An Improper Proposal (24 page)

“Payton. This is insane—”

“Oh, no.” Her hands were on her hips, her face thrust toward his. “You couldn’t marry me. No, I was objectionable. But you could marry a woman who was carrying another man’s child easily enough.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Miss Whitby, of course.”

He said, through clenched teeth, “Payton. I thought I had to marry her.”

“If you’d kept your trousers buttoned, you wouldn’t have had that worry, would you? But no, you had to go and put—”

Drake could not quite believe he was having this conversation. “For your information,” he interrupted, before she could go on—he was very much afraid about what she would say if she was allowed to continue—”I did keep my trousers buttoned. She told me it was Richard’s.”

That got her attention. She dropped her hands from her hips. “What?”

“She told me it was Richard’s.”

“Richard’s? Your brother’s? She told you she was carrying your brother’s child?”

He nodded. “Now, please, Payton. Wait until dark, then get off this ship.”

But Payton appeared not to have heard him. “But Richard’s dead,” she said. “How could she be carrying your brother’s baby, if he was dead?”

“They met before he died, Payton.” He’d been right. This was hell. And Payton Dixon was going to torture him until he descended into madness, as well. “In London. He was there for the season, and they met in some shop somewhere. When he went back to Daring Park, he wrote her letters, love letters. She showed them to me. She wrote him about the child, he wrote back, asking her to marry him. He died from being thrown from his horse while he was on his way back to London to see her. That day we met her, outside that inn, was supposedly just a coincidence. She was on her way to the same solicitors, to see if any provision had been made for her in Richard’s will—which, of course, it had not.”

“Oh,” Payton said, in a very small voice.

Drake shook his head. “Now I know that whole little performance, the reticule being stolen, Marcus Tyler having seen her and my brother together, which was why, she told me in the vicar’s study, he was blackmailing her for the map—it was all planned.” He caught a trace of the smell of smoke. Whatever “diversion” Payton had created, he hoped it wasn’t going to end up killing them both. “But at the time, I didn’t know that. I believed her. I thought my brother had got her with child. She wouldn’t take any money from me. She put on quite a convincing act, Payton. And so I did the only thing I could think of—”

“Oh,” Payton said again. Only this time, she folded her arms across her chest. “Marrying her yourself was the only thing you could think of? Don’t patronize me, Drake. You liked her. You thought she was—”

“Payton. Do we have to go into this now?”

Her chin slid out obstinately. “Yes.”

“I thought she was a pretty girl,” he told her, as loudly as he dared, “whom my brother had left in a terrible spot. Yes, I liked her. I didn’t know her, but she seemed like the kind of girl who’d make a good wife, and I certainly wasn’t getting any younger, and so I figured—”

“You figured you’d hit two birds with one stone.” Payton was glaring at him now. “You’d give a name to your brother’s bastard, and you’d get yourself a pretty little mealy-mouthed wife who’d sit at home darning socks for you while you were away at sea.”

“All right,” he said, with a sharp nod. “Yes, that’s exactly what I thought. Now will you please get outf here? Because if they come back and find you here harping at me like a fishwife, they’re going to know you’re a woman.”

“Be quiet.” She was pacing back and forth inside his tiny cell now, only it took her twice as many steps. Six steps starboard. Six steps back. “You ended up getting a lot more than you bargained for, didn’t you? Because the pretty little mealy-mouthed bride turned out to be a spy for Marcus Tyler.” She stopped pacing, and stood furiously in front of him. “How could you have been so stupid, Drake? How could you?”

Drake licked his lips—cracked from having received so little fresh water over the past few weeks—and said nastily, “Well, maybe, if you had once acted like a woman, and put an a dress once in a while, I might not have been so quick to succumb to Miss Whitby’s charms—”

Payton sucked in her breath. Payton, when she was at her most indignant, always put him in mind of a shipboard cat on whose tail someone had inadvertently trod. She looked even more like one now, as she puffed out her chest and lapped, “How dare you try to turn this around so it’s my fault? If you couldn’t see there was a woman underneath those trousers all along, then all I can say is, you and Miss Whitby deserve each other! I hope you’ll be very happy toge—”

It worked. He’d gotten her so riled up that she inadvertently stepped too close to him. In a second, he had her by both shoulders again, only this time, he didn’t shake her. He held her fast in a grip of iron, pulling her up onto her toes and lowering his head until his face was just inches from hers.

“Now, you listen to me, Payton Dixon, and you listen hard. It doesn’t matter what happens to me, because either way, I’m a dead man. If I don’t get off this ship, La Fond’ll kill me, and if I do, your brothers’ll kill me, for having gotten you into this fix in the first place. Frankly, between the Frenchman and your brothers, I’d take La Fond any day of the week. He’ll probably let me die a quicker death, anyway.” She was wriggling like a porpoise to get away. He only took firmer hold of her. “We’ve been at sea for nearly three weeks now. If I know La Fond, he’s taking the long way, because he’ll think anyone following will assume he’d take the shortest path back to Nassau. So we’ll probably be approaching the American coast soon. As soon as you see it—as soon as you see it—you wait until dark, and then you slip into a longboat and you cut the lines and you go!”

She was still squirming. “Not without you.”

“No! That is what I do not want you to do. Don’t wait for me, Payton. If I even start to suspect that you’re waiting around for some chance to rescue me, I swear to God, Payton, I’ll—”

She stopped squirming. Her eyes opened very wide. Her lips, he noticed, pared slightly. This was very distracting. She said, in a voice hard with challenge, “You’ll what?”

He really felt that what happened next was her own fault.

The Honorable Miss Payton Dixon did not fancy herself a theologian. In fact, there had been times when she’d been in serious doubt of God’s existence.

Now, however, was not one of those times. Because God—that same God who’d taken Payton’s mother from her at birth, and then cursed her further by letting her grow up to have hardly any bosom to speak of—had answered her prayers:

She was in Connor Drake’s arms, and Connor Drake was kissing her.

She wasn’t quite sure how it happened. One minute his hands had been gripping her shoulders, and he’d been shaking her—shaking her hard, too—and the next, he was kissing her, as passionately and as emphatically as, a few seconds before, he’d been shouting at her.

Payton couldn’t help thinking, even as she kissed him back, that this moment, this very moment, made—it all worthwhile … all of it, everything she’d had to suffer since she’d boarded this miserable vessel. His whiskers, which had turned into a full-blown mustache and beard in the weeks he’d been incarcerated, rasped the sensitive skin around her mouth, and when, a second later, he dragged his lips from her mouth, to press them against her neck, his hot breath burned her throat, making her shudder pleasurably, and her nipples go hard beneath the soft linen of her shirt, and the heavier material of her borrowed vest.

That sensation alone, of his lips on her neck, convinced her: it had all been worth it—the pots she’d been forced to scrub; the buckets of water she’d had to haul back and forth from the after house; the fact that she hadn’t been able to take a proper bath in a month; the fact that she had to wait until midnight every night before she could find a quiet corner in which to conduct her personal business, if she wanted to lower her trousers without fear of getting caught not having that particular appendage which the rest of the crew waved so proudly over the back of the ship whenever the urge took them.

It was all worth it. Even the reception she had received when she’d first entered the prisoner’s cell—even that was forgiven, now. Oh, it had been sweet enough, at first … until he’d started shaking her. That hadn’t been at all the kind of welcome she’d been expecting. She hadn’t exactly thought Drake would be overjoyed to see her, true—he’d surely have been happier, she supposed, to see his precious Miss Whitby—but then, she hadn’t expected him to be so angry, either. What ailed the man? Here she was, risking life and limb for him, and he hadn’t seemed the least bit grateful.

When she’d first seen the murderous rage in Drake’s eyes, Payton almost turned around and ran. Except she’d gone to so much trouble—pouring that gunpowder into the dunderfunk mix, timing its explosion just so that she could have a little while alone with him—she couldn’t bring herself to go.

Weathering his initial wrath seemed worth it now. His lips on hers made it all worthwhile; the hunger in his kiss, the desperation—like that kiss he’d given her the night before his wedding—was such that she knew, then and there, she’d done the right thing. This man needed her. She was vital to him, she realized. It was right there, in the greedy way he was kissing her, the urgency with which his tongue was prying her lips apart. She’d been a fool not to see it before.

Or maybe she had, and that was why, in spite of everything, she’d never let him push her completely away, no matter how hard he’d tried. She was as vital to him as food and air. He didn’t want to admit that—that was obvious. But it was also obvious in the way he was kissing her that he couldn’t do without her.

The realization filled her with giddy joy, and she clung to him. He tasted exactly the way he smelled, of fresh clean ocean, salty, bracing. It felt wonderful, more wonderful than she ever would have dreamed, to be in his arms again. The man had been weeks in an airless cell, and yet he still smelled the same, of salt air and clean, healthy male. It was an odor as familiar to her as home. It was Drake. There was no sweeter fragrance in the world than him.

Her fingers fisted in his hair, that baby-fine blond hair that felt so wrong on such a large, hard man. Payton could feel that hardness swelling against her, as certainly as she could feel the softness of his hair, the bristles of his beard scraping against her face. She knew what it was this time, that thick stiffness prodding against the front of her trousers, and this time, she sure as hell wasn’t going to touch it; not after what happened last time.

But it sort of seemed to her as if this time he wanted her to. Because as he’d been kissing her, Drake had been slowly backing up—taking her with him—until he came up against the wall to which he was chained. Then, slowly, he slid down that wall, still taking her with him, until he was seated on the floor of his cell …

And she was seated in his lap.

Only she wasn’t even sitting, really. Straddling his lap was more like it, facing toward him, her trousered legs on either side of his, a position of which Georgiana would most heartily disapprove, but which Payton couldn’t help feeling was absolutely right. She tended to think Drake agreed—especially when he breathed her name against her hair. Payton heard it, but more than that, she felt it, the deep reverberation of his voice in his chest. He was straining her so tightly to him that it seemed as if when he spoke, the sound went straight through her. His voice, saying her name, made something happen to her spine, loosened it, changed it from rigid bone to a substance more akin to butter. She brought her face away from where she’d buried it against his neck, and looked up at him, wondering how he’d done it, this magic with his voice.

But he soon gave her other things to wonder about. His hands, which had been wrapped around her, moved to grip her shoulders. Then one went to her arm, and the other to her waist. Then she realized the one at her waist had actually dipped down beneath her vest, and then disappeared inside it. She could feel the heat of his hand against her ribs, his fingers separated from her bare flesh by only the thin linen of her borrowed shirt.

And something else was happening. At first she’d thought it an accident, when that hard shaft, pressing so deliberately against the soft twill of his breeches, had suddenly brushed against the seams that kept her trouser legs together. She knew he didn’t like to be touched there, and so she’d tried to move away, but the hand on her arm pressed her back down—quite firmly, in fact. So firmly that the swollen head of thatshaft stabbed her in the most intimate of places. Intimate and, to Payton, quite unexpected. She let out a little bark of surprise and broke the kiss, rearing back to get a look at this man who was assaulting her so suddenly, and on so many fronts.

“What—” she started to inquire, through lips reddened from his kiss, but then her voice caught in her throat as Drake, his gaze very much below her neck, and unabashedly so, soundlessly and deliberately untied the string that held her shirt collar closed at the throat. Payton, confused, followed his gaze, but saw only her chest, the skin of which Georgiana had declared disgracefully tanned. What interest Drake could have in the skin of her chest, Payton hadn’t the slightest idea … until the hand that had untied her shirtfront dipped inside it to cup one of her small, tip-tilted breasts.

She sucked in her breath. Never had she felt heat like that, not there. As his fingers tightened, his palm grazed the tender bud of her nipple, which had gone rigid—both of them—the minute he’d first started kissing her. It was torture—exquisite torture—feeling that skin so close, yet not quite touching that part of her that was stretching, yearning for his touch …

And then she realized why he’d reacted the way he had that night in the garden, when she’d reached for the front of his breeches. He hadn’t been angry with her. He’d wanted her to touch him there, the same way she was yearning for him to flatten his hand against her breast. He’d probably just been surprised she was so forward.