Chapter 10 #3
“No,” Cat said, his voice severe, his temper thoroughly evaporated.
“Devon isn’t stupid. And Morgan can see clear inside my femurs.
He’d know I was lying. Besides, Devon’s bloody likely to double-check, just to give you a lesson you wouldn’t forget.
He’s not a man to push. Do you understand what it means physically?
I didn’t think so. The man’s out to buffet your guts around, Merry.
Strain everything he says through a cheesecloth.
” He saw her irises, thick as buckets of blue water, begin to slowly lose their focus.
“Damnation. Don’t look at me like that. I can’t help you.
Don’t expect me to. There are two ways you can make peace with Devon.
Pleasure him, or tell him what he wants to know.
You’re perfectly capable of doing either. Or both.”
She jumped to her feet so fast that her chair skittered on the uneven floorboards. “You and your smug calculations. Hasn’t it occurred to you that the truth wouldn’t save my skin? If Devon found out what I was doing at the Musket and Muskrat, he’d peel me to the gristle.”
Shocked and angry, Cat abandoned the effort to keep his tone polite. “What lunacy possessed you to make an enemy like Devon?”
“Don’t you think I know I’m in trouble?” she shouted back. “Do I look like someone who’s made a practice of consorting with pirates? What am I supposed to do now?”
“Take him to bed, damn it.”
“Understand this. Never.” She was screaming, without knowing it. “It disgusts every feeling!”
“Christsakes, are we talking about the same man? When Devon walks down the streets of Bristol, half the population has neck strain from staring at him. We’ve got practically to hire eunuchs with scimitars to get him the rest of a chaste night.”
They were faced off like weasels. The air between them hissed with their fury; with a movement of his shoulder Cat’s unbound hair flared and caught hers, and held, crackling with static.
“Pardon me for asking you to help!” she hurled at him. “My mistake! I’m not accustomed to people whose range of emotion is limited to irritation.”
A hush fell. As their lungs competed wrathfully for the same oxygen Cat began to slowly digest her final words. His eyes widened, as she had never seen them before, and ate light like a mirror.
“Who were you expecting? Young Lochinvar?” he asked in a half-paralyzed amazement.
The raised muscles in his shoulders began to relax, the white lines around his lips to warm.
With a gentle hand he meticulously parted the wanton intercourse of their hair and put her snapping curls behind her arm.
In a very different tone he continued, “My emotions aren’t limited to irritation. At times I’m annoyed as well.”
Crazily, considering the situation, Merry felt the keen pressure of a grin on her lips and an escaping laugh.
Her resentment sank like an iron slug. And the boy’s astringent blue eyes answered her in a softening that was not a smile but something as humorous and more intimate.
It was the first time Merry had taken pleasure in being angry and felt neither ill nor guilty in its aftermath.
Cat, she had learned, was uniquely shed of threatening complexities.
“Look,” he said, shrugging his own hair back, “do you want to take a bath?”
“What do you mean, a bath?” she repeated, startled.
“Sit in a tub. Rub soap on yourself. Rinse it off. That kind of thing. You know; a bath.”
Merry could barely remember the last time she’d been clean, not being able to do much of a job with a can of water and the worry that who knows who might walk in the door at any minute.
Merry itched in places that she didn’t know the names of.
Almost cheerfully she said, “Where could I take a bath?”
“Morgan’s cabin. He’s on deck, and no one’s going to come in this late.”
“Won’t he mind?” she asked.
“Only if you leave damp towels in a heap on his Persian carpet,” he said, his hand on the door handle. “Well? Yes or no?”
Shyly she came toward him, though the curve of her forehead was skeptical. “You wouldn’t—watch me, would you?”
“Oh, for Christsake. No; I wouldn’t. The way you talk, you’d think I’d never seen a woman stripped, before you.”
Three months ago Merry wouldn’t have called that much of a reassurance.
The new Merry Wilding had spent a week on Rand Morgan’s famous pirate ship, lying her scallops off about her identity, and learning the rudiments of how to argue and how to keep her poise in bare feet and a thin nightshirt.
It was the new and itchy Merry Wilding who twitched her twisted skirts into place and went with the pirate boy to Morgan’s cabin.
She washed herself and her hair in a baroque brass hip bath behind a mother-of-pearl screen from China.
“Are you getting into your dress or do you want a nightshirt?” Cat’s voice called around the screen.
“Nothing would induce me to borrow another thing from Morgan,” Merry said emphatically, drying between her toes. “Especially since you said he was mad about the torn buttons, which were not my fault.”
“This one’s mine. I never wear it.” “It” flew over the top of the screen followed by, of all things, a cranberry-colored man’s robe.
She had to laugh as she put on the robe because the arms hung ten inches past her hands and the hem swept the floor.
Smiling, she came around the screen dangling the long arms in front of her, and the boy stood up and began to roll the cuffs for her.
“Are you cold?”
“No. How come you know so much about everything?” she asked him curiously. “You couldn’t be much older than I am.”
“How come you know so little? Why do you think we’re the same age? How old are you?”
“Eighteen. How old are you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe eighteen. That’s what Morgan thinks, anyway.” He swept a cushion of crimson brocade from the window bench and tossed it on the floor. “Sit down. I’ll brush your hair.”
She was so tired, and indeed so na?ve, that she sank onto the cushion without a second thought. Registering her trust without comment, the young pirate sat behind her and began to put the silver brush through her hair with soft strokes.
The ship rocked them like a great wooden cradle, and the moon smiled through the window, casting latticed shadows over them and mixing drifts of kindly moonbeams in her hair where it lay across his knee.
Soon she had half fallen to sleep; her blameless cheek dropped against the inside of his leg.
Like a warm hand on the shoulder, her movement woke Cat from his reverie in time to see Morgan come through the door.
Cat forced moderation on the muscles that had irrationally tightened and held Morgan’s gaze as the older man crossed the room in his easy stride and let his hand fall, briefly, through Cat’s hair.
“Pretty children,” Morgan observed. He smiled thoughtfully as Merry sat up, knuckling her eyes, looking as though she’d forgotten where she was.
Cat handed Morgan the hairbrush and said to Merry, “Come on—you look ready for sleep now.”
“Do you know, Cat, instead of selling her in Trinidad, why don’t we keep her?
” said Morgan suddenly. “Every boy should have a pet.” He encountered a sharp look from Cat, who, except for Devon at his age, was the smartest boy Morgan had ever known.
As Cat was putting an arm around Merry and bringing her to her feet to lead her from the room he said, “You’re dreaming, Captain, if you think I can afford a mistress on what you pay me. ”
Morgan’s soft laughter followed them from the room.