Each of the previous evenings, he would come into the cabin late after taking the first night shift at the helm. Every night he had been greeted by tears. Not always the deep, earth-shattering sobs that sometimes shook the whole bed. Sometimes just tears streaming down her face. Quivered breaths.
Not tonight.
Facing the window as always, she was on her side, silent, her torso lifting and lowering with each deep breath. Sleep. Truly calm sleep, no hiccupped breaths sending her body to flip and flop.
It helped that she had started to interact with his crewmates on board. After her disastrous cackle at Freddy when he fell from the rigging, she had apologized profusely to him, doing what little she could to comfort him and his cracked shoulder. And then she had apologized to the crew—one by one, and it had taken her two days, her humiliated steps dragging her about the ship. Days, but she had now met everyone on board.
She’d even coaxed a smile out of a few of the sailors.
Des had been with her every minute of those days and he’d found it peculiar how her accent would change depending on who she talked to. She parroted what was in front of her. A common sailor’s accent. A cockney accent. So very different from the drawing room English she used with him. She’d mastered how to talk to sailors, how to make them listen to her without being off-putting because of her gender.
The lot of the crew still looked at her suspiciously, but that was to be expected. Many of the men of the Firehawk had been on ships their whole lives, hardened by the sea, and they didn’t look kindly on the bad luck of a woman on board their ship. Especially one with red hues in her hair.
Des stepped across the floor of his cabin in the darkness, leaning over the bed to see her profile in the shard of moonlight cutting in through the window. No tears. No quaking breaths. Just sleep.
What looked like blissful, deep sleep.
Des stood straight, looking about the room.
Every night he’d come in to find her crying and he’d silently climbed in bed behind her, holding her, and it had calmed her enough to ease the tears and let sleep overtake. Every one of those nights, she’d clutched his arm to her belly as though it was the only lifeline in the vast sea.
Des stifled a sigh. Without her tears, he wasn’t sure what was appropriate as to where he would sleep.
He put the thought off for a moment as he removed his boots and stockings, but left his trousers in place. His shirt had to go—it always did, for he couldn’t stand the feel of it on his back at night. He stripped off his waistcoat and lawn shirt, setting them atop the chest.
Looking to the floor, he eyed the space. If he curled into a ball on his side, he might just fit.
“We can share the bed.” Jules’s sleepy voice drifted up to him.
“We can?”
Her head shifted on the pillow, her face turning back to him. “Or I can sleep on the floor. It is only right that you shouldn’t have to give up your bed. I am small, I’ll fit. You are enormous, you won’t.”
“I’m not going to have you sleeping on the floor, Jules.”
“Then we can share the bed.”
“It’s not appropriate.” The ingrained chivalry of his youth reared. When Jules was crying, comforting her to sleep was one thing. But to willingly climb into a bed with her—it went so far beyond respectability it was laughable.
A small smile came to her lips, her sleepy eyes crinkling. “You think to invoke propriety at this juncture, Des?”
His shoulders lifted. “A semblance of it, yes, I guess I am.”
“I have been on a pirate ship for six years. Any reputation I once may have harbored has been cast into the depths of time, never to be seen again.” Her left arm reached up, searching for his hand in the shadows of the scant moonlight. “And I have to admit, I like having you behind me. You are solid. Solid when I cannot tether myself to the reality I now find myself in. You’re a place in time to latch onto when I wake up and think I’m still on the Red Dragon.”
She leaned further toward him and her hand found his. Tugging him forward, she pulled him down to the bed.
For the life of him, he knew he should resist. Knew he should drop to his knees and curl up on the floor.
But the draw of the bed—of her body on it, of her heartbeat he could feel pulsating through her skin while she slept—was overwhelming. Something he’d been without for so long.
The real touch of a woman—not just the surges of lust and frantic hands during coupling. The feel of a body next to his, breathing his air, the bare of her shoulders touching his naked chest. It’d been so very long. Skin on skin, just for the sake of being next to another human being.
He’d never thought he’d have it again after Corentine.
But there it was.
He just wanted to be next to her.
He’d been lying to himself about comforting her during her tears. He had been the one comforted—she’d done that for him. He hadn’t even realized the fact until that very moment.
Des let her pull him down onto the bed. Shifting onto his side, he wrapped his left arm along the dip of her waist and aligned her body to the front of his.
Uncanny how perfectly she fit into the length of him.
His cock jumped to life.
She wasn’t crying for the first time he’d held her like this and his blasted member had suddenly decided she would be good for other things.
Which she would, he had to admit.
But he wasn’t about to use her like that. No matter how insistent his cock had decided to be.
Drawing a deep breath to mask how he shifted his hips backward, he hoped she’d fallen back asleep immediately or was on her way there before she noticed the iron rod jutting into her back.
“Tell me a story.”
He silently chuckled into her braids that had fallen onto the pillow and curled under his cheek. Not asleep.
He cleared his throat. “A story?”
“Tell me how you came to be on this ship. Why you aren’t back in England—you were on your way there when the Primrose was attacked.”
“I was. But after the letter of my wife’s death was handed to me on the Primrose, I didn’t care. Didn’t care to return to England. Didn’t care about anything. I’d spent seven years before that moment with one goal in mind. To get back to my wife and child. I didn’t care who I hurt in those years, didn’t care who suffered. The only thing I obsessed upon was getting back to my family.”
“Why were you away from them for so many years?”
“I was pressed onto an American warship. I was so young—eighteen when Corentine and I left for the East Indies to look into investments my father had purchased there before his death. We were both so very young.”
“And it did not go as planned?”
“No, it did not. We discovered Corentine was with child just before we reached the East Indies, so once the ship made port, she immediately boarded a ship for home. Neither of us wanted her to have the child anywhere but in England. I was to follow her back in two months’ time. But that never happened.”
“Where did they steal you from?”
“An African Gold Coast port. In a piss small tavern with a few beds by the waterfront. I was changing ships and so eager to get on the schooner bound for England that I stayed as close as I could to the docks. I was naïve. Naïve to a fault. They stole me in the middle of the night—knocking me unconscious from my bed—and I awoke in the middle of the sea. No chance to escape.”
“Redthorn brought far too many men aboard the ship in that way—those were the most unfortunate souls—they rarely stood a chance on the Red Dragon. Most were dead in two months’ time.” A shiver ran down through her body. “How did you manage to survive?”
“I was stronger than most, I guess. But I also didn’t care what I had to do—I didn’t care who I had to kill. Who I had to bow to. I didn’t care where my loyalties needed to lie. I only cared about one thing—getting home. Anything asked of me, I did it for the ver
y goal of getting back to my wife.”
“Your instinct to survive overcame anything?”
“Aye—that it did.” He drew in a deep breath and exhaled it in a long sigh. “And because of it my sins during that time were too numerous to count. The lives I took. The pain I inflicted on others. It was a bloody, bitter time. I was not a good man. And I have paid and paid for those sins.”
Jules’s voice went low and soft. “Your wife and child dying?”
“Yes. And I have been attempting to atone for those sins ever since. To lift the curse that I have inflicted upon myself. But I have yet to do it.”
“When will you know it’s been lifted?”
“When I can go back to England and know that I belong there again. The few times I’ve gotten off the ship and set foot onto English soil, I’ve never made it past two streets from the docks before needing to turn and escape back onto the sea.” His head tilted back along the pillow, his look on the thin crescent of the moon. “Until then, this is where I stay. I stumbled onto the Firehawk under Captain Folback’s encouragement. He saved my life in a treacherous tavern after we got the Primrose back to port. I was looking to die and he was looking for strong sailors without a care for life or limb.”
“Is that how most of the men ended up on the Firehawk? Recruited by Captain Folback at their lowest?”
“I imagine, yes, that is true.”
She gave a slight nod, her head rustling the pillow. “That makes so much sense now. I wondered on it as you made me…meet each of the crew. There is such a mix of men, and most of them have shadows in their eyes—shadows of the past that haunt them. Like you. And you all fight like that—not afraid of death.”
Des paused, heaving a sigh. “Most of the men are like me. All for their own reasons. Which makes us a formidable force when we are in lockstep. It’s why I figured this was as good of a place as any for penance of my past. Captain Folback is a good man. Honorable. All of us are atoning for one sin or another, and to help with that we take down ships that need to be taken down for the harm they do.”
“Like the Red Dragon.”
“Exactly like the Red Dragon.”
She heaved a sigh, her body lifting his arm that sat draped over her side. “It is not easy being cursed.”
“No, no, it is not.” The weight of the past heavy upon him, crushing his lungs, Des drew his arm away from her body and flipped over onto his other side, setting his back to her.
What he was, she should have no part of.
She had her parents to go home to. A life waiting for her.
They lay back to back for long seconds, the past swallowing him whole, dragging him down into the darkness of all he’d done. Faces of dead men. Blood by his blade. The face of his wife. His unborn child.
Darkness. Down to the depths he knew too well. Darkness he could not escape.
Jules twisted in the small space between him and the wall and then flipped over, throwing her arm across his waist, holding him just the same as he’d held her over the past week.
The simplest act of compassion fracturing a deep crevice into his cold heart.
He attempted for one futile second to resist, but then his fingers moved, wrapping along the back of her hand and clasping her palm to the center of his belly.
A moment he couldn’t have anticipated.
A moment he didn’t want to let go.
{ Chapter 8 }
Jules exhaled a breath, stepping out onto the main deck of the Firehawk. The winds had mellowed, though still sent loft into the sails, the brigantine cutting through the swells smoothly for a change.
She looked up at the gently billowing sails against the night sky, the white of the canvas glowing like clouds under the moonlight.
Quiet. Too quiet.
She had left Des’s cabin for that very reason. The quiet haunted her, made her mind wander in directions she didn’t want it to go.
Turning to climb the ladder to the quarterdeck, her bare feet wrapped onto the cool wooden rungs. The air had turned chillier, not thick and suffocating as it had been in southern waters.
She’d forgotten what it felt like to not have the thick warm sea air constantly filling her pores.
She stepped onto the quarterdeck and stumbled, almost tripping over the ship’s cat. The lean tabby had darted out from the shadows and rubbed against the front of her right ankle. A chuckle to herself and Jules picked up the cat, snuggling it onto her chest as she scratched it just behind the ears where the cat’s tiger stripes started.
“You should be sleeping.” Des’s words came soft across the night air to her.
A smile came to her face and she found him on the starboard side of the ship, leaning forward with his forearms balanced on the railing. His gaze shifted from her and trained on the ink of the night bleeding into the waters.
Jules glanced at the helm and the lantern hanging beside it. The wheel had been locked into place and the deck was empty except for the one soul she held and the one soul ten strides away from her.
She moved across the deck, stopping by Des’s side, her fingertips deep into the soft fur of the cat’s neck.
Des looked to the cat and he shook his head. “I’ve never seen anyone hold her like that—a hand around her belly and she usually bolts, hissing with claws bared.”
“No one?” Jules lifted the cat, looking into her face, touching her nose to the sweet tip of the cat’s nose. The cat’s face scrunched, her whiskers twitching. “I don't see why not. She's a love.”
“Or no one has tried to tempt her with half their rations before.”
Jules settled the cat back against her chest, her fingers stroking along the bumps of its spine. “She's skin and bones.”
“You’re skin and bones.”
“Still, she clearly wants the love.” Her look lifted to Des and she pondered him for a moment. “Maybe no one has approached her with just the right amount of compassion before.”
“I don’t know if that’s the case—she’s wild, that one.” Des shrugged, but then curled a hand forward and scratched the cat under its chin. “She doesn’t even let Wes pick her up, and it’s his belly that she sleeps curled up on.”
“Wes—he’s the big one if I remember—bigger than you?”
Des’s lips pulled to the side, slighted. “Marginally bigger than me.”
Jules stifled a chuckle. “He was the other one I had chosen.”
“What?”
“The other one I chose to drop down upon.”
“On the Red Dragon?”
She nodded. “It was you or him and you were the fortunate—or unfortunate—one to walk under me.”
His head tilted to the side as his look pinned her for a long breath. “I call it fortunate.”
The cat shifted in her arms, wiggling, and she bent to set it onto the deck. “Or maybe she lets me hold her because she knows that I’ll let her go when she wants to be free.” Jules watched the cat scamper across the deck, disappearing amongst the shadows of a row of crates. “Does she have a name? I call her Patches because I’ve only heard the men say ‘cat.’”
Des turned back to the water. “It’s ‘cat’ as far as I know it—and why name her Patches? She’s striped.”
“Have you never noticed the patch around her right eye?”
“I cannot say I have.”
She grinned. “Well, there you go. Patches.”
“I will thus forth refer to her as such.” A slight grin curved the edges of his mouth and he looked to her. “So why are you not sleeping?”
She moved next to him and set her palms onto the railing. “I have discovered I have a hard time sleeping without you in the room. Without you long against my back.” A grin quirked the edges of her mouth. “Or my front.”
His look stayed focused on the water. “Security?”
“Yes. And warmth.”
“That’s understandable. Your bones don’t hold any heat—we still need to get more meat onto your body.”
&n
bsp; She chuckled. “Hard to do on a sailor’s diet.”
“Aye.” His gaze finally tugged away from the sea and he looked at her. The moonlight lit the left side of his face, the right side deep into the shadows. Half rogue, half savior.
And handsome. Devilishly so. Handsome in a way she could vaguely remember from her life in England before her father had set their family onto a fool-headed quest across the globe.
Handsome not only because of his fine cut cheekbones, a jaw that looked like it could take blow after blow, and those hazel eyes that had watched her like a hawk since she’d been on the ship. Handsome because of who he was—who he’d been for her during the past two weeks.
The current slight stubble along his jaw was unusual, for he somehow managed what constituted a fresh-shaven face on a ship on most days. But it was deep into the night and the dark stubble had appeared. Yet it was still less than the constant beards of the men around her.
She’d not witnessed a fresh-shaven face in years.
Des had been a passenger on the Primrose, so he’d been of wealth at one time. He’d taken himself out of that life, but he could never escape what he truly was.
A gentleman, through and through.
If she knew one thing at this juncture, it was that Des had been a gentleman to his bones before his life had veered so terribly off course.
Of course it made him all the more handsome—a dream from another time.
Des was from a different land, a different world, one that she barely remembered, except for the fact that she had loved that life in England. Loved the gaiety of it. Waking up without a care, without wondering if it was her last day on earth.
Every day for the last six years death had been a real, distinct possibility. And she was just starting to imagine life without that threat hanging over her head every second of every day.
Des’s eyebrows furrowed as he eyed her. “You let your braids out.”
Her hand flew to the left side of her head, her fingers entwining deep into her loose hair, the crinkle of the braids bumpy under her touch. She’d combed it over and over with the whalebone comb she’d found in the drawer of the desk in Des’s cabin, but the braids had been in so long they still sent sharp waves into the locks.
The Heart of an Earl (A Box of Draupnir Novel Book 1) Page 5
