“Softly, girl.” He was gentle when he pushed her to the mattress. “Softly. There’s no place you have to go. Lie still.”
Did she see him when she looked at him? Probably not. Her eyes were blank. “It’s dark. It . . . hurts. Hurts. I can’t get out.”
“You’re safe. Where does it hurt?”
“Don’t be stupid. Hurts everywhere.” She decided to black out for a while. Her eyes slid shut, and she went limp.
“I imagine it does.” He eased her down flat. “Let’s hope you haven’t cracked anything important in your head. I’m damned if I can fix it.” There was nothing to do for her but wait. The best doctor in London couldn’t do more.
His fault she’d been hurt. The one day in the year he let himself get drunk, this woman needed him. There didn’t seem to be enough inventive ways to call himself an idiot.
He unwrapped her from his coat and pulled her shoes off. She wasn’t bleeding much anywhere, but she was soaking wet, shivering with shock and cold. That, at least, he could fix. All that filthy, soaked clothing had to come off.
He hesitated, then drew his knife. He set the point under the gilt locket she wore and turned the back of the blade and cupped his hand to shield her skin and cut. Lace snicked apart. That was Alençon lace, seven and sixpence a handspan these days, smuggled goods and illegal. And this was a very expensive whore.
She didn’t react when he peeled away damp, clinging cotton. Her breasts slipped free. They were peaches, golden on top where the sun got to them, pale below. They swayed, stippled with goose bumps, the nipples tight.
“No damage to that pair. That’s going to make hordes of men happy, won’t it?”
Beautiful and beautiful, left and right. Unruly parts of him took note, getting hard and ready. His cock was offering suggestions on the best way to warm her up. He and his cock were just going to have to disagree about that.
“Let’s get the rest of this off.” He sawed through a bit of silk ribbon, then cut a widening vee of nakedness down her belly, getting less and less dispassionate with every inch. Devil knew how doctors managed. Maybe they were all eunuchs.
Her skin was cold against the back of his hand, smooth as water. Soon enough he brushed a feathering of curly hair. She was blonde down there, too. Blonde as summer wheat. A man never knew till he checked.
A legion of men had plowed that particular wheatfield, and that was a sin and a shame for a woman like this.
Her belly curved down from her hips to the long, soft plain with that vulnerable navel at the center, then rose in a little mound where those curls sprang up. It was territory that called out for a man to come lay his head in the cradle of her, there, and turn and kiss his way up that hill and fill his mouth with the smell of her and the taste . . .
He shouldn’t have his hand there without invitation.
He took a deep breath and moved on, cutting away the rest of her skirt and peeling it back.
What was she doing on Katherine Lane, trying to sort through his pocket change? Who left her alone, in the stink and cold of the docks, to get attacked by gangs of Irishmen? That was going to stop.
One last tug. He pulled wet cloth out from under her. She lay on the white cotton covers of his bunk, a little on her side, instinctively trying to curl against the cold, wearing nothing but a locket on a thin blue ribbon.
Naked, she looked small and breakable. She’d seemed more substantial when she was on her feet, telling him lies and kicking thugs.
He’d been wrong about that locket. It wasn’t gilt. This was gold, soft and heavy, with the design almost worn off. When he picked it up he could feel the age on it, the years that had rubbed it smooth. The clever hinge was Italian work.
“This trinket doesn’t belong on the Lane. Neither do you, sparrow. We’re going to have a long talk about that when you wake up.” He didn’t open it. He set the gold back between her breasts and left his hand there, his knuckles just touching her. “Your heart’s thumping along like clockwork. That’s good. You keep that up.”
Under his fingers, her skin was smooth and unnaturally cool, with the heart beating inside. She might have been a marble statue, just called to life, taking the first breath. He could slide over a few inches and help himself to those breasts. He’d maybe taste them fairly soon. They’d be honey and cream with a rough nub of a nipple tweaking back and forth on his tongue.
Damn. Was he really thinking that way about an unconscious woman?
Yes. Yes. Oh, yes. Let’s do that. His cock didn’t have any scruples at all.
But then, his cock wasn’t in charge. “And I’m roused up like a squad of marines on shore leave.” He pulled his hand off the girl and stomped across the cabin, feeling moderately despicable, looking for towels. “That’s uncomfortable. Let’s wring some water out of your pretty hide and get you covered up.”
Blankets were in the bottom drawer, towels beside the washstand. He brought them to the bed and sat beside her and dried her off fast, trying not to touch her skin. “We’ll discuss your very tempting wares when you’re awake. I like dealing with women who can talk.”
He wrapped her in one of the Valletta blankets he shipped, vivid blues and greens in long stripes. Wool soft as a kitten. He cocooned her, head to foot, till he couldn’t see a square inch of skin. It didn’t help as much as he’d hoped. “Where the hell has that boy got to?”
Unbelievable, the effect she had on him. Had he ever wanted a woman this much? “You’re something a man might pull up in his net one night. A mermaid, perfect and chill. Maybe you shed your scales and walked up Katherine Lane right out of the kingdom of the sea. Maybe that’s how a woman like you got there.”
Without opening her eyes, she said clearly, “It’s dark.” Whoever she was talking to, it wasn’t him.
“The lamps aren’t lit. I’ll do it soon.”
“I can’t . . .” Gradually, like a flower closing, she curled herself into a ball. When she hid her head in her arms, she smeared blood across her face. “I can’t get out.”
“I’m here.”
“Dark...”
Because her eyes were shut. “I’ll make it light in a minute.”
Loud thumps in the passageway said Tom was back. The boy slammed the door to the bulkhead, slopping water from the bucket. “Is she dead?”
So much for his private idyll with a mermaid. “She’s not going to die. She’s going to sit up and ask why I keep a lazy, half-sized baboon in my cabin. Bring that over here.”
He sat down on the bunk beside her and wet a corner of a towel in the bucket. He began to clean the scrapes on her hands. Tom, a precocious eleven, craned for a look under the blanket. “Gawd, ain’t she a beauty. An’ she sells that up on the Lane?”
“Not to the likes of you.”
The girl opened brown gold eyes. Her first sight was Tom’s face, level with her own. “I fell, Sir. I weren’t . . . careful. ” She tried to focus on him. “Who ’er you?”
“I’m Tom. I’m pleased to make yer acquaintance.”
“Tell ’im I can’t get out.”
“What? Oh, yes, miss, I’ll tell ’im. Can I get you something? Cup of tea. The fire’s lit in the galley. I could get you a cup of tea, miss.”
He could feel her shaking under the blanket. Fear and cold and confusion. “Tom.” He thumbed toward the door. “Lose yourself.”
The girl’s gaze followed Tom as he left. Slowly she blinked her way around the cabin . . . bookshelves, the chart table, a stack of crates, and finally back to him. “Where am I?”
“My ship. How many fingers am I holding up?”
“You think I hit my head.” She freed a hand from the blanket and explored into her hair. “I did.”
“How many fingers?”
“Three.”
“Does the light hurt your eyes?”
“Everything hurts.” This time, when she tried to sit up, he helped her. He kept an arm around her while she huddled, hazy-eyed, clutching the blanket to her, looking bewi
ldered. She would have aroused protective instincts in a stone.
“Talk to me, sparrow. Who are you?”
“Jess. I’m Jess.”
When she’d been reeling in and out of consciousness, her voice had been pure East London. Now she sounded gentry. Somewhere, his cockney sparrow had picked up an education. She got more and more interesting. “Do you remember getting hit?”
She shook her head. Her face knotted in pain. “I shouldn’t do that.”
“No, you shouldn’t. Do you know what day it is?”
“No. I . . . Stop asking stupid questions.”
She’d mislaid a couple pieces of her memory. He’d seen that happen once, when his bosun took a fall from the rigging. It had been a day before the man remembered what ship he was on. He never did remember the fall.
“You’re still shivering. Let’s get you dry.” When she didn’t object, he picked up the towel and started unbraiding and untangling, blotting water out of her hair, making every move slow so he wouldn’t scare her.
She was thinking the whole time, frowning. After a while she said, “I don’t remember everything. What happened to me?”
“You fell under a wagon and got hurt.” They’d talk about it tomorrow. That was one of several discussions he had planned.
Done. He put the towel down. Her hair dried up lighter than he’d expected, the color of a new-cut spar. Lovely. A man would keep this woman just for the pleasure of taking her hair down at night.
“I got my brains scrambled up, didn’t I?”
“A little, maybe. Give it an hour or two and you’ll be fine.”
“I don’t—” She stopped abruptly and jerked away from him. She pulled the blanket loose and looked inside. Her eyes came up, accusing. “I’m not wearing any clothes. You got me naked.”
He was scaring her. He dropped the towel and backed away, holding his hands wide and empty.
THE man retreated, trying to look harmless and not succeeding to any extent at all.
He said, “You’re not naked. You’re in a blanket.”
Oh, that was reassuring, that was. She was wearing damp skin and a wooly blanket. She pulled cloth up to her chin and hid behind it. “We must know each other pretty well, whoever you are.”
“My name is Sebastian.”
“Se . . . bast . . . ian.” She tried the syllables out. She was pretty sure this was a complete stranger. A dangerous stranger. She’d known lots of dangerous men, and she could recognize one at a glance. “You’re one of the things I don’t remember, Sebastian. I don’t remember you at all.”
“You don’t know me.”
“Then I should have my clothes on, shouldn’t I?”
He kept his voice soft, talking to her like she was a scared child. “They were wet.”
There her dress was, a heap of slit-up rags on the carpet. “My dress got wet, so you cut it off. You must be a right terror in a thunderstorm.” A prudent woman in her situation wouldn’t embark upon sarcasm.
“You were soaked to the skin and freezing and bleeding at the edges. I couldn’t do anything with a bundle of muddy cloth.” He made stripping her naked sound prosaic as oatmeal. “And you were leaking mud all over my bed. I sopped a gallon of dirty water off you.”
“Mud. That explains it.” Her head pounded like a mill wheel. Every muscle in her body hurt, some of them in inventive ways. She couldn’t remember how she got here. She was naked. There was nothing good about this situation. Nothing.
She was in bed in the captain’s cabin of a good-sized merchant frigate, about a hundred seventy tons. This isn’t a Whitby ship. I’m not safe. The cut of the cabin and the neat brass fittings said it was from a shipyard in Boston. This man, though, he sounded English, not American.
Most of all . . . it was strange inside her head. Felt like somebody’d taken a big ladle and stirred her brain a few times. Nothing was where it should be. When she went asking why she was sitting frog-naked in the captain’s cabin of a merchant frigate, she couldn’t dip up a teaspoon of explanation. I am in a mort of trouble.
Captain Sebastian stood five feet away, looking large and lethal, with a worried frown. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Well, you’d say that, wouldn’t you?
He was young to be captain. Thirty, maybe. He had black hair and a big beak of a nose, and sailor skin, dark and rough, burned by suns that weren’t polite and English. Colorful splotches of blood were drying on his shirt. That would be her blood, probably.
I’ve seen him before.
A memory bobbed up, all in one piece. She was standing against the Captain, so close next to him, they were intimate as a pair of teeth. Fog swirled past. That inky hair was wet, slicked down over his forehead. He slid his fingers along my mouth, tickling. That’s all he did, and I was heat and pleasure and squirming inside like he’d kissed me for an hour.
He knew what he’d done to me. He wanted to do it.
I said, “Five shillings?” and I laughed at him.
The memory tipped sideways and sank like a stone. She had no idea what came next. She groped in the corners of her mind and couldn’t find anything.
His voice rumbled, “You’re worrying. I want you to stop that. I’ll take care of you.”
I don’t want you to take care of me. I want to have my clothes on. She huddled up close and tucked the blanket in tight under her. This is a Greek blanket. We use them for packing the fragile cargo. Papa buys a bale or two on the docks at Valletta, last thing, and we toss them on top of . . .
Then it was gone. The image of the dock at Valletta rippled into pieces and blew away, taking Papa with it. There was something she needed to do for Papa. Something important. She had to . . .
Chaos and spinning pain in her head. Nothing else. She couldn’t think.
She looked down. Her toes peeked out the bottom of the blanket, pink and defenseless and silly-looking. “I don’t remember how I got here.”
“I carried you in after the wagon hit you. Let me get you some light. It’s getting dark early.”
I got hit by a wagon? That’s a fool’s trick. Doesn’t sound like me, somehow. She watched him as he walked across the cabin, taking lanterns with him. It hurt like needles to move her eyes. They hurt when she closed them, too. Sometimes you only have bad choices. Lazarus used to say that to me.
When the Captain passed the squares of the windows, she saw him in outline against the gray outside.
That joggled loose another little moment.
He had his back to me and he was holding a knife. Men came spewing out of the Dark like demons. He put himself between me and those men . . .
“I was out . . . in that.” She looked at the rain and fog outside the window. “With you. And you killed someone.”
“There was a fight.” He set the lanterns on the chart table. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. You can sort everything out when your head doesn’t ache.”
He’s a killer, then. I know too many killers.
He’d protected her, in some shadowy fight in the fog. She was sure of it. Maybe that was why he didn’t scare her as much as he should have. She watched him make fire, sheltering the tinder with his hand. Big hands, he had. He was substantial in general, and being on shipboard made it obvious. A man his size filled up the space, bulkhead to hull, deck to overhead.
He blew on the spark and got the candle lit. All the while he was taking quick glances in her direction. Assessing. Seeing whether she was about to panic or scream or run. She might have, if her head hurt less. Easier to panic when your head didn’t hurt.
He hooked one lantern up over the chart table. It swung when he let it loose. Bright and shadow skittered around the cabin. He walked toward her, holding the other lantern, and he bulged out in his breeches, randy as a stallion.
No.
Fear ran down her like water. For the first time since she’d opened her eyes, she was crawly skinned frightened. Cold with it. Shocked and sick with it.
She darted her eyes a
way and pretended she didn’t see. Oh, she was looking at the chart table. She was staring at the carpet on the deck. But she didn’t fool him. He pulled up, halfway across the cabin, just stood still, and watched her.
She folded up small, hiding under the blanket.
“Stop that,” he said sharp-like.
Easing the blanket with her, she edged back farther in the bunk. No escape that way. The door was on the other side of the cabin. Past him. No escape there, either.
“Don’t be a idiot.” He looked annoyed.
A flash of memory struck. The Captain yelled, his face distorted with rage and contempt. “Run from me.”
She was in his cabin. No way out. The world got wavery at the edges. I am in so much trouble.
He started toward her, across the cabin, deliberate and slow, like piled-up thunderheads approaching at sea. She jerked the blanket and scuttled backwards on the bed, rucking up the covers till she slammed against the portside hull. Just a startling amount of useless, that was.
He came to the side of the bed. He hung up the lantern on the hook in the overhead and stood there scowling. “Would you calm down? I’m not going to lay a hand on you.”
Her memory was full of dark patches of pain and fighting and trying to run. Anything could have happened to her, and she wouldn’t remember. “Maybe you already have.”
“You think I’d do something like that in front of an eleven-year-old cabin boy, and you cold and limp as a dead mackerel? Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not being silly. I’m sitting here with my dress off, and you’re . . .”
“I’m what? This . . .” he gestured crudely, “doesn’t mean a damn thing. This is because you don’t have any clothes on and you’re female. For God’s sake, I don’t attack women every time I get a cockstand.”
She shook her head. The world went spinning. She was so bloody sick. He could grab her if he wanted to. Just reach out and do it.
“I’m not the kind of sorry bastard who rapes women.” His words would have left marks on stone. It chilled her right to the soles of her feet, that soft voice. “Hell.”
My Lord and Spymaster sl-2 Page 3
