She didn’t need more than a moment to know she’d been right. In his embrace she felt restrained and trapped, but before she could tell him to let her go, his head lowered as if he meant to kiss her. The words strangled in her throat, and she turned her face to one side. His mouth came down on her unscarred cheek, and his beard felt both soft and scratchy against her skin. The best she could have said of the sensation was that it wasn’t unpleasant.
She braced her feet so her hips were angled as far away from his lower body as possible. “How long is this going to take?”
Thankfully he wasn’t fool enough to keep groping her after that. He tensed, but he peeled his arms off her and stepped back, an unreadable expression on his face. Lera kept her features blank as she smoothed a crease out of her coat.
“You know,” he said, “in Dagre, we have a name for women who entice men and then want to stop.”
“Oh, we have a name for such women in Denalay too.” She went to the door and said over her shoulder, “They’re called selective. Good afternoon, Captain.”
After that she hesitated in the empty passageway outside, then went to knock on Jason’s door. The door opened, but she forgot all about the woman when she saw Jason, because he wore nothing but a sheet wrapped around his waist. The sheet was long enough to reach his ankles, though once Lera had seen that, she realized she’d actually looked down.
Her face felt scorching. She didn’t dare to meet his eyes, so she settled for a knot in the wall to the far right, though staring at it promised a crick in her neck. Keep tracing the knot’s shape, she told herself, but instead she saw Jason as if his image was imprinted on her vision.
Which was ridiculous. She’d seen enough men without even the benefit of a sheet, so what difference did one more make? It wasn’t as though he had anything those men didn’t. No scars, for one thing. Though she had enough for both of them. No hair on his chest, either—stop it!
Thankfully all those thoughts had flown through her mind in a matter of instants, because she heard him clear his throat as if he’d been startled too, but was past it now. “My clothes are being laundered,” he said.
“Could I come in?” Lera asked the knot.
“Of course.”
She heard him move back to give her plenty of room, and once she was in, the door shut. Cautiously she detached her attention from the knot and tried to look around without her gaze once alighting on him.
Except for the officers’ living quarters, the cabins on a warship were typically small and bare, so she wasn’t surprised to see nothing in the room except for a hammock. Not that she intended to sit down; it wasn’t her cabin, after all. She stood with her shoulders to the wall, fidgeted with her hands and clasped them behind her back before she looked straight at him for the first time since she had come in. Eyes. Nothing lower than the eyes.
“I didn’t mean to intrude while you were, uh…” Don’t say naked. “…here.” Brilliant. Move on. “But do you know who the third woman on board is?”
Jason shook his head. “I just happened to see her once. Why?”
“She’s the one who was going to marry Richard Alth and be crowned ruler of the land.”
He didn’t reply, but that seemed to be due to genuine surprise for once, rather than his usual bloody-minded stubbornness. There was a pale flicker of movement far below eye level that she strongly suspected was the sheet sliding below one hip, but he caught it at once, tugging it back into position as if in reflex, his mind clearly elsewhere.
“You know her name?” she asked, to distract herself from looking at him. Odd how Garser had never mentioned it.
“Everyone knows it. There was a very popular barroom song about Queen Meghan the First—and Last.” He pushed his hair back from his forehead with his free hand. “I didn’t know who she was at the time, but she tried to escape from this ship. I’m afraid I stopped her and she was dragged back.”
“Well, there’s no need to regret it, because we need her on board.” Lera wondered if that was the Dagran chivalry she’d heard about. Though she couldn’t help thinking that for all Jason’s faults, he could always be depended on in a crisis. But something about his answer didn’t make sense, and she saw what it was.
“Wait a moment,” she said. “She was trying to escape? She must have known she was going to be returned to her future husband. Or was that…”
“…why she tried to escape?” Jason finished. His voice was cool and flat, but she heard the undertone in it as easily as she would have sensed a current. “Looks like she considered that the greater of two evils, doesn’t it? To the point where she killed a man who got in her way.”
Unity. Lera struggled to keep her features blank, because her first thought was how easily that man could have been Jason. Especially since he wasn’t armed, wouldn’t know how to use a blade if he’d had one and certainly wouldn’t have attacked a woman.
As for the woman, it was best not to start thinking of her as an innocent prisoner being turned over to a cruel fate, which was probably why Garser had never used her name. Best not to think about her—just accept that this was how Dagrans handled their internal disputes and move along.
Suddenly realizing how long the silence in the cabin had stretched out, she shifted her feet on the floor. “I should leave. Thank you for, uh, telling me this.”
“Don’t mention it.”
The words were polite, but the undertone was there again. That time she deciphered it for what it was, a cool sardonic edge that brought her gaze straight to his face, to the brown eyes watching her. “After all,” he went on evenly, “I’m not the one who told you about her—Captain Garser did.”
“How did you know?” She felt prickly at once, though he could hardly have been listening outside Garser’s door in his current state of dress. Undress. Damn it, she wasn’t going to think about that.
Jason shrugged one shoulder. All her determination didn’t make her blind, so in her peripheral vision she was aware of the muscles shifting under smooth skin. “Who else would have?” he said. “Besides, you’ve just come from him, haven’t you? I can smell his cologne.”
Oh hell. Was it that obvious? Without thinking, she raised a hand, self-consciously rubbing her palm across her cheek where he’d kissed her.
He breathed out—silently, but the movement of his bare chest was clear—and looked away. “Thanks for confirming it.”
The flatness of his tone brought a jolt of temper so hot it burned away embarrassment, and it took all her self-control not to show that as she lowered her arm. She’d put him back in his place, she’d do it damn quick and then she’d go to her cabin to change into a uniform that smelled better.
“You have some gall.” She put as much contempt as she could into her voice. “As if what I do with a man is any of your concern.”
He’d made a good show of acting like he was some detached observer miles above the messy physical things that people like her and Garser did, but either her tone or her words seemed to bring him back down to Eden. His gaze was on her at once, sharp and snapping like new pine in a fire.
“It doesn’t matter to you that he’s married?” he said.
Married?
Lera blinked, stunned into silence and trying to recall if Garser had said a word to her about being married. No, she would have remembered that. Unbelievable. He looked down on her for calling a halt, but he was happily cheating on his wife.
If it was true. Jason wasn’t exactly neutral in the matter, she had to remember that, and he wasn’t any more naturally honest than Garser. He was probably hoping she’d be shocked and devastated, and then he could share her indignation at the villain who had wronged her, and then he could comfort her with what he hadn’t gotten to do in the brothel. Not a chance. Even if she was livid with Garser, she’d deal with that herself. It had nothing to do with Jason.
“If he do
esn’t care, why should I?” She tried for her most careless tone, as though she seduced married men every day of the week. “And why do you?”
“You know why.”
That time there was nothing cool or sarcastic in his voice. It sounded as if the words had been dragged out of him and as if he was determined not to say or reveal anything else. Not that he needed to. She knew why, all right. He’d wanted her from the time of their first meeting, just as he wanted her now.
Her pulse beat faster, and she managed to swallow through the tightness in her throat, but she had no idea what to say in reply. She would have turned away at once if he had made an obvious pass at her as Garser had done, but she couldn’t refuse what hadn’t been offered. Her being in his cabin was her doing, not his.
As if he’d had the same thought, he moved towards her and reached for the door’s handle. She crushed an urge to back away from him, which would look as though she was afraid, or to step closer, which would be worse, and stayed where she was with an effort of will as he opened the door. Of course he did that in such a way that he was behind the door, but anyone passing by would have an eyeful of her.
“Want to leave?” he said quietly.
She had never broken her unwavering lock with his eyes, and she searched them for any hint of a challenge. What she saw in his face instead was a desire that made his mouth a taut line and all but crackled in the air between them. She felt as though he was more aware of her body than she was of his, as if she was the one who stood nearly naked on the bare floorboards. Except his control was as strong as hers. If she chose to walk out, he would let her go.
Without looking away from him, she reached for the door and her fingers brushed over smooth hard wood. She didn’t know if she meant to anchor herself with that, something solid to hold on to while she walked out, but her body decided before her mind could. A twitch of muscle, a flex of fingers, and the door swung shut.
Click.
Jason’s eyes dilated, dark with need, and he met her the rest of the way. His free arm went around her waist. Her body jolted from the touch, though that only made her press more closely against his tall frame, and her skin prickled as if a tide of sensation both hot and cold at once had rushed beneath it. The sheet might as well not have existed.
Her head tilted back and her eyes closed involuntarily. Feeling his body pressed against hers was overwhelming enough without seeing him as well. Her senses filled with the scent of his skin and the sound of his breathing as his head bent to her.
Her lips parted, but he kissed the side of her face, barely grazing the smoothness of her cheek before his mouth found her ear. He took her earlobe between his teeth and heat spread like ripples from his mouth.
She turned her head, searching blindly for him. Instead he kissed her throat, his tongue flicking hot and wet, before he breathed softly on her skin. She gasped, shaky with desire that thudded through her, and her hands went up to grasp his shoulders. Her palms flattened, fingers pressing hard into muscles that felt harder as she pulled him close against her.
“Ah, Lera.”
The whisper was raw, his voice deepening to a growl, and it made her lean into him, needing more. His thigh pressed between her legs, and she twisted just enough to feel his erection, hard as an anchor against her belly. He shuddered, and his teeth found the softness of her throat in retaliation. Then he sucked on her flesh. Her nipples ached to be mouthed like that, suckled until she was wet and bucking with need, until she pushed him to his knees before her so he could press his face between her thighs, making her cry out before he pulled her down to him and mounted her.
Outside, footsteps hurried along in rapid thuds, and the door at the end of the passageway was flung open. Over the low roar in her ears, like the tide echoed in a shell, Lera heard an urgent voice say “Captain—” and Jason lifted his head. His gaze went from her to the closed door, and the sound of running feet was echoed threefold in the passage beyond.
“Something’s wrong.” Lera held her voice to a whisper, and Jason let her go. That was abrupt enough to make her stagger back, but she caught the handle of the door and steadied herself as he reached quickly out to her. Her body yearned for the warm solidity of his, but she couldn’t indulge in that any longer. She wasn’t sure she should have given in that time.
She shoved the door open and pivoted out, then yanked it shut in the same movement. Being alone in the passageway helped, and she glanced down self-consciously at herself. No, no evidence of what they had done. She hurried up the ladder, telling herself it was a good thing he hadn’t kissed her, because she couldn’t have gone topside with obviously swollen lips.
She went to the prow and Garser handed her a spyglass. “A point off the port bow,” he said.
She strained to see. The schooner was so distant that its sails looked like grains of salt, moored by a small, rocky island. When she lowered the spyglass, she heard a change in the engine, the usual deep rumble lessening in intensity.
“Are we slowing already?” she said.
Garser took off his cap and drew the back of his hand across his forehead before he nodded. His gaze went past her in a quick search of whoever was on deck, and when he inclined his head in a sharp over-here gesture, she saw he’d singled Kovir out. She thought he would give Kovir the spyglass next, but instead he replaced his cap and told the second officer he had the deck.
“I need to speak with you both,” he said to her and Kovir. “My cabin, please.”
He led the way, with his first officer bringing up the rear behind the two of them. Lera’s pulse beat faster, because she guessed that was it. The Dagrans had never needed Kovir to find Princeps, so now she would learn what they really wanted him to do.
Garser pulled out chairs for them and sat at the head of the table, elbows braced before him. “So.” He locked his fingers together and studied them before he looked from her to Kovir. “You were told about Richard Alth and the threat he issued.”
Kovir looked too tense to do more than nod, so she answered. “He has a ship loaded with explosives and is holding people hostage.”
“He’s endangering thousands of lives, that’s for certain,” Garser said. “But those people are on the mainland, not anywhere near his ship.”
“How can he—”
“He’s planning to use those explosives to cause a tidal wave.”
The words fell like stones into the silence of the cabin, and Lera’s stomach lurched. A tidal wave? She had never seen one of those, but she had been in fierce storms, had struggled to take a ship safely through wild water that surged over the gunwales, smashed boats to splinters against the hull and ripped men off the deck. Compared to a tidal blast, that was a ripple on a pond.
“Holy Unity,” she whispered.
“My sentiments exactly,” Garser said.
The polite agreement, as though she had commented on the weather, took her from incredulity to anger in a heartbeat. She rose, hands gripping the edge of the table so tightly they felt numb where her nails bit into the wood. “You never said a word to us about—”
“Would you have come with me if we had?” Garser still spoke mildly. “I was under orders, Captain Vanze. I’m sure you can understand.”
Fuming though she was, Lera was never more aware of her surroundings than when she was ready for a fight. Garser’s posture hadn’t changed, but his first officer, at the other end of the table, was clearly poised to shout for help or to intercept her or both. She set her teeth. If they lived through this, she’d go to the Council of Eyes and Voices herself.
The only sounds in the cabin were her chair’s legs scraping across the floor as she forced herself to sit, but she was determined not to speak. Instead, the silence ended when Kovir spoke.
“Is it possible to create a tidal wave that way?” he said to Garser, as calmly as if they were on the mainland discussing a purely hypothetical si
tuation.
“It can be done.” Garser swallowed, and Lera realized he wasn’t as unaffected by the confrontation as he might want to appear. “His message to the Council said the explosives had been sunk to the seabed. If they’re buried deep enough, in an unstable enough part of the seabed, detonating them would cause an underwater quake. That would result in a tidal wave.”
Kovir frowned. “But he would be killed too, wouldn’t he?”
“Actually, no,” the first officer replied. “You see, such an explosion wouldn’t be felt as strongly in the open ocean, by a ship directly above it. The shock waves travel through the water and have their greatest effect when they reach land.”
Now that Lera was slightly calmer, she thought Richard Alth, while he might well be a madman as the Minister of Defense had called him, had also been quite clever in his choice of threat. Far from the mainland, protected further by the Sea of Weeds and—if Garser was right—able to cause a tidal wave while staying untouched himself. It wasn’t safe to underestimate someone who’d picked such an advantageous position from which to dictate terms.
She wondered if the Dagrans might have been better off just meeting those terms, but even if their government had been prepared to negotiate with a terrorist, they couldn’t make sure Alth would hold to his side of the bargain. Besides, once he had his gold and his woman, what was he supposed to do with tons of explosives at the bottom of the sea—haul them back up?
She almost asked if word had been sent to Iternum. That land was nearby, likely to be affected by a tidal wave—and most importantly, the Iternans had powerful magic. But she remembered they were under a death sentence if they left their homeland. No point expecting them to hold back so much as a drop of water.
“So what do you want us to do?” she said finally.
Garser leaned back in his chair, looking relieved. “The explosives are on the seabed, but there’ll be a way to ignite them from the ship. All you need to do is sever the fuse, and that will defang the threat completely.”
The Highest Tide Page 12