It 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.