Katharine Ashe - How to Be a Proper Lady

She sucked in a breath and poked her fists into her hips. “I don’t want you to kiss me again.”

His brow tilted up, a look of tolerant endurance settling on his handsome features.

“Don’t look at me like you don’t know what I am talking about.”

“I have no intention of kissing you again.”

“I don’t think you had any intention of kissing me the other day either, but you did it anyway.”

He chuckled, shaking his head. “You cannot refrain from quarreling-about anything-can you?”

She had intended a more seductive approach, along the lines of flirtatiously refusing him her favors so he would grow desperate for them and declare himself in order to have her, and thus she would win the wager. Her quartermaster, Crazy, had once told her that it drove a man wild when a woman he desired would not kiss him or cuddle with him. He’d said at those times he would have promised anything, said anything to his wife, even things he didn’t mean, merely to encourage her to touch him.

But Seton didn’t look desperate. At best, he seemed mildly amused. This was not going as she’d planned. Neither of them was following the script.

She pursed her lips. “I don’t argue when I agree with someone, which I never do with you, so you are unlikely to witness my compliance.”

The golden light of the fading sun glimmered in his eyes. Viola’s throat dried to the texture of a ship’s biscuit. He had witnessed her compliance quite well. He had taken part in it.

“Have you business you wish to discuss?” he asked with maddening calm. “Ship’s business, that is?”

“After we drop anchor in the harbor and unload, you and I will head along the coast to a farm not far away.”

“For what purpose?”

“To pay a call on a man my father used to do business with. An old friend.”

“I can remain with the ship.” Until the fortnight of the wager was out, he meant. But she wasn’t about to lose, and she had an ace up her sleeve: Aidan Castle. That, Crazy had told her, was another certain method for making a man mad with desire. Present him with competition.

“You’ll come with me,” she said. “Bring Mattie along, if you like. For protection.” She grinned and lifted a single brow. But she did not receive the reaction she expected. Instead of denial or cool indifference, his gaze remained steady upon her and rather warm.

“I do not need protection from you, Viola Carlyle.”

“Our first three weeks out I didn’t see you atop for one sunset,” she replied, “and yet here you have been five evenings running now, since you kissed me. It can only be because you like to see me.” She cocked her head. “Certain you don’t need protection from me, after all?”

“Why aren’t you at the helm? That is where you like to be at dusk, is it not?”

“Trying too hard to get rid of me now. That’s interesting.”

“If you say so.” His mouth tilted up at one edge and for a moment the sinking sun seemed to flare upon the horizon, shooting sparks into the darkening sky above.

This was strange, knowing one another’s habits as sailors on the same vessel always did, yet not really knowing anything of him in truth. Most of her crewmen confided in her, seeing in her a sister or daughter, even a mother. But this man kept his own counsel. The Pharaoh, she suspected, needed no confidant. The cut of his jaw and cast of his features, the manner in which he held himself, square-shouldered and in command-these bespoke a man of thorough independence.

She knew nothing of Jinan Seton except that his rare smile… made her see stars.

She saw stars when he smiled.

Stars.

She blinked it away.

“My first few years aboard ship, it was the only time of day Fionn allowed me up there.” She lowered herself to the bowsprit, her behind settling onto the beam’s curve. He watched without expression. But it was her ship and she could sit where she wished. And she wished to sit with him in the sunset.

It seemed natural.

And perhaps if she sat here long enough, he would smile again.

“I have very fond memories of that time,” she added.

“They are not your only fond memories.” It was not a question.

She shook her head. “No. I have plenty. But…”

He waited, as he always did. He was good at being silent and listening. She had never been, not from her girlhood. The quiet, dreaming daughter had been Serena, a perfect complement to Viola’s madcap energy.

She looked off to the glistening horizon.

“Dusk is special.” She liked to be atop at dusk, for then the sunset shivered through her and made her feel weak with lonely longing. It was the time of day that seemed least safe, when no matter which direction the April’s bow pointed there seemed no secure port in the sightings, no home ahead. At dusk Viola could stand upon her quarterdeck and feel weightless and directionless beneath the changing sky, as though she might fly away at any moment, or simply disappear into the colors above, swept away with the winds. She imagined at those moments that only her grip on the helm bound her to the deck. To reality.

It was nonsensical. And it was the way Jinan Seton made her feel.

She could admit this to herself now looking into his eyes glimmering with the twilight. Since the moment she’d met him weeks earlier, a sliver of that lonely longing had threaded through her and remained. And she fed it because she loved the feeling. He made her feel like longing was something to be wished for, something to be enjoyed, as she always secretly had.

“What about you, Seton?” She leaned back onto her hands. “What are your fond memories of childhood?”

His gaze slipped over her body leisurely, laying tendrils of heat beneath the surface of her skin. Then he looked into her eyes.

“I suppose that standing beside the auctioneer’s block while the boy who purchased me unlatched the irons from my wrists and gave me freedom must rank as my best childhood memory, Miss Carlyle.”

For a long moment she could not draw air into her lungs properly.

“I suppose it would,” she finally said. After another minute during which lines creaked in blocks and sailors’ voices at the other end of the ship came along the breeze, she said, “Did you know your family?”

“My mother.”

“Only your mother?”

“She watched her husband sell me to the traders. He had noticed that the boy who ran about the servants’ quarters looked a bit too much like his wife and an Englishman who had lived in Alexandria seven years earlier. He beat the truth out of her, then he punished her for her infidelity. And me.”

“Barbary pirates.” Sea bandits who would sell anyone into slavery for a price. Even a boy with white skin. But then to be brought west to be sold at an English market-that was unheard of. Someone had paid the slaver richly to make it so.

He regarded her with unreadable eyes. “So you see, Miss Carlyle, our stories are somewhat similar. But given the principal difference, perhaps you understand now how I am less than sympathetic to your reticence to return to England.”

Her heartbeats came thick in her chest. “One has nothing to do with the other.” The wind snatched up her hair and whipped it between her lips but she felt frozen and could not lift a hand to dislodge it.

“You owe it to your family to tell them you are well.”

Prickling heat swiped at her insides, driving her tongue. “Did you tell your mother when you were sailing around robbing other people’s ships?”

“By the time I was able to return to Alexandria, she was dead.”

She stood up. “They needn’t hear it from me. You could tell them. Indeed, you will be obliged to because I am not going with you.”

“Why not?” He remained still.

“I don’t belong there,” she blurted out. “I am going where I belong now, and no one can force me to do otherwise.” But that was perhaps a lie, because looking into his crystalline eyes she feared greatly that she would do as he bid when the time came. She should not have asked him about his past. The longing rushed inside her now like a bow cutting through water at full sail, clogging her throat and making her feel filled up in a manner she did not like. He was not what she wanted-a man who did not need anyone. She wanted Aidan Castle, who always told her how good she was for him.

Seton said nothing now, as he always did precisely when she most needed him to say something that could derail her thoughts, something with which she could quarrel.

“Tomorrow when we come into port, you will go with me to the farm as I wish,” she said.

“I will.”

“Because if you do not, you will forfeit the wager and I will win.”

“I will go with you because until you are in the home of your sister I do not plan on allowing you out of my sight.”

Weakness swamped her, from her throat to her legs. He made her feel weak where she had felt strong her whole life. The strongest most adventuresome girl in England, the baron had always said. The most reckless.

Years after he took her, Fionn learned from an old smuggler friend who had passed through Devonshire the story of her English family’s reaction to her disappearance. They had believed her reckless enough to climb the bluff by herself, without ropes, without an adult, and had died because of it, dashed upon the rocks in the water below.

Viola didn’t blame them. As a child she had often behaved rashly, but not on that day when Fionn Daly grabbed her up, bundled her into his longboat, and stole her away, using her as bait for her mother, whom he thought would follow. Instead, she had died.

Now this man said Serena had never believed in her death. To learn the truth of it she could go to England easily enough with or even without her ship, then return and slide smoothly into her life again, with her crew and Aidan alike.

But panic swirled in her, insisting she must not go. For, if she did, she might never wish to return to this life, to the life she had made for herself upon the sea. To the people she cared for and the man she intended to marry. All of it might be lost, just as that other world had been lost so completely once. She had learned to live without it. She had fought to learn to live without it, pressing down her memories and bidding her heart do as she commanded as day after day the sea became her home.

“Damn you, Jinan Seton.”

He laughed, but there was no pleasure in the sound now. “I am afraid you are far too late for that, Miss Carlyle. I signed that contract years ago.”

She swallowed through her aching throat. “I cannot think of a worse curse at present.”

“I will await your pleasure.” He bowed.

She expelled a hard breath, jumped off the bowsprit and strode aft. Not to the quarterdeck. Night had fallen and there was no lonely longing there now to clean her head of confusion.

For that was why she loved that place the most of all aboard ship, why that time of day called to her most profoundly and made her ache so hard yet with such sharp pleasure. Because amid the pain of losing those she loved, then the everyday dangers of life on the sea that made the affection of rough and weathered sailors an uncertain gift as well, what she could count on most was loneliness.

Loneliness was not like love. Loneliness was pure. It was constant. It would never fail her.

And now it wore the face of a man.

Odwall Blankton Fishery, Billingsgate Wharf

RECEIPT OF PURCHASE:

10 lbs Mackerel, smoked

20 lbs Sole

1 doz. Lobsters, live

2 lbs Sturgeon Roe

3 doz. Oysters

20 Lemons

TO BE DELIVERED TO: Lady Justice, Brittle & Sons, Printers, London

ATTACHED: My lady, with my compliments. Peregrine

“Matthew?” Viola slid her hand around a thick peg of the helm, wind blowing her hair about her cheeks. Land ran close along the ship’s port side, rising into the island in green slopes to the mountaintops, bending toward the cape. They would make the harbor of Port of Spain on Trinidad well within an hour.

“Cap’n ma’am?” Big Mattie tugged his cap and his leathery cheeks colored up. For a great hulking beast of a man, he was as shy as a girl.

“Are you boys bounty hunters? Is that what the Cavalier turned her canvas to when she quit pirating?”

He screwed up his cauliflower nose and scratched behind his ear. “Just simple sailors, ma’am.”

“ ’Cept Cap’n Jin.” Little Billy perched atop a coil of rope, cleaning his teeth with a stick the size of his skinny arm. “S’always got us after someone or other what’s lost and has got to be brought home.”