Edward, Carlisle, and Esme are the intellectual property of Stephenie Meyer.

In this story, however, I will use them for my own amusement, and perhaps for yours. Ms. Meyer's characters would never behave as badly as mine.

I do not recall who, but one of my faithful readers of "An Old-fashioned Husband" requested this story ages ago. This is for you, if you feel inclined to step forward and accept. This is also for my new friend, Cumor, who inspired and encouraged me with her brilliant Carlisle/Esme trilogy and specifically a rather controversial Dr. C/Es fic, which we shall not speak of for fear of flames.

Cumor made me write after I'd sworn off it. Please direct your props/complaints appropriately. (Get your fire extinguisher handy, mate!)

My beta, sisterglitch, is much more than that. She is Alpha in my heart, and I would do anything for her.

EPOV

Making my way home after a companionless hunt, I detected my father's new mate near our house, where I'd left her. I was hoping that she wouldn't be there, that she'd let herself out on one of her wanders.

So I wasn't exactly an enthusiast of the new sister. I mean, stepmother. Uh, half-sister? Father's wife? Whichever she is. What can I say? It takes time for me to adapt to new situations.

Although I peered inside his head regularly—as long as what was going on wasn't too indecent—I couldn't quite comprehend what my sire saw in her. So you got a girl to go to bed with you. Way to go, Carlisle. Where I come from there is a word for such girls, and they are not hard to find, if you know where to look.

Now I saw the attraction—the romance, the connection—from his perspective. He was helpless to its instinctive trap. But from my view, this falling in love nonsense was complete drivel.

I know what you're thinking. You're really selfish, Edward. Why not let the man have his happiness? Save your breath. I'll tell you why. Because I was his happiness before she came along.

And she's trouble—an outright thorn in my flesh.

That's why I want her out of my house.

Of course, when Esme wandered from home without Carlisle or myself, there was usually a mess to clean up. On her bad days, it was a messy mess, a body to dispose of. For that reason, Carlisle had asked her not to go out without one of us.

He didn't really expect her to always be good. And so, while he was at the clinic, I was supposed to keep an eye on her.

Naturally that made her slip-ups my fault. Everything was always my fault.

On Esme's better days, she didn't murder anybody, and to her credit, these faux pas had become more rare. But now we struggled with another bad habit. One that Carlisle frowned upon, if not with such moral distaste, then certainly with grave disapproval.

Nearing home, I heard Esme's mental panic going in circles: "What am I going to do? What's he going to say? He's going to be so disappointed in me! How am I to explain? I don't know why I keep doing this. Oh, what am I going to do?"

As I came into the clearing, my sight was captured by a rather sizable anomaly. It was large boat leaning on its side in the yard—a handsome piece, wooden with ivory sails, about thirty feet from bow to stern.

Now we lived near the coast, but to find a shipwreck at our home in the woods was...unexpected to say the least. Then I saw Esme, sitting on the ground, hugging her knees, rocking back and forth.

Oh, despite the peculiarity of the scene, I knew exactly what had happened here.

It was precisely this sort of behavior from Esme that would get me in trouble. Well, I thought, might as well have a bit of fun with this.

I put on an outraged face. "Esme! What have you done?"

She whimpered. "I don't know...I didn't mean..."

"This is...this is beyond the pale."

Esme was cringing, her defensiveness overtaken by guilt. I wondered why she didn't think of the consequences before she committed the crime.

I continued my diatribe. "Unseemly, intolerable, shocking—"

"You are not making me feel any better," she sobbed.

I pried into her mind, wanting to understand why she did these things.

It seemed to me that Esme was quite taken with her new self. She was strong and fast, and nothing could stop her. Her whole life, she had wanted things she could not have. An enrollment at Saint Xavier's, tickets to the theater, her very own sewing machine. She had wanted the baby too, but even that had been taken from her. (God, who would want a baby! This tells you the sort of madness I was dealing with.)

Now she could easily take whatever she fancied.

The problem had escalated over the past several weeks. She came home first with small items, such as mail and still-damp laundry from clotheslines. Then it was a bicycle, a ladder, and a baby carriage. She'd stolen a horse two weeks ago.

"Please can I keep her?" she had moaned.

"Uh, actually this horse is a gelding," I'd pointed out helpfully, looking between its legs.

Carlisle had held Esme sweetly while he refused her. "No, darling. We've talked about taking things that are not ours. It's not our horse, and we must return him to the owners. Besides, the poor beast is terrified of us, and we haven't a proper pasture."

It was ridiculous how soft he was going. The way he used the subject pronoun we and plural possessive our—like talking to a misguided child.

"But I love her! I named her Beauty."

"I know. That doesn't change the fact that he doesn't belong to you."

"No! You can't take her," Esme had argued. Argued! With our sire! Had that been me, I would have been immediately bent over and examining my toes while he whaled away on my backside.

"There, there," he consoled her instead.

I had done some spying around the village and discovered who it was that was inexplicably missing a horse. The creature was so startled—its eyes rolling and hooves stomping sideways—I'd had to put a sack over its head.

And guess who had to return it to its stable that night.

Not we. Me.

I shook my head at the sailboat and clicked my tongue at the madwoman on the grass. "I'm sorry, Esme. But you must know what this means."

"No," she said silently to the ground.

"Esme," I called, achieving her attention. I tried very hard to straighten my face before I said it. "You're a pirate."

"No," she said again, shaking her head.

"Well, what do you call someone who steals a boat, hm?" I turned as though to leave and pressed my lips together briefly. "It was nice knowing you," I said over my shoulder.

Her head snapped up. "What do you mean?"

"In case you hadn't noticed, Carlisle is English. There is no leniency for freebooters in the London chancery."

"He's a nice man. He wouldn't—"

"He's a Brit. And he has the utmost respect for the law. And he's a great advocate of capital punishment. For centuries pirates have been the bane of the English monarchy, and when a pirate is caught, she is hanged."

"But I've killed people, and he's not—"

"Those are marks against you. Yep, I'm afraid it's the gibbet for you, madam."

She was keening then, mourning her own demise.

I rambled, loud enough for her to hear. "Of course, he's not going to go through the trouble of building a scaffold, but there are lots of trees around—"

"Edward! You have to help me hide it!"

"Mm. All right." I made a show of looking around. "You can hide it in the bushes, I suppose." What the hell? This female was dreadfully dense as well as mad.

She sighed. "Where can I hide it then?" she asked, wide-eyed as a spring lamb.

"Let me think about this. I'll be back in a moment." I strode off toward the shed.

"Where are you going?" she screeched.

"I need to get some rope."

"What for? We can't drag it. It would leave marks."

"Not for the boat, for the hanging."

"Edward!"

I ignored her and burst into the shed, doubled over, and gave in to my hilarity, laughing silently. After about two minutes of that, I rubbed my mouth with force until I was able to compose myself. Then I told myself that I mustn't think about what her face looked like when I told her she was a pirate, or I would blow my cover to Carlisle. Because something told me he would fail to see the humor in this.

CPOV

I had worked a double shift at the local surgery, caring for our overnight patients. It was dawn and I'd cleaned myself up and was heading home again.

I hoped Esme and Edward had been good during my hours away. They seemed to be getting along. I know my son was having trouble adjusting to having a new member in the family, but he took advantage of Esme's kindly instincts, as she would do anything for him, and I thought that Edward would have liked having an older sister.

And I must say, he'd done a smashing job keeping Esme out of trouble of late. There hadn't been any theft since the horse. The bloodshed...well that, thanks be to God, had slackened too. It was starting to feel more...traditional around here. Esme was fond of coddling Edward—

What the devil!

There was—it's a—there, on my property, was a vessel. For the water. On my lawn. A boat!

Well, someone is going to get paddled all right.

"Edward," I called, not quietly.

He came out to meet me, but I had no audible words for him. "What is the meaning of this?"

"She's gone and done it again," he said in a jumble. He raised his hands in innocence, most likely having heard my inner preliminary and keen to shove the blame somewhere else.

"You're expecting me to believe that Esme nicked a boat?" I asked.

He nodded. "She refuses to return it. Although how we do that without the neighbors seeing, I don't know. She's become very good at stealing things, Carlisle. I'm still not sure how she got it here without notice—"

"Where is she?" I cut him off, finally forming words.

"Uh...she's hiding."

"Where...?" I started to track my mate's scent.

He inclined his head toward the watercraft.

I made my voice gentle. "Esme, love, come out. It's me. Carlisle. Come on out, darling." I found her huddled in the cabin. She didn't uncoil out of the fetal position, so I carried her out of the tilted interior as best I could then sat with her on the grass.

"Please forgive me. Please forgive me. Have mercy. Don't. Please don't—"

"Don't what, darling? You are safe." I turned to my son. "What is she going on about, Edward. Read her mind. Now."

But it was Esme that answered. "I don't want you to kill me."

I looked at Edward, who shrugged—a bit too innocently, with his hands in his pockets.

"Why would I kill you, Esme? I love you. It's not possible." I skimmed my nose along her cheekbone, taking in her scent. "Talk to me, love." I began to play with her hair, hoping she would unwind.

She was crying heartily, but managed a couple of deep breaths. "Edward told me that you would execute me. You would hang me. Because I—because I'm a..." The rest was unintelligible.

"A what?"

"I'm a pirate!" she blubbered.

Edward's frozen expression failed to hide his amusement. He snorted.

In all my years of existence, I could count on one hand the number of times I had wanted to hurt another being. I never imagined that having a son would cause that repressed violence to surface recurrently.

"Esme, listen to me now. I would never hurt you. No matter what you do, I will always love you and support you." I didn't feel it necessary to explain that she could not die by hanging. It seemed beyond the point.

I felt her body unclench.

"However, you must not take things that are not yours, love. If you want anything—anything at all—all you need to do is ask. I would buy you your own boat and name it the HMS Esme. I would buy you your own island, for God's sake! But this must stop now. We will figure out a way to return the sailboat. And that will be the end of it. Clear?"

She nodded and sniffed, gazing up at me from under her eyelashes.

Good. That was done.

"Edward," I bit the inside of my cheek and fixed the boy with a glare, "you will wait for me in my study. We need to chat."

"Why?" Esme curled around and asked.

I spoke to my mate while staring at Edward, who at least was ashamed enough to cast his eyes down towards his shoes. "He needs to understand that when I ask him to do something, I expect him to do it properly. And he knows better than to torment someone who needs help. Especially when that someone is my wife." The last word came out hard. "If he doesn't know better, then he must learn."

"Carlisle," Edward countered, "with all due respect, I was only trying to teach her a lesson. You said it yourself—she can't keep doing this. I thought if she suffered a bit more this time, then it might help her use more self-control next time."

I was well aware that Edward was repeating back to me my own reasoning—thought, not verbalized—when I found it required to correct his behavior.

"Thank you for being so considerate, but it's not your place to make anyone suffer. You are neither a constable nor a judge."

"Nor a father," Edward mumbled.

"Care to say that louder, son?" I held Esme tighter, to keep from taking the lad's head off.

"No, sir."

Esme pressed her cheek to my chest. "Don't whip him, Carlisle! I couldn't bear it."

"Darling, he was supposed to watch you. Furthermore, whether you realize it or not, he ridiculed you. That is no way to treat a lady."

"But it's not his fault that I stole it. It's not like he helped me. And, who knows? I might've done it even had he been with me."

"Yeah," Edward agreed with her.

"Carlisle, whip me instead."

I'm sorry, what? Did my wife just ask me to thrash her? "No, Esme. I'm not Charles. I will not do it."

"Yes, Carlisle. I was wrong to steal. I knew that, but I wanted it and took it anyway. What's to stop me next time from stealing...a baby or something...?" Her voice trailed off. After casting about, her eyes turned firmly to mine. "Whip me, not him."

"No, Esme." This time it was Edward. "It's all right. He's not going to hurt me. He's got a tongue-lashing in mind, which is no cakewalk, but I'll live through it. And I'll keep a better eye on you from now on."

"I'll quit my job," I added hastily.

Esme stood up and pointed a finger that wagged between Edward and me. "Now you two listen to me. Carlisle, you were about to punish him for something I did. I will not allow that. And Edward, I am not your responsibility. I can think for myself, and although I don't understand these new urges, they are mine, and I will learn, with your father's help, to fend them off."

It was then, looking into my wife's eyes—which were the color of the sunset, as the red from her last kill was still fading back into amber—that I knew she was not Edward's sister. She was a mother above all else, and she would mother me too, if I let her.

"Carlisle Cullen, you will meet me in your study." Then she turned on her heel and was gone. "We need to chat."

Edward and I looked at each other in incredulity.

"Stay here," I told him, and I followed my wife indoors.

So. Do you want more?

Beta said that Edward sounds a bit UK. But she said that it reminds us that he is a "peculiar and affected boy." I think she's right. Is it troubling to you?

I don't even notice it anymore. See, I like my Carlisle British, and, well...like father like son, I suppose. I live with an Englishman, who tries very hard to be American. I am constantly correcting him, swinging him back to his origins. "No, don't say 'parking lot.' It's 'car park.' You are not going to the restroom, it's the loo!" And, to my utter horror, he attempted to grow a beard to rival the Duck Dynasty's chaps. That was until I persuaded him to trim it—

Why am I rambling? I must be lonely...