Captain's Surrender (11 page)

"So it seems to me that you already care for me, and your stipulations are intended entirely to prevent me from feeling affection for you in return. Is that right?"
Peter seemed far too coolheaded, far too in control of the situation, while Josh was fast unraveling beneath his hands. Hands that were already lifting coat and loosened waistcoat off Josh's shoulders, leaving him exposed—and so nervous that he wondered suddenly how much of his caution had been self-defense, not nobly motivated at all. Since he was being systematically bared, it seemed appropriate to surrender this, too. "Yes."
Kenyon folded the clothes and placed them carefully on the cleanest barrel. "Shall I tell you something?"
"Please."
"It's too late."
Josh needed a drink, something to steady his nerves, calm him down before he utterly committed himself to something he was persuaded was a very bad idea. What he got instead was Peter returning, having taken off his own jacket, in a shirt so worn and threadbare it was all but transparent. "W— What?"
"I already care about you, you fool. If I didn't," Peter frowned over the too-stiff little buttons of Josh's collar, undid them with practical briskness, and slid his hand under the material, watching it with curious, fascinated eyes. "If I didn't," he said, the hand closing hard, drawing Josh unresisting towards him, "would I be doing this?" He bent his head and kissed Josh's exposed throat, mouthing from shoulder to ear. And there was ... teeth, and—God—tongue, and there might be a logical flaw in his argument, but Josh was too busy grabbing Peter by that worn shirt and shoving him hard into the wall to care. At the impact, Peter gave a little shudder of surprise, his breath caught and his eyes widened—Josh could feel the surrender under his hands, both of them a little taken aback by it. And delighted.
Hauling the shirt out of Peter's trousers, Josh got his hands under it. Pulling it over Peter's head, taking his hair ribbon with it, Josh threw it into a corner. Such skin! Smooth, the muscles shuddering beneath his touch. As he brushed exploratory fingers over the pale belly, Peter wriggled, snorting with laughter, and Josh remembered with a poisonous blackness that he should not be doing this.
He couldn't walk away—desire had become demand in him, insistent and barely rational—but he could at least check his wandering hands, resist the need to crowd closer, rest his forehead on the hollow of Kenyon's shoulder and try to behave less like an animal. "Your reputation? Your life!"
Peter said nothing for a while, while his agile fingers finished unlacing Josh's shirt, then he took Josh's hair and pulled until Josh had to raise his head and look at him.
"Every day on the sea, I risk life and limb and reputation for my king. May I not risk them even a little for you?"
For me?
"No! Not even a little."
Kenyon caught Josh's face in both hands and leaned in to kiss—no surrender in this; it was a hard, deep kiss that left Josh broken and consumed. "It isn't your place to protect me from my own decisions, Lieutenant. It seems to have escaped your attention that
I
want this, too. I have no intention of allowing my first action on this ship to end in failure because of rank cowardice over the consequences. Now, do you want me to fuck you or not?"
And if this was what Kenyon wanted—if he wasn't merely doing it out of the goodness of his heart, to relieve a friend's pathetic need—then he should have it whatever the cost. Overcome, Josh lunged forward, wrapped his arms around Kenyon's chest, nuzzled his face into that perfect neck and hung on, while the fear that someone or something would take this away from him even now ran riot behind his tightly closed eyes. "Oh,
Peter
, yes. Please, I do."
If Kenyon was alarmed by this childish clinging, he didn't show it. Indeed, he sighed contentedly and explored Josh's back with long, leisurely, affectionate touches a world away from the impersonal groping Josh was used to. Gentle, with the habitual gentleness of a man who is only used to dealing with women.
God knows, I am behaving like one.
Josh ruefully raised his head to find Peter looking at him with a fond, slightly shy gaze.
"You'll have to show me how."
And between exaltation and the impulse to burst into tears, it was a wonder Josh retained enough wits to say, "Aye aye, sir. At once!"

Chapter 12
Adam Robinson paused in his examination of the repair work to watch as the HMS
Seahorse
sailed into harbor, her courses backed and then furled, her speed decreasing gently, precisely, until she dropped both anchors and stilled with as little fuss and as much elegance as a swan. Behind her, at exactly spaced lengths came the more bedraggled forms of two prizes: a snow and a thirty-two gun frigate, larger than she was herself.
Beside him, on the harbor wall, Emily stood, and her expressive eyes clouded at the sight. "Bess!" she said, on the edge of courtesy. "Stop that! You make yourself ridiculous, and me with you." For Bess was on tiptoe, waving to the incoming sailors, who festooned the rigging, grinning and whistling and waving back.
"I shouldn't resent his success, I know," said Adam slowly as Emily leaped down, clutching her skirts around her and pretending she was not hiding here in the shadow of the slipway. "But when I think that every prize makes his promotion more likely, and with it brings closer the day when he begins to take heed to your father's hints and addresses himself to you, I cannot help but wish him..."
"Not ill fortune, surely?" she said, rousing herself to tease him. He smiled with appreciation at the effort.
"Perhaps not ill. Good fortune, somewhat slowed down."
"Long enough for you to catch up."
"Indeed." He sighed. A bargain sale of the
Clara Bush
's cargo had just about covered the cost of the repairs to her hull, but the bonus for the men of the
Nimrod
had emptied his savings from the bank, and there was nothing left with which to repair her splinted masts and torn rigging, let alone to buy a new cargo with which to begin again. He had recently had to brick up the window in the garret he lived in, to avoid window tax, and the future looked bleak.
"If I could only get her seaworthy again, there are men who would sign on for a share in the profits without wages, and I could perhaps go into debt enough to finance a trip to the slave coast. It's a business in which a man can make an easy fortune, and yet..."
"You know my feelings on that." Emily unhooked one of her earrings and looked at it, rather than at him, and though panic was a nearer companion than Adam dared admit, he still found her idealism warming.
"I do," he said, "and I share them. But Emily, you know I would marry you now if I could support you. Are you not impatient for that day?"
"I hardly know you," she said with a smile that took the sting from the words, but she reached out and fingered the fraying edge of his cuff. So light a touch, and yet he felt it in every particle of his body, like the press of sunlight. "Oh, Adam," she admitted, "if only my father were content for me to live the life I grew to adulthood in. I have no real desire to be the landed lady he wants me to be. With the money he spent on new clothes for me when we arrived, I might have opened a little shop and be now independent, free to marry who and when I chose. But would you wish to marry a shopkeeper?"
"I would wish to marry you if you were as penniless as myself," he said, gallantly, "but I could not support the idea of living off your labor. I want to lay the world at your feet, not burden you with concerns that you are too fine to bear."
Emily's mouth compressed at this, as if she had bitten into a lemon, but she said nothing, and he concluded that, like him, she was oppressed by the hopelessness of the situation. He supposed he should have withdrawn his suit at once when he discovered that she was not the nobody she claimed, but was in fact the daughter of one of the most powerful officials on the island. But by that time it had been too late; his affections were fixed.
As for hers, he noted how—despite her claim to dislike the man her father so clearly intended for her—she had now rejoined Bess on the harbor wall and was watching the doings of his ship. He took the record of repairs achieved and repairs still outstanding from the hand of his carpenter, tucked them into his partly buttoned waistcoat, and joined her.
The two prizes had dropped anchor and rocked gently in the bay. The captain's barge was lowered over the rail of the
Seahorse
, everything looking freshly painted, smart and bright beneath the blazing sky. The shrill sound of a whistle, and a small figure climbed fluidly down the side and into the boat, which rowed over to the thirty-two and collected a second figure, whose coat sparkled less brilliantly, but whose progress down the side seemed even more enthusiastic.
"I should invite him to dinner," said Emily doubtfully. "He will wonder, else, what I am doing here, and then I will come in for another interrogation as to why I will persist in being seen in your company, and why I will not think of my good name and prospects. If I go home and tell Father I came down to the harbor to invite Captain Kenyon to tea, however, he will be delighted enough not to ask more."
"Of course," Adam replied, jealousy curdling in his breast. It would be easier perhaps if his rival was ugly and stupid in addition to being successful. But the boat was close enough now that he could see Kenyon, with his patrician looks, the snowy perfection of his linen and the blaze of his gold braid. Worse, the man was deep in animated conversation with his first lieutenant, Mr. Andrews, and his normally stoic expression showed fierce pleasure, pride, and a
consciousness of his own worth that Adam found intimidating. How long would any woman prefer so unheroic, unsuccessful, and unenterprising a man as himself to that?
As he thought this, Kenyon looked up and saw Emily watching. Extraordinarily, his first reaction seemed to be a flinch. The smile fell from his face. Between one breath and the next, he had presented once more the perfect mask of civility he had worn on the
Nimrod.
Adam wondered to himself was that merely the startled delicacy of a military man who has grown up among men and does not know how to behave towards women? Or was that the recoil of a guilty conscience? Of a profession for whom "out of sight, out of mind" was a daily reality?
No. No, it was unfair of him to make such an assumption simply because he wanted very much to believe this paragon had some human faults, would prove himself the worse man in the end. As a penance, he walked a little away, sitting on an abandoned coil of cable and shaking out his carpenter's report—so that Emily and Kenyon could meet in some semblance of privacy.
It did seem, as the man ran up the harbor steps to bow to Emily with a expression of shy, delighted warmth, that he had misjudged.
"I ... Oh," said Kenyon, and took his hat off, looking out to sea as though an appropriate topic of conversation might be floating there. It was not. "Miss Jones."
"Captain." She dropped him a small curtsy, but cruelly left him in the lurch where conversation was concerned.
There was a long silence.
In it, Adam looked up again and caught the eye of Lt. Andrews, who stood perfectly rigid behind Kenyon. It was a shocking moment—it almost seemed to Adam that there was a physical snap as his own resentment of this meeting met that of the other man. Andrews' brown eyes seemed dark as the pit of hell, and though his face was appropriately expressionless, Adam could not hold his gaze. Adam looked away as if he had seen murder done, as if he had seen his own reflection and discovered a monster. It was deeply unsettling. Almost more so than watching the amused smile spreading on Emily's face.
"You will come to tea with my father and I? Not today, obviously, I see you have a great deal to do, but this time next week? I know he would be delighted to see you."
Kenyon's own smile answered it; a light and small expression, but on that narrow face ridiculously touching. "I should ... I should be very honored, Miss Jones. My thanks."
The pit of Hell, Adam thought. Yes, that was exactly what it was like.
* * * *

The pit of Hell was occupying Captain Walker's mind also. As if it wasn't enough to feel as though a carthorse had kicked him in the back, or to be so weak he could not lift a hand long enough to write a swingeing letter to the Admiralty. No, on top of all of this, the thought that they had taken his ship away from him, and they had gotten away with it, was nigh unendurable.

While he was still half lucid, in a state where reality and opium dreams mixed, Commodore Dalby had visited to tell him the
Nimrod
had sailed for England under the temporary captaincy of Dalby's cousin, and that when Walker was well enough he was to be offered instead a place administering the dockyard. At the time he had thought it a fever dream, too appalling to be real. They knew he was a fighting captain. Rodney himself had praised his fearlessness and drive; Sir George Brydges Rodney himself had recommended him for his captaincy—what the Devil's business did some paper pushing beau in London have taking it away?

But once he had recovered enough to make his voice heard, he found it was no dream. Summersgill's
recommendation, Dr. Harding said, sharing the gossip that had made its way down into the officer's club. The gentleman had made a remarkable impact at the Customs Office, and Governor Bruere already thought a great deal of his judgment. Enough to invite the commodore to dinner at Government House and make the "request" to him to have Walker deprived of his ship.

At the thought, Walker was filled with such rage he almost felt well again. Summersgill? As if that cringing little civilian could be behind anything! But Summersgill's protégé? Walker was not blind to the affection in which Summersgill held Kenyon. Talking and plotting together all the way from Portsmouth! Kenyon had been trouble from the start, with his dramatics and his "more perfect than thou" attitude. It was surely no coincidence that the threat of mutiny had never been more prevalent than on this last voyage with that poisonous young man as first lieutenant.

Now Kenyon had a ship, and his string of prizes was the talk of the hospital. He and Andrews, that sick little pervert, were getting rich, while Walker himself lay bereft and disgraced with nothing but a small sugar plantation and a few hundred slaves, and a job at the
dockyard
, for pity's sake, like an invalid or a
tradesman.
It could not be borne.