But he also knew what honor dictated.
That was absolutely the only reason he found his legs moving so effortlessly over, and why he joined her even now at middeck.
The moment his shadow fell over the pair, Shorty jumped to his feet.
Cassia glanced up, holding her hand of cards over her brow to shield the sun that beamed from behind him. “Nathan!” she greeted happily. “I mean, Captain!” she quickly amended.
Had anyone ever greeted him so? Not even his own mother, who dearly loved him, had ever found that level of exuberance and warmth at his arrival. Alternately, it unnerved him and left him with a peculiar warmth inside.
“Won’t you join us?” Cassia patted the spot beside her. “Shorty was just teaching me the rules of écarté.” She motioned for Shorty to join her on the floor once more, but the sailor remained standing at attention beside Nathaniel. “Have you played it?” Cassia didn’t allow him a chance to answer. “I’ve only played whist, which I confess I’m not very good at, but—”
“Leave us.”
Shorty instantly dropped a bow and took himself off.
Cassia followed the sailor with her gaze, and then frowned. “Nathan. I am not happy with you for sending Shorty away. We are—”
“We’re getting married.”
“You . . .” She puzzled her brow. “And Mr. Shorty are getting married?”
He cocked his head. “What? No. Not . . . Shorty and me.” He slashed a hand between them. “You and me. We will marry.”
Chapter 18
For a good portion of her girlhood years and then all of her adult life thus far, Cassia had imagined the day some suitor would swoop into her life. He’d be hopelessly and helplessly and madly, deeply in love with her.
And the day he professed his love, he’d also drop to a knee and ask her to be his wife.
In all her dreaming, that moment, that day, those words he’d have spoken, all of it, had been romantic in nature. The man she’d imagined would be unfailingly romantic, penning sonnets and snipping strands of her hair to tuck close to his heart.
That man she’d dreamed of had never been anything like Nathan.
And yet she’d come to appreciate that she didn’t need sonnets or love songs or poems written in her honor. She wanted a man who treated her as an equal and who saw her worth as a person and who didn’t stifle her, but rather supported her, allowing her to grow as a woman.
As such, Nathan’s words, spoken in that gruff and rough and unromantic way, she would have joyously accepted—if it had been a question. Not this statement of fact born of his gentlemanly sense of honor.
“Well?” he barked. “Do you have nothing to say?”
Feeling his hard, unwavering stare upon her, Cassia exchanged the deck of cards for the more familiar comfort of her sketch pad. She opened the book once more, turning to her latest drawing.
“You know, Nathan”—she added several lines to her latest rendering, one of Hayes—“‘Good afternoon’ is generally the more traditional greeting,” she said, imbuing as much sarcasm as she’d learned from this man himself into her words, words she intended as flippant.
He blinked slowly. “I beg your pardon?”
She brightened. “You are excused.” Cassia resumed her sketching. “It was hardly an amusing jest.”
A low growl echoed above her, and she kept her focus on her book.
“I was not apologizing.”
Her heart jumped. “Oh.” She paused and glanced up, craning her neck all the way back so she could meet his fierce stare. “Well, you should be.”
“I’m telling you that we’ll marry,” he said, his tone angrier than she’d ever heard it. That was, with the exception of when he’d dealt with Carlisle, Turner, and Oliver. Not many days ago, the sound of it would have stirred terror. No longer.
Cassia set aside her book and climbed to her feet. “You don’t tell someone you will marry them, Nathan,” she said patiently, thinking she was perhaps more a saint than her family had ever credited for mustering that sentiment.
A frown formed between his eyebrows. “I just did.”
“Yes,” she said, her calm slipping. “Yes, you did.” She tapped his arm. “You’re supposed to ask.”
Understanding filled his dark-blue eyes. “Marry me?”
Only the slight up-tilt managed to transform those same two words into a question. And she realized in this moment it was everything she wanted. He was everything she wanted. If that question had been real. If it had come as something more than an order and were spoken from a place of longing and love. Her heart squeezed painfully so that her entire chest ached. She didn’t want Nathan this way.
She inclined her head. “No.”
His brows dipped. “No?” he growled.
“No . . . thank you?” she ventured, and before she tossed aside her pride and took what he offered, and a mere scrap of all she wanted from him, Cassia bent, retrieved her things, and headed back to his cabin.
She made it all the way to the stairs before she registered his footfalls following close behind her.
“No?” he repeated, his voice tinged with shock and annoyance.
Cassia wrinkled her brow. Leave it to Captain Nathaniel Ellsby to be the annoyed one in this.
“I said, ‘No, thank you,’” Cassia repeated as she reached below deck. “I was perfectly polite in my rejection.”
“Is that what you think I am upset about?” he demanded, his footfalls close to hers. “Your manners?”
“No?”
They reached his cabin. “No.” That syllable emerged as a low growl.
“I believe we’ve already ascertained that my answer”—to his nonquestion that he’d only reluctantly transformed into one at her correction—“was, in fact, a decided no.” With that, she clasped the handle of his door and let herself in.
Nathan followed behind her, and then with the heel of his boot, he shoved the panel shut. Hard.
It shook, reverberating in its frame.
“You are rejecting me.” He sounded so truly incredulous and hurt and shocked that she took mercy on him.
“I’m sorry, Nathan. Fear not. There are other fish in the sea.” She brightened. “Do you like that? My ocean reference? Jeremy taught me that phrase after I told him of the duke’s rejection, and I rather liked it. Given your seafaring ways, it does suit, doesn’t it?” When he continued to stare slack-jawed, she frowned. “Doesn’t it?”
Alas, that sea reference did not seem to mollify him. Not one bit.
Splotches of angry color filled his rugged cheeks.
“We made love,” he snapped.
And despite herself, despite all the ways—the very many ways—in which they had been intimate, she felt a blush steal over her body from the tips of her hair on down to her toes.
“Why?” she asked softly.
The frown lines at the corners of his mouth deepened. “Because we desire one another—”
“Not why did we make love,” she said, taking a step toward him. Cassia tipped her chin back so she could meet his eyes. “Why did you ask to marry me?”
He tugged at his shirt collar. “Because it is the honorable thing to do . . . and I . . .”