No Choice but Seduction (32 page)

The thought immediately brought back her original fear. “The ship wouldn’t have crashed, would it?” she asked anxiously. “With no one at the wheel and no one else on deck to even notice if it was going to run aground?”

He smiled at her. “No, I was due to be relieved within the hour last night. And she was set on a straight course away from land.”

“Then they’ve been looking for us since the middle of the night?”

“Possibly. Langtry, who was to relieve me, might have thought I left the deck mere minutes before he arrived, though, in which case, as I said, they won’t have found us missing until this morning. Or they could have turned around last night. Either way, it won’t be long. Tyrus knows these waters well. He won’t rest until he’s retraced the ship’s course to find us.”

“Unless he thinks we’ve drowned,” she predicted, her thoughts still frazzled.

“He’ll have his spyglass trained on the water as well.”

“He gave his spyglass to me.”

Boyd was trying
not
to grin again, she was sure, when he replied lightly, “You don’t really think that was his only spyglass, do you, or that there aren’t a good dozen on the ship?”

She could tell he was just humoring her now. It didn’t annoy her. It actually had the opposite effect since it pointed out that she was probably being silly in her fears. They hadn’t drowned. He’d gotten them on land. They’d be back on the ship before dark. Nothing to worry about.

She sat down in the sand again. She tried to be demure about it, but that was rather hard to do in a nightgown. He joined her, sitting cross-legged next to her. His feet were as bare as hers, though she noticed his shoes drying out in the sun nearby. At least he still had them, though that must have been hard, swimming with shoes on…

“By the way,” he said offhandedly and with a slight grin. “Are you married today—or not?”

Chapter Thirty-Four

A
RE YOU MARRIED TODAY, OR NOT
?

Katey didn’t answer Boyd immediately and kept her eyes trained on the gentle waves rolling in toward the shore. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to answer at all. He made the question sound like a joke, and that’s probably how he was seeing it now. Which was her fault. She should have just stuck to her guns.

He’d believed her lie about being married that afternoon in the captain’s cabin, after they kissed. It even looked as if he were going to avoid her again, because of it, when he missed dinner with her that evening.

Perversely, the very next time she saw him, she confessed, yet again, that she wasn’t really married. A big mistake, that, especially when she ended up changing her tune once more before they left Cartagena. The man could disturb her too much at times. He’d claimed
he
couldn’t think clearly in her presence? She seemed to be having the same problem these days!

“Let me rephrase that,” he said during the long silence. “Why haven’t you married? You’re certainly old enough. In fact, before long you’ll be an old maid.”

She glanced at him, just in time to see him pour sand from his fist on top of her hand, which was already half-buried in the sand, since she was leaning on it. His silly remark, and the sand, set an irresistibly friendly mood.

“An old maid, eh?”

“Absolutely. In this bright light, I can already see a few wrinkles.” She laughed. He grinned. But then he added, “So why haven’t you?”

She shrugged. “I nearly did. Before I left home, I was desperate to have something new happen in my life. And I was asked by every bachelor in Gardener, all three of them. Two were old enough to be my father. The third could have been my grandfather he was so elderly. You can see why I declined.”

“I can’t believe you only had offers from old men.”

“Believe it. Gardener was a dying village. All the young people had moved on.”

“Your parents gave you no other options? Surely they didn’t expect you to find a husband amid such limited prospects?”

“My father died long ago. My mother often talked about an extended trip to one of the big cities along the coast, maybe even New York, but we never got around to it, and then she died, too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” Katey replied tonelessly, glancing back at the incoming waves.

He dribbled two more fistfuls of sand on her hand before his next question, as if he’d had to work up the nerve to ask it. “So you do plan to marry someday?”

“Yes, maybe even before my trip is over. It would be exciting to marry a Persian prince, don’t you think? If I’m lucky enough to meet one, that is. Or maybe I’ll end up in a harem. I’ve heard of such exotic things, and my marriage will have to be extraordinary, at least very exciting. I won’t settle for less than that since my life before this trip has been nothing but boring.”

“A harem?” he choked out. “You’re joking, right?”

She peeked at him with a grin. He did really look horrified. She felt like patting herself on the back. She hadn’t lost her touch.

“Of course I am.”

He poured more sand on top of her hand before he said, “You wouldn’t find having an affair with a shipowner exciting?”

The image came too swiftly to her mind, of the two of them lying in a bed, limbs entwined, passionately kissing. She blinked it away. At least he hadn’t said marriage, which is what she’d thought he might be leading up to. She didn’t want to sit here all day feeling angry at him for hounding her about something that wasn’t going to happen. The present mood was too cordial. She didn’t want it to end abruptly.

So she continued in the same teasing tone, “I suppose it could be under the right circumstances, like during a terrible storm at sea where the ship might sink, or—well, you get the idea.”

“I’ll try and drum up a storm for you,” he said.

She laughed, delighted with him for playing along. Life was too short for the seriousness that he usually brought to the table.

Of course, his high passion, which he’d mentioned more than once in regard to her, no doubt accounted for some of that seriousness. But she could hardly blame the man for being overly attracted to her when she’d been having the same problem since she’d first met him. She might wish he could control it a little better, but it was nothing to hang him over.

Suggesting marriage, though, just to solve his problem, was preposterous.
That
was worth hanging him for. The very idea! No romance involved, not the least bit of courting on his part. Good grief, they’d only shared one kiss together, and that was
after
he’d proposed!—those kisses she’d fantasized about didn’t count.

But she tried to continue in the same light vein, and staring down the beach with nothing in her view but lush foliage, she said, “When you order up that storm, how about ordering a carriage, too. Or do you think we’re close enough to a town to walk to one?”

“You don’t seem to have much confidence in Tyrus,” he admonished.

“It was just a thought. But we are somewhere along the Spanish coast, aren’t we?”

He shook his head. “Not unless I got seriously turned around in the water. This should be one of the Balearic Islands. I had just sailed past them last night right before you appeared on deck, so I knew which direction to swim in. They aren’t all populated. It looks like this is one that isn’t, though I could be wrong. Most islands, even well-populated ones, can still have long stretches of empty shoreline.”

He leaned to the side to feed a few more twigs to his little fire, and to turn the fish over on its spit. Not seeing anything else lying around other than a pile of dry twigs next to the fire, his shoes drying in the sun, and his jacket tossed over a nearby bush to dry as well, she wondered how he’d obtained a fish for their lunch.

“How did you catch that?”

He chuckled. “I’m not going to pretend I’m an excellent fisherman. It got trapped in that little pool over there when the tide went back out. I found it flopping about in the puddle that was left.”

She saw the indent in the shore he was talking about. There wasn’t much sand there. Dirt and trees had encroached too close to the water, and dirt wasn’t as malleable as sand, so the hole was being further eroded by the tides, rather than filling back in. It was a nice-size fish, probably enough for lunch and dinner. At least they weren’t going to starve while waiting to be found.

“And the fire?” she asked curiously.

He grinned and pulled a small glass lens out of his pocket to show her. “I’ve been carrying this around with me for years now, ever since I watched someone break a spyglass open to hold the lens toward the sun to get a fire started. I found this much smaller version, small enough to barely notice it in my pocket. I figured it might come in handy someday, though, ironically, I almost tossed it away this year, since I never did end up needing to use it and I frequently misplaced it, as small as it is. It’s a good thing I didn’t. I don’t think you would have liked raw fish. Hungry?”

“Not yet.” She smiled. “I rarely am when I first wake up, and I did just wake up.”

Instead of smiling, she thought he actually winced slightly. Odd. Or was she mistaken? But the sun was getting up pretty high. It could even be close to noon already, and she never slept this late.

Come to think of it, how could he possibly have gotten her to shore without her waking? Water would have been splashing in her face, his arm would have been uncomfortably tight around her, pulling her along. Normal sleep couldn’t have survived that much activity. Either she’d drunk more than she remembered last night or hitting the water had indeed knocked her unconscious. She supposed she was lucky to have finally woken up at all.

She realized suddenly that he’d risked his life to save her. He wouldn’t have been able to keep them both afloat for long if he hadn’t found land. And she would have sunk to the bottom, without even knowing she was about to die if he hadn’t jumped in after her. She owed him…

“What?”

She blushed. She’d probably looked quite amazed there for a moment, enough for him to notice.

“Nothing,” she said, glancing down in her lap, then, “Do you see rain on the horizon?”

Oh, God, she didn’t really just give him such a blatant invitation, did she? But maybe he wouldn’t relate her question to his remark about drumming up a storm for her so they could have an affair. And a peek back at him showed he didn’t even look at the sky for storm clouds. There was no need. There hadn’t been a single cloud of any sort in that blue sky and they both knew it.

His eyes did widen, though. He understood perfectly. And now would be the time to tell him she’d been teasing, whether she had been or not. Quickly, before it was too late. But no words came out as she stared at him. Sun sparkled in his golden curls. That intensely sensual look entered his eyes.

He dove at her. She shrieked with laughter as she fell back in the sand, because she’d caught his playful smile. But now his smile was gone as he settled carefully on top of her. So was her laughter. And she was staring up at a man who wanted her so much, he’d made a fool of himself a number of times because of it. God, she could say the same thing about herself. And she was so tired of fighting it…