“You can’t make me stop,” the insolent deckhand shot back with an arrogance only one born to a noble family might exhibit.
“Trust me,” Nathaniel said brusquely. “I can, and I will.”
“Is that a threat?” And this time, the lad’s wasn’t a challenge, but rather a curiosity-tinged question.
“No, it’s not a threat, but a promise.”
Cassius’s mouth quavered, and more tears welled, even as the boat rolled sharply to the left.
And then, the boy gagged and—
“Bloody hell,” Nathaniel muttered as his new cabin boy emptied the contents of his stomach right on his floor, and he jumped out of the way to avoid being splattered. What next?
“I-I’m s-siiiick.”
Nathaniel cursed blackly and roundly. Everything about the young man was soft. There wasn’t a person less capable of surviving on a ship.
He alternated a glower between his splattered floor and the deckhand responsible for it. “I see that,” he said acidulously. “Get yourself cleaned up, and then get back here and see to this damned mess.”
The green-looking lad stared, wide-eyed, back.
Nathaniel jabbed a finger at the doorway. “Go!”
His cabin boy jumped, already racing off, tripping over his feet in his haste to leave.
Letting himself inside his quarters, Nathaniel pushed the door shut, welcoming the quiet.
He shook his head wryly. His father had alternately pleaded with him and threatened him into giving up his seafaring ways. He’d been resolute in his refusal. Only to discover he’d prefer to cast himself overboard and swim himself back to merry old England than suffer a voyage with Cassius McQuoid.
His accidental deckhand forgotten, Nathaniel headed over to his desk, tugging free his shirt as he went. The single note that had been tucked inside his bag, as it invariably was, rested, sealed and untouched, upon the map that lay out.
He hesitated a moment, not wanting to read the letter.
Because he’d received enough before this to know the general idea of what would be written in those flowing, graceful strokes.
For through the years, his mother had made it her mission to attempt to create peace within her family.
To convince her six—now five—sons that the duke did, in fact, care—in his own way. And that they were loved by two parents, not just one, and . . . Well, it was all really irrelevant.
She may need to delude herself into believing the blustery duke was something other than a coldhearted peer driven by his reverence and love, first and foremost, for that title, but it was not an illusion that Nathaniel or his brothers had needed to maintain.
But then, in Nathaniel’s case, he’d gotten away. He’d made a life for himself away from his family, and away from the duke.
And now, it was all about to be taken away.
Unless somehow, for the first time in the whole of her life, the duchess had managed to reason her husband out of his unswerving focus on controlling Nathaniel the same way he’d overseen Marcus.
Picking up the note, Nathaniel grabbed the emerald-encrusted steel dagger that rested on his desk and made quick work of the seal.
Unfolding the page, he skimmed the handful of paragraphs written.
My dearest son,
Each time you leave, my heart is full from knowing the joy you find in your travels, and yet it weeps because you are gone, and because of the dangers you face out there. Even with my fear for you, however, I’ve never sought to intervene or interfere, because I know the love you find in your seafaring ways.
You believe, following your last meeting with your dear father, that his threatening to end your seafaring ventures if you do not marry is driven by his need to be in control. It isn’t.
Nathaniel froze. “The hell it isn’t,” he muttered.
I will confess, selfishly, that I’ve longed for you to give up your time at sea. I’ve lived with fear that you will one day lose your life on those waters that you so love, and that in so doing, you will never know what it is to have the love of a wife and a family of your own. I worry I will lose you as I lost Marcus. There has always been an understanding between Lady Angela’s family and ours, one that was cemented with your late brother’s engagement to the young lady . . . but this is about far more than just that connection. I know . . . she will make you a good wife. She is all things good and clever. If you are to be angry and carry resentment at the requirements your father put to you, then I’d have you place blame where blame is owed. We both want you to come home.
Nathaniel’s jaw worked. Yes, both of his parents might wish for his return, but they did so for entirely different reasons.
A curse escaped his lips, and he crushed the pages in one fist, wrinkling the scrap and attempting to calm his riotous emotions.
It had been one thing when the order had come from his father. It had been expected of the cold, heartless bastard, who, despite the duchess’s incorrect insistence otherwise, loved nothing and no one beyond his title.
But to know his tenderhearted mother wished it . . . and the reasons that motivated her?
Both his crew and the Crown depended upon Nathaniel’s work as a privateer, and now all that continued only if he married and produced an heir as his parents expected. For he also had a duty to the title. It was a rank he’d never wanted nor desired, but one he’d been saddled with all the same. The bitter sting of regret left an acerbic bite on his tongue.
He forced himself to lighten his grip on the page and scanned the remaining sentences there.
Please know, it is not just a fear of losing you to the seas that resulted in my interference. I truly believe you need more than a life of work, my son. You need a love like I have with your fath—
Crumpling the letter into a ball, he slammed it down on the desk.
If he were to continue to sail, they’d make him marry Marcus’s intended, Angela. And he’d do it. Because there was only one thing he truly loved in this life, and that was the Flying Dragon and the freedom it represented.
Bloody hell.
Chapter 5
This wasn’t so bad.
Later that afternoon, after Cassia had tidied herself, she’d sought out the captain’s chambers and proceeded to straighten them.
In fact, all things considered, her situation could have been a good deal worse.
If the surly captain had discovered Cassia was, in fact, a female, it would have been disastrous.
But he hadn’t.
And she found some solace in that not-insignificant spot of luck.
Yet it could be a good deal better . . . if her stomach weren’t fighting every miserable back-and-forth sway of the boat.
“Ship,” she said acridly, concentrating on speaking and breathing and her new work so that she didn’t think about the bile continuing to creep up her throat.
Ship. Boat.
They were really the same thing.
Only a man would get so very hung up on the semantics of it all.
Alas, having brothers and many male cousins and kin, Cassia well understood they were all peculiar creatures who liked to pretend they were tough, and who presented a shell to the world, but ultimately, there was something soft inside. One just had to look close enough to see it.
As such, she didn’t think it was a coincidence the assignment he’d given her was one that kept her close and safe from the rest of the crew, and also saw her given the shelter and security provided by his chambers.