Page 26 of Go, Rogue

“Hello, milady,” comes the tremulous voice of the cabin boy from the other side of the door.

“Could you please open the door?” Catherine asks. “It’s jammed.” She tugs on the handle a few more times for effect.

“‘Fraid I can’t do that. Cap’n’s orders. But I’d be happy to get you what you need. Also Cap’n’s order.”

“What I need,” she says as sweetly as she can muster, “is to be let out of this room. If you could ask that of the captain, please.”

She can hear his footfalls as he scurries away, and then sometime later, she hears the sound of him returning.

“Cap’n says you’re to stay in and there’s books on the shelf if’n you need to occupy yourself.”

“I think,” she says in her most winning voice, “that we can agree the captain may be a bit dim-witted about ladies, can we not? Not like you, young sir. You seem a very capable young man indeed.”

She pauses to let the compliment sink in. She would absolutely flutter her eyelashes, too, if only he could see her. “Are you sure you won’t let me out? I’d be very grateful.”

“Aye, the lad’s sure,” McGann hollers at her with a smugness that makes her blood boil.

After last night’s dinner and the bath, she’d thought, well, it didn’t matter what she thought. She should have known that Andrew McGann would never come to any sort of accord with her. He dislikes her too much.

“Though you might consider a thank you,” he adds. “Fresh water to bathe is a luxury even I don’t warrant.”

“I’ll thank you as soon as you let me out.”

“You’ll stay where I put you, lass. Until I tell you otherwise.”

“How about breakfast then?” Her stomach rumbles on cue.

“Breakfast was hours ago, when the rest of the crew was eating it.”

“What then,” she asks, not bothering to keep the exasperation out of her voice, “do you expect me to do with my time?”

She really should have known better than to be lulled into a sense of camaraderie with him. He’s never going to treat her with anything like respect, no matter what she says or does. And, she thinks with some embarrassment, she must have smelled badly enough he felt he had to give her a bath for his own sake.

Heavens.

“I suggest you read, lass. Supper will be around before you know it.” And then she hears the heavy cadence of his footsteps taking him away.

She turns from the closed door and frowns. He’s locked her in. While she’s aboard her first ever sailing ship. Of all the—argh!

She likes to read; usually she’ll read everything she can get her hands on, even all those boring agricultural and legal texts from Scotland when she’d been ill there. But that isn’t the point. She doesn’t want to read now. Not when she’s in the midst of her first ever adventure. Not when she’s an investor in the company that owns this ship. She has every right to be on board and not locked in a room.

She frowns and sinks down on the bed. She doesn’t want to do what he’d told her to do. But she doesn’t want to just stare at walls for the rest of the day either.

Fine.

She rises and peruses the bookshelves. She can read. She can do anything so long as it means she goes her own way when her feet touch ground in Boston.

She’ll be okay. She’ll be more than okay. She has her entire life, her entire life, ahead of her. Freedom is only nine days away.

She pulls out and rejects tome after tome from the bookshelves: navigation charts, books on shipbuilding and steam technology, the art of naval warfare.

Boring.

Catherine crouches down to find even more boring books on the bottom shelves. And then she drags the desk chair over to search the top shelves.

Where would she put her favorites? At eye level, of course. And McGann’s eye level is much higher than hers.

She steps onto the chair and begins to peruse the upper shelves of the bookcases, and sure enough, here she finds treasure. Two volumes of Robert Burns poetry and multiple Walter Scott novels.

Excellent.

And a whole row of books on Jamaica. She pulls one out. Long’s History of Jamaica. She slips it back onto the shelves and grabs Coke’s A History of the West Indies. There’s also Scotland and the Caribbean and one without a title at all.

Odd.

She pulls that one down and opens it, watching in confusion as something shiny falls out of its hollowed interior and clanks onto the deck.

“Menace,” McGann growls from the open doorway where he stands with a tray of tea and toast. “What in hell are you doing?”

She startles and looks up. She hadn’t heard him come in, and she’s still standing atop his desk chair.

“You did tell me to read,” she says.

“Aye, but I did not tell you to snoop.”