The Piratical Miss Ravenhurst. Louise Allen

for forty-eight hours.’ Stanier cut a wedge of cheese and pushed the rest towards her.

      ‘Why, sir?’ Clemence cut some and discovered that she could find a corner still to fill.

      ‘Pockets to let,’ he said frankly. ‘If this hadn’t come along, I’d have been forced to do an honest day’s work.’

      ‘Well, this certainly isn’t one,’ Clemence snapped before she could think.

      ‘Indeed?’ In the swaying lantern light the blue eyes were watchful over the rim of the horn beaker. ‘You’re very judgmental, young Clem.’

      ‘Pirates killed my father, took his ship.’ She ducked her head, tried to sound young and sullen. It wasn’t hard.

      ‘I see. And you ended up with Uncle who knocked you around, eh?’ He leaned across the table and put his fingers under her chin, tilting her face up so he could see the bruises. ‘Heard the expression about frying pans and fires, Clem?’

      ‘Yessir.’ She resisted the impulse to lean her aching face into his warm, calloused hand. It was only that she was tired and frightened and anxious and wanted someone to hold her, tell her it was all going to be all right. But of course it wasn’t going to be all right and this man was not the one to turn to for comfort, either. Something stirred inside her, the faint hope that there might be someone, somewhere, she could trust one day. She was getting tired—beyond tired—and maudlin. All she could rely on was herself.

      Stanier seemed to have stopped eating, at last.

      ‘I’ll take these plates back.’

      ‘No, you won’t. You’re not wandering about this ship at night until you know your way around.’ He took the tray from her. ‘Look in that bag there, you’ll find sheets.’

      It was a fussy pirate who carried his clean linen with him, Clemence thought, stumbling sleepily across to open the bag. But sure enough, clean sheets there were, even if they were threadbare and darned. She covered the lumpy paliasses, flapped another sheet over the top, rolled up blankets for pillows and then shut herself into the odorous little cubicle. If she did nothing else tomorrow, she was going to find a scrubbing brush and attack this.

      But privacy, even smelly privacy, would perhaps save her. She couldn’t imagine how she would have survived otherwise in a ship full of men. Clemence managed to wedge open the porthole to let in the smell of the sea, then emerged. Water and washing would have to wait; all she wanted now was sleep and to wake up to find this had all been an unpleasant dream.

      Could she get into bed, or would Stanier want her to do anything else? She was dithering when he came back in. ‘I am not, thank God,’ he remarked, ‘expected to stand watch tonight. Bed, young Clem.’ He regarded Clemence critically. ‘No soap, no toothbrush, no clean linen, either. I’ll have to see what we can find you in the morning. I don’t imagine going to bed unwashed and in his shirt ever troubled a boy, though.’

      ‘No, sir.’ Clemence thought longingly of her deep tub, of Castile soap and frangipani flowers floating in the cool water. Of a clean bed and deep pillows and smiling, soft-footed servants holding out a drifting nightgown of snowy lawn.

      Stanier sat down on the edge of his bunk and shed his coat, then his waistcoat and began to unbutton his shirt. The air seemed to vanish from her lungs. He was going to strip off here and now and…He stood up and she bent to pull off her shoes as though someone had tugged a string.

      She risked a peek up through her fringe. He was still standing there, she could see his feet. There wasn’t anything else she could take off while he was there…Belt. Yes, she could unbuckle that. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him heeling off his shoes. One foot vanished, he must have put it on the bunk to roll down his stocking. Yes. A bare foot appeared, the other vanished.

      ‘What are you doing, boy?’

      ‘Buckle’s tight,’ she mumbled.

      ‘Need any help?’

      ‘No!’ It came out as a strangled squawk. Thank goodness, he was going into the privy cupboard. As the door closed Clemence hauled off her trousers and dived under the sheet, yanking it up over her nose.

      The door creaked. He was coming out. Clemence pulled the sheet up higher and pretended to be asleep. Drawn by some demon of curiosity, she opened her eyes a fraction and looked through her lashes. Stanier was stark naked, his breeches grasped in one hand. She bit her tongue as she stifled a gasp. He tossed the clothes on to a chair, then stood, running one hand through his hair, apparently deep in thought.

      She should close her eyes, she knew that, but still she stared into the shifting shadows, mesmerised. Long legs, defined muscles, slim hips, flat stomach bisected by the arrow of hair running down from his chest. Clemence’s eyes followed it, down to the impressively unequivocal evidence that she was sharing a cabin with a man. She had known that, she told herself. Of course she had. It was just seeing him like this, so close, so male, made it very difficult to breathe.

      It was not as though she was ignorant, either. She had swum with her childhood playmates in the pools below the waterfalls, but this was no pre-pubescent boy. In a slave-owning society you saw naked adults, too, but you averted your eyes from the humiliating treatment of another human being. She shouldn’t be staring now, but Stanier seemed so comfortable with his own body, so relaxed in his nudity, that she doubted he would dive for his breeches if he realised she was awake. Only, he did not know she was a woman, of course.

      ‘Asleep, boy?’ he asked softly.

      Clemence screwed her eyes shut, mumbled and turned over, hunching her shoulders. Behind, she heard his amused chuckle. ‘You’d better not snore.’

      Nathan eyed the bunk. The lad had made it up tidily enough, but sleep did not beckon. In fact, he felt uncomfortably awake, which was a damnable nuisance, given that he was going to need to be alert and on his guard at daybreak to take Sea Scorpion out of harbour and on to whatever course McTiernan wanted. Knowing the man’s reputation, he would set something tricky, as a test.

      He found the thick notebook in his old leather satchel and climbed into bed with it. From the opposite bunk came the sound of soft breathing. And what the hell was he doing, acquiring someone else to take care of when he had his own skin to worry about?

      Nathan set himself to study the notes he had made on the area a hundred miles around Jamaica. He had not been bragging when he had told McTiernan that he was the best navigator in these waters: he probably was. In theory.

      He did not underestimate his own strengths, his depth of knowledge, his experience in most of the great oceans of the world. The problem was, the Caribbean was not one of them and he knew that two months spent weaving through their treacherous waters making endless notes was not enough. Not nearly enough. At which point he became aware of the nagging heaviness in his groin and finally realised just why he was so restless.

      What the hell was that about? And why? He had more than enough on his mind to drive any thought of women from it, and in any case, he’d hardly seen a female all evening, so there should be no inconvenient image in the back of his mind to surface and tease him.

      The flash of dark eyes and black hair, the remembered lush curves of his late wife, presented themselves irresistibly to his mind. Nathan shifted impatiently. He thought he had learned not to think about Julietta; besides, lust was no longer the emotion those thoughts brought with them.

      The recollection of Clem’s slim, ink-stained fingers gripping his thigh rose up to replace that of Julietta’s hands caressing down his body. Nathan shifted abruptly in the bed in reflexive rejection. For God’s sake! He was as bad as this crew, if that was the cause of his discomfort.

      From across the cabin came an odd sound—Clem was grinding his teeth in his sleep. Nathan grinned, contemplating hefting a shoe at the sleeping boy. No, he could acquit himself of that particular inclination—it must simply be an odd reaction to finding himself in the most dangerous situation in all his thirty years. The thought of straightforward danger was somehow soothing. Nathan