Page 32 of Maggie and the Pirate’s Son

“So you can store it up to keep you going through the long, dark night? You speak as if you know the islands well.”

“I was born and raised on Lewis for a time.”

“With no cousins or siblings for company,” she said sadly.

Bash had never minded being solitary. As a child, it suited him, and when he was taken aboard the ship, he’d been glad not to leave a houseful of cherished brothers and sisters behind. But, despite Maggie’s own lonely brooding, something about the way she spoke of her kin, of Jory and Ellen, the Shaw Wretch and the big MacKenzie laird, it stirred a yearning for companionship deep in Bash’s soul, one which must have lain dormant all this time.

“Is that why you ran away to sea?” she asked. “Because you were alone?”

“No, but perhaps it’s why they let me go.”

“Or they recognized you were bound for someplace warm and couldn’t deny you the opportunity.”

Releasing a humorless huff, Bash shook his head. “It is the irony of my life. My grandparents’ greatest fear was that I’d become a pirate. Perhaps not irony. Perhaps it was destiny.”

“My father’s greatest fear was that I’d become a wanton whore,” she said as though it were nothing at all to admit, not painful in the slightest.

Bash’s heart caught in his throat. “But my grandparents were proven right,” he said softly. “Their fears all came true. I am a good-for-nothing pirate.” But not like the captain. Never like the captain.

Maggie nodded, seeming to understand. “Then I suppose my great irony is I went the other way, becoming a… frigid, fatuous shrew.”

It sounded as though she were quoting someone.

“I would slit the throat of any man who claimed so,” he whispered in her ear, leaning into her so that her next shiver set his groin on fire.

They stayed like that, stock still, until the bells rang at midnight to change the watch.

Chapter Eight

First watch passed far more pleasantly than Maggie had anticipated. With most of the crew in bed and under the shroud of darkness, she could finally let down her guard a little. It was a tremendous relief to speak candidly, almost flirtatiously, without fear of being observed or overheard.

Bash had been terribly forward, standing so close to her. Maybe he’d forgotten she was a lady at all. Or perhaps it was her—a moth responding to a flame she hadn’t realized was burning, because she basked in his warmth and his nearness as though she hadn’t been held in a lifetime. It made her mind drift to places she oughtn’t go.

Frigid she might be, but they hadn’t been all wrong about her. She was wanton. She craved touch. Connection. A kind smile, a warm hand—she had shivered from the chill, and his arms around her felt like heaven. Alone in the dark, she wasn’t even ashamed to admit it. There was risk in speaking her truth out loud, the words others had said about her, but Bash didn’t push her away in disgust. Quite the contrary.

Despite her exhaustion, she would have willingly stood in his arms like that until the sun came up, but when the bells were rung for second watch, he practically dragged her to the hatch, down the companionway, and into his cramped quarters. When she moved to curl up under his desk where she’d slept for the past week, he caught her wrist, stopping her.

“We can both fit,” he said, eyeing her uncertainly before glancing back to his canvas hammock.

Maggie very much doubted it, but then she’d never lain in a hammock before. Perhaps it was deceptively spacious, perhaps like sleeping on a cloud. It seemed a very grave waste to sneak aboard a pirate ship and never try out a hammock, and she was desperately tired of lying on the hard floor. Even so…

Bash pulled his shirt over his head in one fluid motion, baring not only his bronze chest and the trail of dark hair that led to his waistband, but a ropey scar on his bicep that made her suck in her breath.

“Mags,” he breathed, sitting down in the middle of the hammock and drawing her close. “We can both fit.”

She stood between his legs, staring into the dark pool of his right eye. Brazenly, she flipped up the patch since he had not, a little surprised when he sat still and let her. Emboldened, she gently traced his cheekbone, avoiding the jagged scar. For days she’d been curious whether the eye was damaged from whatever encounter had scarred his cheek. Now she could see nothing but perfection as both eyes reflected back the starlight shining through a tiny porthole.

As if reading her thoughts he whispered, “It helps me to see,” turning his cheek a fraction as if to kiss her fingers.

She reached to flip the patch back down, but he stopped her. “No,” he said. “I want to see you.”

Something about his scruffy face and earnest voice struck her with a desire to kiss him, too, and instead of being troubled by the notion and dissecting its meaning at length, she gave into the novel urge.

In her younger days, Maggie had longed to be kissed. Every boy she met was evaluated based on the shape and plumpness of his lips. She had lain awake, night after night, imagining scenarios, tracing her own lips with an inquisitive finger. She’d begged Jory to describe kissing the Shaw Wretch, and though her cousin had been stingy with the details, Maggie gathered Finn wasn’t stingy with his tongue.

She’d spent hours scouring Ellen’s early letters, too, for details of the MacKenzie’s lips, hidden as they were beneath his bushy beard. To her own horror, she’d even once dreamt she let the MacKenzie’s younger cousin kiss her. Even more mortifying, her dream self had enjoyed it.

Then, all too soon, her wedding day had arrived, and with it, the moment Maggie had longed for. But when Jeremiah pecked her lips with his, poking her in the eye with his nose, everything changed. His kisses weren’t the stuff of daydreams. By turns dry and perfunctory, they were otherwise so wet and sloppy she thought only of drying her face on her sleeve. Every time seemed dutiful and calculated, but poorly executed. Rather than excitement or lust, kissing elicited calculations. When would it end so she could breathe again? Could she wipe the spit away without drawing his wrath?