Skies of Fire (11 page)

Hectic pink stained her cheeks, and her jaw clenched tight. Her hazel eyes glinted with anger—at herself. She’d always been toughest on herself, allowing others far more latitude and giving herself none.

“We know the answer’s here somewhere,” he continued. “It’s just a matter of reasoning it out.”

“I’m not fond of being patronized,” she ground out.

“When in the whole of the time that we’ve known each other have I fed you palliative words? Don’t insult me like that.”

She muttered an apology.

“I’m telling you the truth,” he said. “You earned top marks in constructing explosive devices, fine, but you did so in controlled conditions. Now’s the time to show us all what you’re made of. In that devious brain of yours lies the answer to this conundrum. It’s there. Stop gnashing your teeth and pulling your hair, and find it.”

At first, it appeared as though she’d turn some of her vitriol on him, but then she drew in a ragged breath, visibly fighting for calm.

“All right,” she said. “All right.” She glanced up. “No wonder you’re so adept at leading your crew. Look how well you managed me.”

They both realized at the same time that he still held her. He dropped his hands. Too late. Her warmth and feel had already imprinted upon his palms.

“The first thing I’ll need . . .”

“Tell me.”

“. . . is whiskey.” Her eyes twinkled.

“And not for the bomb.”

“For the bomb-maker.” God, her smile could lay him out on the floor, bleeding and happy.

Deciding it would be more expeditious to simply fetch the whiskey himself rather than pulling one of the crew off of their duties, he gave her a mock salute and quickly left the magazine. Moments later, he returned with a bottle taken from his private reserve.

“A thousand blessings upon you.” She uncorked the bottle and put it to her lips. Tilting her head back, she took a healthy swallow. “You can join me if you like.”

“Very generous of you, considering it’s my whiskey.” But he took the bottle from her and drank. The burn pleasantly scalded its way down his throat.

For several minutes, they leaned against the table, passing the bottle back and forth. Surprising how companionable the quiet was between them, how easily they shared, like old friends.

The realization struck him. They had been more than lovers; they’d been friends. Beyond the time they spent in bed, he liked her, liked spending time with her. And when she’d walked out on him, she’d torn a hole in his life, her absence all the harder to bear because of that lost friendship.

He shook his head, then took another drink. Life could be a regular son of a bitch.

“Ah!” She slapped her palm against the table and shoved away it. “The explosive!” Facing him, she continued. “The bomb’s size comes from the amount of explosive required. If I can find a way to concentrate it, make it more potent, I can drastically reduce the size of the device.”

“Making it easier to transport and sneak into the munitions plant.”

“Precisely.” Excitement brightened her eyes and flushed her cheeks, and she looked so damned beautiful it was a sweet pain.

He set the bottle down and stood. “Chemistry’s not my strength. Give me something that sails or flies, and I’m a wealth of information, but I wouldn’t know the first thing about concentrating an explosive.”

“Lucky, then, that I happen to be very good at it.” She paced around the magazine, tapping her chin with her finger, deep in thought. “What’s on this ship that can be used to supercharge an explosive? What can I combine with trinitrotoluene to make it more than double its power?”

In this, he was at a loss. He knew the best places at which to aim a cannon to create maximum damage. He could read the color and texture of the sky like a scholar pouring over tomes. He could tell from just a glance which of his crew would prove to be the strongest and most reliable. But the arcane world of chemistry left him directionless.

Ironic, given that his whole existence had been changed by scientific advancement. But you didn’t wonder what made your heart beat. It simply did.

All he could do was watch Louisa as she paced and ruminated and muttered to herself. To watch the complex machinations of her mind, the play of thought across her face—it was unexpectedly fascinating. And arousing.

Suddenly, she stopped in her pacing. Her eyes went wide as she looked him. “Telumium.”

“What of it?”

“I read some intercepted communications between Swedish scientists. They were discussing a new use for telumium. When combined with an explosive, such as trinitrotoluene—”

“TNT.”

She nodded. “When combined with TNT in different proportions, the telumium infused the explosive with tremendous power. They’ve been experimenting with it to use in mining, but it might also work with a bomb. I can conduct some experiments of my own. What I need,” she said with a concerned press of her mouth, “is a source of telumium.”

“The
Demeter
happens to have a telumium source.” He glanced at his left shoulder, then at her. “Me.”

L
OUISA STARED AT Christopher. “Are you sure? The gathering panels mounted in the ship’s bulkheads also contain telumium.”

“They’re alloys. What’s been grafted to my skin is the pure form of the metal. It’s what you’ll need for your experiments.” Confidence deepened his already sonorous voice.

He was right. The Swedish scientists alluded to using unadulterated telumium, and if she added in unknown elements, the results would be either ineffective or possibly disastrous. Before she could even open her mouth to agree, however, he’d already taken off his coat and was undoing the buttons of his waistcoat.

She couldn’t take her gaze from the sight of his long, broad-tipped fingers slipping the buttons through their holes. “Ah, um, very good.” She cleared her suddenly dry throat. “You’ll need to, ah, expose the implants so I can take a sample.”

His only response was a slight tilt in the corner of his mouth. Shrugging out of his waistcoat, his shirt clung adoringly to his shoulders and arms, the material fine enough to hint at the skin beneath. He unknotted then whipped off his neck cloth. It dropped to the growing pile of clothing on the floor. He tugged his shirttails out of his breeches and worked at the buttons, starting at the top.

Slowly, his flesh was revealed. His neck. The hollow at the base of his throat. The span between his pectorals, lightly brushed with red-gold hair. The top of his ridged abdomen, then lower, to the indentation of his navel, and below, where a thin trail of more hair traced down his flat stomach to vanish beneath the waistband of his breeches.

He peeled away the shirt and added it to his discarded clothes. She was conscious of his gaze on her, conscious that he could see every play of emotion and need, but for all her skill at deception, she couldn’t hide her reaction to him.

“Oh,” she breathed, “what a wonder is science.”

She’d known that he had physically changed as a result of the implants, had seen hints and glimpses, but here he was, nude from the waist up, and the transformation was astonishing.

Where once he’d been lean and compactly muscled, now he possessed the exaggerated masculine beauty of a summer god. The delineations of his abdominal muscles were precise, his chest broad, his arms potently hewn. Her gaze strayed farther up to his shoulders, wide as the sky itself. Her searching perusal stopped when she finally beheld the telumium implants.

Metal had been fused to the skin of his left shoulder and pectoral, sculpted in the shape of muscle, like Roman armor. The telumium gleamed in the reflected sunlight, and her fingers itched to touch it.

She actually took a step forward, hand upraised, before realizing what she was doing.

“Touch it,” he murmured. “You won’t hurt me.”

Closing the distance between them, she stood very close and saw herself reflected in the telumium. Her breath misted slightly on the implants. She brought her hand up slowly, tentatively, before lightly touching her fingertips to the metal.

“Warm.”

“It heats me, and I heat it.” He raised his arm smoothly. “One of the unique properties of telumium. It retains its strength and durability but is also flexible, so no mobility is lost.”

She bent even closer, studying the metal. This was the first time she’d ever seen actual Man O’ War implants. There had been photos and cinemagraphs, but never had she beheld this with her own eyes, felt its heat and strange suppleness beneath her fingers.

He’d said the procedure had taken many painful hours. Seeing the seamless way in which the telumium was integrated with his flesh, she could believe it. He must have wanted this very badly to have endured so much. She’d been trained in resisting torture, but she doubted she could have borne what he had.

Glancing up, she saw him watching her guardedly. Tension tightened along his jaw and neck.

He was troubled. By what she might think of him. Of this final proof that he had truly altered into something not entirely human.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

Heat flared in his gaze before he looked away.

She wanted to touch the rest of him, too. Not merely to test the new strength of his body, but to feel
him
, this man she had known and cared for. His unique combination of bravado and kindness that challenged and cherished her. The gleam of purpose as well as humor in his gaze. When she pushed, he pushed back, and when she needed tenderness, his arms had always been ready to hold her close.

The drumming of her pulse revealed that she cared for him still. Wanted him. He might desire her, but what of his heart? Could she move past her own fear?

She had to keep silent. They had reached a tentative entente, perhaps even a small fragment of friendship, and if she spoke of her heart, she could destroy it all. He had every right to push her away. She must give him no cause to.

Pulling back, she tried to speak briskly. “If you’ll just sit there,” she nodded toward the chair, “I’ll take some samples.”

He moved fluidly to take a seat. Without his shirt, in motion, his body was a brutal poem. She attempted to steady herself by grabbing her spectacles and meticulously polishing them with a small cloth. After donning her glasses, she sorted through her tools to find precisely what she needed. She selected a rasp and a smaller file, then pulled out another chair to sit beside him.

Despite the fact that they had been in the magazine together for some time, the chamber felt a good deal smaller now. He seemed to fill the space with his presence. Lacking the barrier of his clothing, he exuded heat, and her own skin warmed to be so close to him. He stared straight ahead, hands braced on his knees, as Louisa bent close to the implants.

“Let me know at any time if you feel the slightest discomfort.”

He gave a slight nod.

With a piece of paper cupped just beneath to collect the filings, she began to run the rasp along the metal. The angle was awkward, her purchase minimal, as she was trying not to touch his bare flesh. The rasp skidded over the telumium, succeeded only in creating a few scrapes. A tiny flake of metal drifted down onto the paper. At this rate, by the time she gathered enough telumium, the Hapsburgs would conquer London.

“Could you hold this here?” She pressed the paper into his right hand and guided it to the proper position beneath his implant.

Drawing a breath, she cupped her free hand around his bicep to hold it steady as she worked.

They both hissed in a breath at the sensation.

Good god, it was as if his whole body was made of metal. He’d never been a loose and flabby man, far from it, but now he was impossibly hard and solid. She could hardly believe she touched flesh, save for the slight yield to the pressure of her fingers and the hot, satiny feel of his skin. Yet more than these changes, she was acutely aware that it was
Christopher
she touched. And she touched a place reserved for intimacy. How many nights had she gripped him, just here, as he stretched above her, with her legs wrapped around his waist and the dimmed gaslight all around them like antique gold? How often had she watched the bunch and flex of muscles in his arms as he gripped the headboard, her atop him, riding them both toward ecstasy?

Desire and sorrow combined within her in a mystifying alchemy, so she could not separate one from the other.

Mouth pressed tight, she made herself focus on her work. She ran the rasp back and forth across the implant. With the additional leverage, she had more success, and curls of metal gathered on the paper.

“This doesn’t hurt?”

“No.”

“Even if it did, you wouldn’t tell me, would you?”

“No.”

She scanned his face for any signs that he might be in pain, but there was no way to know if the lines bracketing his mouth came from her scraping at his implants, or him simply having to endure her touch. Unless he said otherwise, she’d just have to proceed.

The only sounds in the magazine came from the rasp and the faint noise of repairs continuing throughout the ship. Someone in the passageway outside walked by, whistling an old sea shanty.

She thought being this close to Christopher might help her get used to him, that she could hold his arm and feel its weight, and think of him as any man. Take away some of the mystique. The opposite proved to be true. For the more she touched him and saw up close the rise and fall of his chest—the same chest on which she used to rest her head—the more she ached and wanted and cursed herself.

The tension within the magazine ratcheted higher, far more explosive than the powder in the cannon shells.

She could stand it no longer.

“I could never become anyone’s wife, Christopher,” she said quietly. “I made no secret of it. But you asked me, anyway.”

He tensed, as if her words had been an unexpected blow. For several moments, he didn’t speak. Perhaps he’d simply ignore her. She couldn’t decide whether to press him, or just continue with her work.

Then, “It’s what men typically do,” he said tightly, his face in pristine profile, “when they fall in love.”

“We aren’t typical, you and I.”