He accepted the spoon. It was that, or accept a spoon to the skull.
She kicked a stool toward him. “Now sit down.”
Gray gave in. He did need rest, and having Davy on deck would be a boon. And, his stomach reminded him loudly, he’d scarcely tasted more than a biscuit in days. He’d avoided her since they boarded this ship, but she’d sensed these things somehow—his fatigue, his hunger. She’d sensed something else as well. He’d been giving orders for three solid days, and he needed a bit of ordering around. Given a choice between eating and working, his duty as captain demanded that work take priority. She left him no choice, so he sat and ate.
Still, he couldn’t let her get away with it so easily. “If you’re the cook,” he said between mouthfuls, “I’m your captain. You can’t continue speaking to me that way.”
“You aren’t dressed like a captain.”
Gray looked down at his homespun tunic and the loose-fitting trousers cinched with a knotted cord. The clothes of a common seaman, borrowed from a sailor now dead. He hadn’t the luxury of fine attire on the Kestrel. With the ship so undermanned, he had to be everywhere—climbing the rigging, down in the hold.
“Don’t look apologetic. They suit you.” Her gaze glanced off his shoulders, then dropped to the floor. “But I see you’ve kept the detested boots.”
He shrugged, spooning up another bite of chowder. “I’ve broken them in now.”
“And here I hoped you were keeping them for sentimental reasons.”
She set a tankard of grog before him, the moment before he became aware of his own thirst. Gray reached for it, shaking his head. A long swallow of watered-down rum added fuel to his resentment. He’d allowed himself to become so transparent to her, while she remained an enigma to him. Her talents fit no logical pattern—sketching, painting, deceit, seduction, thievery … now the ability to pound biscuit and salted meat into a fair-tasting chowder? It was enough to make him abandon all hope of ever comprehending her.
Perhaps he never would. But it was another thought that had him hurrying through his food, desperate to put some distance between them. He might never understand her, Gray realized, but he could get dangerously accustomed to this other feeling.
Being understood.
“Just hold her steady, that’s it. Don’t lean too close, she might kick. Now firmly grasp her … her …”
Sophia was beginning to doubt the brilliance of this enterprise she’d suggested. She cleared her throat and affected a brisk, business-like tone. “Her teat?”
“Er, yes.”
Thankfully, there was a brown-and-white nanny goat blocking her view of Davy’s face, but she could hear the fierce blush in his voice.
“Take her teat,” he said haltingly. “Like so.”
She tilted her head to view the goat’s underside, where Davy’s thumb and forefinger curled around one knobby teat. Cautiously, she reached out to follow suit on her side. At the first brush of her fingers against the milk-swelled udder, the animal gave an annoyed shiver. Sophia snatched her hand back.
“Don’t let her frighten you, Miss Turner. You can’t be timid with a goat.”
A nervous giggle escaped her. “Oh, I assure you, I can. I haven’t your bravery, Mr. Linnet.”
Her remark fell into the silence like a lead weight. Davy made no answer. Drat. Sophia chastised herself with a sharp tug on her apron. That was badly done of her. It was awkward enough that she’d asked him for milking lessons; to engage him in flirtation was unspeakably insensitive. Still, she needed to learn how to do this. Every hour Davy spent at milking was an hour he couldn’t be standing watch.
Emboldened by the desire to complete this lesson quickly, she reached out in a flash, capturing the goat’s second teat with her thumb and forefinger. “Like so?”
“Yes, miss. And now you roll your fingers down, one by one …” He demonstrated, and a jet of milk hit the tin pail with a sharp trill.
Sophia imitated his movements. Nothing happened. She tried again, earning only an impatient shuffle of the goat’s hind legs.
“Try again, a bit faster this time.”
She tried again, pulling harder. Nothing. The goat bleated, in seeming irritation at her ineptitude.
“Don’t wring it, now. You want to coax the milk out, one finger at a time, see?” He sent a few more squirts of milk pinging into the pail.
Taking a deep breath, Sophia began again, painstakingly imitating the rolling pull of Davy’s hand. When a thin stream of white shot from the teat, she could not suppress a small cry of elation. In truth, if she hadn’t feared it would startle the nanny dry, she would have done a little dance. She tried again, with greater confidence. Another spurt of milk came forth.
“Good,” Davy said, after she’d removed enough yellowish milk from the goat to cover the bottom of the pail. “You’ve the way of it now.” He continued milking the other teat, and they settled into a quiet, contrapuntal rhythm.
“Did you do this often at home, then?” She hoped conversation would feel less stifling than silence.
“Often enough. Every day, when I was a boy.”
Sophia smiled to herself. No, she supposed he wasn’t a boy any longer. “Who tends them now that you’re gone?”
“My sisters, I expect.”
“Sisters? Are they older or younger?”
“I’m in the middle. The eldest, she got herself married already. By the time I see her again, she’ll have a brat of her own, I reckon.” His voice deepened in pitch, as though the prospect displeased him.
“Shouldn’t you like to be an uncle? Just think of the exotic tales and trinkets you’ll bring home. You’ll be a returning hero. The children will swarm around you like bees.” She imbued her voice with a coy lilt. “All the girls will be mad for you.”
He fell quiet again. Frustrated with herself, Sophia gave a harsh yank on the goat’s teat and narrowly missed a swift kick to the thigh. It would seem she’d lost the ability to converse rather than flirt, if she’d ever developed that talent at all. What was her reasoning, precisely? That a man couldn’t possibly hold himself in high esteem without the benefit of her flattery? Or that he’d see no reason to esteem her without it?
Davy finally said, “So long as I come home with my wages, I don’t expect they’ll turn me away.”
She let the soft splashes of milk fill the silence. At length, she asked cautiously, “Aren’t you happy for her, your sister who married?”
“I don’t know that it matters, how I feel about it.”
“But she’s your sister. She matters to you.”
His hand stilled on the teat. “The man she married, he’s too old for her. My father’s the one that arranged it. I think …” He squeezed out another jet of milk. “I think my father was in the man’s debt, more than he could pay.”
“I see.”
Her dismay must have been evident. Davy’s voice grew robust with defense. “She weren’t forced into it, mind. She didn’t marry him against her will.”
“No. No, of course not. Just against her heart. I do understand. It’s the way of things for women, sometimes.” After all, it had nearly been the way of things for her. “You don’t suspect he’ll mistreat her?”
“He’ll treat her fair enough, I reckon. My father wouldn’t have let her go, otherwise.”
“Then that’s some comfort.”
“Aye.” He shook a few last drops from the goat’s teat, then released it completely. “Just the same, I didn’t like it. I don’t like to see her married to a man she didn’t choose.”
Sophia continued milking on her side, settling into a hypnotic rhythm. “Of course you don’t. She’s your sister. If you care for her, you want to see her well cared for. If you love her, you want to see her loved.” If only she’d been so fortunate, to have a brother to want the same for her.
“Aye.” His voice cracked slightly on the word, and he paused. It must have been a full minute before he spoke again. “He’s a good man, the cap
tain.”
Her hand stilled. “The captain?”
“Gray. He’s a good man, Miss Turner. He’ll do right by you.”
Sweet Heavens, the boy was giving her his blessing. Sophia didn’t know what to say. It would probably wound his pride, to call him the loving brother she’d never had. Certainly, she couldn’t tell him the truth of how matters stood between her and Gray. She didn’t want to deplete the boy’s faith in his captain’s honorable intentions. To the contrary, she dearly wished to borrow it.
Sniffing, she let go of the goat’s teat and brushed her hand on her skirts. “I think she’s empty.”
“Are you certain?” He reached under the goat and gave the udder a brisk rub. Then he took the teat closest to Sophia and gave it a twist. A fresh stream of milk shot forth, glancing off the rim of the bucket and splashing her slippers.
“Take care!” With a little shriek of laughter, she pushed away from the goat’s side. Davy tilted his hand and squeezed the teat again, this time splattering Sophia from crown to chest. Sputtering and wiping milk from her face, she scrambled to her feet. “Davy Linnet,” she scolded, towering over both youth and goat. “You’re a rascal.”
“Am I?” He flashed her a lopsided, innocent grin. Shrugging, he dropped his gaze and emptied the last drops of milk into the pail. “Well, you’re blushing.”
Sophia made a show of huffing and crossing her arms, but she could not keep the laughter out of her voice. “Never say you’ve learned nothing from me, Davy. You might have shown me how to milk, but I’ve taught you to flirt.”
“A fair bargain, then.” He stood and took the goat by its collar.
“Perhaps. Mind you don’t confuse the two talents. Keep your goats straight from your girls.”
“That’s easily done.” Mischief twinkled sharp in his eye. “The goats don’t blush.”
“Son of a bitch.”
Gray scowled at the ink spattering his trousers and pooling atop the toe of his boot. This was why captains had cabins. It was nigh on impossible to keep a proper log in the first-mate’s berth, with only the most meager of lighting and this paltry writing surface jutting out from the wall, too narrow to accommodate both logbook and inkwell. And, he concluded as he frowned at the now-emptied latter, it was definitely impossible to keep a log without the benefit of ink.
He threw open the door of his berth and entered the captain’s cabin, knowing it to be unoccupied. At this hour, she would be preparing dinner in the galley. Flinging the logbook and quill down on the table, he moved to search the built-in drawers for a fresh bottle of ink. He found none.
“Blast.”
His eye fell on her trunks, stacked neatly in the corner. Surely she had a supply of ink, and quality ink at that. Without sparing a moment to second-guess the decision, he strode to her trunks and worked open the latches of the smaller trunk. He flipped it open.
It felt intimate, revealing. As if he’d unlaced her stays. And what treasures awaited him. Sheaves of paper, neatly wrapped in oilcloth and tied with efficient knots—knots that would do a sailor proud. Small bundles of brushes, smelling faintly of turpentine. And rows upon rows of her little bottles of ink and cakes of pigment. Of course, for Gray, the array of colors did not particularly impress. Rather, it was the care and precision with which they were packed that caused a sharp pinch in his chest. In this trunk was everything of delicacy, beauty, and painstaking care. Everything he admired in her, laid open for his examination, with no veneer of lies to obscure his view.
He looked his fill. He touched each item in the trunk, skipping his fingers from one object to the next. He couldn’t bring himself to lift one out.
Until a small, leather-bound book wedged along one side caught his attention. Hooking a fingertip under the spine, he eased the volume up, and a title greeted him: The Memoirs of a Wanton Dairymaid. His shout of laughter rattled the bottles in their straw-buffered rows. So this was the one book she’d selected for the journey? A ribald novel?
Gray tipped the book into his hand. The binding was strained and the pages swollen—as though the entire volume had been dipped in water and dried. The cover fell open to reveal an elaborate frontispiece, depicting a buxom dairymaid wearing a straw bonnet, voluminous petticoats, and a knowing smile. On riffling the pages, it immediately became clear that the book’s expanded bulk could be credited to the addition of numerous pen-and-ink illustrations.
He recognized her deft hand and eye for detail immediately. He flipped through the pages, past vignettes of the dairymaid and her vague-featured gentleman engaged in a courtship of sorts: a kiss on the hand, a whisper in the ear. By the book’s midpoint, the chit’s voluminous petticoats were up around her ears, and the illustrations comprised a sequence of quite similar poses in varying locales. Not just the dairy, but a carriage, the larder, in a hayloft lit with candles and strewn with … were those rose petals?
I’ll be damned.
Gray was fast divining the true source of the French painting master’s mythic exploits. More unsettling by far, however, as he perused the book, he noted a subtle alteration in the gentleman lover’s features. With each successive illustration, the hero appeared taller, broader in the shoulders, and his hair went from a cropped style to collar length in the space of two pages.
The more pages Gray turned, the more he recognized himself.
It was unmistakable. She’d used him as the model for these bawdy illustrations. She’d sketched him in secret; not once, but many times. And here he’d nearly gone mad with envy over each scrap of foolscap she’d inked for one crewman or another. His emotions underwent a dizzying progression—from surprised, to flattered, to (with the benefit of one especially inventive situation in an orchard) undeniably aroused.
But as he lingered over a nude study of this amalgam of the real him and some picaresque fantasy, he began to feel something else entirely. He felt used.
She’d rendered his form with astonishing accuracy, given that it must have been drawn before she’d any opportunity to actually see him unclothed. Not that she’d achieved an exact likeness. Her virgin’s imagination was rather generous in certain aspects and somewhat stinting in others, he noted with a bitter sort of amusement. But she’d laid him bare in these pages, without his knowledge or consent. God, she’d even drawn his scars. All in service of some adolescent erotic fantasy.
And now he began to grow angry.
He had been handling the leaves of the book with his fingertips only, anxious he might smudge or rip the pages. Now he abandoned all caution and flipped roughly through the remainder of the volume. Until he came to the end, and his hand froze.
There they were, the two of them. He and she, fully clothed and unengaged in any physical intimacies—yet intimate, in a way he had never known. Never dreamed. Sitting beneath a willow tree, his head in her lap. One of her hands lay twined with his, atop his chest. The other rested on his brow. The sky soared vast and expansive above, gauzy clouds spinning into forever.
The hot fist of desire that had gripped his loins loosened, moved upward through his torso, churning the contents of his gut along the way. Then it clutched at his heart and squeezed until it hurt. Somehow, this illustration was the most dismaying of all. So naïve, so ridiculous. At least the bawdy situations were plausible, if sometimes physically improbable. This was utterly impossible. To her, he’d never been more than a fantasy.
It occurred to Gray that more secrets might be packed within these trunks. If he sorted through her belongings, he might find the answers to all his questions. Perhaps answers to questions he’d never thought to ask. In spite of this, he let the lid of the trunk clap shut and fastened the strap with shaking fingers. He’d suffered as many of her fantasies as he could bear for one day.
It was time to acquaint her with reality.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Reality was hitting Sophia hard. Or rather, kicking her hard, and leaving bruises the size and shape of a goat’s cloven hoof. Reality
was making her ache all over, in muscles she hadn’t known she possessed.
Her first day as ship’s cook had been novel, amusing. She’d experienced the thrill of competency and earning her own keep. Each fire built, each potato peeled, each squirt of milk into the pail was a small triumph. Just a few days later, she was fully prepared to admit defeat. Manual labor was not romantic in the least, and only dimly satisfying, in the way chewing rock-hard ship’s biscuit satisfied one’s hunger—begrudgingly, and at considerable expense of effort.
Once she assumed control of her inheritance, she intended to never boil water or tend a goat again. With a bit of prudence, her trust ought to keep her in servants for the remainder of her days. For the remainder of this voyage, however, she would toil or go hungry. And if there was one thing Sophia suspected would suit her less than a life of menial servitude, it was hunger.
The work suited Gray, though. He’d slipped into the role of Kestrel’s captain faster than he’d filled out a borrowed tunic and trousers. Authority was simply comfortable to him, like a second skin.
Despite all that had passed between them, despite his anger and hurt—at some deeper stratum of his being, he was more content than she’d ever seen him. He was pleased to be in command, to be on deck working rather than sitting idly below, and Sophia was pleased to see him where he belonged, living as he was meant to live.
Because she loved him, so much it hurt. She wanted him to be happy, whether or not that meant being with her. And if she never laid eyes on him again after they dropped anchor, she would carry this picture of him forever: Gray prowling the deck of the Kestrel, all confidence and energy and charisma, coordinating the movement of the sails and rigging as instinctively as he manipulated the fingers on his hand.
As for herself, the current picture was one she would endeavor to forget.
Toting a pail of hard-earned milk, she shouldered open the door to the storeroom to gather biscuit and salt-beef for the evening meal. Weak light spilled into the barrel-crammed space. She stomped hard on the floorboards: once, twice, three times. Then she counted ten and tried to ignore the sounds of rats scattering into the shadows. Heavens, if her mother could see her now. There weren’t enough restoratives in Bath and Brighton combined to counteract the attack of nerves this scene would doubtless inspire.
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