Her eyes flared. “What are you doing?”
His grin was wicked. “Undressing. Care to help?”
“No!”
“You’re not a particularly helpful cabin boy.”
She smirked at him. “About that. I thought you said you didn’t need a valet, yet you have a cabin boy?”
“A cabin boy is entirely different from a valet,” Cade replied.
“How so?”
“Less picky. Less exacting. Someone you can yell at to bloody well get out and leave you alone when you choose.”
“You have an answer for everything.” She rolled her eyes.
“Of course I do. At any rate, unlike you, I don’t sleep fully dressed and don’t intend to begin now to accommodate you.”
When he began to unbutton his breeches, Danielle spun around and crossed her arms over her chest, facing away from him. She waited a few minutes, trying not to imagine him undressed. “Finished?” She hated the fact that her voice shook.
“Not until I’m nude,” he replied in far too jovial of a tone.
Her mouth fell open. And went dry. “Am I to understand that you—” She snapped her mouth shut again as his breeches came flying past her shoulder to land in a heap on the wood planks in front of her.
“You’ll see to those, won’t you,boy?”
Danielle gritted her teeth. “Yes, Cap’n.” She grabbed the breeches from the floor, still facing away from him, and spent an inordinate amount of time shaking them out and folding them. They smelled like him, spicy cologne and a hint of soap.Nom de dieu. Why did they have tosmelllike him? If they didn’t, she’d have a much easier time ignoring the fact that the man who owned them and had recently occupied them was standing five paces behind her completely naked.
“Are you decent?” she finally asked in a much sharper voice than she’d meant to.
“I’m never decent,” came his laughter-tinged reply. “I thought you knew that about me.”
She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I meant are you clothed?”
“No,” came the succinct reply.
“No?” she echoed. Before she had a chance to inquire as to whether he meant to stand there unclothed all night, he continued, “I sleep in the nude.”
“You sleep in the—?” A string of French curse words flew through her head.
“However, I am covered, if that’s what you’re worried about, though I can uncover myself again if you’d like.”
That was it. She was through playing word games with him. She’d seen a lot on ships. A naked man wasn’t about to intimidate her. She would call his bluff. She spun on her heel to face the bed again. He was in it, covered by the sheets from the waist down. From the waist up, however, the man was fully, gloriously undressed. The bare expanse of his chest was on display. His muscled arms were crossed behind his head and he had a roguish grin on his face.
Danielle had seen her fair share of male chests before. Working on ships, she’d been careful to keep herself covered, but she’d seen and heard it all. Every inch of the male anatomy and every word they used to describe their… parts. And there were a great many words, to be sure. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for the sight of Cade Cavendish’s bare chest. Broad, muscled, ripped, hairless. She longed to run her fingers across the smooth expanse of skin. Her mouth watered. She pressed her lips together and forced herself to drag her eyes away from his chest and meet his gaze.
“Care to join me?” He patted the empty space next to him.
She ignored the invitation, instead marching past the bed to open the wardrobe and carefully set the breeches inside. She located his discarded shirt and shook it out before hanging it in the wardrobe, too. Next, she gathered his boots and made her way to the cabinet where she’d located the polishing items earlier. She set about dusting the boots with a horsehair brush.
The entire time he watched her with an unabashed grin on his face. “Hmm. Seems you do know the duties of a good cabin boy.”
She forced herself to bite back the I-told-you-so on her lips. Finally, she finished her ministrations and faced him again. “Where does—did—Martin sleep?”
“In here.”
“Where?” she bit out. He wasn’t about to make this any easier for her, was he?
