Taming Charlotte

by Linda Lael Miller

  “I brung you somethin’, Captain,” answered the man who carried her. “Me and the rest of the crew, well, we’ve been lookin’ for a way to cheer you up a mite.”

  Door hinges creaked, and Charlotte felt a peculiar combination of excitement and fear. After all, she’d been stripped of every stitch, and she was in desperate need of a bath and shampoo. When the bag was opened, she was going to make for a very unnerving sight.

  The sack landed on the floor with a thump; she felt pulling as the rope or twine at the top was untied. The burlap fell around her in a rough pool, and she snatched it back up far enough to cover herself.

  When she finally found the courage to look up, she found herself staring into the astonished ink blue eyes of Patrick Trevarren.

  2

  NAKED THOUGH CHARLOTTE WAS, HER SKIN SCRATCHED AND itchy from the burlap bag, her muscles cramped, she felt real hope as she looked up into Mr. Trevarren’s handsome face. A lamp swung from a low beam in the small quarters, and there was a comfortable clutter of books and charts on the sturdy-looking desk. She smiled, even though her ordeal had robbed her of all but the dregs of her courage.

  “I can explain everything,” she said.

  Mr. Trevarren nodded brusquely to the sailor, dismissing him, and after the door closed, her host went to his bed and wrenched off a woolly white blanket. “I sincerely hope so,” he replied at length, offering her the covering.

  Charlotte accepted gratefully, but she was too weak and achy to rise from her humble position on the floor. “I was taken captive while my friend Bettina and I were trying to find our way home from the souk…”

  Bless him, Patrick had poured wine into a wooden cup, and he extended this to Charlotte, then sank into his desk chair to regard her in attentive silence.

  Charlotte was not accustomed to strong drink, but she clutched the cup in shaking hands, raised it to her mouth, and drained every drop before rushing on.

  “It’s been quite a devastating experience, I can assure you, Mr. Trevarren…”

  He frowned, took the cup, filled it again from an elegant carafe. “How do you know my name?”

  Charlotte blushed and then gulped down the second cupful of wine. She was both relieved and injured that he did not seem to recall their encounter a decade before, in the high rigging of the Enchantress. “We met once,” she said, and then hiccuped. “May I have more wine, please?”

  “Certainly not,” he said, with decided disapproval, settling back in his creaky chair with all the assurance of a man who received gifts of naked women every day of the week. “You’re already getting drunk. What you need is some food and, from the looks of you, a bath.”

  In all her fantasies about Patrick Trevarren over the years, Charlotte had never once envisioned being received so casually. “Don’t you even want to know my name?” she asked, in a small voice, when her formidable Quade pride was looking the other way.

  Mr. Trevarren sighed. Now he’d gone from nonchalance to an attitude of distracted bother, as though he found her arrival tiresome. “All right, then,” he conceded, gesturing. “Who are you?”

  Charlotte was stricken by his lack of friendliness, but she wouldn’t have let him see that even for a ticket home to America. She straightened, inside the swirl of soft wool cloaking her, and glared at him. “I don’t intend to tell you,” she said. “There. How does it feel to be treated rudely?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, the way Charlotte had seen her father do when he was exasperated with her stepmother, Lydia. After that, Patrick rose abruptly from his chair, took hold of her blanket-covered shoulders, and raised her to her feet.

  “This is no time for schoolgirl games,” he snapped, glowering down at her.

  The moment he relaxed his grasp, Charlotte’s knees folded, and to her abject humiliation, she started to sink back to the floor.

  Patrick cursed under his breath, caught her, and swept her up into his arms. He carried her, blanket and all, to the bed, and dropped her ungracefully onto the mattress. The feathery softness all but swallowed her.

  Charlotte’s eyes went wide. She had imagined this event innumerable times, but finding herself faced with the reality was another matter entirely. Her throat clenched shut with fear.

  Patrick’s manner softened a little, though his size and masculinity still overwhelmed her. He leaned over Charlotte, his hands pushing deep into the mattress on either side of her, and smiled. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. His voice was low, mesmerizing. “Now, tell me your name.”

  The wine had spread into every tiny tributary of Charlotte’s veins, every cell and pore. Her fear was receding behind a rising wall of darkness, and she yawned. “Aphrodite,” she said. “Daughter of Zeus.”

  Picturing her father in a toga, standing atop his personal Mount Olympus on Puget Sound and glaring imperiously down on mere humanity, she giggled.

  “Beware the thunderbolts of Zeus,” she warned Patrick, turning sage in the space of a moment. “If my father finds out about this, he’ll be absolutely outraged.”

  Patrick sighed and thrust himself away from Charlotte and the mattress. “There’s no point in talking to you now,” he said. “Go ahead and sleep, little goddess.”

  She pulled the blanket up under her nose and peered at him over the plain edge. “Don’t you dare ravish me,” she said.

  He smiled, and Charlotte was quite dazzled by the flash. “Rest assured, my dear—my taste doesn’t run toward pampered rich girls.”

  “Pampered—?!” Charlotte tried to sit up, wanting to offer a vehement protest, but she simply had no strength left to do that. She collapsed against the pillows, closed her eyes, and slept.

  Patrick sent a passing sailor for Cochran, who appeared momentarily, bearing a basin of warm water, some liniment, and a stack of clean washing rags. The first mate looked at the girl for a long moment, then made a tsk-tsk sound.

  “Poor little thing. She’s been poorly used these past few days, I’m afraid.”

  Patrick glanced at her smudged, pale face. Her matted hair was the color of maple syrup, and it would glow in the lantern light once it had been washed and brushed properly.

  “What do you mean, ‘used’?” he demanded. He knew he was scowling at Cochran as though the man had done the using personally, but he couldn’t help it.

  Cochran smiled, set the things he carried on the stand bolted to the floor beside Patrick’s bed. “I wasn’t speaking of her virtue,” he said. “The kidnappers wouldn’t have lowered her value by enjoying her favors, though God knows they must have been tempted.”

  Patrick swallowed hard. He was relieved, but at the same time, for some unfathomable reason, he wanted to grasp his friend’s shirtfront and send him flying backwards against the closest wall. With effort, he managed to control both his temper and, he hoped, the expression on his face.

  “She won’t tell me her name.”

  “Probably thinks you’re no better than those wasters who nabbed her in the marketplace,” Cochran said with a shrug. “It’s no great wonder if she’s been a little fractious, now is it?”

  “I guess not,” Patrick conceded, though somewhat ungenerously.

  The vixen stirred in her sleep, turned onto her side, and whimpered softly at the pain the motion caused.

  An angry flush surged over Patrick’s jawline.

  “They bruised her pretty badly,” Cochran commented in a quiet voice, looking down at the trail of black and blue marks on her bare arm and shoulder. “Maybe we’d better get Ness in here to check her over and bind up any wounds.”

  “I’ll tend to her myself,” Patrick said. Once he’d finished speaking, he was embarrassed, because he’d spat the words at his friend like pieces of red-hot lead. He made a forcible effort to calm his renegade emotions. “We’ll find out who she is soon enough—I know she’s from Seattle or thereabouts—and send her home.”

  “Yes,” Cochran agreed, somewhat heavily. There was no conviction in his voice. “J
ust remember that some folks are of a mighty strange turn of mind when it comes to situations like this one.”

  “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  Cochran had reached the door of the cabin and he paused there, one hand on the latch. “Whether the young lady has been…er…deflowered or not, a lot of papas and mamas would see her as used merchandise, a shame to the family. Not a few would refuse to take her back.”

  Looking down at the nameless waif, Patrick saw the child he’d rescued from the rigging so long ago, not the woman she’d become. He felt a twisting sorrow just to imagine her being spurned by the very people who were supposed to love and protect her. “Go now,” he said, in a tone of defeat, and he heard the door close behind Cochran.

  With a gentleness he hadn’t had occasion to use since the year he was ten, when his dog had been run down by a carriage and he’d carried the spaniel out of the street, Patrick turned back the blanket. First he washed the lady’s dusty, swollen skin, and then he treated the worst of her scratches with dabs of good brandy. She flinched a few times, but didn’t awaken, not even when he lifted her up and maneuvered her into one of his shirts.

  Clearly she was exhausted, and Patrick felt no small amount of tenderness toward her as he stood for a time, watching her sleep. After a while, he turned the lamp down until there was barely any wick to burn, then went up on deck to make sure all was well with the ship.

  When he returned, his lovely guest was sleeping on her side. She’d kicked free of the covers, and her long, shapely legs, as white and translucent as the finest porcelain, lay as if she’d been running.

  Patrick sat down on the end of the bed, kicked off his boots, then rose to unfasten the buttons of his breeches. He favored the wide-sleeved, open-throated kind of shirt that made him look like a swashbuckler in a three-penny opera, and this he pulled over his head and tossed across the back of his desk chair.

  He crawled into bed, next to the wall, settled in with his customary strenuous stretch and loud, sighing yawn, then turned his back on the waif.

  She made a sound in her sleep, shifted, and laid one hand full on Patrick’s right buttock.

  He tensed, from his scalp to the soles of his feet, and his member was suddenly as erect as the main mast. Patrick murmured a swear word and reluctantly moved out of her reach, but up on deck, the watches changed and then changed again before he was able to sleep.

  When Charlotte awakened, fierce sunshine was pouring in through an open porthole and she was alone in the captain’s quarters. At least, she assumed Mr. Trevarren was the captain, since he had such fancy accommodations all to himself and seemed accustomed to ordering people about.

  She wriggled up onto the pillows, which were wadded against the plain wall that served as a headboard, and stretched. That was when she realized she was wearing one of Patrick’s shirts, that he must have unwrapped her from the blanket and put the garment on her while she was sleeping.

  The idea mortified Charlotte, but she wasn’t about to let it take too much of her energy. Her first thought, upon being delivered to Patrick like a bagful of walnuts plump for the cracking, had been that she was safe now, in the hands of one of her own countrymen. Now, however, as she mulled over the fact that the pillows next to her own still bore the imprint of a head, she wondered.

  Horror made Charlotte’s heart lurch. She’d had wine the night before, and she’d been rendered almost witless by the things that had been happening to her. Had she been besmirched?

  She spread her legs beneath the blankets and felt herself tentatively with the fingers of one hand, but there was no soreness, no change. There was, however, just the slightest twinge of pleasure at the scandalous thought of Patrick touching her so intimately.

  Charlotte slapped both hands down on top of the covers and pulled her legs together with such force that her knees knocked.

  A rap sounded at the door, and before Charlotte could call out that she preferred to be alone, the hinges creaked and Patrick strode in, grinning.

  Charlotte glowered at him. “It is not proper for you to be in here,” she pointed out.

  He laughed. “Wrong. It’s not proper for you to be here, goddess. These are, after all, my quarters.”

  She pulled the covers up to her cheekbones. “You slept in this bed,” she accused, her voice muffled by the blankets.

  “I often do,” Patrick conceded blithely. “Feeling better this morning?”

  Charlotte remembered the disturbing excitement she’d felt a few minutes before, and her cheeks grew hot again. “I’m fine. Now, if you’ll just send me home—”

  “Gladly.” There was a tray on the desktop, Charlotte noticed, and Patrick was engaged in pouring fragrant Turkish coffee into a cup. “All you have to do is tell me your name.”

  It still rankled that he didn’t remember, but she supposed she couldn’t hold that against him forever. “Charlotte,” she said. Instinct stopped her from adding her surname. The Quade name meant wealth and power in Washington Territory, and it was possible that Patrick was not merely the dashing captain of a clipper ship, but a slave trader and kidnapper in the bargain.

  If he realized what a high ransom she would command, it might be just the start of her troubles instead of the finish.

  He brought the steaming cup to the bedside and offered it, and Charlotte reached out to clasp the handle, being careful to keep the blanket in place at the same time.

  “Charlotte,” Patrick said, musing over the name, as though it were some ancient riddle he was anxious to solve. “Charlotte what?”

  “Just Charlotte,” she responded, after taking a cautious sip of the strong, hot brew he’d given her.

  He narrowed his indigo eyes at her for a moment, and she thought he meant to argue, but then he must have changed his mind. He treated her to another of his bright smiles.

  “You’re making this very difficult,” he said pleasantly. “I have half a mind to sell you when we dock, or hand you over to my friend, Khalif, for his harem.”

  Charlotte nearly dropped her coffee. “It is reprehensible of you to make jokes about such things! Don’t you think I’ve been through enough as it is?”

  Patrick rolled his eyes. “Not only are you a saucy little wench, and all too friendly of a night, when a man’s trying his best to sleep—”

  The cup rattled against the bedside table as Charlotte set it down. “I beg your pardon?”

  He laughed and folded his gracefully muscular arms. “I thought that would catch your attention. You and I slept together last night, darling Charlotte, and damned if you didn’t reach out and grab a round place on my anatomy.”

  For the first time in her life and, she sincerely hoped, for the last, Charlotte blushed so hard that her face hurt. “I would never do such a thing!” she hissed.

  Patrick smiled. “Yes, you would. You did. You’re just lucky I’m such a gentleman, that’s all.”

  Charlotte could not believe his audacity; it evidently had no limits. Mr. Patrick Trevarren was decidedly not the man she’d spun so many lovely dreams around for ten long years. Her logging camp vocabulary came back to her in a rush.

  “Don’t you dare call yourself a gentleman in my presence, you bloody bushwhacker—you sorry son of the devil’s donkey—”

  Patrick gave another startling burst of laughter and bowed low. “Why, you’re very welcome, Miss Charlotte No-name. No need to regale me with your thanks!”

  “Get out!” Charlotte screamed.

  “This is my cabin,” Patrick replied, unruffled. “If anybody gets out, goddess, it’s going to be you.”

  “Gladly! Just give me some clothes and I’ll be gone so fast, you’ll think you imagined me!”

  Her fury seemed to amuse Patrick, which only made her angrier.

  Whistling, he opened a chest in a corner of the compact room and took out a pair of black breeches and a wide leather belt. He flung the items to her, and they landed askew on the bed.

  “Trousers?” she questioned.<
br />
  Patrick smiled. “I’m sorry if they won’t do, darling Charlotte. Since I don’t wear dresses, I’ve never seen reason to carry them about in my sea chest.”

  Charlotte closed her eyes and took ten deep breaths before she was calm enough to speak to the captain in a civil tone. “If you’ll just grant me a few minutes’ privacy.”

  “Certainly,” he conceded graciously, but he didn’t leave the quarters, he only turned his broad, imperious back.

  Using the covers for a tent, Charlotte scrambled into the breeches, which were too large for her at the waist and tight across her bottom, tucked in the tail of the shirt she’d slept in, and cinched the belt around her middle. She needed to use a chamber pot in the worst way, but she wasn’t about to do that with Mr. Trevarren in the room.

  “Where are we?” she asked instead, moving to the porthole and looking out. She saw turquoise water, beaches so white that they dazzled her, a spacious palace flanked by a desert of snowy sand. “Is there an American embassy here?”

  Patrick answered her questions in reverse order. “I’m afraid not, goddess. As for our location, we’re just a short swim from the palace of the sultan of Riz.” She felt his gaze touch her, rather than saw it. “I wouldn’t recommend jumping into the drink and splashing for shore, though, since there are probably at least a hundred sharks circling the ship, waiting for galley scraps.”

  Charlotte shuddered, but her aplomb was the only defense she had left, and she wasn’t about to abandon it. “I don’t splash when I swim, Mr. Trevarren,” she said. “I have an excellent stroke.”

  He stood beside her at the porthole, gave her a sidelong glance and an irritating grin. “All the more fun for the sharks. They probably like it when their breakfast puts up a fight.”

  Charlotte’s stomach growled right then, at that very inauspicious moment. She couldn’t help it; she needed a big meal in the morning, the sooner after she woke up, the better.

  “I want to go home,” she said, and suddenly her eyes were brimming with tears.

  To her surprise, Patrick behaved like his fantasy self and touched her cheek lightly with the fingers of his right hand. “You will,” he said hoarsely. “I promise you, Charlotte—no one is going to hurt you.”