Pride of Duty (Men of the Squadron Book 2)

by Andrea K. Stein

  After a few minutes of agonized indecision, she answered. “Yes, Cullen, I’m still awake. Light a candle if you wish.”

  “No need.” He stumbled a bit in his progress to his side of the blanketed “wall.”

  Willa pondered her next words while the sounds of Cullen shedding his clothes wafted across the barrier. “She’s a beautiful woman.” She bit her lip and squeezed shut her eyes after the blunt words tumbled out. Her cheeks burned, but her hands were ice cold from the uncertainty and fear coursing through her. “You must have loved her very much.”

  The silence from the other side of the blanket stretched out for what seemed an endless abyss of nothingness. Finally, he coughed and cleared his throat. “Yes, Ariadne is a beautiful woman, but she has no soul.” The silence wore on.

  On Willa’s side of the wall, her mind scrambled to make sense of his words. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t comprehend your meaning.”

  “Let me explain. Ariadne would never think to protect the feelings, let alone the health, of an old, injured man who’s worked his hands into twisted knots feeding this ship. Ariadne would never have lost a night’s sleep saving the life of a draft horse in the midst of a difficult birth. Ariadne would never have stayed upright in the surgery for blood-soaked hours helping me save a man’s life.”

  “But…” Willa tried to interrupt her husband’s intense outpouring.

  “Please, let me finish.” There was a loud intake of breath on the other side. “That woman shot me and left me for dead four years ago, because once in the midst of battle, I thought she needed protection. But I was merely an obstacle to her mission, and she had to eliminate me.”

  “But, surely, there is some logical explanation…”

  He cut her off, his voice like gunshots in the dark. “No, there is not, and I warn you, once again, do not cross her. Under no circumstances find yourself alone in her presence. She is ruthless. Human life means nothing to her.”

  “I’ve done nothing to invite her ire.” Willa’s temper spiked at her husband’s assumption that she was helpless.

  “Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong.”

  “How can you be so arrogant and sure of yourself?”

  “Even though you believe I do not care for you, it is obvious to the rest of the world that I do. You are precious to me. You are mine, and what is mine I protect, to my last dying breath if necessary. Never doubt what I carry inside for you.” The sound of his fist thumping against the bulkhead cracked so loudly in the dark, Willa feared he’d break his hand.

  She sat up suddenly, intending to go to him, to calm him. But when she stood, he was there, close and warm. He cradled her face in his large, calloused hands, the same hands that shook and were clumsy during their strange, late-night wedding, or strong and deft, when he sewed up a sailor’s torn limbs.

  The kiss he claimed was so soft at first that she didn’t know whether she should respond or not, but he deepened the pressure on her lips and pulled her closer. She could taste the salt on his tongue, and the scent of clean soap mingled with the musk of his bare skin flooded her senses. With each ensuing kiss, he continued to whisper, “You are more beautiful just the way you are than she could ever be.” At the last minute she panicked and tried to push him away. That was a mistake. The feel of the strong, steady beat of his heart mesmerized. She couldn’t pull away.

  He thudded down onto the bunk and took her with him, pulling her back against his chest. Willa jerked away at the hard prod at her backside.

  “Shhh,” he said, and whispered snippets of a strange tongue into her ear, Gaelic she supposed, as if gentling a mare. “I’m not going to hurt you. I want only to give you pleasure.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Cullen had grown up on his mother’s family’s Highlands estate, tending sheep, gentling horses and working side-by-side with clan tenants in the fields.

  Everything he’d ever learned, everything he’d ever experienced had led to this moment with this woman. Patience, he’d decided long ago, was highly overrated, but now he understood what a precious trait it could be and how lucky he was to have had to cultivate the art throughout his life.

  Willa remained stiff and alert to his every movement, his every word, his every breath. Tucking her warm, shapely bottom close within his thighs was excruciating, but he was determined to let her take the lead in love-making. His cock, of course, had other ideas, but, damn him, he’d have to wait.

  His wife pushed a bit to the side, avoiding the hard-ridged intrusion. When she accidentally touched him, he sucked in a sharp breath.

  “Did that hurt?” Her tone was anxious. Then she brushed her hand against him, slowly and deliberately, and he stopped breathing.

  He put his hands over hers to stop further exploration. “If you don’t cease stirring up a conflagration, this will be over before we start.”

  “Oh.” She turned her head, her mouth open as if forming a question. He stole another kiss and then pulled her back against him. When she squirmed and tried to turn around, he held her firm with one arm while his other hand explored the contour of a nipple-hardened breast straining against the thin muslin of her night shift. Out in the middle ship, beyond the surgery, fiddle music surged and the sounds of dancing and loud revelry drowned out Willa’s cry of pleasure.

  She pushed into his hand, but Cullen lowered his head and replaced his fingers with his tongue, wetting the thin fabric over her breast. When she bucked against him in pleasure, he maneuvered their bodies into a tight, curled position on the narrow bunk.

  “I can’t,” she whispered. “It’s the wrong…”

  He pressed a finger to her lips. “I’m not going to hurt you, Willa. I’m not going to do anything that would get you with child. You have to trust me.”

  When she stiffened and tried to pull away, he stole another soft kiss and waited, willing his body to wait, like the fox who waits for the hen house to quiet down after dark.

  The air below decks was close with all the sailors and their “guests” in the midst of a raucous party. At least that was what Willa blamed for the dizzy spin of her head. And then she realized she’d stopped breathing. She took a deep, clarifying breath and regained her bearings.

  The narrow bunk that barely accommodated one sleeping adult now sheltered both her and Cullen, pressed together, nearly naked, in a hot, clammy heap.

  The tender skin beneath her right ear burned from the last, lingering kiss Cullen had claimed. He’d asked her to trust him. And he’d promised not to get her with child. However, she feared the hard, probing part of his body now pressed against her bottom had other ideas.

  His hand had stealthily lifted her nightdress just to the juncture of her knee where he now lightly massaged the skin behind the joint. Each gentle sweep of his fingers climbed a tiny bit higher on the back of her thigh. After what seemed a blistering eternity, he headed higher, this time on the inside of her thighs.

  She let out a long sigh when he abandoned her upper legs and returned to what she’d hoped he would do. He once again suckled at her breasts beneath the thin muslin. Only this time he applied harder pressure which shot straight to her center. She forgot about her carefully constructed calendar of courses and curled into him, levering one long leg over his bare hip.

  In one swift rustle, he pulled her nightdress over her head and tossed it to the cabin deck.

  When she drew back as if scalded, Cullen claimed her mouth in a long kiss and explored the inside of her mouth with his tongue. His clever hands returned to her breasts which seemed to have taken on lives of their own, begging shamelessly for attention.

  He levered his body over hers and moved her legs apart to accommodate him on the bunk. He moved lower, and just when she thought he’d betrayed her and would enter her body in spite of his promises, he made a quarter turn and plied the entrance to her mons with his thumb. When she jerked at his touch, he stopped and returned his attention to her breasts, suckling one at a time with soft caresses to the
other.

  At the same time, his thumb resumed circling slowly and gently at the small nub she’d discovered long ago as a center of pleasure for herself. Only now, his insistent, light pressure stoked an unfamiliar warmth that spread to her belly. This man was a menace to her self-control.

  The glow of the rowdy party in the middle deck shone down the hatchway and imbued a faint light through the canvas walls of their cabin. She could see the blanket still hanging between their two single bunks.

  Where was the level-headed Dr. MacCloud who had assured her a woolen coverlet thrown across a rope would be enough to keep them safe from temptation? That was her last rational thought before she fell apart in his arms with a moan when one long finger slid into her, and then two in wetness she was sure could not be coming from her own body.

  Cullen would never understand women in general. Willa in particular was an enigma within a maze of unanswered questions. As a man and master of his own world, as most of his friends believed, he didn’t have to understand Willa. She was his, his to love and protect.

  But Willa was not like a medical book he could categorize and shelve. Her resistance to being unceremoniously saddled with a husband, her resistance to being returned to her rightful place as a young woman, her resistance to conceiving a child - all of that he could understand.

  But the woman he now held on his lap sobbed like she’d been deserted and betrayed, not like she’d been carefully pleasured for the last hour and a half. Unlike another part of his body which throbbed accusingly at the bare bottom of the sobbing woman. He wanted to continue to comfort Willa, but if he did not assuage his coarser self, there would be an unfortunate accident.

  He planted a warm kiss on Willa’s tear-streamed face before quickly moving back to the safer side of the blanket. After attending to his own needs, alone and in the dark, he moved to their shared basin of water. He wet a flannel cloth and took it to Willa before returning to his side of the marital battlefield.

  He crooked one arm to prop up the back of his head and stared into the darkness above his bunk. His mind darted from one inconsequential thought to another. Did they have enough packets of medicine to keep up with the demand for treatment of the pox during the long passage to and from St. Helena? Why did the long-legged, delectable Willa still give out occasional little hiccuped sobs on her side of the blanket? What had his father been thinking when he had him forcibly removed from his squadron to this ill-gotten posting?

  “Dr. MacCloud?” The small voice from the other side of the blanket was so soft, he at first thought he might have imagined the sound.

  “I’m sorry, but the doctor does not see patients after midnight.” Cullen smiled to himself in the dark, mentally daring her to call him by his Christian name.

  “Cullen?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can you forgive me?”

  “For what?”

  The silence on the other side of the cabin lengthened.

  “For crying like a silly girl.”

  “Willa, you are not a girl. You’re a full-grown, warm and beautiful woman, and certainly not silly. I don’t know that I’ve ever observed you doing anything silly. Come to think of it, I don’t reckon you’re capable of acting silly.”

  Another long silence pulsed in the darkness.

  Cullen finally had begun to slide into sleep when Willa’s small, insistent voice rose again.

  “Did you…did you do the same things to her you did to me?”

  Cullen sat up so suddenly, he thumped his head against the bulkhead. “Christ, Willa. Stop fashin’ yerself over somethin’ that happened four years ago. It’s over.”

  “But Ariadne doesn’t act like it’s over.”

  “It’s over when I say it’s over. And I say it’s over when a woman shoots me and leaves me for dead. Why does no one believe me?”

  “Why would an elegant woman like her shoot a man?”

  “Because she’s a spy.”

  “Surely not now?”

  “She was a spy then, and I’d bet my next payout she’s still a spy. The sooner she and that Frenchie friend of hers leave the ship, the easier I’ll breathe.”

  “Why would a Royal Navy ship transport French spies?”

  “I don’t know, nor do I want to know. What I do know is nothing good can come of that woman on this ship.”

  Willa smoothed her hands down the skirt of her sensible, gray woolen work dress. She’d been forming pills for hours out of the mercury salt powder they used to treat venereal diseases. She stood, stretched her back, and looked over at her husband who bent his head to the surgeon’s log they kept for the ship. It was his job. His pay depended on careful notations on the health of each of the three hundred crew members on the Arethusa.

  His spectacles had slipped down his nose, and she was tempted to straighten them, if only to see the shade of green his eyes became when he was annoyed. His ginger hair was starting to curl down over his collar and needed a trim. Her stomach fluttered low like a frantic moth at the thought of sifting her fingers through his hair and snipping the unruly ends. She ended the thought as quickly as it formed. A walk on the top deck and some fresh, salt air would clear her head. Depending on the wind, she might catch a glimpse of “Lizard” point, the last bit of England she’d see for two years.

  “Dr. MacCloud, I’m going above to enjoy a bit of fresh air before we leave the channel.”

  “Mmmm.” Cullen barely looked up from the surgeon’s log, but gave her a brief wave of acknowledgement.

  The Arethusa had slipped her lines and risen with the outgoing tide after midnight on the middle watch while they still slept. She’d felt the pull of the gentle swells as they’d made their way out of Portsmouth’s Royal Navy basin and then through Spithead into the wide English Channel leading to the Atlantic Ocean.

  They would sail over five thousand miles to a place so remote between Africa and South America, that only an expert navigator could bring them to the tiny island that served as a remote prison for Napoleon. Royal Navy ships regularly patrolled the St. Helena Station to deter any further attempts to liberate the man who had terrorized Europe for years.

  Since Willa had grown up prowling the decks of Royal Navy ships, she had no difficulty adjusting to the rolling motion beneath her feet. When a rogue swell in the channel caused an abrupt drop, though, she wasn’t prepared for the French passenger, Monsieur Duvall, lunging for her in the passageway to the upper deck.

  The man threw a protective arm around her and gave her waist a tight squeeze. “Mon dieu, that was a near thing.”

  “What was a near thing?” She pushed hard away from his grasp. “Until you adjust to the pitching of the ship, perhaps you should hang on to something safer than my person, like a hand hold.” She pointed to a loop of rope attached to the bulkhead.

  “A thousand apologies, Madame MacCloud. I did not mean to offend.”

  The exaggerated look of chagrin on his face made Willa want to laugh, but she managed to maintain what she hoped would pass for an expression of feminine embarrassment. It was damned difficult to remember who she was now and how she’d be expected to react. Her father had never explained how she should go on in the world after he was gone. Sometimes, she wondered if he’d convinced himself over the years that she really was a boy.

  At that moment, the Frenchman’s partner, Ariadne, joined them. The movement of the ship did not seem to affect her progress in the least. This woman must have spent a great deal of time at sea.

  “If it isn’t the newly minted Mrs. MacCloud.” She tipped her head toward Willa in the midst of clouds of an expensive scent emanating from her, belying the simple woolen dress she wore. Gone were the expensive gown, hat and jewelry she’d worn the day she arrived aboard the ship. Her only nod to fashion was a light paisley shawl she wore around her shoulders, fastened with a simple gold metal pin. “If you’re going to walk the deck, please join us. It’s so much more pleasant above than trapped in our small cabins.”

  T
he last thing Willa wanted to do was spend her bit of free time with the two French spies, but she saw no polite way out of Ariadne’s invitation.

  “Perhaps I’ll join you for a bit before I have to resume my duties.”

  “Your duties? Isn’t that just like Cullen? He’s such a dull Scotsman, always looking for ways to scrimp and save. Attention to duty is everything to him. He never has any fun.”

  “I take my duties to the men of this ship as seriously as Dr. MacCloud does. We’re partners.” Willa returned the French woman’s inscrutable stare without blinking. She’d be damned if she’d yield any ground to the deceitful termagant.

  Cullen took off his spectacles and wiped a hand across his eyes. Perhaps he’d join his wife for a few moments above on deck to clear his mental cobwebs after a morning of seeing ailing sailors followed by hours of log entries. He knew Willa would be watching for the last sight of land before they slipped out into the Atlantic, and he wanted to be with her. He wanted to see the expression in the depths of those gray eyes framed by dark, sooty lashes. He’d surprised himself when he realized he couldn’t get enough of his wife’s gray gaze, even when those eyes flashed a challenge at some wrong-headed thing he’d said.

  He stood, grabbed a jacket from a hook next to the surgery entry, and headed toward the deck above.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Willa observed the confident expression on Monsieur Duvall’s face change rapidly to one of distress. The swells had become choppier the closer their approach to the place where the English Channel met the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Mademoiselle de Santis, Madame MacCloud, I believe I will retire to my bunk until la mer…” he swept his hand toward the water before doubling over and racing to the taffrail. He removed a delicate linen handkerchief from his coat pocket and wiped his mouth before turning back and waving them away.