“Just say it.”
“Say what?”
“I’m hopeless,” she whispered, and with that whispery-soft wail, she threw her arms wide, and flung herself back onto his mattress, her slight form bouncing amongst the feathered top. Reclined as she was, the shirt she’d pilfered from his belongings climbed several inches higher. And all the self-control he’d prided himself on before meeting his unruly stowaway proved absent once more, and his gaze went to the slight part in her shapely legs. His blood heated, and his body instantly stirred.
Nathaniel swallowed several times and forcibly wrenched his gaze away. He needn’t have worried about her noticing his lecherous study. At some point while he’d been staring at the expanse of her cream-white limbs, she’d dragged a pillow over her head.
Reining in that rampant hungering, Nathaniel sighed and started over. “Be kind,” he muttered. “Be kind . . .”
“Are you talking to me or yourself?” she called, her voice muted by the feather pillow.
God, she had sharp ears.
“I don’t talk to myself,” Nathaniel said when he reached his—her—bed.
Cassia shifted the feather article and angled her head a fraction so she might look at him. “So you were talking to me, then?”
“No.”
She puzzled her high, proud brow.
“I didn’t talk to myself . . . until you.” He mumbled that last part under his breath.
Cassia made to return the pillow to her head, but Nathaniel caught it and set the article aside.
“What’s your problem?” he asked with the same bluntness he reserved for all his exchanges with his father and crew and brothers, before recalling Hayes’s earlier urgings. “That is . . .” Nathaniel cleared his throat. “Why are you . . . Why are you . . . ?”
The lady stared expectantly at him.
“Sad.” He forced the word out.
“I’m not s-sad.” The slight tremor to her voice made a complete lie of that false assurance.
“You’re a terrible liar.” If he’d been an affable, charming sort, like his ship surgeon, Nathaniel would have mustered some gentleness to that statement.
Tears welled anew in her eyes, and his gut muscles clenched. “Don’t cry,” he said roughly, and not solely because he had absolutely no idea what to do with those drops, but rather because the sight of her suffering was having the oddest effect on his chest, leaving it all tight with a vise gripping at his heart.
“You can’t order me not to c-cry.” A drop fell, and the sight of this hit him like a blow to the belly. “O-or, I suppose you can because you just did, but you can’t make me not cry.” With that, she curled herself up tightly, and presenting him with her back, she stared at the wall.
Nathaniel sat there, helpless. For in this, Cassia was correct. He couldn’t make those tears stop. And he hated that for reasons the lady would never believe, because, hell, Nathaniel didn’t believe it himself. The sight of her suffering struck like a blade he’d taken to his arm in a sea battle two years earlier.
“Y-you’re right, you know,” she said, her voice smaller than he’d ever heard, even when she’d been at her sickest, pleading with him to cast her overboard to end her misery.
Nathaniel shook his head, before recalling she couldn’t see that gesture. “I . . .”
The lady rolled back onto her other side. “I am a terrible liar.” Cassia’s full bottom lip trembled.
“And?” he entreated, because he had no idea why that should make her cry, too.
“And I’m terrible at everything, Nathan. I can’t even plait my own hair.”
Ah.
“I don’t have a lady’s maid, Cassia,” he said gruffly, but also without inflection.
“I know that.” She struggled up onto her elbows, then pushed herself upright so she sat beside him in a matched pose. “I didn’t even consider that when I left.”
“That you should bring your lady’s maid with you?”
“No,” she said in exasperated tones as she threw her hands up. And then she stopped, her jaw slackened, as she looked over. “You’re making a jest.”
Nathaniel winked. “Don’t tell the crew.”
Something passed through Cassia’s eyes in an instant, a shimmery light, as those green-blue pools the color of Caribbean waters went all soft—a faraway, dreamy glimmer that terrified the hell out of him.
He scrambled away, putting several inches between them on the bed.
Cassia blinked as if coming to from a stupor, and when she did, she sighed, that sadness returning in the form of her soft exhalation and in her eyes and damned if Nathaniel didn’t yearn to see that happy glitter once more.
And then, silent when she was never silent, Cassia reached for a brush he’d not noted beside her until her fingers were upon the silver handle, and wordlessly, she dragged it through her waist-long tresses.
Each and every upward and then downward stroke brought the fabric of his shirt stretching and pulling against her chest, and unbidden, his eyes locked on the shadowy outline of her breasts, the dusky hint of those tips pebbled by the cold. His breathing grew shallow as he took air in slowly through his nose and exhaled out his tightly closed lips. He was an absolute scoundrel. A blasted fellow as weak as Adam, lusting after a woman so innocent and vulnerable.
“Here,” he said gruffly.
Cassia paused midstroke and stared questioningly over at him.
Nathaniel flicked four fingers of his right hand against his palm, motioning for the silver brush.
She hesitated, then held it out.
As he closed his palm around it, his gaze snagged on the three letters there: CDM.
Cassia . . . C . . . McQuoid.
And Nathaniel was beset by the unlikeliest of needs to know the mystery behind that unknown-to-him letter. Knowing it changed nothing and served no purpose—that was, other than to learn more about Cassia-with-the-Mysterious-Middle-Initial McQuoid. Despite knowing all that, Nathaniel found himself asking, “What is the C for?”
She stared quizzically at him.
Nathaniel touched his index finger to the elaborately curved letter. “On your brush.”
“Oh. It is my middle initial.”
He stared, waiting for her to say more, and when he was still waiting several moments more, a grin pulled at the corners of his lips. “I gathered as much. What is your middle name?”
Her mouth pulled. “Cora.”
Nathaniel froze. “Cora.”
“I know,” she said, mistaking the reason for his response. “Cassia Cora.”
“It’s a fine name.”
She snorted. “You aren’t the charming sort, so you needn’t try and pretend on my behalf. They sound quite ridiculous together.”
Nathaniel opened his mouth to defend the sincerity of his admission, and then frowned. Not the charming sort? Of course, he knew he wasn’t charming. He’d long known his quartermaster, Hayes, was invariably the fellow who knew how to charm a lady into a smile, or out of her slippers. But something in hearing Cassia acknowledge his lack of charm . . . grated.
“I’m not pretending. Just like I don’t charm, I also don’t pretend on anyone’s behalf,” he said gruffly. “Cora. It comes from the name Persephone. She was the Greek goddess of the sirens.” That queen perfectly embodied everything Cassia was. “It suits you,” he settled for.