Chapter 6
Chapter
That goddamn wee bloody menace.
He’s hard as a rock inside his trousers. He spanked her for Christ’s sake. Andrew McGann, bastard Scotsman in every sense of the word, spanked the daughter of an English earl. On the rear.
And she liked it.
He could tell because the heat was rolling off her in waves, despite the cold December day. And how she baited him into doing it again, despite their circumstances. It’s absurd. The whole thing is absurd. Yet here she is, aboard The Elphame, making him absurd too.
What in bloody hell am I to do now?
The obvious, he supposes. Give the lass some clothes. Find her some shoes. She can’t very well go about barefoot in this weather.
If her feet get wet, which they of a certainty will, she’s more likely to freeze to death than make it to Boston.
He can’t have that—the thought of something happening to her making him angry.
As angry as when he first met her in that alleyway six months ago: the carnage of a carriage crash all around her and the coins in her reticule clanking together loudly enough to attract the attention of every ne’er-do-well in Covent Garden.
Menace.
She’s going to be the death of him one way or the other.
He stops by his former cabin on the way aft to the upper deck to gather what she might need. And to give himself a few moments alone to calm himself. He can’t very well walk around with a cockstand, can he?
But there’s no time to take himself in hand as he might want to. As he definitely wants to. So, he wills his excitement away instead.
He thinks of England. When that fails, he thinks of Barclay. The image of his arsehole half-brother is more than enough to settle him down. And thank Elphame, too, because he has work to do today. There is no free ride on a sailing ship, not for the captain, anyway. Nor for any member of the crew.
He rummages in his wardrobe and his trunk and finds the smallest pair of trousers he has, along with a linen shirt.
His clothes won’t fit her. They won’t come within a nautical mile of fitting her, but it’s the best he can do.
Did she think there would be a wardrobe full of ladies’ clothes just waiting for her aboard his ship?
Spoiled lass probably did. Menace. He shakes his head.
He could ask one of the crew or, Elphame help him, the cabin boy to give up their own clothes, but he won’t. Even if they have shirts to spare, which he doubts, he’s not going to inconvenience them for her lack of planning.
His clothes will do fine.
Ten days will be fine.
It will all be bloody fine. It’s less than a fortnight!
And then—what in hell will he do with her then? She said she was going to become a Yankee, but he can’t just leave her alone in Boston unattended. The woman is a goddamned beacon for danger.
And she said she was his investor! Whatever in hell she meant by that.
She’s not his investor. Crawford’s family is.
Although… she’s Crawford’s family too now, isn’t she? She’s Violet’s cousin. Hell’s teeth, Crawford must be worried sick at her disappearance. And Violet even more so.
A slow smile spreads across his face as realization dawns. Catherine is Crawford’s family by marriage. She’s Crawford’s responsibility, not his. All he has to do is send a message to the man as soon as they reach port and put her on a return ship to England.
Where she bloody belongs.
And then he can go about his business. He’s got a hold full of whisky that needs to be sold to keep his sister’s tavern afloat.
And then he needs to load that same hold full of goods from the Americas to be traded back in England.
His and Crawford’s livelihoods, and Esmee’s too, depend on a successful first voyage of The Elphame.
He can’t lose his way because of a wayward Sassenach aristocrat.
And now he won’t, because he has a solution.
One that will work if he stays as far away from her as possible until they reach Boston.
She’s not going to like that, though. He knows she won’t.
She’s going to fight him every step of the way.
McGann sighs. It would be so much easier to do what needs to be done without her aboard.
But easy is not his lot in life, not for a bastard like himself.
Easy is for the bloody peerage and the arseheaded Sassenachs.
For his father and his brother and Lady Catherine West; they get easy choices, good choices. But never him.
What he has instead is patience and planning. And he knows he’s going to have to use both over the next ten days to get the lass off his ship and out of his life.
And whatever happens to her when he puts her on a return ship back to England, well, that’s her problem, isn’t it? He didn’t ask her to show up here, dynamiting her marriage and social standing and family and whatever other asinine values she holds dear. That’s her doing and hers alone.
Although—and he has to work hard to suppress the smile that arises from his next thought—the mayhem that must have erupted in the church when they found her missing would have been a sight to behold. A magnificent thumb in the air to the peerage.
Wee bloody menace.
He pushes the smile away and is making his way back up to the main deck when he hears the faint, tinkling sound of her laughter. And then the deep guffawing of his crew. He doubles his pace, racing up the remaining ladder treads and back on deck to look for her. It doesn’t take long to find her.
Jesus wept, lass.
She’s standing barefoot among the rigging blocks, asking questions about sailing that Rogers is happily answering while the crew parades back and forth in front of her.
Showing off like a pack of giggling schoolboys.
McGann watches for an amazed moment, his ragtag crew of hardened men may as well be in leading strings for all the discipline they’re showing.
They don’t mind a damned woman on board after all.
Not that he can blame them. He only needs one look at her to know how they became a gaggle of foolishness.
Somehow, the torn and tattered dress and the disheveled golden hair glinting in the sun, combined with her bare feet and straight back and wide blue eyes make her look less like a woman than a goddess.
Like Elphame herself, alighting on the prow of her namesake ship to wreak havoc on mere mortal men. It makes no sense, but there it is. He wonders if anything about her will ever make sense.
“Enough!” he calls out. At this rate, they’ll never make it to Boston.
“Hoist the sails, men. And you,” he says to Catherine, “come with me.”
She gives him the barest curtsey and an, “At your command, Captain,” before she faces him with a smile of such genuine, radiant delight that he damn near trips over his own feet.
He blinks, as if he’s looked directly into the sun. But he recovers quickly enough, growls an, “Aye” at her, and turns to lead her below deck.
Catherine follows McGann’s broad back down the ladder and through the passageway to his cabin. Her cabin now.
He’s taut as a bowstring. She can see the tension in the line of his spine and hear it in the quick snap of his boots against the planks beneath their feet.
“Are you alright?” she calls as she follows his huge frame below deck via a ladder she hasn’t seen before.
“Aye.”
“I know you’re angry with me, but I can explain if you’ll give me a moment.”
“Nay,” he says. “I doubt you could explain, Menace. Because there is no rational explanation for your presence aboard my ship!”
“Don’t yell at me,” she says as he flicks open the door to his cabin and stomps inside.
“I am not yelling!”
“You are.” She steps toward him and points her finger at his massive chest. “And I won’t have it. As your investor, I have a place on this ship whether you like it or not. I understand the rules, and you are the one who is being irrational.”
“You,” he brushes her finger out of the way, “understand nothing. You threw money at me once, in your little lady’s tantrum, but that’s no more investing than pissing into the wind is a thunderstorm.”
She pauses and raises an eyebrow. No man has ever said the word “piss” to her before. But she is a woman of business now, aboard a sailing ship. She ought to become used to a certain level of vulgarity.
“I am sorry about that,” she says. “It wasn’t right of me. It was, well. I’d had a bad day, and it doesn’t excuse my behavior, but I apologize for it.”
She pauses and looks at him, waiting.
“I don’t need your apology,” he grumbles. “Not then. Not now.”
“Have it your way,” she says. “But make no mistake, Captain McGann, it was me who gave you the funds for this ship. The money that was delivered to you once a month by a different courier, all business conducted without faces and names and under the auspices of an anonymous man of affairs? Me. The first investments you had in this shipping and trading endeavor? Also me. A modest sum to be sure, but, to my understanding, all you had at the time.”
She cocks her head and stares at him, curious. “Where did you think it came from? Or does money typically fall from the sky and land in your lap such that the arrangements I made don’t seem at all strange to you?”
He turns away from her then, not answering that.
“Of course it seemed strange,” she goes on, realization dawning. “But you needed the money, so you didn’t ask any questions. I do understand. Sometimes we believe what we need to believe because our fortunes depend upon it.”
He turns back to her and his emerald-green eyes flash.
“You. Don’t. Understand. A. Bloody. Goddamned.
Thing. Not about me. Not about my business.
Not about my ship. And certainly not about my life.
Hell, Menace, even if you tried to understand, my life is beyond your grasp, and I have neither the time nor the desire to explain it to you. ”
She sighs. “We’re here now, Captain McGann. Together. So, we might as well make the best of it.”
He shakes his head so that his dark curls toss about like the storm that seems to be gathering in him.
“No, lass. We are not here together, and I will not make the best of it. I will endure your presence aboard my ship for ten days and ten days only. Right until we land in Boston, and then I’ll put you on the first ship back to London.”
“What?” she sputters. “You cannot do that!”
“But you can do whatever you please? We’re not in the ton any longer. You’re on The Elphame now, under my command. A place where I’m in no way beholden to you, but I am to Crawford. He’s my partner, and it means something to me when I say that. So, if I’ve to ease anybody’s mind, it’s his.”
He pauses and stares at her with narrowed eyes. “Unless you gave your family the courtesy of telling them where you’d run off to? But I don’t think you did that, did you? If you had, you wouldn’t be standing here now with no shoes on your feet.”
Catherine closes her eyes for a moment. He’s right. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. She hadn’t really known herself until she was in Chester’s carriage and giving directions.
“I didn’t tell them,” she admits.
“And your so-called investments in Crawford’s and my company? Not a word of that either, I presume?”
“No.”
“You’re selfish, lass. Lying to those who love you. Making them worry when a note or a whispered word could ease their minds.” He shakes his head. “And you’re cruel.”
She stumbles backward from him as if he hit her. She feels like she wants to be sick. Because. Because—
Because he’s right. She could have left a note for Violet or her mother to tell them where she went, but she didn’t. All she could see was her future with Pembrooke yawning in front of her like a deep, dark chasm. And she fled so as not to fall into it.
The investments, well, she told herself that her omission of the truth was for Violet’s own good. She’d thought that because Crawford refused Violet’s funds, he would refuse Catherine’s too.
But Catherine isn’t opening a medical clinic. If she’s honest, the only thing she’d been trying to do was stay connected to Andrew McGann.
His green eyes bore into her and she shakes her head. He’s right.
Drat him.
“Would you have taken the funds?” she asks quietly, “if I’d told you they came from me? After what I… what I did?”
McGann only shrugs. “We won’t know now, will we? You took that choice away.”
She had done that. But it doesn’t justify him doing the same now.
“So, you’ll take away my choice in Boston? A choice for a choice, like an eye for an eye? One does not absolve the other, Captain.” She glares at him. “And as I said earlier, I earned a place on this ship. And the right to my own life. I’ll have them both.”
“You bought your berth,” he spits at her. “You didn’t earn it. ‘Tis not the same thing. And no amount of money will buy me out of sending word to Crawford, so don’t even think of it. I’ll do what’s right for me and for this company, and that’s sending you home, lass.”
She feels the tears begin to prick in her eyes. She doesn’t want to go home. She can’t, not after the mess she made of her nuptials. Even an earl’s daughter can’t get away with jilting a fiancé at the altar.
She’ll never be accepted into polite society again, and that will harm everyone. Violet’s efforts to fundraise for her medical clinic and her mother’s social standing now that she’s finally out from under her father’s thumb. Not to mention that she’ll be a social pariah.
No, it’s better for everyone if she stays as far away as she can.
She takes a deep breath. “Look, Captain McGann,” she says, “I’ll send word of my whereabouts as soon as we land. And then I’ll go straight to Violet’s father in New York to further allay any worry. I promise you that. But please, please do not send me back.”
He doesn’t answer her, only turns and walks away. And the clench in her stomach at the thought of going back to London, to that life she just escaped from, nearly brings her to her knees.