Page 21 of Go, Rogue

“I meant,” he corrects, “how you managed to wind up here and not on your honeymoon where you ought to be. I’m well aware of how I found you.”

“Oh. I don’t want to talk about that.”

He narrows his eyes at her, but she only sets her jaw stubbornly and takes a bite of her dinner.

“Then we eat in silence,” he says, and he doesn’t even know why. She doesn’t have to tell him anything. It’s better that she doesn’t. It’s better that she sits over there mutely and eats her food and then goes to bed and they don’t speak again for the next ten days.

“Fine.” She nods at him as if it were possible for her to go five minutes without speaking.

He knows better, though. He sips his wine and discreetly glances at his pocket watch before turning his attention to his food.

“Why steam,” she asks.

He glances at his watch again: three minutes. Christ. “Jilted fiancé or nothing,” he says.

She frowns and tries again. “Why did you come to my wedding?” she asks, but he only shakes his head.

“Not happening, Menace.”

“Captain,” she says in the sweet voice that makes him suspicious of whatever she might say next, “I’m afraid I’m going to get glitter everywhere in your cabin if I don’t have a bath soon. How do I manage that aboard a ship?”

She knows what she’s doing, mentioning a bath. He’s almost certain of it, that she’ll know exactly how to wield this kind of fake coquetry. She’d have learned that in the ton, how to use flirtation as a weapon. He hates it. Partially because she’s worth more than trickery but mostly because it works—now he’s thinking of nothing so much as her naked, in the water.

What she doesn’t know is that he’s been picturing her naked ever since he found her that night on the street in Covent Garden with some hoodlum trying to rob her. So, he can damn well continue with dinner now, even if his tongue is licking water droplets off her thigh in his mind.

He brings his wine glass to his mouth and notices his hand tremble. He stills it.

“You can bathe in Boston like the rest of the crew,” he says flatly and returns to his meal.

She makes a little harrumphing kind of noise at that but carries on undeterred a moment or so later with, “I wonder what made you want to be a ship’s captain.”

When he glares at her, she only flutters her hand at him in response. “Don’t worry. If you’d like to remain silent, you’re more than welcome to. I can talk to myself. It isn’t an idle question though. I do wonder at your aspirations. The same as I wonder at Violet wanting to become a nurse. How does one know what one’s life should be? I have no idea. But I would like to know. I’d like to be something, something more than a wife, anyway.”

He glances up at her. What happened inside that church? But he doesn’t ask. Better not to delve too deeply there.

“I’d rather hoped to figure it out when I got to Boston,” she goes on. “But I suppose if you’re going to send me back, I’ll have to figure it out over the next ten days, aboard the ship.”

“Menace,” he says.

“Yes?”

He can hear the hopefulness in her voice and he ignores it. “What will it take to make you be quiet?”

She frowns. “You telling me how you ended up at my wedding in Surrey, I suppose.”

“No.”

“I am willing to exchange information, Captain. It’s a fair trade, a story for a story.”

She sets her wide, blue eyes on him, and he’s reminded again of the first time he saw who she was. She was standing in an alleyway in Covent Garden, drenched to the bone after a carriage accident in the rain, with some piece of scum holding a knife to her throat.

She hadn’t flinched then. She doesn’t flinch now.

“Or,” she goes on, “I can continue to converse with myself while you growl into your food. Whichever you prefer. I’ve got a whole soliloquy on the most fashionable bonnet trimmings this year that should take up most of our supper.”

He lets out a long sigh. She’s going to keep talking. And he’s going to keep wishing he wasn’t such a goddamned eejit every time he finds himself in her presence.

“Fine,” he says. “We’ll exchange our stories, and then you’ll let me eat in peace.”

“Deal!”

She looks at him expectantly but he only glares at her. “You first, Menace.”

“Very well, then. Do you want the prelude or just the day itself?”

“You’re a smart lass,” he says. “Tell me what I ought to know.”

He looks away then and back again in time to see her eyes light up at the compliment. Having put that light there feels like waking to the Christmas morning he’d never had but always longed for.

Elphame help me.

He better get her off his ship, or he’s in real danger of losing himself completely. That cannot happen. He won’t let it.

“I’ll start at the beginning,” she says, while he tries to rein himself back in.