Chapter 9 #3
In a voice as pleasant and light as goose down Devon said, “God love us all, the wench is eating! Good morning, Cat. Have you managed to repair her internal arrangements? What’s that? Oatmeal? I hope you emptied into it the contents of every bottle of aphrodisiac in the medicine closet.”
Her chin flew up, her eyes widened, but it was clear from her face that she didn’t know the word.
Her alarm was merely the unease of someone who has just found herself the butt of a baffling and probably tasteless joke.
Devon saw her gaze fly to Cat and saw the boy first reject her with his eyes and then, surprisingly, reassure her with a spare shake of the head that he had put no adulterants in her food.
Merry’s chin thunked back down on her chest in relief.
From the look of her the girl had no idea what an extraordinary phenomenon was Cat’s kindness to her; Morgan had this morning sardonically professed himself still reeling from the shock of it.
But then, this flowerlike creature had no basis for comparison.
She had never seen Cat with other women.
She was the third-string mistress of the man Devon hated, and she was no longer guarded either by nausea or by the urgency of his damned inconvenient need to take her to bed.
Primed for butchery, Devon lifted his hand and darned his fingers into her heavy hair and drew her head slowly back until her gaze had no escape from his.
“Dare you eat?” he asked her, blandly tender. “One meal in Hades and you’re never allowed up. Persephone had only a few seeds of pomegranate…”
It was a successful way to intimidate someone and about thrice as effective as he would have needed.
The final lump of cold oatmeal had been stuck like a sand tick to the back of Merry’s tongue, and it decided suddenly to ignore the esophagus and slip daintily into her lung.
She coughed and sputtered for thirty seconds before Cat came and whacked her on the back with a slap that dislodged the oatmeal and very nearly rib cage from spine bones as well.
When Merry was able to suck in enough air to speak, she faced Devon, who had been forced to relinquish his grip on her hair.
“At least,” she said, “when the king of the underworld dragged Persephone to hell, he had marriage in mind.”
Or so Merry had heard the myth reported.
All she had asked from her response was that it be in his classical category and that it be critical.
Any mention of marriage and its application to her situation vis-à-vis Devon had been an accident.
Marriage. It was an off-key note to have struck.
From the swiftly gathering malice on Devon’s face Merry knew the depth of her error even as she saw Cat wince.
Before Devon could deliver an annihilating rebuff, Cat rescued his hapless protégée from the fruit of her na?ve words.
“Devon, try to look hurt,” said the boy. “She don’t have faith in your intentions.” Then seeing the moment could stand to cool longer, he added glumly, “I’m sorry about the crossbow—I never thought about it. She was higher than a jackdaw. Who would have thought she’d get into mischief?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Devon and smiled at Merry.
He drew a slow finger down the line of her cheek.
“There’s something relentlessly disarming about a woman who pukes in your washbowl.
Do you know, my sea nymph—and there are honestly not many women I’d say this about—that you’re more amusing defending your virtue than I wager you’d be surrendering it? ”
Across the room Morgan had turned, the dark, unkindly surface of his gaze moving like a nightwalker among the three startling blond heads.
Jesus. Entertainment. Against odds to the contrary the puny, dove-eyed chit possessed a soul.
So you made yourself sick, did you, on Devon?
Morgan thought. That was well done of you, my babe.
I didn’t pump you too fast, too full of opium for nothing.
Grinning a little, he collected Devon’s cool glance and said, “Can we blame her for being ill? With you such an ill-favored fellow?”
“His smile,” observed Cat, “has been known to raise blisters at fifty feet. Even when he’s slept in his shirt. What did you say her name was?”
“Mary,” said Devon. “As in the Virgin.”
“No!” Merry said, delighted to be able to correct him, though she did it through clenched teeth. “With an e and two r’s. As in merry-go-round.”
Equally delighted, Devon gave her one of those blistering smiles and said, “Or as in making Merry?”
The only thing left for her was a feeble sort of gulp. “I didn’t give you permission to use my name,” she said, and it sounded inappropriately grandiose even to her own ears.
Devon said, “I’d be happy to call you Miss something, or Mrs. something, for that matter. What’s your surname?”
She ought to have been anticipating it. If only her brain hadn’t been as furred this morning as her tongue.
Not understanding what he wanted with her, she couldn’t take the risk of telling him her last name.
Merry Patricia Wilding was not a famous name, but her brother was a widely known and romanticized figure, and anyone who read the newspapers would have heard of her father.
You were never anonymous when your name was Wilding.
Looking into Devon’s eyes, with their brilliant centers of filigreed gold, she would have been surprised had he heard her last name and not suspected a connection at once.
He repeated his question, and since she didn’t have a ready alias, she was left harboring a pause as revealing as last season’s bear grease in a porch bucket.
“A woman of mystery,” said Morgan, at the side table, pouring himself wine. “Cat, fetch the thumbscrew.”
Cat snapped his fingers with apparent regret. “I can’t remember where I put it. It’s been a while since I’ve screwed any thumbs. Captain, sir, it’s the iron maiden or nothing.”
“If you say so, child.” Morgan rested his long body on a chair arm. “Personally, I can see her lashed to the yardarm, bared to the waist. I’m all in favor of something really vile and modern. Shall we bring it to the crew for a vote?”
“They,” said Devon pleasantly to Merry, “are teasing. Until I decide otherwise.” He gently loosened the cereal spoon that had been still fastened, unheeded, in the claw-like grip of her fingers.
Bowl and spoon he delivered to Cat and then hooked a chair and straddling it backward, faced her over the rail.
“Never fear, darling. For the moment all I want is the right to grub around in your pia mater. Hullo! You’re nervous this morning! I only meant your brain.”
Merry gathered every scrap and particle of the coldness that was making itself at home in the linings of her digestive tract and wove that coldness into her voice as she said, “Browbeat me, then, if it suits your mood. I prefer that to your—”
“What? My passion? Ah, love, what makes you so sure we’re done with that?”
She had a second’s warning before his right hand found her and slid gently under her hair to the thin, neat flesh that spread, soft as a gosling, on the side of her neck.
She hadn’t learned yet the trick of mastering her respiration; as he touched her Devon heard the sharp intake of her breath.
His thumb braced, without pressure, on her rapidly pulsing artery, and the tactile surfaces of his curved fingers were slow on her skin.
Wishing heartily that she hadn’t been so stupid as to have antagonized him on this, of all subjects, Merry said, in a voice that was embarrassingly hoarse, “Is it too late to retract any part of my remark that caused you offense?”
“No, but that time is fast approaching.” The pirate’s clever fingers were discovering her nape.
His touch was scattering her thoughts like leaves in a wind eddy.
Trying what was quite possibly the most serious risk she had knowingly taken in her life, Miss Merry Patricia Wilding ventured, “Are you sure—” His fingers smoothed over the tumble of her lower lip, so she had to swallow hard and begin a second time with closed eyes.
“Are you sure this is what you want? How do you know I won’t bore you, next time, with a surrender? ”
It was the closest she had ever come to the sort of wordplay at which he was so skilled.
It was a joke, only a joke, and if he misunderstood: disaster.
Like the gazelle, sick faced, who offered leftover salad to the hunting lion, Merry meant to placate and to make him laugh. Astonishingly she succeeded in both.
“What do you want to know?” she asked resignedly into the soft folds of his laughter.
The long firm-boned hand gave her cheek an approving pat and withdrew. “You don’t have to abandon hope, my dear,” he said. “Despite appearances, you’re really quite safe, if you cooperate. Now. When did you meet Michael Granville?”
Sooner or later, Merry had known, it would come back to this.
From the myriad tidbits of information she had culled since being brought on the Joke, she gathered that Devon had paid to have Granville’s room searched and certain papers—what papers?
—stolen, which meant the pirate and the English gentleman had a connection, probably unfriendly, but what went into it exactly was anybody’s guess.