A day or two later at dinner, Captain Rodolfson smiled about the table and said cheerfully, “I have good news for all of you. We’ve been ordered to put in at Honduras to pick up some cargo. You will have several hours ashore, and I’m sure you will enjoy it. Belize is a city little known to tourists, and yet it is a fascinating place.”
Major Lesley beamed in happy eagerness.
“Oh, yes, Captain, I’ve read about it. We are very lucky to get a chance to go ashore there,” he said, and turned to the others with what Claire recognized, with affectionate amusement, as his “walking guide-book” expression. Belize was founded in 1578 as a mining settlement, and then in 1880 became the capital of Honduras. I’m sure it must be a fascinating place. It’s a banana republic, isn’t it, Captain?”
“It’s a British possession,” Captain Rodolfson agreed. “And it has a one-crop economy, which is bananas. They call them the ‘yellow gold of Honduras.’ ”
For some reason she could never afterwards understand, Claire found herself looking at Vera, whose expression was that of one who had had a terrific shock. For a moment she sat quite still, her face white beneath her careful make-up, her eyes on her plate. Beneath the edge of the table her hands were gripped tightly together, and Claire could see the rigidity of her shoulders as her hands clenched.
Nora, beside her mother, looked almost as shocked, and after a moment Nora touched her tongue to suddenly dry lips and faced the captain.
“Do we have to stop there, Captain?” she asked huskily.
Captain Rodolfson looked at her swiftly, smiling faintly.
“I’m afraid we do, Miss Barclay,” he answered politely. “Why? Are you getting bored with our leisurely pace?”
“Oh no, it’s not that,” Nora stammered, and glanced across the table at MacEwen who was watching her curiously. “It’s just that — well, if we keep putting in at every small port along the coast, we just won’t ever get anywhere, will we?”
Captain Rodolfson smiled at her.
“That’s freighter travel, Miss Barclay,” he admitted lightly. “We have a vague idea of where we are going, but we have no idea whatever about how long it’s going to take us to get there, and most of our passengers don’t seem to mind. They claim it’s one of the reasons they like freighter travel.”
“Well, of course — ” Nora stammered, and added, “You did say Honduras was British, didn’t you?”
The others were listening curiously. Nora was flushed and stammering, but it seemed that she must have an answer to her question.
“Well, yes, but it’s nothing like the Bahamas or the more sophisticated tourist spots of the British colonies in the Caribbean,” the captain explained. “It’s far more Spanish than British, and very interesting. I’m sure you will enjoy going ashore there for a few hours.”
Vera spoke for the first time, her voice taut and thin.
“How soon will we be there, Captain?”
“Well, we hope to make port there within the next twenty-four hours,” he answered with a friendly smile. “But of course the Queen makes her own rules. So far, we’ve been making good time, but these waters can be a bit tricky. However, the motto of the freighter lines is, ‘What’s the rush?’ ”
Vera’s brows drew together in a savage scowl and she got to her feet.
“If I’d had the slightest idea that we were just going to potter around in these waters, I’d never have come aboard,” she snapped, and her tone was so ugly that they all stared at her, a trifle shocked. “I thought even a freighter had some sort of schedule that was followed with a reasonable amount of attention. This — this is ridiculous!”
The captain’s expression was much less genial than usual, though he spoke as politely as before.
“I’m very sorry you are so dissatisfied with us, Mrs. Barclay, but surely the agent through whom you bought your ticket warned you that we stopped wherever ordered, by radio, to pick up cargo?”
Vera tried hard to control herself but her anger burst the frail bonds of that attempt, and she cried harshly, “Nobody told me that we’d just poke around, like an old woman hunting her thimble.”
She turned then and went out of the salon, moving so swiftly that she left behind her a small, resentful murmur. After a moment, Nora, her face scarlet, muttered a breathless, “Excuse me,” and followed her mother.
MacEwen started to rise, met Claire’s eyes, saw the tiny negative gesture Claire made and sank back into his seat, scowling.
Claire was relieved, a little later, to be able to make her escape from the table and to get out on deck where, as had become usual, Major Lesley was waiting for her.
He smiled a greeting, but she could see that he was troubled. And when a few minutes later Curt came up to where they were standing, she turned to him quickly.
“Captain’s compliments, Miss Frazier,” said Curt formally, “and he would appreciate it if you would come to his quarters for a few minutes.”
“Of course.” Claire’s tone was quite as formal as she smiled an apology and walked away with Curt.
At the door of the captain’s quarters, Curt threw open the door and stood aside, smiling, so Claire could precede him into the room. And then, to her complete astonishment, he followed her in, closed the door and ostentatiously turned the key in the lock.
Claire stared at him and then glanced about the room.
“But where is the captain?” she asked.
Curt gave her a small boy grin.
“On the bridge, where he will be for the next hour or so,” he assured her. “I borrowed his quarters, since it has become of vital importance that I have an uninterrupted conversation with you. And this seems to be my only chance. You’re always running away from me, or somebody is always intruding.”
Claire said sharply, “If this is your idea of a joke, I don’t find it at all funny.”
Curt studied her as though he found the sight of her very rewarding.
“It’s far from a joke and it’s not intended to be funny, darling,” he told her, his tone so matter of fact that the endearment seemed to leap out at her as something so incredible that she could only gasp.
He indicated a chair and asked politely, “Won’t you sit down?”
“Thanks, I prefer to stand.”
“I think you’d better sit down,” he insisted, and because it would have been absurdly undignified to argue, Claire obeyed him.
For a moment he seemed somewhat at a loss as to how to begin, and paced the brief length of the cabin and back again, one hand sunk in his pocket, the other rumpling his hair, his brows drawn together in a scowl of concentration.
“I’ve tried to get a chance to talk to you, Claire, but you’re always slipping away,” he said at last. “And then you drew a gun on me.”
Claire stared at him in utter astonishment.
“I did no such thing!” she gasped.
He grinned wryly.
“Oh, yes, you did,” he insisted. “You threw me a remark so loaded that there was no possible answer to it, and then you stalked out in a rage. And I’ve never been quite able to understand just why you felt you had to do that. Walk out on me, I mean. Especially when you’d hurled that loaded remark at me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Claire hated herself because she could not keep her voice steady.
“Sure you do,” he insisted firmly. “It was something to the effect that I was much too — I believe the phrase you used was ‘devastatingly good-looking’ — for your taste. Now if that isn’t a loaded remark, I’ve never heard one.”
“You’re not trying to tell me you aren’t perfectly aware of your good looks and your well-practiced charm?” Claire mocked spitefully.
He studied her a moment longer and then said very quietly, “That hurt.”
“I’m sorry — ”
His eyes held hers, steady, measuring, yet with something in their depths that was much warmer and that had the ability to make her heart beat uncomfortably fast.
“You’re not a bit sorry,” he countered grimly. “If only I knew what it was that I do — or that I am — that irritates you so, darling, I’d try to change it. I promise with all my heart — ”
“This is utterly absurd,” Claire said wildly. She tried to get to her feet and was unpleasantly startled to discover that her knees wouldn’t support her. “I know it’s a part of your job to charm feminine passengers — ”
“That,” Curt stated dispassionately, “is a lie.”
Claire blinked and caught her breath as she studied him.
His brown jaw was hard-set, a little ridge of muscle leaping along it, his eyes cold and bleak. Now he was looking at her as though he didn’t like her at all, and she saw that he was coldly angry.
“I’m the captain’s second-in-command,” he stated coldly. “As such it’s my job to take as many of the worrisome details of his job as I can on my own shoulders. ‘Charming the feminine passengers’ is certainly not a part of my job, as you so charmingly put it. Just why you should be so busy trying to cut me down to size, I have no idea. But before you leave this room, you’re going to tell me — if it takes us until the end of the cruise! Is that clear?”
“It’s nothing personal,” Claire managed huskily. “It’s just that I’m — well, a bit wary of good-looking men.”
Curt studied her for a moment, and then he nodded.
“He must have been one gosh-awful fool,” he said quietly.
Claire felt as though she had taken a step in the dark and stubbed her toe violently.
“He?” she stammered wildly, knowing it was inane but unable in her present state of mind to find anything better to say.
Curt nodded as though he, too, felt it was inane but answered it nonetheless.
“The man who hurt you so much that you’re a bit soured on the whole sex,” he said.
Claire looked away from him and felt her face flush with shame.
“She had a lot of money,” she managed feebly.
“I still say he was a fool, if you were in love with him.”
“I was very much — ”
“Then I’m sorry, darling. Very sorry.”
There was a brief moment of silence between them that warned her of the growing tension. Once more she tried to stand, and this time, by resting her hand on the chair arm, she managed it.
“May I go now?” she asked faintly.
He looked up at her from the chair where he had sat down, and his brows were knotted in a scowl.
“Of course not,” he told her sternly. “We aren’t nearly through.”
Claire blinked, but sat down again and managed to meet his eyes.
“If I’ve been offensive,” she stammered against that growing tension, “I apologize. I’m sorry — ”
“Offensive is scarcely the word I’d have used,” Curt told her. “But I suppose it will have to do. It’s much milder than I’d have used. Still, now that we have reached some sort of understanding — ” He broke off and his scowl deepened. “We have, haven’t we?”
Claire gave a small, startled laugh that was faintly edged with hysteria.
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know about that,” she confessed.
“Well, at least I know now why you have been treating me like the lowest living form of animal life,” he told her with a sudden briskness. “And you know that I’m in love with you and want to marry you — ”
“What?”
He looked at her in puzzled surprise.
“Well, don’t you?” he demanded.
Claire’s eyes were round with astonishment, and her heart was beating so hard she felt certain he must hear it.
“How could I?” she asked faintly. “You never said so — ”
“And what chance have I had to say anything to you that couldn’t be said in the presence of the entire passenger list and most of the crew?” he demanded sharply. “Why else do you suppose I lured you here tonight, except to settle the details?”
Claire asked faintly, “What details?”
“Why, the details of just when and where we will be married, of course.” He seemed to think her question was too absurd to deserve an answer. “It can be at sea, with Captain Rodolfson performing the ceremony and the passengers and crew as witnesses; or it can be ashore, provided you don’t make me wait too long. I really am very much in love with you, Claire. I’m thirty-two, and this is the first time I’ve ever said that to a woman.”
Claire put her hands to her throbbing forehead and stared at him in helpless amazement.
“But — oh, for goodness sake!” she stammered faintly. “I haven’t said I’d marry you, anywhere or at any time.”
The eager light went out of his eyes and his face fell. His big, lean, powerful-looking fingers were twisted together, and his eyes were on them as though he could no longer endure to look at her.
“I know,” he said huskily. “I thought maybe if I talked very fast, took an awful lot for granted and hurried you, I might bludgeon you into saying yes. I see I was wrong.”
“You wouldn’t really want a wife you’d have to bludgeon into marrying you, would you?” she asked.
Curt looked up at her, and their eyes tangled. And a warm, wild sweetness unlike anything she had ever known before slipped into her heart. She had a sudden desire to lean forward, frame his face between her two palms and kiss him! And the force, the unexpectedness of that desire shocked her so that for a moment her face revealed her emotion.
“I’d want you for my wife any darned way I could get you,” he told her, and the force of his feeling made his voice a little harsh. “If I had to fling you over my shoulder, screaming and fighting the way the ancients are supposed to have done, I’d still want you for my wife.”
He stood up after a moment and turned toward the door.
“I don’t suppose there’s any more to say,” he said over his shoulder.
Claire said unsteadily. “You come right back here!”
Startled, afraid to hope, Curt turned, and her tremulous smile, the mist of tears in her eyes, lit a flame of hope in his eyes that made her want to put her arms about him.
“Yes, Claire?” he said huskily, while she struggled for words.
“Oh, Curt, you’ve taken me so by surprise,” she told him, and her tremulous smile deepened. “Isn’t that a corny phrase, though? ‘This is such a surprise!’ But it is, Curt. I’d — well, I hadn’t dreamed you could — it’s been so sudden. Golly, I’m digging up all the old corny phrases — ”
“So stop it and put me out of my misery,” Curt ordered, with a restrained violence that bespoke his inner hope and turmoil. “Is it ‘yes’ or ‘no’?”
She held out her hand to him and then dropped it before he could grasp it and turned away from him.
“Oh, Curt, you’ll have to give me a little time to get used to the idea,” she stammered shakily.
“How much time?” he insisted.
“Just — just until I can be sure!”
“Then — I do have a chance?” His tone was ardent, pleading, ragged with desire.
“I knew Rick so long,” she murmured as though she spoke only to herself. “It just sort of — well, grew into love. I was heart-broken when he ran out on me. And now, such a little while later, I don’t seem to be able to remember what he looked like. That’s very strange, isn’t it?”
“Not so very,” Curt countered, within reach of her, yet not touching her, though his eyes embraced her with an ardent yearning. “I think it just meant that you weren’t so much in love with him as you were — well, used to him.”
They had been standing so close to each other that she had felt he must surely hear the wild tumult in her heart. Now his arms went out and closed about her, gently, hesitantly at first; and then, as the warmth of her filled his arms, his embrace tightened until they were so close they were almost a part of each other. And his head bent, and his mouth closed on hers for a moment of such exquisite tenderness that she felt as though she swam in an enchanted shining sea.
It was a moment that endured until she felt that she could no longer bear the exquisite tenderness of it. Then he held her a few inches away from him, and his eyes were glowing with a warmth and a radiance that made her heart skip another fast beat.
“So now we know,” he said huskily, and though his voice was low, it held a note of such joy that it was like a shout.
“I’m beginning to,” she answered, and stood on top-toe to kiss him again. “But, you’ll have to give me a little time, Curt. This time I have to be — oh, so very sure!”
“You shall have all the time you need, dearest, now that I know there is a chance for me,” he promised her. And his cheek was pressed against her hair as he held her so closely that she could feel her heart pounding against his, as though the two hearts sang a lovely melody made perfect by being together.