“I confess, you have me at a loss. Tell you what?” He walked past her, leaving her to follow him to the other side of the deck while he repeated the procedure he’d just done and tied another knot.
“The celebration of your homecoming would have exposed you.”
He turned to face her, and she thought he smiled a little. The sea was an eerie midnight surge behind him, crisscrossed by scores of shadowy lines that shot up to the masts. The dream washed through her like a wave spreading across the beach.
“You do realize the insane are poorly treated in England,” he said. “You ought to have a care.”
She laughed away both his suggestion and the dream’s temptation.
“Tell me, Captain...do you deny it out of self-preservation or shame?”
He stepped so close that his warm breath, tinged with a hint of the rum her crew favored, wafted over her face. “You can hardly blame me for concealing my identity when you’ve made little secret that I would not be as welcome a guest as my lieutenant.”
A shiver coursed over her skin.
“Although I’ll admit you’ve surprised me,” he went on. A hint of amusement played at the corner of his mouth, drawing her attention to firm lips accustomed to issuing commands. “I would have expected you to mete out something rather more unpleasant than a cabin boy’s duties. That is what you’ve been doing, is it not? Punishing me, and not my lieutenant. I suspect you’ve known the truth for some time—William’s loyalty is steadfast indeed. Bravo, Captain. You have proven yourself an accomplished actress these past weeks.”
“As you have proven yourself an actor.” Let him assume what he would about how she had discovered his identity. “Perhaps we should both join a theatrical troupe on our return.”
“I fear the ton will be shocked enough as it is.”
Oh, yes. The ton would be shocked. It was difficult to think standing this close to him, so Katherine moved to the railing and breathed a little easier. “Perhaps you hoped to keep the element of surprise on your side so you could have my ship arrested and forfeited the moment we reach England.” She raised a brow at him over her shoulder.
He gave a bark of laughter and came up behind her, close enough that his words feathered the back of her neck. “If your ship is arrested and forfeited, it will be none of my doing. Not only do I lack the power, I also lack the desire. I assure you, once we reach England your life will proceed without interference from me.”
She forced her attention on the sea, breathing only through conscious effort, inhaling his scent with every breath. Apparently he had not considered that he was her leverage against his brother’s bill. “Is it true that you plan to resign your commission?” she asked.
He moved in next to her, and she watched his strong hands wrap around the railing much too close to hers. The breeze fluttered his sleeve against hers, and she felt it like skin against skin.
“Everything I told you about myself was true.”
She made a noise. “You told me you have an elder brother named Theodore.”
“I was describing Lieutenant Barclay.”
“You also said you had never told a fiction except to your governess—”
“That was a lie.”
“—and that you sometimes dislike yourself.”
“Given your lack of regard for me, you of all people should have little difficulty understanding the truth of that.”
His voice carried a dark undertone that spoke of regret. She chose to ignore it. “I find it difficult to believe you plan to abandon the glory of the sea when you have yet to reach the pinnacle of your career.”
“The glory of the sea,” he repeated thoughtfully. In profile he looked like chiseled stone except for the breeze ruffling his hair. Her fingers warmed with the knowledge of what that hair felt like, as though the dream had not been a dream at all. “And what, exactly, would that glory be?” he inquired, staring out at the sea. “The French prize I took in ’59, and then recaptured twice after she was taken back, only to have her sunk by the Spanish? Or perhaps the cholera outbreak in ’61 that killed nigh on half my crew. Or certainly you don’t mean the wreck of the Henry’s Cross—glorious indeed.”
If his bitterness had been a whip, she would have bled.
“Glory,” he said again, turning to look at her. “Perhaps you refer to the merchant ship I stumbled across ten years ago. I found her in the hooks of two xebecs, like a fly already half-wrapped in a spider’s silk.”
Katherine tensed. The Merry Sea. “And so you sank her.”
“I attempted a rescue,” he shot back.
Her mind filled with the smell of blood, the terrifying clash of swords, the screams of the Merry Sea’s crew, the bite of rope around her wrists. The explosive roar of Captain Warre’s cannons. “Was I supposed to catch a cannonball and float to safety?”
“I didn’t realize there were women aboard,” he bit out.
“Would it have made a difference?”
“The fate of European men taken to Barbary is well known.” The relatively few women, however, were usually ransomed quickly and returned home.
It took her a moment to realize the implication. “So you assumed they would have preferred to die?” she asked in disbelief.
“A quick death in the sea versus a slow, tortured one being sodomized and performing heavy labor under the whip? Yes, I think they would have. The fighting I witnessed aboard the Merry Sea attests to that.”
“Self-preservation is a different thing from being murdered,” she said coldly.
“Murdered?”
“Would you prefer to call it mercy killing? I can assure you, from where I sat there was no mercy in it at all.” But honestly she didn’t know which had been worse—the destruction wreaked by his cannons, or the calm that had settled over that xebec after it made its escape and the cannon fire died. Her own screams dying in her throat after she’d given up tugging uselessly on the ropes. The terror of being brought ashore, captive, in Salé—a foreign city that was the furthest thing imaginable from either London or the Continent—and having no idea what to expect.
He was quiet for a long moment—affronted, no doubt, by her lack of gratitude. “You have a flair for the melodramatic,” he finally said. “And a righteous view of naval warfare for one who has plundered so many ships.”
“I only plunder those that have already plundered.”
“That’s putting a rather fine point on it, don’t you think?”
“If you’re implying there is no difference between making a prize of a pirate’s take and plundering a trading vessel sailing under legitimate colors, then no, I don’t think so. Besides, my marauding is greatly exaggerated. I’ve made most of my fortune running perfectly legal trade goods.” She kept her eyes on the sea but felt him watching her. Assessing. Judging. Wondering. Pearls of moonlight danced on the waves.
From the corner of her eye she saw him reach out and capture a strand of her hair. Her breath caught. The fire that had torn her from sleep ignited instantly. Her gaze flew to his hand, and she watched him smooth the inky curl between his fingers. Then she met his eyes.
He dropped the strand as though it had burned him. Common sense screamed at her to step back, but this was her deck, not his. Her ship. Her command.
“Thanks to my failures,” he said roughly, “you were fed to the Barbary dogs.”
Annoyance raced through her veins. “To call them dogs would be to say that