Your Wicked Heart

  The doorknob turned. The door swung open to reveal an empty cabin.

  No. That could not be right! She stepped inside the room.

  It smelled like him. Cologne and spices and man.

  Another cresting swell. The door banged shut behind her.

  He was not there.

  No! That couldn’t be! She went down on her knees to check under the bed—realizing only belatedly how stupid that was. He would never fit beneath it.

  She straightened, a whimper trapped in her throat. Where could he have gone? He knew nobody on this ship.

  He had gone overboard!

  But that was impossible. The passenger cabins were below, safely away from any railings.

  Ominous thumps sounded over her head. Crossing her arms to hug herself, she looked up at the low wooden ceiling.

  He’s gone up.

  The conviction struck her: he had gone up to help.

  You may call it a vice, he’d told her. If something needs to be done, I vastly prefer to do it myself.

  The fool! What did a viscount know of steering a ship through a storm? And he was injured, still limping from the fight in Malta—

  He had gone up, and then he had gone overboard!

  That explained the yelling of the crew, didn’t it? They would not be flummoxed by a common storm, but if they had lost a viscount, they very well might have cause to shriek!

  Or perhaps . . . perhaps he had gone over and nobody had noticed! Perhaps, even now, he was thrashing and bobbing in the waves, crying out for help in a salt-choked voice, nobody noticing, all hands bent on their urgent tasks—

  She threw open the door and raced up the ladder. This was stupid, tremendously stupid of her. But it made no sense that Ripton was not in his cabin. And nobody would think to worry for him, save she. They were partners, at least for this short journey. He thought of her as an ally—a formidable ally, he’d said, and formidable women did not cower below. It was her obligation to worry for him as he had done for her not an hour ago, when he had come to fetch her from the forecastle—

  At the top of the ladder, she paused, terrified by the sight that opened before her. Men rushing across the deck, screaming at each other; sails rippling wildly, cracking and snapping, sailors fighting to pull them down—and beyond them, the low, dark sky, an inferno of boiling clouds. The deck tilted wildly, nearly pitching her back down the ladder.

  This was too stupid! Even if he was in trouble, what would she be able to do to help him? Surely he was not in trouble—she was hysterical, not thinking straight; she must go back below—

  Coward!

  No. She was not a coward.

  Steeling herself, she inched out into the open. The rain lashed her face with such stinging force that for a moment, she was blinded. Wiping her eyes, she turned to look for the safest passage toward an authority, one who might sound the alarm for a missing passenger. But a mighty gust of wind knocked her back a pace, ripping the pins from her hair and blinding her again. She turned, shoving hair from her eyes—

  Hands caught her shoulders, gripping without mercy. “What in God’s name are you doing up here!”

  Relief gave her wings. She flew around to face him. “You’re alive!”

  “You’re an idiot!” With a savage push, Ripton forced her back down the ladder. As the bulkheads rose on either side of them, the roar of the storm diminished. “What in God’s name—”

  “Your cabin was empty! I thought something had happened—”

  “Enough! Not another word!” At the bottom of the ladder he did not release her but hustled her forward into his cabin, where he shut the door and spun to face her, rain still dripping from his chin. His expression was livid.

  “You,” he said, wiping wet hair away from his forehead, “were born under a lucky star. There is no other way to account for your continued survival—”

  “I know it was stupid. But no more stupid than you being up there—”

  “Helping to reef the sail!” he roared.

  “You are not a sailor!” she yelled back.

  “By God, I own three yachts and a shipping company! Amanda, it is not your job to look after me! Learn first how to look after yourself !”

  The injustice astonished her. “I? I learn? Why don’t you learn! You can barely stand! Did you see the ship’s doctor today? No! Limping about during a storm—oh, but you need nobody’s help, do you? All you do is bully and order!”

  He made a strangled noise. “My leg is beside the point! The point is your bloody, hotheaded idiocy in coming to look for me—”

  “You came to look for me!” she burst out. “I had to do the same!”

  Her outburst seemed to astonish him as much as it did her. He gaped at her—truly gaped—as though she had just revealed herself to be a carnival freak, a mermaid, something truly beyond his comprehension.

  Or, her intuition whispered, as though nobody had ever come for him before.

  The possibility lanced like a needle through her heart. She studied his face, his blank expression of surprise. A lock of black hair was plastered across his chiseled cheekbone, and her hand fisted against the urge to wipe it away.

  “You came for me,” she said. “So I came for you.”

  He sat down on the bed.

  For a long moment, the only sound was the dim whistling of the wind. Rain had molded his white shirt to his body, rendering the cloth nearly translucent. With a shock, she realized she could see the musculature of his arms as clearly as though he were unclothed.

  And he was still wet. Dripping. A single bead slipped down his face, tracing the hollow of his cheek, the sharp edge of his jaw, and then plummeting to his collarbone, where it glided slowly onward across an expanse of golden skin normally concealed from view. He wore no tie, and at the top of his open collar she could spy a faint smattering of black hair.

  He had hair on his chest.

  And his nipples were erect from the cold.

  Her breath hitched. She had not known men’s . . . bodily parts . . . also behaved in such a way. But that shirt kept few secrets from her now. His upper arms, his belly, were corded with muscles that rippled and shifted as he straightened.

  “Is that how it works?” he asked.

  She looked quickly into his eyes, which were intent on hers. Had he noticed her ogling him? The thought caused heat to rush through her, dizzying. She had never thought of a man’s body as something that could be beautiful. But his soaked shirt had shown her enough to prove her ignorance. “How what works?”

  “I look for you, you look for me.” His look was narrow, sober and assessing. “Reciprocity,” he said.

  She hesitated. “In a . . . partnership?”

  The faintest smile moved his lips. “Yes, that’s right. A partnership.”

  “Then . . . yes. I believe that is how it works.”

  “And so you really would have crossed the deck in search of me.”

  “I—”

  “No. Don’t answer that.” He covered his eyes with his hands, raking his fingers back through his hair. She took avid advantage of his blindness, staring intently at his chest again and then at his mouth, where a single bead of water now clung just atop his sculpted upper lip. When he knocked it away with the back of his hand, she felt the loss like a pang.

  His hand fell. He stared at her, his dark eyes fraught with some unreadable emotion.

  “Your hair,” he said.

  “My . . .” She realized with a jolt that her hair was loose, spilling down over her shoulders, damp and tangled. “The wind,” she said as she gathered it up.

  Silently he watched her braid it. “Very long,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Rapunzel’s hair.”

  Her hands stumbled in their work. His faint smile worked a queer effect on her, bringing all her senses to painful sharpness. She took a deep breath to forestall a blush. “It’s blond, at any rate.”

  “You look like an overgrown doll,” he said. “Albeit a ragg
ed one.”

  She frowned. That was hardly a compliment. Reaching the ends, she tossed the braid over her shoulder. “Your appearance is hardly—”

  “And that wind would have knocked you overboard in a moment,” he said, still in that quiet, contemplative voice. “Had you strayed a few steps farther toward the railing, you would have disappeared. Drowned. And I never would have been the wiser.”

  “But I didn’t,” she said slowly. “I’m well.”

  “You would be dead. And I would not have been worth it, Amanda.”

  The strange statement pierced her through. “What nonsense! What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you forget your former opinion of me.” His expression was impassive. Unnaturally still. “Which was, no doubt, the correct one. A bully, a kidnapper, a cad. I’m not a friend to you.”

  How horrid to hear him speak so unjustly of himself ! “You . . . haven’t behaved well, it’s true. But you also behaved . . . very well, I think. Defending me in the taverna. Calming me when I couldn’t sleep that first night. You thought me a . . . criminal sort of woman, but you still showed kindness to me. If you thought me otherwise—if you thought me honorable—I imagine you’d be a very fine friend, indeed.”

  Still he studied her, his face shadowed. “It would be easier,” he said, “to continue to believe the worst of you.”

  “Likewise.” She scuffed the planks of the deck with one soaked slipper. “Only, as you see, I’m finding it rather difficult.”

  “Likewise,” he whispered.

  She glanced up, uncertain whether she had heard him right. He gave her another smile, lopsided, almost wistful.

  Her breath caught. How young he looked right now—strikingly young, and handsomer than any man had a right to be.

  “How old are you?” she asked without thinking.

  “Twenty-six. And you?”

  Why, he was young. Very young, she thought, to have had his entire family’s cares on his shoulders for—seven years, he’d said. Why, he was nineteen when he became head of his household!

  She cleared her throat. “I’m twenty-two. A confirmed spinster.”

  “Ancient,” he agreed with a wink.

  Her cheeks burned hotter. The room seemed to be shrinking, her lungs growing constricted for want of air. She inched toward the door. “Well, I must be going . . .”

  “Not until the storm passes.”

  “It seems to be dying down.” The sound of the wind had decreased.

  “Yes, they usually pass quickly in these parts. Give it a quarter hour, just in case.”

  Another quarter hour, boxed up with him like this? Such intimacy seemed suddenly unbearable. Her skin felt too tight, and she was painfully aware of how close he sat. How many more temptations awaited in the water still dripping from his hair!

  She cast around nervously for some distraction—anything to keep her from having to look at him, for she could feel his regard on her now like a physical touch, and all she could think of was the way his lips had felt on hers . . .

  “If only you had visited the ship’s doctor,” she said, “I might have made a compress for you. Your knee—”

  “I did pay a visit to the ship’s doctor.” He gestured toward the far side of the bed, where she now noticed a bundle of cloth and a chemist’s bottle. “I can’t say I know what to do with that lot. He promised to come see to it, but I expect the storm prevented him.”

  Here was something to do. She crossed round the bed, uncapping the bottle to take a proper sniff. “Arnica.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “My father was an apothecary.”

  “Was he? Did he have his own shop?”

  He sounded genuinely interested, which at once pleased her and made her feel strangely vulnerable. To discuss her family with him would not help her to regain her composure. Briskly she said, “It’s used to reduce bruising and swelling. It will serve.”

  “Ah.” He considered her closely for a moment. But if he noted her evasion, he made no mention of it. “So I soak my knee in it, then?”

  “Goodness, no. You’ll need to dilute it, first.” She carried the bottle and cloth to the washbasin affixed to the wall, and mixed a few splashes of the tincture with the remnants of the water in the basin.

  A heady, astringent smell filled the room. When she lifted out the soaked cloth, he wrinkled his nose. “That’s wretched.”

  “It’s medicinal,” she said. “Roll up your trouser leg.”

  Eyebrow cocked, he gave her a parody of a leer. “Miss Thomas. I didn’t know you cared.”

  She found herself retreating into her primmest attitude. “Without delay, if you please.”

  With an obliging shrug, he began to roll up the cuff of his trousers.

  Her mouth went dry.

  Fine black hair sparsely covered his skin. His ankle was surprisingly trim, but his calf quickly widened into a solid, strapping shelf of muscle that flexed as he bent his foot.

  She should look away.

  No, she shouldn’t. It was her task to attend to him. Her task, now, was to step forward and confront this long, well-muscled length of leg.

  “If I rip these, I will bill you,” he muttered, and then yanked his trouser leg over his knee.

  Her smile, carefully formed in reply to his jest, faded. His poor knee! It looked swollen to painful dimensions. She placed the compress directly over it, then grimaced in sympathy as he sucked in a breath.

  “Sore, is it?” she asked. “Willow bark will help with that. Madam—that is, Mrs. Pennypacker—took it religiously. Thrice a day, dissolved in water.”

  “‘Madam,’” he said darkly. “Is that what you called her?”

  Standing so close to him, feeling the great warmth of his skin, she dared not look up at his face. “That is the common address for one’s employer.”

  “If you’re a servant,” he said curtly.

  “I was a servant.”

  His mouth twisted, as though the idea displeased him. “Far too good for the likes of her.”

  “She was a renowned personage. The position was highly prized.”

  “I suppose she didn’t openly advertise for a whipping girl.”

  Perhaps he did not mean to assault her pride, but it stung, regardless. “I competed against thirty or more well-qualified women for that post. I will thank you not to diminish my accomplishment in securing it. Why, if I’d managed a letter of reference from her . . .”

  The thought was too ludicrous, too sad. She swallowed her next words.

  “Then what?” His voice was gentle. She dared to look up and saw nothing but compassion in his face. “What would you have done with it?”

  She shrugged. “Found another position, I suppose.”

  “Is that what you hope for?” His gaze was steady and kind. “Adventure, you told me—a chance to see the world. But what else? What do you want for yourself after the adventure is over?”

  A wave of shyness fell over her. Nobody had ever asked such a question of her. But he seemed earnestly interested. “I . . . don’t know, exactly. I never thought that far. A solid living, I suppose? A permanent place in a respectable household.” No, that didn’t sound quite right, either. “A place where I belong,” she said quietly.

  “Not a husband?”

  She bit her lip. This conversation was growing too intimate. With a nod toward the compress, she said, “Here, you can take hold of it yourself.”

  His hand closed over hers before she could pull away. And then his fingers tightened, holding hers in place.

  His grip was strong, his palm callused. One did not expect an aristocrat to work with his hands. If she had had any remaining doubts about his claim to the viscountcy, she might have clung to this detail as proof that he lied.

  Instead, the sensation riveted her, becoming proof of mysteries, secrets, she could only begin to guess at. Mysteries that she desperately craved to know.

  God save her from her own foolishness! She tried to p
ull back, but his hold did not loosen.

  “I imagine you married,” he said softly. “That is why I ask.”

  She raised her eyes. The look on his face swam through her like a strong wine. How intently his dark eyes held hers.

  “With children,” he said. “Children with eyes as blue as yours. I see you laughing in a garden. Full of roses, and sunlit. Always sunlit. Those golden curls spilling to your waist, gleaming in the sunlight . . .”

  A sigh slipped from her. His lashes lowering, he took a deep breath, as though—strangest thought—to inhale the breath that had escaped her.

  “Miss Thomas,” he said very quietly. “You were right, of course.” His gaze rose to hers. “You told me a man would find much to value in you. I tell you now . . . I agree.”

  He lifted her hand then, raising it until she felt the heat of his breath on her knuckles. Slowly, softly, he kissed her palm.

  “Thank you,” he said into her skin, “for coming to look for me.”

  She could not catch her breath. He had such beautiful eyes. If she ever had children, she would wish them to have his eyes—eyes just like his, rather—

  He pulled her the last inch toward him. “Amanda,” he murmured. His lips brushed over hers, as light as a breath. A soothing touch, a kiss as soft as a whisper and as sweet as a lullaby. A kiss as quiet as the world around them, the silence so immense in the wake of the roaring wind.

  Her body relaxed. His broad hand slid up her back slowly, firmly, until the flat of his palm rested between her shoulder blades. Silently he urged her to lean into him as his tongue slipped into her mouth.

  He was built so broadly, his chest so easily cradling her weight. Her arms wound around his shoulders as the kiss deepened. Sparks began to light deep in her belly. This kiss was different than the one they had shared in Malta. In his lips, on his tongue, she tasted something richer, deeper, more lasting than mere hunger. He was making a promise to her with his mouth. And she was drinking it in, desperate for it, desperate for more . . .

  Desire was heavy and light all at once. She was floating, weightless, but her body grew fuller, heavier with need. Her palm found his cheek, the prickle of new beard, and she moved into him, wanting him to take . . . something. His hand skated down her shoulder and glanced against her breast, and she gasped, twisting toward it, a silent encouragement. His hand obeyed; his thumb found her nipple through the thin cloth of her dress, stroking lightly, and a cry tangled in her throat, a single syllable of triumph. Yes. Take everything; take all of me.