‘I’m all right, you can put me down.’ She was ignored. Of course, Nathan Stanier took no orders from scrubby boys. He would have to set her on her feet when they got to the companionway though, she reasoned, praying he was not intending to undress her to tuck her up in bed.
But it seemed that Nathan had thought out the logistics of descending steep stairs on a pitching ship with his arms full. He swung her round and hung her over his shoulder, one arm tight around the back of her thighs as he climbed down. ‘Sorry if this jars your head, but we’ll be down in a minute.’ And they were and she was back in his arms almost shaking with the jumble of sensations, fears, emotions that were rattling round her poor aching head.
‘There.’ He put her down. Clemence opened her eyes and saw they were in their cabin. This was her bunk, thank goodness. She’d say she wanted to sleep…
But she wasn’t safe, not yet. Nathan knelt in front of her, overwhelmingly big on the confined space, and tipped her forward against his chest so he could part her hair and look at her scalp.
‘Skin isn’t broken, but you’ll have a nasty lump.’ He didn’t seem ready to release her, one hand flat on her back, holding her close, the other running gently through her hair, checking for lumps. Clemence let her forehead rest against his shoulder. Madness. Bliss. ‘All her senses were full of him, his heat, the feel of him, the scent of him, the aura of strength that seemed to flow from him. She could stay like this all day. Safe. She began to drift.
‘Clem?’ Nathan’s voice was puzzled. ‘Why the devil are you trussed up like the Christmas goose?’
‘Cracked ribs,’ she said on a gulp, back in the real world with a vengeance. ‘When my uncle hit me. I, er…fell against a table.’
‘Rubbish. You’d have yelled the place down just now when I slung you over my shoulder if you’d got cracked ribs.’ He slid his hands free and sat back on his heels beside the bunk. Clemence closed her eyes as though that could hide her. She wanted so much to believe he would protect her when he knew her secret, wanted so much, in the midst of this nightmare, to believe there was good in this flawed man. ‘Clem, take your shirt off.’
‘No.’ She opened her eyes and met his, read the questions in them.
‘Why not?’
There was nowhere to go, no lie she could think of, no escape. Eyes locked with his, braced for his reaction, Clemence said, ‘Because I’m a girl.’ And waited.
Silence, then, ‘Well, thank God for that,’ Nathan said.
‘What?’ She sat bolt upright, then clutched her head as the cabin swam around her. ‘What do you mean, thank God?’
Nathan was looking at her with all the usual composure wiped off his face. He seemed a good five years’ younger, grinning with what had to be relief. ‘Because my body was telling me there was a woman around,’ he confessed, running a hand through his hair. ‘I kept finding myself staring at you, but I didn’t know why. The relief of finding that my dissipated way of life hasn’t left me lusting after cabin boys is considerable, believe me. What’s your real name?’
‘Clemence.’ The release of tension on finding that he had not become a slavering monster bent on rapine turned into temper. It was that, or tears. ‘And the relief might be considerable for you, but now I am sharing a cabin with a man who knows I am a woman and whose body is most certainly interested in that fact—a piece of information I could well do without, believe me! Forgive me, but I was much happier when you were simply confused and uncomfortable.’
‘So, you think I am more likely to ravish Clemence than Clem, do you?’ He rocked back on his heels and stood up, hands on hips, looking down at her.
She had made him angry again. Clemence lay down cautiously, too dizzy to stay sitting up. ‘No, I don’t think that. My cousin was going to force me every night until he got me with child and I had to agree to marry him. I may not know you, but I do understand that you don’t treat people like that. But this…’ she waved a hand around the confines of the cabin, the closeness of him, the privy cupboard ‘…this is not very comfortable. Not for a woman alone with a man she doesn’t know.’
You wouldn’t mistreat people you know as individuals, that is, she qualified to herself. Putting a pirate ship in the way of capturing and plundering merchant vessels and killing their crews, that was another matter. You couldn’t tell that sort of thing about people just by looking at them, it seemed.
‘My God.’ He sat down on the nearest chair. ‘No wonder you ran away. Which of them hit you?’
‘My uncle. Why?’
‘For future reference,’ Nathan said grimly. ‘This cousin of yours—he didn’t—’
‘No. I’m too scrawny to interest him at the moment. He was going to fatten me up.’ Nathan’s growl sent a shiver of pleasure down her spine at the thought of Lewis walking into the cabin and coming up against that formidable pair of fists. ‘Are you going to tell anyone about me?’
‘Hell, no! If you were in danger when they thought you a boy, you wouldn’t be safe for one minute if they knew you are a woman.’ He pulled out a chair and sat down out of reach of her, whether for his peace of mind or hers, she couldn’t tell. ‘How old are you?’
‘Nineteen. Twenty in two months’ time.’
Nathan’s eyebrows went up and he raked one long-fingered hand back through his hair again, reducing it to a boyish tangle. Clemence resisted the urge to get up and comb it straight. ‘This gets worse and worse.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? I thought you were fourteen, a child. Now I know you’re not—’ He stopped, frowning. ‘We need to think about the practicalities of this.’
‘There aren’t any, not really.’ Clemence sat up against the hard bulkhead with some caution. ‘There’s the closet, thank goodness, and now you know who I am I can just ask for privacy when I need it.’
‘When are your courses due?’ he asked, in such a matter-of-fact manner that she answered him before she had time to be embarrassed.
‘Three weeks.’ Goodness, she hadn’t thought of that.