The Acquisition

by Louisa Trent

  "No, I don't hear you, and the reason I don't, is only because you have high aspirations of being a fine gentleman someday. I don't share those same dreams. I'm happy enough being exactly who I am."

  Josh was happy with the way things stood in that respect too, for all that the mouth on Harry could singe the wings off an angel.

  "You're right there, Harry--you will never be a gentleman. Now let's get this off you," Josh said, speaking low, trying to escape bad memories. "This shirt is covered with blood and dirt, and frankly smells of stale tobacco and cheap rum."

  "I will have you know, not a drop of rum passed my lips, cheap or otherwise. Not even watered-down grog. It's ale you smell on my clothes, and whiskey you smell on my breath," Harry slurred self-righteously, taking issue with the malt, if not the actual transgression. "And I don't need you to undress me. I am fully capable of undressing myself. I am not a child," Harry added, after another hiccup.

  From where Josh was standing, Harry was every bit the child, and an obstinate one at that. This was borne out when a slender arm was raised, only to fall back limply to the bedding. The skinny hothead didn't have the strength or the sobriety to perform even the most simple of childhood tasks.

  Josh continued unbuttoning the hothead's shirt. "Harry, I appreciate that at 18 you are growing up, but right now you need a little help. All right?"

  Harry wiped uncoordinatedly at some chin slobber. "All right, Joshie. Truth to tell, I don't mind you getting me naked, not one itsy, bitsy, bit." A naughty grin was flashed. "I just thought I would help, is all. "

  Josh rolled his eyes at the drunkard's 100-proof boast, as he carefully removed the shirt. As Harry wore neither a camisole nor a chemise, he assiduously avoided looking at all that bare skin revealed...

  Most especially, Josh avoided looking at those small, pink-tipped, immature breasts.

  Still, he was harpoon-hard, his arousal just as sharp as a whaler's spear, as he picked up the sopping wash linen from the basin, wrung it out, and finished cleaning Harry's bruised face.

  Ben should be hung from the scaffold for many things, but letting his kid sister work nights at a tavern was right at the top of the list. Second in importance was not putting her in some female undergarments. A lone female working and living on the wharves, as Harry did, was asking for trouble; even if she did disguise her sex under lad's clothing.

  Did Harry know how close she had come to assault tonight? If those five whaling merchants had found out they'd been fighting a she, not a he, they would have taken out their humiliation on her in a strictly male-on-female way. Gang rape was a common occurrence in the back alleys abutting the docks.

  Josh took a deep breath. His beat-up hands actually trembled.

  Apart from some minor bruises, she was all right, he reminded himself again. Those merchants hadn't raped Harry. He had arrived in time. She was so drunk, she most likely wouldn't even recall the night's events. As to her assailants, he had left those slimy turds in the sawdust, clutching their mangled balls; they wouldn't be cocking any females for a good long time.

  But what would happen to Harry when he shipped off? Who would protect her then?

  The possibilities were as endless as they were horrific.

  In the year while Josh had been gone, Harry had grown up. In some ways, she was still the same nuisance brat she had always been. But in other ways, she was a blossoming young woman on the pinnacle of adulthood. And as Ben was a good-for-nothing, she was on that pinnacle unsupervised. Even if she wasn't attacked, some seaman passing through town could sweet-talk her into the family way.

  Sighing, Josh pushed a short strand of red hair back from Harry's forehead. What was he to do with her?

  She talked about the naked whores, but did she even really understand how things were between a man and a woman?

  It worried Josh that Harry had started her flux. The summer before Josh had left port on his last voyage, she had come to him, afeared she was dying of some horrible disease that made her bleed from the privates. He had explained the facts of life as best he could, about her monthly and her need of clean rags and such, but he hadn't gone into any great detail.

  Maybe he should have. Maybe he had been remiss not to. He wanted Harry to learn about lovemaking the sweet way. He didn't want her virginity stolen up against the wall in some back alley.

  He didn't want her kept ignorant, but he didn't want Harry's sweet innocence corrupted either. Josh wasn't ready to see his little Harry armed with a woman's full defenses. Despite her foul mouth and redhead's temper, she was charmingly naïve. Lying there on the bed, half-naked, proved how open she was with him.

  A little too open.

  While Josh was busy washing her face in the stark brothel room with its peeling paint walls, shabby furnishings, and gray bed linen--still warm from the three naked whores he had paid off only a few minutes before, and sent packing--Harry had been busy too ... wiggling her second-hand lad's trousers down her legs.

  Despite his good intentions to ignore the little drunkard's blatant disregard for propriety, Josh gazed longingly at Harry's pretty, red-curled-covered notch. "Why no drawers, sweetheart?"

  "It's wash day."

  "Huh?" Josh asked, those red curls dazing him, dazzling him. He'd grown up in a brothel! He knew all about female flesh. There was nothing new here, nothing he hadn't seen hundreds of times before. Save with Harry, everything was new again, pure again, real again.

  "I have but the one set of underwear," Harry said by way of explanation, yawning and stretching, both arms flung over her head as a knee came up, and she kicked free of the trouser legs, leaving her completely nude, thighs splayed.

  Christ! Why did Harry go and do that?

  He shouldn't be looking where he was looking now. It wasn't right. It wasn't decent. He shouldn't notice.

  Josh jumped up off the bed where he had been seated. "Oh, that's right. Monday's your wash day."

  Harry squinted her bloodshot eyes some more. "I cannot hang out a line of wash without every seaman in town knowing what I wore the week before. I have absolutely no privacy."

  This said while she lay naked on his bed in his brothel room, with her knee bent, absolutely everything open to his perusal.

  Josh forced out a chuckle, though he didn't feel much like it, and rubbed his thumb along his jaw. He should tell Harry to close up, to guard her femininity against men like him, lusty men who needed to get laid.

  Instead, Josh looked his fill--he was no saint--but he didn't touch. In all the years he had seen to Harry's care, he had never stepped over the line, never touched her in a disrespectful way. "Well smote me down, Harry. You're only piqued because I saw your lacy underpinnings."

  Her pale cheeks went pink, rosy pink, to match the parts of her he should not have noticed. "That wasn't my clothesline you were nosing up to," she said, glaring up at him, though drunkenly. "Where would I get anything with lace on it, Joshua Kane?"

  "I thought maybe it was something that got beached up. Flotsam from the hold of some wealthy sunken ship off-shore."

  "Well, you thought wrong."

  "That's right." He slapped his hand flat against his forehead. "Today's the day I ogle Rachel Truit's clothesline. I got the days confused there for a minute. Yours were the big white drawers flapping in the breeze. Enough material to be sailworthy, as I recall," he teased.

  He felt bad about the lace-underpinning jibe, as Harry owned naught that would pass as pretty.

  Save all of her, every last pretty inch. From the top of her flame-bright head to the bottom of her narrow pale feet, Harry was like a porcelain doll that sits behind the locked glass doors of a curio cabinet, made for admiring, not for rough play.

  Josh had only jested with Harry about her underdrawers because teasing put some much-needed space between them. His perverse desire for his best friend's baby sister made him feel like a lecher, and it wasn't that way, never had been that way, between them. The affection they felt for one another was pure, and Jos
h intended it to stay that way. Harry was twelve years his junior, after all, and as pale as he was swarthy. Like all seamen, he was tan, but Josh knew his complexion was not made dark entirely by the sun. More importantly, Harry trusted him. That meant the porcelain doll stayed locked away behind that glass door.

  "I need to go downstairs and straighten out the tab for the havoc you reaped in Shaunnessy's tavern." Joshua backed up. "All those broken glasses..."

  "Don't go, Joshie," she called after him, sounding like the little tike she had only just been, a blink ago. "Why are you always leaving me?"

  His heart turned over in his chest. "But don't I always return to you, sweetheart?"

  "I'm afeared someday you will take it into your head to sneak off on me, that you will leave without even saying goodbye."

  No matter that she fretted, and he would do anything to set her mind at ease, Josh never made a promise to Harry he might not be able to keep. There could yet come a time when he had no choice but to leave without telling Harry adieu. Sometimes a man got involved in things larger than himself, a sacred duty, a charge passed on at a deathbed, an obligation of love that must be seen through, carried out, regardless of the inconvenience. Then a goodbye might not be possible.

  Thinking a little better with distance, Josh reached into his seaman's chest, pulled out a soft cambric nightshirt he never wore and tossed it at Harry on the bed. "Get into that while I am gone."

  "Oh, pooh! I don't need no silly nightshirt..."

  "Harry," he warned.

  "All right." Scrambling to a naked sit on the rumpled bed, she reached for the garment. "I will wear the silly thing. Only don't leave me. Please? "

  Didn't she see? He had to leave! He had to make his way in the world. A man born poor, stays poor all his days, if he lacks ambition. The sea was his way to riches, the only way a man like him had.

  He wasn't wealthy yet, but that day was coming soon. Josh expected to make captain after this next journey--a four-year whaling expedition to Alaskan overkill in local waters had prompted--and then he would buy Harry all the pretty things a young miss coveted. He would be better able to take care of her then, make sure she wed the right sort of fella, that sort of thing. Money buys respectability, and he wanted respectability for Harry.

  Josh pulled his thoughts away from the future, to concentrate on the here and now. "I need to get a note sent off to Ben, so he won't worry after you."

  "I can stay here with you?"

  "I think you should. Ben is expecting a ... uh ... a visit from Beth tonight," Josh explained, when Harry's expression turned confused.

  "Oh," she said, with the wisdom of the intoxicated. "That's why Ben took his Saturday night bath early this week. He has talked a blue streak about proposing to Beth. Could be tonight's the night."

  According to Ben, Beth Holmes was holding out for marriage. If Ben popped the question, the bed would be shaking and sounds passed right through the cottage's thin walls. Josh did not want the impressionable Harry exposed to shaking beds and carnal noises, not at her young age.

  "Ben and Beth had an argument," Harry confided. "But yesterday, they patched things up between them. Good thing too, because we've fallen behind on the rent money."

  Josh filled in the blanks Harry left out: since Beth's father owned their little run-down fisherman's shack, rental arrears would mean eviction if Beth and Ben were on the outs. Old Man Holmes was a real son-of-a-bitch, vindictive--and a tightwad on top of it. He wanted his spoiled daughter taken off his hands. If Ben didn't propose marriage to Beth, Harry would pay the price for her brother's lack of foresight.

  That couldn't happen. Joshua couldn't let Harry go homeless and begging; she would end up working the piers, picking up sailors ... prostituting.

  "How far behind is the rent?" Josh asked, quickly.

  "A year's worth behind," Harry slurred.

  It was worse than Joshua thought. A year's rent, even on a fisherman's shack, was a lot of whale oil. Damn! And there was no need for any of this to have happened. To ensure Harry's care, Josh had given the chronically out-of-work Ben money to cover expenses like rent, before leaving New Bedford on his last voyage.

  No help for it, Josh would just have to dip into the money put aside for his savings--Harry was not losing that shack! That was the only home she had ever known.

  Harry wiped a hand over her eyes, made sleepy from all the drink. "Upon their marriage, Beth's father has promised Ben a position in his merchant's business. Finally my brother will have steady employment! I hate accepting handouts from church people. Charity makes me feel lower than low."

  "I know, sweetheart," Josh whispered. Double-damn Ben, for spending the money meant to keep his little sister from feeling ashamed.

  With a huge drunken yawn, Harry flopped back onto the pillow, the nightshirt still clutched in her hand. "Go write that note to Ben. I don't want my brother to worry. And then hurry back to me!"

  Josh knew he always would.

  Though it killed him to leave Harry there in the brothel room, naked on the bed, he opened the door. Giving her a suitably affectionate smile, the type of smile a big brother would bestow upon a much younger sister, Josh stepped out into the hallway.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Head spinning dizzily on the pillow, Harry fixed her bleary eyes on the closing door. Joshua and his fond smiles...

  She hated that fuck'n smile. Josh had given her that slow and easy smile all her life. It was the same detestable grin he bestowed on slobbering dogs with wagging tails, and chubby children with sticky hands. Having once been such a child, and having once owned such a dog, she was all too accustomed to those lifted smile muscles. Sadly, the stray had long since gone to doggy heaven, and thankfully her appearance had changed since losing her baby fat. Unfortunately, Josh's reaction to her never had.

  Changed, that is. And that was the agonizingly painful crux of her problem: Josh still saw her as the annoying kid sister of his best friend, someone he was required to be nice to. She was being niced to death, and she was fed up.

  The man she loved in secret, the man whose name appeared in her raggedy diary about a zillion times, wielded niceness like a warrior's sword, while hiding behind the shield of kindness, the same way other men hid behind lies. Josh would never, ever lie to her, but his kindness still kept her from getting too close, and his niceness still cut her to the very quick.

  Crinkled, seafaring hazel-green eyes, flashing white teeth, a quick and engaging laugh ... a damn irritating habit of patting her on the head ... these were Josh's weapons. Well, she had her own battle weapons, and she intended to use every sneaky last one of them tonight.

  She only wished her head wasn't spinning so! Not that she was sorry about the brawl, she wasn't--that loudmouth had deserved her fist in his gut for what he had said about Josh.

  On land, Josh had started off as poor as poor can get. At sea, he had worked his way up from cabin boy to harpooner to first mate. Hard work and good instincts had served him well, helping him locate the feeding grounds of the sperm whale, those great ocean beasts hunted for their blubber and meat and bones. Where would folks be without the boiled-down whale fat that provided clean oil to light their homes and streets, and the whale bones made into corset stays and buttons and sundry other useful items?

  In the dark with their clothing undone, is where they'd be! Everyone depended on these expeditions, and that's why Harry was so confident that someday Josh would captain his own whaler, maybe even own his own fleet of vessels; he was that good at spotting whales.

  That reliable too. So constant was Josh, the minute hand of one of those fancy timepieces could be set to his dockings and departures. Though to Harry's mind, Josh seemed to leave more frequently than ever he returned. This discrepancy in logic was due to the fact she missed him so when he was away at sea. He seemed to stay away longer and longer every time he embarked upon a new voyage. This time he would be gone four whole years!

  Harry wanted to give Josh something
to remember her by when he left, something to ensure his safe return to her. Only to her. There was only one thing she had of any real value, and she intended to hand it over to him tonight.

  A fortnight ago, her best friend, Mary, had explained what a man and woman did together in bed. After recovering from her initial sick disgust, Harry promptly decided that no man was ever doing those things to her...

  Save Josh. If she had to have a man's thing rammed up inside her privates, only Josh's man's thing would do. And if that were not a true test of her heart's devotion, naught ever would be.

  That is to say, if the description Mary gave her was even an accurate presentation of the facts. The entire notion seemed farfetched to her, if not downright silly. Why would anyone wish to do that? All that naked bundling under the covers in bed! To her mind, the time would be much better served sleeping than doing that. Harry didn't believe most married people really did that, and if they did, not on a regular basis, probably only every year or so, just to make a baby.

  But according to Mary, that was done more frequently; husbands wanted to do that all the time, several times a day as a matter of course, regardless that it just about killed their wives, causing them all kinds of miseries from dyspepsia to megrims to the woman's troubles. For that reason--leastwise, according to Mary--the fastest way of getting the wedding vows said was to let a man do that to you.

  She didn't expect Joshua to wed her before he left, that was far too grand a scheme, but she did wish to be in the running for the position when he returned, even if it took doing that.

  If what Mary said were even true. Sometimes, she thought her best friend was a terrible fibber and had made the whole thing up, and that wasn't how babies were made at all. If mum hadn't died giving her life, and if father hadn't died when she had just turned eight, Harry was sure either one or both would have confirmed her suspicions that babies came about through some other means. Like ... like...