Chapter Nine

So it has come to this.

Roarke had once prided himself in knowing with uncanny accuracy when sailors became sullen and disgruntled. He’d captained enough pirate ships. He understood the anger that grew during the long stretch between prizes, or when bad weather and incessant work embittered the sailors. He cast back over the last weeks and wondered when everything had turned. Was it when he dragged those thirteen sailors out of the taverns of Roscoff? Was it Gwynn Sayer’s punishment? He didn’t really know. His alertness had slipped since the dirty urchin now living in his cabin had turned into a sylph of a woman.

That woman now stood before him, hugging her dead pet.

“You’re wrong,” she said, in a voice that was as soft and feminine as any dulcet young bride. “Chou-Chou is warm, he’s just sleeping.”

“Adriana.”

She didn’t look at him. She scratched the dirty fur beneath the animal’s chin and then pressed his head back and forth with one finger and whispered for him to wake up. He wanted to pull the body out of her arms so she would stop poking at the dead. He didn’t want to witness the way her breath grew shorter as she struggled with the truth.

He recalled the night on deck in Roscoff when she’d played her Breton horn to make the creature dance. He remembered the way the animal had clung to her shoulder, the way she had fought to protect him from the cruelty of the other sailors, the way the creature curled up on her chest when she slept.

Now she stared up at him with eyes as dark as midnight, breathing as if she’d run a thousand miles, with a look as if she expected an explanation for what she already knew. She didn’t seem to notice when a single tear slipped down her cheek and dripped onto the lemur’s fur, but the sight unhinged him.

He felt as ungainly as a boy. He didn’t know what to say or how to move. He felt the urge to give her a pat on the shoulder—like he’d do to a child who’d lost a toy—or, alternatively, bark an order to wrap the creature up for his funeral and send her off so he could turn his mind to the greater danger. Should he turn his back to save her from the shame of her grief, or should he bundle her into his arms?

The former seemed wiser, the latter too dangerous.

This would be so much easier if she were still the sharp-tongued urchin that he had brought on board in Saint-Malo.

“Just a little while ago,” she said, taking tiny sips of air between words, “he was jumping around.”

“It happened fast, Adriana. He did not suffer.”

“Did he…choke on something?”

She glanced around the room, searching, but in the end her gaze rested upon the newly-replaced bowl of stew.

He watched as she remembered the sequence of events: A sailor delivering the captain’s dinner and slipping out before either of them could see his face. Chou-Chou standing on the dinner tray, his furry face smeared with gravy from that dinner. Her pet lying on the hammock in a pool of his own vomit.

Her pale face blanched beneath the smears of soot. She’d spent a lifetime on pirate ships. She probably knew the crew’s mood better than he did, even if she didn’t know who’d orchestrated the poisoning.

He peered once again at the raw areas of burned skin around the lemur’s short snout. He suspected they’d discover some missing poison in the stores…if the surgeon wasn’t in on the poisoning.

First things first.

“Adriana,” he said, “let me.”

She didn’t fight as he expected her to do when he slipped his arms under the lemur. She released her pet into his arms. He walked the limp creature to his bed and laid him down. He straightened the creature’s legs and arms. Later, he would wrap the pet in a sail, let Adriana sew it up, and they’d all commit this little body to the deep, but only after he confirmed with the surgeon what he suspected.

When he turned back toward her, she buckled like a sail suddenly bereft of wind.

He seized her shoulders before she hit the floor. He pulled her into his arms. He felt against his body what he’d spent too much time imagining—a woman of subtle curves, warm and soft and lithe. He pressed his cheek against her short, cushiony hair as his hand found the hollow of her lower back. Molded against him she was tiny, weightless, too fragile to bear the burden of this grief. He waited for her to morph into a clinging, crying woman, but her grief was a cold, silent thing.

A vague, unfocused anger unfurled in his chest. Anger at the mutinous assassin, at the situation, at his own powerlessness in the face of her grief. Anger at the world she’d grown up in, the world that had taught her to bury her natural feelings deep. Her brow tasted salty. At the touch of his lips, she shifted in his embrace.

“Adriana?”

Her hands lay flat on his chest. Her lashes clumped in spikes around her eyes, but no tears fell. Her expression was stone-still. He ran a hand over the curls on her head and found himself wondering what they would look like, long and tumbling down her back.

“The poison,” she said, “was meant for you.”

“Poison is a coward’s weapon,” he said, unnerved by how quickly she’d controlled herself and become alert, focused, and steady. “It’s the work of one man, maybe two.”

“But—”

“Had more men been involved, they’d be breaking down the door right now.”

“Oh.” The word was no more than a breath. “Of course.”

Her brown eyes were fixed but he could see in the depths where she’d hidden her pain. His chest began to hurt in a strange way. He wanted to lower his head and touch those lips. He wanted to let her know that it was all right to cry. He wanted to thank her, because he was in her debt again. Tonight her pet had saved his life.

Instead, he thought about her hands, still flat on his chest, a subtle pressure.

He thought about what she’d once told him about women and choices.

And then he became alert, focused, and steady.

He quietly stepped away.