by Peggy Gaddis
“You’re not trying to tell me you aren’t perfectly aware of your good looks and your well-practiced charm?” Claire mocked spitefully.
He studied her a moment longer and then said very quietly, “That hurt.”
“I’m sorry — ”
His eyes held hers, steady, measuring, yet with something in their depths that was much warmer and that had the ability to make her heart beat uncomfortably fast.
“You’re not a bit sorry,” he countered grimly. “If only I knew what it was that I do — or that I am — that irritates you so, darling, I’d try to change it. I promise with all my heart — ”
“This is utterly absurd,” Claire said wildly. She tried to get to her feet and was unpleasantly startled to discover that her knees wouldn’t support her. “I know it’s a part of your job to charm feminine passengers — ”
“That,” Curt stated dispassionately, “is a lie.”
Claire blinked and caught her breath as she studied him.
His brown jaw was hard-set, a little ridge of muscle leaping along it, his eyes cold and bleak. Now he was looking at her as though he didn’t like her at all, and she saw that he was coldly angry.
“I’m the captain’s second-in-command,” he stated coldly. “As such it’s my job to take as many of the worrisome details of his job as I can on my own shoulders. ‘Charming the feminine passengers’ is certainly not a part of my job, as you so charmingly put it. Just why you should be so busy trying to cut me down to size, I have no idea. But before you leave this room, you’re going to tell me — if it takes us until the end of the cruise! Is that clear?”
“It’s nothing personal,” Claire managed huskily. “It’s just that I’m — well, a bit wary of good-looking men.”
Curt studied her for a moment, and then he nodded.
“He must have been one gosh-awful fool,” he said quietly.
Claire felt as though she had taken a step in the dark and stubbed her toe violently.
“He?” she stammered wildly, knowing it was inane but unable in her present state of mind to find anything better to say.
Curt nodded as though he, too, felt it was inane but answered it nonetheless.
“The man who hurt you so much that you’re a bit soured on the whole sex,” he said.
Claire looked away from him and felt her face flush with shame.
“She had a lot of money,” she managed feebly.
“I still say he was a fool, if you were in love with him.”
“I was very much — ”
“Then I’m sorry, darling. Very sorry.”
There was a brief moment of silence between them that warned her of the growing tension. Once more she tried to stand, and this time, by resting her hand on the chair arm, she managed it.
“May I go now?” she asked faintly.
He looked up at her from the chair where he had sat down, and his brows were knotted in a scowl.
“Of course not,” he told her sternly. “We aren’t nearly through.”
Claire blinked, but sat down again and managed to meet his eyes.
“If I’ve been offensive,” she stammered against that growing tension, “I apologize. I’m sorry — ”
“Offensive is scarcely the word I’d have used,” Curt told her. “But I suppose it will have to do. It’s much milder than I’d have used. Still, now that we have reached some sort of understanding — ” He broke off and his scowl deepened. “We have, haven’t we?”
Claire gave a small, startled laugh that was faintly edged with hysteria.
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know about that,” she confessed.
“Well, at least I know now why you have been treating me like the lowest living form of animal life,” he told her with a sudden briskness. “And you know that I’m in love with you and want to marry you — ”
“What?”
He looked at her in puzzled surprise.
“Well, don’t you?” he demanded.
Claire’s eyes were round with astonishment, and her heart was beating so hard she felt certain he must hear it.
“How could I?” she asked faintly. “You never said so — ”
“And what chance have I had to say anything to you that couldn’t be said in the presence of the entire passenger list and most of the crew?” he demanded sharply. “Why else do you suppose I lured you here tonight, except to settle the details?”
Claire asked faintly, “What details?”
“Why, the details of just when and where we will be married, of course.” He seemed to think her question was too absurd to deserve an answer. “It can be at sea, with Captain Rodolfson performing the ceremony and the passengers and crew as witnesses; or it can be ashore, provided you don’t make me wait too long. I really am very much in love with you, Claire. I’m thirty-two, and this is the first time I’ve ever said that to a woman.”
Claire put her hands to her throbbing forehead and stared at him in helpless amazement.
“But — oh, for goodness sake!” she stammered faintly. “I haven’t said I’d marry you, anywhere or at any time.”
The eager light went out of his eyes and his face fell. His big, lean, powerful-looking fingers were twisted together, and his eyes were on them as though he could no longer endure to look at her.
“I know,” he said huskily. “I thought maybe if I talked very fast, took an awful lot for granted and hurried you, I might bludgeon you into saying yes. I see I was wrong.”
“You wouldn’t really want a wife you’d have to bludgeon into marrying you, would you?” she asked.
Curt looked up at her, and their eyes tangled. And a warm, wild sweetness unlike anything she had ever known before slipped into her heart. She had a sudden desire to lean forward, frame his face between her two palms and kiss him! And the force, the unexpectedness of that desire shocked her so that for a moment her face revealed her emotion.
“I’d want you for my wife any darned way I could get you,” he told her, and the force of his feeling made his voice a little harsh. “If I had to fling you over my shoulder, screaming and fighting the way the ancients are supposed to have done, I’d still want you for my wife.”
He stood up after a moment and turned toward the door.
“I don’t suppose there’s any more to say,” he said over his shoulder.
Claire said unsteadily. “You come right back here!”
Startled, afraid to hope, Curt turned, and her tremulous smile, the mist of tears in her eyes, lit a flame of hope in his eyes that made her want to put her arms about him.
“Yes, Claire?” he said huskily, while she struggled for words.
“Oh, Curt, you’ve taken me so by surprise,” she told him, and her tremulous smile deepened. “Isn’t that a corny phrase, though? ‘This is such a surprise!’ But it is, Curt. I’d — well, I hadn’t dreamed you could — it’s been so sudden. Golly, I’m digging up all the old corny phrases — ”
“So stop it and put me out of my misery,” Curt ordered, with a restrained violence that bespoke his inner hope and turmoil. “Is it ‘yes’ or ‘no’?”
She held out her hand to him and then dropped it before he could grasp it and turned away from him.
“Oh, Curt, you’ll have to give me a little time to get used to the idea,” she stammered shakily.
“How much time?” he insisted.
“Just — just until I can be sure!”
“Then — I do have a chance?” His tone was ardent, pleading, ragged with desire.
“I knew Rick so long,” she murmured as though she spoke only to herself. “It just sort of — well, grew into love. I was heart-broken when he ran out on me. And now, such a little while later, I don’t seem to be able to remember what he looked like. That’s very strange, isn’t it?”
“Not so very,” Curt countered, within reach of her, yet not touching her, though his eyes embraced her with an ardent yearning. “I think it just meant that you weren’t so much in love with him as you were �
�� well, used to him.”
They had been standing so close to each other that she had felt he must surely hear the wild tumult in her heart. Now his arms went out and closed about her, gently, hesitantly at first; and then, as the warmth of her filled his arms, his embrace tightened until they were so close they were almost a part of each other. And his head bent, and his mouth closed on hers for a moment of such exquisite tenderness that she felt as though she swam in an enchanted shining sea.
It was a moment that endured until she felt that she could no longer bear the exquisite tenderness of it. Then he held her a few inches away from him, and his eyes were glowing with a warmth and a radiance that made her heart skip another fast beat.
“So now we know,” he said huskily, and though his voice was low, it held a note of such joy that it was like a shout.
“I’m beginning to,” she answered, and stood on top-toe to kiss him again. “But, you’ll have to give me a little time, Curt. This time I have to be — oh, so very sure!”
“You shall have all the time you need, dearest, now that I know there is a chance for me,” he promised her. And his cheek was pressed against her hair as he held her so closely that she could feel her heart pounding against his, as though the two hearts sang a lovely melody made perfect by being together.
Chapter Fifteen
When at last she had said good night to him and was once more in her own stateroom, she dropped down on the side of the bed, her face in her hands. She had the feeling that she had been rushed headlong through space and was only now being given a chance to get her thoughts in order.
She got ready for bed at last and lay wide-eyed, staring into the moonlight that shimmered through her porthole. It was a gorgeous tropic night; the deck would be awash with moonlight; there might be flying fish to see!
She glanced at the clock on the small bed-side table and saw that the hands pointed to two A.M. She slid out of bed, walked to the porthole and looked out. Then, moving very quietly, she got into slacks and a thin shirt, thrust her bare feet into brown leather scuffs and walked to her door.
She opened it very cautiously, thoughtful of the slumber of her fellow passengers. And then she stood rigid, speechless, dazed. Curt was standing at the door of the Barclay cabin, which obviously he had just eased shut behind him.
She watched him with wide, incredulous eyes as he stood there for a moment, his head bowed. And then he went swiftly, cautiously away from the door toward the stairs that led up to the deck.
Claire watched until he had vanished, and then she closed her own door and dropped down on the edge of the bed. She was dazed and bewildered. What did it all mean? Just a little while ago, Curt had held her close in his arms and had asked him to marry him. He had said that he had never before asked any woman to marry him. Yet now he was hurrying stealthily away from Vera Barclay’s cabin!
Suddenly her thoughts fell into place and she could even laugh a little, though shakily, at her jealous suspicions, because it was jealousy that made her so angry at seeing Curt leaving Vera’s cabin at two in the morning. Now she told herself that Vera had not been alone in the cabin. Nora was there, of course. Vera had been very upset when she had learned that they were putting in at the port in British Honduras; she had left the salon in a fury. No doubt Nora had summoned Curt when she had been unable to quiet her mother.
That, Claire told herself with a relief so complete that it made her smile radiantly, was the whole explanation. Vera wasn’t ill; if she had been, Curt would have summoned Claire to attend her. No, Vera was merely indulging in a tantrum and Nora, unable to quiet her, had asked Curt’s help.
It was no more than that, Claire told herself, and was ashamed that within so short a time after Curt’s protestation of love, she should have plunged into such an abyss of doubt. She knew now that she was going to say “yes” to his proposal. And the thought brought a warm sweetness that made it lore than ever necessary for her to get out on deck in the glorious moonlight. The cabin seemed suddenly too small to hold her great happiness, and once more she opened her door, cast a swift glance along the empty corridor, and moved with a nurse’s accustomed silence toward the companionway.
She was passing the salon, which lay in darkness save for the moonlight that felt its way through the windows, when she heard the sound of sobbing, half-muffled, so desperate, so desolate that it stopped her in her tracks.
Somewhere in the salon someone was weeping heartbrokenly; someone whose grief was so deep that only tears could ease the unendurable tension. And Claire instinctively moved into the salon, intent on offering solace.
She traced the sound of weeping to a big leather-covered lounge that stood against the wall, and there, in the light from the moon and in the darkness to which by now her eyes were becoming accustomed, she saw a small, huddled heap of dim white. As she spoke softly, the sobbing broke off with a small, frightened gasp, and she realized the small heap of glimmering white was Nora.
“Why, Nora,” she said softly, and sat down on the lounge beside the girl. “What’s wrong, honey?”
“Claire?” stammered Nora.
“Of course, dear,” Claire said gently, and put her arms about the girl. “What’s wrong, dear? Why are you out here like this?”
“Oh, Claire,” Nora barely managed to keep her voice down from a wail, “Mother turned me out. We had a terrific battle — look!”
She extended her hand to a beam of moonlight and revealed in its palm the broken fragments of the necklace of shells that MacEwen had given her.
“She jerked it off my neck and threw it down and stamped on it.” Nora’s voice rose, choked with sobs, as though at an outrage that was beyond recounting. “She said Mac was a no-good and I mustn’t ever speak to him again, and that the necklace was a cheap, tacky thing I should be ashamed to wear — ”
She hid her face against Claire’s shoulder and clung to her, sobbing wildly.
So this, Claire told herself, was why Curt had been leaving Vera’s cabin. Nora had gone for him, and he had — She heard herself asking, “How long have you been out here, Nora?”
“Oh, since midnight, maybe earlier,” Nora answered, and Claire felt as though a sudden numbing blow had fallen upon her.
“And did you go for Curt and ask him to quiet your mother?” Claire asked steadily, because she had to know.
Nora lifted her head in surprise.
“Why, no, Claire, of course not. Why should I?” she asked wonderingly. “I didn’t want anyone to know about our fight — we’ve had a lot of them, but never one like this. Because for the first time, I stood up to her. That’s why she turned me out of the cabin. She was so surprised that I talked back to her. I never did before — only she said such awful things about Mac. She’s never let me have any friends; not even girl friends — ”
Claire listened, and something died within her. So there had been no sane, logical reason for Curt to be leaving Vera’s cabin at two in the morning. She had been so sure of him — and then a small, biting thought like the darting of a tiny, venomous snake reminded her, you were sure of Rick, too — remember?
“Oh, Claire, what am I going to do?” wailed Nora, and once more her head was hidden against Claire’s breast and Claire’s arms held her closely.
“We’re going to put you to bed — ” Claire began.
“Oh, no, she won’t let me in,” Nora protested, and shivered.
“We’re going to put you to bed in my room, chick,” Claire comforted her. “And in the morning, you’ll find that things aren’t nearly so bad as they seem at night. Come along, and I’ll give you a sedative. And when you wake up you’ll find everything is fine. I promise.”
She guided the girl down the corridor to her own room. Nora paused uncertainly in front of her mother’s door and listened; and then, her tremulous mouth thinning a little, she walked on with Claire.
Claire turned down the covers of the bed and made herself smile at Nora’s tear-sodden face, though she felt that, given th
e slightest encouragement, she herself could have wept as forlornly as Nora.
“In you go,” she said briskly. She brought a cold washcloth and wiped the tears away and kissed Nora’s brow lightly.
“But if I take your bed, Claire, where will you sleep?” Nora hesitated even as Claire waited to tuck her in.
“Oh, nurses are trained to sleep standing up, if necessary,” Claire assured her briskly. “It’s only a few hours until morning, anyway, and this chair is very comfortable. Now you take this tablet and get to sleep like a good girl. Do you hear?”
Nora’s hand caught Claire’s and held it tightly, and her young face was touched with shyness as she said awkwardly, “Oh, Claire, you’re just the greatest! I hope some day I can be just exactly like you.”
“Well, now, that’s very sweet of you, Nora,” Claire said smiling.
“Maybe I could even be a nurse?” Nora asked eagerly.
“You go to sleep now, and we’ll talk about it in the morning,” Claire promised.
Nora rested her cheek for a moment against Claire’s hand, and then like a child snuggled down against the pillow and her eyes closed.
Claire sat down in the deep, comfortable chair in the warm darkness, safely out of reach of the vagrant moonbeams that spilled through the open portholes.
And aren’t you the smart one, my girl? she asked herself savagely. Falling for this handsome devil, after the treatment you got from Rick! Being so sure this time that it was love, and so sure that he loved you! Oh, how big a fool can you be!
Chapter Sixteen
When Nora woke Claire had showered in the tiny bathroom and was already dressed in a thin, cool frock for the morning. Seated at the small dressing table, she looked over her shoulder at Nora, who woke up with a deep yawn like a healthy child and looked about her, bewildered.
“Oh,” said Nora, and some of the light went out of her sleep-flushed face. “I remember now. Oh, Claire, you didn’t get any sleep at all, because I took your bed!”