by J. Hepburn
I felt a twinge of jealousy at my Katharine knowing another woman engineer.
"Do you have need of another engineer?" I asked, trying to be haughty. "You would seem to have enough!"
She laughed, a low and satisfied sound. "Oh, my dear Franc," she whispered into my ear. "We have more than one ship!"
Even greater vistas of adventure opened out before my mind's eye. "Are they all as exciting as this boat?"
"This thing? Oh, much more than this," she said gloatingly. "This has to be seen in public."
I sat bolt upright, old thrills charging my blood. "When can I see these wonders?"
"Patience, my Franc, patience! When we get to them!"
"And how," I demanded to know, my mind still jumping about wildly, "is Lillian controlling the engine, I saw no dials on the bulkhead behind her!"
"There are dials in the pedestal in front of her, and all the controls."
I immediately made to stand, to go and investigate, but Katharine wrapped her arms around me and pulled me back down.
"Later! I've only just reclaimed you. I will not lose you again so soon!"
I may have done little more than hold and kiss her as we steamed east, following the twists and turns of the river like an eel, passing through Brisbane as rapidly as we could without attracting the attention of the river police, and then racing across Moreton Bay at speeds I had not realised possible over water.
Much later, we rendezvoused with the Boadicea as that beautiful ship, long and black and aggressive, rode at anchor behind Moreton Island. Much later than that, long after Katharine had, finally, taken the corset off me she had long ago designed for me, we lay on her bed among tangled sheets and I felt myself burn with happiness.
She carried her nakedness with total lack of concern and, after she chided me for pulling the sheet over my breasts, I felt a defiant lack of modesty that excited me anew.
I could not take my eyes off her body but I was still, despite a growing, delicious, tingling feeling, sated enough to demand answers from her.
"My dearest Kat," I said, as my eyes followed the curve of her body as she stretched, arching her back off the bed, "what are these skills you said you had found?"
She collapsed onto the bed and gave a low, throaty laugh that made me shiver.
"I plan." She rolled towards me and propped herself on one elbow while I delighted in what the posture did to her small breasts. "I seem to be particularly good at it. I am, the captain says, a strategist and a designer of plans, and more than plans."
"Like corsets?" I could not resist reaching out and tracing the curve of her topmost breast with my finger, following it from her shoulder down towards the puckered nipple crowning it.
"Like corsets," she said smugly, "and sometimes engines, and more usually stratagems. A ship like this demands that people find their skill, and then rewards them for it." She broke off to sigh as I gently stroked her nipple, fascinated as it responded to my touch by hardening. "I could have bought your hand in marriage within a year, but we invest everything we own. We may not all earn the same, but we all pay it back into the ship."
"So you have not borrowed the captain's room to woo me in?"
She laughed, spontaneously and as uproariously as a man. It was a sound of such freedom and purity I fell in love with her all over again. "No! This is mine! The captain's quarters are even more impressive! Yes, the men do sling hammocks in the hold but we all eat the same fare, no matter what table we sit at."
"And what of that box you sent me? It was old."
She looked suddenly so sombre I stilled my hand and pulled it back before I had realised. "It was old, right enough," she said softly. "When I joined this crew I begged them to let me find you, but they said I would have to prove myself, first. They let me write that note, and place it in the bottle, and nail shut the box, and store it in the hold until I had enough authority and standing to bring you aboard as my guest. We have been steaming back to Brisbane for six months now, business delaying us many times along the way."
"It's been two years," I said in a suddenly small voice.
She nodded, eyes clouded by memory. "Two years. I'm second only to Captain Dalton, now, and it was for you, my Franc. I had to rescue you. I had to bring you aboard and bring you with me, and if you had forgotten everything you knew, or no longer cared for it, I would bring you as my wife and be damned to the lot of them. I had to get you back, Franc, and that meant I had to win the right to have you."
I slapped her. I couldn't help it. "Two years!" I shouted, tears springing forth from a dam two years thick. "Two years! I thought you were dead, Kat! I heard you were kidnapped in Sydney! They were hunting for you! Your mother screamed for the army to hunt you down, but was dismissed as a crazy old woman! I cried myself to sleep for a year thinking you were being raped by pirates!"
She stared at me open-mouthed, her cheek turning red from the impact of my hand. "I never... I didn't think… I would never deliberately have done that to you, Franc! I'm so sorry!"
She looked so shocked, so mortified, I felt a desperate need to reassure her even as I shook with sobs. I clutched at her and we clung to each other as I tried to stop crying and she kept apologising in a broken voice.
We lay for a long time after my tears dried, until the light through the porthole turned dim and I could only see her by the sheen of her pale body under her tanned face.
As we lay there, a diffident but somehow knowing knock came at the door, followed by the faint sounds of footsteps deliberately moving away.
Katharine looked up, quizzical for a moment, before her expression cleared and she leapt out of bed and to the door, snatched her blouse to hold in front of herself, and cracked the door open for a second to peer out before pulling it wider, bending down quickly to slide something inside, and closing the door, bolting it securely.
When she stood, she held a tray covered in food, like Venus at a feast. I was suddenly, ravenously hungry.
The food was simple but of much finer quality than I had been expecting, and, under the circumstances, was the finest meal I had tasted in two, no, three years. We discarded the silver cutlery and ate with our fingers, giggling like schoolgirls and feeding each other mouthful after mouthful, licking the proffering fingers clean, and sharing a goblet of magnificent claret.
When I could eat no more, I collapsed onto my back, breathing heavily. Katharine, whose slender but hard physique belied an appetite far greater than mine, chased some gravy around the edge of a plate with a final hunk of bread and tried to feed it to me. I had to fend her off with both hands, beginning to laugh hysterically and gasping out, "Stop! I'll throw up!" until she relented and ate it herself.
She had a particularly self-satisfied expression on her face as she lay propped on her elbows and took another swallow of wine.
I lay and looked at the ceiling, low above our heads, and felt an almost wholly forgotten sense of happiness.
I was unprepared for Katharine to suddenly pour a small trickle of wine onto the top of my breast and then chase it with her mouth, sucking my nipple between her lips, making me first gasp in shocked surprise then collapse in blissful, erotic surrender.
I felt her hand trailing down my stomach and through the thatch of hair below my waist, and automatically spread my legs for her. Her tongue played about my nipple, coaxing it to grow in her mouth into startling rigidity as I lay and sighed with what I knew, without caring, was wanton happiness—revelling in unfamiliar but utterly desirable sensations until her fingers made me gasp and arch up and grab at her wrist, at first overwhelmed and then desperately desiring more.
The second time we made love was wilder, more passionate and more inventive than that first, desperate, coupling had been, and I learned more about my body than I had ever known, before this night. When we finally collapsed to once more catch our breath, I did not let her go this time but kept my arms tightly wrapped around her from behind, one hand trapped between her thighs, the other wrapped possess
ively over one firm breast and our mingled sweat sticking us together.
"I may need the head later," she said, sleepily.
"I will not let you out of my sight," I said into the muscle of her shoulder.
"That could prove difficult."
"I don't care." I snuggled closer against her, which I would have thought impossible before trying it. "I’m not letting you out of my sight."
FIN
About the Author
J. Hepburn lives with his partner, several kilts, an Irish Wolfhound, two cats, an indeterminate number of wild birds and, sometimes, a passing python. He cares enough about coffee to not only grind his own, but roast it first. This says a lot about him, some of it complimentary. He rides a motorbike because it’s fun, and wishes they’d hurry up with a genetic cure for short sight.
He writes because otherwise the words come out when he’s not expecting them to, and likes to explore any genre with “speculative” in the name. He’s been writing for more than a decade but only submitting for a couple of years, which was a mistake he doesn’t intend to repeat. He thinks romance is more interesting than violence and a lot more morally defensible, not to mention fun.
He tweets sporadically at twitter.com/JHPeregrine, and is slowly establishing a web presence at jhepburnauthor.com.
