The Ravishing One (16 page)

The thought did not bring him much comfort. There was too much coincidental here. Though what he could do about it he was at a loss to think. He would soon have to ship out of London harbor. What with last year’s disaster, their shipping company could ill afford any delays or setbacks. He was duty and honor bound to follow through on his promise to Thomas.

He would simply have to wait here in London until he shipped out, hoping Carr took the bait he and Fia
had dangled before him. To leave now, following after Fia or Thomas, would destroy all their carefully laid groundwork.

No—he sighed, snapping the leads smartly and maneuvering the horse into the traffic—he could do nothing to either support or disprove his suspicions regarding Thomas and Fia.

But he might know people who could.

Chapter 12

T
he pungent scent of the sea swept in with the rising tide. Overhead a high wind shredded the clouds, leaving long white tatters stretched across a bleached blue sky. The midday dockyards were crowded with traders and buyers, peddlers and costermongers, sailors and stevedores loading and unloading the slighters that bobbed alongside the wharves. Farther out deep-hulled ships waited, a forest of masts in the harbor.

Thomas led Fia to the berth where the
Alba Star
was moored. She was not completely refurbished, half her sails were gone and the others ill-mended, some planking unvarnished. Still, she was seaworthy enough for this voyage.

He looked with affection at the sloop. Singlemasted, sleek, and small, she’d been designed by her
Spanish builders for speed and maneuverability, to outrun the enemy’s fleet. Since he’d captured her she’d served him well in outrunning privateers and pirates.

“We are going in this boat?” Fia asked as he crossed the narrow gangway and held out his hand.

“It’s a ship, not a boat.” She laid her hand in his and, even though her gloves encased her fingers, awareness tingled through him. This and the short hour he’d spent closeted with her in the hired carriage proved the wisdom of choosing to journey by sea rather than land.

Her fragrance had permeated the warm interior; the shadows clung with lascivious ardency to her cheeks and brow, the cut of her lip, the column of her throat. He’d forced his gaze outside, but imagination provided what he denied his senses and her image hovered in his mind’s eye, taunting and enigmatic.

“I have never been aboard a ship.” She said it without any discernible inflection yet Thomas sensed a tensing in her.

“It is a very safe vessel, Lady Fia—”

“You called me Fia not so many days ago and now that I am at your mercy you suddenly afford me the respect of my title? I commend you on your originality.”

His mouth flattened. He’d only meant to reassure her and she’d seized the opportunity to upbraid him. But, some part of him insisted, wouldn’t he have done the same thing in her position? Wait for his enemy to show weakness or inconsistency and then abuse him with it? Yes. In fact, he
had
done the same thing. To
his bondmaster. He carried a few scars on his back to prove it.

She released his hand and stepped lightly down onto the deck. A deckhand, Portuguese as were most of the other members of the skeleton crew, came to take her meager luggage.

“I’ll show you to your quarters,” Thomas said. He led her across the deck, down a steep flight of stairs to a short corridor separating two main cabins. The crews’ quarters were belowdeck. He pushed open the nearest door.

Inside the cabin was spartan, containing a single bunk attached to the bulkhead and a small table and chest of drawers secured to the flooring with bolts. A tiny window allowed in a single shaft of daylight. Her portmanteau and trunk filled the rest of the space.

“Charming,” she murmured. She turned to him. “How long will I be here?”

“Three days, I should imagine. Perhaps four.”

“Then I can assume we are not going to France?”

“No.”

She did not react to his words but ducked her head and entered the cabin. She removed her hat and placed it carefully on the table. “Your compartment is across from this one?” Her tone invested a wealth of scorn and warning in the simple query and Thomas felt the blood rise in his face.

“Yes.” Confound the girl!

“Then I suggest you go to it, unless you have some other captainly duties that require your attention. I bid you good day.”

Her sangfroid was supreme. She dismissed him as easily as she would a servant. She also left him little choice but to leave her. To stay would be unconscionable.

“Do not attempt to leave the ship, Lady Fia. We will be under way within a quarter hour, and my crew is most diligent and most faithful.”

“What a comfort to you,” she replied without bothering to look around as she stripped off her gloves.

With a curt inclination of his head, he left.

As usual, the harbor was choked with traffic and threading the
Alba Star
through the city of tall ships, frigates, and pleasure craft took the rest of the day. By the time they’d left London behind and turned north toward the Suffolk coast, the sun hovered just above the horizon, its burning belly pricked by London’s countless steeples.

Fia did not appear on deck and Thomas could only assume she was sulking. The explanation did not satisfy him. It was not what he would have expected of her, but then, what really did he know of Fia Merrick?

The notion consumed him as he worked. As a young girl Fia been untouchable in her isolation, and somehow pitiable, owning a sophistication that her tender years should never have supplied. She’d been Carr’s shadow, Thomas remembered, watching the carnival at Wanton’s Blush with brilliant eyes that gave away nothing of what she thought.

Yet on those occasions when he’d spoken to her
he’d been surprised by her reticence, the obvious effort it cost her to reply. It had intrigued him—in an entirely objective and dispassionate way, of course.

Then, for the next six years, though he’d heard plenty about Carr, there’d been no word of Fia. When finally he heard about her, it was through her reputation. He learned about her in seasoned roues’ knowing smiles, in the betting books of “gentlemen’s” clubs and, not least of all, in poor Pip Leighton’s near-tragic introduction to the ways of a worldly woman. Now, for the first time, Thomas wondered why Fia had set herself on so infamous a course.

The mainsail luffed and Thomas pulled the wheel left, bringing the ship about and calling out for the crew to raise the jib. In minutes the smaller sail filled, rolling the ship to a gentle angle against the wind.

“Dinner in an hour, Captain,” the thin, elderly man who acted as steward called up in Portuguese. Thomas raised his hand in acknowledgment and called his helmsman. He gave him the wheel and headed for Fia’s cabin.

No sound answered his knock. He tried again. “Lady Fia?”

“Go away.”

Her voice was muffled.

“Are you all right?”

“Perfectly.
Go away.”

“I will. But if you want to eat, you’d best be in the galley in an hour.”

“Go away!” Her voice rose in a thin protest. “I don’t want to e—”

Begads! She was being sick. He’d heard that telltale sound too often to mistake it. He opened the door. She was sitting on the edge of the narrow bunk in her chemise and underskirt, her knees spread wide, her head hanging over the wash basin that sat on the floor between her feet.

Long, damp ropes of hair clung to her shoulders and throat. She looked up at his entrance, bringing her face directly into the shaft of the late-afternoon light. Her skin was a ghastly milky green, her dark-ringed eyes bleak with mortification.

“Go away!” she pleaded weakly.

He swung around, jerked open the door to his cabin, and ducked inside. He grabbed his water pitcher from the table, a tin cup, and a hand towel and returned to Fia’s room. She hadn’t moved, only hunkered down closer to the basin. He sloshed water into the cup and thrust it at her.

“Drink this.”

“Oh, God.”

“Drink it,” he commanded. She glared up at him through the tangled ropes of hair.

“I—I can’t—oh—oh—” She jerked forward and retched. A weak retch. Not much spirit to it. Not much of anything to it.

He sat down and wrapped an arm about her shoulders. Her skin was moist and clammy, the thin chemise damp with sweat. He lifted her chin up with his fingertips. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut.

He brought the cup to her lips and tipped it slightly. Water dribbled over her lips and down her chin.

“Drink it, Fia. It will help. I promise.”

She obeyed, too weak to argue, too ill to resist.

“Small sips, is all. There. Feel better?”

“No,” she moaned softly. He pulled her closer, noting grimly that even though she was so ill she could barely hold her head up, she resisted. She was small in his embrace, so small it surprised him. He could trace the shallow rut between each rib, measure the deep dip at her waist and the gentle camber of her hip with a hand.

“Relax,” he murmured, laying his palm against her cheek and pressing her face down against his shoulder. She didn’t have the strength to fight, and grudgingly rested her head beneath his chin. The breath coming between her pale lips was shallow. Her small fist curled tightly against his breastbone.

How she hated this. He could not say how he knew but he was certain it was not humiliation at her physical state she felt, but a deeper distress. He sensed her vulnerability and her own deep contempt for it and remembered his own fury at the tears that had sprung to his eyes with the fall of the bondmaster’s whip.

Hiding any sign of sympathy that would only increase her sense of defenselessness, he offered her more water. Eyes still squeezed shut as though unwilling to chance seeing his pity, she accepted.

After she’d taken a few sips he leaned sideways, carrying her with him. He dipped the towel into the pitcher and wrung it out as best he could with one hand. Gently, but with matter-of-fact sureness, he
swabbed her forehead and eyes, her cheeks, lips, and throat.

“You won’t die,” he said after another dry wretch racked her body and subsided.

At this her eyes finally opened, sunken and clouded with misery. “That,” she said, “is exactly what I am afraid of.”

He grinned, surprised by her unexpected humor and surprised even more when an answering smile flickered briefly across her pale lips, a smile unlike any she’d ever given him. Their gazes met and held for a heartbeat and then she pulled back, a frown troubling her moist brow. She turned her head and shut her eyes again.

“You have the seasickness,” he explained.

“Really?” she asked with devastating sarcasm, her icy composure wrenched back into place. “Thank you
so
much for informing me. And here I thought it but this morning’s kipper—” Her eyes abruptly widened, her sarcasm ending in another dry retch.

He could have shaken her. He felt cheated and angered, and hated the flippancy she so readily assumed. Hated that the bit of—What to call it? Humanity? Honesty?—he had seen had been snatched away.

“Serves you right, you rancorous, viper-tongued wench,” he muttered as he bent her forcibly over his forearm and rubbed her back between the delicate winglike thrust of her shoulder blades. Her head twisted and she shot him a startled glance.

“What?”

He grunted. “Has no one ever called you a rancorous, viper-tongued wench before?”

She blinked. Apparently not.

“Well, there’s an oversight ’Twould be hard to forgive! For had someone had the
balls
to call you out earlier on that caustic tongue, it might have been recast in a more genial mold. As it is, I fear whoever ends up wedding you, Milady Maleficence, will go to bed each night praying God he meets the next morning without having been bled dry, pricked a thousand times over by that savage tongue of yours.”

The glance turned to wide-eyed wonder. “You! You! You—ohhh!” The tongue-lashing she obviously longed to deliver was subverted by another spasm, folding her in half over his forearm, shudders wracking her body. When she was done she reached for the tin cup standing on the floor and with a shaking hand raised it to her mouth. She took a short drink and straightened cautiously.

“You
are no gentleman.”

“Really?” he asked. “Thank you so much for informing—uff!” Her elbow caught him in mid-stomach. A look of open triumph lit her beautiful, disheveled face before another attack of nausea overset it, turning victory to misery and upending her once more over the basin. He held her forehead in his palm, bracing her.

“Thank you. Go ’way.”

He hesitated a second before slipping his arm from around her and standing up. She did sound better. She’d drunk enough water to restore her body’s fluids
and it did neither of them any good for him to remain here when her opposition to his presence grew stronger with each second.

“You must eat. I’ll have a plate sent down—”

“If you bring …” she paused, swallowed audibly, then went on,
“food
 … into this room, I shall not content myself with merely pricking you with words. Do I make myself clear?”

“Abundantly. But I must insist, in all Christian conscience”—at this her mouth quirked—“that you’ll feel better if you—”

“Don’t say that word!
Get out!”
She picked up the wet rag from a puddle on the floor and hurled it at his head. He dodged it easily. She was indeed better. There had been real power in that throw.

He let himself out and only then discovered that he was smiling. What the hell was he grinning about? The girl had tried to do him bodily harm, shouted at him, and threatened him, and here he reacted as though he’d just received his first kiss. He was certainly mad.

But damned if later he could remember anything but the spontaneity of her smile.

And its beauty.

Chapter 13

S
he wasn’t much of a sailor. In fact, she wasn’t any kind of sailor.

This struck Fia—on the rare occasions during the next two days when she could give consideration to something other than how far away she was from the ubiquitous basin (which by the end of the voyage had supplanted castor oil in topping the hierarchy of her personal hatreds)—as being most unfair. After all, she’d spent her childhood looking out at the sea and dreaming about a tall ship that would carry her away. Tall ships and tall, strong captains …