Even if they’d managed to keep her disappearance concealed until now… when she failed to appear for her own wedding, the secret would be out. Rumors of her elopement with the mysterious Gervais would leap from lady to lady like fleas in a church pew. She’d be the talk of the ton—although not quite the way her social-climbing parents would have hoped. What an elaborate joke she’d played on them all. What a laugh. So why did she feel like crying?
Standing on tiptoe and clutching the wooden pins, she leaned over the ship’s side, staring hard into endless waves and swirling trails of foam. A single tear fell from the corner of her eye, dropping into the seawater with all the significance of a grain of sand strewn in a desert. A flash beneath the waves caught her gaze. A smooth dart rose up from the blue-green depths, then sank beneath the surface again. Sophia waited, holding her breath. It surfaced once more, a bolt of quicksilver slicing through the waves, pacing the Aphrodite’s brisk progress. A sailor nearby called to another, and the two men joined her at the rail, marking the elegant creature’s course.
“What is it?” Sophia wondered aloud, her eyes never leaving the water.
“It’s just a dolphin-fish, miss,” one of the crewmen answered. The creature leapt from the water, its sleek, shimmering form sailing through the air before disappearing once more beneath the waves. It leapt again, and then again, carving playful, exuberant arcs through the spray, trailing silver-dipped rainbows in its wake.
The fish’s course veered, bringing it even closer to the ship’s hull. Sophia admired the creature’s flat snout and the sharp blade of its fin, running the full length of its spine. But most marvelous of all were the bold, iridescent shades decorating its scales.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
A harpoon shot out from the sailor’s hand, skewering the fish with a sick squelch.
“It’s dinner,” the crewman said cheerfully. The two men dropped a net over the side and hauled their thrashing catch aboard.
Gagging, Sophia pressed a hand to her mouth and turned away.
“Now don’t be squeamish, miss,” the crewman said. “You’ll miss the colors.”
The colors? Sophia peeked over her shoulder. The men had the fish completely aboard now, and its flat body thumped uselessly on the planked deck.
“See, miss? The colors are starting.”
As the sailor spoke, the bold hues of the fish’s scales began to shimmer and change. Sophia stepped toward it, fascinated. Its light-blue belly deepened to the truest cobalt. A stripe of fresh green turned electric with gold. Sophia had never seen colors so vivid—not in nature, not in paintings. Not even in her dreams. The fish was a living rainbow.
A dying rainbow, rather. Its arcing body eventually went pale and limp, turning as colorless as the decking. Having withdrawn their harpoon, the crewmen returned to the rail to look for more. And there the fish lay, gutted and lifeless.
Sophia had never felt so disillusioned. The stark reality of life and death had been splashed in her face like so much seawater. She realized, with sudden clarity, that all her life she’d been raised to view the world as a collection of objects assembled for her amusement, her admiration, her consumption. But now she understood—nothing existed for beauty alone.
Even a beautiful fish still died, was still food.
She’d left home seeking to experience real life, true passion, grand adventure. Well, this was real life, and it wasn’t pretty. And every moment she stood here, staring blankly at the deck and crying pointless tears, was a moment of real life wasted.
“Here’s another,” one of the sailors called, flinging his harpoon back into the sea. A second later, he crowed with triumph. “Got ’im in one.”
Sophia rushed back to the rail and peered over the edge at the thrashing fish churning the waves to froth. A giddy thrill warmed her toes. The crewman began to pull in the rope, hand over hand.
“May I help bring it in?” she asked.
“What?” the sailor grunted, not losing his pace.
“May I?” She jerked her chin at the struggling fish and laid one hand on the rope, above his. She had reeled in a fish before—granted, it was a smallish trout, plucked from a stream in the English midlands. But still, the principle appeared the same.
He stared at her a moment, then shrugged. “Don’t see why not.”
Sophia grasped the rope with both hands, and he showed her how to brace one foot on the bulwark and pull hand over hand, letting the rope fall in a neat coil at their feet.
“Ready to try it yerself?” he asked.
She nodded, and he released the rope.
“Ah!” Sophia gave a sharp cry as several yards of cable slid straight through her grip. The dolphin-fish was swifter than she’d expected, and stronger, too. Now she’d made matters worse by giving it more slack, more room to struggle.
“Shall I help you, miss?” the sailor asked.
“No, thank you. I’ll do.” Bracing her foot and tightening her grip, Sophia clenched her teeth and began to pull, arm over arm. For every arm-length of rope she pulled in, it seemed the dolphin-fish took three. What with all this thrashing, the fish would probably resemble mincemeat by the time she hauled it aboard.
But she would haul it aboard, if it was the last thing she did. And she would rejoice to see even minced fish on her plate tonight, instead of salt pork.
After a minute, the task seemed to grow easier, presumably because the fish grew weaker. But just when she thought she had it netted, the dolphin-fish made one last desperate surge for freedom, dragging her a few steps toward the bow. Her boot caught in the coiled rope, and she very nearly tripped. She managed to pull up, however, and regain control. Her efforts were rewarded with a rousing chorus of whistles and cheers.
“That’s the way, miss!”
“You’ve got ’im now!”
Slowly pivoting her head from one side to the other, Sophia realized she’d amassed quite an audience. Evidently her battle with the fish made for high entertainment. Ah, well. Let the men laugh. She was having fun, too. She smiled as she resumed pulling in the catch.
In fact, she was having the time of her life.
Jesus Christ. The chit was going to get herself killed.
From the stern, Gray looked on in disbelief as Miss Turner played tug-o-war with a fish and the crew watched with glee. What the hell were they thinking?
“What the hell are they thinking?” Joss came to Gray’s side. “Mr. Wiggins,” he ordered, “tell the men—”
“Don’t bother,” Gray called out, vaulting over the rail that separated helm and quarterdeck. “I’ll put a stop to it myself.”
Long strides carried him across the decking, while Gray tried to hold panic at bay. Devil take it, when had the Aphrodite become so damned long? Up at the bow, Miss Turner lost her footing, tripping over the coiled rope, and Gray very nearly lost his breakfast.
“Bloody idiots,” he muttered, as a prelude to the worse invectives running through his mind. Only a fool let a fish thrash at the end of a rope like that, churning up the froth, leaving a wake of blood and innards on the waves. It was a cretinous way to catch a fish, and a surefire method of attracting a—
“Shark!”
And from there on, it all went so fast. But so slowly, at the same time. Had the girl any common sense, she would have dropped the line at once. But she had no sense. She made no sense. She was a pale English rose of a governess, adrift in a watery wilderness, on her way to a grueling post on a godforsaken island, when any fool could have told her—a woman so lovely need never work for her keep.
Had the men around her any sense, they would have cut the rope immediately. But they were idiots, bloody shite-for-brains idiots, too entranced by the pretty girl in peril to reach for their knives. Had Gray his own knife, he would have drawn it. But he wasn’t wearing his knife, because he wasn’t the captain on this ship, was he? Nor an officer, nor even part of the crew. He was just a stupid, overdressed passenger who hadn’t strapped on a goddamned knife that morning because it might ruin the lines of his goddamned brand-new coat.
No, he didn’t have his knife. But he had his legs, powering him the remaining yards to the bow. He had his arms, lashing around Miss Turner just as the shark’s jaws snatched the dolphin-fish carcass and dragged it under the waves. And he had his voice, that authoritative tone of command. The voice that carried over storms, and gunfire, and howls of pain.
“Let go of the line.” He grabbed her forearms and shook them. Jesus, she’d been holding on to the thing for so long, her instinct was to tighten her fingers further. Precisely the wrong thing to do. As the shark lunged away, the cable streamed through her two-fisted grip, no doubt taking the skin of her palms along with it.
“Let it go!” he ordered. “Now!”
She did. Her shaking fingers were white; her palms were abraded and raw.
And damn it to hell, he stared at those ruined hands an instant too long. By the time Gray attempted to pull her back from the rail, the shark had spooled out several more yards of rope. The rope that lay coiled and tangled about her foot, that was.
“Cut the bloody line!” he commanded, tightening his arms around her slender frame and jamming his boot down on top of hers.
The rope cinched like a noose about their ankles, yanking their feet out from under them. She screamed as together they fell to the deck, then skidded toward the rail, tugged by their intertwined legs. In a matter of seconds, they would either be pulled overboard entirely, or have their legs torn off. Neither alternative sounded particularly pleasant. Gray shoved his free boot against the bulwark, bracing himself for what he knew would be a futile, and brief, wrestling match with a shark. He gritted his teeth.
“Someone. Cut. The. Damn. Line.”
Thwack.
Someone did.
Gray lifted his head to spy Levi’s hand on an ax handle, and the blade several inches deep in the rail. “Thank you,” he huffed, letting his head fall back against the deck.
And now here he lay on the forecastle, holding Miss Turner as if they were two spoons in a drawer. The crown of her head tucked neatly under his chin, and her round little bottom nestled between his thighs. She was damp with sweat, and panting for breath. Gray was struck by the ridiculous notion that he’d had a dream the other night, very much like this. Except they’d been wearing fewer clothes. And there hadn’t been a half-dozen gawking seamen standing about.
And what did she say, his dream girl? This exquisite, rose-scented siren who would smile as she pulled him to his death?
“Well,” she said. “That was exciting.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“That”—Mr. Grayson slammed the door of the captain’s cabin—“was the most breathtaking display of stupidity I have ever witnessed in my life.”
Sophia cringed in her chair as he plunked a basin of water on the table. Liquid sloshed over the side, trickling toward the floor. With jerky motions, he removed a flask from his breast pocket, unscrewed the top, and added a splash of brandy. Then he threw back a healthy swallow, himself. She’d never seen him so agitated. He took everything as a joke, laughed off confrontation, deflected insult with a roguish smile.
“You’re angry,” she said.
“Damn right, I’m angry. I’d like to string every one of those bloody idiots up to the yardarm and shout them deaf.”
“So why are you here, shouting at me?”
He yanked open a drawer and removed a box. When he flung it on the table and flipped the latch, the box proved to be a medicine kit, crowded with brown glass vials and plasters and rolls of gauze.
“Because …” With a sullen sigh, he dropped into the other chair.
“Shouting the crew deaf is the captain’s privilege. And I’m not the captain. So I’m here instead, playing nursemaid. Give me your hands.”