“No?”
“I’m surprised you’re not better acquainted with the word.”
His eyes lose their spark of amusement. “You can climb down on your own, can you?”
Probably not.
I lift my chin. “Absolutely.”
He sighs, ignoring my yowling protests as he scoops me up with ease and tucks me against his muscular chest. “Stop wriggling and wrap your arms and legs around me.”
Averse to the idea of making more of a scene, I clamp my legs around his trim waist, thread my arm around his neck, and stab my stare across the sea now littered with rowboats.
“Unless you want to fall again, I suggest you lean closer and tighten those pretty thighs.”
“I’ll tighten them around your neck,” I mutter, and he chokes out a laugh.
“Once we’re coupled,” he says, maneuvering us through the hatch, “I’ll hold you to that.”
Realization strikes a match to my face, and I’m silently begging he drop me now so I can plummet to a swift death.
Instead, he confidently scales the ladder, my injured arm tucked between us the only barrier preventing our bodies from being flush—something that heats my skin but rattles my soul.
Cheeks burning, I watch the small boats drift and disperse amongst the rest of the fleet, the men stealing peeks over their shoulders at me clinging to their High Master, being pulled from the perch I stubbornly set myself in.
“This is humiliating.”
“So is waitingdayswith bated breath for your promised to dock at her new home, to no avail.”
Bated breath, my ass.
I don’t know much about managing a fleet, but I doubt he could prepare one on such short notice. He probably put the order in the moment he returned. Hell, he probably sent a mail sprite before he even left Castle Noir.
I’m forced to admit there may be some weight to Rhordyn’s condemning observations ...
Cainon has ambition.
“Tuck your head under my chin,” he gripes. “I’m getting a kink and not the fun sort.”
I do as he asks, refusing to take his verbal bait. Refusing to takeanyenjoyment from having my cheek pressed against his chest—no doubt his intention.
He reaches the bottom and steps off, one hand weaving around to support the underside of my thigh.
My breath hitches. “I can walk, Cainon.”
“Clever girl,” he muses, and bends to retrieve my sack before striding to the rail and tossing it.
I twist in time to watch it thunk into the hollow of one of the three remaining rowboats still tethered to the ship’s side, right beside an austere sailor’s booted foot.
“I wish you’d stop throwing my shit around,” I mutter.
“Out,” Cainon bellows, and the two sailors clamber into another dinghy already stuffed with five other men. He turns as Captain approaches. “Is the ship clear?”
“He’s the last,” Captain says, gesturing toward an injured sailor being hoisted off the side.
“Good.”
Captain turns to bellow down at the crew, not even glancing my way, and a splinter of guilt lodges itself deep in my chest.
