Almost a Scandal (26 page)

The group came together at the edge of the beach where the sand gave way to the low escarpment dividing the sea from the scrub and fields beyond. Lieutenants Horner and Lawrence split up their men, took charge of their groups, and disappeared into the scrub beyond the beach.

Kent was close behind him, her teeth shining white in the night. “Ready, Mr. Colyear?”

“Close your mouth.” He said it to cover his own anxiety. But also so he wouldn’t be tempted to kiss her on that same wide, lovely mouth. Instead, he handed her one of his pistols. “Do you know how to use it?”

“Ah, yes.” Her voice was slightly affronted, slow and droll. “I do, sir.”

“Good. Keep it dry.” Thus far, he had not felt any of the telltale trouble navigating the land, but it was early days yet—they had only been ashore scant minutes and had only just cleared the beach. He was not out of danger yet. “We’ll head southeast, across the fields. Stay alert. Keep your weapon covered, but at the ready. We’ll avoid all towns and villages and any persons we can. Stay close. I’m counting on you reading the road signage.”

“Sir?”

“You do speak French, Kent, do you not?”

“Aye, sir. But I don’t know Breton.”

He did not mutter and curse under his breath. He restrained himself. He swore, vilely and at length, only in the comfort and privacy of his brain, where his mistakes didn’t expose him to ridicule.

But such restraint did nothing to ease the taut coil knotting up his gut like a fouled line. He had made a horrible mistake. He never should have picked her to accompany him. He never should have agreed to the captain’s plan in the first place.

He was behind enemy lines, on shore in Napoleon’s France, with his best friend’s nineteen-year-old sister, and any moment, he was going to faint like a little girl.

*   *   *

The flatland vertigo began as they made for a thick line of trees marking the edge of a small coastal river. Under cover of the woods, he thought he could balance himself against the tree trunks to ease the sudden, nasty, shifting sensation. He tried to breathe deeply, but his breath began to come in shallow pants, pushing in and out of his chest like a bilge pump. The night felt warm, and inshore, away from the cooling winds of the open Atlantic, the air was denser, heated by the earth below his feet.

And then, just when he thought he would make it, because his boots were wet again with the water of the stream they were crossing, everything tilted, and he went down hard.

So hard, he knocked the breath from his lungs and lay there, with the water soaking into his coat, until Kent, or at least her gigantic feet, appeared in front of him.

“Mr. Colyear!” She was there, hauling him up by the armpits and dragging him to the bank.

Humiliation soaked him as surely as the water. He was, quite literally, staggered, and until such time as the earth ceased rising and falling like the tide, and lay still beneath him, he could go no further.

Kent squatted down before him, peering into his face. A spate of moonlight illuminated her pale face and made her look like an inquisitive owl, blinking at him with the calm wisdom of the ages. “Mr. Colyear? What is it?”

He couldn’t hide it any longer. “Sick.” He gritted his teeth together. “The land. Makes me sick.”

That dusted her back on her heels. Her eyebrows were flying away with her owl face. “Oh. If that doesn’t beat all.” And she began to help him, unbuttoning his coat and waistcoat as if he were Mr. Worth, a green midshipman and not a goddamn officer of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, and her commanding officer to boot. “Of all the people—”

“Shut. Up. Kent.”

But she was easing his coat off behind him and loosening the black silk stock at his neck. “It will pass. Hopefully. When was the last time you were ashore? In Portsmouth?”

He would have shaken his head, but even that little exertion made the earth tilt precariously to larboard. So he concentrated on the smooth solidity of the rock on which he was propped, and as he pressed his back into it, the swirling eased. Kent sat herself down comfortably at his feet, checking the compass she unearthed from the depths of her pockets. Prepared, reliable Kent.

“We’ll head that way, in a minute or two, when you’re able. We have time to sit while you recover yourself.” Her face tipped up to the sky. “It’s a beautiful night. But not too clear.”

So positive and calm. So full of unshakable optimism.

With her so close, he could smell the warm pungency of her castile soap, and see by the dancing light of the sparse moon the myriad colors that made up her ginger hair.

Such beautiful hair.

“Did you cut it? Your hair?” he managed.

The glance she slanted him was watchful, as if she weren’t sure if he had been made mad by his infirmity, but at the same time she reached back to draw the messy queue through her fingers self-consciously. “Yes. I made the club, then just cut it off with scissors. I was going to burn it in the grate at the inn, in Portsmouth, but I thought it might smell bad, so I just stuffed it in my valise. Which I left there. I wonder what happened to it.” She frowned, turning the corners of her plush mouth down, and pulled the queue over her shoulder to contemplate it. “Why? Does it not look right?”

“No.” His answer was gruff. “Fine.” It was not fine. It was a crime that anything that alive and beautiful, and full of color, had been in any way curtailed.

“Oh. I just wondered. Gamage has Tunney shave him every morning, although Beecham and Dance do it themselves, and I just wondered if I was supposed to be trimming it all the time. I mean regularly.”

There wasn’t much vanity in that, but it bothered him, for not the first time, to think of her living so intimately with other men. Most women only ever saw their own husbands shave themselves, if even that. In the cockpit, and even in the gunroom, she had been in the company of men routinely stripped to their waists. Perhaps even naked in front of her. Every day for weeks.

And what about her?

His curiosity got the best of him. “What did you do? There are no screen walls, no cuddys in the orlop berth. How did you change your clothes or…” He let the question trail away, before the words “wash yourself” came traveling out of his mouth with the same speed that images of her doing that very thing traveled into his brain.

What did she look like in the flesh, with her hair down, and her shirt stripped to the waist, running a warm flannel over her skin? Would the water chill it to gooseflesh, and make her nipples contract into tight buds? What color would they be, her nipples? The range of color suggested by her freckles was nearly infinite—everything from soft apricot to dark chocolate brown. The possibilities were endless. And tempting. Always effortlessly tempting.

The air in his lungs heated by several slow degrees. Goddamn his eyes. And his infernal, imagining brain.

She laughed, a low hum that included him, as if he were in on the joke. “Very carefully. And Pinky helps.”

The hum strangled to stillness in his chest. “What do you mean, Pinky
helps
?”

She had turned away to scan the tree line—as he should have been doing if he weren’t staggered and unable, and also obsessed with her. With this ferociously intelligent girl who was always watching and thinking.

“Oh, somehow he managed to get the hammocks up and down for the watch changes, and I just left—and still do leave—my … things in the hammock, and now my cot, and he finds them. And he leaves clean shirts and smallclothes, and the bands I wear around my chest, in my dunnage. It’s easier now I’ve a door, but I’d gotten used to putting on the clean ones while I was under my blankets in the hammock, before I went to sleep.”

“So Pinky knows? He knows who you really are?”

“Oh, no.” She seemed anxious to keep Pinkerton from any real trouble. “I mean, I suppose he must, though he’s never said so. Never said so much as a word. But even though Richard and I do look alike, Pinky was my father’s steward. He practically had the raising of us, Richard and I, after my mother died. But he’s a good man, Pinky is, and deeply loyal to my father. If he knows, he’s kept it entirely to himself.”

“I see,” Col answered, because there was nothing else for him to say that wouldn’t mortify Kent, cause Pinky trouble, or reheat Col’s overly active imagination. But just as one worry—of carrying the burden of Kent’s identity should something happen to them ashore—was eased, a fresh problem arrived. He had to ask. “You wear bands?”

She nodded, gesticulating about her midsection, as matter-of-fact as if she were discussing the catting of a masthead. “A long, wide strip of linen, under my shirt.”

“You mean, wound all around you?”

“Yes, to keep me … to fit the coat. Richard was a bit … narrower than I.”

“Yes, I see.” God help him, he could see, in his mind’s eye, her pale, freckled body, wrapped in linen. He could imagine her beneath, without the layers of fabric or the obscuring camouflage of waistcoat and coat, being unwrapped. His skin fairly itched with the tormenting prickle of desire under his skin. “Isn’t it hot?”

She shrugged and laughed again, quieter. “Depends upon the weather.” She darted a quick look sideways at him before she looked back out upon the woods, still alert and watchful.

“Are you hot now?” His coat was folded over her knee, but she had remained fully clothed, despite the still, sticky night air.

“Not much. I’m conscious not to ever take my coat off. No matter what.”

“Yes. I see.” He let the moment fade away before he suggested, “You can take it off now. I already know your secret.”

“Yes, I suppose you do.”

She shrugged her way out of the coat, folded it carefully, and set it down beside his. Clad in only the linen of her shirt, her shoulders looked narrow and somehow fragile. Yet she was like a talisman—the compulsion to touch her was so strong.

“Kent.” He wanted her to look at him. To see him and understand. For just a moment, no more. “Sally.”

He had been longing to say it, her name. It had ridden on the back of his tongue for days, straining to get past the barrier of his good sense. His use of her name was like a lightning rod—she was transfixed, and the moon of her face stilled and turned up to him. A bright streamer of her hair fell across her face, and he pushed it back, hooking it behind her ear.

But that gesture, that touch, led him to the soft, vulnerable skin behind her ear. His hand slipped around to cup the nape of her long, slender neck, where her skin was hidden and warm. His fingers slipped below the surface, into the silken water of her hair.

And he knew. That nothing on this whirling earth was going to stop him from kissing her. Nothing.

Chapter Sixteen

Need unraveled within him like parted hemp. His hand tightened, flexing where it cradled her skull, and her hand crept up to cover and mesh her fingers with his.

“Sally,” he said again, because he couldn’t think, and because it seemed the right thing to say. And when her name fell from his lips for the second time, her eyes slid shut and her mouth fell open—a gift he meant to take.

The feel of her lips beneath his was new, and extraordinary, and he was conscious of wanting to go slowly, to savor every touch, every taste. Her lips were as chapped and rough as his, but the moment she opened her mouth beneath his, he fell into the inevitable soft sweetness of her.

She kissed the way she lived, with generosity and bright enthusiasm. And with a sureness that left him breathless and racing to catch up. But when he would have taken her face between his hands and lifted her up to him, and followed the dark, twisty path of his desires, she drew back.

For a long moment she looked as disoriented as he, as if the world had shifted beneath
her
feet, but then purpose flowed back into her face. “Are you better now?”

As if the delirious bliss of kissing her had reset his internal barometer, and he was cured. He wanted to laugh at the sheer glorious absurdity of it all.

“Yes.” And strangely enough he was. The world had slowly stopped its spinning.

And they were in enemy territory, in the dead of night, and they still had a very long way to go. He needed to have other things on his mind than the exquisite torture of kissing Sally Kent. “Yes.” He said it again to convince himself. “Let’s push on.”

She was there instantly, offering her hand to pull him up, and easing his coat back over his shoulders like a seasoned valet. Or a wife.

He was in the process of trying to banish that particularly ludicrous thought, when she took up his hand, lacing her fingers through his to lead him on, and all thought abruptly ceased again. He ought to have been aware of their direction, of where he was stepping, of the countryside beyond, but every last drop of his sense and feeling was concentrated in his hand. In the chapped texture of her skin, rough around the edges from climbing shrouds and hauling on lines. On the fragile strength of her bones as she kept a firm hold of him, guiding him forward, toward Brest.

Improvise,
the captain had told him.
Think on your feet
. How in the hell was he to do that when he couldn’t even
stand
on his feet? He knew what to do, what to think and improvise on the deck of a ship, but here on land, he was not so sure. Here, he was depending on the support of a nineteen-year-old girl.

Col was conscious of her at every moment, walking easily at his side. It seemed a natural enough place for her—she fit. He was a tall man, taller than most, and it seemed as if he had spent half his life stooping to move belowdecks, but here he could walk with her tucked in close beside him. She came up to his chin, but their hands met in perfect accord at just the right length.

She was … comfortable.

The thought made him smile in spite of himself, despite the still-percolating drip of anxiety that made him move cautiously.

What a ludicrous sight they must make, an officer and a boy of His Majesty’s Royal Navy walking hand in hand down a road deep in France.

For once, he didn’t care. From time to time the cool night air would bring him a waft of the scent rising off her body, and his fantasies about the lithe, supple, intriguing body he had never quite seen grew apace, gathering strength like a wave. And under cover of the dark, without anyone to see or censure, he could give in to his impulse, and indulge his senses.