Chapter 26
Rosetta was forced to turn her back to the men in the boat when Alister sat at the very head. He folded his arms and leaned into the corner, eyeing her and the chest between them.
She was sure he was carefully watching her back too. He was pleased by today’s spoils, but he didn’t wear a smug smile.
“I think I’ve worked enough for it.” She patted the top of the dirty chest. “I’m the reason you had the map.”
“You’re going to help me count it.”
He squinted his eye at her when her lips pursed into thin lines of irritation.
She leaned as far forward as she could so the men behind her wouldn’t hear her whisper. “You know I can’t.”
“Oh aye, and I know why.”
She gulped. She didn’t like the sound of that. Rosetta mulled over what it could possibly mean as they slowly rowed to her ship.
They climbed up the rope ladder rolled down the side of the hull while men pulled the boat, with the chest sitting inside, to the main deck. The bustle of excitement was instant the moment all eyes fell on their booty.
“Move,” Alister demanded to the crowd as he took one handle while Naeem took the other. “You’ll get your spoils once we’ve gone through it.”
They carried it up to the navigation room. He dropped it in the middle of the circular blue rug in the centre and told Naeem to leave. He started going through the drawers of her desk before pilfering the many cabinets and drawers fixed to the walls.
“I knew I’d find these in here.” He pulled out a magnifying glass and a jewellery loupe – a small magnifying lens that sat in the socket of a person’s eye – and placed them on the desk.
Her navigation room was brightly lit, since the back wall was almost completely covered in windows. The room was semi-circular, with two doors on either side that led to sleeping cabins: hers, and one unoccupied since it had belonged to Theodore – she still hadn’t stepped inside.
“Why are you doing this here?” she asked when he dragged the chest across the floor with a sharp scraping noise that made her wince. My poor flooring. Then he manoeuvred it next to the desk and took the seat behind it.
“Because you don’t like being off your ship for long periods of time.” He opened the chest and pulled a jewelled necklace from it. “And we’re going to be here a while.”
He placed the jewellery loupe to his good eye and started checking the quality of the stones, lifting the magnifying glass up to further check when he needed to.
Knowing he was right, Rosetta grabbed a chair from a different, smaller desk that would have belonged to the first officer and brought it to the opposite side of the desk – not where she should be at. He’s in my bloody seat.
She plopped herself down, crossed one knee over the other, folded her arms, and watched him.
He has many skills. Not once had she seen Alister be presented with a task he couldn’t complete. He was smart in his own way. Not cunning like she was, but if Alister wanted something, whether it was a ship or a task done, he always knew the best way to go about getting it.
Except for her.
Sometimes, he was exactly how he needed to be to make her melt into a useless puddle. He was never gentle, but his large hands could turn her body into putty. His words, his deep, gruff, growly voice, set her spirit alight to the point she wanted to burn him with the flames he ignited.
Other times, he was so off the mark, she thought he was the biggest idiot to ever be born into the cosmos.
This moment was one of those times.
“Well?” he asked, never lowering the loupe.
She didn’t know how he could tell she wasn’t doing anything. He was blind in one eye and probably couldn’t see much past the tool in the other.
Her voice raised an octave in pure, unimaginable disbelief at his stupidity. “You know I can’t count!”
“Because you refuse to learn.”
“That’s not true.” She jiggled her foot up and down in irritation. “Mr Smith has been teaching me.”
“Trying. You refuse to learn from him.”
He put down the necklace and blindly reached into the chest to feel for a different piece of jewellery. Once he had one, he started inspecting it as well.
“That’s not true,” she rebuffed once more.
He gave a dark laugh. “Don’t lie to me, lass. I’ve spoken with him, and he’s told me you refuse to listen.”
“What does it matter if I don’t want to?” She turned her head to the side. “I have him to do the math for me.”
It was all just so... boring, numbers and counting. Rosetta couldn’t think of anything worse. She could count to twenty, but then she got lost and confused, embarrassed every time she got it wrong.
“He won’t be around forever. You need to be able to do this if you want to be a good captain.”
“Naeem can count.” He couldn’t read too well, but he’d learned enough math from Mr Smith to take over his duties.
“And what if they are both gone?”
A spike lanced her chest and twisted her gut.
“I-I’ll, uh, find someone else.”
“Someone you can trust with all the information?” He turned his head up, looking at her through the eye tool. “Or would you prefer to leave yourself open to getting robbed right in front of your own eyes and not know it?”
“You’re such a bastard sometimes.” Her voice was disappointed and defeated.
“That I am. I didn’t get my reputation by being kind.”
With a sigh, Rosetta took herself from the chair and knelt next to the chest. “What do you want me to do?”
“You can start by going through all the coins and separating them into groups. I noticed there were different kinds from different countries. They’re all worth different amounts depending on where they’re from because of their purity and their size.
However, the bronze ones all seem to be the same. ”
Sitting on the floor, since it had the most amount of space, Rosetta started doing just that.
Since there wasn’t a lot of jewellery, Alister eventually joined her, helping her go through it all. By the end, they had separated all the coins into six different piles: two of bronze, three of silver, and one of gold.
“You can do the silvers; I’ll do the rest.”
Rosetta sat with her legs spread, with piles between them and on either side of her. Alister moved to make himself comfortable by lying on his side, and he started by counting the smaller bronze coins.
“H-how am I supposed to do that?” The number of silvers seemed daunting to her.
“Put them into stacks of ten and then put those stacks into groups of ten.”
She tightened her lips inwardly. “Well, that doesn’t seem so hard.”
Alister looked up at her with a grin. “Aye, it’s not. You’ve gotta have a little more faith in me, lass. I wouldn’t make you do something if I didn’t think you were capable of doing it.”
Some of her apprehension lessened, and she gave him a half-hearted smile. She started doing as she was told, but he made sure she knew how to count to ten by getting her to do it out loud the first time. He was done long before her and eventually started to help.
Then came the hard part. She had to calculate how many silvers they had by their large groups of stacks of tens, in groups of tens.
Her eyes focused on him as he explained it. He didn’t seem bothered he was doing this for her, or that she kept making mistakes – especially when they started bringing the total worth together. Not once did he wear a look of humour or snort with laughter.
She half expected Alister to make fun of her. Instead, he made sure she understood the math before moving onto the next puzzle. He often pointed to the piles between them and circled his finger around them.
Eventually, everything had been halved, despite the occasional odd number of coins. He placed his half back into the chest to take to his ship later. Hers remained on the floor so she could eventually put it in the safe.
He held her gaze with a knowing stare when they were done, one side of his lips curled upwards in a smirk. “There. Now you can’t say I stole more for myself.”
“Wait.” She looked around at her piles. “So, it wasn’t just to make me learn?”
“Nay.” He chuckled. “Didn’t trust that you wouldn’t say I tried to cheat you out of some of it.”
Then he started pouring a handful of coins from one hand into the palm of the other, making them clink together. Once the hand above was empty, he grabbed what he’d dropped to do it again.
Well shit, Alister knew her well enough to predict she would have done exactly that.
“Plus, counting chest loot is fun. I don’t get to do it often, but it’s one of my favourite activities.” He looked at the coins in his hands instead of her, almost like he couldn’t meet her gaze as he murmured, “Wanted to watch you do it with me.”
A slight feeling of warmth spread across her cheeks, and she chose to believe it was because of a sudden hit of arousal rather than a small blush of tenderness from his words.
He’d never said anything that sweet to her before.
What is it with this man and the way he makes me feel?!
He was being... considerate, nice, more so than usual. It was getting her body in all kinds of disarray.
Rosetta almost launched herself, crawling above him to straddle his waist. She brought her lips to his, needing to shut this bastard up with her tongue before he said something even sweeter.
“Oi!” He chuckled beneath her lips, half-kissing her back, half-trying to talk. “We’re going to have to count those again so we can get the right amounts to your men.”
“Okay,” she answered, followed by a tiny moan as she clutched the collar of his tunic to keep him to her. She pulled on it to the point she thought she may rip it in her swelling need. “Sounds good. Whatever you want.”
She didn’t care what she had to do, not when right then, in that moment, she needed this big, annoying brute inside her more than anything.
Alister turned them over, spreading more of the neatly placed coins around as he carelessly laid her down. Cold coins pressed into her bare back after he yanked her tunic from her tights and off her body to reveal her breasts, making her arch away from the floor and into him.