My Enemy, My Heart (The Ashford Chronicles)

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  She kept her attention focused on Kieran Ashford.

  He heaved a gusty sigh and glanced at her before flicking his gaze to the window behind her. “I have a reputation for being a . . . Lothario. That is, a debaucher of ladies.”

  With his looks, she could believe it.

  “Is it deserved?” She asked the question, though the answer had nothing to do with her.

  “I have never seduced a lady in my life.” The heightened color returned to his face. “But some have lied in an effort to get me to the altar.”

  “I have no interest in going to the altar with an Englishman, so you don’t need to worry about me claiming I’ve been ruined by you.”

  “It may not matter.” He surged to his feet and began that restless pacing around the cabin again. “I need to stay aboard this ship because it is my prize, but if I do not send you to the Phoebe, your reputation will be ruined.”

  Deirdre snorted. “What does my reputation matter now?”

  “How you are treated in England.” He ran his hand along the teakwood bulkhead. “As the captain’s daughter, you can be presumed to have been protected. As a female alone in the world, and with me this close.” He thumped on the bulkhead between the cabins. “The middle and lower classes are even crueler to women they believe have fallen than the haut ton.”

  “The what?”

  “The upper classes. Aristocrats. Noblemen.”

  “So you think I would be treated badly wherever I am housed.” She studied his profile, wishing he would look at her so she could read his eyes, discover how truthful he was being. “But if I’m married to you when I get to England, I will be treated well, with rights and privileges otherwise denied me?”

  “You will.”

  On alert for the flaw behind his claim, she demanded, “And what do you get out of marrying me?”

  He turned his head and gave her a smile that reached his eyes. “I gain the right to go home with some of my honor restored.”

  Deirdre emitted a scoffing bark of laughter. “I find it hard to believe that this schooner and cargo aren’t enough to make up for you ruining some English lady’s reputation.”

  “It is a long story.”

  “We have a long voyage.”

  “But we need to decide before we bypass Bermuda. It is our last opportunity to find a vicar to wed us, and we must be wed before we reach England and you are taken into custody as a noncombatant prisoner.”

  And she didn’t want to bypass Bermuda. Bermuda offered possibilities for getting free.

  “That’s two or three days away, and I have nowhere to go.”

  And every bit of information helped defeat the enemy.

  He leaned on the chart table, his palms flat on the smooth surface behind him. “My father thought I should wed, so I got myself engaged to a beautiful and sweet young lady.” He spoke fast, belying the casualness of his stance. “Turned out she was being a little too sweet to someone else, but accused me of being the father.”

  Deirdre felt a ridiculous urge to laugh at his obvious discomfort. Instead, she asked, “And you weren’t?”

  “I was not.” He spat out the words. “But no one believed me. There was trouble, and my father said, among other things I would rather not repeat, not to darken his doorway until I had done something honorable.”

  “And there’s the rub of this, Mr. Ashford. Is marrying me honorable?” Suddenly restless, Deirdre rose and began to prowl around the cabin, making sure she touched nothing, looked at nothing in the event her gaze strayed too long to the secret compartment. “I am not a respectable candidate for a wife for a rich Englishman. And even if I were, what happens when the war is over? You will be stranded with me and I you. Do you think I want to live on land the rest of my life?”

  “As the daughter of a captain who owned his vessel, you are an acceptable enough wife.” He straightened as much as the low deck beams allowed and swaggered to the window seat.

  Deirdre clutched at the edge of the chart rack and waited for him to explain the rest.

  “As for being stranded with one another . . .” He tilted his head as though studying something she couldn’t see. “Once you provide me with an heir and a second son for security, we are free to go our separate ways. You would be socially ruined in England if Parliament grants us a divorce, but I doubt that matters to you. You can sail to India or Australia for all I care. Once the war is over, I will buy you your own ship or schooner or—”

  “Stop.” Deirdre flung up her hands in protest and whirled to fully face him. “What was that about an heir and an extra? Are you saying you don’t intend for this to be a-a—” She choked on the next phrase, her face flaming.

  He drew up one knee and rested a forearm on it, his face too bland, too innocent. “I believe the term you want is mariage de convenable. No, of course not. I have no intention of getting leg-shackled without some rights and privileges of my own.” He rose then and closed the distance between them. “I intend to be an attentive and faithful husband until we mutually decide to go our separate ways. You will have weathered the war in comfort and a reasonable amount of freedom.” His voice softened, grew husky. “And I will have done the right thing for once in my life.” Shadows dimmed the gold of his eyes. He looked vulnerable, haunted, sad. The way he kept flexing his fingers against his thighs cried out his anxiety. He wasn’t making an idle offer. Her answer meant a great deal to him.

  Her answer should be no. Once married, he would control her life, heart, soul, and body. His notion of reasonable freedom and hers might not be the same, might not be as much independence of movement as she needed. Becoming trapped in parson’s mousetrap for years, even if he didn’t renege on this bargain and let her sail away, seemed risky at best. He was right in thinking she cared nothing for social ruin in England. Still, she would be laying her life into the hands of the enemy for more than the duration of the war with no guarantee that stepping into the prison of matrimony would help her free her crew from the prison in England.

  She hadn’t yet touched on the implications of her providing him with an heir and an extra. Thanks to how drunken sailors often behaved on the docks, she knew more about procreation than any single woman should. An image flashed into her mind, replacing couples she had glimpsed with her and Ashford, him touching her with those long, beautiful hands, kissing her, that satiny hair falling around her face—

  She shivered and backed away from him. “I-I’m—let me think. I can’t think.” Her back collided with the door, and she pressed against it as though it were a backboard slumping girls at school had been strapped to train their spines. “Let me—think.”

  Surely she could find a better avenue to make up for getting them all captured and her father killed, however indirectly. She was a clever woman. At thirteen, she had managed to escape the walls of the boarding school where Father had abandoned her in an attempt to make her act like a female. She could figure out how to elude one Englishman.

  “You have until we reach Bermuda to think this over.” He smiled, and the deck fell away beneath her feet.

  No, not from the impact of that smile on her senses. The schooner had just dropped into the trough of a wave with too little grace, and she wasn’t recovering well climbing the next swell.

  Heart skipping a beat, Deirdre charged to the windows. As she had focused on Ashford and his stunning proposal, the weather had begun to deteriorate. Three- and four-foot swells had turned to five- and six-foot waves with foaming crests. The wind had veered to an easterly direction and no longer swept through the open stern windows. East, the direction from which storms blew this time of year.

  “What’s wrong?” Ashford asked from behind her.

  “Nothing yet. The wind’s picking up, but the sky is still clear. It might look different from the crosstrees.”

  A tightness to his voice drew her attention to him. He had paled, and she recalled his mention of not being a good sailor.

  For some reason, she sought to reassure h
im. “I think this will be little more than a squall. I don’t feel the kind of drop in barometric pressure usual with a hurricane.”

  “Barometric pressure?” His blank look was comical. “A storm is imminent?”

  “The mercury is falling, but not significantly.” Deirdre pointed to the barometer mounted above the hanging shelf of books. “See that? It hasn’t fallen below thirty. We’re probably just catching the surf from a storm farther to our east.”

  “I hope so. Seeing me rolled up like a dead worm and whimpering like a baby will not incline you to accept my proposal.” He braced one hand on the window frame beside her against the plunge as the schooner dropped into the next trough.

  Being so close, she smelled the clean land scent of his vetiver. She turned, intending to slip away from him. The movement brought them chest to chest, him only a few inches taller than she.

  Before she could dart to the side and be away across the cabin, he lowered his hand from the frame to her shoulder. “Or have you already decided your answer is no?”

  “I haven’t decided anything.” Her throat felt strangled, her body paralyzed.

  “Good,” he said.

  Then he kissed her.

  Chapter 5

  Other than the affectionate brushes of her parents’ lips on her cheek or hair, Deirdre had never been kissed. Those people she had seen kissing seemed to enjoy it, but the idea of having someone else’s mouth pressed to hers sounded rather disgusting. Who wanted to taste someone else’s saliva, feel the heat of their breath exchanged with one’s own, experience the pressure of soft, firm lips pressed against one’s own?

  Any woman whom Kieran Ashford kissed.

  The swirling, dipping, spinning of her head, her body, the deck beneath her feet had nothing to do with the deteriorating weather. She had ridden out hurricanes with only a hint of discomfort. This contact, this melding of part of another’s body to hers robbed her legs of their ability to stand on a swaying deck. She flung up her hands, grasping his shoulders for support. The schooner hurled herself off the top of a wave and dropped like a stone off a roof. Holding one another, Deirdre and Ashford careened against the bulkhead, breaking the connection of their mouths.

  “I think—” Realizing her lips had formed the words but no sound had emerged, Deirdre coughed and tried again. “I think something is wrong.”

  Ashford smiled, his eyes sleepy. “I thought it was absolutely right.”

  “Not that.” She shoved away from him. “I mean, that was wrong of you. But I’m talking about the Maid. She’s not recovering like she should.”

  They were canted too far to port. If another wave the size of the last one struck at even the slightest wrong angle, they could capsize.

  “I need to go.” Not waiting for permission, she flung open the cabin door in time to see Teague racing from his guard post up the ladder to the main deck, and followed in time to find him bent double over the rail, retching. None of the Maid’s original crew remained on deck, but half a dozen strangers cast up their accounts into the scuppers.

  She sighed. “Landlubbers. No more sense than—”

  A crack overhead snapped her attention upward. A loose sheet spun in the howling wind twenty feet above. Badly tied, it allowed the mainsail to droop and catch far more wind than was safe for the rising gale.

  In a shot, Deirdre launched herself into the rigging, climbing the shrouds with the ease of mounting steps. Without any rain, the lines were as dry as they ever could be. Perfectly safe. Except they weren’t as taut as they should be. One sagged beneath her weight. For a moment, she swung like a pendulum, her hold jarred by the unanticipated motion.

  She clenched her teeth against cursing the stupid British, who didn’t know how to secure a line. If the storm worsened, those lines would come loose. Freed, sails would catch too much wind and capsize the Baltimore clipper in a heartbeat.

  She paused, perched on a spar, and secured the line. Wind howled and shrieked around her. Men howled and shrieked at her, too. “Come down,” she thought she heard someone shout. As if she would. She’d secure the clipper’s rigging or die trying.

  She reached the whipping sheet just as the first onslaught of rain struck the ship. Across two cable-lengths of water, she caught sight of the Phoebe, its sails properly furled, then she saw nothing but a silvery curtain of rain. Her foot slipped from a soaked shroud. For a heartbeat, it dangled in midair. She swung it hard and got a hold again. The flying sheet required both her hands. She gripped the lines with feet and knees, dove for the errant line, caught it.

  “Deirdre!” Definitely her name. “For the love of heaven!”

  She glanced down to see Ashford braced against a stay, scowling up at her. Even lashed with rain, his face looked green.

  She grinned and tilted her head to grin at him, wondering how long he would manage not to run to the rail either.

  “Get down here,” he bellowed.

  She shook her head at him and the half-dozen men who stood staring up at her. Ashford motioned to them, commanding them—judging by his gesticulations in her direction—to climb up and help her. Not one moved.

  The schooner twisted and dipped, trying to tug the sheet from her cold hands. Deirdre returned her attention to her task. But drawing up the heavy sail alone proved more difficult than it should have, than it would have had she managed before the rain. Wet canvas weighed as much as she did, possibly more. She’d never had to raise a sodden sail alone. She needed help. A glance down told her that none of the Phoebe’s crew brought aboard the Maid were about to assist her. Kieran had even disappeared.

  “Coward. You think I’d marry a man who—”

  The wind caught the sodden sail. It flew to leeward, heeling the ship too far over on her beam. Water foamed over the rail, dousing the men on deck.

  The Maid didn’t right herself.

  Deirdre clung to the spar and prayed for help. They were going over. Her crew locked into the hold wouldn’t have a chance at survival.

  Frantic, she locked her knees over a shroud and threw all her weight into hauling on the sheet. She rocked back, a line catching her shoulders and holding her in place like a chair without a seat twenty feet above a deck careening toward the sea. She had the sail furled. The Maid righted herself without the extra strain throwing her off balance. But she couldn’t stay that way forever. Wet, the sheet slipped in her hands, tearing at even her calloused palms.

  If only she had help . . .

  She caught her breath. She did have help. Two long, elegant hands curled around the sheet above hers.

  “Tell me what to do,” Kieran Ashford shouted over the wind.

  Not a coward.

  Deirdre looked at Ashford with his hair whipping in the wind, his shirt plastered to broad shoulders, and wanted to be back in the cabin kissing him again. Absurd, nonsensical, dangerous thinking that. She needed to forget about those moments. She had to recover enough of her senses to give him directions. Teaching him the complexity of the knots would take too long. “Hold the sheet.”

  “Sheet? Oh, you mean this rope?”

  Deirdre nodded, not bothering to explain that sailors never referred to lines, cables, or hawsers as ropes. At least he’d worked out that the sheet was not the sail.

  Together, they hauled the line home. With a strength that surprised her in such an elegant man, Kieran—no, Ashford, the enemy—held the sheet in place while she knotted it. The sail completely furled, the Maid righted itself as much as it could in such a rough sea, and Deirdre prepared to descend.

  “Can you manage?” she asked.

  He gave her an indignant glare, then climbed down the shroud, tumbling more than jumping the last two yards. He was on his feet in an instant and staggering to the companionway beneath the quarter deck. He looked so unwell she gave him a quarter hour before she descended to the deck herself, then another five while she approached the two men at the helm.

  “You can lash the wheel and go below,” she explained. “There’s
no steering in this storm anyway. Keeping the rudder straight is the best we can do.”

  The men, little more than boys, exchanged glances.

  “We didn’t want to go without permission,” the shorter of the two said.

  “I’m giving you permission,” Deirdre said, “from Mr. Ashford. He’s unwell.”

  The boys laughed. “Aye, that he is. No sailor, Mr. Ashford,” the taller one said.

  “He’s got more courage than all of you.” Deirdre spoke through stiff lips.

  Another exchange of glances, knowing grins.

  “Aye, a real William the Conqueror.” The shorter boy spoke through his mirth.

  Deirdre was too cold to know if she blushed, but she didn’t stay around for the Englishmen to see if she did. She turned her back on them and descended to her cabin. She needed dry clothes. When she raised her hands to unfasten her buttons, she saw that blisters crisscrossed her palms. They began to sting as soon as she noticed the abrasions.

  If she suffered from the work on the sheet, Kieran’s hands had to be far worse. He wasn’t accustomed to that kind of labor. She could wash her hands and rub in ointment she kept for the nicks and scrapes common in life aboard ship. But he wouldn’t know where it was, and infection could set in if the blisters went untreated and broke.

  She flung on dry clothes, then walked into her father’s cabin without knocking. Ashford had changed into dry clothes, too. Now he sat on the bunk with his head in his hands, his hair loose and obscuring his face.

  “Are you ill?” she asked.

  He let out a soft moan in response.

  Her lips twitched. “Gets the best of us sometimes. My father always insisted tea was the best cure, but I’ve something better.”

  She opened a cupboard over the bunk and pulled out a bottle of laudanum and a jar of preserved ginger. She wished she had hot water to infuse the ginger better, but cold would have to do, and she’d have him chew the ginger. The Chinese merchant who’d sold it to her had insisted that nothing settled a sick stomach better. Going around Cape Horn, she’d tried it on a couple of the crew and found that it worked. The laudanum would make him sleep. She used a table knife to chop the ginger into a cup of water, then picked up the bottle of laudanum. It felt light. She held it up to the window and noticed that it was nearly empty. She’d procured a full bottle in Rio de Janeiro. Who had been in such pain he’d needed to use nearly a full bottle in mere weeks? Her father? Who else would have used it without her knowledge? But why?