Darius interrupted his thoughts. “Enough with the doom and gloom. Let us sit and eat: you two must be famished.”
James nodded though he wasn’t hungry at all. Daniella turned back to the window again.
Taking a key from his pocket, Darius approached him, a question in his blue eyes. “If I unlock you for the meal, do you promise not to throttle her?”
“I’ll do my best,” James offered.
Darius chuckled. “Good enough for me. She does need a good whipping, that one.”
He pressed his lips together at the thought of the pirate doing any such thing to Daniella. Flexing his fingers into fists he resisted the urge to knock the man on his arse. He really wanted to hit something. Or someone.
The next hour passed in a blur of small talk, mundane questions and clipped answers, with the ever-rocking ship creaking beneath their chairs. But James couldn’t absorb a single word of the conversation. He couldn’t get his mind off Daniella’s angry words.
She was well and truly tarnished. Not just by her antics in London, he now saw, but by the life she had been born into; it wasn’t fair.
Of course she would be free to take a lover if she captained her own ship, but would her deckhands let her? Would they all want a turn? His grip tightened on the goblet, red liquid sloshing over the side and onto the table. She had no sense. She knew nothing of men’s minds when they were faced with a beautiful woman. And there weren’t many more beautiful than her. Her red hair shone in the morning light, the loose curls draped over her shoulders and breasts. When she laughed, she did so freely. Darius was making a concerted effort to raise her humour. James wished he could make her laugh like that. She was mischief and light all rolled up in one pretty little scandalous package.
He recalled those moments at the inn, right before Hobson had crashed into the room. He’d wanted nothing more than to kiss her.
He gulped and drained his cup in one long swallow and held it out for Darius to refill.
Now he felt like getting drunk. He had nothing else to do and if he could get drunk enough, maybe he could forget about Daniella being whipped by pirates and Amelia being tumbled in haylofts by stable boys.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Daniella didn’t precisely know why she was so irritable. Forcing so much laughter at Darius’s ridiculous jokes had proved to annoy James but had only served to hurt her stomach and heighten her discontent. She continued to use her woman’s prerogative to behave irrationally and held on to it tightly throughout the day. After supplying the two with copious amounts of wine (probably hoping to loosen lips) Darius led them up onto the foredeck for fresh air and sunshine. They were far enough out in the icy sea that escape would only be through death in the cold waters.
Hobson and Patrick had been above and passed them in the hall, looking hale and hearty, if a little green around the edges. Obviously neither man was used to the ocean and they weren’t handling the transition well.
So now she sat and brooded and cursed beneath her breath. When James took an unlikely interest in the way the ship was maneuvered and the tasks of the individual men, Daniella scowled. Why couldn’t he also be seasick and stay in the cabin? When he removed his shirt to climb into the rigging, she looked away. For a moment. But her gaze kept drifting back to him again and again. The look of unadorned pleasure on his swollen face as he lifted his head to the sea breeze was unexpected.
The day her father had come across the returning servicemen’s ship, James had been seated on the deck with the other wounded soldiers, pale and listless. By the time Captain Germaine realized his mistake in this quarry, they had already engaged and it was too late to change course. The James of today was not so pale and certainly not listless. The scars on his arms and torso glistened in the sun as the muscles beneath the skin flexed and moved the higher he climbed. She was forced to shield the sun from her eyes as she tracked his ascent, holding her breath when he lost his footing for a moment.
“He’s taken to it as though he was born aboard a ship,” Darius remarked. He reclined next to her, uninvited and unsolicited. He draped his body over the bench with an elbow next to her shoulder and his legs crossed at the ankles.
“The man seems to suffer from a tad too much arrogance,” Daniella stated with a nod for emphasis. She wanted to look back to ensure he’d found his footing but that action would betray her.
“And you do not?” he chuckled.
“You don’t know me, Darius. Not anymore. Perhaps not ever.”
“I know your kind. You always desire what you cannot acquire.”
“Poetry? Philosophy? Come to change my mind and alter my heading?”
“The only person who can change your mind, Daniella, is you. You talk to him about choices yet you know as well as I do there are always decisions we can make.”
“Sometimes those decisions are just plain wrong though, are they not?”
“Ah, now you want to discuss the mutiny?” She speared him with a glare. “I don’t need to hear you attempt to justify what you did. You put all of our lives in danger when you betrayed my father and me.”
“I wanted more,” he admitted with a nonchalant shrug. “I saw what your father had and I was sick and tired of taking orders. But after that day I was taught the error of my ways through sound beatings and torture. It was about then, when a man faces certain death,
