Chapter 13
Chapter
Catherine lays in bed and listens to the soft inhale and exhale of McGann’s breathing. He’s spread his bedroll across the cabin floor. As her pretend husband, at least he no longer has to sleep on deck.
He asked her at dinner why she wanted to learn to fight, and what she told him had been true enough, she supposes.
She had been with Violet as her cousin treated the women of London who had black eyes and broken ribs and worse at the hands of their husbands and relations and employers.
She’d thought it smart to at least be able to protect herself a little, should the need come to pass.
And so, she and Violet together had read Mendoza’s Art of Boxing and McBane’s The True Art of Self-Defence.
But in the moment when that man had held a knife to her throat, it hadn’t mattered what she’d read. She’d been defenseless and she knew it.
It was only McGann who had saved her, not her reading. So, yes, it’s true that she wanted to know how he had so quickly and so easily dispatched those men in the rain. If she could learn even a bit of his technique, it would ease her mind.
But that’s not the whole of the truth. The truth of it is that she’d been astounded when this man she knew only briefly as Violet’s beaux’s business partner had erupted out of the shadows and come to her aid.
He was graceful and lethal, and so, so quick on his feet that it seemed to only take a few seconds before those curs were running back into the shadows from whence they’d arrived and she’d been wrapped safely in his arms.
Heavens, she’d swooned. There’s no other word for it.
She remembers every moment of that meeting entirely. The way he smelled like the very embodiment of Scotland: full of peat and rain and ocean, with that top note of a floral unknown to her.
And how his eyes were the color of Scotland, too, a deep green that was like the most beautiful moss on the most rugged mountains. His dark hair too long and curly and his skin brown and smooth. She’d wanted to touch him. More than that, she’d wanted him to touch her.
That was why she’d asked him to teach her to fight that night.
Because she’d been shocked at the events of the evening and confused by her reaction to them, and more so by her reaction to him.
Especially the deep thrum of want she felt in her body when he’d held her briefly in the rain and asked if she was alright.
She’d leaned into him and thought, yes. For the first time in a long time, yes, she’d been alright when he’d held her.
She had not even known that such a feeling existed before, some dichotomy of safety and desire, that was hard to imagine until it was upon you. But once she’d had it, once she’d felt it, she wanted to experience it completely, betrothal be damned.
She’d wanted more and had hoped, for a few short days, he might be the man with whom she could find whatever that more entailed.
So, she’d asked him to teach her to fight. And when he’d said no, she’d remembered the coin she still had in her reticule from the solicitor’s office—what those men had been after, hearing them clink in her bag, no doubt—and she’d promised to pay him for his troubles. And only then had he agreed.
She had thrown her money and station around, and… well.
She prefers not to think of what came after that. When she’d tried to show him what she felt, that she wanted him, and he’d refused her.
So, she listens instead to the sound of McGann’s breathing. She envies him that peaceful slumber, while her own mind spins. And she wonders if, before he’d fallen asleep, he’d been as aware of her presence in that dark room, as she is of his.
She wonders what will happen in the morning, too, when they parade their pretend marriage before the crew and test its credibility.
And then she wonders what time it is.
After midnight, certainly.
Which means she has only eight more days left to figure out her future. Unless she can convince McGann not to send her back.
She thinks briefly about paying him with the pearl and diamond parure she hid in the hem of her wedding dress, but she won’t make that mistake again. They’ve both had enough of her money.
No, if she can’t convince him not to send her back, she’ll just have to sneak off this ship when they reach port in the same way she snuck onto it: quickly and quietly, in the dead of night.
In only eight days, her new life awaits her. A blink of time and an eternity all at once. She closes her eyes and turns on her side.
Her future is uncertain, but that’s no different than it has been since her father died.
What’s different now is that while her future is unrolling before her empty and untried; for the first time, it’s her future, made of her choices.
Even if she sometimes makes the wrong ones.
She hopes she hasn’t made the wrong one tonight by agreeing to this fake marriage.
But as she listens to McGann breathe, she doesn’t think she has. He’s so different from her father and Pembrooke, from all of the men she’s known. He’s good, beneath the temperamental bluster.
In fact, she thinks now, it’s possible he uses the temperamental bluster to try and hide his goodness.
Because it makes him feel vulnerable. That thought makes her want to protect him as he’s always trying to protect her.
And that, the idea of a shared promise to safeguard each other, is what finally soothes her to sleep.
When she wakes the next morning, he’s gone. She rises and dresses quickly and makes her way to the door. Time to start being Mrs. McGann and truly experiencing her first voyage on a sailing ship.
The thought excites her. It makes her heart beat a little faster and her mind wander toward adventure, such that she almost doesn’t see her once-ruined slippers lined up neatly on the inside of the door.
They have been so completely patched over with strips of leather and sail they may as well be new.
She leans down and picks them up. They are indeed her shoes, remade into something better. Something more.
She knows he did it so she wouldn’t walk around the ship barefoot.
That he made them out of necessity more than anything else, but she still cradles them in her hands for a long moment before she slips them on her feet, imagining his large body bent over, solemnly stitching with a needle and thread.
It’s… well, it’s sweet. Almost unbearably sweet.
She feels a kind of blooming warmth in her stomach that makes her smile. He’s good and he’s sweet. She’ll find him now and thank him properly.
She opens the door, still smiling, right up until the moment she finds herself face to face with the first mate, Rogers.
“Good morning, Mrs. McGann,” he says, loudly enough for any passing crew to hear. “If you’ll allow me the pleasure of escorting you to breakfast.” He offers her his arm and lowers his voice, “I believe we are due for a conversation.”
She glances at him sideways, but takes his arm nonetheless. “It would be my pleasure, Rogers,” she says. “What is it you would like to discuss?”
McGann is at the navigation tables when he catches sight of Rogers leading Catherine to breakfast. The man is leaning in close, too close, and whispering something to her in a quiet voice that makes him want to toss the bugger right off the side of the ship.
He scowls and tries to ignore them. Rogers is only escorting her to breakfast. It’s a perfectly normal, acceptable thing for the first mate to do. He should leave it.
He doesn’t.
McGann rises and strides toward them. “Good morning,” he calls out. “Did you sleep well, Madam?”
“I did,” Catherine says, and when McGann reaches them and holds out his arm, she drops Rogers’s and takes his instead.
He can’t help the smile of pure satisfaction that spreads across his face at that. And then she goes up on her toes and whispers into his ear, “Careful, Captain. You look exactly like the cat that stole the cream.”
Her breath, warm against the sensitive curve of his earlobe, nearly makes him dizzy.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he replies, flashing her his best, most rakish grin. “I’ve the prettiest lady aboard on my arm.”
“I’m the only lady aboard,” she counters, though she’s smiling. And he’s still riding that bright, heady rush — the moment sweeping him along, her shoulder brushing his, the lingering tingle in his ear — when he leans in and presses a kiss to her cheek.
Of all the things to have done.
Of all the ridiculous things.
He stills, frozen by his awkward awareness that he’s touched her when he shouldn’t have. That he kissed her when he hadn’t intended to. That if they found themselves alone and she turned her face to his, he wouldn’t stop kissing her.
“Shall we breakfast?” he asks, trying to find his footing again as Rogers departs.
“No,” she says and touches her cheek. “I think we ought to talk first.”
He feels his stomach plunge down to his feet at that, but he says, “Aye,” anyway and leads her to the upper decks where they can take a short promenade without the prying eyes and ears of the other sailors.
In his experience, a crew is a worse bunch of gossips than even a gaggle of hens.
And whatever it is she is going to tell him is probably not a thing he wants overheard: that she’s changed her mind.
That the slippers are too much. That he is an enormous oaf and a bastard with no right to touch her, much less kiss her.
Ever. His mind can come up with plenty of reasons for this discussion, and it hates all of them.
“Alright then, Menace,” he says when they’re alone and he’s resigned himself to whatever recriminations are coming next. “What are your rules?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What are your rules of engagement? For this pretend marriage. Or did you call me up here to tell me you changed your mind completely?” He steels himself for whatever she might say next.
“Rules of engagement?” she asks and even he, in the midst of his embarrassment, can read the confusion in her face.