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and wax wafers. She felt along the sides of the drawers and on the bottoms of the ones above. She used her hand to measure, seeking a hidden compartment.
    “You know that’s rude,” Belinda said.
    “Abducting someone is rude.” Phoebe scowled at the desk.
    No more drawers. No results. Nothing as interesting as a hidden compartment. So where could it be?
    She scanned the top. A fiddle board kept an inkwell, a pen holder, and a box of sand in place. She braced her hand on the fiddle board as she staggered to her feet. It didn’t move in its slot on the desktop, and yet . . .
    She yanked the board from the desktop with a screech of protesting, swollen wood.
    Belinda gasped and knocked the plum preserves onto the floor. It rolled with the tilting of the ship but didn’t break and stain the plush carpet.
    “You’re destroying things.” Belinda was white.
    Phoebe stared at her. “Are you frightened of these men? If so—”
    “Not these men. You. I thought you’d understand. I thought you’d want to come. I thought you’d stay with me no matter what.” Huge tears began to roll down Belinda’s round cheeks. “You were so faithful to my brother, even if—but you’re going to make something horrible happen, and then George won’t get free.”
    “Oh yes he will. If we get free, we can go to Dominick, as I wanted to in the first place.”
    “He can’t help.”
    But Docherty had confirmed that Dominick, son of a British peer, could. If he still held enough influence to get someone’s letters of marque revoked, he held enough power to get a prisoner free, despite being married to an American lady.
    “We’ll get him free without subjecting ourselves to this.” Phoebe swept out one hand to indicate the cabin. It happened to be the hand holding the fiddle board. It cracked against the bulkhead and split down the middle without the screech of rending wood.
    Belinda screeched, though. Phoebe smiled, for a shining brass key lay on the rug. If only it proved to be the right one.
    She sank to her knees to snatch it up. The brig dipped and twisted. Phoebe took long, deep breaths, thought about aromatic ginger water.
    And a gray-eyed man smelling of eastern spice.
    A shiver ran over her skin. She curled her fingers around the key. If this was what she hoped it was, she would be rid of the man whose presence, whose voice, whose moments of tenderness raised gooseflesh on her arms with the merest hint of memory.
    “Phoebe, please tell me what you’re doing.” Belinda wasn’t whining, pleading, or commanding. The quietness of the question drove a spike of ice through Phoebe’s middle.
    “I’m doing what I must to get us off this brig.” She hauled herself to her feet. Her head spun from the opiate in the ginger water, but her stomach cooperated. She could manage a spinning head. “I won’t let you risk George’s baby like this, with a stranger we have no reason to trust, if he thinks nothing of alienating us to our countrymen.”
    Belinda didn’t respond. Her dark eyes wide, she stared at Phoebe as she dragged and stumbled her way across the cabin, shoved aside boxes of provisions and trunks of clothing, and fetched up hard against the opposite bulkhead.
    The one with the array of weapons. The locked-up weapons. But Phoebe held a key. If it fit . . .
    She slid it into the lock. It turned. Tumblers fell into place. The lock clicked open.
    Phoebe curled her fingers around a dagger with a six-inch double-sided blade and lethal point. Then she turned back toward the door.
    And found Belinda right behind her. “If you don’t put that back right now, I’ll scream to get the captain or someone down here.”
    Phoebe smiled. “Go right ahead.”

3
    Guided by the distant glow of lantern light through canvas walls, Rafe prowled between the double row of muttering, sighing, snoring men sleeping in hammocks suspended from the deck beams, and pushed open the door to the source of the light—a cabin beneath his own