Once Tempted (20 page)

At the very mention of the word, Gavin grinned, and she knew she had a co-conspirator.

Olivia spent the rest of the day and well into the night with Robert, his fever taking a turn for the worse. She’d given up hope that he would survive. She stopped believing that he intended to take her to Wellington. Rather, she spent the night cursing her heart for caring as she watched Robert Danvers slip deeper and deeper into his fever.

What time she fell asleep she didn’t know. The last bells she’d heard had been at the second dogwatch.

In her dreams she found no relief. Like the other nights when she’d fallen asleep at Robert’s side, his presence stole into her slumber like a thief.

But this time the dreams were not the wild images that had plagued her since she’d first laid eyes on the imposter marquis; they were different.

No longer was his love fierce, demanding and rough, but rather the gentle ministrations of someone who held her heart.

His fingers stroked her hair, plying the loose tendrils slowly, tentatively. Somewhere in her drowsy state, she heard him calling to her.

“There, now, my little termagant, what have you done to me?”

Those same fingers that had tenderly combed her hair now coaxed her awake, slowly tracing a line along her jaw and over her lips, teasing them to open, leaving them longing for a kiss.

Her lashes fluttered open, and for a drowsy second she tried to remember where she was. All she could see before her was the expanse of a man’s bare chest and her own fingers toying with the dark curls resting there.

As she blinked again and pulled herself up, her hand came down on his thigh and a hard, throbbing warmth that told her only too clearly that Robert Danvers had lived through the night.

Not only lived, thrived.

Her head spun toward the top of the berth. She guessed it was near dawn, for the first warm fingers of light crept in at the tiny window. This morning a redgold shaft of light cast over his dark head like a halo. His eyes were closed, his face almost serene, as if he’d finally found peace from all his feverborn fury.

For a moment she thought she’d been mistaken, he wasn’t alive but dead, but then his lashes fluttered open and those green eyes, the color of the waves beyond the window, sparkled with life.

“Hello,” she managed to whisper, swiping at the tangled locks of her hair that he’d freed from the loose chignon she’d taken to wearing in the last few days.

He glanced around the cabin, obviously assessing where he was and trying to remember the events that had led him there. She knew how he felt. His hand went unconsciously to his shoulder, and he flinched for a moment as he plucked at the poultice she’d placed over the inflamed wound. “So you missed another opportunity to do me in.”

“So it seems,” she said.

“How long?”

She knew what he meant. “Five days.”

He sucked in a breath and tried to rise, but she stopped him by doing the same thing she’d done all week—her hands on his bare chest and using all her weight to force him back.

But holding down a man who was fully aware was an entirely different matter from one gone with fever, she discovered.

This time she realized how her breasts pressed against his chest, how his body offered a solid resistance to hers. Perhaps resistance wasn’t the right word—more like a welcoming embrace.

When she glanced up, there was a wry smile on his lips, while one brow arched at her.

She struggled up from his chest. “Stay still,” she told him. “You’ll tear your stitches again.”

“Again?”

“Yes, you’ve torn them twice.” She edged away from the bed, away from this man who had gone from helpless patient to unnerving male in the blink of an eye.

“I suppose I should be grateful that I agreed with Pymm’s advice and let you tag along,” he teased.

“Tag along! You kidnapped me!” she snapped back, before she saw the flash of tantalizing challenge in his eyes.

“A matter of linguistics,” he said with an indifferent shrug, then a flinch of pain. “You’re the expert, I’d think you’d know the difference.”

“Harrumph!” she muttered.

He smiled at her. “So why did you save my life?”

She hemmed for a moment. Her pride wasn’t about to let her admit the truth, so she offered the next best plausible excuse. “Because you saved mine.”

“Oh, you mean this scrape from Chambley. Don’t read too much into that. I had no choice. You carry valuable information. Saving you was a matter of duty.” He said it with a bored air of indifference.

“Duty!”
Why, she’d never been so insulted. So much for her fantasies about a hero, about a man who’d put her life before his out of undying loyalties. How had she been so foolish to think him capable of the same honorable, noble intentions Hobbe would have extended to her. Not out of duty . . .  but out of something she doubted this man would
ever
understand.

“I suppose I should be grateful,” he said. “I have no doubt you’ve been most attentive to my needs.” He rolled a bit in the berth, a grin spreading across his face. Lifting up his blanket, he peeked beneath, then over the edge at her. “Was this your idea?”

Olivia blushed. “It was necessary.”

“Did you do the honors?”

“I did not!” she told him. “Your brother undressed you. My dealings with you have been quite . . .  quite . . .  decorous.”

“You? Decorous?” He laughed. “Perhaps you sought to confirm once and for all I’m not Bradstone.”

Olivia tipped her nose in the air. Of all the insulting insinuations. And after she’d worn herself ragged saving his miserable life. The leering waggle of his brows and his mocking gaze seemed to see right through her veneer of indignation. But a wicked bit of her decided the man could use a dose of his own medicine, even if it was a lie.

“Yes, I did discover some inadequacies between you and your cousin. But on those regards, your secret is safe with me.”

*    *    *    

Any hint of a truce between them ended the next morning. Olivia awoke at dawn and went to check on her patient. She found him halfway out of his berth, a blanket wrapped around his waist.

“What do you think you are doing?” she asked.

“Getting out of this confounded bed, if you must know,” he told her. “Where have you put my clothes?”

She should have been warned immediately by the crotchety tone in his voice, but she hadn’t just spent the last week nursing this man back to life only to have him throw it away by getting out of bed too soon. Hands on her hips, she faced him. “I threw them overboard.”

“You tossed my clothes overboard?”

“Well, at least your hearing wasn’t addled by your fever, but your mind obviously was if you think you are well enough to get dressed and start stalking about this ship.”

His face turned murderous, but it was hard to fear a man whose legs were shaking like a foal’s and whose jaw was quivering in a painful line of determination.

She could only guess how much it had hurt him to inch his way out of his berth, let alone continue to stand there arguing with her.

He wavered for a moment, his grip on the berth tightening, leaving his knuckles a deathly white.

“I should fetch you some broth,” she told him, turning to leave.

“Damn the broth, you termagant! Get me some clothes.”

“That is hardly the way to address someone who saved your life.”

“Might I remind you, you owed me one.” He slumped onto the side of the bed in defeat, letting out an enormous frustrated sigh. “Consider us even now.”

“Even?” she sputtered. “I hardly think so.”

He looked up. “And how is that?”

“Have you forgotten you kidnapped me? Hauled me aboard this ship against my will and in a sack, no less?”

His answer was an arrogant shrug. “As a point of record, I don’t remember you making any protests as we boarded this ship.”

“I might have been able to express myself if you hadn’t poisoned me.”

He slumped back into the bunk, finally giving in to the pain that must have cost him all his meager stores of strength. “That was Pymm’s idea, truly not my first choice. But really you left us no other means.”

She took the two steps across the room to help him, but he brushed her away. “You most certainly had other means,” she told him gently, setting aside her more strident tones and trying to take a more calm approach. “And the obvious one was to leave me be.”

“Leave you be?” He laughed. “I hardly think so. I have my orders where
El Rescate
is concerned. I wasn’t to return to the Peninsula without its whereabouts, and according to you, now I have them. Such as it is—and what good it will do is a fool’s notion.” He gazed out the window, but Olivia knew what his mind saw was far away, far from the endless waves, to the well-worn tracks of Portugal, to the high, hard plains of Spain. “Legends and dust—they have much in common with the death and dying that happens every day there.”

The bitter chill of his hopeless conviction stopped her. It had never occurred to her that of all the men who had sought her help discovering
El Rescate del Rey,
this one would be so different.

So completely different.

“You don’t believe,” she whispered, her own shock sending ripples of gooseflesh down her arms. In the seven years since she had learned of the King’s Ransom, it had never occurred to her that it might not exist. That he didn’t believe left her scandalized. “It is real. It has to be.”

He shook his head. “Do you know how many people have spent their lifetime searching for it? Most of the idiots hadn’t even a notion where to start, much less what they were looking for. Eleven centuries of men chasing its shadow.” He scratched at the dark whiskers that had grown with abandon during his illness and made him look like he truly belonged on this pirate ship. “A ransom for a king no one remembers. ’Tis pure folly and a waste of time,” he muttered.

“Wellington obviously doesn’t believe so.” Olivia stepped into the circle of his anger and cynicism, wanting with all her heart to vanquish his disbelief. “My father said that all legends have a basis in truth somewhere, even if it’s just a small measure.”

“Yes, well whatever the measure, I doubt this ransom will save the Peninsula from the French. It certainly didn’t save it from the Moors all those years ago.”

It was Olivia’s turn to shake her head. The King’s Ransom did exist. It had to. For if it were just folly, as Robert believed, then her father, that poor boy Bradstone had murdered, and even Bradstone himself, had all died in vain.

The last seven years of her life had been in vain.

And that she couldn’t, wouldn’t believe.
“El Rescate del Rey
is real.”

“You aren’t the first to believe so,” he said. “And you probably won’t be the last. All I care is that you tell what you know to Wellington. Then let him do with it what he will.”

“You really intend to take me to him?” She still hadn’t shaken free her more pressing doubts that he, like all the others, was chasing her only to gain the treasure for himself.

“Of course. Why else would I go to this trouble?” He nodded down at the blanket covering his lower half. “But if I am to do that, I will need my clothes.”

It was Olivia’s turn to smile at him. “You are a persistent devil. I think it might be better if you remain as you are until you are strong enough to get out of bed.”

“I’m strong enough,” he told her, throwing his legs over the edge and tugging the blanket free from the middle of his torso.

“Keep that blanket on,” she told him, backing out of the room.

“Why?” he asked, his eyes wide with mock innocence. “It isn’t like there isn’t anything there you haven’t seen before.”

Olivia colored. Whether from embarrassment at being caught or from his insinuation. “I did no such thing,” she lied.

“Five days with me tossing about this bed, and this blanket
never
fell off?”

“I’m too much of a lady to answer that question,” she said, taking the high road.

“You, Miss Sutton, are no such thing.”

At this Olivia’s color deepened, but this time with indignation. “How dare you!”

“You forget, your letters to Bradstone were published in the
Morning Post,”
he countered. “I don’t need to dare when all of London knows your past.” He leaned forward. “What I don’t understand is how you were so duped by Bradstone.”

She turned away. It was a question she’d asked herself too many times to count. “I was very young. I believed myself in love.”

He shook his head. “That might be. But I suspect, Miss Sutton, if you’d been given the chance, you would have outfoxed him at his own game.”

Olivia drew a deep breath and looked away.

“Aha!” he said. “I believe I’m on to something. Do tell—your secret is safe with me.”

He was coming too close to the truth for her comfort, so she used an old trick of Lady Finch’s and turned the tables right back on him. “You’re a fine one to be accusing me of keeping secrets. Parading about London claiming to be the Marquis of Bradstone, skulking about with the likes of that dreadful Mr. Pymm and finally kidnapping me with some grandiose claim that you are doing it for King and country. You must admit, it is all a bit far-fetched.”

“Not really,” he told her. “I think it all makes sense. Now, you, on the other hand, were at the scene of murder, fled the crime and hid for seven years. Why is that?”

“I had nothing to hide,” she declared. “I was innocent.”

“Then why disappear?”

She chose to ignore him. “Do you want some broth or not?”

“I want my clothes and some answers.”

“You’re getting broth,” she told him, leaving the cabin before his questions became too persistent. Behind her, she heard his muttered complaints, but she chose to ignore those as well.

Just down the hallway, Jemmy stepped out of the shadows, causing her to start in fright.

“Sorry there, Olivia,” he said, as she tried to catch her breath. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just so glad to see you.”

With Gavin’s help, Olivia had been able so far to shield Jemmy from detection. They’d done this by keeping him stowed during the daylight hours and letting him up out of the hold only at night during the wee hours. It had worked so far, but Olivia knew it was only a matter of time before someone discovered the stowaway’s presence aboard the
Sybaris.