Nathaniel jammed his fingertips hard against his temple.
“Do you want me to open the door for you, Captain?” That question brought Nathaniel’s focus flying over to his quartermaster.
His damned grinning quartermaster, who was alone. He’d managed to detach himself from the prattling chit and gotten her to stay in Nathaniel’s cabin. There was something to be said for that triumph this day.
“Do you find this amusing?” he snapped. Because undoubtedly there was absolutely nothing amusing about this.
“About the fact we’ve got a lady aboard our vessel?” Hayes chuckled. “Nothing good about that. Better an evil spirit than a woman.”
An evil spirit.
With the way he’d last seen her, all pale and green from nothing more than the casual rolling of the waves, she’d had the look of the dead here to haunt.
Nathaniel caught the other man’s look.
“What?” he demanded, because clearly his quartermaster wished to say something more.
“Well, it’s just the lady may have been pretty desperate to climb aboard a ship. Must be running away from something . . . fairly dangerous.”
That gave Nathaniel pause.
Yes, only a greater peril would send a young lady sneaking aboard a ship, and yet . . . A thought slipped in, and Nathaniel froze. “Or something else.” Someone else.
Hayes stilled. “Surely you don’t think the duke would send her.”
As in, put a lady at risk so that Nathaniel would feel obligated to turn around, even if it meant abandoning his mission and leaving the lives of British soldiers to hang in the balance? Yes, he absolutely did believe his father capable of that ruthlessness. He believed the duke thought of nothing but his own wants.
“Wait outside my cabin until I’m . . . done interrogating the lady.” He’d neither the patience nor inclination to worry about why the minx had colluded with his father. What he cared about, the only things he’d ever care about, were this vessel, his work for the Crown, and the people reliant upon him.
With that, Nathaniel dismissed the other man and, setting his jaw, made his way inside his cabin. He did a sweep of the room.
Gone.
At some point the bloody minx had slipped free, and—
A low, misery-laced groan echoed around the room, and Nathaniel whipped his gaze over to the owner of that suffering someone.
He narrowed his eyes.
Nay, at some point, she’d commandeered his bed. She’d not fully gained her sea legs yet.
Her cheeks pale and her eyes clenched shut, the lady clung to the side of the mattress—his mattress.
And if he’d been another man, any other man, he’d have felt a scrap of pity at the sight of her suffering.
Nathaniel, however, was all out of patience with his deckhand.
He slammed the door shut so hard the panel shook behind him, and the thwack thundered around the room. The young woman’s eyes went flying open. “You,” she said with the same dread that had previously been reserved to only the captains and commanders of vessels he boarded and commandeered.
“Were you expecting another?” he asked, imbuing as much ice and fury as he could within that query. “Prinny? Mad King George.”
She cocked her head, the long auburn plait bouncing at her side as she pushed to unsteady feet. “Whyever would Prinny or King George be here? Do they sail?” Before he could answer, she added, “I did not know that. Even so, if they did, I’d not be looking to meet them.”
Nathaniel opened his mouth to get a word in.
“Not because I’m disloyal to the Crown,” she rushed to assure him. “I’m very much loyal. However, I’m not looking to meet the king.”
And to keep from losing his bloody mind, and raging her down, he silently sang the shanty ditty called out by the men at the pumps and windlass.
“I’ll go no more a-roving with thee, fair maid.
A-roving, a-roving, since roving’s been my ruin,
I’ll go no more a-roving with thee, fair maid.”
The lady’s hesitant tones forced him away from that place of calm in which he sought to plant himself. “Unless . . . they’re here,” she ventured cautiously. “In which case, I’d not be rude and pay my respects.”
Pay her respects? To Mad King George and Prinny? Here?
“You think I have King George and Prinny on my ship?” he clipped out.
“Do . . . you?”
“No,” he snapped.
“No. No, that makes sense. It is just . . . my mind is all over the place since I discovered this isn’t Jeremy’s ship.” She laughed, covering her face with her hands. “But imagine if Prinny was here? That would certainly make all of this awkward.”
“Which part?” he snapped. “The lack of proper tea and biscuits for a high tea? Or your being unchaperoned, in the middle of the ocean, with a ship full of ruthless men.”
Several lines creased her high-noble brow. “Well . . . the latter.” Though with this one, that slight hesitation was hardly indicative of a woman fully committed to that answer. “And . . . they don’t seem ruthless. Not all of them. The ones who hung me over the side of the boat. A couple, however, have been very patient and kindly toward me. Little Ron, for one . . . though they are all a little coarse in their speech.”
“That was before,” he said coldly, disabusing her of any notion of cheerful and, as she put it, kindly sailors.
She frowned. “Before what?”
He took another step closer to her, and the lady toppled onto the mattress, landing on her buttocks. As he leaned forward, snarling at her, she craned her head back. “Before they knew you were a damned woman who’d sneaked away on their vessel.”
She blinked.
Hers were the biggest eyes he’d ever seen, and a mesmerizing shade, bluer and vaster than the Caribbean waters he’d sailed through. They were an azure green that distracted a fellow. He steeled his jaw. The last thing he could afford at sea was a distraction. Nathaniel got to the heart of it.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded in steel-coated tones, scraping a gaze over her. “Who sent you?” he asked, even as he already knew the answer to his question.
His damned father had also anticipated Nathaniel’s plans to leave early and, unable to snag a favor from Prinny quickly enough, had saddled him with a lady to worry about.
Except . . . would he have done that? Risked putting Nathaniel with another lady when he expected him to wed Lady Angela?
Confusion wreathed the young woman’s high cheeks. “I sent myself. You see, I thought your boat—”
“Ship.”
“Was the Waltzing Dragon.”
“A bloody ridiculous name for a ship,” he muttered.
“I think it is rather clever,” she said defensively. “In fact, one might even say your Flying Dragon is rather cliché.”
Cliché?
“All dragons fly. That is, the legends have them as flying. But waltzing is a forbidden dance, and it conjures—”
“Do you ever shut up?”
“Yes.” She paused. “When the situation calls for it. This situation, however, does not seem t—”
“Trust me,” he snapped. “It does.”