“I may have asked him some questions.”
When the smile appears, it’s more of a grin. “You’re thinking like a free trader already. Why don’t you tell me everything our friend the lieutenant shared with you while we walk to the cove?” Indicating Dick and the whiskered man, he says, “You’ve met Dick Pascoe under less fortuitous circumstances, and this is Harry Tremayne, my first mate on theRapide. Harry, this is Mrs. Isabel Henley, whom I’ve told you about.”
She looks at the men uncertainly—she knows from George and her father that sailors are a superstitious bunch and most consider a woman on board ill luck. But Harry Tremayne smiles genially and Dick Pascoe, too, appears entirely unconcerned.
Jack says, “She’ll make a fine ship’s boy, don’t you think?”
The three of them laugh. She looks down at her feet to hide the heat rising in her face and sees she has tracked mud into Jack’s study. The hem of her dress is covered, too.
Jack says, “Did you not encounter the lieutenant on the way here a second time? Did he not go to the customhouse?”
“He went to Manaccan to see the innkeeper there. He said the man may turn informer.” Plucking at a thread sticking up from her sleeve, she says, “I don’t know which inn it is.”
“That’ll be the Crown,” Dick says. “There’s only one inn in Manaccan.”
“Aye,” Harry Tremayne says.
Jack’s expression changes. Where before his face was animated, helooks distant suddenly. Detached. Darkly, he says, “I hope there isn’t any truth in it. If there is, something needs to be done about him.”
Ice in her skin. She says, quietly, “Something, such as?”
“We’ll have to convince him our side is the more profitable. If he cannot be convinced, we’ll be forced to take other measures.”
She takes a step back and almost trips. Fear churns in her stomach. It’s a side of Jack she has glimpsed only twice before: when she threatened to betray his identity to the Revenue Service and when he took up the pistol on the bed while waiting for the doctor and aimed it, coolly, at the bedroom door. It’s a side of him she has ignored in favor of the picture of the gentleman and seafarer, as well as in favor of how he makes her feel—not like a poor, young widow, but like a woman with a worth of her own.
“What other measures?” Her voice wobbles. Dick coughs, as if he’s embarrassed for her.
Jack says, “You know what measures. You’re not a fool, so don’t pretend to be one just to hear me say it.” He says it calmly, conversationally almost. Somehow that makes it worse. She takes another step back and now she’s with her back against the window.
Jack drums his fingers on the chart. “It’s a bad business, if it’s true.” He turns to Dick and says, “We’ll discuss it when we’re under way.”
You think you know him, but you don’t.Her head aches with the thought. It dawns on her that her fear about the innkeeper’s fate is really a deep fear about what Jack may be capableof.
“Aye, Captain,” Dick says.
Those two words, spoken in Dick’s gruff baritone, stir something inside her. She could still walk away. She should. These men, underneath their civility and their country-cloaked affability, underneath Jack’s talk of fair prices and free trade, they’re no better than pirates.
Just as Lieutenant Sowerby wouldn’t hesitate to string them up, she’s certain none of Jack’s crew would hesitate to fire their pistol at a man of the Revenue Service if it meant saving his own hide or his contraband. And Jack is no different.
She should walk away, but this is her one chance to go to sea, theonly chance she has had in all these years—or is likely ever to get. She cannot give itup.
The wind is blowing hard enough she can hear the waves crashing on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff, a stone’s throw beyond the back of the house. The ocean is calling to her.What would George think if he saw you now?The thought hits her so suddenly she almost panics. Is she betraying George’s memory by going on a smuggling run to France? Would George have understood? Her hand goes to her throat, clasping the Trafalgar medal, Nelson’s face ridged in the silver.England Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty.
She glances at Jack, taking in the way he’s half smiling again already, the way his eyes brighten when he looks at her and the quiet sense of command in him as he addresses Dick and Harry Tremayne, instructing them to go on ahead to the ship. As the two men leave the study, she knows there’s another reason she cannot walk away. She’s tied to Jack—heart, mind, fate, and all—whether she likes it or not.
As if he knows what she’s thinking, he gives her a smile that pulls on the rigging inside her. And despite the fact that his trade is helping the French and that his work takes him far outside the bounds of the law, the hot rush of feeling holds her and she’s smiling back at him.
“That’s better,” Jack says. Leaving the desk, he reaches for her and lightly touches her cheek, as if brushing away a stray hair, and this infinitesimal touch makes him feel as close as when he held her in the water at Frenchman’s Creek, with only his wet shirt and her gown separating them. What’s happening to her, that she should feel every little thing so sharply?
With George it wasn’t so. She loved George. When he took her to bed, she felt every fumbled touch, every hurried caress before another long goodbye like a small, contained thrill. Yet it wasn’t this…fire.George’s eyes on her made her feel cared for, warm, secure. His embrace was like dipping into a calm sea on a hot day. With Jack, it’s the opposite. The look in his eyes makes a storm inside her, black clouds, churning water, towering, foaming waves, and all of it heated as if the sun itself lives in them.
She should shrink away from his touch, but instead there’s a yearning inside her, a leaning into him. It’s dangerous. Jack is dangerous, and not just because he lives outside the law and carries a pistol. He has vowed not to wed, and even if hewereinclined to marry, she would not now give up the little freedom her position as a widow has given her. She doesn’t want to live in a walled garden like Harriet. For the first time, she’s in charge of her own life. Not her father or husband, but she, herself. It’s a gift George has given her. She could not give that sort of power to another, not even to Jack.Especiallynot to Jack.
She will have to master her feelings until they fade to nothing. The easiest way to do this would be to avoid Jack, but this is at present impossible. She’ll have to try to keep her distance aboard the ship.
Jack says, “Don’t worry about the innkeeper of the Crown. I can be very persuasive—or my purse can be after a good run. I’m sure we’ll get him back on our side, if need be.”
“Very well,” she says so softly it may as well be a whisper. She turns to the window. The clouds have grown tails. A renewed bout of rain hammers the already muddy courtyard. She isn’t sure now if the rushing sound is the sea or the water falling from the sky.
