Regency High Society Vol 4. Julia Justiss

we’re truly fortunate, our dear captain will have found us yet more company for the breakfast table.”

      Jerusa groaned as she pushed herself up onto one elbow. She’d never been one for early rising, and Michel could be appallingly cheerful. “Nothing could be worse than that captain from the Portuguese whaler at supper two nights ago! I’ve never met a man who talked so much or smelled so bad!”

      “Oh, it could have been worse, Rusa. We could have had to dine with him on empty stomachs at breakfast.”

      Jerusa groaned again and dropped back down onto the pillow. It was strange how they’d fallen back into this pattern of teasing banter with each other, the same kind of jests and nonsense she’d always shared with Josh. She enjoyed it, true, but it also put her on her guard. For all that they might be brother and sister, she knew better. Nothing with Michel was ever less than complicated, and nothing was what it seemed.

      But as she watched Michel swing out of his hammock in one fluid motion, she wasn’t thinking sisterly thoughts. Far from it. He moved with the ease of a cat, his movements both purposefully spare and graceful in the narrow space. They’d sailed far enough south that the cabin was warm, especially at this hour, and he was dressed in only his breeches and shirt, the full sleeves rolled up high over his muscled arms to keep the linen clean as he worked with his guns. He crouched down to pull his sea chest from beneath the bunk to stow the cleaning rags back inside, and Jerusa raised her head and leaned forward, the better to see how his shirt pulled across his back and the way his breeches stretched taut.

      He snapped the lid of the chest shut, and hurriedly she dropped back down onto the pillow before he caught her ogling him. She closed her eyes, pretending she was dozing, but the image of him remained to tantalize her. She’d been the one who’d stopped their lovemaking, not him, so why did he seem to be so much better able to cope with the intimacy of their shared quarters? She was the one who awoke in the night with her pulse racing and her heart pounding from dreams that were little more than memories of what they’d done that first night, in this very bunk, while Michel seemed to sleep as easily as he did everything else.

      Perhaps it was because everything had been so new to her. She’d been kissed before, true, but Michel was so different from Tom and the others that kissing him seemed like something new, heady and breathtakingly sensual. And as for the rest, while he had seen and caressed a great deal of her, she’d been too inexperienced to explore him in return, and over and over again her thoughts struggled to try to fill in what she still didn’t know.

      Didn’t know and now wouldn’t learn, at least not with Michel, and the wave of sorrow that washed over her immediately doused her desire. She still loved him. If anything, the voyage had drawn them closer, not further apart.

      But she hadn’t been foolish enough to tell him again how she loved him. No matter how much she guessed at the depth of his feelings, he’d made it painfully clear that they didn’t include love, at least not for her. She thought one more time of the miniature she’d found in his saddlebag, and wondered unhappily if his heart was already promised to the black-haired Frenchwoman.

      The other possible reason was one Jerusa liked even less. Because her name was Sparhawk, she remained Michel’s enemy. An enemy he’d kiss and tease and protect if it suited him to do so, but an enemy nonetheless. The way he spoke of her father proved that.

      With her eyes still closed, she listened to the sounds of Michel shaving, the little drip as he dipped his wet razor into the cup of seawater, the muted scrape as the blade crossed his jaw. The only other man she’d watched shave was her father, and her fingers bunched into fists beneath the coverlet as she imagined what would happen when these two men she loved finally met.

      She did not want either of them to die; she didn’t want them to fight at all. But the more she tried to find an answer, the more complicated the question became. The best idea she’d found so far was to find Michel’s mother on Martinique and beg her to intervene. Though Michel seldom spoke of her, she apparently still lived. Surely no mother would want to see her only son commit such an awful sin. Surely for the sake of the man she’d once loved, Michel’s mother would help her try to end this feud before it claimed another life.

      “Will you come topside with me, ma mie, or shall you spend the day where you are?” He had braided his hair in a sailor’s queue, cooler in the hot sun, and now stood tucking the long tails of his shirt more neatly into his breeches before he shrugged into his coat. “From the cacophonie on deck I should think you’d be a little curious as to exactly what our captain has drawn to our side this time.”

      Jerusa opened her eyes and frowned, not sure she liked the idea of such cacophony on the deck over her head. Whatever its source, she’d never heard such a racket of screams and squawks, and she didn’t need another of Michel’s fancy French words to tell her she’d have no more sleep this morning.

      Braiding her own hair much like his and daring to leave her stockings and shoes below, Jerusa followed Michel to the deck. After the twilight of their cabin, the sun was blindingly bright as it glanced off the water, and squinting, she shaded her eyes with the back of her hand.

      The tropical summer sun was as hot as it was bright. The smooth, worn planks of the deck were warm beneath her bare feet, and despite the wind that filled the brig’s sails, Jerusa felt the prickle of perspiration trickling down between her shoulder blades, under her layers of ladylike clothing. No wonder the men working in the rigging had stripped down to canvas trousers and little else besides hats to shade their faces.

      “Ahoy, Mr. and Mrs. Geary! You’re just in time to settle a question for me!” Captain Barker waved to them from the larboard entryway. Behind him the single mast of a small boat was just visible, bobbing alongside the Swan.

      “Look here,” Barker said as they joined him and his cook, still in his apron and a knitted wool cap. “I must decide which of this fellow’s wares to buy for our breakfast. If you were at market, Mrs. Geary, which would take your fancy, eh?”

      Jerusa peered over the Swan’s side to the little fishing boat below, floating on the transparent Caribbean water as if hanging in air. Her master, a black-skinned man in white trousers and an open red waistcoat, waited patiently with the pride of his catch spread out on his deck for the Englishman to make his decision. Swinging from a bracket on the mast was a large cage of woven reeds, full of small, brightly colored birds—scarlet, yellow, emerald and turquoise—and it was their shrieks and whistles and chattering that Jerusa and Michel had heard from their cabin.

      Jerusa shook her head. “I really can’t say, Captain. There’s not a fish I’d recognize from home.”

      The fisherman waved his arm grandly toward the cage of birds and said something to Jerusa in a language halfway between French and Spanish.

      “He says he hopes the lovely English lady will buy one of his pretty birds,” explained Michel at her side. “All ladies like them, he says. But I wouldn’t advise it, chère. Away from their companions, the little creatures fall silent and pine away. They also bite, and odds are, beneath those pretty feathers, they’re covered with pests.”

      “How charming,” said Jerusa as she smiled and shook her head at the fisherman. “But I’d wager he’d still likely do a wonderful trade in the market house at home.”

      Barker conferred one last time with his cook, then tossed a handful of coins to the fisherman. “Shark and cod, and a brace of those handsome langoustes,” he said with relish as the fish and lobsters were handed up in a basket. “Oh, we’ll have a fine breakfast, won’t we?”

      Less than an hour later, Jerusa, Michel and Captain Barker were sitting on the quarterdeck beneath an awning rigged to shade them from the worst of the sun. The dining table brought from the captain’s cabin was graced by fillets of the fish he’d bought earlier, now cooked and sauced, as well as biscuits and a pot of incongruous, glittering beach plum jam from some distant Connecticut kitchen. For Jerusa the biscuits and tea were breakfast enough, but Michel and the captain argued happily over the different merits of the shark versus the cod as they ate more than enough to make their