Surrender of a Siren (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy #2)(8)

Gray’s nerves prickled. So, it wasn’t the girl Joss was concerned about. No, he expected Gray to c**k it all up.

“Right, Joss. I’m an unprincipled, lecherous bastard.” He paused, waiting for his brother to argue otherwise.

He didn’t.

Gray protested, “She’s a governess, for the love of gold. Prim, proper, starched, dull.” Soft, he thought in counterpoint. Delicate, sweet. Intriguing.

“Ah. So you’ll dally with any chambermaid or serving wench who’ll lift her skirts, but you’d draw the line at seducing a governess?”

“Yes. Have a look at me, man.” Gray smoothed his brushed velvet lapel, then gestured upward at the banners trimming the freshly tarred rigging.

“Look at this ship. I’m telling you, my libertine days are over. I’ve gone respectable.”

“It’s easy to change your coat. It’s a great deal harder to change your ways.”

Gray sighed heavily. He’d never been a model brother, and God knew he’d never be a saint. But whether Joss believed it or not, he’d worked damn hard to launch this business. He’d worked damn hard for them—to give this patched-together family of theirs some security, the place in society their father had forfeited de cades ago. He’d talked investors into entrusting him with thousands of pounds; he’d promised the insurers he could be trusted to safely deliver the cargo.

Yet his own brother didn’t trust him to keep out of a girl’s skirts. The irony would have struck him as humorous, had it wounded him any less. Had it been any less deserved. Gray rubbed his face with one hand and tried again, all trace of joking gone from his voice. “Listen, Joss. I won’t pursue her.”

“She’s beautiful.”

“I won’t pursue her,” Gray repeated slowly. “And I thought that you weren’t looking.”

Joss stared back out at the water. “I was widowed, Gray. I didn’t go blind.”

No, not blind, Gray thought. Just … numb. When Joss turned and caught him staring, Gray just smiled and shook his head. “The girl’s right, you know. We both have his ears.” He pushed off the rail and straightened, pulling a hand through his hair.

His uncovered, wind-mussed hair.

“Witch’s tit,” he muttered. “When did that happen?”

Joss raised an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

Gray wheeled about, searching the deck and glancing over the rail. “I’ve lost my damn hat.”

Joss broke into low laughter.

“It’s not funny. I just bought that hat. I liked that hat. Cost me a bloody fortune, that hat.”

Joss laughed again, and this time Gray laughed with him. Yes, that hat had cost him a bloody fortune. And now that hat had purchased him a moment of carefree laughter with his brother, on the deck of the Aphrodite. An echo, somehow, from a happier time past.

Gray smiled to himself. Damn, but he loved a good bargain.

CHAPTER THREE

Surely there was a man in there somewhere, Sophia thought. Somewhere under all that hair.

The hunched, ancient steward shuffled down the narrow staircase, whistling a jaunty tune as he went. She followed, treading gingerly on the bowed boards. As her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, she took in the greasy, gray tangle of hair that hung midway down the man’s back, the grizzled froth of beard that extended nearly as far down in front, the lightly furred forearms exposed by his loose checked tunic.

“ ’Ere we are, miss,” he announced. “Ladies’ cabins.” He pushed aside a thin curtain of dark fabric, and they entered a small, low-ceilinged chamber with a round table and chairs occupying the center. Sunlight streamed into the space from a skylight above. Four doors opened off the small room, two on either side. The steward crossed to the door marked “Seven” and opened it with a flourish. “Your berth, miss.”

“Thank you, Mr. …”

“Just Stubb, miss.”

“Thank you, Stubb.”

“The privy’s just there.” He nodded toward a small door. “Go through the cabin this way, and you’ll hit top steerage—that’s where all the provisions are kept—and then the forecastle. Go the other direction, and you have the gentlemen’s cabin, the galley, then the captain and mates’ cabins at the stern. But if you need anything, you just call on me, miss.”

“Thank you, Stubb.”

“I’ll have your trunks down in a wink, then.” He bowed extravagantly, sweeping the floor with the fringe of his beard.

Sophia entered her berth and shut the door, then turned a slow circle in place. There wasn’t room to do much else. The little closet, for lack of a better term—her family’s Mayfair town home boasted cupboards larger than this—consisted of a narrow bed protruding from the wall at shoulder height, storage space beneath the bunk, and a small writing desk that folded down from the wall.

No chair.

Sophia removed her bonnet and knotted the ribbons together, then hung it from a peg driven into the wall. She might have sat down, but there was nowhere to sit. She could have lain down, but she wasn’t certain how to vault herself into the high bed. Instead, she returned to the common area and sat at the table, dropping her head into her hands.

Had she succumbed to seasickness already? The gentle rolling of the anchored ship seemed insufficient to occasion this amount of dizziness. The whole vessel was a study in contradictions. The captain who wasn’t a captain. The governess who wasn’t a governess. Two men—one white, one black—claiming the close kinship of brotherhood.