‘I’ll get into bed, pull up the blanket and pretend to be dozing. When they’ve gone I’ll wedge the latch before I take my bath.’
That did it. The image of Clem standing up, slowly pulling off that shirt, unbinding her breasts, stepping shivering into cold water, her nipples puckering, was so vivid Nathan drew in a deep, racking breath. Her eyes slid down his body, stopped, widened. ‘Good idea. I’ll knock when I come back.’
Clemence sat staring at the back of the cabin door for some minutes after it had shut abruptly behind Nathan. So, not only was she sharing a cabin with a man she desired and who had discovered she was a woman, but a man who was showing unmistakable evidence of the fact that he desired her, too.
She understood the theory of lovemaking, naturally. But she had never observed the—her mind scrabbled rather wildly for a word—the mechanism before. And she had produced that effect on him. The feeling of gratification was something to be ashamed of, she told herself severely.
What would she have done if Nathan had done more than kiss her? Protest or yield? She had a sinking feeling that she would have yielded. No, worse, she would have positively incited him. She had seen those sculpted muscles; now she wanted to caress them.
Shame, confusion, arousal were all uncomfortable internal sensations when you had just had a nasty thump on the head. Clemence slid down under the blanket, pulled it high over her ears and closed her eyes, thankful to be still for a while. If she could slip into sleep, she could pretend this was the dream.
The sound of voices, the rattle of the door opening, jerked her out of her doze, rigid under the blanket. It seemed a very slight barricade. There was a thump on the floor, some more banging about, then the door closed again. Cautiously Clemence sat up. There was a small half-barrel on the floor, just big enough for a person to sit in with their knees drawn up, and two big buckets of water and a jug.
She slipped out of bed and wedged the latch on the door with her knife, then went to dip a finger in the water containers. The buckets were salt, but the jug was fresh for her face and hair. A rummage through Nathan’s kit bag produced a new block of green soap. She sniffed. Olive oil. On the side were imprinted the words Savon de Marseilles. And there was a luxuriously large sponge as well. French olive-oil soap and sponges? Had he been in the Mediterranean recently? She sensed there was a lot he had not told her.
Clemence stripped, sighing with relief as the linen strips uncoiled from around her ribs. She ran her hands over her torso, massaging the ridges where the bandages had cut into her skin. Nathan’s hands had rested there, and there—and just there.
She stepped into the tub, shivered and hunkered down, gasping as the cold water covered her belly. Her head throbbed; the strange new pulse between her thighs throbbed, too, despite the chill of the water, and she realised the fear that had been ever present in the pit of her stomach for days had gone at last.
There was no logical explanation—it was dangerous folly not to be frightened. Clemence reached for the block of soap and began to work up a lather.
Nathan tapped on the door, wondering at the apprehension that gripped him. What was he going to find inside? His imagination reacted luridly to months of enforced celibacy at sea; it suddenly seemed a long time since he had left England and paid off his mistress. The remembered sweetness of Clemence in his arms conjured up the vision of a slender, naked woman, dripping with water, a nymph uncoiling herself from her tiny pool. The reality, when the door opened, was Clem, wet hair tousled, cheeks glowing and exuding a healthy, and less than erotic, smell of olive-oil soap.
In her clean second-hand clothes she looked the perfect well-scrubbed youth until she met his eye and blushed, rosily. Heat washed through his body and he gritted his teeth. ‘Better?’
‘Yes, much, much better, thank you. I found some birch-bark powder in your medical kit and that helped my headache, and the bliss of being clean, I cannot describe.’ She gave a complicated little wriggle of sensual satisfaction, causing his loins to tighten painfully, and smiled. ‘It is horrible being dirty; I don’t know why it is so difficult to get boys to wash. Surely no one is willingly dirty?’
Nathan found he was not up to discussing any subject touching Clemence and the removal of clothes. She followed his eyes to the tub of dirty water, perhaps assuming his silence was irritation. ‘Sorry, I was just trying to work out how to empty it.’
‘I’ll use the empty bucket and bail it out through the porthole.’ He tossed his waistcoat on to the bunk and rolled up his sleeves. ‘You’ve been very thrifty with the water.’
She was looking at his bare forearms. Nathan watched his own muscles bunch as he hefted the bucket and found, to his inner amusement, that he was endeavouring to make as light work of the task as possible. Poseur, he mocked himself. Showing off like a cock with a new hen. He remembered the frisson of pleasure when he had sensed Julietta’s eyes on him in his uniform, the temptation to swagger to impress her.
‘There isn’t much space in the tub,’ Clemence pointed out, jerking him back to the present. ‘And there’ll be even less room for you.’
Nathan chucked a pail full of water out of the porthole, his mind distractingly full of the image of Clemence curled up in the tub. ‘You’ll have to scrub my back, then, if I can’t reach,’ he said, half-joking.
‘I suppose I could,’ she said doubtfully. ‘With my eyes closed, of course. Have you a back brush?’
‘No. I was teasing you.’ She smiled at him, unexpectedly, and he found himself grinning back. ‘Are you usually this calm about things, Clem? I would have thought you fully justified if you were throwing hysterics by now.’
‘It wouldn’t do any good, would it?’ she pointed out, folding discarded clothes with a housewifely air that contrasted ludicrously with her appearance.
‘I wish my father was alive and I was at home with him, or, if that cannot happen, I wish my uncle and cousin were the men Papa believed them to be. Or, worst come to worst, I wish I had stowed away on a nice merchantman and was now having tea in the captain’s wife’s cabin. But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride and having hysterics would not be pleasant for you.’
‘That’s considerate of you.’ Nathan poured clean water into the tub and began to unbutton his shirt.
‘It is in my interests not to alienate you,’ Clemence pointed out, all of a sudden as cool and sharp as fresh lemonade. She sat down on her bunk, curled her legs under her and faced the wall.
‘What’s the matter?’ Nathan asked, his fingers stilling on the horn buttons.
‘I do not want to have to go into the privy cupboard while you have your bath.’
‘Oh. Yes, of course.’ He would have stripped off without a second thought, Nathan realised; he was so focused on not pulling her into his arms that he was forgetting all the other ways he could shock or alarm her.
The shock of the cold water as he crouched down was a blessed relief for a moment, then the absence of the nagging tension in his groin was replaced by the sobering reality of protecting a young woman on the Sea Scorpion. Clemence would be safer in a dockside brothel—at least she could climb out of a window.
Nathan shook his head in admiration as he scrubbed soap into his torso. Out of a window overhanging the sea, up creepers, along a roof, stealing a horse…Now that was a woman with courage and brains. He had been brought up to regard the ideal woman as frail, clinging and charmingly reliant upon a man’s every word. And he had found himself one who apparently embodied all of those attributes combined with the exotic looks of half-Greek parentage. The only fault his mother would have found with her—at first—was her lack of money.
They had all been well-dowered young ladies, the candidates for his hand that his mother had paraded before him. She always managed to completely ignore the fact that, however worthy