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think I’d do something like that in front of an eleven-year-old cabin boy, and you cold and limp as a dead mackerel? Don’t be silly.”

    “I’m not being silly. I’m sitting here with my dress off, and you’re . . .”

    “I’m what? This . . .” he gestured crudely, “doesn’t mean a damn thing. This is because you don’t have any clothes on and you’re female. For God’s sake, I don’t attack women every time I get a cockstand.”

    She shook her head. The world went spinning. She was so bloody sick. He could grab her if he wanted to. Just reach out and do it.

    “I’m not the kind of sorry bastard who rapes women.” His words would have left marks on stone. It chilled her right to the soles of her feet, that soft voice. “Hell.”

    “My father has money. I can pay you . . .”

    “If your father had money, you wouldn’t be on Katherine Lane.” That hawklike glare never wavered. Unreadable eyes, he had. “It doesn’t do any good to tell you not to be scared, does it? You’d be a fool if you weren’t scared. What do you want me to do about it?”

    I should kick him and run. She didn’t though. Like he said, she wasn’t a fool.

    “Do you want me to get out of here? I can go up on deck and let my cabin boy keep you company.”

    The lantern he’d hung was swinging still, reshaping the shadows of his face. Revealing and hiding. Hiding and revealing. It was deliberate, the way he stood crowding her at the bunkside. He was showing her he could come as close as he wanted and still not lay a hand on her.

    He said, “You can try leaving under your own sail. You won’t get far before you keel over, but I won’t stop you. Take the blanket, if you want.”

    A minute ticked by. She said, “You didn="3id, “Yo’t do anything to me, did you? You didn’t . . . ”

    “I did not. I don’t take sport with unconscious gutter-snipes. London’s full of willing women. Pretty ones.” He pushed the bed-curtains back along the railings and cupped his fingers over the bed frame. “Less grubby, too.”

    You had to look into that hard face for a while before you saw he was laughing, quiet, underneath. At her. At himself, too, maybe.

    “I guess . . . if you wanted to do something, you’d be doing it.”

    “I would, if I wanted a woman pale as a fishbelly and listing badly to port. A real villain wouldn’t let that stop him.”

    “Fishbelly.”

    “Fishbelly green. You still are.”

    She wouldn’t have trusted a kindly, reassuring man. This bloke, rude, impatient, and exasperated, though . . .

    “Let’s make a deal, Jess. I don’t touch you, and you stop trying to dig a hole through the portside planking. Those are the terms and conditions. Shake on it.”

    He wanted her to shake on it. Somehow this made sense. She was pretty sure parts of her mind weren’t working.

    “I keep my contracts,” he said. “Ask anybody.”

    He had his hand out. It was twice as big as hers and dark with the sun. Bands of callus crossed the palm. He got that reefing sail in high winds when the lines cut into his flesh as the ship bucked and he had to hold on.

    She slipped her hand out from under the blanket, into his.

    It was a shock, touching him. Made him seem bigger and closer and more real. It set off a pulse in her belly, nervous and twitchy like. A little drum, drum, drum started up between her legs. She recognized the feeling, since she wasn’t ignorant in such matters. That was her body noticing he was a fine-looking man. Her body generally had more sense than that.

    He shook her hand and let go. “That’s it, then. I’ll keep you safe tonight. Safe from me, too. Your part is, you trust me. For one night.”

    He was already walking away. He tossed the words at her over his shoulder and picked a wide-bottomed decanter out of the brass rack in the bookshelves. “You’re getting the better of that deal. You wouldn’t make it twenty yards if you tried to run.”

    He acts like Papa. Like