And then it happened. He, a master of patience and self-control aboard his ship, snapped. “Who in hell is Myrtle?” he thundered.
The lady paused, her lips opening and closing like the trout dinner Jeremy fished them faithfully from the sea each night.
He’d stunned her.
Scared her, even.
And he couldn’t care ten damns on Tuesday. Because he wasn’t a man who cared either way about presenting himself as something he was not. Even for a lady’s sake. It was why—
“Myrtle,” the lady said patiently. “As in my sister.”
“Oh, Myrtle,” he said, with a false dawning understanding.
Only, by her smile and pleased nod, she was about as good at spotting sarcasm as she was at navigating aboard a sea vessel.
“You see, my family left Myrtle behind last winter when we departed for the Christmastide celebrations at Quagamore.”
If Myrtle was anything like Cassia, well, Nathaniel was hard-pressed to believe all this “forgetting their daughters” business was a coincidence.
“Myrtle was resourceful and even managed to fall in love and find a husband.” Amidst the misery swirling in her expressive eyes, a new, clear emotion came filtering forward: envy.
“Never tell me you set out aboard my damned ship for love and a husband?” he asked curtly, because if that was the foolish hope she’d carried, well, then she’d a better chance of starting a mutiny.
The lady blinked several times, and slid her gaze back over his way, as if she’d only just remembered his presence.
“Oh, no. Not at all. After two London Seasons, I’ve quite accepted I’m not the manner of lady to inspire love and prompt a declaration for marriage,” she said pragmatically.
“I cannot even begin to imagine why,” he said snarkily, and then wonder of wonders, coupled with horrors of horrors, the lady’s eyes lit from within, and she clasped her long fingers together in a joined fist, and held them to her breast.
Adoration?
Nathaniel recoiled.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “That is quite lovely of you, considering the fact that I boarded your boat upon false pretenses.”
Nathaniel opened his mouth to disabuse her of the idea of that emotion, and also to point out for the flighty lady hopeless against identifying sarcasm that his had been nothing more than just that. But he stopped. Something held him back.
“It’s a ship,” he said, flustered.
“Yes, yes. But I’ve been thinking a good deal about that, and well, I’m fairly certain boats and ships are the same thing.”
And she spoke with the absolute confidence of someone on whom it was entirely a waste of his actual breath to convince otherwise. And yet—
“It is entirely different.”
“I don’t see—”
“A ship is a large seagoing vessel and possesses a bowsprit and usually three masts, each composed of a lower mast, a topmast, and a topgallant mast. A boat is a small vessel—shorter than one hundred and twenty feet, for travel on water.” As he spoke, the horror and panic of having a woman aboard his ship and on his latest—and if his father would have it, his last—mission, brought Nathaniel’s voice climbing. “As in a vessel that, say, some empty-headed lady would, in fact, take to travel wherever in hell it is she wants to go,” he finished on a thunderous boom.
Cassia McQuoid’s perfectly arched auburn eyebrows inched up. “You’re . . . speaking about me?”
He opened his mouth to snap her head off.
And stopped himself.
“In Amsterdam there lived a maid,
Mark well what I do say,
In Amsterdam there lived a maid,
And she was mistress of her trade.”
When reciting those lyrics did nothing to lessen or lighten the volatile fury roiling within him, he silently moved on to the next in that song.
“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 . . .”
His efforts proved futile. “What in hell are you doing here, then?” he bellowed.
The lady jumped a fraction, and damned if he didn’t feel like he’d transformed into the blasted Duke of Roxburghe, blustering around servants and offspring alike. Nathaniel had grown well accustomed to his mother always darting off and keeping a distance when his father was in a temper. And the last thing he’d ever wanted to be or become was—
“You are angry,” Cassia said simply, as if she’d herself made the discovery that the earth was a damned sphere, and without any of the hint of fear. She wilted not at all, and . . . well, damn him, but it was impossible to not admire the scatterbrain a small bit.
He growled. “Damned right I am.”
“If you are upset, imagine me? I don’t even want to be on your ship.”
“Lady—”
“Cassia,” she corrected, interrupting Nathaniel mid-lecture.
He stared back.
“It is just, given we’re going to become friends over the next several weeks—”
“We aren’t.”
“And that I’m going to be on your ship all that time.”
“Barring I don’t throw you overboard?” he grumbled.
“Then it might make more sense if you call me by my given name, Cassia.” He was across the room in a moment and reaching for the door handle. He needed to get the hell away from her before he lost his damned mind. “And that I call you—” Nathaniel shut the panel hard.
He stood there and stared at the opposite wood wall before shutting his eyes.
What a bloody fucking day—
The door hinges behind him squeaked, and he whipped around.
Hanging on to the solid oak panel, Lady Cassia ducked her head out. “May I call you Nath—”
“No. It’s ‘Captain.’ Now shut the damned—” The lady slammed the door on the remainder of his voluminous shout, a shout whose echo mingled with the rattling of that panel.
A grinning Hayes stood in wait.
Nathaniel gnashed his teeth. He was glad one of them could find humor in this.
“Well?”
“Well, what?” Nathaniel asked brusquely.
“Oh, I don’t know,” the other man drawled. “I just thought you might have something to say about the fact we have a woman on board our ship.”
Not just a woman. A lady. A damned fine-spoken, innocent lady.
Christ in hell. This was bad.
Nathaniel clenched his jaw. “There needs to be a guard stationed outside her door.”
Hayes nodded. “Shorty.”
Shorty had a softer side, having rescued injured gulls, and had once turned a ship rat into a damned pet. Perhaps he’d react the same toward a woman, who on a ship was a foreign animal in her own right.
“I take it the mission is being cut short?” his quartermaster asked.
Nathaniel slanted him a look. “Why would you think that?”
The other man’s lips moved, but no words came out.
“Because a woman sneaked aboard my ship?” Nathaniel flexed his jaw. “I’m expected to turn it around and forsake my mission? I’ve not quit a single assignment, and I certainly don’t intend to begin now because the lady confused our ship for a family friend’s passenger boat.”