She shrugged out of his hold, her skin hot where he’d touched her.
“You sound like a hen-wife, Seton. Go nag someone else.”
His gaze, intense and hard, scanned her face. But there was something else in the blue, something seeking. Quite abruptly her knees weakened.
Her knees weakened?
She clutched the washstand. “Go away.”
“Goddamn it.” His voice was low. “You behave as though possessed sometimes.”
“Possessed by the rapidly increasing regret that I signed you on?”
“What is in the box, Viola?”
Viola. Only Viola. Not Miss Carlyle. Not Captain.
The air petered out of her lungs. Perhaps she was insane. At the very least, a fool. The mere sound of only her given name upon his lips, that simple familiarity, turned the remainder of her joints liquid. No man had called her by her real name in fifteen years. Not even her father.
“A letter.”
“What letter?”
“If I knew that, would I have swum under the belly of a ship in a freezing ocean to get it?”
“Viola.”
“A letter to his wife and children.” She shrugged. “Nothing, really. He’d told me he always nailed a box to the underside of his ship whenever he was making ready to set off on a journey. That way if brigands took his boat and threw him overboard someone might someday find the letter and send it to his family. As a final good-bye of sorts.”
His chest jerked in a sharp inhalation but he said nothing.
“I told him that was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.” She waved it off, but her motion was unnatural. “What pirates would send a letter to the wife of the man they killed? And there was every chance it might end up at the bottom of the sea, in any case, or just rot away no matter how finely soldered the box. But he said that if there was even one small chance it might reach…” Her voice faltered beneath his regard and she was shaking now, soaked to the bone. “I mean to say, it didn’t seem very logical for him to…”
His lips parted as though he might speak, but still he did not.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she snapped.
“You risked your life to retrieve a dead man’s last letter to his family?”
“I already told you there was no risk in-”
He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her close, knocking a gasp from her. He bent his head, his breath filtering over her chilled skin. She fought not to close her eyes, not to wish for what she was wishing.
“Going to bite my nose again like a ten-year-old, Seton?” Her voice quavered.
“No.”
At that moment Viola discovered that the perfect mouth felt even more perfect than it looked. He kissed her, and quite abruptly the question of whether she would allow it became instead how long she could make it last.
It was not a short or simple kiss. Not from the moment it began. They met, fully, and they held, immobile. Far too long. Far too close. Far too intimate. Far too much like he might have been wanting to kiss her as much as she had been wanting to kiss him and now if they were to move or part even slightly the reality of it might scamper away. As though he were imprinting the feel of her upon him. Aidan had never kissed her like this. Aidan kissed her like he could step away at any moment, like kissing her was something he bestowed upon her as a favor and he might cease easily enough.
This was different. This was possession. It was relief and certainty at once. It was a need to be close and remain so for as long as possible without breathing. To underscore the impossible intimacy of it, his hand scooped behind her head and held her still, attached to his mouth, where she was quite willing to remain in any case and he needn’t bother trapping her. But so help her God she liked being trapped. He was heat and strength and she needn’t ever breathe again if he would not release her.
He did finally, but only to drag in air as she did, then cover her mouth again with his.
Now it became clear that this was not only a man who could dazzle a girl into suffocation. He was also a man with an impressive knowledge of what sort of kiss turned a woman to pure desire. In an instant, unsettling intimacy gave way to drugging sensuality.
He tasted her, it seemed, his attention first on her lower lip and the tender inside edge of it, then the upper edge, and she got hot everywhere. She opened her lips and let him have her. Tilting her head back, he played with her hunger, unbearably, caressing slowly until she was leaning up into him for more. She pressed onto her tiptoes. With the tip of his tongue he traced her lips, urging them apart with the lightest caress. Her body flushed with pleasure.
Like some sort of desperate cat, she whimpered.
His fingers sank into her hair and his tongue slid alongside hers, testing. The ache spread, throbbing as he kissed her with this intimacy beyond intimacy, dipping into her so she could feel him inside her and making her tremble. She grabbed his wrist, the taut sinews of a man, his strength holding her and she wanted to feel him holding her all over. Her skin sought it. His hand slid down her neck, and Viola’s blood turned to fire.
He lifted his mouth. For a moment he hovered there, both of them breathing fast.
“There.” His voice was low. “That shut up that mouth for a minute.”
“More than a minute.” She swallowed around the anchor apparently lodged in her throat. “Surely.” His hand was hot heaven on her neck. He seemed very large. She had always been short, but for the first time in her life she felt delicate too. Like a lady.
But a lady would not ache to dart her tongue out and lick his lips, even if she could summon the courage, which Viola could not despite the perfection of that damp mouth so close to hers.
It curved up at one side. His hands fell away from her, he lifted his head, and Viola stood wet and warmed only by his coat as he crossed the small cabin and went out, shutting the door behind him.
She leaned back, her knees gave way against a chair, and she sank onto her behind. She ought to be furious. She ought to have scratched out his eyes. Instead she had allowed him to kiss her without the slightest bit of resistance.
But she had not kissed a man in a very long time. Of course she hadn’t resisted.
The next time, she would.
There would not be another kiss. It had been a mistake. Jin’s brain knew it even if his perpetually aroused body did not. She tasted sweet and hot and like a woman who needed kissing. Like a woman who needed a great deal more than kissing.
But he should not have done it. The plan of winning her agreement to return to England through seduction was not realistic. He could not control her desire if he could not first control his own-which he now knew he could not do while touching her hair and face and body. Wet and bedraggled from her swim, and rushing to justify her foolish behavior in stuttering fits, she had set her dark liquid gaze upon him and he felt her desire in his gut. In his chest. He’d had to kiss her. He only managed to leave it at a kiss by reminding himself that despite all appearances to the contrary she was a lady.
He was not a gentleman. He was the bastard son of a woman who had cared for him so little that she allowed him to be sold into slavery. He was a man who had done evil deeds in cold blood that had nothing of honor about them. He was not a man to be enjoying the touch of a woman of aristocratic blood, no matter how she denied her birthright or how eagerly she responded to him. And he was the man who was taking her home to England whether she wished it or not.
But neither was he a man of regret. He simply would not allow himself to make the mistake of coming too close to her again.
To that end, he steered clear of her. She obliged. It was remarkable how on a modest-sized ship they managed to successfully avoid each other. It would not be possible on his own considerably smaller vessel when they sailed east. But he would deal with that when the time came.
They skirted Barbados, catching sight only of an American naval frigate, then losing it in the rain that began falling heavily, and Jin counted ea
ch day closer to port. The downpour lasted twenty hours, soaking the sheets and canvas and all aboard while the wind remained high, driving them west. The men barely grumbled, trained to constant good humor by their mistress. Like dogs. Even Matouba climbed down from the crow’s nest drenched yet with a smile for his captain as he lumbered below.
But rain was not storm, and Jin must be content with their progress.
The night before they were to make port, the rain let up entirely, clearing on a swift northerly wind. He took the chart to the bow and settled on the forecastle to study it at his leisure. But he knew these islands already, their inlets and beaches and mountains. He had spent most of his youth sailing between them, picking up work where he could, stealing it where he could not.
Sixteen hours and they would be in port. Two days after that the fortnight would be over, and he would return Viola Carlyle to the home in which she belonged. To her family.
Her footsteps sounded on the deck behind him, approaching. She moved with a confidence her men did not possess, and he knew her by her tread and the scent of spiced flowers coming before her on the wind. He knew her satin voice and the flavor of her mouth and the texture of her skin at the delicate curve of her throat. He knew her stubborn determination and the reluctant flicker of uncertainty in her violet eyes. He knew her more than he wished to.
He turned his head, met her unshrinking gaze, and feared that two days and sixteen hours might prove an eternity.
Chapter 10
Avoiding him had not served the purpose she hoped. He was as gorgeous as he had been four days earlier when in her cabin he kissed her into a rag doll. The slant of the setting sun rendered his face and hands dark and set him before a curtain of cobalt fading to lavender. It was not a sight conducive to steady nerves.
She sucked in a breath and poked her fists into her hips. “I don’t want you to kiss me again.”
His brow tilted up, a look of tolerant endurance settling on his handsome features.
“Don’t look at me like you don’t know what I am talking about.”
“I have no intention of kissing you again.”
“I don’t think you had any intention of kissing me the other day either, but you did it anyway.”
He chuckled, shaking his head. “You cannot refrain from quarreling-about anything-can you?”
She had intended a more seductive approach, along the lines of flirtatiously refusing him her favors so he would grow desperate for them and declare himself in order to have her, and thus she would win the wager. Her quartermaster, Crazy, had once told her that it drove a man wild when a woman he desired would not kiss him or cuddle with him. He’d said at those times he would have promised anything, said anything to his wife, even things he didn’t mean, merely to encourage her to touch him.
But Seton didn’t look desperate. At best, he seemed mildly amused. This was not going as she’d planned. Neither of them was following the script.
She pursed her lips. “I don’t argue when I agree with someone, which I never do with you, so you are unlikely to witness my compliance.”
The golden light of the fading sun glimmered in his eyes. Viola’s throat dried to the texture of a ship’s biscuit. He had witnessed her compliance quite well. He had taken part in it.
“Have you business you wish to discuss?” he asked with maddening calm. “Ship’s business, that is?”
“After we drop anchor in the harbor and unload, you and I will head along the coast to a farm not far away.”
“For what purpose?”
“To pay a call on a man my father used to do business with. An old friend.”
“I can remain with the ship.” Until the fortnight of the wager was out, he meant. But she wasn’t about to lose, and she had an ace up her sleeve: Aidan Castle. That, Crazy had told her, was another certain method for making a man mad with desire. Present him with competition.
“You’ll come with me,” she said. “Bring Mattie along, if you like. For protection.” She grinned and lifted a single brow. But she did not receive the reaction she expected. Instead of denial or cool indifference, his gaze remained steady upon her and rather warm.
“I do not need protection from you, Viola Carlyle.”
“Our first three weeks out I didn’t see you atop for one sunset,” she replied, “and yet here you have been five evenings running now, since you kissed me. It can only be because you like to see me.” She cocked her head. “Certain you don’t need protection from me, after all?”
“Why aren’t you at the helm? That is where you like to be at dusk, is it not?”
“Trying too hard to get rid of me now. That’s interesting.”
“If you say so.” His mouth tilted up at one edge and for a moment the sinking sun seemed to flare upon the horizon, shooting sparks into the darkening sky above.
This was strange, knowing one another’s habits as sailors on the same vessel always did, yet not really knowing anything of him in truth. Most of her crewmen confided in her, seeing in her a sister or daughter, even a mother. But this man kept his own counsel. The Pharaoh, she suspected, needed no confidant. The cut of his jaw and cast of his features, the manner in which he held himself, square-shouldered and in command-these bespoke a man of thorough independence.
She knew nothing of Jinan Seton except that his rare smile… made her see stars.
She saw stars when he smiled.
Stars.
She blinked it away.
“My first few years aboard ship, it was the only time of day Fionn allowed me up there.” She lowered herself to the bowsprit, her behind settling onto the beam’s curve. He watched without expression. But it was her ship and she could sit where she wished. And she wished to sit with him in the sunset.
It seemed natural.
And perhaps if she sat here long enough, he would smile again.
“I have very fond memories of that time,” she added.
“They are not your only fond memories.” It was not a question.
She shook her head. “No. I have plenty. But…”
He waited, as he always did. He was good at being silent and listening. She had never been, not from her girlhood. The quiet, dreaming daughter had been Serena, a perfect complement to Viola’s madcap energy.
She looked off to the glistening horizon.
“Dusk is special.” She liked to be atop at dusk, for then the sunset shivered through her and made her feel weak with lonely longing. It was the time of day that seemed least safe, when no matter which direction the April’s bow pointed there seemed no secure port in the sightings, no home ahead. At dusk Viola could stand upon her quarterdeck and feel weightless and directionless beneath the changing sky, as though she might fly away at any moment, or simply disappear into the colors above, swept away with the winds. She imagined at those moments that only her grip on the helm bound her to the deck. To reality.
It was nonsensical. And it was the way Jinan Seton made her feel.
She could admit this to herself now looking into his eyes glimmering with the twilight. Since the moment she’d met him weeks earlier, a sliver of that lonely longing had threaded through her and remained. And she fed it because she loved the feeling. He made her feel like longing was something to be wished for, something to be enjoyed, as she always secretly had.
“What about you, Seton?” She leaned back onto her hands. “What are your fond memories of childhood?”
His gaze slipped over her body leisurely, laying tendrils of heat beneath the surface of her skin. Then he looked into her eyes.
“I suppose that standing beside the auctioneer’s block while the boy who purchased me unlatched the irons from my wrists and gave me freedom must rank as my best childhood memory, Miss Carlyle.”
For a long moment she could not draw air into her lungs properly.
“I suppose it would,” she finally said. After another minute during which lines creaked in blocks and sailors’ voices at the other end of the ship came along the b
reeze, she said, “Did you know your family?”
“My mother.”
“Only your mother?”
“She watched her husband sell me to the traders. He had noticed that the boy who ran about the servants’ quarters looked a bit too much like his wife and an Englishman who had lived in Alexandria seven years earlier. He beat the truth out of her, then he punished her for her infidelity. And me.”
“Barbary pirates.” Sea bandits who would sell anyone into slavery for a price. Even a boy with white skin. But then to be brought west to be sold at an English market-that was unheard of. Someone had paid the slaver richly to make it so.
He regarded her with unreadable eyes. “So you see, Miss Carlyle, our stories are somewhat similar. But given the principal difference, perhaps you understand now how I am less than sympathetic to your reticence to return to England.”
Her heartbeats came thick in her chest. “One has nothing to do with the other.” The wind snatched up her hair and whipped it between her lips but she felt frozen and could not lift a hand to dislodge it.
“You owe it to your family to tell them you are well.”
Prickling heat swiped at her insides, driving her tongue. “Did you tell your mother when you were sailing around robbing other people’s ships?”
“By the time I was able to return to Alexandria, she was dead.”
She stood up. “They needn’t hear it from me. You could tell them. Indeed, you will be obliged to because I am not going with you.”
“Why not?” He remained still.
“I don’t belong there,” she blurted out. “I am going where I belong now, and no one can force me to do otherwise.” But that was perhaps a lie, because looking into his crystalline eyes she feared greatly that she would do as he bid when the time came. She should not have asked him about his past. The longing rushed inside her now like a bow cutting through water at full sail, clogging her throat and making her feel filled up in a manner she did not like. He was not what she wanted-a man who did not need anyone. She wanted Aidan Castle, who always told her how good she was for him.
How to Be a Proper Lady Page 9