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“It’s all over now anyway,” he said, letting his head fall back against the pillow. “The condition of my service was the freedom to name when I left.”

“What happened that day, Andrew?”

“What day?” he asked, even though he knew what she meant.

“The day your ship wrecked.”

He sucked in a breath. “Disaster.”

“Will you tell me?” she asked, her head shifting on his chest as she was looking up at him.

“Why do you want to know?” he asked, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

She was silent a moment, but then, in a voice that cracked slightly, she said, “Because that day changed both of our lives.”

Changed. Altered. Ruined.

He hugged her a little closer, pulling strength from the simple fact that she was there. “I’d been named the first mate on the Andraste when we left São Luís in Brazil, but I was still green.”

“What happened to the old first mate?” she asked.

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “It’s not fit for a lady . . .” She began to protest. “But since you keep insisting that you’re not a lady, he and a woman from the port were making feet for children’s stockings and—”

She burst out laughing. “ ‘Making feet for children’s stockings’? Is that what you sailors call it?”

“Among other things.”

“Enlighten me,” she said.

“You can shake out the sheets or dance the Paphian jig. Or perhaps you’d prefer to have your corn ground?”

“Oh Lord,” she groaned between laughs. “That’s particularly awful.”

He was grinning like an idiot now. “It is, isn’t it?”

“So this first mate was caught in the midst and . . . ?”

“The story goes that he leapt out a window to avoid an angry husband with a pistol,” said Andrew. “I was promoted to replace him, and we sailed out that evening with a full ship.”

The memory of what happened next drove all of the humor from him, and his voice sobered. “We were two weeks out of São Luís with a good wind when a storm hit. They aren’t supposed to be that big at that time of year, but for whatever reason we were caught right in the middle of it. I’d sailed through nor’easters and squalls, but I’d never seen anything like this.

“We brought the sails down as fast as we could, but it hardly mattered. The wind whipped up the waves, and they started smashing the deck like a hammer. Two men were swept overboard in the first ten minutes, and we would’ve lost more if we hadn’t been quick with rigging up a grid of ropes across the deck to act as guidelines.

“In the end, the hull was breached—I still don’t know how—and she started to take on water. We did what we could to try to save her, but we couldn’t pump fast enough to clear the water out. The storm ripped the Andraste apart like it was nothing more than a piece of balsa wood. We didn’t stand a chance.”

“What did you do?” she asked.

“Abandoned ship and hoped for the best. A sinking ship can cause a vacuum that sucks down anything in its path. I jumped and managed to get away from the worst of it by holding on to the galley door. A few weeks before, we’d rigged it with a rope to keep it shut when it was too swollen in the tropical heat, and I wrapped the line around my wrist to keep myself tethered to it. I reasoned that if I were to die, at least my body might wash up when the door reached the shore.”

He’d wanted Lavinia to stand a chance of knowing what had happened to him if he died. They hadn’t married yet, but as his fiancée she should have an answer—to know that he hadn’t gone the way of so many sailors before him, jumping ship on a far-flung island where the weather was always hot and the living was easier than on the deck of a merchant vessel. Yet for all those fatalistic thoughts, getting back to her—surviving for her—had been everything. She’d been the reason he’d kicked his legs when he’d jumped overboard into the churning sea. She’d been the reason he’d held on when his fingers had bled from the scraping and scrabbling it took to stay clinging to his float when the waves thrashed at him.

“The storm finally stopped, and by some miracle I was still alive and on that door,” he said. “I couldn’t see the ship’s debris any longer, and I didn’t know how far I’d been carried. All I knew was that I had to hang on with everything I had.”

“How long were you like that?” she asked quietly.

“Maybe three days? I can’t be sure. Quenching your thirst is the only thing you can think about when you’re a castaway. It’s torture. You’re surrounded by water all day and night, and you can’t drink a drop of it.

“But I was fortunate,” he said with a rueful smile. “The storm tossed me near the coast of Suriname. At some point I spotted land and, after convincing myself it wasn’t a hallucination, I swam as hard as I could for it. Somehow I made it to the shallows off a tiny fishing village. A fisherman and his son pulled me out of the water and took me to their home. They nursed me and treated my saltwater blisters. It took weeks for me to get any strength back, but as soon as I had enough to sit up I began to make a plan for the next time the traders came through.”