“God. There’s a wench in my bed,” said Devon, standing over her.
She retreated full under the blanket and had it ripped off her too.
“Wake up, Anne Bonney,” he said. “Your friends are aloft, waiting for you. Don’t you want to be a lady pirate? There’s Saunders and Erik Shay—hear them singing? No,now they’ve stopped. They want me to send you up to them, clad like a mermaid. Shame on them, they’re drunk as friars. Or if you don’t want to go up, shall I invite them down?”
“No! Devon, please—”
“Wonderful, Merry pet. Could you turn on your back and repeat that?” She felt the mattress shift slightly as he sat by her. “It’s damned appealing. Again and more throatily…”
Merry reared to her knees in a riffle of white hollands, her hair flying over her sloping shoulders. “They’redrunk, are they? And I suppose you’re not?”
He twisted around to smile at her. The lamp he had brought in with him sat in its niche on the small desk, and an arc of rosy light reached into his glowing hair, discovering the moisture dewed there from the sticky sea mist. His supple skin appeared golden, his teeth neat and white, and his eyes made of moonlight. Fragrances from him caressed her; the tang of driftwood smoke and mineral-rich beach sand, the fresh breath of the wind, the bouquet of sweet wine.
“I am but ‘lightlie merrie,’ my bunkmate,” he said, “and not transmuted into Attila the Barbarian. Wait. I’d forgotten. I was that already, wasn’t I? Help me with my boots?”
“Boots? Are you taking them off?” she gasped in a voice anything but throaty.
“Of course I am. I don’t usually sleep knee-down in leather.”
One boot hit the floor, and she jerked with alarm at the thud.
“Now, Devon—” she began nervously, watching him work on the other boot. “Devon, I—I… Devon, please leave me alone. Go away. Go to bed. I want to go back to sleep.”
“You’re welcome to sleep, and Iamgoing to bed. Dear child, this is my bed, gracefully occupied though it may be.”
“You can’t really mean to sleep in here,” she said desperately.
“You can’t really be so naïve as to think I won’t.”
Merry, forgetting that her new motto was panic won’t help, said, “No! Devon, no!”
“Don’t tell me,” Devon said, starting to shuck his jacket, “that we’ve already degenerated to incoherent protests? I’ve been looking forward to a moving and articulate appeal to my submerged sense of decency. Please, if you won’t be throaty, be eloquent. You haven’t soured on a truce, have you? Think. It will be biblical; we shall beat our swords to plowshares, and the lion will lie down with the lamb.”
“Not if the lamb has any say in the matter!”
“They don’t, as a rule,” he said. “One shears them seasonally, bleating or not.”
The pirate’s shirt was soft-textured and clean. His expression was tidy and his words hardly slurred. It didn’t seem fair when she, unblamably asleep, should be handicapped once waked by a soggily semialert brain, eyes that itched under raw lids, and a tongue as flaccid as dry wool. If he wanted bleating, he was going to get it.
“I shall scream!” she said.
“As you like. Mind you, I feel compelled to mention that there are any number of otherwise civil individuals on board who are working their way into pleasantly intoxicated sleep. If you’re noisy, someone’s likely to come in here and stick a sock in your mouth.”
Over the past few days Merry had had enough opportunity to observe men under the influence of alcohol to decide that it was probably true. His shirt, opening over tough, lovely muscle, made Merry’s throat contract involuntarily in a gulp. Grabbing the two sides of his collar, she drew it fiercely together and snapped, “There’s not enough shame in you to wash a flea’s foot! Do you mean to sit there before me and bare yourself?”
He swallowed a laugh, though his eyes brimmed with humor as they devoured her in fascination. “Ah, darling. NowI remember. No wonder I’m shocking you. Your husband slept in a nightshirt.”
Caught off guard, Merry drew a blank, and it showed in her face.
“That freckled paragon, Jeremiah Jones,” he said in a gently encouraging tone. “Your husband. Sleeps in a nightshirt. Recall telling me that?”
There was something unnerving about a man who could grin and “forget” a threat he’d made two weeks earlier; and then turn around and throw in your face an insignificant scrap of conversation eight months old. It wouldn’t have surprised her if she’d been deliberately maneuvered into her present indignity of holding his shirt closed. She saw herself in five minutes trying to hold up his britches and shuddered. How he would love that! Before she had figured what to do, he said affably, “I don’t want to throw you out of the bunk, you know; just share it. If that’s worrying you.”
“Don’t work so hard to be funny,” said Merry, who’d learned the phrase from Cat. She let go his shirt with a sharp gesture and put her bare feet on the cool floorboards and stood with her back to him. “If you’re getting into this bed, then I’m getting out of it.”
“You’re safer than you think” came Devon’s voice behind her. “Cat swept me off to the mainland and smothered me in drink and female hospitality. He didn’t say so, but I gather the charitable zeal was on your behalf.”
For so brief a statement it had a remarkable number of half messages. Miserably the one that penetrated to Merry most clearly was the image of Devon with a woman. She was disturbed and more than a little embarrassed by the discomfort it caused her.
