, nor whom I’m addressing.”
“You know who I am, Delmore.”
He was suddenly afraid to speak. His fist tightened on the tarry rope and he shook with cold.
“Gráinne Ni Mhaille,” she said. “Your English father—” at this, her smile changed ever so subtly, and he caught the disdain there— “would call me Granuaile.”
“Grace O’Malley?”
She inclined her head, her smile broadening, and he wondered why there was nobody on this strange boat except for the two of them, and how it could sail with just her to crew it.
“Then that makes you my grandmother.”
“Aye, several times great,” she replied.
“Am I dead?”
She laughed, no ladylike twitter but a full, gusty sound that cut through the roar of the thrashing sea. “Not dead, young man, but dreaming. It’s the only way I could reach you. Now listen closely, because you will not see me again for a long, long while.”
“I’m listening,” Del replied, wide-eyed, holding on for dear life as the galley’s pitch and yaw grew more noticeable, his small arms straining with the effort.
“You, like so many in our family before you, will grow up to be a great and famous mariner. This, despite the wretched English blood you carry from your sire’s side!” The wind strengthened, snapping the pennant above, pushing the galley over on her lee rail until Del’s arms began to ache. The wind tore at the woman’s hair, flung wild, wet strands of it across her fierce eyes. “You will grow up and you will find your true love. There will be many who’ll have your heart, and many who will break it, but don’t despair, little lad. I’ll send someone who will be your soulmate. Someone that God made just for you. A mariner, like yourself. A woman worthy of the man that you’ll be.”
Del just stood there. Girls, marriage, a wife... they were the farthest things from his mind.
The howl of the wind strengthened, and water was streaming through the scuppers now, washing down the decks, soaking his feet, pouring out into the sea. His body was tiring from the effort it took to cling to the shroud as the vessel leaped and dove beneath him. The apparition was fading, losing substance, losing form, and Del felt a great pulling and wondered if the sea was sucking him down into its depths or if the galley was driving herself into the rising waves, into the sea itself, with each building swell.
“Gráinne!” he yelled, desperate, unwilling to be left alone on what he now knew was a sinking ship. “Don’t leave me!”
She was already moving away, the waves washing over her boots, her cloud of dark hair tangling in the wind, whipping across her face and shoulders in a wild, snarling cloud.
I will never leave you.
“Gráinne!”
She was fading into the sea mists, the ship going with her.
“How will I know her?” he cried desperately. “How?”
She turned back then, and through the screaming wind he heard her strong, resolute voice.
“She will bear my name.”
The wild pitching gentled and ceased. His ancestress shimmered in the salty mist and flying foam and was gone. Del jerked awake, his heart pounding so hard that he felt the throbbing in his throat. The dream was vivid. Real enough that he felt he could reach out and touch it. He lay there in the bed, quite dry save for the sweat beneath his back, staring up into the darkness and his pulse hammering in his ears. Bang, bang, bang. He shuddered and blinked, finally hearing the sound of Colin’s measured breathing in the other bed as his heartbeat began to quiet.
A dream.
He could not know then that it would fade, as dreams almost always do, and as he grew to adulthood it would be all but lost in the pick-and-choose array of memories that the adult mind remembers when looking back at its childhood years. He could not know then that he would suppress his imaginative and sensitive side to become the mariner the strange woman had said he would be, not because she’d foretold it but because it was in his blood, like it was for all the Lord men and, truth be told, all of the O’Devir men of his mother’s side as well. He could not know that the dream would become less vivid, its colors and emotion fading as the years passed and that eventually he’d dismiss it entirely, when he even bothered to think about it as all, as silly childhood fantasy.
But for now, he lay there in the darkness, trembling in fear and awe.
It was a long time before he slept.
1
Barbados, April, 1814
The letter came by fast-sailing packet to the commander of the Leeward Islands squadron of the Royal Navy’s West Indies Station, a celebrated Vice Admiral named Sir Graham Falconer who happened to be married to an ex-pirate queen named Maeve. The letter’s bearer, a hapless lieutenant wilting in the day’s heat, stood by with tense expectation. That hapless lieutenant happened to be under the command of one Delmore Lord, flag captain of said admiral and commander of His Majesty’s Ship Orion, and the flag captain himself stood quietly at attention, hands clasped behind his back, as Sir Graham broke the wax seal and began to read.
Orion, a massive floating fortress of a hundred guns, was currently sleeping in the sun out in Carlisle Bay, happily at anchor, and Del had the feeling her repose would soon be interrupted given the thunderclouds darkening his admiral’s face.
“Damnation! Is there no end to my being summoned back to England under the most ridiculous of circumstances?”
Del held himself rigidly straight. “Ridiculous, sir?”
“Aye, bloody ridiculous! A wedding. This place is crawling with privateers and the French are ever a concern, and I’m being summoned home for a damned wedding!”
Del exchanged a look with the trembling messenger and cut his eyes toward the door in a crisp motion. I will handle this. You are dismissed.
The young man bolted.
“I suppose,” said Del carefully, “that would depend on whose wedding you are being asked to attend.”
“My sister Ariannah’s! Damn it to hell, it’s not like she hasn’t been married before, what, two times now?”
“I believe it to be three, sir.”
“Three! And what is this
, number four? The safety of the Leeward Islands is to be compromised because I have to go home to attend a damned wedding? What madness is this?”
“I should say, sir, that that would depend on who she is marrying, and who’s demanding your attendance.”
“She’s marrying a relation of the king, a relation who enjoys favor with the royal family, and when the Prince Regent says his admiral must go home to attend the nuptials, that admiral cannot refuse. Damn it. Damn it all to hell!”
Movement at the doorway; for a moment, Del thought that the terrified junior officer was coming back, but no, it was only Kieran Merrick, one of the said American privateers who complicated family matters on the other side of Sir Graham’s pedigree— that is, the side into which he’d married.
“Something amiss, Gray?” asked the American, pouring himself a glass of lemonade from the sweating glass pitcher that dominated the table on which the admiral had thrown the letter. “I heard you from the veranda.”
“I have to return to England. Again.” He slanted a look of pained exasperation at his brother-in-law. “And what am I to do with you whilst I’m gone? Leave you here to run rampant over British shipping?”