11. Chapter 11
Chapter eleven
The first thing Marguerite did after locking the door was look at the clock.
Five hours until midnight. Five hours until Tristan Blackmere came to her cabin to collect the rest of her good sense.
She turned away from the clock at once. Time, like men, became dangerous when stared at too long. Then she peered behind the partition at the hidden comforts waiting there like contraband aboard a ship commanded by a man who survived by cutting away everything superfluous.
The room was his. The ship was his. The hour, infuriatingly, had been chosen by him.
Very well.
She could not command the sea, the frigate, or the duke’s alarming shoulders, but she could command this cabin.
By midnight, it would not look like a place where a woman had been lodged at another man’s convenience.
It would look like a room in which Marguerite d’Ailes could receive a guest without surrendering every advantage before he crossed the threshold.
Her heart gave two quick, superfluous beats.
She pressed one hand to her breastbone, as if the organ might be reasoned with by touch. If Tristan knew how often it had begun to beat at the thought of him in this cabin, would he cut that too?
Ridiculous. He would not know. He would not guess. And if he did guess, she would deny it with such serene authority that even her pulse would feel ashamed.
“Elsie, we have five hours to make this cabin livable.”
Elsie, who had been inspecting the copper tub with the reverence of a pilgrim before a relic, looked up. “Five hours till what?”
“Until—” Marguerite’s fingers tightened around the rug.
Until a black-haired duke with green eyes, a captain’s hands, and no respect for her pulse entered this cabin as if he had every right to occupy the air in it.
Heat climbed her throat. “Until darkness made this room even less forgiving. Help me with this.”
Elsie took one end. The ship rolled, and the pink in Elsie’s cheeks answered by a sudden retreat, leaving behind a greenish cast. Swallowing, Elsie released her end of the rug and sank slowly to the floor.
“What are you doing?”
“Dyin’, I think. If Naples wants me, it can come here.”
“Very well. Stay there, but do not be sick on anything useful.”
Marguerite set to work. She dragged the rug free and unrolled it over the bare boards.
Then came the cushions. She set one on the bolted chair, transforming it from an instrument of naval penance into something a woman might sit upon without permanent posterior damage.
She shook out the blankets, then laid them across the narrow bed.
The tub had seemed enchanting when hidden behind the partition. It was less so once dragged into the open and examined by candlelight. Salt had dulled its surface, and greenish stains clung near the rim.
Marguerite began to scrub. The work heated her at once.
Soon she was flushed, damp at the temples, and engaged in a private war with tarnish.
Good. Let tarnish be the enemy. Tarnish did not have green eyes.
Tarnish did not call her Moon. Tarnish did not hand her a key.
She scrubbed harder. The tub brightened beneath her cloth, and a ridiculous pleasure moved through her.
Behind her, Elsie made a faint groan. “If I die, sell my body to an Italian. I don’t care which, so long as he’s warm.”
“You are not dying.”
The brazier was another battle. Marguerite coaxed, adjusted, coughed, blackened two fingertips, and finally bullied it into a small, steady glow.
Afterward, she stood in the center of the room and looked around.
It was still a cabin aboard a frigate. But it was no longer stark.
The rug softened the boards. The chair had ceased to look punitive.
Candles made the walls less like a cell and more like a room in which a woman might not perish of despair.
Even the copper tub, now burnished and gleaming beside the screen, had acquired a kind of indecent promise.
Marguerite had done it. She had taken a naval cabin and made it habitable.
Then she turned toward the clock. Three hours had passed.
The sky beyond the stern window had gone dark.
Her pulse abruptly remembered the black-haired duke who would come through that door, broad enough to make the room feel smaller, green-eyed enough to make every sensible thought flee toward the nearest coast. Heat gathered beneath her skin, then tangled with an answering chill so sharp that she pressed her blackened fingertips to her stomach.
Her hair had escaped its pins. Soot marked one cheek.
Her sleeves were pushed to the elbows, her hands smelled of coal and metal, and a damp curl had attached itself to the side of her face with all the elegance of a mutinous flag.
She had cleaned the tub, lit the brazier, softened the bed, and prepared the room for diplomacy of a distinctly dangerous kind.
In the process, she had become dirty, hot, and in desperate need of a bath.
The cabin was ready.
Marguerite was not.