The Very Daring Duchess Part 27

"I'd rather have you here than let him say you sleep apart from your wife, which you know he will," she countered. There'd be no secrets like that on a ship as small as the Antelope. "We can sleep together in this bunk, can't we?"

Now he stared at her, his expression incredulous. "We can?"

"I mean if we remain dressed, of course," she said quickly, her cheeks burning. Her imagination was jumbling all sorts of wicked thoughts and memories together, how his mouth had tasted when they'd kissed, and how her body had responded with a will of its own the minute he'd touched her, and how standing this close to him in this tiny cabin was making her long to do it again. "With our clothes on. And only to sleep. Sleep. We could bear that, couldn't we?"

He made a rumbling growl of doubt deep in his throat.

"Well, I could," she said with as much conviction as she could muster, which wasn't really very much, considering. "I can."

"And I'd rather take my chances in a duel than lying with you like that," he said. "You're a temptation, Francesca, a powerful great temptation to my weak old soul. How much longer are we going to go on like this, eh?"

"Until-until London," she said, for that was true.

But Edward, of course, couldn't know the truth. "Oh, aye, London," he said, his expression darkening. "You wish to wait until I've word from the Admiralty, don't you? Wouldn't want to be shackled for life to some poor disgraced b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I'll sleep elsewhere, my lady, thank you."

"No, you won't, you great fool!" she cried unhappily, shoving at his chest with both her hands. "You belong here, with me, because-because you are my husband, and I won't have anyone say anything ill about you, and-and because I would be frightened to stay in this place alone at night, without you with me!"

He caught her wrists, holding her hands against his chest. "You, frightened, Francesca? I don't believe you're frightened of anything."

"Then I'm a far better actress than I ever dreamed, Edward, because right now I'm frightened nigh to death." She smiled unsteadily, knowing that if she'd any sense left she'd lift her hands from his chest and move away from him as fast as she could. "And so, I think, are you."

"Am I indeed." He slid his hands down her arms, pulling her closer until her face-and her mouth-- was directly below his. A perilous place to be, she told herself sternly, yet she didn't move away.

"Oh, yes," she said softly, swaying closer into him, her cloak falling open to include him inside. "We're much alike, you know. We've both lost our moorings, and now we're adrift, aren't we?"

He frowned down at her, more bemused than antagonistic now. "Adrift? Moorings? Where'd you learn to speak sailor-talk like that?"

"From you, mio marinaro," she said, and when he bent down that last inch to kiss her, she welcomed him gladly, closing her eyes to let the desire build and simmer between them. She loved the way he kissed her, almost as much as she loved kissing him in return. Yet there was a bittersweet melancholy to this kiss as well that would be impossible to explain to anyone else, a sense that they shared more than longing alone.

"My charming Francesca," he whispered gruffly, running his thumb along her cheek. "What in blazes does marinaro mio mean, anyway?"

"My sailor," she answered with a little squeak in her words as he trailed another few kisses along her jaw. "Which you are. And I didn't misspeak, did I? About the moorings and such?"

"The moorings?"

Saints in heaven, how had he forgotten so soon? "About us both being adrift, Edward," she prompted, refusing to be as distractible. "You have lost your Centaur, and I have lost my Napoli, and I cannot imagine a better description of cut moorings and being adrift than that."

He fell silent, his mouth becoming a hard, harsh line of grief, and she knew he was dwelling on all that had befallen him these last twenty-four hours.

"Ah, sweetheart," he said finally. "At least we've been set adrift with each other, haven't we?"

"With each other, caro mio," she echoed sadly. "With each other."

But only, alas, until London.

0="10"10.

It was beginning once again, the same way it always did, and with the same dread certainty Edward knew he'd be as helpless to challenge and change fate as he had every other time before.

Seventeen French ships, Napoleon's great fleet, attacked by twelve English under Admiral Nelson, yet the English were winning. Even through the disorienting smoke and fire that filled the night sky over Aboukir Bay, Edward had been able to learn that much from the messages read by his lookouts as, one by one, the French ships of the line began to strike their colors and surrender, their masts shattered, their sails and rigging in rags, their crews slaughtered by the merciless English guns.

With victory seemingly so near, it took all of Edward's will and training not to succ.u.mb to the same euphoria of blood l.u.s.t that was already sweeping through the Centaur's crew. Though he should try to keep them under control, he decided instead to use their frenzy to his own purpose, and with a roar calculated to match their own, he shouted at the gun-captains to prepare for another raking broadside as soon as the next hapless Frenchman-- the Heureux, he thought it was-- drifted into range. If he could make her surrender to him next, then there'd be even more honors, more glory, more praise.

"Steady, Edward, my lad, steady," he muttered to himself, his hands gripping tight to the quarterdeck's rail as he concentrated on the battle around him. His wool uniform was soaked with sweat, p.r.i.c.kling his neck and back in the hot Egyptian night, and his white breeches and the reveres of his coat were black with gunpowder. Though he'd lost his hat and his arm had been gashed by a flying splinter, he felt nothing beyond pure exhilaration. If he survived this night and this battle, then he'd be a hero honored by his king and country, and not even his brothers would be able to deny it.

"My G.o.d, sir, look!" shouted Lieutenant Pye, his eyes round with horror as he stared past Edward to the starboard. "It's the L'Orient, sir, bearing down hard upon us with her stern afire!"

Instantly Edward turned, and saw the French flagship coming toward them, flames shooting from her hull high into her rigging and aft toward her powder magazine, any second she'd explode and G.o.d save them all, she was going to take the Centaur with her in a fireball of agonizing death and disgrace bound straight to h.e.l.l and it was going to be all, all, Edward's fault and-

"Oh, caro mio, don't, don't!" a woman's voice was crying, and then it wasn't a woman, it was Francesca, his Francesca, here with him where she would die so horribly, too, if he couldn't steer the Centaur clear from the L'Orient's path. Disfigured corpses already bobbed in the sea, the water turned red with blood, red as the flames that licked at the French flagship's masts.

"I must order them to cut the anchor chain, la.s.s," he said, struggling to fight through the tangle of fallen rigging to reach his men. "d.a.m.nation, Francesca, don't stand in my way, else we'll all die when the fire reaches the powder!"

Yet still her hands were holding him back, just like the jumbled wreckage that was keeping his legs from carrying him below to where he must go.

"Wake, Edward, oh, please, please, wake!" she pleaded, clinging to the place on his upper arm where he'd been wounded, where his blood must surely be staining her fingers. "It's only a dream, Edward, a nightmare-l'incubo!-and you must wake to end it!"

But the only way for Edward to end it and save them all was to get the Centaur clear of the burning French flagship, and desperately he wrenched free, striking his elbow so hard against something wood-a broken timber, a shattered mast or spar?-that he howled and swore with pain. Yet as he did, the churning bloodred sea turned pale and faded from his sight, taking the ships and the fire and the great guns and even his beloved Centaur with it. All vanished, and in their place he was staring at a rough-plank bulkhead and wrought-iron lantern lit with a tallow candle.

"There you are, my darling, there," murmured Francesca as she gently pushed his sweat-soaked hair back from his forehead. "I told you it was no more than a bad dream."

His heart was pounding with excitement and fear, his shirt plastered to his body, and his breath still came in short, rasping gulps. His elbow throbbed with pain, yes, but from where he'd struck it against the edge of the bunk, not from the splinter-wound that had long ago healed, and his feet had been tangled in the coverlet instead of fallen rigging. He wasn't on the Centaur's quarterdeck, but in the mate's cabin on board the Antelope, and it wasn't Lieutenant Pye at his side, but Francesca, her face shadowed with more concern and tenderness than a score of nightmares would deserve.

And Jesus, but he felt like the greatest a.s.s in all Creation.

"Go back to sleep, Francesca," he said, his voice thick as he shook off her touch. He swung his legs over the edge of the bunk and leaned forward, cradling his head in his hands as he strove to shake off the last of the nightmare. "I'd no wish to wake you. It was just as you said, a bad dream and nothing more."

"It most certainly wasn't 'nothing,' Edward," she said quickly, her voice low and coaxing, "and I won't be put off as if I were some blindly trusting noddy. You were dreaming of the Nile, weren't you? Of the battle at Aboukir?"

"Francesca, please," he said wearily. The dream always exhausted him, draining him almost as much as if he'd survived the battle once again. "It's done for now, over, and it won't return this night. Now let that be an end to it for us as well, and go back to sleep."

"So you've had the dream before?" she asked curiously, coming to swing her legs in their yellow clocked stockings over the edge of the bunk beside him, pulling the coverlet over both their shoulders like a cozy private tent. He took it thankfully, though without comment, for the sweat was turning to chill in the unheated cabin.

"Truly, I shouldn't wonder if you did," she continued. "I don't know how you fighting gentlemen can sleep at all, given the sights you must have seen in this horrible war."

He shrugged, no real answer. Sometimes he wondered the same himself, though nightmares were so common that men didn't comment on them. On any given night on board every ship he'd ever served in, there'd be at least a half-dozen sailors among the crew asleep in their hammocks who'd wake swearing or screaming or thrashing wildly, just as he'd done now.

But the difference was that he was a captain, and a high-ranking one at that. He was supposed to be beyond such weaknesses and fears, and he wasn't about to begin confessing them now to Francesca.

She wriggled closer for warmth, her feet dangling beside his. She'd braided her hair into heavy braids that hung over her shoulders and her gold hoops with the pearls swung from her ears. She'd slept in her clothes, too, as they'd agreed, and they'd both self-consciously kept their bodies from touching in the bunk. But sitting with her now under the coverlet like this was oddly both more intimate and more unsettling, made all the worse from realizing how much she could have heard when he'd been raving in his sleep.

"Tell me, mio coraggioso inglese leone," she coaxed softly. "Was the Nile that much worse than other battles you'd fought?"

Her brave English lion: ha, so brave that he had nightmares like a child who'd eaten too much treacly candy.

"The Nile was a great victory for Nelson, for England, for all of us," he said carefully. "That is what you need to know about the Nile."

"And you were one of the grandest heroes, la, la, la," she said. "That much I know from Lady Hamilton, who is wicked proud of you. How the Centaur and the Swiftsure were the two English ships that brought down the L'Orient, how courageously ruthless you were to attack a vessel so much larger, yet how you lowered your own boats to help pluck the wounded Frenchmen from the water, showing mercy even in your victory."

"Aye," he said grudgingly, though at last his racing heart was beginning to slow. These were facts, the barest, purest truth, and borne out in the logs of every captain who'd been there. "Aye, that is so."