shudder ran through Royd’s large frame. She glanced at him; he was staring at his linked hands. His fingers were gripping hard, then abruptly they eased. In a low, almost tortured voice, he said, “I’d been the central cog in a long and difficult mission—I’d saved three thousand lives and got away with my crew and myself unharmed. I was...a hero by anyone’s standards, yet you didn’t want to know. That’s how I saw it.”
His chest swelled.
Her gaze locked on his profile, she didn’t expect him to say more, yet she waited, breath bated...
“I was so damned hurt! No, worse—it felt like a wound, a stab wound more deadly than any I’d ever taken.” His voice was raw, his tone harsh. “You were the only one I’d ever let so close—you were the only one who could ever have hurt me like that. And you did.”
The sounds of the sea—of the wind, the waves, the sails, and the gulls—surrounded them and held them in a cocoon of remembered pain.
Then he drew a huge breath and, raising his head, exhaled. “So yes, I walked away. From you, from us. From everything we’d been to each other.” More evenly, he stated, “There was no other way for me to go on.”
She didn’t need to think to know that everything he’d said had been the literal truth. His expression might be unreadable, impenetrable, but this was Royd; she’d always been attuned to his moods, his emotions. His feelings rippled over her awareness; she sensed them in the same way a blind person used touch to read.
“I thought then,” he went on, once again gazing at his clasped hands, “that while I’d been away fighting for king and country, you’d fallen out of love with me. That you’d changed your mind. That whatever had been between us, it hadn’t been love, the sort that never died—that that hadn’t been a part of our equation at all.” He lifted one shoulder. “What else was I to think?”
Rocked by the intensity of his feelings—she’d forgotten how powerful his emotions were—she felt as if, once again, she was reeling.
Then he turned his head and looked at her. The unshielded emotions in his gray gaze sliced effortlessly through her defenses; they might as well not have been there. Then he said, his tone hard but even, “You didn’t fight for us, either.”
She held his piercing gaze. “I didn’t know there was an ‘us’ worth fighting for.”
Royd held to the contact, to the steadiness in her dark-brown eyes; she’d ever been his anchor, his safe harbor through any storm. But this storm raged between them, created of them, yet it seemed they now stood at the eye, with the past behind them, but no clear view of what might lie ahead. Of what future they might have.
Your future will be what you make of it.
His father’s words. Oh, so true.
“Now we both know the truth of what happened eight years ago, is there an ‘us’ worth fighting for now?”
The critical question.
She didn’t look away; she felt the weight of the moment as acutely as he.
After several silent seconds, she drew breath and simply said, “I don’t know, but there might be.” Her gaze flicked past him, down the deck. “And then there’s Duncan.”
He followed her gaze to where their son was diving headfirst into his heritage.
He considered the sight, then replied, “As there is, indeed, Duncan, I suggest ‘might be’ is a possibility you and I need to explore.”
She returned her gaze to his face.
He turned his head and met her eyes.
Her gaze was steady and unwavering.
He realized he was holding his breath.
Then she nodded. “To confirm or eliminate—we can’t go forward without knowing...what might be.”
* * *
Royd spent the rest of the afternoon with William Kelly, going over charts and plotting the fastest route from Southampton to Freetown. He made no attempt to advance his position with respect to his de facto wife and his son until, seated about his desk in the main cabin, the three of them had dined, and after having cleared their plates, Bellamy produced a blancmange for Duncan.
How his steward had managed to concoct such a thing while at sea, Royd couldn’t imagine, but as he watched Duncan’s eyes light, he couldn’t help but smile. Duncan babbled his thanks, then attacked the treat. Satisfied, Bellamy withdrew.
Duncan glanced at Royd and—predictably—posed another question; having learned of knots and ropes to his immediate satisfaction, his interest had shifted to sails.
Royd dutifully listed the sails The Corsair flew, expounding on when each set was deployed and what weather conditions limited their use.
Throughout, his senses remained trained on Isobel.
The task of rewinning her was going to be a great deal more demanding than winning over Duncan, even though he suspected that more of what she’d once felt for him remained in her heart than she’d yet let him see. As far as he could tell, he had reason enough to hope that, under her prickly carapace, she still loved him.
God knew, he still loved her.
After their discussion in the bow—which he didn’t want to revisit even in his mind; just the thought of what had fallen from his lips left him feeling naked and vulnerable—she’d retreated somewhat. Just half a step, enough to think things through. That was her way. She tended to stand back and assess before stepping forward, while he forged on, assessing as he went.
That was why, in all their childhood adventures, she’d always followed rather than led. Not because she was any less adventurous but because she possessed at least one cautious instinct.
He wasn’t sure he possessed any such instincts at all. Any caution he brought to bear derived from a single-minded drive to succeed, to win—a recognition that sometimes winning required caution. In pursuit of a prize, he could be cautious. He could be patient.
He was going to have to be patient to win the particular prize he’d set his heart on. Dealing with Isobel had never been easy. Challenging, exhilarating, and satisfying, undoubtedly. Easy, no.
But she’d admitted to a “might be,” and at present, that was enough. He wasn’t going to push her; that way lay dragons.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t shore up his position. Not sharing all aspects of his life with her had been his critical misstep in the past; that wasn’t a mistake he would make again.
By the time Duncan had scraped every skerrick of blancmange from the bowl and downed the last of his milk, Royd had decided on his next step.
He waited while Isobel oversaw Duncan’s nighttime ablutions, then tucked him into the bed built out from the ship’s side and dropped a motherly kiss on his forehead. Royd stepped back from the doorway as she returned to the main cabin. Once she’d shut the connecting door, he tipped his head toward the door to the cabin he was using. “Now you’ve caught up with the past, perhaps you’d like to learn what I know of what’s going on in Freetown.”
