I Kissed an Earl: Pennyroyal Green Series (24 page)

“We’ll speak to Mr. Musgrove in Brest and inquire at the docks to see what we can discover about the ships.”

“And I can accompany you to question him?”

“Yes.” He said it curtly, after a moment. Not looking at her.

But he could feel the pleasure and triumph radiating from her. I made her happy. Oddly, the realization that this made him untenably happy also made him irritable. That strand of hair had gotten loose again. It whipped gaily around her head, giddy to be free.

“You won’t forget our bargain?” She meant two nights from now she’d be sleeping in his much more comfortable bed if she was a compliant cook’s mate.

He pictured her in his bed, every one of those strands loose over his pillows.

“How could I forget?” He said it shortly.

He glanced down then. And suddenly realized what he’d been tracing in the moisture on the rail: Violet Redmond’s clean, lyrical profile.

He stared, alarmed. Then wiped it almost frantically clean immediately.

“Good night, Miss Redmond. You’d best go below now.”

She was clearly startled to be so abruptly dismissed.

“Good night, Captain.”

He watched her go, spine straight as a soldier’s, inevitably tucking her hair behind her ear as she went.

Chapter 15

I t was the oddest bargain she’d ever struck, but she’d survived three days of potato peeling without losing her limbs or her temper, and two more nights of tossing and turning on the lumpy little mattress in the vole hole.

Two days during which the earl had made himself surprisingly scarce. At least when she was about.

He’d left her the other night with his patience nearly in tatters, she knew. But embedded like a thorn in her pleasure at winning a concession about Lyon was the worry she’d driven the earl away. Bored him, perhaps.

Feeling unaccountably deflated, she was nevertheless ready for a comfortable bed and a room that smelled like a clean earl and not like dozens of indifferently clean Distinguished Guests. So when the third evening arrived, she’d tentatively knocked on the captain’s cabin door. And waited.

Then turned the knob when there was no answer.

She slinked in and closed the door. She slipped into her night rail, and unpinned her hair, and gave her head a vigorous shake to encourage it to plummet Rapunzel-like down her back. She divided it into two plaits, and watching herself in the earl’s mirror, brushed it for fifty strokes on either side, until it gleamed and poured through her hands like water. She lit the lamp perched on the little table next to the bed, which pulsed into life and illuminated about as effectively as a firefly. She thought she might read a bit before she doused it for sleep.

Miles’s book generally did the trick for her when it came to inducing sleep. She made her way to his bookshelf. And here were the books on English grammar the earl had studied. She furtively pulled one down and thumbed through it with a peculiar, furtive, tenderness, as though she were peeking into his heart. In the margins were notes to himself, in a hand at first very careful, clumsy, which she found unaccountably moving. Then bolder, freer, more certain as it went on.

And here was proof that he hadn’t sprung fully arrogant from the sea, like Poseidon. He had transformed himself through sheer will.

She drew her finger across the spines of books in Spanish, which she could read a little. Don Quixote she recognized. Its presence was ironic: the earl wasn’t one to tilt at windmills, while he thought her belief in Lyon’s virtue and innocence clearly qualified as such. There were a few books in French, which she could read fluently: Le Roman de la Rose. Really, Flint? This amused her, as he’d steadfastly maintained he was not romantic. Though certainly it was a book of action. Embossed in the spines of other books was language that was Arabic or Greek and she’d no hope of ever understanding, the letters looking more like hieroglyphics to her. He’d been everywhere, indeed. No wonder he wanted to belong to something, to someplace. At last she took down her brother Miles’s book on Lacao, and took it to bed with her. She pulled up the blanket that smelled so like the earl she might have been draped in him. Soap and man. And for a dizzied instant she rested her cheek upon her knees, and wondered, breathlessly, precisely what that would be like.

The book tipped from her knees, and pages gapped a very little in one spot, as though Flint had marked a place where he was reading. Perhaps at the anecdotes of the women who wore naught above their waists for clothes?

Curious, she slipped her fingers into the gap.

And a jasmine blossom tumbled into her lap.

She stared at it, as dumbstruck as though a star had fallen clean out of the sky. Its bruised cream petals seemed to glow against the stark white of her night rail. Gently, gently, she settled the book down on the bed. She took up the bruised cream blossom between two trembling fingers, as though she’d captured a fairy. Succumbing to impulse, she closed her eyes and drew it softly along the line of her jaw. He’d done it as though he were trying to memorize her.

The realization was a sweet kick in her chest, like a blossom too tightly furled bursting opening.

Oh God. This was a man who only kept things that meant a good deal to him. And that moment, again, was like her first glimpse out onto the sea. Infinite, terrifying, glorious, very uncertain.

And then she heard the unmistakable footsteps pounding toward the cabin. She sat bolt upright. Bloody hell!

She snatched up the book, clapped the blossom back between the pages, frantically gauged the distance between the bed and the bookshelf, and finally decided to shove both beneath the bed and snatched the blankets up to her chin.

She froze in the semi-dark when the door opened and Captain Flint strolled in, already undoing the buttons on his shirt with one hand while depositing a lit lantern on a small table. He tugged the shirt up out of his pants and flung it off over his head and onto the back of his chair, then and paused in front of the mirror.

Good God.

The bands of muscle across her stomach tightened involuntarily, bracing to withstand his raw male beauty. Those vast shoulders she’d admired before did indeed taper down to a narrow, hard waist. He turned slightly, deciding to shake out and smooth his shirt more carefully onto the chair, and a mesmerizing series of muscles slid elegantly beneath the skin on his back, which was achingly tawny and smooth and gleaming in places and mapped in scars in others—here was a narrow white flat slash—from the time he’d won Lavay at cards?—and another, a round one, white and raised, low on his back near his waist; one that had clearly been stitched closed; it was uneven, puckered at the edges. From the prison escape? She thought of the woman at the viscomte’s party giggling over the romance of piracy. There was no romance in violence.

What to her was unselfconscious brute beauty was for him simply armor, a utilitarian suit he possessed and used to go about the daily business of being Captain Flint. He flung it into danger; he waltzed with it, he steered the ship with it, he saved lives with it. He made love to his mistress with it.

She shied violently away from that thought.

He’d pressed a jasmine blossom into a book.

A vulnerable man might have done that. But it was a half-naked warrior who stood before her now.

She put her hands up to her face, found her cheeks hot, brought them down again. Her entire body sang with a ferocious awareness, with longing. She felt, yet again, unequal to him. Which didn’t mean she wouldn’t love to try to feel equal.

“He’s a V.”

She’d meant to think it. Too late she realized she’d murmured it rather than thought it.

Chapter 16

F lint went comically still. The words echoed in the semi-dark, an absurd non sequitur demanding acknowledgment as surely as if she’d wantonly broken wind. Please ignore it, please ignore it, please ignore it.

He turned very, very slowly. He stared at her, the blankets clutched up to her bosom in one fist, her white nightdress slipping from one shoulder. The air chilled her skin where it was bare. The rest of her was certainly unusually warm.

“A V?” He studied her gravely.

He didn’t seem surprised at all.

And suddenly she wondered if his appearance had been planned.

His chest was magnificent. Scored in neat divisions of precise muscle, begging for a finger to trace them the way one might use a compass to chart courses. Lightly furred, a dark trail forming a seam to vanish into his trousers.

She couldn’t think or speak when her eyes were so very occupied.

“Have you given up speaking in complete sentences, Miss Redmond? Please say it isn’t true. What a loss it will be to the world.” He waited, eyebrows relentlessly arched.

“A V,” she repeated faintly, a little irritably now. “It’s the shape of…”

She couldn’t finish this sentence. It could lead nowhere good. Or certainly nowhere comfortable.

“The shape of you,” she admitted, resigned.

His puzzled frown deepened.

So she sat up and released the blanket. It rolled to her lap, and his avid, unabashed eyes focused on the parts of her revealed instantly. The lamplight was likely making her nightdress nearly transparent, or casting her in tantalizing shadows.

She was wickedly, dangerously glad.

With one finger, with slow, exaggerated patience, she sketched a broad V in the air, beginning at the vast shelf of his shoulders—the left one—slanting slowly, slowly down to that hard narrow waste scored in muscle and golden skin and scar, drawing it upward to the hard round wonder that was his right shoulder.

Perhaps the world’s most glorious V.

Flint stood transfixed. As though he could see himself shimmering in the air between them. And then he jerked his head away and sat down hard on the bed, his back to her. Surely his face was warm simply because the night was sultry. It seemed instantly important to work his boots off, to set to work on something. His deft hands suddenly felt huge and clumsy; he tugged; it clung. He abandoned the effort and put his hands on his thighs. Why was he undressing? He ought to leave.

He’d forgotten it was her turn to sleep in his cabin.

Or had he?

Silence landed, butterfly soft, strangely fraught.

He turned to look at her. In the lamplight her skin was half golden, and this was disorienting: she seemed soft and exotic and…eminently mussable. Made for mussing.

“How on earth did you arrive at that conclusion?” he managed to ask casually.

“All English young ladies are taught to draw, and to view the world in terms of shapes when we do. I noticed that y-your torso is shaped rather like a V.” She shrugged with one shoulder. For some reason the one-shouldered shrug irritated him.

“Are you trying to tell me that I’m a work of art, Miss Redmond?”

He returned his attention to his boots. They were beautifully made and he cared for them meticulously, because he valued and respected all things beautifully made and useful. And yet the toes were still creased from uncountable steps across the deck of ships, across foreign lands, across ballrooms. If he could count those creases, perhaps he could measure the distance he’d come, the way one could measure the age of a tree by counting rings. But this…why did this moment feel like terrain he’d never before crossed?

She’s just a woman, Lavay had said.

When no retort ever came, he looked up sharply. He was certain nothing short of fatal apoplexy could rob her of a clever rejoinder.

He stared. Violet was…Good God, was she blushing?

If she was, this was clearly the very first time, as surely she would have contrived to do it prettily if she’d had any experience with it. As it was, she was blotchy to the brow and frowning so powerfully two distinct furrows cut across her forehead. She didn’t even put her fingers up to her brow to smooth it into perfection again.

And this was so disconcerting he nearly reached over to do it for her. No, not pretty. But definitely fascinating.

He finally got his damned boot off to the sound of silence. When it thunked to the cabin floor they both started absurdly. He set to work on the other one, and still it was a struggle, too. He stopped. He was an earl, for God’s sake. Perhaps he ought to get a valet to help him do things he’d done for himself his entire life.

He looked up at her. “You’re blushing,” he said rudely, finally.

“Nonsense,” she declared. The blush retreated almost instantly, as if by command. The forehead magically smoothed.

And thus aplomb was restored to both of them, and when she spoke, and it was in her cool Violet voice.

“It’s just that a girl will instinctively seek diversions when her usual diversions are denied her, details can become more pronounced. More noticeable.” She lifted one shoulder again, a Gallic gesture, an attempt at nonchalance. Again. And so reminiscent of Lavay Asher felt himself stiffen absurdly. Irrationally, he disliked seeing his first mate’s influence stamped upon her. It was like watching the other man’s hands on her.

“I see,” he said thoughtfully. “Are you a very good artist then, Miss Redmond?”

“No,” she said instantly.

He wanted to bedevil her. “Perhaps I’ll inspire you to heights of artistry. My V might…as it were.”

“I shouldn’t nurture that particular hope if I were you,” she said quickly. He smiled, enjoying himself, more comfortable in the territory of volleys. And then without warning he levered himself back on the bed, his bare back pressed against the satisfying scratch of the blanket, the mattress singing a siren song to his body. It fit him the way his boots did, the way no human did: with intimate knowledge of his weight and weariness, taking it upon itself willingly. Close your eyes, it sang. Surrender to me. It was provocative, and it was a provocation. He heard the faint rustle of this girl who’d been teasing for days tensed with awareness.

But his body was strangely alert; he felt its contours and needs and temperature somehow more acutely now that he knew a girl was studying him…all of him…in terms of…shapes. And the girl was but a few inches away from him.