A Scandal to Remember (31 page)

She groped out in the empty dark. “Dance?” Her voice sounded battered and torn—unraveling with fright.

“Here,” she thought he said. Or maybe he didn’t, but his big hand found her, and scooped her toward his chest, and held her there against him in the bottom of the well. She clung to him, this live, human piece of flotsam, holding herself to his warmth, hoping some of the heat that seemed to blaze from him would seep into her.

Which made it difficult for the poor man to see to the boat, but she couldn’t seem to let go. He carried on somehow, using his other arm to secure the tarpaulin cover back over the cockpit well to keep as much as possible of the freezing rain and waves out.

“Can you see any light? I need you to look.” His voice seemed to come to her through his chest, and she pushed herself up next to him, and tried to scan the black water in the opposite direction from where he was looking, peering hard through the gloom to try and make out some sign of light.

Jane saw nothing. Nothing but the white patch of foamy water where the ship had only moments ago been, and the ebb and flow of the tops of the whitecaps as the waves rose and fell endlessly around them.

“They can’t be far,” Dance said, as if he were talking to himself as much as her. “I ordered them to hove to, and wait. I think. But they should have done it anyway. Lawrence or Simmons—” His mutter died away for a long moment. “We need to keep the boats together. My damn compass, and instruments were on that bloody fucking gig.”

His language, gritted out between clenched teeth, was enough to shock her into action. There ought to have been a compass stored somewhere forward in the little boat’s bow. She had packed all such equipment that would be necessary to recording the precise location of each and every shell she had planned to find. But shell collecting seemed a rather far-off, superficial thing now. They needed to stay alive in a small boat at sea.

To that end, Jane made herself detach her arm from around the poor lieutenant’s neck, so she might make her blind way under the tarpaulin in search of the instrument box. She had ordered the compass, sextant, and glass through correspondence, and it had come all the way from the famous instrument maker Mr. Josiah Culmer in Wapping, near London. She had stowed it under the curved bench seat on the larboard side, if she recalled correctly, because she had thought that equipment needed to be accessible from the tiller. And there it was. She dragged out the small wicker case.

“Compass,” was all she said when she pushed it toward him.

Because she was done being away from him. Her clothes were heavy and sodden and cold, and only he radiated any warmth. She crawled back onto him, like a cat up a familiar tree, sinking into the solid comfort only he could give.

Jane couldn’t imagine what the man made of her behavior, but he made no objection, only holding her tighter against him. “I’ve got you.”

“Thank you.” Jane didn’t think he heard her—she could barely hear herself over the driving hush of the snowy wind. And her throat was so tight it ached from the harsh passage of the cold air. But Jane set herself to endure the pain. She was alive, thanks to Dance. He had come back to find her when no one else would. When another had quite deliberately locked her in.

“It was Manning,” she told him, not because he could do anything about it at this point, but because she had to tell someone. And he was the only one. The only one who might even care. “Manning locked me in and left me.”

Dance let out a curse so visceral and colorful, Jane was surprised the air around him didn’t light up with blue sparks. And his rage was so magnificent and heartfelt, it made her want to cry. Heat built like a bonfire behind her eyes and in her throat.

She felt ravaged. Aching, worn down and numbed by the cold. She could feel the helpless hopelessness creep over her, like a killing frost. Her will was withering away with every toss of the boat beneath her.

“Shh.” Dance pulled her closer somehow. “I came back. I wasn’t going to let you die.”

Jane thought she felt the firm comfort of his lips press against her forehead, and when she looked up at his beautifully harsh face shrouded from her by the dark, she knew that if she were going to die out in the middle of the cold, open ocean, she wasn’t going to die without having kissed Charles Dance.

He had kissed her, and given her comfort in the privacy of his cabin, but she wanted to be the one doing the kissing. She wanted to give him comfort, to show him how she felt, and what he meant to her—the gratitude and grace and admiration and respect and need all rolled into one.

So she wrapped her arms around his long neck, and pulled his lips down to hers.

That was almost all she could do, but the taut skin of his lips was warm and giving and comforting, and his hand came round to cradle the back of her head, holding her close. His long fingers seemed to span her skull, and his thumb brushed along her cheek, pushing her sodden hair out of her eyes, and tilting her face up to him so he could draw her lip into his mouth, gently caressing, and pressing warmth and heat into her.

He held her so carefully, stinging heat built again behind her eyes, and threatened to spill down her wet cheeks.

She didn’t want careful and courteous. She didn’t want soft and sweet. She wanted heat and warmth and needy, hungry life.

Something of her desperation communicated itself to him, or maybe he felt as cold and shattered as she, because his kiss slowly became more. More insistent. More ardent—a fiercer pressure that tipped her head back, and urged her to open her mouth.

His tongue found hers, tangling and tasting until her head spun with the swirling desire, and she felt ravaged and adrift, and saved and secure all at the same time.

This man, this aloof, sarcastic, stony man, was nothing but heat and need and pity.

Oh, God, the pity—this was all they would have of each other now that they were cast adrift to die. She could feel his desperate pity even though he said nothing, but continued to kiss and hold her fast.

“Dance.” It was a rebuke and an exhortation. She pressed the word into the raspy skin of his cheek, holding herself fervently into him, wanting to feel everything she could, to hold on to life and love and heat, and be alive while she could. While she still cared that she
was
alive.

Because she was losing hope that it would last. Losing hope that they would live.

And he somehow seemed to understand that.

“Jane.” His voice in her ears was the answer to a prayer she had not even known she had prayed—the secret yearning of her silent heart. But to hear her name from his lips, to have it whispered in her ear, was everything she wanted. Everything she needed to push her forward. She could close her mind and pretend, she could cling to the desperate lie that they were fine, that they were anywhere but abandoned in the middle of the ocean.

It was irrational, she knew. A desperate fear lodged so firmly inside she could not shake it loose. But no amount of self-chiding would silence the need to be in his arms. If she was holding on to him, and could feel the warmth and breadth of his live, living body, then she was alive too. He had rescued her when she could not rescue herself, and so she would not relinquish herself from his care.

But he did not complain. He did not say anything. He merely held on to her as if he knew he had to hold her together like a cracked vase—once the edges slipped apart she would collapse into nothing more than a pile of broken fragments.

But eventually there was nothing more she could do. There was not enough hope left in her to keep kissing him, and she was tired and exhausted from the effort to simply stay alive. So exhausted she didn’t even have enough strength to cry.

*   *   *

She clung to him in exhaustion, plastered against his side as if she were one of her precious barnacles stuck fast to his hull. She felt small and nearly weightless, insignificant enough to be blown away by the howling wind. So he kept her tight against him.

And he kissed her, because there was no reason not to anymore. And because he wanted her to live. Because she tasted like cold and salt, and everything sweet and bitter and hopeless. He could feel the will drain out of her, as if she had exhausted all of her powers just to keep herself alive.

And it was nothing short of a miracle that she was still alive, and breathing in painful, shallow pants against his chest. Nothing short of a miracle that she had somehow floated into his arms down there in the flooded wardroom, when he had put his feet against the sides of the batten door, and torn the damn thing off its hinges.

The burning line of stinging pain at the top of his boot, just below his knee, told him that there had been something shoved into the latch to jam it shut—something long and sharp that cut through his breeches and dug into his flesh. Something like a handspike. Something only a sailor would know how to use.

Goddamn their superstitious eyes. Goddamn every last worm-brained one of them who had ever cast an evil glance her way. One of them had locked her in. One of them had left her to drown in the hull of the sinking ship.

Manning, she had said. Damn his eyes, if it were true that mild-mannered, scuttling Manning had tried to kill her. But she had been so sure. He had felt her hopeless rage in her scratching, fighting desperation when he had pulled her out of the water—the frantic clawing that would have sent him under had he not known her panic for what it was, and kept a firm, almost ruthless hold of her.

He would kill Manning. If he survived, he would hunt the skulking little rat of a man down, and choke the life from him, the same way Manning had tried to choke the life out of his Jane.

The thought filled Dance with such a murderous, helpless rage that he had to make himself loose his arms to keep from gripping her too tightly. But she didn’t seem to mind—she held him just as tightly, afraid, even in exhausted sleep, to relinquish her hold.

So he cradled her against his chest. Whatever happened, he would not let her be alone in the dark again. He would let her cling to him just as assiduously as he clung to her, the proof that he was a man who could make a choice that went beyond duty.

Because his duty had floated away without him. The four other boats had disappeared into the dark of the night without a trace. Ransome, he reckoned, would have led them away by force of personality. Neither Doc Whitely nor young Lawrence would have been able to withstand his sort of forceful, violent persuasion—not without Able Simmons and Jack Denman, as well as Morris and Flanaghan, to back them up, and Denman likely had all he could handle just trying to tend to the ghastly gash on the back of Simmons’s head.

Dance hoped to God that they had been able to stop the bleeding. Except that he didn’t believe in God. It was only that he was exhausted, and afraid really, and didn’t quite know where to turn. And Jane Burke was counting on him—clinging to him as if he were worth clinging to. As if she had confidence in him.

That made one of them.

He arranged the boat cover so only his head poked out into the dirty weather, and kept searching the dark for the lights from the boats, staring into the darkness until red and yellow spots danced across his vision like demons from the night.

He shut his eyes, and ducked beneath the cover for a momentary respite, shifting his legs so they lay alongside hers, and covered them both with their cloaks. The thick wool was sodden with water, but still it held some warmth, as did his wool uniform coat. Together they might be able to keep the two of them warm.

Together, they just might be able to keep each other alive.

Dance’s leg bumped up against the stiff poke of a wicker case, and he remembered then what she had said.
Compass,
she had croaked at him, and shoved the case toward him, as if it were a gift.

He roused himself enough to see, and devil take him if that wasn’t exactly what lay within, packed in straw for all these weeks and weeks, just waiting to be made useful.

In the pitch-black of the storm he could barely see the hand in front of his face, but he could make a rough reading of which way was north. They were entirely turned around from where he thought they would be. But with the wind hooking out of the southeast, it was impossible to go east into the wind, toward the mainland of South America, even if he managed to raise the nimble fore and aft sail. And to do so would only serve to expose them to the storm. Best to hunker down beneath the tarpaulin to stay as warm as possible, and let the wind and current take them where it would.

If they were still alive in the morning, he would think of what he ought to do next.

If they were alive and not swallowed whole by the ravenous sea.

Chapter Nineteen

Dance came awake with a jerk, and an ache in his neck, as well as a pain in his leg. All of which told him only one thing—he was alive. Painfully so.

Outside the thin cover of the tarpaulin, the light of dawn was gray and thin, the clouds still hung low over the water, weeping a steady rain that seeped under the tarpaulin cover, and chilled him to the bone.

He shook the creeping lethargy out of his head, and took stock. The wind had died down to a more general roar—enough so that he might sail the boat instead of just letting it float along at the will of the filthy weather.

He let go of Jane long enough to haul out and attach the tiller, but woke her in the noisy process. “How are you? Are you cold?”

Jane shook her head, and disappeared forward, crawling on her hands and knees along the floorboards under the small covered bow. For a moment Dance worried that she had gone off to be quietly sick away from him, but she made no sound, and presently came crawling back, and set about tenting the tarpaulin just so, so that the rainwater collected and ran downward into a collapsable canvas water bag.

Remarkable. Organized and efficient in the middle of nowhere after she had nearly been drowned.

When she had collected enough to drink, she asked, “May I have some?” in a voice so scratchy and dry, he caught himself swallowing in sympathy. “My throat feels as if it were on fire.”