When she didn’t flinch or move away, he brushed her cheek with his calloused fingertips. The dampness he encountered went straight to his heart, like a too-blunt knife scraping away rotten wood.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know what you and your family did was meant only to help me.” The silence stretched on so long, Cullen was afraid to move, torn between the need her lemon-lavender scent aroused in him and an intense fear of making a wrong-headed move. A move that might send her galloping off and away from him for good.
He could see her long, white, tapering fingers working at the fastenings at the neck of her nightdress. Instinct from God-knows where made him enclose her hand in his and bring those sensual fingers to his mouth. He suckled them one by one before touching his lips to her forehead and easing her back down onto her pillow.
“No,” she protested, reaching for his arms and trying to push herself back up. “I have to get this over with. I have only…”
Cullen put one finger against her lips. “Shhh, lass. I don’t want to be something like the pox or the plague, that ye have to ‘get over.’” He gently pushed her back down and covered her with the blanket. “Yer not ready to love me,” he whispered. “But that is not yer fault. It’s my job, big dolt that I am, to court ye and convince ye I’m worthy of being yer husband.”
If asked to describe the emotions tearing at her heart, Willa would be unable to summon the words. Her mind and heart seemed to have slammed down a gate between them.
She’d begun the evening determined to seduce her husband and get the inevitable shaming over before the window closed on the few “safe” days she might have this month. Now, she wasn’t sure what she wanted. For the first time in her limited experience, she could begin to see why women became pregnant despite the horrific risks and the best of intentions and precautions.
Cullen’s touches and suckling of her fingertips had shot straight to her quim, bypassing both her heart and mind. After he’d returned to his side of the “wall,” she’d heard some restless thrashing for a few minutes before a silence punctuated by the soft snoring whufflings she’d come to associate with the stubborn Scot’s deep sleep.
A week later, Willa stepped onto the gangplank with Cullen at her side, the crisp morning air turning their breath into puffed clouds. They’d spoken little during a hurried breakfast with Captain Still in his quarters, but now when Cullen took one of her hands in his meaty paw and gave her a shy look, she didn’t pull away.
Her return smile was not forced, in spite of her self-consciousness at the stiff, odd looks they were getting from various members of the Arethusa’s crew sloshing water and scrubbing the decks. The attitude now directed to her as a woman was unsettling, compared to the easy companionship and acceptance she’d enjoyed over the years as a man. The questioning looks in their eyes at every packet of medicinal powders she’d given them, every suggested treatment, was confounding, not to mention unsettling, after years of assumed trust when she was Wills Morton.
As a result of her husband’s seemingly endless patience, and the blanket “wall” he’d erected, Willa had spent many nights in her darkened share of the space listening to his whispered tales of his childhood in the Highlands, and finally relenting to share some of her experiences on the ship at her father’s side in the surgery: the moans of dying men, the horrible screams of men having limbs cut off. She admitted that her father was well loved by all the men of the crew for the speed and efficiency with which he performed amputations. And she’d shared the good things, like the night before she’d gone away with Cullen, when she’d saved the beautiful mare at the stable dying in the throes of a difficult birthing.
Cullen hadn’t returned to her side of the blanket since the fateful night he’d first touched her. The “safe” part of the month had passed, but she lay each night wondering if he would return, listening for the now familiar sounds of a man deep in slumber. The way he’d fall asleep in the middle of an argument was maddening. Whenever she’d marshal a rebuttal to some wrong-headed idea of his about running the surgery, she’d hear soft, whuffing snores from the other side of the blanket.
She’d made arrangements to return to the dressmaker’s shop for additional fittings of the work dresses she’d ordered for the long voyage to come. The ship had been provisioned for the journey of many weeks to St. Helena, in addition to a side trip the captain had just revealed would make the voyage even longer. They were to divert to Gibraltar to deliver two unnamed passengers before continuing back out into the Atlantic to sail south to Napoleon’s remote prison island, more than five thousand miles away.
The long walk to the modiste’s shop brought a warming glow to her cheeks she could feel in the nip of early morning air. She sneaked a secret look at Cullen and was oddly pleased by the fact he seemed to enjoy a brisk pace without slowing to accommodate her. She kept up easily, enjoying the stretch of her legs after so many days of sitting on a stool in the surgery, preparing doses of treatments for the months ahead.
“What machinations and intrigues are going on behind those gray eyes this morning?” Her husband was teasing her again.
She gave him a gentle push against his solid, immoveable frame. “There’s so much to be done yet. I suppose I’m going over the many lists swirling around in my head.”
“You are not alone. You do know that. I’m here.”
She gave him a long look. “I do know, but it’s hard to shake old habits.
