But now Caro knew she was no better than her mother and her friends. Only her price had been different. And God in heaven, how dearly it had cost her!
For a long time Jeremiah stood watching her, crumpled there on the deck at his feet in the black sea of her tangled skirts. She was too lost in her sorrow to notice him, and as she wept softly to herself, he felt the blind anger that had so possessed him lessen and slip away. Overhead he heard Bertle shout an order, followed by the crewmen’s footsteps as they hurried to obey. Strange how he’d forgotten he was even at sea. Stranger still how his whole world seemed to have narrowed to this one tiny cabin and the weeping woman within it.
Her hair had fallen forward to veil her face, leaving the nape of her neck and her back in the open gown touchingly exposed. He had never thought of her as vulnerable, yet as she was now he could think of nothing else, and he had done it.
This was his fault, not hers. The scars he carried were there on his body, plain as day, but the ones that marked her ran deeper, and were no less painful for being hidden. He, of all people, should have listened when she’d begged for his understanding. He didn’t care now what had happened to make her believe she was so unworthy of the love she was born to give. What mattered most was that once again, one more time, he had failed another who had trusted him.
With a weary sigh he crouched down beside her, taking her hands in his to gently raise her to her feet. She kept her face lowered, unwilling to let him see how she wept. Wordlessly he turned her like a doll toward the bunks and began to lace her gown the way she’d first asked. The black cord crossed and recrossed her skin until, with a deft twist of his wrist, he pulled the two sides tightly together. He tied a neat little bow at the neckline and tucked the ends inside the gown.
And then, before she realized it, he was gone.
Chapter Ten
“That rocky island to the nor’ west is Sardinia,” said Jeremiah as he handed his spyglass to Caro, standing beside him on the Raleigh’s quarterdeck. “With any luck at all, we’ll make Naples by nightfall. For all that he’s an unpleasant rascal, Bertle’s done right well for us as a navigator.”
“We’ll be there tomorrow?” asked Caro wistfully as she took the glass, careful not to let her fingers brush his. “So soon?”
Jeremiah nodded, his hand tapping lightly on the rail as he gazed out across the bright blue Mediterranean. Even with a brisk breeze off the water, the morning was warm, and he’d left his coat in the cabin below and stood now in his waistcoat and rolled-up shirtsleeves, the wind billowing through the linen above his tanned forearms.
“Oh, aye, Bertle’s made a first-rate passage for us. Couldn’t be better.” He glanced down at her from the shadow of his hat brim, his eyes very green in the light reflecting from the water. “I thought you’d be pleased, considering. The sooner we make Naples, the sooner you could have your husband back.”
“I am pleased, thank you,” she answered evenly. “It is only that the journey’s been so easy that I wonder that we are there this soon.”
These past weeks with him she had become accomplished at such demonstrations of polite good breeding. By now she could let her eyes meet his without her face growing hot, and smile serenely when he offered his arm to her on the deck. It was all passing genteel, most correct.
She was sure he never guessed how she lay in the bunk above him each night and fought the fevered memory how his lips had felt on hers, the wildfire his touch had sent racing through her blood, and how shamelessly she had writhed in his arms as her body had begged for more. The vividness of the memory shocked her, returning whenever she was near him. She prayed he never noticed how many times she’d watched him covertly beneath her veiled hat and felt her pulse race as he climbed the rigging with an acrobat’s grace, working alongside the Raleigh’s crew to relieve the tedium of the voyage.
Most of all, she wanted him to believe she was as happy and as carefree as he seemed to be himself. Why shouldn’t Jeremiah be? Because he wasn’t married, he’d done nothing wrong, while she had betrayed the trust of one of the kindest men ever created. It could hardly be Frederick’s fault that though she loved him, she’d never been in love with him, a distinction she’d never known existed until now. And now it was too late, too late for all of them. But then she could hide her misery well. She’d had, after all, years of pretending she was something she wasn’t.
Jeremiah watched as she delicately arched her wrist and lifted the glass to her eye, her hands so dainty in the black kid gloves against the polished brass. Damn these overnice, ladylike airs of hers! He missed her impishness and her impulsive laughter and the way she’d tug on his sleeve like an impatient little girl. With her veil knotted back from her hat’s sugar-scoop brim, her face had the exact fashionable blandness expected of a countess. Only the freckles across her nose, like the gold pollen scattered across a lily, remained as he remembered.
Maybe it was the possibility of being reunited with Lord Byfield that had made her turn so proper on him, or maybe this really was the genuine Caroline Moncrief, and the woman he’d fallen in love with had been the artful imposter. Maybe his Caro, his passionate, impulsive, irrepressible Caro, wasn’t his at all, and didn’t exist beyond a handful of misadventures in Portsmouth calculated to bring him here to Naples with her, and those first two wretched nights aboard the Raleigh.
Whoever she was, she’d kept her distance since then. No more kisses, no more confessions, and somehow she’d rigged a way to get in and out of her clothes without his help. She didn’t need him for anything. And that, he told himself fiercely, was all for the best and fine with him.
Too bad he didn’t believe it, too.
“Is Sardinia a country in its own right?” she asked, focusing the glass.
“A kingdom, I think, if General Bonaparte hasn’t swallowed it up wholesale.” More of her polite small talk, he thought contemptuously. She wasn’t even looking in the direction of the island. “I’ve never put in there, so I can’t tell you much of the place.”
“Do you know the colors of their flag?”
“Red with yellow bars, I think. They’ve so few deep-water ships that I can’t have seen it more than a half-dozen times.”
Caro’s veil floated back up before her face, and impatiently she shoved it away without lowering the glass from her eye. “This flag might be red and yellow, but I don’t believe it is. No, now that it’s clear of the horizon, I can see it’s blue and white with the red.”
“What the devil?” Jeremiah grabbed the glass from her. Even at this distance, the tricolor of France was unmistakable, as were the three tiny dots of white topsail that crowned the masts of a frigate. And if Caro had spotted them from the deck, then the frigate’s lookouts high in those same sails would definitely have seen the Raleigh by now, and Jeremiah swore under his breath. To come so close to their destination and then be captured—it was too much like what had happened to the Chanticleer. No more war, he prayed, please God, no more fighting.
“It’s a French ship, isn’t it?” asked Caro, standing up on her toes to try to see better. “If England’s at war with them by now, as everyone said we would be, then they’ll try to catch us, won’t they?”
“Damned right they will.” Jeremiah squinted up at the Raleigh’s own lookout, staring dreamily at the purple-blue hills of Sardinia, and he bit back the automatic reproach. This wasn’t his ship, no matter how much danger the man’s carelessness had put them in.
Bertle wasn’t on deck, but Hart was, and in three steps Jeremiah was at the other man’s side, thrusting his own glass into the mate’s