She glared at him.
“Isadora. May I call you Isadora?”
“Why ask permission? You’re the captain, the despot, the most high admiral of the ocean sea.”
“Not the ocean. This ship.” Very slowly, deliberately, almost insolently he let his hands skim across her shoulders and trail down her arms. “Isadora, you surely don’t need me to make you miserable. You’re doing a fine job of that on your own.”
She caught her breath in fury and surprise. “How dare you?”
He laughed, his hands cradling her elbows. “Because I have nothing to lose, Isadora. Not a damned thing to lose.”
Despite his laughter, she heard pain in his voice, saw it in his eyes. She had never met such a maddening, interesting, complex individual.
“What do you mean by that?”
“You despise me already, sugar. So it doesn’t seem to matter what I do.”
“Your mother is a woman of such admirable manners. I find it surprising that she raised a man who would say such a thing. Particularly after hacking off a lady’s hair with a sabre.”
“It was a midshipman’s dirk.”
“It was the height of rudeness.”
“We’re talking in circles here, Isadora. We’ve been over this. I’m not going to apologize. And you’re not going to be miserable any longer. You were supposed to leave that unhappy mode of life behind when we left Boston.”
“Unhappy? How dare you suggest I am unhappy?”
He let out a sigh of exasperation. “My dear, you are unhappy to the last inch of your shadow. I fear this state is so familiar to you that you no longer recognize it as unhappiness.” Finally he did the unthinkable. He moved his hands to cover hers, making an insistent circular motion with his thumbs in her palms. “What I want you to know is that you don’t have to live like that, Isadora. At least, not while you sail under my ensign.”
She had a strange urge to shut her eyes and simply feel the sensation of his thumbs rubbing her. His fingertips were sinfully warm and leathery from work, so different from the clammy clutches of men forced to partner her at Boston dance parties.
She made herself sit very still, eyes wide open as she fought the inexplicable slow warmth that filled her, beginning with the tips of her fingers and flowing through her body, settling in its more unmentionable places. “I really don’t think,” she began, then had to pause and moisten her lips before going on, “I don’t think you need concern yourself with my happiness or lack thereof.”
“I’m the skipper. Every aspect of every crewman’s life concerns me.” He let go of one hand and cradled her cheek in his palm.
She was too startled to pull back.
“Even if it were not for that,” he continued, “I would care, Isadora. I don’t have many good qualities, but I do care.”
“I…I…” She swallowed, then gave up trying to speak.
“Be safe,” he said. “That’s what today was about. Wear your clothes and fix your hair for comfort, not confinement. No one would look askance at you if you entered the galley for supper without all this frippery.” To punctuate his statement, he ran his hand across the ornate worked trim around her throat. “We’re simple men of the sea, not ballroom snobs on Beacon Hill.”
He stood, leaving her feeling curiously bereft, and went toward the door. “I shall see you on deck.”
“Wait!”
He turned back with an eagerness that startled her. “Yes?”
“You forgot your mirror.” She picked it up and held the palm-sized glass out to him.
“So I did.” He took it from her with a wink. “You’d not like to see me after shaving without a mirror. Not a pretty sight.”
She sat very still after he left, listening to the creak of the timber and the rush of the water past the hull.
Whiskers or no, she thought, Ryan Calhoun would always be a pretty sight.
Ten
Woman stock is rising in the market.
—Lydia Maria Child,
Letter (1856)
Ryan stared into the little mirror with fierce concentration as he drew a straight razor along the side of his jaw. The ship plunged into a trough, causing him to list to one side. He felt the subtle bite of the blade in his chin and swore.
But it was no less than he deserved, he decided. Isadora Peabody’s words still haunted him: Why does cruelty come so easily to you?
He’d wanted to deny it, but the truth was, thoughtlessness did seem to come naturally to him. It had ever been that way with Ryan and women. He was all too willing to partake of their physical charms, but the involvement always ended there. The minute he started to care about them in a deeper way, he made it his business to push them away with careless, cutting words.
Isadora, of course, was the first one he’d actually attacked.
“Have a towel, Skipper.” Journey tossed him one.
Ryan pressed it to his chin. “You’re my steward. You should be doing this.”
“I’m busy,” Journey said distractedly.
Ryan stopped the bleeding and lathered up again to finish shaving. “Did you take the morning readings?”
“I did. I’m reckoning our position now.” Journey gazed intently at the papers on the table in front of him. He had a gift for the logarithms of navigation, figuring in his head with lightning quickness. He gave the task his total attention, yet with his left hand, he fingered the small pouch he wore on a leather strap around his neck. The pendant lay against his heart. Toying with it was a habit, an unconscious tic. Delilah, the wife he’d left behind, had given him the pouch. Inside was a tiny love knot fashioned from a lock of her hair.
Ryan’s gut twisted with impatience and urgency. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t natural for a family to be separated like this. He recalled the morning he and Journey had left to go north. They had stopped at Bonterre, the neighboring plantation where Delilah lived.
Ryan had waited in the open carriage while Journey dropped to the ground near the slave quarters. An anguished smile had strained his face as Delilah came running out of one of the cabins, a toddler held against her hip and her thin cotton dress outlining the ripe shape of her pregnancy. Putting Ruthie down, she’d placed her arms around her husband’s neck, then risen on tiptoe to kiss him solemnly. And then she’d said something Ryan would never forget, something he wasn’t supposed to hear. But her words had been imprinted on his heart forever. “Honey,” Journey’s wife had said, “Life don’t work right when you’re not around.”
Ryan swore at the pain from that memory. He finished shaving and wiped his face, then went out on deck, leaving Journey to his navigational figuring.
A balmy day greeted Ryan. With a sweep of his gaze he read the wind and the sea; this was his gift. Marble-hard swells rose beneath a brisk wind from the west. They would cover a good distance today.
“Morning, Captain.” Ralph Izard bent over the deck, securing a new winch, for Ryan had decided to add an extra lifeboat as a safety measure. Izard’s face, chapped and furred with the beginnings of a beard, crinkled as he smiled briefly. “A fair wind, eh?”
“So it seems, Mr. Izard.” He indicated the tall leather-bound journal under the chief mate’s arm. “Is everything in order?”
“Aye, though I think we took on too little ballast,” he replied.