Her eyes blazed as she snapped, “Do tell. How chivalrous of him. I suppose he means to strike a private deal and save the percent that would have gone to the auctioneer?” She sat down in the waves of her skirt and thrust her face into her hands. “I’d sooner stay on theJokeand be y-y-your—”
“Oh?” His voice was calm. “Whym-m-mineand not Devon’s?”
“Because I hate Devon!” The words, filtering through her dainty fingers, were startlingly convincing.
It would serve no good purpose to heave her into another argument, so he only said evenly, “Does it matter if you hate him? If you’re going to play Adam and Eve with someone you don’t like, it might as well be Devon, who’s a fair hand at it.”
“If he were Adam and I were Eve,” she said with dignity, “and if the future of humanity depended on us, I wouldn’t let him touch me.”
Amused in spite of himself, Cat rested his forearms on the table so that his face and hers were at a level, his orderly braid dangling like rope.
“Merry?”
Merry’s fingers curled down to expose the smoky blue fret in her eyes.
“I can tell you in a word what I’m like in bed,” he said. “Quick.”
Her arched brows knit, and she said crossly, “Good. It can’t be too quick for me!”
“For God’s sake, Merry. Do you always have to be so bloody melodramatic? You’re spending too much time down here immersed in self-pity.”
“What choice do I have?” she said, outraged.
“About the self-pity, plenty. Eat your oatmeal. I’m going to talk to Morgan.”
And Cat asked for and rather surprisingly received Morgan’s permission to take Merry up on deck.
The girl herself was a good deal harder to convince. Devon, it seemed, had planted a seed or two to keep her from trying to escape. Things too terrible to describe would happen if Cat took her on deck and “threw her to the crew,” she told him, her face hot with emotion. Devon had shrewdly left the details to her imagination. It took Cat the better part of an hour to clarify for her that there was a difference between being thrown to the crew and having the liberty to go aloftunder Morgan’s protection. There was no question that if she was presented as a plaything, she would have been used as one. However, as she was Devon’s inviolate property, any sea dog who laid a finger on her would find himself eating barnacles off the keel. And anyway, if she thought men lost their heads over sniveling eighteen-year-olds, she was wrong. “Now, if you were twenty-seven and were really good with your—”
“My what?” she interrupted, glaring at him.
“With your ability to deal with the servants,” he finished dryly, “there would be more cause for concern.”
She stood pale and still as a birch as he wrapped her in a worn coat of blue-dyed velvet trimmed with fur and even let him put a wide-brimmed straw hat on her, but Cat had to forcefully steer her aloft.
The noise and the clutter of the busy deck, the cold slap of the wind, and the brilliant vast sky exploded into Merry’s numb senses as she came, blinking, onto the open deck. Hard light shimmered from the ship’s brass work, white flame danced in the waves, and tilting back her head, she saw beyond the wide square sails, a bright bank of cumulus clouds, luminous and scudding high in a race with the ship. Everywhere there was motion. TheBlack Joke’s great bow rocked and speared the sea. The horizon lifted and lowered as the potbellied sails strained in the heady wind.
The deck had just been scrubbed, and her feet in Cat’s moccasins slipped a little on the drying planks. It was a good excuse to look down and mind her footing instead of the men above her on the crosstrees of the masts or active on the deck. There were winks, smiles that were predatory, exchanges that she was glad not to hear.
“Cat—” she said.
He cut her off. “Try to show some spirit. You’re a curiosity, like the five-legged calf.” Cat’s voice roughened almostimperceptibly. “Sweetheart, you don’t have to shake like that. Itoldyou. They won’t do anything.”
Morgan was on the foredeck of the vessel, fresh-faced, romantically disheveled by the wind, and talking to a narrow-shouldered black man whose height topped even Morgan’s by more than two inches. A sharp scar cut the man’s right eyelid and sliced through his pointed brow. His lips were deep-seamed and narrow, his eyes strict and without frivolity. The taut red linen of his shirt was lively as a cardinal against the ship’s timber and rigging. Cat delivered Merry there, his hand on her forearm. She had the sensation she was being carried by the scruff of the neck, like a fox cub, and her knees, as she stood there, were so disobliging asactuallyto quiver.
Morgan laughed when he saw her, and when he had finished speaking with the tall man, he turned and said, “This is Mr. Valentine, our quartermaster. Put your chin up, nestling, so he can have a look at you. Oh, dear. Will we have to teach you how to obey an order? Ah. That’s better. I’m pleased to see that in spite of everything you have a functioning neck.” A neat movement of Morgan’s hand set the straw hat farther back on Merry’s head. He turned to the quartermaster. “Well, Tom?”
Thomas Valentine’s meager smile touched one side of his lips. “That damned boy… Devon walks into a town, and women comely as sea sirens creep at him through the wainscoting. This one, of course, is… I’m surprised he’s let business keep him away this long. Some of the men aren’t too happy about her. You know. Having a woman on board is—”
“What?” Morgan was grinning, but the effect was its opposite. “Bad luck? A Jonah? Kittle cargo?”
“A damned nuisance,” Valentine said frankly.
“This one needn’t be a nuisance to anyone but Cat.” Morgan’s flexible, placidly timbered voice carried across the deck to more than a dozen actively interested ears. “All anyoneneed manage around her is a little continence. And if any of the men complain about having a woman on board, I hope you’ll send them to talk to me. I’ll be fascinated to learn who sails in my crew and still has the superstitions of a lake fisherman.” Every head within a twenty-yard radius turned quickly back to its task; men who for one reason or another were not standing high just now in Morgan’s credit betrayed themselves with whistling that was too nonchalant and an excess of diligence at their work.
Tom Valentine’s good eyebrow rose. “You won’t find me making an objection if Cat wants to install one of Devon’s convenients on deck. Just so he keeps her out of the way. And I hope she’s not a troublemaker.”
“If she makes any trouble, then with my blessing you’re welcome to—” Morgan delivered one of his less benign smiles to Merry while he allowed the hesitation to develop artistically and then cut it off exactly right with “Request that she desist.”
