The Captain of All Pleasures

Chapter 4

When Nicole forced her eyes away from Sutherland and surveyed his cabin, the first thing she noticed was his oversize bed. The second—he’d caught her looking at it. He had the gall to smirk at her, and her face flamed as she glanced away.

The room was extremely large even for a ship of this size, but snug and warm with none of the usual drafts. She took in the tasteful colors and decor and reluctantly acknowledged that it easily surpassed her own cabin, even with all those fancy gifts from her hard-hearted grandmother crammed into it—gifts just waiting, in her opinion, for the right time to be coldly pawned.

A sizable mahogany desk rested under a large clouded-glass skylight, and scattered all over it, so like her own, were charts and scribbled numbers.

As if magnetically drawn to it, she edged over to spy out his course, straining to see in the low light. She made out many of the figures while he fed fuel into the stove and turned up the room’s lanterns.

She examined his course line, knowing she was cheating, but she wanted to find out how far south he planned to sail through the Southern Ocean when rounding Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. If she could determine that, then she could either meet his course or beat it with a more dangerous, but faster latitude farther south. How low are you going to go, Captain Sutherland?

Her eyebrows shot up. Lower than even her reckless father had ever dared.

His course ran insanely close to the perilous seas around the Antarctic, cutting the distance and sailing time to Sydney. She had to have read it wrong.

“Don’t try to read that,” he advised. “It will only give you a headache.”

Her eyes narrowed. She’d been plotting since she was old enough to count. Indeed, she almost informed him with a sharp rap of her fingernails over the offending numbers thathe had made a mistake in one of his calculations. But she should probably let the error stand, since it could adversely affect his course in the race. It would be a cold-blooded thing to do, but this wasn’t a child’s game. If he couldn’t meet the challenge, then he’d fail.

When she said nothing, he scrutinized her and said, “It’s a course —a map of where I’ll sail this ship on my next voyage.” Had he explained that slowly?

Nicole’s nails bit into her palms as she quieted her arrogant pride. She managed a tepid smile as if impressed with his knowledge. Yet thoughts of the race vanished when he walked toward her in that slow, fluid way that made her belly tighten.

He reached out to her, his body so close that she would have to move to avoid touching him. Instead, she lowered her lashes. Would he kiss her again? Did she want him to touch her with those lips once more? Nothing happened for the space of what should have been a couple of breaths.

Her eyes flashed open; he’d reached past her toward a bottle of brandy. She didn’t think he’d seen her mortifying surrender, but that didn’t stop her from berating herself for being so vulnerable to him. Sutherland was a cruel man. A patronizing man. He expected, lest she forget, that she would be bought tonight.

Well, he could occupy himself with liquor all night if he wanted, but she would not let him touch her again. As if to illustrate his matching intention, he poured a generous amount and drained his cut-crystal glass in two long draws.

Inclining the bottle toward her, he halfheartedly offered her some. She couldn’t decide if this was because he didn’t think she’d accept or because he didn’t want to share. She shook her head in answer, the movement making her sway.

Perhaps she should have taken a drink, she thought as a sudden wave of exhaustion washed over her and chilled her. Shivering, she pulled her cloak closer and wrapped her arms around her body.

“You’re cold,” he said. He set down his glass and walked to a cabinet.

“I seem to be,” she confessed. “I become cold very easily.”

Their tones sounded so mundane that she thought of what would happen when reality claimed her. Thinking of tomorrow was like a wet blanket over all the sensations he’d produced in her, and she couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted him to kiss her or if she wanted to fall down where she was and sleep.

He turned from the cabinet and tossed a blanket at her, and though her sore body made it difficult, she awkwardly managed to catch it. Frowning, he looked her over; then, seeming to make a colossal sacrifice, he took it from her. Without a word, he tugged off her damp cloak to wrap the blanket around her, as if she were no more than a doll he was changing.

He looked her up and down, his gaze stopping at her feet. “Since I’ve already started this idiocy…” he muttered gruffly, as he bent to untie and pull off her filthy boots. Obliged to place her hands on his wide, solid shoulders, she had to resist moving her fingers over the firm bunching of his muscles.

When he removed the first boot, his eyes narrowed. He held it up to the lantern, where they both saw that the scuffed brown leather had soaked up splattered blood like a sponge.

“Are you hurt?” he barked as he dropped that one and rushed to remove the other.

“That’s not—that’s not my blood.” Merely thinking about where that blood came from, about the falls and the running enervated her.

His eyebrows rose in amazement, and he studied her face before returning to his task. Nicole felt foolish when he took off her socks, leaving her to furrow her toes in the cabin’s plush rug. But she stood unresisting, knowing she needed his help just now. He strode to his bureau and brought back a pair of thick woolen socks. She hadn’t realized her feet were cold, but when she spied those socks her body cried for them.

He jerked them over her feet, and her eyes closed in blissful comfort. “That feels so good,” she breathed. She opened her eyes and frowned at the sound of her husky, sensual voice. When had she ever sounded like that?

He looked at her curiously, then stood abruptly. As if he needed to explain, he said, “Your feet were like ice.”

Nicole nodded slowly, overwhelmed with fatigue. She took such a deep breath that her head moved with it. Her eyelids opened more sluggishly with each blink.

With something like resignation in his eyes, he placed a huge hand on her lower back and began guiding her to his bed. “Come on. You’re exhausted.”

“Oh. No, I can’t. I couldn’t.”

When she resisted, he said, “I won’t hurt you.”

She focused on his face to tell him she absolutely could not be in his bed, but no words came. Her legs shook. She must have gone soft in the rich surroundings of her last school, because a second later they simply gave out. She sank onto his bed, bewildered by her weakness.

“Will you be all right?”

“Yes. No?” she whispered. “I’m just so tired.”

“The night is catching up with you, so rest for a bit. Then we’ll talk about who those men were,” Sutherland said, his voice neither menacing nor kind as he lightly grasped her shoulder and pushed her down. He squeezed it firmly once, letting her know without words that he wanted her to stay put, before releasing her to walk over to the basin. He brought back a soaked cloth and began washing her scraped hands.

Nicole looked up at him one last time as he brushed at a smudge on her face, trying to decide if she could trust him, knowing she didn’t have much choice. She couldn’t tell anything. His face could have been made of marble for all the emotion it showed. Nicole unwillingly drifted to sleep and dreamed that Sutherland said in disbelief, “Her eyes are blue.”

Derek didn’t make as large a dent in his bottle as he’d intended while he sat and watched over the girl curled in his bed. He’d definitely not predicted his first night with her to be like this. Usually he was impatient to bed a woman and get her gone, but she had been afraid and possibly hurt. Still, he wasn’t resigned to having her sleep here the whole night.

He was, he had to admit, proud that tonight he’d overcome his natural selfishness in order to do something considerate. Why he was being so charitable to a prostitute, he had no idea. It must have been the liquor affecting his brain, because the girl could be prickly and rude, and he certainly did not get involved with women for more than purely physical reasons.

That’s just what he needed to be doing, taking on the troubles of a young prostitute. As if he didn’t have enough weight on his shoulders.

Even more remarkable, he was experiencing the wholly unaccustomed feeling of protectiveness. He wanted to kill the two who’d chased her. She’d put up a good fight, which was most likely why she’d survived. Hell, the little spitfire had actually drawn blood from someone.

The idea that she was a fighter intrigued him, probably because he had let go of so much so easily.

Oddly, she hadn’t behaved like a prostitute. No innuendos gone stale from overuse or practiced pouty smiles. And only minutes after she’d kissed him and made him want her with a surprising ferocity, she’d had to drag her feet back into his cabin. He’d automatically reached for a drink because she’d disconcerted him. A slip of a girl likely a decade younger had made him ill at ease on his own ship.

Derek didn’t know why she didn’t practice her wiles on him, wiles he would have known how to proceed with. This girl had only looked at him with a tilted head and open curiosity, until her eyelids slid over those dark eyes, blue eyes, as she began to fade.

He’d almost experienced relief when she’d passed out. Yet that was crazy. If he understood one thing on this bizarre night, it was that he wanted to sink into her lithe body. Sink into her until she eased the ache her abandoned response had created. Damn, how she’d responded to him.

Turning his mind from that gripping image, he took a long pull of drink. The way things were going now, she’d have to spend the night in his bed. He grimaced at the thought. With him, that just wasn’t done. Had never been done, in fact.

He reached over to shake her awake, but his hand stilled on her shoulder. She lay like the dead, as she had for hours. Her silky skin shone white as porcelain except for the pale lavender rings under the sweep of her lashes. But if he didn’t wake her, where the hell was he supposed to sleep?

For the space of several minutes, he stared down at the girl. It wouldn’t make a difference if he slept with her for the few hours left till dawn. It wasn’t a monumental thing, damn it!

Decided, he slipped off his boots and clothes and slid in next to her. Her body burned like a little furnace in the bed, and being near her warmth was comfortable. Seemingly of its own volition, his arm covered her waist and brought her to him.

Derek was aware that he protected her, and on some hidden plane he felt good and strong, if only for a few hours. He pulled her small body closer still and breathed in the soft scent of her hair.

He was, though not completely—never completely— pleased. Until he thought of the strange moment of hesitation he’d just had as he stripped off his clothes. It certainly wasn’t modesty, but for some reason he had a fleeting impression that his state of undress would make her uneasy. Ridiculous, of course, since she’d probably spent most of her nights like this with dozens of different men.

His last thought before drifting to sleep was how much that fact bothered him.

When a soft ray of light flitted through the window and warmed her face, Nicole woke in a dismayed flash. Her rapidly blinking eyes spied a tanned arm sprinkled with golden-tipped black hair wrapped around her.

Captain Sutherland held her in his bed.

She slowly twisted her head back. In sleep, his face was softened, though certainly not relieved of the dark weariness that had marked it the two previous nights. She felt a tug of emotion, a pull toward him that differed from the physical attraction that had surfaced so powerfully before.

She made herself look away and took a mental inventory of her body, concluding that most of her clothes were on. Her shirt, her pants—her eyes widened and the blood rushed to her face. Sutherland pressed against her backside. At least, a very hard part of him did. It would appear that although she was clothed, he certainly had nothing to…restrain him.

Captain Sutherland held her in his bed with no clothes on.

Alarm quaked through her. Last night she’d been so disoriented. She’d welcomed his advances mainly because she was glad to be alive and safe. Right? So what would she do now if he awoke and touched her breasts again? If he pulled her down next to his unclothed, aroused body? Astonished by her own answer, she understood that she could not remain with him any longer.

Besides, her father was no doubt searching for her even now, barking at people who hadn’t seen her, shaking those who might have. Somehow she had to get out of this position and back to her ship. But his arm was unwieldy, anchoring her to him as if he’d never let go. Slowly, she pried it off her torso, not daring to breathe the whole time it took to lower it gently to the bed.

She grinned in relief, then jumped at the sound of his voice, deep and gravelly with sleep as he mumbled something from his dreams. After what seemed like eternity, his breathing deepened again, and she risked slipping to the floor.

Her whole body was stiff and unmanageable as she walked, but she finally found her stockings, still wet, so she drew her boots on untied over her enormous borrowed socks.

Fully dressed, she wobbled away from Sutherland, away from the compulsion to slide in next to him and have him wrap his warm arms around her again.

Before she made it to the door, her eyes leveled on his desk. The calculations. Could she leave them as they were? Although Sutherland could have done anything he wanted to her last night, he hadn’t hurt her. No, he’d saved her life.

As swiftly as she could, she padded over and ran through the numbers again. Finishing in very little time, she finally walked out of his cabin and past Sutherland’s openly curious crew.

As soon as she stepped off the Southern Cross, one of her father’s search parties spotted her. As they pulled her away, the lot of them, just primed for a fight, threw aggressive remarks and lewd gestures at the Southern Cross ’s crew. Not even half an hour later, they’d ferried her to her father, along with the story of her night’s accommodations. He was livid, and he wasn’t the only one, if the crew’s behavior was any indication.

When her father finally cleared the nosy crew out of the chart room, he had his temper under control, at least regarding her. “I know you’re tired,” he began with a grimace, obviously in response to her drained face, “but I need to find out what the hell happened last night.”

“I am beyond tired—”

“Please, I need to know who did this to you before you go rest.”

Nicole sighed, but then smelling the pervasive scent of coffee, a tinge burned, she relented. They’d been up all night looking for her. She tried to limit her story to just the attack, focusing her tale on that part, but she couldn’t steer him from the subject of Sutherland.

Nicole hoped to get a reprieve when Chancey, the big, blustering Irishman who was like her second father, ambled into the room. She gave him a beseeching glance as he dropped his immense frame in a chair behind his captain in an unconscious display of added authority.

Cornered like that, she decided to make it sound as if she’d sought Sutherland’s help in absolute desperation. If not for him, she stressed, she wouldn’t be here this morning—and he had not compromised her in any way. But her father seemed concerned only with the fact that she had spent the whole night on his ship. She cringed each time his hands clenched as he strode around the cabin.

“Christ, what were you thinking, going to his ship like that?” Lassiter demanded again.

Nicole imagined what he’d do if told she didn’t have any say in the matter. She answered honestly, “I was terrified those two men would catch up to me. I thought I’d be safe with Sutherland.”

“I can certainly think of one thing that isn’t safe with a man like him,” he half-muttered, slanting Chancey a knowing look. The man responded by crossing his thick arms over his chest and grunting in agreement.

“But considering the nature of the attack,” Lassiter continued, “you were probably better off doing what you did. Still, didn’t you wonder why he would help you? The man’s a reprobate—hardly a knight in shining armor.”

“I know, and I’ll not make the same mistake again,” she promised, her words a mix of raspy exasperation.

“I can’t believe you stayed with him overnight,” he said to himself, and turned to her, “Are you certain you weren’t compromised?”

Unbelievable. Nicole glared at him. “For the last time, Father, I was not compromised and Sutherland didn’t harm me.” When he looked to be about to say more on the subject, she asked, “What I want to know is, after last night, with those men damaging the ship…we’re targeted now?”

He paused, as if deciding whether he’d allow her to change the subject. Then, nodding gravely, he answered, “They’d been going to work on the Bella Nicola before you surprised them. But those two were just lackeys to someone directing the damage.”

Her father sat down on the edge of his seat, though he would just get up in seconds anyway. “The contact I met last night wouldn’t give me names, but he made it sound as if the leader was a man of some importance. Possibly a peer. He also assured me that I am a prime target. Chancey and I have narrowed the suspects down to a handful of men, but I never expected violence like this out of any of them.”

She looked up as a thought occurred to her. “What happened to the guards?”

“They were knocked out. Believe it or not, they look worse than you do.” Lassiter sprang out of his seat and began pacing again. “They feel horrible about what happened.”

She nodded absently, becoming lost in her own thoughts.

“Nicole, you’re not thinking about Sutherland?”

She jerked her head up, her face heating in a guilty flush.

He sat down again, heavily this time, as he opened his mouth to speak and then closed it. He ran a hand over his face before explaining in halting tones, “Sutherland is the worst sort of man. I understand you were scared—you had a hell of a night—but from now on you have to stay away from men like that. You’re not a little girl anymore.”

“Of course, Father.”

Lassiter took a deep breath and rose to walk over to her. He placed his hand on her head and spoke in a tone others might think was calm, but really was only camouflaging his emotions. “Now, get some sleep. I’ve got half the crew guarding your cabin, including Chancey, so don’t worry that those men will come back.”

Because he didn’t have any viable leads into who’d hired the thugs, she didn’t doubt he’d go and deal with Sutherland soon. She rose and faced him, trying to keep the concern out of her eyes. “What will you do to him?”

Her father acted as though he didn’t understand what she meant, but when she frowned up at him, his expression changed until he smiled benignly down at her. “Nic, I’ll simply talk to him and make sure he understands he shouldn’t bring young ladies like yourself to his ship.” The smile vanished as if never there. “And that there will be…repercussions if he ever comes near you again.”

As he stormed out of the cabin, she thought of all he’d said. She wasn’t stupid. Her father’s idea of “talking” with Sutherland meant insulting him between punches. He was a hotheaded man, her father, and she fretted that Sutherland would hurt him. Whether anyone wanted to admit it or not, he’d saved her life last night, and she didn’t want him hurt either. Unfortunately for her father, Nicole didn’t believe that to be the likeliest scenario.

There’d be no rest today, she thought as Chancey got up to cluck over her, to convince himself that she was all right. His concern was so obvious, the creases in his leathery face deepening, that she attempted a reassuring smile. He knew her well enough to know it was forced, but she was nervous now and would remain so until her father returned. Her mind drifted as she pictured what might happen—until she became aware of Chancey staring at her feet, at the huge socks spilling out of her stuffed boots.

“Good God, Nic! Whose socks have ye?”