Gilded Lily (18 page)

“Sleep well, brother. And you, Miss Murcheson. I'll be back at dawn.”

“H
E KNOWS, DOESN'T
he? Somehow he knows.”

Privately, Barnabas agreed with Freddie, but he shook his head anyway. “He just wanted to be alone. Even if he suspects, it's not as though he's likely to tell anyone. By the time he got to that part of the tale, he'd already be either in the stockade or possibly promoted to rear admiral. Either way, I doubt we're in much danger. And his misanthropy is our good fortune.”

Good fortune, or a temptation sent by the Devil? Barnabas wasn't at all sure he believed in the Devil, but this scenario could have been handcrafted by the old sinner expressly for the purpose of ensnaring a young man's soul.

A room. A bed. An entire night to spend there. And Freddie, studying him with those remarkable green eyes, with half a smile playing hide-and-seek at the corners of her mouth between sips of hot toddy.

She was dressed as a boy. She was quite possibly more than a little mad. They had been impersonating military officers, stealing government property, were probably being hunted by smugglers and maybe also facing encounters with giant, rampaging squid things.

He'd never felt so happy or content. So sure of what he was doing. Which made no sense, because objectively Barnabas was aware he had no idea what he was doing, with any of this. Not the job he had been assigned, certainly. Not anything he'd ever planned to be doing with his life, or even contemplated as a set of options. He
ought
to be horrified by the entire situation.

“What are you thinking?” Freddie asked.

“I'm thinking about . . . you.” It was more or less the truth.

“Not sure I like that, with the look on your face just then. You can't have been thinking anything very nice.”

“How did I look?”

“Baffled. Do I baffle you?” She frowned, as this was clearly a matter of grave concern.

“Only in the best possible ways. I do sort of wonder what comes next, however.”

“I find it more than a little worrisome you don't
know
what happens next. Of the two of us, you're really the one who ought to know.”

“No, no,” he laughed, moving a step closer. “That part I know. Minx. I mean after all this is over. Assuming neither of us is dead and I'm not thrown in prison, and we both go back to our lives. Or do we? Is that what you want? Is it even what I want, because I honestly have no idea at the moment. It's as though, where once I looked ahead in my life and had a general idea of how I expected things to go, now I find I can't even picture what lies in store. I'm not sure whether that should make me feel liberated or petrified.”

“Instead of thinking about how it
should
make you feel, maybe let yourself think how it actually
does
make you feel. That seems a better place to start.”

“Do you know your future? Can you see what you think it'll be, I mean?”

She considered it a moment, then shook her head, frowning. “It's that same problem with
should
, I suppose. I was the pot calling the kettle black, wasn't I? I know all the types of futures I should want, the ones that I know are available to a woman such as myself, and it ought to be a simple question of choosing between them. It isn't, because none of them seem remotely palatable, but I have no idea what to picture in their place. It's as though I don't have a wide enough frame of reference even to imagine what I want yet. I don't know what my possibilities ought to be.”

“You'll have to make new ones, then.” He wanted to see her try. Wanted to see the world she might construct, given free rein to do so. And he hoped there would be room for him in her orbit. “You're still in wet things, I've just realized.”

“So I am.” Her frown vanished, but she tried to hide her smile behind the hot toddy. “I'm probably headed for a nasty case of pneumonia.”

“We really ought to do something about that.”

“Yes, but what?”

“Fortunately for us both, I know what happens next.”

He took the still-warm mug from her hands, placing it carefully on the table by the bed, and drew her off to stand in front of him. The buttons of her shirt seemed to melt open under his fingers, but he stopped cold when he saw what lay beneath once the shirt dropped to the floor.

Padding. Layers of it, bandaged into place. All sodden, heavy, and now dripping seawater onto the floor by his feet. “I'd forgotten all about this. How can you stand it?”

“At least it's kept me warm. Here, I'll do that.”

He plucked at a knot where she'd tied a bandage off. “No. I'll unwrap you.”

It sounded more intriguing than it turned out to be. In truth, the bandages were tricky to remove, and the prurience Barnabas had started out with was quickly subsumed by more practical thoughts. Such as whether to find a knife and simply cut through the entire mess, saving time and effort. Freddie refused to allow this, however, as she needed the stuffing and wrappings intact to wear again the next day.

The soaked linen seemed to have congealed where it was knotted, however, and Barnabas was yawning by the time he got the first one untied and began unwinding it, passing the wad of bandage around Freddie's midsection with quick, efficient movements. She was already at work on another knot and kept having to move her arms out of his way. It made an odd ballet, the two of them working at cross purposes until they found a rhythm that allowed them both to operate.

“This is a great deal less lascivious than I had hoped it would be,” he complained, when he realized there was still another bandage left to work on, besides the one Freddie had started on. The last one tied off near her hip, and Barnabas dropped to his knees to attack it once he'd dropped the first bandage on the hearth to dry.

“I imagine any sinful impulse left will be completely annihilated once the padding is off, because I'm sure I smell frightful under there.”

“I smell like fortnight-old halibut myself, so I'm positive I won't even notice.”

He really only heard the
under there
part of what she'd said, because it reminded him that beneath the tricky padding and fiddly bandages was a naked girl, a naked
Freddie
. More than worth the bother.

She was, however, sadly accurate regarding the smell. It centered on the bag of cotton-wool-stuffed muslin that formed the basis of her figure-transforming disguise, but clearly the source was the skin beneath. He'd envisioned revealing her torso and immediately conducting a sensual exploration prior to shucking off her trousers. Instead, despite the astonishing visual appeal of her smoothly curved waist and high, small, rose-tipped breasts, his first impulse was to suggest she wash first.

“Ugh. I told you,” she said before he could figure out what to say. She stepped from between him and the bed and went to the washbasin, grimacing as she lifted her arms to scrub with the scrap of rag draped over the side.

Barnabas remained where he was, enchanted with the play of the firelight on the muscles in Freddie's back. Beneath the ugly impressions left by the constraining bandages, her skin was smooth and fair, and when she twisted to clean the other side, she resembled a Greek marble. He couldn't think which one. He could hardly think at all.

The braces she'd slipped from her shoulders earlier dangled at her hips, framing the view. Without their support, her trousers had slouched low to hang from her hips, accentuating the graceful sweep from hip to waist. His body responded to the angles and particularly the arcs of hers, hardening while his eyes lingered everywhere she was softest.

“Those trousers are still wet too,” he reminded her helpfully.

“Perhaps you'd like to help me with them.”

He would. Nothing would please him more.

When he stood to cross the room, however, he glimpsed Freddie's face in the small mirror over the washstand. Eyes squeezed shut, bottom lip caught between her teeth. It was not an expression of lustful anticipation, but anxiety. Because she was, he remembered all at once with the sick thud of painful reality slipping back into place, not actually a brazen, daring, smuggler-defying submersible thief. Not just that, anyway. Primarily she was a young, sheltered virgin who was quite possibly making heat-of-the-moment decisions she would later regret.

She'd said it herself: She didn't know what she wanted her life to be. He could only assume the rejected plans included everything obvious and conventional, such as marriage and motherhood and helping a husband manage a small but reasonably profitable estate in the Hudson Valley. Everything, in short, that a man like Barnabas could offer. And if she wasn't prepared to do that, should he really be doing anything like taking off her trousers? His conscience told him no. His still-stirring erection and the tingling in his balls indicated there was room for debate.

Cautiously, he wrapped his arms around what he deemed the safest portion of Freddie's anatomy, her waist. It was a mistake. As soon as his chest came into contact with her back and he felt her sigh against him, he knew his conscience would lose the argument, and for the worst reasons. He wanted to keep holding her because she felt like she was already part of him. Knowing he could never keep her should make him back away, not squeeze tighter.

“We don't have to do anything next, you know. Not if you're not sure.”

She wrapped her arms around herself, placing her hands over his forearms. “Don't you want to?”

He shifted his grip lower, pulling her hips toward his, pressing his length against the exquisite cleft of her backside. “Of course I want to. I've wanted to all along. I want to every time I look at you. If wanting were all that mattered, the world would be full of naked people coupling on every street corner. Nothing else would ever be accomplished. In fact there probably wouldn't even
be
street corners.”

Her giggle registered against him, delightfully vibrant against his body as well as to his ears. “Good, then. Because how often in my life can I expect to be stranded in a rustic inn overnight with a beautiful man who doesn't mind that I'm wearing trousers?”

Barnabas trailed her waistband with his fingertips, finding the placket and unbuttoning the trousers in question. “Are you just using me because I'm convenient for playing out your little fantasy?”

“Convenient
and beautiful
,” she reminded him.

“I ought to be offended.”

The wet wool didn't slide off; it had to be tugged and coaxed. They were both laughing by the time he finally yanked the garment free of Freddie's foot and held it up with a triumphant “Ha!”

She grinned at him. Standing there, in a pair of damp cotton drawers that hid nothing.

“Ha,” he said again, letting the trousers fall from his fingers. They thumped to the floor, surprisingly loud.

“Shouldn't you put those in front of the fire?” She smirked and started for the bed, flipping the counterpane back and climbing on while he retrieved the fallen trousers and spread them carefully among the collection of slowly drying clothing.

When he turned, Freddie had already made herself comfortable, propped on one elbow and watching him. Her feet were tucked under the sheets, but the rest of her was gloriously bare. She had removed her drawers at some point while he wasn't looking. He had a fleeting moment of disappointment about that until he lost himself gazing at the swatch of auburn that decorated the crease where her shapely thighs met. Very shapely. Luscious, even, all creamy velvet and plump curves. Then that dip at the waist, and the delicate shell of her ribs, visible beneath her skin when she breathed just so. Vital, arresting. Her breasts were smaller than they appeared when she was clothed, objectively probably too small to properly balance out her magnificent derriere. His were not objective eyes, however. To him, she looked like everything he'd ever desired.

“Stop
staring
.”

“But there's so very much that's worthy of a good, long appraisal.”

“Barnabas?”

“Mmm?”

“Stop staring and come to bed.”

 • • • 

S
HE'D USED UP
her audacity, and as Barnabas stepped closer to the bed, Freddie closed her eyes and tried to slow her breathing to something approaching a reasonable rate. It was little use. She could anticipate his approach, gauge his proximity as though her body had come equipped with special Barnabas hydrophones she'd only recently activated. She knew the second before the mattress dipped under his weight, and opened her eyes as he smoothed her hair back from her forehead.

“I shouldn't have cut it, should I? It makes me look like a boy.”

“Nobody could possibly mistake you for a boy. Not without your boy suit, anyway. Certainly not right now.”

“You're staring again.”

His gaze tracked down the line of her body, lingering here and there. “As I said. Worthy. I want to memorize every inch of you.”