“Blast it, woman, answer me.”
“I don’t take orders. And I’ll do nothing until you allow me to dress that properly.” She glanced at the drawing- knife. “Did you cut it on that old thing? It could fester in an instant. You will lose your hand.” His hand that even now wished to trace the slope of her cheek lit by the sun, to explore again the body that had been his to touch in the dark.
He returned to his work. “Then I shall have a hook installed in its place to frighten off pestering females.”
She set her fists on her sweet hips, the breeze catching up her tresses and fluttering them about her face and shoulders.
“You’re in a wretched mood.” She chuckled. “Didn’t you sleep?”
“Your snoring wakened me.” He sounded waspish. Not his finest self by far, but she brought out the worst in him. And the lust-driven Bedlamite. Her eyes bespoke tangled bedclothes and limbs, and her lips… Jin’s vision fogged again imagining those lips wrapped around his-
“I don’t snore.”
“You do,” he snapped, unraveled. “What? Has no other man ever mustered the courage to tell Violet
“No other man has ever been present while I’m sleeping.”
He halted. “I don’t believe it.”
“Cur.”
“Ever?”
Her nostrils flared.
Jin’s pulse skittered, cold and metallic like the panic he’d felt the night before when for a moment he believed he had taken her maidenhead. He tamped it down.
“Of course not.” He forced a derisive laugh. “That would be like a lord allowing his valet to watch him sleep, wouldn’t it? Mustn’t allow the minions to see you vulnerable. Or rather, acolytes.” Or a former slave whose first master had called him an animal because of the violence he’d seen in him-the nature that could not be tamed.
“You are a prize boor,” she grumbled.
He strode up the gangplank, away from her, his head spinning. But the insane desire pressed at him to return to her and tell her the truth-that he had never felt a woman’s touch like hers-that it had never proven difficult to leave a woman’s bed until hers.
She had allowed him to see her sleep.
When he’d awoken before dawn he watched her shallow breathing, her full lips and the tilt of her chin, her lovely features peaceful, soft in slumber. But she was not his to hold, and without taking again that which he wished from her, he had torn himself away.
Now her footsteps followed him.
“You must come with me to the harbormaster’s office. I told him I could be trusted to provide the money in time, but he didn’t believe me. Only your name got his attention. It seems your reputation precedes you. Not a poor reputation in English ports, apparently.”
He pivoted. “Why is it that I once more find myself obliged to remind you that I hold a commission from the Royal Navy?”
She stepped close, nearly as close as that first day when he was a prisoner aboard her ship, nearly as close as the night before. She swept her dark gaze over him.
“I’ll admit it’s difficult to believe. That a man like you would agree so easily to be bound seems improbable.” A question lit her eyes; its meaning seemed more than the words she spoke. Jin’s heart pounded. This could not be. He was not intended for her, not even to satisfy a temporary desire. She was intended for more.
“Do not mistake me, Viola,” he forced across his tongue. “I do only that which serves my interests.”
The grin slipped from her lips.
“Then you’d better accompany me to the harbormaster’s office shortly or you’ll be tossed into jail with the rest of us. That, I’ll wager, would not serve your interests in the least.” She moved across the deck away from him. “But first I will doctor that wound. That is an order, Lieutenant.”
Chest tight, he stared at her disappearing down the companionway. Around him the ship rested peculiarly quiet. Sailors were motionless at their work, watching him.
“Hands at the lines!” he shouted. “Ready to make way.” He swung up the stairs to the helm. At the wheel Mattie met him with a scowl and a shake of his head.
“What’d you say to put her back up, so short on last night and the loss o’ them low-dunnits?”
“Nothing of your concern. Make for those mangroves, fifty yards to portside. We will drop anchor there.”
“Saying something she don’t like? Or
“You are a besotted fool like the rest of them.”
Mattie’s thick brow lowered. “Don’t like to see a lady treated poor.” His gruff tone warned. “And this one, she don’t deserve it.”
Jin fixed his helmsman with a hard stare. “Decide now if you wish to aid or hinder me in this, Matt. But at this late date, if you choose to make trouble for me, take care to wear your knife close when you sleep at night.”
The hulk’s weathered face paled. “Got us fifteen years between us, you and me. You’d never.”
“Watch me.”
Jin descended to the main deck, then to the companionway, black anger boiling beneath his skin. Threats now, to a man he had known since he was a lad. But Mattie knew better than anyone of what Jin was truly capable. Mattie had seen it with his own eyes. Such images did not fade from a man’s memory. Ever. Nor were such acts ever erased from a man’s soul.
The ship rocked in the rough harbor like an old nag in the traces, reluctantly getting under way. Jin passed through the short corridor to the shipmaster’s open cabin door. The chamber was empty, its accoutrements tidy, the bed in which he had taken his pleasure in a woman of aristocratic blood now neatly made. The sextant no longer graced the writing table, in its place a wooden medicine chest, its drawers carefully labeled, with folded squares of cotton beside it.
He took up a bottle of wine from beside the chest, uncorked it, and doused the cravat, then unwrapped the stained linen and flexed his hand. Blood oozed from the wound anew. He closed his fist, and his eyes, and breathed in her scent, all about him now-the scent of spiced roses and damnable woman.
“Afraid it’ll sting?” Like water rippling over a rocky beach, her laughter came from the doorway. Her hat dangled in her hand.
He pressed the cravat to his palm. “Afraid you will swoon at the sight of blood?”
She moved to him. “I’ve been a woman for thirteen years, Seton. I’ve seen more blood than probably even you.”
“Charming.” He worked the alcohol into the slash, the pain nothing to him. “You may wish to curtail some of this delightful frankness when you again reside in your father’s house in Devonshire.”
She hesitated only a moment. “My father’s house now belongs to me and it is in Massachusetts.”
With each pass of the cravat the blood flowed afresh.
“Incompetent man.” She grabbed up a scrap of cotton and trapped his palm between hers, lifting it and pressing down hard. “You’ve been master of your own ship for years and you don’t even know how to treat a wound?”
He did. Perfectly well, of course. He had tended more sailors’ injuries than he cared to count. But he had no desire to stanch this wound yet. Today he wished to bleed.
Brow taut, she took up a vial of root powder and dusted the cotton then replaced it against his palm, her movements deft and competent and her slender fingers strong upon him, as when she had clasped him to her in the moonlight.
“Do you truly care nothing for it? For them?” He watched her face as she concentrated on her task. “Does it not affect you that those who call you sister and daughter still hope for your return? That they yet consider you one of theirs?”
She opened another drawer in the chest and withdrew a small pot corked with wax. “You know nothing of it.”
