Chapter 14
Chapter
James, the helmsman, is an utter fool—and a drunkard, too.
He had been so deep in his cups last night that he was still in them this morning when he took control of the wheel and nearly ran them aground on an underwater ridge. One that’s clearly marked on the charts.
Bloody hell.
They could have been stranded on that ridge. Or worse, capsized by it. The kind of slow-moving disaster that kills too many because it feels like it isn’t happening at all until it’s too late to stop it.
“Where is he now?” McGann demands of Rogers.
“He’s abed, sleeping it off, but the brig is an option too if you’d like to prove a point.”
McGann thinks it over. That’s twice now he’s sensed the steering was off. Once is a mistake, but twice is negligence, and negligence cannot be tolerated. If he had a large enough crew to do without the extra set of hands, he’d absolutely throw the man in the ship’s jail.
But he doesn’t have the manpower for that, so he says instead, “Demote him to deckhand and move McNeil up.”
McNeil, the deck officer, is a fine sort, and not just because he’s a Scot too. He’s one of the few on board McGann’s sailed with before, and he’d thought highly of him then. McNeil’s young, which is why McGann didn’t put him at helmsman to begin with, but it’s time. The lad is trustworthy.
“Yes, Captain,” Rogers says and goes to get McNeil. And then the three lean over the navigation maps to try and sort through the mess James made.
Catherine eats her breakfast alone, and then she retreats back to the cabin after taking a turn on the upper decks to see the sea and the sky.
She wishes she could enjoy it but she can’t.
Not when—she touches her hand to her cheek again—Andrew McGann is anywhere about.
The kiss on her cheek this morning discombobulated her, as did the moment preceding it, when she leaned in close to him and could practically feel the beat of his heart next to hers.
But when she asked him about that kiss, he told her in no uncertain terms that it meant nothing. That he does not feel for her the way she feels for him.
How many times must he tell her before she listens?
Except…
She looked into his eyes when she took his hand and saw them soften for a moment. And she thought he was going to tell her something about what he was thinking, what he was feeling, but he didn’t.
She watched his features change instead from the warm, sweet man that she knows into something else, something hard. As if he’d turned himself back into that Roman marble on purpose. And then Rogers appeared and the moment was lost.
Drat it all.
She could chalk the shoes, the smiles, and that kiss on the cheek up to nothing more than a show for the crew.
He proposed to her a fake marriage, after all, and then very clearly reiterated it was his intention to keep it as such.
There’s no reason for her to think his actions are anything other than that.
Her fingers drift to her cheek again.
Except, he had that look on his face this morning, as if she was something wondrous to behold. She’d seen the same look on Pembrooke’s face when he watched Sarah Jenson, and on Alistair Crawford’s face, too, when he gazed at Violet.
She perches on the bed and opens the volume of Robert Burns she’s pulled from the top of the bookshelf, more confused now than she was this morning before they spoke. She turns page after page, trying to lose herself in the reading, but she can’t concentrate.
She touches her cheek again, another unbidden smile slipping across her features. But then she shakes her head. She will not get her hopes up that there is something growing between them until they have a conversation she can understand.
Until he can tell her the truth.
Pending such a confession, she will not allow herself to be deluded by daydreams just because the man pecked her cheek. She will be thoughtful. Careful, even.
Drat it all.
She turns another page and then wrinkles her nose.
What is that smell?
She stands, inhaling more deeply now and trying to place it, before a shudder of fear runs through her. That smell is fire. FIRE! Even she, with no sailing experience whatsoever, knows the danger of fire aboard a sailing ship.
“Catherine!” she hears a deep Scots accent calling for her “Catheriiinnneeeee!”
McGann. She puts on her shoes and rushes to the door, flinging it open and expecting to find the giant Scot standing there. But the passageway is empty.
She steps out of their cabin. “Andrew?” she calls, craning her neck. “Where are you?”
And then she feels a hard crack on the back of her head. She spins, crashing to her knees as darkness creeps in at the edges of her sight. Pain sears through her skull, sharp and throbbing, spreading until it swallows everything.
She feels as if she’s sinking into some kind of void; one full of pain and darkness and heat.
And then she feels nothing at all.