When she was younger, there were a few who had been particularly kind and she’d imagined what it would be like to be the object of a man’s affection. But always, she’d snapped back to reality. Their kindness and affection had been directed at what they’d assumed was a young man.
Willa was no missish, ignorant young woman. She was well aware that love could take many forms aboard a ship. Even though the penalty for buggery was death, there were ways to avoid detection.
The man with whom she would be sharing close quarters for the next several years was like a new, unexplored country. She had no idea of how the intricate dance of courtship should proceed, but she did know one thing. She had no intention of allowing Dr. MacCloud’s dubious charms to cloud her good senses.
Although, she could see how other women might have succumbed to his blandishments. The soft green of his eyes darkened whenever he was intent on overcoming obstacles, like the tight lid on the biscuit tin. Or they could flash in warning, like the day before when he’d cajoled, argued, and then pried her away from her work as a groom at the inn’s stable.
His ginger hair curled down his neck and poked over his cravat. He was in need of a trim. She resolved she’d be his barber on the long sea trip ahead of them. The thought of running her fingers through his hair evoked a curious stab of need in the vicinity of her stomach, and lower. Now the silly man was trying to push off the lid with a small knife. She shook her head hard and demanded, “Give me that tin before you hurt yourself.”
Cullen considered arguing with his new “wife” about who was better able to pry off a biscuit tin lid, for God’s sakes. But then something in the snapping, direct stare in her gray eyes made him stop and hand over the damned tin.
What would his old mates in the squadron say if they knew he’d just lost the first battle of his marriage to this fiery lass just because she’d stared him down? She hadn’t even flirted and batted her sooty lashes. And…they were still no more intimate than casual acquaintances.
She grasped the top of the tin with long, slender fingers and expertly wiggled the lid from side to side until it popped off, and he caught it with one hand.
Cullen’s mouth dropped open. “How did you do that?”
“Practice,” she said, and pointed toward the surgery outside their quarters. “Some of the dried herbs we use are kept in air-tight tins. When my father requires something to treat a crew member I have to get it for him in a hurry.” She blinked, struggled against the moisture threatening to leak from her eyelids, and corrected herself. “When he required something,” she added, her tone more subdued.
“Your father was a ship’s physician for a long time, and he trained you well as his assistant. You don’t have to pretend or apologize to me, Willa.” He enfolded one of her hands between his two massive paws. “Your father has been gone only a few weeks. Ye must give yerself time to grieve, lass.” He nearly bit his tongue. He hated how he reverted to a Highlands brogue when he was emotional.
She pulled away as if scorched by his touch and rubbed at her eyes. “I know my duties and responsibilities. I’ll work at your side until we return to England.” She swiped at a stray tear on her cheek with her sleeve. “But after that, I’ll live my own life…without you.”
Cullen leaned back against the overly-small chair bolted to the floor of the surgery. He swept the hazy cobwebs of guilt from his mind and gave his “wife” a hard look. “I accept,” he said.
“You accept?” She gazed at him, a bewildered look in her eyes.
“Yes. I accept your challenge.” Cullen lunged forward in the uncomfortable chair and leaned into her space.
“Pah—you are an impossible man, a—a stubborn Scot.” She crossed her arms tightly across her chest.
“I, Cullen MacCloud, wager you, Willa MacCloud, will not be able to resist my charms for the entire two years of our mission to St. Helena.”
“That is a preposterous wager. You will surely lose. We barely know each other, and my choices were rather limited when you crashed into the life I was settling into at the stable.”
“Willa, you are a beautiful woman. How long d’ye think ye could have pulled off that charade? How long would it have been before someone would have guessed yer secret and forced ye to dance to their tune?”
“I’ll never know now, will I?” Willa’s smile returned, the smile that hid so many things while rendering Cullen a staring dolt, like an awkward youth trying to impress his first love. Wait, that’s exactly what he was doing.
After a long silence, he abruptly said, “I was born twenty-nine years ago on MacKenzie lands west of Inverness.”
“Exactly twenty-nine years ago?” Willa gave him a half-intrigued, half-laughing look.
“Yes. As a matter of fact, twenty-nine years ago today.”
Her eyes widened. “It’s your birthday?”
He nodded solemnly.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Ye said ye barely know me. I’m telling ye something about myself. Now, it’s your turn.”
“But it’s not my birthday.”
“Then you’ll have to come up with something else. I’ll wait.”
“All right. Here’s something.” She paused for a moment, a mischievous light in her eyes. “I don’t like people who pry.”
Cullen sucked in a breath and bit down on his lower lip to forestall the acid retort bubbling in his throat. The voyage to St. Helena was going to be the longest tour of duty in his entire career with the Royal Navy. In more ways than one.
Willa hated herself for the small pleasure she’d taken in sharing a pot of tea and simple ginger biscuits with the infernal Scotsman she’d been forced to marry.
And the nerve of him. Challenging her to resist his so-called “charms” for the years they’d be forced to share the tiny cabin adjoining the ship’s surgery. She’d shared that same cabin with her father for the six years they’d been assigned to the Arethusa. And the four years before that, an even smaller living area aboard the frigate, Endmyion.
She would perform the work she’d been trained for since she was a small child. She would, by damn, continue that work in spite of Dr. MacCloud’s dubious “charms.” Her work was all she had left. There were always plenty of medical duties aboard a ship the size of the Arethusa. Each day, after the morning call for sailors with illnesses, the work never ended. Doses had to be dispensed for stomach complaints, aching joints, and most of all, venereal disease. After all of her husband’s years in the Royal Navy, she was sure at some point he had had to avail himself of treatment for the clap, like the hundreds of sailors he no doubt had treated as well.
Willa shuddered at the thought of all the hidden dangers of cohabiting with a man. She knew she could not forestall indefinitely the inevitable, disgusting joining, but she would do what she could to protect herself. Dipping into her sea chest, she reached for the thin leather volume of her latest journal. She could not refuse her husband forever, but she could track the vagaries of her own fickle body and perhaps avoid conception as long as possible.
Chapter Ten
Cullen returned to the darkened cabin with a pail of water for the morning. The one candle in the lantern on his sea chest had been snuffed. He put down the pail and struck a flint to re-illuminate the gloomy interior.
“I left only a few minutes ago. Could ye not wait until I got back to snuff the light? I might have broken my neck in the dark.”
Willa sat up suddenly, pulling the blanket to her chin. “I thought you might spend some time at whist with the officers.”
“I’m just the surgeon, not a blasted officer. And in case you’ve forgotten, it’s been a long day.” He pulled a small coil of thin rope from his pocket along with two short nails he’d coaxed from the ship’s carpenter. Cullen sank onto a short stool in the corner and tied sturdy loops at both ends of the rope.
“What…what are you going to do with that?” Willa pointed to the piece of line twined around one of his sturdy palms. Sh
e jerked the blanket higher, nearly covering her nose.
Cullen said nothing, but pulled off one boot and used the bottom of the heel to pound a nail in each facing bulkhead. He fastened the rope loops to each side and threw a spare blanket over the taut line.
After snuffing out the candle in the lantern a final time, he shucked off his remaining clothes, hanging them from wooden pegs attached to the bulkhead. With a deep sigh, he flopped onto his narrow cot, pounded his pillow a bit, and rolled to his side, praying to God he could fall asleep as fast as possible.
He was at the very edge of slumber when there was a small clearing of throat and a voice so soft in the dark from the other side of the blanket, he nearly missed her words.
“Dr. MacCloud?”
“What?” He knew his retort was overly sharp, but at this point, he didn’t care.
“I just wondered why you put up the blanket.”
Her reply was so low, he wondered if he’d imagined it. “I thought I made myself perfectly clear. I’ve never had to bed an unwilling lass, and I’m not going to start now.”
“I’m ready to do my duty.” Willa’s voice ended on a squeak.
“Yer duty?” Cullen seethed. “And exactly what would yer ‘duty’ entail?”
He fancied he could hear an audible gulp from the other side of the blanket.
“You know…what a man expects from his wife.”
“What I expect is for my wife to come to me because she loves me, because she wants me. I’ll accept nothing less. So, until ye have feelings for me, please do us both the courtesy of staying on yer own side of this wall. He gave the blanket a kick with his bare foot. And if ye care at all, my given name is Cullen MacCloud, not ‘Dr. MacCloud’ when we are in the privacy of this cabin.”
With that, he gave his pillow another vigorous pounding and tried lying on his other side, in the hope of coaxing sleep to return, soon. However, another part of his body refused to stand down from high alert, so he finally gave up, threw on his clothes, and found his way to the top deck to pace until fatigue claimed him again.
Willa fought off tears after the sound of her husband’s pounding footsteps faded. Now what had she done wrong? She was ready to perform her wifely duties. Lots of couples ended up in the same predicament as she and Cullen.
Why was the stubborn Scot she’d married so insistent that she had to care about him? She shivered. He even insisted she should “want” him, whatever that meant. How would he know the difference? She could pretend, but had no idea what it would take to convince him she was in thrall to his charms.
She only wished he would let her endure the whole mess of submission, and soon. By her reckoning and the check marks in her journal, she had only a day or two of relative safety left before the next onset of her menses.
She lay dry-eyed for long minutes, staring at the ship beams above her head, remembering the last time she’d assisted at a birth aboard this ship. The captain’s wife had refused to remain home alone for her confinement.
Melissanda Still had died in a pool of her own blood, her stillborn child in her arms. Dr. Morton had done everything he could to save her, but could not overcome the great destroyer of women, childbirth. Willa, who had gotten to know the young woman quite well, held her hand until the end, when the light faded from her eyes and her grip slackened. Willa was just fourteen.
In the midst of one of his many turns around the deck, Cullen came to a kind of peace about his marriage. If the woman he was bound to never came to love him as he thought she should, who should he blame? If not love, might they one day at least share mutual respect? That would be a good place to start. He had nothing but respect for the former Wills, then Willa, Morton.
Before he met Willa, if anyone had told him he would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a woman in a surgery rent by the screams of a patient amidst blood and broken bones, he would have called the man a fool. And fool was he for assuming Willa would react to their marriage like a normal lass in love. Willa had not led a “normal” life.
When he returned to the cabin, he snuffed the burning candle in the lantern he’d left outside their cabin. He tried to make as little noise as possible, considering his hulking frame, but froze mid-stride to his side of the blanket “wall.” Once his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he could sense the outline of his wife sitting up on her bunk. He said nothing but moved carefully toward her and settled gingerly next to Willa on the narrow space.
When she didn’t flinch or move away, he brushed her cheek with his calloused fingertips. The dampness he encountered went straight to his heart, like a too-blunt knife scraping away rotten wood.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know what you and your family did was meant only to help me.” The silence stretched on so long, Cullen was afraid to move, torn between the need her lemon-lavender scent aroused in him and an intense fear of making a wrong-headed move. A move that might send her galloping off and away from him for good.
He could see her long, white, tapering fingers working at the fastenings at the neck of her nightdress. Instinct from God-knows where made him enclose her hand in his and bring those sensual fingers to his mouth. He suckled them one by one before touching his lips to her forehead and easing her back down onto her pillow.
“No,” she protested, reaching for his arms and trying to push herself back up. “I have to get this over with. I have only…”
Cullen put one finger against her lips. “Shhh, lass. I don’t want to be something like the pox or the plague, that ye have to ‘get over.’” He gently pushed her back down and covered her with the blanket. “Yer not ready to love me,” he whispered. “But that is not yer fault. It’s my job, big dolt that I am, to court ye and convince ye I’m worthy of being yer husband.”
If asked to describe the emotions tearing at her heart, Willa would be unable to summon the words. Her mind and heart seemed to have slammed down a gate between them.
She’d begun the evening determined to seduce her husband and get the inevitable shaming over before the window closed on the few “safe” days she might have this month. Now, she wasn’t sure what she wanted. For the first time in her limited experience, she could begin to see why women became pregnant despite the horrific risks and the best of intentions and precautions.
Cullen’s touches and suckling of her fingertips had shot straight to her quim, bypassing both her heart and mind. After he’d returned to his side of the “wall,” she’d heard some restless thrashing for a few minutes before a silence punctuated by the soft snoring whufflings she’d come to associate with the stubborn Scot’s deep sleep.
A week later, Willa stepped onto the gangplank with Cullen at her side, the crisp morning air turning their breath into puffed clouds. They’d spoken little during a hurried breakfast with Captain Still in his quarters, but now when Cullen took one of her hands in his meaty paw and gave her a shy look, she didn’t pull away.
Her return smile was not forced, in spite of her self-consciousness at the stiff, odd looks they were getting from various members of the Arethusa’s crew sloshing water and scrubbing the decks. The attitude now directed to her as a woman was unsettling, compared to the easy companionship and acceptance she’d enjoyed over the years as a man. The questioning looks in their eyes at every packet of medicinal powders she’d given them, every suggested treatment, was confounding, not to mention unsettling, after years of assumed trust when she was Wills Morton.
As a result of her husband’s seemingly endless patience, and the blanket “wall” he’d erected, Willa had spent many nights in her darkened share of the space listening to his whispered tales of his childhood in the Highlands, and finally relenting to share some of her experiences on the ship at her father’s side in the surgery: the moans of dying men, the horrible screams of men having limbs cut off. She admitted that her father was well loved by all the men of the crew for the speed and efficiency with which he performed amputations. And she’d shared the good things, like the night befor
e she’d gone away with Cullen, when she’d saved the beautiful mare at the stable dying in the throes of a difficult birthing.
Cullen hadn’t returned to her side of the blanket since the fateful night he’d first touched her. The “safe” part of the month had passed, but she lay each night wondering if he would return, listening for the now familiar sounds of a man deep in slumber. The way he’d fall asleep in the middle of an argument was maddening. Whenever she’d marshal a rebuttal to some wrong-headed idea of his about running the surgery, she’d hear soft, whuffing snores from the other side of the blanket.
She’d made arrangements to return to the dressmaker’s shop for additional fittings of the work dresses she’d ordered for the long voyage to come. The ship had been provisioned for the journey of many weeks to St. Helena, in addition to a side trip the captain had just revealed would make the voyage even longer. They were to divert to Gibraltar to deliver two unnamed passengers before continuing back out into the Atlantic to sail south to Napoleon’s remote prison island, more than five thousand miles away.
The long walk to the modiste’s shop brought a warming glow to her cheeks she could feel in the nip of early morning air. She sneaked a secret look at Cullen and was oddly pleased by the fact he seemed to enjoy a brisk pace without slowing to accommodate her. She kept up easily, enjoying the stretch of her legs after so many days of sitting on a stool in the surgery, preparing doses of treatments for the months ahead.
“What machinations and intrigues are going on behind those gray eyes this morning?” Her husband was teasing her again.
She gave him a gentle push against his solid, immoveable frame. “There’s so much to be done yet. I suppose I’m going over the many lists swirling around in my head.”
“You are not alone. You do know that. I’m here.”
Pride Of Duty: Men of the Squadron Series, Book 2 Page 8
