The Steel Rogue: A Valor of Vinehill Novel

by K. J. Jackson

  At eye level, she looked at him, her crystalline gold green eyes boring into him. Scouring his soul. “Where did you learn to do this?”

  “In the prison I should still be rotting in.” He rocked back on his heels and stood, looking down at her. “That done, why were you following me? Wishing me back to Newgate is very different than following me onto the waterfront. Creeping along the docks to watch me is an extreme that no sane lady resorts to.”

  She laughed, raw and pointed. “So now I’m not sane?”

  He shrugged. “You aren’t exactly rational to have walked onto the docks by yourself and expected no harm would come to you.” He met her gaze full on, taking the weight of her condemnation. “So why do it?”

  Her mouth tight, her face twisted for a moment as though she was holding back the force of a thousand horses, but then her full lips cracked, her voice hissing. “Because you need to pay.”

  { Chapter 4 }

  “I need to pay?” The impossibly hard set of his jawline tightened even further in front of her eyes.

  He’d looked brutal earlier when she had attacked him. Now he looked deadly.

  Damn her mouth.

  She knew how to hold her tongue. She knew well her precarious position on this ship. She knew she was an idiot for going to the docks—for being possessed by this ridiculous obsession she had over this man. An obsession she had no control over and she didn’t need this bastard reminding her of her foolishness.

  She knew all of it, but with this damn man her mouth couldn’t stay properly closed.

  He closed his eyes for long seconds, wrestling back the demons of destruction that threatened explosion. When his grey eyes—the color of fresh cooled steel—opened to her, the darkness had been leashed. Demons he kept at bay—at least for the moment.

  “My years in prison didn’t make me pay? Not to your satisfaction?”

  For as much as she knew she needed to keep her tongue still, she couldn’t hold back, not now. Not now after all of the years knowing this man was alive, while her parents and her brother and her cousin were dead. Dust. Not now when she was sitting in front of the bastard, an arm’s length away, and he had the gall to be nice—to bloody well sew up her wound with care and quickness.

  No. He couldn’t offer a few quick stitches and a look of concern in exchange for ruining her life and expect her forgiveness.

  “My satisfaction?” She scoffed a hard chuckle. “No—years—days—none of them will ever be enough. My satisfaction has you in one place only—rotting in that Newgate cell, the rats feasting on your flesh. Death is too good for you—for what you did to my family.”

  He leaned over her, the demons in his grey eyes sparking alive again. “I’ll say it once more, then never again, Torrie. You are wrong. I never set flames to anything. I had nothing to do with the deaths of your mother and father and brother and cousin.”

  “I’ll never believe you.”

  “That is your prerogative. And that is also your idiocy—for what did you think to do to me in port? You thought to mete out justice on your own?” His voice lifted. “What did you think you were going to do to me on the docks? Yell at me? Shove me into the drink? Slip a blade between my ribs? The only word for what you did yesterday was insanity.”

  She leaned slightly away from the ferocity of his words. Ferocity directed at her fool actions. “Why do you even care what I thought to do?”

  His arm flew up along his side. “Because your idiocy almost got you killed in the most brutal way.”

  “And that is also my prerogative.”

  He leaned further over her. “Your death is not your choice. And you’re more of an idiotic chit than I thought if you truly believe that.”

  Fury made him whip around and grab the door, crashing it open. One step out and he stopped and turned halfway into the room, his eyes searching the floor. Spying his boots, he picked up his left one, yanking it onto his foot and then grabbed the right one she had dropped to the floor by the bed.

  She sprang to her feet, her hand flying up between him and the boot. “Stop—I retched in your boot.”

  He froze, his livid look going to her. “You what?”

  She glanced to the boot and her cheeks lifted high in mortification, squinting her eyes. “I retched—threw up in your boot.”

  He looked inside, the edges of his eyes crinkling in disgust. “You couldn’t grab your own damn boot?”

  Her hand dropped away from him. “I’m sorry, but yours was the first one I saw when I woke. I keep a chamber pot on my bedside table because I wake up too often having to heave from the dreams. But this isn’t my bed and there was no pot to be seen when I woke. So I went to your boot. It was the first thing I saw. ”

  He stilled, his look pinning her. “The dreams?”

  Her mouth clamped closed. The words had left her tongue without thought and she would give anything to have them back in her mouth.

  “What dreams, Torrie?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No. I don’t look back. And especially not with the likes of a bastard like you.”

  What should have sparked his ire and sent him storming out the door only made him grow more still, his voice dropping low. “Yet you do look back.” His dark grey eyes pierced her. “At least in your dreams. What are they?”

  She shook her head, her arms wrapping around her stomach.

  “If you don’t look back, then what is the bother with telling me what the dream is that makes you wake up retching?”

  Her jaw shifted to the side as she met his stare. He was twisting her into a corner. Admit she looked back all the time, or tell him about the damn dream. Devil.

  She sighed, her arms clamping tight across her middle. “It is only in my dreams. I am back there. Back in the day after the fire. The pain of my burns, the pain of losing my family. I heaved for days. Heaved and retched until my body was exhausted and I would pass out. Then I would awaken and I would heave again and again. They didn’t think I would live past the first days.”

  “But you did.”

  “Aye.” Her eyes closed, her head shaking, her left hand flitting in the air. “It is nothing, now. Nothing can compare to that pain, but I sometimes dream of that day and my body thinks I am in that agony again and I wake up heaving, needing to vomit.”

  “Sometimes? You said you keep a chamber pot by your bedside for when it happens. That doesn’t sound like sometimes. That sounds like often.”

  Her bottom jaw jutted out. “It is what it is. I manage it and I don’t let it go past those moments after awaking.”

  “Except when you decide you need to be the one to mete out justice and follow the bastard you want revenge against into the most dangerous part of town?”

  Her mouth closed, her tongue grinding along the back of her teeth. She looked down at his hand still holding the boot and flipped a finger out toward it. “Why would you leave your boots in here anyway? If you’d worn them like a proper man, I never would have retched into them.”

  He shrugged, looking down at the well-worn black leather. “I don’t like them, wearing boots. I lived too long with none on my feet.”

  His mouth stayed open, about to say more, but then he closed it and abruptly turned from her, exiting the room with a lopsided stride and closing the door behind him.

  He took his boot with him.

  ~~~

  A polite knock on the door sent Torrie to her feet in front of the bed.

  Her mouth closed, it was silent long enough, that the knock echoed into the room again.

  Too polite.

  Mr. Lipinstein wouldn’t be that courteous. No. He had a right to any and every thing in this room and would never lower himself to knocking.

  She hadn’t put her stockings and boots back on, so she bent slightly at her knees, letting her skirt drape all the way to the floor to cover what little of her ankles could be seen. “Come.”

  The short door cracked open and a man almost as tall as Mr. Lipinstein ducked into the ro
om. “My lady, I have been requested to bring you on deck.”

  She blinked hard. Overlooking the rumpled clothes of a sailor, the man was handsome. Strikingly so. Not only that, he held himself with the air not of a deckhand and there wasn’t the common slur in his words she’d heard before in sailors. A passenger, perhaps?

  “On deck? What for?”

  “Forgive me, I should have introduced myself.” He inclined his head slightly to her. “Desmond Ulrich, first mate. Call me Des.”

  “So you are a sailor.”

  His head cocked to the side. “Why would you think me not to be?”

  “No reason.” She shook her head slightly, her hands smoothing the front of her skirt. “Why is it that I have been requested to come on deck?”

  “Cap said something about proving you aren’t a prisoner—though not in such clean language—so he wanted me to show you about the ship.”

  Why hadn’t she thought of this earlier? The captain. She should have demanded to see him directly when she awoke. The second Mr. Lipinstein entered her room. Relief washed over her, sending her spine to tingling. “Who is your captain? I would be delighted to meet him—relieved, actually.”

  Des’s forehead scrunched. “Cap’n Roe is. Roe—Robert Lipinstein.”

  The tingle in her spine evaporated, dragging her back down to the worn floorboards beneath her heels. She pushed words out through her suddenly dry mouth. “Mr. Lipinstein is your captain?”

  “Aye, he is.” Des glanced about, his nervous look telling her he thought she was slightly addled. “I thought you would have figured that, you being in his quarters and all.”

  She looked over her shoulder, her gaze drifting over the rolls of maps, the logs, the wall of windows. Captain’s quarters. It was a tight space, but of course she was in the captain’s quarters. She would have realized it if she’d been able to think of anything past that ogre of a man since she had awakened.

  Her look darted back to Des. “Mr. Lipinstein is captain of this ship?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  “How—how is that possible? He’s only been out of prison for two years. How does a man like that become a captain of a ship in that amount of time?”

  A decided frown set into Des’s face. “He earned it, my lady. But best that you ask him a question like that. I was just sent to fetch you.”

  With a slight nod, she shuffled to the left of the door and retrieved her boots and stockings, then moved to sit on the chair by the desk, making sure her skirts continued to dust the floor.

  She twisted to the side so Des couldn’t see her scarred legs as she tugged her stockings up her legs. The first mate had the civility to turn his head to the side, giving her privacy. At least there was one gentleman aboard.

  She laced her boots slowly, her mind wild with this new information of Mr. Lipinstein—he was the bloody captain of this ship. Why hadn’t she been told of this by the investigator she had following Mr. Lipinstein? How was it even possible that he was the captain of this ship? From everything she’d learned of the man since the fire, he’d never set foot off of English soil until he was freed from Newgate.

  Her boots laced, she stood, smoothing the front of her muslin shirt with her left hand.

  Des pointed to her bare right arm where her sleeve had been ripped free. “Should I wrap that? Cap said if there wasn’t pus and it wasn’t throbbing, it’d be good to wrap it before we go on deck.”

  Torrie lifted her elbow, looking at the line of stitches just above the joint. The blood had crusted along the thread in neat fashion. “It looks well enough.”

  He picked up a strip of linen from the desk, unfurling it. “May I?”

  She nodded, watching him as his long fingers lifted her elbow and he started to wrap the strip around her upper arm. He had a kind face—classically handsome with his square jaw, sandy blond hair, straight nose and a mouth that made her want to reach out and touch the delicate skin of his lips—but the depths in his blue eyes told her he’d weathered too much of what this world could hand out. Sadness, but with a certain resilience over the darkness. She immediately trusted him. “It sounds as though you respect Mr. Lipinstein.”

  “I do.” Des nodded as he set the end of the one strip in place and grabbed a new one, tucking it under the first wrap to secure the start of it. “He has saved my life more than once, though I’ve done my fair share of saving his hide on occasion.”

  “So he’s earned your esteem?”

  His hands staying in motion as he wrapped her arm, Des glanced up at her. Hazel eyes. Such an interesting swirl of colors she knew she stared a touch too long at them.

  “Most men in his position, they demand the respect. It’s the way of the sea. It always has been.” He looked down at the wrapping. “But not Roe. No—Cap has earned the respect he has. Every bit of it. I never met any man in my life so willing to lay down his own life for others. But Roe can’t be killed—not that I’ve seen anyway.”

  He tucked the end of the linen strip under the wrap, securing it in place. “That should keep the stitches in place for the time being. But try to not bump your arm against anything on the ship as we move about—the walls, the rails. It is calm skies now, but the swells are still enough to throw you off your feet, and if you open up the wound again, Cap will have my neck.”

  She gave him a smile. “Thank you. I can’t get my jacket over the bindings, so my arm is a bit exposed with my sleeve torn away as it is, but this helps me maintain a semblance of modesty.”

  He gave her a nod and held out his right elbow. “Shall we? Cap had cook set a full plate for you on deck, and as I said, the skies are clear and the air is brisk. A beautiful day, at that.”

  She drew in a deep breath and set her left hand along the crook of his elbow. “Then I would be happy to get a breath of fresh air.”

  { Chapter 5 }

  The swell of it hit her, startling her awake. She hadn’t even realized she was dreaming, so far deep into the dark she was.

  Panic.

  Wicked panic surging through her veins as she sat upright before her eyes could even open. A sudden mercy, a pot was shoved into her chest just as the first heave hit.

  Her hands wrapped around the chamber pot, her eyes closing tight as she retched, emptying what little was left in her stomach.

  Damn Poley. She didn’t eat late in the day specifically for this reason, yet the dinner the ship’s cook, Poleson—Poley they called him—had made had been surprisingly good last evening and she had been famished, finishing her plate without a worry into the future.

  Her heaves waning, her eyelashes lifted open and she saw Mr. Lipinstein in his white linen shirt, trousers and bare feet kneeling on the floor next to the bed, his dark grey eyes studying her.

  Her hand lifted to her forehead, pushing back the errant strands of hair that had loosened from her braid during the night. Full consciousness filtered into her mind and her hand stopped. She was worried about how she looked. In front of him, of all people. The bastard.

  Her fingers dropped from her forehead.

  “You are done?” he asked.

  The spasms easing in her stomach, she nodded.

  He handed her a handkerchief. It was wet and she looked at him, her eyebrow cocked.

  “To wipe your face.” His thumb flicked over his shoulder to the basin of water in the corner of the room. “I just dipped it and the coolness should help to calm.”

  When he’d had time to dip a kerchief and find a chamber pot to toss into her lap, she didn’t know.

  His look centered on her. “Tell me of them. Of your family.”

  She shook her head, her stomach seizing upon itself as her words came out in a whisper. “No. I cannot. Not to you.”

  He gave a slight nod, not pushing the topic. Instead, he pulled the stopper on a bottle of brandy and shoved it into her hand. “Here.”

  She took a sip, swishing the sting of the amber liquid in her mouth, then spit it into the chamber pot.

 
; “Do you ever speak of them?”

  He asked the question low, so casually and without any expectations attached that her mouth opened before she could think on it.

  “I don’t talk of them. It is the only way I can stay in the present. Not wallow in what was. I had to make a choice when I left Vinehill Castle—when I was well enough to leave—to not think of them. To not think on what was lost.”

  His head tilted slightly forward. “I understand.”

  “You do?”

  A flash streaked across his eyes—a flash of sadness so visceral it sent pain radiating into the air between them, enough to twist something deep in her chest.

  He blinked, and the flash was gone. “There are lifetimes worth of sins I want to forget. When I can forget, I can move forward. When I remember, I stay still. I drift backward.”

  Before she could reply, he took the chamber pot from her grip and set it beneath the bed. The pot removed from her lap, she realized how exposed she was. Only in her chemise for the heat in the cabin, the skin of her bare arms and upper chest were in full display.

  She held the brandy bottle out to him, encouraging him to take it and leave the room, but he flipped his palm to her up. “And take a swallow for your belly as well.”

  “It’s early for it.”

  “It will also calm your breath, your heartbeat.”

  “What could you possibly know of my heart?” Her heartbeat was thundering in her chest, but there was no way he could know that.

  He lifted himself high on his knees, to the height where he was almost eye level with her. “This vein along here.” He reached out a finger, stroking up along her bare neck with the slightest whisper of a touch. “It is throbbing, screaming with every crazed heartbeat you’re having. It is usually still, almost imperceivable as it measures the beats of your heart. But not now.”

  She stilled in place, her gaze locked onto his dark grey eyes. As much as she knew she should, she couldn’t move away from the touch of his finger. From the prickle of heat radiating from his fingertip.