Almost a Scandal (23 page)

“I’m not sure,” she said candidly. “I fear Mr. Gamage may have some … deficiency in his learning.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to say any more, but suffice it to say, I have some idea of how to help him and will do everything in my power to prepare him for the exam. But even if he only gains the satisfaction of conquering some maths, enough to figure longitude and latitude, then
Audacious
will be a much happier, well-run ship.”

“Careful, Kent,” Col warned casually. “You’ll find yourself mastheaded again for such offhand insults.” He only half meant his warning as a joke, but she had to understand the order of things.

She didn’t. Or if she did, she ignored it. “The insult, Mr. Colyear, would be in not acknowledging that things need to change.”

Her vehemence no longer astounded him. But it did begin to wound him. Because his own passion seemed tepid in comparison. It seemed ambitious instead of loyal, and calculated instead of devoted.

Yet, however vehement, or well meant, her lack of tact was going to get her in trouble. Although
more
trouble was a more accurate description.

The other officers, especially Mr. Charlton, who did not care for such careless, impetuous talk, and Mr. Horner, who had only a few hours of sleep before he was to go on watch through the dog watches, sought their berths. One by one, the screen doors to the gunroom cuddies shut. One by one, the other inhabitants disappeared, until he and Sally Kent were finally entirely and completely alone.

Chapter Fourteen

“Well, Kent.”

“Well, Mr. Colyear.” She looked wary and careful, keeping the breadth of the table between them, yet all her chariness couldn’t obliterate the lovely, warm flush of her skin. The days in the sun and wind and weather had put roses into her cheeks beneath the freckles, despite the purpling of the rakish bruise high on her cheekbone.

“Are you going to tell me how you got that?” If it had been Gamage he was going to seize the bastard up on a grating and thrash the life out of him with his own hands, and be damned to the consequences.

She tipped her head to the side and brewed up a small bit of the mischievous Kent smile. “Juggling. Wine bottles. Most ill-advised.”

He had expected so different an answer that the truth left him bemused. And ill-advisedly intrigued. “I didn’t know you juggled.”

“Judging from the tenderness of my face, I don’t.”

He chuckled at her joke, and she smiled back. But only for a moment, before she looked over at the only two cabin doors that remained open, and faltered, the laughter in her gray eyes fading back into solemnness.

She retreated into the safety of formality. “Are you not going to retire, sir? You’ve been on deck today longer than anyone, even the captain. You look tired.”

He was tired. But the walls that separated the cuddies were nothing but canvas spread over battens. If the fellow next door had a lantern, so he might see to wash, or keep a journal, or read, it shone through the light-colored cloth and cast a shadow of their movements.

To see
her
shadow, to know that nothing but canvas would separate them, to imagine that if he listened very closely, he might hear the cadence of her breathing in sleep, would be nothing less than torture.

He already had an unreasonable fascination for her—there was no need to feed it. He would sleep in the bloody chair if need be.

“I was about to say the same of you, Kent.” His voice sounded hoarse to his own ears. Making oneself heard over the guns did that to a man, not the strain of talking to intriguing young women disguised as acting lieutenants. “You look like you’ve been holystoned.”

Her hand rose to touch her cheekbone. “Do I look very bad?”

Her question was devoid of vanity. It held only self-deprecation and astonishment, as if she hadn’t thought about it before. “No. You look fine. Like a sailor. Though perhaps more like a prize fighter, fresh from a good milling.”

“That’s the stuff.” The laughing mischief danced back into her eyes. “Perhaps I should keep up the juggling so I’ll continue to look the part. It will make a nice change from not bathing.”

Damn his eyes. Damn him. Because even if he closed his eyes to the sight of her, he could still vividly imagine the dark shape of her body silhouetted against the backlit canvas wall of his cabin, an erotic shadow, like a mural of an odalisque brought to life. A flesh-and-blood woman, instead of the grime-coated boy she was trying so hard to be.

His mouth ran so dry, all the brandy on board wouldn’t be enough to wet it. He opened his eyes and tried to speak normally. “Kent, I should warn you, the screen walls are thin, and light comes through. So when you…”—he had to swallow around the word—“wash yourself, you’ll want to take care with your lamps. Do you understand?”

“Oh.” Her brow pleated up in puzzlement. “Does that mean I oughtn’t? Pinky left a ewer of warm water, and I was hoping to finally—”

“No.” Damn him for a dog. Clearly her brain didn’t function like his. “You just need to be careful. Unless you want Mr. Horner to discover”—he glanced around the empty cabin, but still lowered his voice—“certain things, and to be eaten up with lust and longing, and as hard as a belaying pin, then you had best either make sure he is not in his cabin, or extinguish the lantern before you wash yourself.”

“Oh.” She drew back, belated understanding steeling her spine. “I understand. But does that mean y—” She stopped, and said no more, but she couldn’t stop her eyes from shying down his frame, or keep her face from flaming with a heat that swept downward over her neck like a trail of fire.

But he knew exactly what she had not asked. The hectic heat in his own face was burning away all traces of his pride. Why should he not tell her? She needed to know. To understand. If not for her own sanity, then for his. “Yes, Kent,” he informed her quietly. “That is
exactly
what I mean.”

Her answer was the barest shred of a whisper. “Eaten up with lust and longing?”

Within her voice, he found a cobweb of hope. “Yes.” He kept his eyes on hers, steady and even as his voice. “Consumed.”

When she finally spoke, her voice was as small and tight as if she had forgotten to keep breathing. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.”

Her eyes were wide and dark with something other than fright. Something altogether more promising. “I won’t light it if you don’t want me to.”

“You will need the light sometimes. We all do. Just make sure Horner is still on deck.”

She nodded, and then brought her head up to look directly at him. “But not you?”

Col held himself very, very still, and willed himself not to react. Not to move. Not to leap across the space that divided them and take her and open her mouth beneath his. Not to so much as move a single muscle. “That, Kent, is entirely up to you.”

Her mouth fell open slowly, so slowly and softly he was drawn to it, like a future addict to the first taste of opium. He could do nothing to stifle the instinctive urge to touch the plush fruit of her lips.

It wasn’t smart, and it wasn’t prudent, and he could lose his commission for misconduct at the very least, if any of the men in the cabins that lined the gunroom walls chose to look out of their doors. But he had known all along that some time he would give in to the craving, to the need to feel her skin beneath his hands. It might as well be now.

His fingers landed lightly along the line of her jaw, even as his thumb brushed the very edge of her bottom lip. Oh, but she was soft and smooth, and altogether alive in a way he had not anticipated. Nothing about this startling girl was what he had anticipated.

Because instead of standing, or telling him he oughtn’t, or doing any of the hundred things
she
ought, she stilled, like a wild animal tamed to hand, and simply let him touch her.

Her lip was full, and ripened by wind, and the same rosy pink as the inside of a seashell. He could feel the warm exhalation of her breath on his skin, and it was everything he could do not to lean forward and press himself to her. His hand slid around to cup the back of her neck, to span the slender strength, and explore the soft silk of her hair where the bright tresses whorled upward into her queue. Along the side of her neck a dark freckle beckoned, like a bright copper penny found by chance. It seemed decidedly intimate, his knowledge of that place on her body.

As intimate as touching her face. He skated around the edge of the bruise, tracing the line of unblemished skin, where the rainbow of subdued colors faded into the speckled beauty of her cheek, down along the line of her jaw to the underside of her chin, where he longed to place his lips and taste the ginger spice of her skin.

She turned her face into his hand, almost as if she were blindly seeking the comfort of his touch. He could hear her breathing, shallow and light, and feel the warming of the air between them as he leaned closer to her face. “Kent.” He wanted her to look at him, to understand what they were doing. How irrevocable a step they would take if—

He let the rest of the thought die, and brought away his hand. And scraped his chair back. There could be no
ifs
. “Kent.”

She came back to herself with the same swift decision she did all things. She stood immediately and stepped away. “My apologies, Mr. Colyear.”

“No apologies, Kent.”

“Perhaps I should go back to the cockpit, sir.”

“Nobody goes
back
to the cockpit, Kent.” He tossed his head at Rudge’s door. It was all the movement in her direction that he would allow himself. “Go to your cabin. You’re safe enough here, and certainly safer than you would be if you stayed in the cockpit. Lock your door. Take care of that burn on your leg. And get some sleep.”

God knew he wouldn’t. And with that he rose and took himself on deck, where the wind and the night could hide his longing. Perhaps, if there were a merciful God, it would rain.

*   *   *

Sally shut the door and held on to the knob until she could hear the measured pace of Mr. Colyear’s footfalls retreat upward to the deck. Only then did she allow herself to breathe, and to collapse slowly down the back of the door. Her legs weren’t fit to hold her. Nothing felt fit.

She was as limp and ragged as if she had been hung up in the rigging to dry.

Oh, Col. Col, Col, Col.

She had felt the heavy warmth of his hand all the way from the tight muscles of her shoulder, down to the backs of her knees. An entirely new world of sensation had arisen under the weight of his fingers. She could feel a hundred pinpricks of sensation she had never felt before. Everything was new.

The callus on the inside of his index finger as he casually stroked the newly sensitive skin along the side of her neck. The size of his hand as it spanned the back of her neck. The architecture of her own bones as he moved her to his will. Heat arose from the spot where his finger had alit and washed over her skin, leaving her flushed and flustered.

His long, strong fingers had caressed the back of her neck just as they had caressed the deckhead that very first day. Heat, and something more, something more potent, blossomed under her skin, leaving her breathless and nearly dizzy.

It wouldn’t do. Sally tipped her head back and banged it against the door. Hard. So she could knock some sense into her thick skull. So the pain echoing through her head might make her remember who she was, and what she had come aboard to do. The first privacy she’d had in weeks and all she could do was sigh over Mr. Colyear like a moonstruck calf. As if she’d forgotten she was a Kent and not some stupid, swooning girl.

In the corner, a small stand containing a basin and pitcher of warm water had been set up. In her efforts to hide her identity in the cockpit, her ablutions had been minimal and hurried, had never included more than her face, neck, and hands, and had been conducted under the cover of either darkness or a blanket—a soapy swipe under her arms to combat the worst of her dirt. She had not seen her own body in weeks.

Nor had she seen her face. There was a small mirror hanging from the wall—Mr. Rudge’s shaving mirror. It must have been inadvertently forgotten in the rush to remove his dunnage to the Spanish prize ship.

The face that filled the small oval was one she hardly recognized, so completely and methodically had she transformed herself into Richard. She hardly knew herself.

She had, once or twice in her life, been referred to as a handsome girl, but she had never been accused of being beautiful. She looked too like her brothers to be considered feminine, with her father’s flaming red hair flying like a banner at a masthead, and her gray eyes too sharp and probing to ever be considered warm.

Certainly, she was nothing in looks to Mr. Colyear, who was everything handsome and masculine rolled into one. He was a paragon—as tall and dark and forbidding as any hero of fiction.

While she looked an absolute fright. Sally hung the small lantern on the peg beside the mirror and took a good, hard look. And to think she had thought herself cleaned up enough for the captain’s cabin when she had run her fingers through her windblown hair and washed the sulfurous stink of gunpowder off her face. But it was still there, the rime of grime, ringing her face like a high tide mark.

But Mr. Colyear had not seemed to mind. He had touched her anyway and told her she looked just fine. Clearly it had been a merciful lie.

The bruise around her eye made her look like a bailiff’s mongrel dog. What could he have been thinking when he touched her face like that?

Sally laid her own finger across her lip to try and understand, to test if she could make the shivery feeling come back. But it wasn’t the same. Nothing was the same. When he touched her everything changed.

She had thought that by coming aboard, by becoming Richard, she had finally slipped the leash of ladylike expectations. But when Col had touched her, she felt suddenly feminine beneath the surface of her skin. Under the obscuring cover of her clothes, she became aware of her physicality in an entirely different way than she had while reveling in the athletic glory of climbing the shrouds.