“You know the family, then?” Sophia kept her tone light, but inwardly she loosed a flurry of curses. She’d never considered the possibility that this merchant captain could claim an acquaintance with the Walthams.
“Oh, I know Waltham,” he continued. “We grew up together. Our fathers’plantations shared a boundary. He was older by several years, but I paced him for mischief well enough.”
Sophia swallowed a groan. Captain Grayson not only knew Mr. Waltham—they were friends and neighbors! All her plans, all her carefully tiered lies… this bit of information shuffled them like a deck of cards. He continued, “And you’re traveling alone, with no chaperone?”
“I can look after myself.”
“Ah, yes. And I tossed Bains across the room just now for my own amusement. It’s a little game we seamen like to play.”
“I can look after myself,” she insisted. “If you’d waited another moment, that revolting beast would be missing an ear.”
He gave her a deep, scrutinizing look that made her feel like a turned-out glove, all seams and raw edges. She breathed steadily, fighting the blush creeping up her cheeks.
“Miss Turner,” he said dryly, “I’m certain in that fertile female imagination of yours, you think sailing off to the West Indies will be some grand, romantic adventure.” He drawled the phrase in a patronizing tone, but Sophia wasn’t certain he meant to deride her. Rather, she surmised, his tone communicated a general weariness with adventure.
How sad.
“Fortunately,” he continued, “I’ve never known a girl I couldn’t disillusion, so listen close to me now. You’re wrong. You will not find adventure, nor romance. At best, you’ll meet with unspeakable boredom. At worst, you’ll meet with an early death.”
Sophia blinked. His description of Tortola gave her some pause, but she dismissed any concern quickly. After all, it wasn’t as though she meant to stay there.
The captain reached to retrieve his felt beaver from the bar.
“Please.” She clutched his arm. Heavens. It was like clutching a wool-sheathed cannon. Ignoring the warm tingle in her belly, she made her eyes wide and her voice beseeching. The role of innocent, helpless miss was one she’d been playing for years. “Please, you must take me. I’ve nowhere else to go.”
“Oh, I’m certain you’d figure something out. Pretty thing like you? After all,” he said, quirking an eyebrow, “you can look after yourself.”
“Captain Grayson—”
“Miss. Jane. Turner.” His voice grew thin with impatience. “You waste your breath, appealing to my sense of honor and decency. Any gentleman in my place would send you off at once.”
“Yes, but you’re no gentleman.” She gripped his arm again and looked him square in the eye. “Are you?”
He froze. All that muscle rippling with energy, the rugged profile animated by insolence—for an instant, it all turned to stone. Sophia held her breath, knowing she’d just wagered her future on this, the last remaining card in her hand.
But this was so much more thrilling than whist.
“No,” he said finally. “No, I’m not. I’m a tradesman, and I need to turn a profit. So long as you’ve silver to pay your passage, the brig Aphrodite has a waiting berth.”
Relief sighed through her body. “Thank you.”
“Have you trunks?”
“Two. Outside with a porter.”
“Very well.” His mouth curved in a slow, devilish smile. A conspiratorial smile. The sort of smile a young lady of fine breeding didn’t acknowledge, let alone return.
So naturally, wicked thing that she was, Sophia smiled back.
“Well,” he murmured, “this is going to be a challenge.”
“What is?” she asked, feeling suddenly disinclined to put up much of a fight.
“Retrieving your trunks, with you clinging to my arm.”
“Oh.” Yes, she was still clinging to his arm, wasn’t she? Drat. And yet—she wasn’t quite ready to let it go.
Maybe it was the lingering desperation from her episode with Bains, or the flood of profound relief that accompanied her rescue. Perhaps it was a perverse fascination with this enigma of a man, who possessed the brute strength to toss grown men around, and just enough charm to be truly dangerous. Or maybe it was simply the feel of his rock-hard muscles beneath her hand, and the knowledge that she’d made them flex. Sophia couldn’t say. But touching him made her feel exhilarated. Powerful and alive. Everything she’d been waiting her whole life to feel. Everything she’d been prepared to travel halfway across the globe to find. In running away, she had made the decision to embrace infamy. And lo, here he was.
The girl really needed to let him go.
This was the voyage Gray went respectable. And it was off to a very bad start.
It was all her fault—this delicate wisp of a governess, with that porcelain complexion and her big, round eyes tilting up at him like Wedgwood teacups. She looked as if she might break if he breathed on her wrong, and those eyes kept beseeching him, imploring him, making demands. Please,rescue me from this pawing brute. Please, take me on your ship andaway to Tortola. Please, strip me out of this revolting gown and initiateme in the pleasures of the flesh right here on the barstool. Well, innocent miss that she was, she might have lacked words to voice the third quite that way. But, worldly man that he was, Gray could interpret the silent petition quite clearly. He only wished he could discourage his body’s instinctive, affirmative response.
He didn’t know what to do with the girl. He ought to do the respectable thing, seeing as how this voyage marked the beginning of his respectable career. But Miss Turner had him pegged. He was no kind of gentleman, and damned if he knew the respectable thing. Allowing a young, unmarried, winsome lady to travel unaccompanied probably wasn’t it. But then, if he refused her, who was to say she wouldn’t end up in an even worse situation? The chit couldn’t handle herself for five minutes in a tavern. Was he truly going to turn her loose on the Gravesend quay? What would he tell George Waltham then?
Damn it. After years of aimless carousing, Gray had reached the point in his life where, for one reason and another, he actually wanted to behave in an honorable fashion. The trouble was, somewhere in all those years of aimless carousing, he’d mislaid his sense of honor. He could sail through a cyclone and not lose his course. He could navigate a woman’s body in the dark. But his moral compass had grown rusted with disuse. However … he never lost sight of the bottom line. And so, with this governess putting him to the test, Gray reverted to his usual method of making decisions—he opted for profit. Miss Jane Turner was a passenger. He had a ship with empty berths. The decision was simple. He was a tradesman, and this was business. Strictly business.
He had no business studying the exquisite alabaster sweep of her cheekbone.
And she had no business clutching his arm.
“Miss Turner,” he said sternly, in the same voice he gave orders to his crew.
“Yes?”
“Let me go now.”
She released his arm, blushing fetchingly as she did so and looking up at him through trembling lashes. Gray sighed. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.
“I’ve one last piece of business, then. Stay here.”
With that imperious command, he crossed the tavern. Bains sat at a table, hunkered over a fresh tankard of ale. Gray clapped a hand on his shoulder and leaned over to speak in his unwashed ear. A few more stern words, a few coins, and there was one more quandary resolved to his profit.
“Now then, Miss Turner. We can be on our way.” Grasping her firmly by the elbow, he whisked her out the tavern door.
“You gave him money?” Struggling under his grip, she twisted to look back toward Bains. “After what he did to me, what you did to him … You paid him?”
Ignoring her question, he caught the porter’s eye. “The lady’s belongings,” he commanded briskly.
The porter wrapped beefy forearms around the larger of her two trunks.
Gray reached for the smaller one, hefting it onto his shoulder and holding it balanced there with one hand. He took three paces before he realized she wasn’t following.
He paused long enough to toss a comment over his shoulder. “Come along, then. I’ll take you out to the Aphrodite. You’ll be wanting to meet the captain.”
CHAPTER TWO
The captain?
Sophia stood staring numbly after him. Had he just said he’d introduce her to the captain? If someone else was the captain, then who on earth was this man?
One thing was clear. Whoever he was, he had her trunks.
And he was walking away.
Cursing under her breath, Sophia picked up her skirts and trotted after him, dodging boatmen and barrels and coils of tarred rope as she pursued him down the quay. A forest of tall masts loomed overhead, striping the dock with shadow.
Breathless, she regained his side just as he neared the dock’s edge. “But… aren’t you Captain Grayson?”
“I,” he said, pitching her smaller trunk into a waiting rowboat, “am Mr. Grayson, owner of the Aphrodite and principal investor in her cargo.”
The owner. Well, that was some relief. The tavern-keeper must have been confused.
The porter deposited her larger trunk alongside the first, and Mr. Grayson dismissed him with a word and a coin. He plunked one polished Hessian on the rowboat’s seat and shifted his weight to it, straddling the gap between boat and dock. Hand outstretched, he beckoned her with an impatient twitch of his fingers. “Miss Turner?”
Sophia inched closer to the dock’s edge and reached one gloved hand toward his, considering how best to board the bobbing craft without losing her dignity overboard.
The moment her fingers grazed his palm, his grip tightened over her hand. He pulled swiftly, wrenching her feet from the dock and a gasp from her throat. A moment of weightlessness—and then she was aboard. Somehow his arm had whipped around her waist, binding her to his solid chest. He released her just as quickly, but a lilt of the rowboat pitched Sophia back into his arms.
“Steady there,” he murmured through a small smile. “I have you.”
A sudden gust of wind absconded with his hat. He took no notice, but Sophia did. She noticed everything. Never in her life had she felt so acutely aware. Her nerves were drawn taut as harp strings, and her senses hummed.
The man radiated heat. From exertion, most likely. Or perhaps from a sheer surplus of simmering male vigor. The air around them was cold, but he was hot. And as he held her tight against his chest, Sophia felt that delicious, enticing heat burn through every layer of her clothing—cloak, gown, stays, chemise, petticoat, stockings, drawers—igniting desire in her belly.
And sparking a flare of alarm. This was a precarious position indeed. The further her torso melted into his, the more certainly he would detect her secret: the cold, hard bundle of notes and coin lashed beneath her stays. She pushed away from him, dropping onto the seat and crossing her arms over her chest. Behind him, the breeze dropped his hat into a foamy eddy. He still hadn’t noticed its loss.
What he noticed was her gesture of modesty, and he gave her a patronizing smile. “Don’t concern yourself, Miss Turner. You’ve nothing in there I haven’t seen before.”
Just for that, she would not tell him. Farewell, hat.
To a point, he was correct. She likely had nothing in there he had not seen before. He’d certainly seen a sovereign in his life, and a banknote or two. He may have even seen almost six hundred pounds’ worth of them, all lined up in a tidy row. But he likely hadn’t seen them in the possession of a governess, because no woman with that sort of money would ever seek employment.
That scuffle with Bains in the tavern had only underscored her peril. She needed to focus on the tasks at hand. Escaping England and marriage. Guarding her secrets and her purse. Surviving until her twenty-first birthday, when she could return to claim the remainder of her trust. And in aid of it all, keeping men out of her stays.