by Louise Allen
‘Right.’ She nodded firmly. Concentrate. She had to keep up this deception, please this man so she kept his protection—and watch like a hawk for a chance of escape.
‘Are you hungry? No? Well, I am. Come along.’ She followed him out, resisting the urge to hang on to his coat tails. As a child she’d had the run of her father’s ships in port, sliding down companionways, hanging out of portholes, even climbing the rigging. This ship was not any different, she realised, as they made their way towards the smell of boiling meat, except that the crew were not well-disciplined employees, but dangerous, feral scum.
They located the galley mid-ship, the great boiler sitting on its platform of bricks, the cook looming out of the savoury steam, ladle in hand, meat cleaver stuck in his straining belt like a cutlass. ‘You want any vittles, you’ll wait to the morning.’
‘I am Mr Stanier, navigator, and you will find food for my servant and me. Now.’
The man stared back, then nodded. ‘Aye, sir.’
‘And as we’re in port, I assume you’ll have had fresh provisions loaded. I’ll have meat, bread, butter, cheese, fruit, ale. What’s your name?’
‘Street, sir.’
‘Then get a move on, Street.’ He looked at Clemence. ‘Wake up, boy. Find a tray, platters. Look lively.’
Clemence staggered back to the cabin under the weight of a tray laden with enough food, in her opinion, for six, and dumped it on to the table that ran down the centre of their cabin. Stanier stood, stooping to look out of the porthole, while she set out the food and his platter, poured ale and then went to perch on the edge of the smaller bunk bed, built to follow the curve of the ship’s side.
What was he staring at? She tried to retrieve some sense of direction and decided he was looking out at the wreckage of old Port Royal, although what there was to see there on a moonless night—
‘Why aren’t you eating?’ He had turned and was frowning at her.
‘I ate before…before I left.’
‘Well, eat more, you are skin and bones.’ She opened her mouth. ‘That’s an order. Get over here, sit down and eat.’
‘This isn’t the navy,’ Clemence said, then bit her lip and did as she was told.
‘No, that is true enough.’ Stanier grinned, the first sign of any real amusement she had seen from him. It was not, now she came to think about it, a very warm smile. It exposed a set of excellent teeth and crinkled the skin at the corners of his eyes attractively enough, but the blue eyes were watchful. ‘What’s happened to sir?’
‘Sorry, sir.’ She slid on to the three-legged stool and tried to recall how her young male friends had behaved at table. Like a flock of gannets, mostly. ‘I haven’t got a knife, sir. Sorry.’
‘Have you got a handkerchief?’ Stanier enquired, then did smile, quite genuinely, when Clemence shook her head in puzzlement. With an effort she kept her mouth closed. When he smiled, he looked…She hauled some air down into her lungs and tried not to gawp like a complete looby. Thankfully he had his back to her, rummaging in one of the canvas kit bags piled in the corner of the cabin. He turned back, holding out a clasp knife and a spotted handkerchief. ‘There.’
‘Thank you.’ She tucked the handkerchief in the neck of her shirt as a bib and unfolded the knife, trying not to imagine sitting next to him at a dinner party, both of them in evening dress, flirting a little. And then walking out on to the terrace and perhaps flirting a little more…Which was ridiculous. She never flirted, she had never wanted to.
‘You should carry that knife all the time. Can you use it?’ Stanier speared a thick slice of boiled mutton, laid it on a slab of bread and attacked it with concentration.
‘On a man? Er…no.’ Clemence thought about Lewis. ‘But I probably could if I was frightened enough.’
‘Good,’ he said, swallowing and reaching for his ale. ‘Go on, eat.’
‘I thought I’d wait for you, sir. You’re hungry.’ He was eating like a man half-starved.
‘I am. First food for forty-eight hours.’ Stanier cut a wedge of cheese and pushed the rest towards her.
‘Why, sir?’ Clemence cut some and discovered that she could find a corner still to fill.
‘Pockets to let,’ he said frankly. ‘If this hadn’t come along, I’d have been forced to do an honest day’s work.’
‘Well, this certainly isn’t one,’ Clemence snapped before she could think.
‘Indeed?’ In the swaying lantern light the blue eyes were watchful over the rim of the horn beaker. ‘You’re very judgmental, young Clem.’
‘Pirates killed my father, took his ship.’ She ducked her head, tried to sound young and sullen. It wasn’t hard.
‘I see. And you ended up with Uncle who knocked you around, eh?’ He leaned across the table and put his fingers under her chin, tilting her face up so he could see the bruises. ‘Heard the expression about frying pans and fires, Clem?’
‘Yessir.’ She resisted the impulse to lean her aching face into his warm, calloused hand. It was only that she was tired and frightened and anxious and wanted someone to hold her, tell her it was all going to be all right. But of course it wasn’t going to be all right and this man was not the one to turn to for comfort, either. Something stirred inside her, the faint hope that there might be someone, somewhere, she could trust one day. She was getting tired—beyond tired—and maudlin. All she could rely on was herself.
Stanier seemed to have stopped eating, at last.
‘I’ll take these plates back.’
‘No, you won’t. You’re not wandering about this ship at night until you know your way around.’ He took the tray from her. ‘Look in that bag there, you’ll find sheets.’
It was a fussy pirate who carried his clean linen with him, Clemence thought, stumbling sleepily across to open the bag. But sure enough, clean sheets there were, even if they were threadbare and darned. She covered the lumpy paliasses, flapped another sheet over the top, rolled up blankets for pillows and then shut herself into the odorous little cubicle. If she did nothing else tomorrow, she was going to find a scrubbing brush and attack this.
But privacy, even smelly privacy, would perhaps save her. She couldn’t imagine how she would have survived otherwise in a ship full of men. Clemence managed to wedge open the porthole to let in the smell of the sea, then emerged. Water and washing would have to wait; all she wanted now was sleep and to wake up to find this had all been an unpleasant dream.
Could she get into bed, or would Stanier want her to do anything else? She was dithering when he came back in. ‘I am not, thank God,’ he remarked, ‘expected to stand watch tonight. Bed, young Clem.’ He regarded Clemence critically. ‘No soap, no toothbrush, no clean linen, either. I’ll have to see what we can find you in the morning. I don’t imagine going to bed unwashed and in his shirt ever troubled a boy, though.’
‘No, sir.’ Clemence thought longingly of her deep tub, of Castile soap and frangipani flowers floating in the cool water. Of a clean bed and deep pillows and smiling, soft-footed servants holding out a drifting nightgown of snowy lawn.
Stanier sat down on the edge of his bunk and shed his coat, then his waistcoat and began to unbutton his shirt. The air seemed to vanish from her lungs. He was going to strip off here and now and…He stood up and she bent to pull off her shoes as though someone had tugged a string.
She risked a peek up through her fringe. He was still standing there, she could see his feet. There wasn’t anything else she could take off while he was there…Belt. Yes, she could unbuckle that. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him heeling off his shoes. One foot vanished, he must have put it on the bunk to roll down his stocking. Yes. A bare foot appeared, the other vanished.
‘What are you doing, boy?’
‘Buckle’s tight,’ she mumbled.
‘Need any help?’
‘No!’ It came out as a strangled squawk. Thank goodness, he was going into the privy cupboard. As the door closed Clemence hauled off her trousers a
nd dived under the sheet, yanking it up over her nose.
The door creaked. He was coming out. Clemence pulled the sheet up higher and pretended to be asleep. Drawn by some demon of curiosity, she opened her eyes a fraction and looked through her lashes. Stanier was stark naked, his breeches grasped in one hand. She bit her tongue as she stifled a gasp. He tossed the clothes on to a chair, then stood, running one hand through his hair, apparently deep in thought.
She should close her eyes, she knew that, but still she stared into the shifting shadows, mesmerised. Long legs, defined muscles, slim hips, flat stomach bisected by the arrow of hair running down from his chest. Clemence’s eyes followed it, down to the impressively unequivocal evidence that she was sharing a cabin with a man. She had known that, she told herself. Of course she had. It was just seeing him like this, so close, so male, made it very difficult to breathe.
It was not as though she was ignorant, either. She had swum with her childhood playmates in the pools below the waterfalls, but this was no pre-pubescent boy. In a slave-owning society you saw naked adults, too, but you averted your eyes from the humiliating treatment of another human being. She shouldn’t be staring now, but Stanier seemed so comfortable with his own body, so relaxed in his nudity, that she doubted he would dive for his breeches if he realised she was awake. Only, he did not know she was a woman, of course.
‘Asleep, boy?’ he asked softly.
Clemence screwed her eyes shut, mumbled and turned over, hunching her shoulders. Behind, she heard his amused chuckle. ‘You’d better not snore.’
Nathan eyed the bunk. The lad had made it up tidily enough, but sleep did not beckon. In fact, he felt uncomfortably awake, which was a damnable nuisance, given that he was going to need to be alert and on his guard at daybreak to take Sea Scorpion out of harbour and on to whatever course McTiernan wanted. Knowing the man’s reputation, he would set something tricky, as a test.
He found the thick notebook in his old leather satchel and climbed into bed with it. From the opposite bunk came the sound of soft breathing. And what the hell was he doing, acquiring someone else to take care of when he had his own skin to worry about?
Nathan set himself to study the notes he had made on the area a hundred miles around Jamaica. He had not been bragging when he had told McTiernan that he was the best navigator in these waters: he probably was. In theory.
He did not underestimate his own strengths, his depth of knowledge, his experience in most of the great oceans of the world. The problem was, the Caribbean was not one of them and he knew that two months spent weaving through their treacherous waters making endless notes was not enough. Not nearly enough. At which point he became aware of the nagging heaviness in his groin and finally realised just why he was so restless.
What the hell was that about? And why? He had more than enough on his mind to drive any thought of women from it, and in any case, he’d hardly seen a female all evening, so there should be no inconvenient image in the back of his mind to surface and tease him.
The flash of dark eyes and black hair, the remembered lush curves of his late wife, presented themselves irresistibly to his mind. Nathan shifted impatiently. He thought he had learned not to think about Julietta; besides, lust was no longer the emotion those thoughts brought with them.
The recollection of Clem’s slim, ink-stained fingers gripping his thigh rose up to replace that of Julietta’s hands caressing down his body. Nathan shifted abruptly in the bed in reflexive rejection. For God’s sake! He was as bad as this crew, if that was the cause of his discomfort.
From across the cabin came an odd sound—Clem was grinding his teeth in his sleep. Nathan grinned, contemplating hefting a shoe at the sleeping boy. No, he could acquit himself of that particular inclination—it must simply be an odd reaction to finding himself in the most dangerous situation in all his thirty years. The thought of straightforward danger was somehow soothing. Nathan put the book under his pillow, extinguished the lantern and fell asleep.
Chapter Three
‘Wake up!’
Clemence blinked into the gloom of the cabin, momentarily confused. Where…? Memory came back like a blow and she scrabbled at the sheet twisted around her legs. It was, thankfully, still covering her from the waist down and her shirt shrouded the rest of her.
Stanier was tucking his shirt into his breeches. She felt the colour flood up into her face at the memory of last night, then found herself watching as his bare chest vanished as he did up the buttons, long brown fingers dextrous despite his speed. As if she was not in enough trouble without finding herself physically drawn to the man! She had never felt that before, but then she had never been rescued by a tough, attractive man before either, which probably accounted for it. Whatever the explanation, it was not a comfortable sensation. Surprising areas of her insides seemed to be involved in the reaction.
‘Come on, look lively!’ So, now she had to get out of bed, find her breeches and get into the cubby hole, all under Stanier’s, admittedly uninterested, gaze. She tugged at the shirt, which came to just above her knees, slid out from under the sheet, scooped up her trousers and edged round the table.
‘You are far too thin.’
She whisked into the cupboard and shut the door. Enough light came through the porthole to see the bucket, but of course, there was still no water to wash in. ‘Things were difficult since my father died,’ she said through the thin panels, fumbling with the fastenings on her trousers and tightening her belt. Thinking about her father, she felt reality hit her. Pirates had taken Raven Duchess, killing her father as surely as if they had knifed him, and now here she was, not only in their hands, but feeling grateful to a man who was as good as one himself. She’d had some excuse last night, she had hardly been herself. Now, after a night’s sleep, she should face reality.
He was a pirate. She had seen him accept the position with her own eyes, heard him state his terms to McTiernan. So he was just as bad as the rest of the crew and deserved a fate as severe as theirs should be. Clemence opened the door and stepped out, jaw set.
‘I’m sorry about your father.’ Stanier was coatless, a long jerkin, not unlike her own waistcoat, pulled on over his shirt. ‘Do you know which ship it was that attacked his?’
Clemence shrugged, combing her hair into some sort of order with her fingers. They had never discovered who had been responsible. The one survivor, found clinging to a spar, was too far gone to communicate, even if his tongue had not been cut out.
Her face felt greasy, she was sticky and sweaty under the linen bindings around her chest and there was grit between her toes. ‘Could have been this one for all I know,’ she said, having no trouble sounding like a sulky boy.
‘I hope not,’ Stanier said.
‘Why should you care? You’re one of them,’ she pointed out, too angry with him and his casual sympathy to be cautious.
‘True.’ She had expected anger in return, even a cuff for her insolence, but he looked merely thoughtful. ‘There are degrees of piracy.’
‘Like degrees of murder?’ Clemence retorted. ‘Anyway, you’ve chosen to sail with the absolute scum of the seas, so that makes it first-degree piracy.’
‘You’re outspoken, lad.’ Stanier came round the table and took her chin in one hand, tipping up her face so he could study it. ‘I wonder you dare.’
‘I don’t care if you are angry. Things can’t get much worse.’
‘Oh, they can, believe me,’ Stanier said softly, tilting her head, his fingers hard on her jawbone. ‘Is that eye paining you much?’
‘Only when someone hits it,’ Clemence said, contemplating struggling, then deciding it was certain to be futile. He was too close, far too close for comfort. She could smell him, his sweat. Not the rank odour of the habitually unwashed crew, but the curiously arousing scent of a man who was usually clean, but was now hot and musky from bed. Goosebumps ran up her spine.
‘Well, if you want to avoid that, you can go and find me some coffee a
nd bread.’ Did he really mean it? Would he hit her if she displeased him? Of course he would, he thought her just a troublesome boy and boys were always getting beaten. ‘Then bring it up on deck. It’ll be dawn soon.’ He picked up a telescope from the bunk and fitted it into a long pocket in his jerkin, then dropped a watch into another. ‘Here, take this and remember what I said about staying out of trouble.’
Clemence caught the clasp knife that was tossed to her, fumbling the catch. Stanier frowned, his gaze sharpening. ‘It’s this eye,’ she said defensively, recalling her playmates’ jibes that she caught like a girl. ‘I can’t see out of it properly.’ Then he was gone and she could hold on to the end of the table, ridiculously shaken.
Toughen up, she told herself fiercely. Think like a boy. Which was easier said than done, given that all her treacherous feminine instincts were telling her quite the opposite whenever Stanier was close. The knife fastened to her belt, she made her way to the galley. Instinctively, she kept her head down, trying to make herself as small and inconspicuous as possible, until she found she was being stared at curiously. Perhaps looking like a victim was not a good idea in the middle of this crew, used to preying on the weak.
Clemence arrived at the galley, head up, shoulders back, practising a swagger. She conjured up Georgy Phillips, the leader of her gang of childhood male friends. He would love this adventure. He was welcome to it.
‘Mr Street? I’ve come for Mr Stanier’s coffee. And something to eat.’ There was bacon frying, she could smell it. ‘Some bacon.’
‘That’s for the captain.’ But the cook said it amiably enough, slopping a black liquid that might have been coffee into a mug.
