“Oh. Right. My apologies, Miss Moore.” The big man rolled off of her but kept his body between hers and the side rail.
Cassie peeked around his legs. Verity stood by the rail, shirtless, with some sort of black pitch streaked over his torso. Charles knelt before him, in the same strange attire, or lack thereof. And Lincoln lay beneath him, his shirt clutched in Charles’s hand, his face becoming more and more bloodied with each blow Charles landed upon it.
“Charles,” she breathed. She took the worker’s hand and rose to unsteady feet. “Stop.”
The worker placed a restraining arm in front of her. “Let him get rid of his anger.”
Her stomach churned. Charles wasn’t only getting rid of his anger, but also his restraint. His values. Those weren’t things she wanted him to surrender. The look in his eyes as he methodically pounded Lincoln’s face was something she had never seen, and never wanted to see again.
She slipped past the worker and stumbled to Charles. She laid her hand on his arm as he drew back. “Charles.”
He paused, looked up at her. “You’re unharmed.” It was more demand than question.
She nodded. “I am.”
He looked back at Lincoln then dropped him like he was a snake. The man’s head bounced off the deck.
Charles grabbed her hips to pull himself up. He wrapped her up in his blackened arms. He smelled of tar and salt, and she didn’t care. Her cheek stuck to the viscous material on his chest, and she didn’t mind if it remained attached there permanently. He was safe. She was alive. That was all that mattered.
She caught Verity’s eye. “Lincoln has a gun in his coat pocket.” Not that he looked conscious enough to use it, but she wasn’t taking any chances.
“I’m sorry.” Charles lifted her a couple inches to burrow his face in her throat. “I didn’t kill him for you.”
“I didn’t want you to.” She pulled back and clasped his cheeks between her palms. His face was strange-looking, darkened as it was. His eyes seemed to blend into his skin. But covered in muck or not, it was his face. And it was lovely. “Charles Strait believes in the justice system, in right and wrong. That a life should only be taken in self-defense. He has strict principles and he stands by them. And that’s one of the many things I love about him.”
“It is, is it?” His lips stretched into a smile, his teeth gleaming. “I’m going to want the full list later. Every single reason why a woman like you could love a fool like me.”
“Detailed lists do make ordering things into systems easier,” she agreed. She wrapped her hands around his neck. She ignored the passengers starting to cluster around them, mouths hanging open, and the sailors shouting for the captain.
Charles stopped smiling, his expression turning serious. “And what about you? Will you be all right when Lincoln is killed by an impersonal hangman?”
She swallowed. She wouldn’t deny that she still wanted to pull the trigger herself. But that a man such as Charles could still love her even when she held those dark feelings inside her breast was a miracle in itself. And she wasn’t one to turn her back on miracles. So much of the last several months had been lived looking to the past. She wanted to live for her future now.
“I want to be in the crowd when he is hanged.” She dug her fingers into his hair. “And that will be enough.” It would have to be. And after that day, she would try very hard to never think about Clive Lincoln again.
A man in a captain’s uniform pushed through the crowd. “What’s going on here?”
Charles lowered her to the deck. Her pelisse was streaked with pitch, along with her hands and she suspected her face, as well. With as much dignity as she could gather, she said, “That man is a killer. Please have someone send for a magistrate.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Cassie’s chin slipped off her palm, and she jerked awake. She swiped her finger under her mouth, wiping away the bit of drool, and glanced about the office. Good. No one had noticed.
“There is the cot in the back room.” Charles didn’t look up from his piles of paper on his desk as he addressed her. “This might take a bit longer until you can read and sign the statements.”
All right, he had noticed. Heat radiated through her chest. But then, he always seemed to notice her.
They were in the agency’s office. Mr. Verity and the dockworker, who had been introduced to her as Agent Duffy, had gone home hours ago. Wilberforce spoke in low tones with the magistrate they’d roused from bed, leaning against the doorjamb to his personal office. The sky outside the window was slowly brightening, and tired as she was, she smiled.
It was a new day, and she and Charles were there to see it.
The man in question dusted another page with drying sand, stuck it on top of a stack of other papers, and turned to the next. He had managed to wipe off most of the pitch he and Verity had coated themselves with so they could climb onto the ship undetected, but small streaks of it still remained under his chin and around his elbows.
She knew where every bit of pitch remained as she’d watched him change into a spare shirt and trousers from the agency’s closet as she’d donned a loaned gown.
Cassie bit her lip. She couldn’t wait to help him clean every remaining trace of the substance from his body.
“You’re thinking immoral thoughts again, aren’t you?” The edges of his lips curved.
