Sweet. She no longer felt sweet—perhaps she never would again. She tipped up her chin and regarded him down her nose.
‘My dear girl, if you are shy of showing your legs, allow me to remind you that I have seen your entire delightful body.’ He sounded as though he was recalling every detail as he spoke, but was not much impressed by what he had recalled.
‘Then you do not have to view any of it again,’ Averil snapped. Where the courage to stand up to him and answer back was coming from, she had no idea. She was only too well aware that she was regarded as a biddable, modest Nice Young Lady who did not say boo to geese, let alone bandy words with some pirate or whatever Luke was. But her back was literally against the wall and there was no one to rescue her because no one knew she was alive. It was up to her and that was curiously strengthening, despite the fear.
He shrugged and pulled out the chair. ‘I want to see you eat. Get over here—or do you want me to carry you?’
She had the unpleasant suspicion that if she refused he really would simply pick her up and dump her on the seat. Averil fumbled for the sheet and stood up with it as a trailing skirt around her. She gave it an instinctive twitch and the memory that action brought back surprised a gasp of laughter out of her, despite the aches and pains that walking produced and the situation she found herself in.
‘What is amusing?’ Luke enquired as she sat down opposite him. ‘I trust you are not about to have hysterics.’
It might be worth it to see how he reacted, but he would probably simply slap her or throw cold water in her face—the man had no sensibility. ‘I have been practising managing the train on a court presentation gown,’ she explained, as she reached for the fork and imagined plunging it into his hard heart. ‘This seems an unlikely place to put that into practice.’
The stew consisted of large lumps of meat, roughly hewn vegetables and a gravy that owed a great deal to alcohol. She demolished it and mopped up the gravy with a hunk of bread, beyond good manners. Luke pushed a tumbler towards her. ‘Water. There’s a good clean well.’
‘How are you so well provisioned?’ she asked and tore another piece off the loaf. ‘There are how many of you? Ten? And you aren’t here legitimately, are you?’
‘I am,’ Luke said. He returned to his position by the hearth. ‘Mr Dornay—so far as the Governor is concerned—is a poet in search of solitude and inspiration for an epic work. I told him that I am nervous of being isolated from the inhabited islands by storms or fog, so I keep my stock of provisions high, even if that means stockpiling far more than one man could possibly need. And there are thirteen of us and we are most certainly here in secret.’
She stowed away the surname. When it came to a court of law, when she testified against the men who had imprisoned and assaulted her, she would remember every name, every face. If he left her alive. She swallowed the fear until it lay like a cold stone in her stomach. ‘A poet? You?’ He smiled, that cold, unamused smile, but did not answer. ‘When are you going to let me go?’
‘When we are done here.’ Luke pushed himself upright and went to the door. ‘I will leave you before the men eat all of my dinner. I’ll see you at supper time.’
His hand was on the latch when Averil realised she couldn’t deal with the uncertainty any longer. ‘Are you going to kill me?’
Luke turned. ‘If I wanted you dead all I had to do was throw you back or leave you here to die. I don’t kill women.’
‘You rape them, though. You are going to make me share your bed tonight, aren’t you?’ she flung back and then quailed at the anger that showed in every taut line of his face, his clenched fist as it rested on the door jamb. He is going to hit me.
‘You have shared my bed for three nights. Rest,’ he said, his even tone at variance with his expression. ‘And stop panicking.’ The door slammed behind him.
* * *
Luc stalked back to the fire. He wouldn’t be on this damn island with this crew of criminal rabble in the first place if it was not for the attempted rape of a woman. Averil Heydon was frightened and that showed sense: she’d had every reason to be terrified until he took her away from the men. He could admire the fierce way she had stood up to him, but it only made her more of a damn nuisance and a dangerous liability. Thank God he no longer had to nurse her; intimacy with her body was disturbing and he had felt himself becoming interested in her more than was safe or comfortable. Now she was no longer sick and needing him, that weakness would vanish. He did not want to care for anyone ever again.
The crew looked up with wary interest from their food as he approached. Luc dropped down on to the flat rock they had accepted as the captain’s chair and took a platter from the cook’s hand. ‘Good stew, Potts. You all bored?’ They looked it: bored and dangerous. On a ship he would exercise them too hard for them to even think about getting into trouble: gun drill, small arms drill, repairs, sail drill—anything to tire them out. Here they could do nothing that would make a noise and nothing that could be seen from the south or east.
Luc lifted his face to the breeze. ‘Still blowing from the nor’west. That was a rich East Indiaman by all accounts—it’ll be worth beachcombing.’ They watched him sideways, shifting uneasily at the amiable tone of voice, like dogs who expect a kick and get their ears scratched instead. ‘And you get to keep anything you find, so long as you don’t fight over it and you bring me any mermaids.’
Greed and a joke—simple tools, but they worked. The mood lifted and the men began to brag of past finds and speculate on what could be washed up.
‘Ferret, have you got any spare trousers?’
Ferris—known to all as Ferret from his remarkable resemblance to the animal—hoisted his skinny frame up from the horizontal. ‘I ‘ave, Cap’n. Me Sunday best, they are. Brought ‘em along in case we went to church.’
‘Where you would steal the communion plate, no doubt. Are they clean?’
‘They are,’ he said, affronted, his nose twitching. And it might be the truth—there was a rumour that Ferret had been known to take a bath on occasion.
‘Then you’ll lend them to Miss Heydon.’
That provoked a chorus of whistles and guffaws. ‘Miss Heydon, eh! Cor, a mermaid with a name!’
‘Wot she want trousers for, Cap’n?’ Ferret demanded. ‘Don’t need trousers in bed.’
‘When I don’t want her in bed she can get up and make herself useful. She’s had enough time lying about getting over her ducking,’ Luc said. He had not given the men any reason to suppose Averil was unconscious and vulnerable. They had believed he was spending time in her bed, not that he was nursing her. His frequent absences seemed to have increased their admiration for him—or for his stamina. ‘I’ll have that leather waistcoat of yours while you’re at it.’
Ferret got to his feet and scurried off to the motley collection of canvas shelters under the lea of the hill that filled the centre of the island. St Helen’s was less than three-quarters of a mile across at its widest and rough stone structures littered the north-western slopes. Luc supposed they must have been the habitations of some ancient peoples, but he was no antiquarian. Now he was just glad of the shelter they gave to the men on the only flank of St Helen’s that could not be overlooked from Tresco or St Martin’s.
Stew finished,
