Not Quite Married (18 page)

“I need a pint of strong rum, Mr. Hicks, and quickly.”

He looked at her in disbelief. “Really, my lady, I-I don’t know if .

. .”

“It’s for Miss Trowbridge. She is quite ill and in need of a strong sedative to help her rest. Now, will you get it for me, or shall I find the captain?”

Hicks soon secured a full tankard of potent, uncut rum for her.

She moved carefully back down the passage with it, but just as she opened Jeannie’s door, the ship pitched violently, she was thrown against the doorframe, and she spilled it down the front of her dress. Undaunted, she poured some for the girl and helped her to drink it.

This had been Ella’s remedy for an upset stomach. A liberal dose of whiskey or strong brandy and sweet sleep. Perhaps it would work on Jeannie.

She sat with Jeannie for a while, then felt her way back down the passage to her own cabin. As she made to enter, the door to the next cabin swung open and Aaron Durham stepped out into the passage.

“My lady,” he addressed her and she looked up. “You are a constant surprise. At this hour of the morning, to smell as though you’ve bathed in rum . . .”

A moment later she was safely inside her cabin, leaning back against the closed door. The wretch. He meant to taunt and torture her with verbal thumbscrews.

The next morning she ventured up on deck for the first time since sailing. Without Jeannie to help, she had managed to put her hair up in a braided loop at the back of her head. Without hoops her skirts were too long, and she had pinned them up under the sides into false panniers. Her petticoats were visible, but that was preferable to tripping constantly over her skirts. It was a great relief to be up in the cool sea air. She felt the breeze pulling the pall of illness from her and freshening her spirits.

Above her, at the wheel, Aaron Durham watched her turn her face to the sun and drink in the cool, crisp sea air. Her hair was a tawny gold in the sunlight, and in her plain, blue dress and large knitted shawl, she might have passed for a country girl on market day. He felt a stab of regret at his earlier taunt. She fared better than most women did at sea. She had gotten her sea legs quickly and had even found a way to stylishly surmount the problem of those bulky skirts.

“Hicks,” he called. “Take over.” In a minute he was down the steps to the main deck and making straight for her.

She watched the sea, seeming fascinated by the rising and falling of the waves and the endless sky overhead. He stood beside her a full moment before she realized he was there, and glanced over at him.

“How do you like my ocean?” He leaned his elbows on the rail beside her.

“It is magnificent,” she said simply, refusing to address his claim.

He was silent for a moment, then turned from the sea to watch her instead. “I’m glad to see that you’re feeling better.” He glanced up. “It looks like the good weather will hold for a while.

We’re making good time.”

“We can’t get there a moment too soon,” she muttered.

“I meant to ask . . . what takes you to Boston in such a hurry?”

She thought for a moment, then turned to study him as he leaned against the rail. “I have urgent business there. One of Weston Trading’s mercantile ventures has proved unprofitable.” She paused, searching his face for mockery or disbelief. When she found none, some of her defensiveness faded. “The colonial assemblies have made it impossible for us to collect on accounts and conduct business with any degree of confidence. I will look for a cash buyer and divest Weston Trading of its American holdings.”

“I’ve heard of the assemblies’ cancellation of debts.

Unfortunate.” He rubbed his chin and tilted his head to study her from another angle. “You take part in your father’s company, then?”

“Is that so strange?” Her defenses came up quickly and she crossed her arms.

“Yes, frankly. For a woman of your rank and wealth—”

“To be interested in anything but gowns and parties and gossip is unheard of?”

“For a woman of your station to be interested in commerce, much less traveling across the ocean to conduct business transactions, is highly unusual. As you well know.” He studied her. “How did you come to be involved in the trading business?”

“After Raoul—since the death of my husband, my father has taken me under his wing and taught me commerce and finance.”

She looked out to sea, turning only her eyes back to him. “I’ve been interested in trade since I was a little girl. He used to take me with him sometimes when one of his ships returned home. I got to see the cargoes being unloaded and hear his discussions with his captains. I never forgot the sights, the smells, and the excitement. My father indulges me.”

“But it hasn’t always been so,” he prompted with a light scowl.

“No, we were not close for several years.” She made a rueful smile. “But I am all the family he has left, and since my husband—”

“He forced you to wed the Frenchman,” he declared, feeling a turbulence stirring his insides at the thought of anyone forcing her to do anything.

“The details of my marriage are none of your business,” she said, straightening, her openness abruptly closing.

“You said that you married me to keep from having to marry another. You married the Frenchman so quickly after . . . it must have been him you tried to avoid.”

“Keep your conjectures to yourself, Captain. I owe you no explanations.”

“They say he was handsome.” He stepped closer, his expression sober and his unusual eyes glowing with intensity. “Was he?”

Brien refused to back away . . . whether from determination to stand up to him or a reckless desire to be close to him, she didn’t know. All she could think was that those eyes that were so clear and so readable, were also tinged visibly with
green
. Suddenly she understood. He wanted to know if Raoul had bedded her.

Because of what they did that night, he felt he had a claim on her, that part of her somehow belonged to him.

The bastard.

“Yes. He was handsome.” She set her jaw and spoke from between clenched teeth. “And determined. And loathsome.” She backed away now . . . in disdain, not retreat. “But he taught me a valuable lesson. It is not what is on the outside of a man that matters, but what is inside. Put another way, handsome is as handsome
does.
” She raked him with a searing look. “You know, I hadn’t seen it until now . . . You resemble Raoul a great deal.”

She pulled her shawl tighter around her. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe I should check on my patient.”

Stung by her declaration, he watched with his ears burning and his fists clenched until she disappeared down the hatch. Until that moment he hadn’t given thought to what it must have been like for her when her scheme failed. She’d been forced to marry a man she detested and tried desperately to avoid. “Loathsome,”

she had said. What would it take for a legendarily handsome man to make himself loathsome to a woman—his own bride, at that?

Grasping . . . manipulating . . . taking what she didn’t want to give

. . .

She had just served notice that she didn’t see any difference between him and the man she had been forced to marry. Setting aside his qualms about his own earlier motives toward her, he decided there was a world of difference and he determined to show it to her.

As he turned from the railing he caught sight of Brien’s protector, Dyso, sitting on a crate not far away, staring intently at him. He was not used to looking up to other men, and he found it unsettling to be in the presence of a man so much larger and more physically powerful than himself. The hulk’s eyes darted toward the hatch where Brien had disappeared and then back to Aaron, narrowing slightly. But when Aaron blinked and focused, that hint of an expression was gone. He felt the big man’s gaze following him as he mounted the steps to the quarterdeck and took his post beside the wheel.

The next morning Brien rose early to walk on deck in the chill of early morning. Opening her door, she gasped. Dyso lay on the floor just outside the raised sill, with a blanket as his only comfort.

He started up as the door opened and looked at her, then got up slowly and wrapped the blanket into a ball.

“Dyso, have you been there all night?” He nodded and looked down, whether from anxiety or embarrassment, she could not tell.

“Why don’t you sleep in your cabin?” She feared she already knew.

One of his massive hands gestured toward the next door. Aaron Durham’s cabin. Then he brought his fists together in a pounding motion and swept them open toward her.

She knew. “It’s all right, Dyso. No one here would hurt me.” She put one hand on his arm, hoping she spoke the truth. “I lock the cabin door at night. Please sleep in your cabin where you’ll be more comfortable.”

But he shook his head sharply and moved quickly up the passageway to the steps.

That night after Brien had gone to bed, she heard a quiet thump on the floor outside her door. Dyso had resumed his vigil. Her smile was bittersweet. There could be such a thing as too much protection.

Fourteen

AFTER A FULL WEEK of sitting sedately in her cabin and Jeannie’s, tending to her patient and reading over and over the thin volumes of poetry and essays she had brought with her, Brien was slowly going mad from boredom. And by Mr. Hicks’s most optimistic assessment, they still had two full weeks to go.

Almost as desperate for diversion as she was to avoid Aaron Durham, she approached Mr. Hicks about possible reading matter.

“No shortage of books on board the
Secret,
my lady. Come with me.”

He led her straight to Aaron Durham’s door and beckoned her inside. The captain’s cabin was spacious and elegantly appointed

. . . polished teak paneling, mahogany furnishings, silver candlesticks, and soft, well-tended linen. Along one wall was a series of cabinets that included a wardrobe and chart drawers, and on the facing side were two broad sets of shelves from ceiling to floor . . . filled with books.

“Heavens.” She ran her fingers over the spines of the books, concentrating on the names and authors to keep herself from greedily drinking in the rest of the cabin. This was the home away from home he had created for himself, the place where he kept his possessions . . . the space where he thought and slept and worked and dreamed. It was a revealing expression of his personal taste and habits. Being there felt to her like stepping into his boots or sleeping in his—

“Quite a collection to find on a ship in the middle of the ocean.”

She couldn’t take her fingers from the tooled and gold-stamped leather of the bindings. “Perhaps I should wait and ask—oooh, Jonathan Swift!” She slid a volume from the shelf and turned it over and over in her hands.

“Oh, the captain won’t mind, my lady. He allows anyone in the crew who can read to borrow a book.”

“He does?”

“He does. And I can’t imagine he would deny you the same privilege.”

She looked up at the genial Mr. Hicks’s face and hoped her confusion wasn’t too evident. Books. He read and owned books and lent them to others. Poetry. Essays. Histories. A rush of memories of days ensconced in the library at Byron Place came over her. She had tended and expanded the wonderful library her father had begun there, and the books had become her intellectual companions. Her throat tightened at the realization that her books were yet another loss in her life, one she had yet to reckon with.

She opened the handsome vellum pages, stared with burning eyes at the rich black print of the opening page. She gave a sigh. It felt as if something parched and dry inside her were being watered.

The moisture in her eyes kept her from seeing the way Mr. Hicks slid a chair from the table across the floor to her, but she heard the dragging sound and felt it nudge against her skirts. Sinking into it with a grateful nod, she pored over the prose of the first page and then hurried on to the second. . . .

That was where Aaron found her some time later, in his cabin, curled up on the end of his bunk, leaning against the window with an array of volumes spread on the bed beside her. He stood for a moment in the doorway, appreciating the sight of her on his bed, sun-drenched and slightly tousled, surrounded by his books. His bed. He was surprised by a stir of internal heat.

“Find something you like?” he said, pushing off from the doorway with his shoulder and strolling toward her.

She started and looked up, jolted by her location and reddening.

“I-I . . . Mr. Hicks said I might borrow a book from your . . . and I had difficulty choosing. Then I started reading this one and needed more light . . . and . . .”

“You made yourself quite at home.”

“I didn’t mean to impose.” As she scrambled to the edge of the bed, her skirts slid up to reveal much of her lower legs. The instant she reached the floor, she yanked them down again and snapped upright, clutching his book to her breast.

“Finding a beautiful woman curled on my bed, reading, is never an imposition.”

“Nor, I would think, is it a frequent occurrence,” she said tartly, eyeing the door.

He chuckled. “You have me there, my lady.” He pointed to the book in her arms. “What did you find to interest you?”

“This? A book on the history and prominent families of the colony of Massachusetts. Quite recent. Just what I needed to introduce me to the people and culture of Boston.”

“‘Culture’ and ‘Boston’ used in the same sentence. Interesting.”

He suppressed a smile and glanced at the books on the bed beside her. “What else did you choose?”

“A volume on the development and construction of ships. It contained a number of helpful drawings. It’s no wonder that sailing takes years to learn. . . . I had no idea that each rope and square of canvas has its own name.”

“Absolutely.”

“And I looked through a well-used book devoted to navigation and shipboard skills, and almost went cross-eyed trying to make sense of the tables and computations.”

“So did I, when I was learning navigation. It gets easier the more you work with the calculations. What else?”

“A great collection of poems and essays by Alexander Pope.