Pirate Wolf Trilogy (109 page)

“I… no. No, the chair is comfortable enough
for my needs."

"Well, if we are speaking of needs, I have
several of my own and they come before charts and wells and phantom
treasure ships. And they don’t include listening to someone pace
back and forth across the floor."

“I promise, I will not pace.”

“Indeed, you won’t.” Before she could react,
he was on his feet and had scooped her into his arms. By the time
she found the wits to protest, he had deposited her onto the
mattress, where he remained looming above her like an enormous dark
shadow, his hair fallen forward over his face.

"You will lie here quiet as a churchmouse.
You will not move, you will not speak, you will not even blink
loudly or I might think you want company. Do we understand one
another?”

She nodded, wide-eyed.

He snatched up a blanket and spread it on
the floor in front of the cabin door.

Eva pushed herself up onto her elbows. “I
cannot take your bed, Captain.”

He stretched out on the blanket and folded
his arm beneath his head to use as a pillow. “One more word,
Mistress Chandler and you’ll be taking something else of mine.”

She opened her mouth to protest, thought
better of it, and laid back down as quietly as she could. Having so
many memories of the shooting, the fire, the painful discovery of
Lawrence Ross’s betrayal stirred, she doubted she would even be
able to close her eyes, but she did. And the next time she opened
them daylight was streaming through the gallery windows.

CHAPTER NINE

A fist pounded on the door loudly enough to
make Gabriel jump out of his skin and scramble to find a sabre that
was not at his side. "Eight bells," Stubs announced. "Crew wants to
know if ye're foamin' at the mouth an' squirtin' yer bowels all
over the floor."

Dante cursed and cradled his head in his
hands. "My mouth is fine, as are my bowels.”

"Aye, well, I've brung victuals. I'll leave
'em here ayont the door."

Gabriel muttered his thanks and fisted the
sleep out of his eyes, wincing as he rubbed his tender eye a little
too hard. His legs and arms had stiffened overnight, and the sudden
jump upright set his back on fire again, the muscles across his
back screaming a reminder that some of the deeper lashmarks were
still only partly healed.

He groaned, then cast a surly glance around
the cabin. Daylight was streaming through the gallery windows. The
air was stuffy, redolent with the lingering stink of camphor.

Dante stood and stretched the cramps out of
his legs and back. He opened the door and brought the wooden
platter inside, setting it on the desk and helping himself to a
round biscuit. He remembered he was not alone and checked the bed,
but did not see Eva curled up in the crush of blankets. She was not
at the desk, not in her chair, not lurking in any of the shadowy
corners. Knowing she could not have gone far, he was about to look
under the bed when he happened to see his reflection in the
mirror.

The gargoyle-like swelling on his cheek and
eye had gone down considerably and the side of his face was not
quite as blue-black anymore. The bruising, like that over the rest
of his body, was more a sickly yellowish green. He rubbed his bad
eye again, gently this time, to brush away the remnants of scabbing
and scowled as he splashed water on his face.

He supposed he had to give Eva Chandler some
credit for not screaming in horror each time she looked at him.

A flicker of something caught his attention
and he looked toward the gallery windows again. A long yellow
ribbon of hair was whipping across one of the glass panes. The door
to the stern balcony was ajar and when he peered outside, he saw
her standing at the rail gazing out over the open sea. Her hair was
tied with a string at the nape of her neck, but several long
strands had escaped and were playing havoc in the backwash of wind.
The front of her shirt... his shirt... was filled with air, which
should have rendered her shapeless but for the fact the early
morning light was shining through the cloth and perfectly outlining
every curve and indent.

His mouth felt suddenly dry and he would
have retreated before she saw him, but the wind caught the narrow
gallery door and swung it outward to bang on the bulkhead.

"Good morning Captain Dante," she said,
turning her head.

"Good morning Mistress Chandler. You slept
well, I hope?"

"Not very well, no, but I did sleep some. I
came out here so as not to make any noise that might disturb
you."

He had a vague recollection of the warning
he delivered last night, but made no apologies. Instead, he stepped
to the rail and drew a deep breath of the clean ocean air. He
marked the size and curl of the wake scrolling out behind, and
estimated the galleon's speed. Laying low across the southern
horizon was the island the Spanish called Espiritu Santu, but
otherwise, as far as the eye could see, the sea was sparkling and
clear.

"I've been watching those
creatures," Eva said, pointing to a pod of dolphins racing
alongside the
Endurance
. "They seem quite playful crossing back and forth over the
wake."

"The cook must be tossing scraps over the
side. Either that or the crew is, for he's not a very good
cook."

Eva smiled, and he found himself drawing in
a breath. With her face gaining some color from the wind and her
hair not looking like a hag's broom, she was as lovely as the
sunrise itself. His experience with delicate young English beauties
was limited. Most women of his acquaintance were dark-skinned,
dark-haired, buxom and broad-hipped, possessing few scruples with
regards to modesty or chastity.

His most recent mistress
had stood over six feet tall with jet black hair and enough meat on
her bones that their bouts of lovemaking were often like wrestling
matches. This little
esquilo
was so slender he would be afraid of crushing her
beneath him.

He cleared his throat and retraced his steps
to the door. "Speaking of food, Stubs brought our morning meal if
you are hungry."

"Starving," she admitted and turned to
follow him inside. Her own breath caught in her throat when she saw
his back. His shirt was stuck to his skin in patches, stained dark
with fresh seepage from his wounds. She remembered seeing the
lashmarks when he had stripped and changed clothes. He had
recounted some of the details of the recent battle, but made no
mention as to how he had come by his brutal injuries. While it was
not her place to pry, neither was it in her nature to simply ignore
his obvious discomfort. The scrape she had suffered in the beakhead
throbbed like the devil, so she could only imagine how his back
must feel.

The previous evening the ship’s doctor had
left a pot of unguent outside the door with orders for him to apply
it to his wounds, but he had ignored both the orders and the little
jar of salve.

Despite the lure of food, she went first to
the bed and stripped off one of the linen sheets. Using the
jewelled dagger he had left on the desk top, she cut several
notches across the top edge and started ripping the cloth into long
strips.

Gabriel frowned as he watched her. "If
you're planning to knot those together for an escape, it might be
more effective to do it while I wasn't looking."

"I am making bandages. Some of the wounds on
your back are leaking and they will keep leaking if you do not
treat them with more care. Each time you take a garment on or off,
or chafe the skin the wrong way, you disturb the healing.”

"You know about doctoring?"

"I know how to be practical, Captain. If
your wounds fester and you take a fever, your men will blame me
without troubling themselves to look for another reason.”

He arched an eyebrow.

She arched one of her own by way of a
rebuttal, then quickly finished rolling up several of the torn
strips. She poured some water into the washbowl and carried it to
the desk along with a smaller square of linen and the pot of
unguent.

"Kindly remove your shirt, please."

He assessed the determined look in her eye
for a moment, then clamped a biscuit between his teeth and pulled
the hem of the shirt out of his waistband and drew it up and over
his head.

Eva was standing less than a foot away as he
did so, close enough to feel the swish of air tingling across her
skin as the garment was lifted and tossed aside. From the front, he
was all hard, sun-bronzed muscle, his chest furred with smooth,
dark hairs. There was still evidence of bruising and some minor
cuts and scratches, enough to make her wonder how a body could take
such a beating and recover so quickly. When he turned, however, it
was all she could do to cover her mouth with a hand to keep from
gasping out loud. Whoever had plied the lash had wished to cause
immeasurable pain. His back was a mess of crisscrossed welts, most
delivered with a heavy enough hand to leave stripes on the flesh
that would take weeks to fade. Others had been deliberately laid on
top of existing welts until the flesh burst open and the underlying
muscle was lacerated. These latter cuts were the ones that were not
healing properly and she marvelled that he could even dress and go
about his duties let alone sleep on a hard floor or sit for hours
at his desk.

She could only guess how the salt water had
felt when he dove into the sea to rescue her.

"Will you sit, please? Not in a chair...
here, on the corner of the desk with your back to the light so I
can better see what I am doing."

He huffed out a breath, but did as asked
half-sitting, half-standing with one hip propped on the corner of
the desk. While she touched here and there with delicate fingers,
inspecting the worst of the wounds, he munched on the biscuit,
alternating it with bites of cheese and a strange white fruit Eva
had never seen before. She worked as carefully as she could with
the dampened linen to clean around the wounds, and although he
distracted himself by picking up another Spanish document and
studying it, she could see his flesh quivering just beneath the
surface if she touched a particularly red-raw lesion.

When it came time to apply the unguent, she
thought she would faint from the smell, but it went on smoothly and
seemed to melt into the heat of his flesh. If it stung even half as
badly as it smelled, there was fair reason for the fine sheen of
sweat that appeared between his shoulder blades.

When it was time to wrap the bandaging
around his ribs, he set the papers aside and stood facing her so
she could move the roll across his chest and around behind. Her
arms were just long enough to allow her to transfer the roll from
hand to hand before bringing it around front again, but in doing
so, it brought the tip of her nose nuzzling up against the soft mat
of hair on his chest. By the time she finished and tied a knot in
the bandaging, her cheeks and throat were scarlet and she was
experiencing a most disconcerting sensation in the pit of her
belly.

It did not help matters that Gabriel Dante's
eyes had been following her movements with each pass of the roll
around his chest. She had the distinct feeling he had examined
every hair on her head, every freckle across the bridge of her
nose.

No sooner had that thought entered her mind
when she felt his hands lowering and coming forward to rest on her
shoulders. "Your turn now."

"M-my turn?"

"Your leg. Since you seem so concerned about
leakage and festering, you really should let me have a closer look
at it."

Eva blushed and glanced down. The cut on her
thigh was just out of her ability to twist enough to see it. "It
was just a scrape, Captain."

“One that has you twisting up your mouth
every time you sit on it.”

“I am quite capable of tending it
myself.”

“I’m sure you are. But it occurs to me that
I should, perhaps, have been checking your entire body all along
for signs of a rash. Spots could be spreading in places not easily
seen through the layers of clothing.”

“I really don’t think—“

“Again with the thinking.” He sighed and
before she could react, he had a hand wrapped around a healthy
fistful of hair to hold her steady while he slipped the knot in the
rope belt. The breeches slid down her hips and pooled around her
ankles without any further encouragement.

Eva gasped. One hand flew instantly to the
hem of the oversized shirt to ensure it was pulled down as far as
it would go, the other caught at his wrist.

"What are you doing!"

"Stripping you naked to have a closer look…
unless of course you would care to cooperate and show me the
scratch on your backside.”

The threat was clearly evident in his
eyes.

"All right! Leave go of me and I’ll show
you."

His grip on her hair eased and Eva slowly
turned. She grudgingly inched the hem of the long shirt upward
until the patch of skin high on the back of her thigh was exposed.
She closed her eyes and ground her teeth together as she sensed him
bending over to inspect. The tingling sensation she had felt
earlier flowed in liquid spirals into her belly and she had to lean
forward and brace herself on the top of the desk to keep from
toppling over.

Dante placed his strong, tanned hand on the
smooth skin, gently squeezing a wide pinch of bared flesh.

It was too much and Eva whirled around
shocked into nearly stumbling against the bank of windows as her
ankles tangled in the fallen breeches. When she regained her
balance, she saw him hold up a long, thin sliver of wood.

"Here's your culprit. Another day it would
have given you real trouble." His smile was decidedly vengeful as
he flicked the sliver aside and reached for the pot of unguent.
"Best take all precautions.”