Under his fingers, her skin was smooth and unnaturally cool, with the heart beating inside. She might have been a marble statue, just called to life, taking the first breath. He could slide over a few inches and help himself to those breasts. He’d maybe taste them fairly soon. They’d be honey and cream with a rough nub of a nipple tweaking back and forth on his tongue.
Damn. Was he really thinking that way about an unconscious woman?
Yes. Yes. Oh, yes. Let’s do that. His cock didn’t have any scruples at all.
But then, his cock wasn’t in charge. “And I’m roused up like a squad of marines on shore leave.” He pulled his hand off the girl and stomped across the cabin, feeling moderately despicable, looking for towels. “That’s uncomfortable. Let’s wring some water out of your pretty hide and get you covered up.”
Blankets were in the bottom drawer, towels beside the washstand. He brought them to the bed and sat beside her and dried her off fast, trying not to touch her skin. “We’ll discuss your very tempting wares when you’re awake. I like dealing with women who can talk.”
He wrapped her in one of the Valletta blankets he shipped, vivid blues and greens in long stripes. Wool soft as a kitten. He cocooned her, head to foot, till he couldn’t see a square inch of skin. It didn’t help as much as he’d hoped. “Where the hell has that boy got to?”
Unbelievable, the effect she had on him. Had he ever wanted a woman this much? “You’re something a man might pull up in his net one night. A mermaid, perfect and chill. Maybe you shed your scales and walked up Katherine Lane right out of the kingdom of the sea. Maybe that’s how a woman like you got there.”
Without opening her eyes, she said clearly, “It’s dark.” Whoever she was talking to, it wasn’t him.
“The lamps aren’t lit. I’ll do it soon.”
“I can’t . . .” Gradually, like a flower closing, she curled herself into a ball. When she hid her head in her arms, she smeared blood across her face. “I can’t get out.”
“I’m here.”
“Dark...”
Because her eyes were shut. “I’ll make it light in a minute.”
Loud thumps in the passageway said Tom was back. The boy slammed the door to the bulkhead, slopping water from the bucket. “Is she dead?”
So much for his private idyll with a mermaid. “She’s not going to die. She’s going to sit up and ask why I keep a lazy, half-sized baboon in my cabin. Bring that over here.”
He sat down on the bunk beside her and wet a corner of a towel in the bucket. He began to clean the scrapes on her hands. Tom, a precocious eleven, craned for a look under the blanket. “Gawd, ain’t she a beauty. An’ she sells that up on the Lane?”
“Not to the likes of you.”
The girl opened brown gold eyes. Her first sight was Tom’s face, level with her own. “I fell, Sir. I weren’t . . . careful. ” She tried to focus on him. “Who ’er you?”
“I’m Tom. I’m pleased to make yer acquaintance.”
“Tell ’im I can’t get out.”
“What? Oh, yes, miss, I’ll tell ’im. Can I get you something? Cup of tea. The fire’s lit in the galley. I could get you a cup of tea, miss.”
He could feel her shaking under the blanket. Fear and cold and confusion. “Tom.” He thumbed toward the door. “Lose yourself.”
The girl’s gaze followed Tom as he left. Slowly she blinked her way around the cabin . . . bookshelves, the chart table, a stack of crates, and finally back to him. “Where am I?”
“My ship. How many fingers am I holding up?”
“You think I hit my head.” She freed a hand from the blanket and explored into her hair. “I did.”
“How many fingers?”
“Three.”
“Does the light hurt your eyes?”
“Everything hurts.” This time, when she tried to sit up, he helped her. He kept an arm around her while she huddled, hazy-eyed, clutching the blanket to her, looking bewildered. She would have aroused protective instincts in a stone.
“Talk to me, sparrow. Who are you?”
“Jess. I’m Jess.”
When she’d been reeling in and out of consciousness, her voice had been pure East London. Now she sounded gentry. Somewhere, his cockney sparrow had picked up an education. She got more and more interesting. “Do you remember getting hit?”
She shook her head. Her face knotted in pain. “I shouldn’t do that.”
“No, you shouldn’t. Do you know what day it is?”
“No. I . . . Stop asking stupid questions.”
She’d mislaid a couple pieces of her memory. He’d seen that happen once, when his bosun took a fall from the rigging. It had been a day before the man remembered what ship he was on. He never did remember the fall.
“You’re still shivering. Let’s get you dry.” When she didn’t object, he picked up the towel and started unbraiding and untangling, blotting water out of her hair, making every move slow so he wouldn’t scare her.
She was thinking the whole time, frowning. After a while she said, “I don’t remember everything. What happened to me?”
“You fell under a wagon and got hurt.” They’d talk about it tomorrow. That was one of several discussions he had planned.
Done. He put the towel down. Her hair dried up lighter than he’d expected, the color of a new-cut spar. Lovely. A man would keep this woman just for the pleasure of taking her hair down at night.
“I got my brains scrambled up, didn’t I?”
“A little, maybe. Give it an hour or two and you’ll be fine.”
“I don’t—” She stopped abruptly and jerked away from him. She pulled the blanket loose and looked inside. Her eyes came up, accusing. “I’m not wearing any clothes. You got me naked.”
He was scaring her. He dropped the towel and backed away, holding his hands wide and empty.
THE man retreated, trying to look harmless and not succeeding to any extent at all.
He said, “You’re not naked. You’re in a blanket.”
Oh, that was reassuring, that was. She was wearing damp skin and a wooly blanket. She pulled cloth up to her chin and hid behind it. “We must know each other pretty well, whoever you are.”
“My name is Sebastian.”
“Se . . . bast . . . ian.” She tried the syllables out. She was pretty sure this was a complete stranger. A dangerous stranger. She’d known lots of dangerous men, and she could recognize one at a glance. “You’re one of the things I don’t remember, Sebastian. I don’t remember you at all.”
“You don’t know me.”
“Then I should have my clothes on, shouldn’t I?”
He kept his voice soft, talking to her like she was a scared child. “They were wet.”
There her dress was, a heap of slit-up rags on the carpet. “My dress got wet, so you cut it off. You must be a right terror in a thunderstorm.” A prudent woman in her situation wouldn’t embark upon sarcasm.
“You were soaked to the skin and freezing and bleeding at the edges. I couldn’t do anything with a bundle of muddy cloth.” He made stripping her naked sound prosaic as oatmeal. “And you were leaking mud all over my bed. I sopped a gallon of dirty water off you.”
“Mud. That explains it.” Her head pounded like a mill wheel. Every muscle in her body hurt, some of them in inventive ways. She couldn’t remember how she got here. She was naked. There was nothing good about this situation. Nothing.
She was in bed in the captain’s cabin of a good-sized merchant frigate, about a hundred seventy tons. This isn’t a Whitby ship. I’m not safe. The cut of the cabin and the neat brass fittings said it was from a shipyard in Boston. This man, though, he sounded English, not American.
Most of all . . . it was strange inside her head. Felt like somebody’d taken a big ladle and stirred her brain a few times. Nothing was where it should be. When she went asking why she was sitting frog-naked in the captain’s cabin of a merchant frigate, she couldn’t dip up a teaspoon of explanation. I am in a mort of trouble.
Captain Sebastian stood five feet away, looking large and lethal, with a worried frown. “I’m not going to hurt you.”