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For all he was a wretched brute, the touch of his calloused finger was soft, a whispered caress she was unprepared for.
Two agonizingly long breaths she sat suspended, unable to look away from his gaze, before his finger snapped away from her neck, almost as if a snake had struck out and bitten him.
He jumped to his feet, moving a step backward and to the side where he sat on the wooden barrel-backed chair. He leaned back, his fingers tapping along the edge of the desk.
A hot flush spread up her neck and she took a panicked sip of brandy. What was she thinking, allowing him to touch her? The liquid burned down her throat as her look darted about the room, desperate for anything to move her out of the awkward moment. His dark blue jacket lay crumpled on the floor, rolled into a haphazard pillow. Her gaze lifted to him. “You were in here all night?”
“Yes.”
“Sleeping on the floor?”
“Yes.”
Her brow furrowed. Why on earth would he bother? “You realize it’s not necessary? You don’t need to protect me. No man will touch me.”
His head tilted to the side for a moment as he contemplated her, then his gaze dropped to the desk where his fingers had moved to fiddle with the brass sextant. “What I realize is that I would have preferred you hadn’t explored the ship yesterday with Des. You stayed on deck for far too long.”
“But he said it was your idea. And you said I wasn’t a prisoner to this room.”
“You aren’t. Which is why I allowed it, requested it, even. It was my idea.” He shrugged. “That doesn’t mean I liked it.”
“Why would you bother to care?”
His eyebrow cocked, his gaze lifting to her. “You say no man will touch you, but I cannot believe you don’t realize that every man on this ship wants that very thing.”
Her mouth opened with caustic scoff. “Not with my legs. And I saw the way each of the men aside from Des gave me a wide berth—would walk in ridiculous arcs about my person.”
“They walk around you because you’re a woman on a ship. Bad luck.” He shifted in his seat, his nails finding a loose shard of wood on the edge of the desk and he picked at it for a long moment before setting his gaze fully on her. “You don’t see yourself, do you, Torrie?”
Her head tilted up slightly and she looked down her nose at him. It’d been her way since she’d been out in society in the years since the fire.
Judge before she could be judged.
But she knew what she was—she harbored no illusions on the matter. “See myself? Of course I see myself. I’m very real about what I am now, how the scars define me.” Her fingers tightened around the neck of the brandy bottle. “I’m absolutely honest with myself instead of trying to gloss over the reality of what I am, as you seem determined to do with this magnanimous captain act.”
His grey eyes flickered for a moment, a shot of fury, but it blinked away as quickly as it appeared and he leaned forward in the chair, setting his forearms to balance on his thighs. “You truly see yourself like that? Scars? That’s all you are?”
He didn’t rise to her bait and it sucked all the indignant fire from her chest. “No. I’m also jaded. The scars, the fire did that. Jaded me beyond repair.”
She sighed, shrugging her shoulders, and her head dropped forward as words slipped raw from her throat. “And I’m also tired—so very tired of this. I’m tired of walking through life as though it’s a dream. I have been waiting to wake up from this nightmare. A nightmare of the in-between.”
“The in-between?”
Her look lifted to him. “Between knowing what normal is but never achieving it, and death.” Her head bowed again, her gaze on the rim of the brandy bottle in her hand. “I am so tired of the torture of the in-between. Every day is a dream that I cannot wake up from, but death never comes.”
~~~
Roe swallowed hard against the hard rock wedged in his throat.
Shewasjaded.
Broken. Beyond anything that he’d imagined.
And he hadn’t realized it until that very moment.
She’d put up a good front the last six years—ever since she’d left her home at Vinehill Castle—with her marriage to the viscount, her acceptance into society. All a farce.
It broke his heart.
