An Officer but No Gentleman (24 page)

Morty released her foot.

“I’ve missed our nights on the town,” Charlie confessed. 

“Me, too,” Morty said, solemnly knowing this was the last time.

“Are you sure about this man of yours?” he asked.

“Oh, Morty, I didn’t know I could love someone so much.”  She looked up through her lashes at him.  “He makes my knees weak,” she said shyly knowing he would remember their conversation.

He saw the blush on her cheeks and although it hurt, he wanted her to know love even if it wasn’t with him.

“I’m happy for you, Charlie, I really am.  But if that’s the way you feel, why aren’t you with him?”

“Things were said tonight.  I think we may have broken off our engagement.”

Charlie cast her eyes around at their surroundings.  They were at the docks with its warehouses and disreputable taverns.

“Let’s go in here.  This place could use the excitement of a little brawl.”

“No, Charlie,” he said grabbing her arm.  “I’m not going to let you get in a fight.”

Charlie pulled free of his hand and darted towards the tavern.  “You can’t stop me, Morty.  You never could.”

Morty swore as he watched her enter and followed her.  She was at the bar ordering more drinks for them, two ales and a brandy which she threw back immediately.  She lef
t one tankard at the bar for Morty, the other ale she would intentionally spill on some mean-looking tar.  That was how she usually started fight.

Charlie grabbed the tankard and scoped the place for her victims.  Two men by the wall seemed to be in a heated discussion.

“No, Charlie!”

But it was too late.  Charlie pretended to trip as she slung the contents of the tankard at them.

Chairs scraped noisily as the men jumped to their feet.

“What the hell?”

“Don’t hit her,” Morty cried thrusting himself in front of Charlie.   “She’s a girl.  It was an accident.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” Charlie said shoving Morty aside.  “And you are more of a girl than I am.”

Morty suddenly recognized the men.  “She’s your captain’s fiancée.”

“Bullshit!  Women tremble in fear at the sight of our captain.”

Charlie wasn’t going to let Morty stop her.  She kicked one of the men in the chest sending him into the wall. The other lunged at her and she flipped him onto his back.

“Charlie, stop.  They were on the corsair.  They are—“

“My men!” Jaxon said pushing Morty aside.  “You’re twice her size.  Can’t you stop her?” he ground out to Morty.

27

Morty speared Jaxon with a hard stare folding his arms over his chest. This man didn’t know Charlie like he did.  She fought fearlessly and had no qualms about inflicting pain when she was riled. “Why don’t you show me how it’s done,” he drawled, a smirk lifting one corner of his mouth.

Jaxon was behind her in an instant. He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her away from his crewmen as they found their footing again. “Don’t even think about hitting her,” he ordered to his men. Then he turned to Morty, “
That’s
how you do it.”

Unfortunately for Jaxon, he had only used one arm to grab her leaving his injured side open.

“You’re only stopping me because I’m letting you,” Charlie said sending her elbow into Jaxon’s wound.

Jaxon doubled over with the force of the blow, relaxing his grip on her enough for Charlie to break free.

“You were saying…?” Morty sneered.

Jaxon cast a caustic glare at Morty as he righted himself. Charlie had taken up an offensive position across from him, bouncing on the balls of her feet with her arms raised. Jaxon could feel the wake of air as she began throwing kicks and punches inches from his face. Had he moved any closer, he would have gotten walloped with the full force of her blows.

Jax tried several times to grab her wrists, but she easily batted his hands away.

“Bloodthirsty wench,” Jaxon muttered taking a step back and turning away. He reached in his pocket and threw a couple of coins on the table where his men had been sitting. “Have a couple more on me.”

He turned back to Charlie who had settled down on her heels. “I’m leaving. Are you coming with me?”

“Are you going to make me tremble?” she asked with a saucy glint, knowing he had heard what his sailors had said.

He held out his hand to her silently. Stoically.

Charlie’s eyes darted between Jaxon and Morty. She loved Jaxon with all of her being
, but Morty was hurting and frankly, she missed him more than she imagined possible.

“
Charlie, your hesitation speaks volumes,” Jaxon gritted then turned on his heels and departed without looking back.

Charlie watched as Jaxon left the tavern in stunned silence. She swore and ran after him, catching up with him quickly in the middle of the road.

“Jaxon—”

Jaxon turned and grabbed her by the arms. “I don’t share what’s mine. When you didn’t walk out that door with me, it told that you are having second thoughts.”

“I’m here now,” she cut in.

“You were happy to marry me when you had no other options
, but now that you’ve got your ship and your old life back…” he trailed off with a shrug. “I-I think Grayson may have been right. Maybe I was just a way to improve your lot.”

“No, Jaxon—
”

He gave her a little shake. “You need to decide what you want. I’m not going to play this game with you.”

“I’m not playing games!” she shouted. “I needed to make sure Morty was all right. Daniel should have warned him, but he was taken unawares.”

“You’re so worried about his feelings; what about mine? Did you think for one second what it felt like to have you leave our engagement party on the heels of another man? Did it occur to you how that would look? You’ve embarrassed me in front of my whole family. I can’t even try to save face by taking you back t
o the party because you’re half-drunk and dressed like that.”

Jaxon seemed to suddenly realize he held her with much more force than he intended and released her as if he picked up a hot pan with bare hands. With a grunt of frustration, he turned and strode away from her as fast as his uneven stride allowed
, leaving Charlie standing alone in the middle of the street.

Charlie stood unmoving, watching Jaxon’s retreat. The lump in her throat choking her
, but the tears that burned her eyes refused to fall as though the uniform transformed her back into the emotionless person she was raised to be. The longer she stood there, the more she felt herself shutting down until she felt like the hollow shell her father brought aboard the
Arcadia
at the age of six.

Charlie stood in that street long past the time it took for Jaxon to disappear from sight. She didn’t move as sailors moved about and as a handful of wagons and carriages plodded down the street. She had no concept of time. She only felt the burning knot in her stomach growing. The overwhelming emptiness she felt as a child was swallowing her and she didn’t know how to pull herself back to the surface.

“Come on, Charlie,” she heard Morty say. “Let’s go back to the ship.”

In her fugue state
, she heard the words, but it was as if he were speaking a foreign-language. She didn’t understand them. Morty put his arm around her shoulders and guided her back to her cabin on the ship.

“Go to bed, Charlie. You’ll feel better in the morning, I promise.”

Morty opened the door, pushed her gently into the room and pulled it closed behind her.

She didn’t know if she stood there for minutes or hours
, but eventually Charlie’s brain began to function again in a rudimentary sort of way. Morty told her to go to bed. She knew how to do that. The first step was to lock the door. Charlie automatically reached into her pocket, but found it empty. Her keys had gone to the bottom of the ocean with Jimmy’s corpse.

How could she go to bed if she couldn’t accomplish the first step of going to bed? She had locked the door to her father’s cabin to keep Byron out before she boarded Jaxon’s ship. Her father’s keys were locked inside. And Byron’s keys went down to the bottom of the ocea
n—not that it mattered—he didn’t have keys to her cabin, but she supposed she could have slept in his bed if she had the key.

Jaxon Bloodworthy didn’t sleep longer than thirty minutes at a time the whole night. He kept reaching out for Charlie, but when he didn’t find her, he woke up and the memories of the evening rushed back with harsh clarity. He gave up trying to sleep when the sun came up. His decidedly foul mood forced him to look for distraction, anything that would occupy his mind and keep him from reliving the previous night’s events.

Since his ship was
finally home, Jaxon decided work would be the distraction he needed. What little belongings Charlie had were at his townhouse, nothing belonging to her was on the ship and the last thing he needed was to see little reminders of her everywhere he went.

If anyone had suggested he wanted to go to his ship to get a glimpse of Charlie on hers, he would’ve growled a denial at them. His ship was back. He was captain and had duties that no doubt needed to be tended to immediately.

Jaxon stopped at the galley before heading to his cabin. Breakfast wasn’t ready yet, but he was able to secure a tankard of coffee to help him wake up. Jaxon sipped at the hot brew as he made his way down the passageway to his cabin. His leg was more than a little achy, it really hurt, probably more from the mishap on the dance floor than from chasing Charlie all over town. If it wasn’t feeling better by this evening, he’d soak it in the hot bath. But without Charlie to massage it, he didn’t know if it would help.

Jaxon reached out and grabbed the doorknob to his cabin and found it locked.

“What the hell,” he muttered under his breath. There was no reason for the door to be locked. Daniel needed access to the charts and sextant inside while he was in charge and Jaxon kept anything of value locked up in the small safe inside.

It took Jaxon less than five minutes to locate Romy in his hammock in the forecastle. He woke up his half-gypsy crewman and told him to get his lock picks and follow him. Romy wasn’t a man to talk about his past
, but over the past few years, Daniel had befriended the untamed gypsy and found he was a man of many hidden secrets. One talent was the ability to pick nearly any lock.

It took Romy less than a minute
to open the door to Jaxon’s cabin. Jaxon began to wonder if he was going to find a drunken tar sleeping off his cups in his bunk. Heaven help the man if he had a wench in his bunk with him. He almost hoped that was what he would find because Jaxon was in the mood to jump down someone’s throat.

“Romy, ask Vinnie to bring me breakfast in my quarters when it’s ready.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

Jaxon entered the room
, and as suspected, there was someone sleeping in his bunk, but it was who that surprised him.

Charlie.

Jaxon took a gulp of his coffee before setting it down. Had things been different, he would have watched her sleep until she woke up on her own, but he couldn’t bear the sight of her.

“Charlie!” Jaxon said loudly, not trusting himself to touch her to wake her up. “What the devil are you doing here?”

Charlie’s eyes opened immediately as she shot up to a seated position. “Jaxon, I meant to be gone before the sun came up. I guess the brandy…” She didn’t finish her thought as she threw her feet out of the bed and began pulling on the too small boots.

“Why are you here? Your ship is three berths down.”

“I-I didn’t have any way to lock my cabin door. If they still didn’t know I was female, I would’ve taken my chances.”

Charlie stood up and turned around to put the bed covers back in place.

“Leave it.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll get a locksmith out today so it won’t happen again. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“There is a hotel and several inns in town.”

Charlie met his eyes for the first time. There, she saw the anguish and hurt she caused him. She couldn’t hold his gaze.

“I wasn’t thinking,” she answered honestly. “I hoped you wouldn’t mind.”

In truth, he preferred she be safe and if that meant letting her use his cabin, he didn’t really mind. He just hadn’t expected to find her there. It added a bit of insult to injury. At least Morty wasn’t with her in his bed.

Charlie moved around him to the door. She had it halfway open when he reached around her, slamming it shut. She reeled around to face him. He loomed over her leaving his arm against the door.

“What’s wrong with your lock?”

As she explained what happened to the keys, all she could think about was how close he was standing to her and how much she wanted to stretch towards him and kiss him. How was it possible someone she’d only met a month earlier had become her whole life? How could the sight of him, elicit such longing?

“They killed the mate?”

“I would have preferred they throw him in the brig, but what’s done is done. It was clearly piracy to steal the ship and he would have swung after a trial.”

“I have a man who can get you into your father’s quarters without breaking the lock.”

“Thank you, Jaxon.”

Pushing away from the door, he righted himself. “I’ll send my man over in a few minutes.”

“Thank you,” Charlie said, but made no effort to leave his company. “Jaxon, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“My brothers warned me
, but I was too stubborn to listen. I have a history of jumping in with both feet—thinking my infatuation is love. Criminy, you’d think I’d learn.”

“Y
ou don’t l-love me?” Charlie looked at him wide-eyed, feeling suddenly sick to her stomach.  She schooled her expression instinctively, her brain silently chanting,
Don’t cry. Don’t cry.

“Apparently, I wouldn’t know real love if it bit me.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not your fault. It’s so r
are that a woman looks at me—you know what I mean—looks past the scars, that I guess I got carried away.”

“Jaxon—
” Charlie’s eyes filled with tears. He didn’t love her. She always knew she loved him more than he loved—no, not loved—her.

“I put you in an unfair position. You had no options, really. You had no money, no family, and no home except what I gave you.”

“I had options,” Charlie said, her voice just above a whisper. “I could have said no. If I had asked, wouldn’t you have helped me get to Charleston?”

Jaxon turned his back on her and moved across the room. Would he have taken her to Charleston if she’d asked? Maybe after they were mar
ried or if she rejected him outright.

“When are you leaving?”

Charlie felt the breath leave her body. He couldn’t wait for her to go.

“I have to hire a new captain.”

“You’re not going to assume the captaincy?”

Charlie shook her head. “At my age, I doubt many would follow me if they still thought I was a man.”

Jaxon nodded. “You’ll be lucky if you find one who’ll want to keep you on as second mate.”

“First mate,” she corrected. “My father told me a fe
w days before he was killed, he intended to get rid of Byron and promote me.”

Jaxon’s dubious look said it all. What man would take a position as captain with the female owner as first mate? He was sure a captain desperate enough for employment would take the position
, but he also knew the man that desperate, would probably be a drunk or someone incompetent.