Surrender of a Siren (14 page)

Enough
. She’d been reliving those events for days now, ruminating over the implications and castigating herself—and, when regrets became tiresome, savoring the memory of his wavy hair caught in the webs of her fingers, or the sensation of his strong hands encircling her waist …

Enough
. It was time to go back to work. Once she put charcoal to paper, a bubble of concentration formed around her, blocking out all distractions.

She drew a kitten, of all things. A kitten, with wide eyes and sharp little claws, wiggling back on its hindlegs as if preparing to pounce. Pounce on what, she had not yet decided.

A shadow fell over her paper, and a low whistle sounded from some feet above. Sophia froze, afraid to look up.

“Would ye look at that. Got his sights on a wee mousie, has he?”

It was O’Shea. Sophia sighed with relief. She didn’t know all the crew by name yet, but O’Shea’s thick brogue—and mammoth size—distinguished him from the crowd. “I hadn’t yet decided,” she answered him, tilting her head to the side. “I was thinking, perhaps a cricket. Or maybe a snake.”

“Brave puss.”

Sophia shielded her eyes with her hand and peered up at the Irishman’s face. His hard eyes wandered from her hand, to her face, to the sketch in her lap. He made a gruff noise in his throat—the sort of noise men make when they’re working up to saying something and don’t quite know how to get it out, but want to keep up the aura of brute masculinity in the midst of their indecision.

He was making Sophia nervous. He meant to ask her something, and she was afraid to learn just what.

“Yes?” she prompted.

“The crew … We had it out between ourselves, Miss Turner. There were a bit o’ scuffling, but I came out on top.” He suddenly crouched before her, transforming his silhouette from tree-trunk to boulder in an instant. His craggy face split in a devilish grin. “I get to be first.”

“We drew lots, Miss Turner. It’s my turn next.” Sophia looked up from her drawing board. Quinn stood before her, wringing his tarred sailor’s cap in massive, knob-knuckled hands, wearing an expression more fit for a funeral than a portrait-sitting. “Do take a seat, Mr. Quinn.”

The man lowered his weight onto the crate opposite, bracing his arms on his knees. “What am I to do?”

With her fingernail, Sophia sharpened the stub of charcoal. “You needn’t do anything but sit there.” She gave him a small smile, then quickly looked down again, as it clearly made him uncomfortable. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?” She directed her question to the paper as she began to rough in the oval of his face.

He scratched his chin. “Not much to tell. Born in Yorkshire, I was. My father moved us to London when I was a lad. Got pressed into the Navy when I was sixteen, and I’ve not called dry land home since.”

“You don’t have a wife then? No family of your own?” Sophia kept her tone light, stealing furtive glances at Quinn’s hawk’s-beak nose and heavy brow between questions.

“Not as yet, miss.”

“But surely you’ve a sweetheart for Saturdays?”

Quinn gave a rough laugh. “Oh, I’ve one for every day of the week, Miss Turner.”

Sophia stilled her charcoal and lifted an eyebrow. “What a relief to learn that your calendar is full, Mr. Quinn. For I warn you, I shan’t be tempted to stray from Gervais.”

He laughed then, and his posture relaxed. Sophia was relieved, too. In the week since that night, her drunken toast had become just another shipboard joke. Mr. Grayson had returned abovedecks quickly enough to prevent the crew from suspecting an affair. Neither had the men taken Gervais seriously, thank Heaven, and she was coming to understand why. Most of their toasts weren’t based in reality, either. Life at sea was a dangerous business. The men flirted with death on a daily basis, and they laughed off their close calls. But even if they could escape death, they could not escape loneliness. It was an ever-present shadow that they worked to shrug off—through song, drink, embroidered tales.

Sophia could wholeheartedly relate to that sentiment. She knew loneliness, all too well. And having a fantasy lover—well, for the first time in her life, it didn’t make her feel isolated. Here, she was just like everyone else.

She set to work on her sketch, keeping Quinn occupied with questions about his childhood, his home, his service in the war. Asking a man to recall his past invariably caused him to look away, as though his memories marched along the horizon. And while Quinn focused on that far-off time, Sophia could study his features openly without making him ill at ease. She noted the small divot between his eyebrows that appeared likely to become a furrow with time. She observed the tar embedded under his fingernails and in the creases of his palms; stains that would likely never wash off. And when he spoke of his nephew, she caught the faintest hint of a smile at the corner of his eyes.

How different it was, to draw people—
real
people with lives of sweat and labor, each a unique challenge. A far cry from sketching the same old vases of flowers and copies of copies of great masterworks. It gave Sophia a surprising amount of pleasure to simply talk with the men and gain their confidence. When they sat down before her, they trusted her to collect all their weathered features and tiny imperfections and commit them to paper, to assemble them into likenesses for their wives, their sweethearts, themselves. It felt somehow important. When she handed them the completed sketch, she gave them something of value that came from her talent, not from her fortune or her pretty face.

Of course, it also helped pass the time. And it kept Sophia, for those few hours a day, from thinking of
him
.

He was everywhere on the ship; there was no escaping him. Even if she remained in her cabin most of the day, the skylight was always open, and through it flowed steady streams of sunshine and fresh air and his voice.

Mr. Grayson, as she’d learned from the first, was not a quiet man. He spoke often. He spoke loudly. And when he spoke, people listened. Including her.

The coarse shouts of the sailors, their muttered curses… the periodic clanging of the ship’s bell, the scrape of chains across the deck, the creaking of the ship’s wooden joints … All these sounds had blended into a flotsam of sound that now floated beneath Sophia’s consciousness. But never his voice. Mr. Grayson’s baritone rang out over all, assailing her at the most awkward moments.

She would be dressing in her chamber, bared to the waist, lacing her stays with a newly gained efficiency, and Mr. Grayson would choose that particular moment to linger above the cabin and scandalize young Davy Linnet with a ribald joke. It irritated Sophia beyond reason, that he could bring her nipples to tight peaks without even occupying the same room. Without even knowing he did so.

At least, she prayed he did not know he did so. Sometimes she wondered.

She might have been the sole person Mr. Grayson aroused with a simple laugh or phrase, but she certainly wasn’t the only one he affected. When the crew fell idle on a calm afternoon and the sluggish silence grew thick, those were the times Mr. Grayson chose to sing. As though he’d been waiting for Nature herself to grow still in anticipation of his performance.

He’d burst out with a song—some bawdy, coarse sailor’s shanty, sung with all the reverence of a hymn—and by the time he’d reached the end of the first verse, the entire crew would have joined him. The chorus would ring from every mast, and down in the cabin, Sophia would smile despite her best efforts not to.

At other times, he’d smooth over a brewing argument with a jest, delivered in a smooth, disarming tone. Or his casual comment about the wind would be followed by swift adjustments in the rigging. With that clear, pleasing baritone, Mr. Grayson directed the crew just as surely as the rudder steered the ship.

“I know what you’re thinking, Gray.” O’Shea’s brogue lilted down through the skylight one warm morning, while Sophia was hard at work.

Mr. Grayson responded, a raw longing in his voice. “Aye. It would be so easy to take her.”

Sophia nearly dropped her quill.

“We’ve the advantage of the wind,” O’Shea said.

“And a faster ship,” Gray replied. “We’d be on her stern in no time.”

Ships
. Sophia breathed again.
They were speaking of ships
.

“Those were the days.” O’Shea gave a low whistle. “One cannonball to the rudder …”

“Wouldn’t even need that. She’d accept our terms with little more than a signal shot and a smile.”

She could hear that smile in his voice.

He continued, “Cannons are for amateurs. Seizing a ship intact … it’s all in the approach. From the moment that sail appears on the horizon, you act as though it’s already yours. All that remains is to inform the other captain.”

Now Sophia smiled with him. She knew exactly what he meant. It was the same attitude she’d carried with her into the bank that day. A half-hour later, she’d walked out with six hundred pounds. She wished she could tell Mr. Grayson that story. He would find it amusing, no doubt. She could almost hear the ringing laugh he’d give when she described the red-faced clerk and the way she’d …

How curious
.

She’d barely spoken with Mr. Grayson in over a week. How could she have done, after that horrid night? But somehow, through these overheard conversations and stray remarks, she’d come to know him quite well. She’d come to
like
him.

She’d come to think of him as a friend. He’d saved more than her life that day.

There was no denying it now, after the conversation she’d just overheard. She had to face up to the truth she’d been avoiding.

He could have had her that night, so easily. Conquest was his specialty, as he’d just said. Ships, women … what ever Mr. Grayson wanted, he took. And he
had
wanted her, at least in the carnal sense, despite all his protests to the contrary. When she’d pressed up against him so shamelessly, she’d felt his unmistakable arousal. She’d made herself his for the taking, and he had walked away.

Of course, he wasn’t the first person to guard her virtue. Her family, her schoolmistresses, her companions—even her own betrothed—all her life, she’d been surrounded by a fortress of people, all devoted to keeping her untouched. Because her virtue was currency, a token to be bartered for social connections. Would any of those same people give two straws about her virginity, had Sophia been a lowborn, penniless orphan? She doubted it.

But Mr. Grayson did. He thought her a poor, friendless governess, with no connections worth mentioning and no one to care. And still, he’d guarded her virtue when, in a moment of drunken foolishness, she would have thrown it away.

In running away from home, Sophia had seized control of her fortune. But she’d also seized control of her body. Her nouveau-riche parents had been desperate for one of their daughters to marry a title. When her older sister, Kitty, had failed to do so, their hopes had transferred to Sophia. But to marry without passion or love, simply for money and connections—it would have made her the worst sort of whore. Sophia didn’t want to lose her virginity as a means of completing a transaction. She dreamed of a different experience, one of passion and emotion and breathtaking romance.

And she’d have lost that dream, if not for him.

Maybe he’d been right. Maybe she ought to thank Almighty God in Heaven that he didn’t want her.

What did it mean then, that she couldn’t?

Rising to her feet, she packed away her quill and ink. Maybe she couldn’t tell Mr. Grayson the story of her own conquest. Maybe he wouldn’t speak to her at all. But the day was fine, and there was a sail on the horizon, and she simply couldn’t stay put in the cabin a moment longer. She wanted to be in the center of the activity, enjoying the warm rays of the sun.

Oh, who was she fooling?

She wanted to be near
him
.

Gray froze as Miss Turner emerged from the hold. For weeks, she’d plagued him—by day, he suffered glimpses of her beauty; by night, he was haunted by memories of her touch. And just when he thought he’d finally wrangled his desire into submission, today she’d ruined everything.

She’d gone and changed her dress.

Gone was that serge shroud, that forbidding thundercloud of a garment that had loomed in his peripheral vision for weeks. Today, she wore a cap-sleeved frock of sprigged muslin.

She stepped onto the deck, smiling face tilted to the wind. A flower opening to greet the sun. She bobbed on her toes, as though resisting the urge to make a girlish twirl. The pale, sheer fabric of her dress billowed and swelled in the breeze, pulling the undulating contour of calf, thigh, hip into relief.

Gray thought she just might be the loveliest creature he’d ever seen.

Therefore, he knew he ought to look away.

He did, for a moment. He made an honest attempt to scan the horizon for clouds. He checked the hour on his pocket watch, wound the small knob one, two, three, four times. He wiped a bit of salt spray from its glass face. He thought of England. And France, and Cuba, and Spain. He remembered his brother, his sister, and his singularly ugly Aunt Rosamond, on whom he hadn’t clapped eyes in de cades. And all this Herculean effort resulted in nothing but a fine sheen of sweat on his brow and precisely thirty seconds’ delay in the inevitable.