Page 23 of The Sea Witch
“It’ll mean preserving your life for a little longer.” She studied him thoroughly, as if he could be read like the waves or the stars. “Are you so proud, Sailing Master, that you won’t try to stay alive for as long as you can?”
He held up his manacled wrists. “I’m your captive, but my pride belongs to me alone.”
Something like respect shone in her hazel eyes when he said nothing more. “Very well, Sailing Master. I’ll spare you tonight. But by morning, I may change my mind and heave you overboard for the reef sharks.”
“I am not reassured.”
She stepped forward to weave her fingers into the hair at the back of his head. It was almost, almost like a lover’s embrace.
“I don’t care if you are or not,” she murmured, tightening her grip so that tingling pain crept down his neck and along his shoulders. “Have faith when I tell you that I won’t hesitate to end your life themomentyou endanger me or my company. Understand that. Understandme.”
In the whole of his life, he’d never met a woman with as much lethal confidence, as muchpower, as Captain Alys Tanner. A thrill of something ran the length of his spine, and it wasn’t entirely fear or disgust or anger.
“Understood,” he replied.
She didn’t let go of him right away. Her grip on him lingered, and the narrow space between them seemed to grow vibrant and alive. Was she beautiful? All he knew was that he was profoundlyawareof her, from the freckles scattered across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose to the unexpectedly rosy hue of her lips and the hollow of her throat, where a few pearls of sweat collected.
Her gaze dipped to his mouth.
“Alys,” the quartermaster said loudly. The magpie also twittered.
The captain released him so abruptly that he had to fight to regain his footing. She took a jagged breath.
“Tell Faith to bring me a hammock,” she finally said to Stasia.
“Your berth seems fine enough,” the quartermaster replied.
“It’s not for me,” Captain Tanner answered. “It’s for him.”
Ben started. “Me?”
She regarded him with a smile that could only be called predatory. “You may yet prove useful to us, Sailing Master. I’m keeping you close. You aren’t to set foot outside my cabin.”
“I’m unarmed,” he answered. “Manacled, shackled. Without magic, when many of your company are witches. Surely you can trust me with your crew.”
“This is foryourprotection more than theirs. If you’re in the brig, it’d be an easy enough thing for a member of my company to slip into your cage and slide a dagger between your ribs or cast a spell to turn you inside out.” One of her brows arched up. “The safest place for you is beside me.”
He stared at her. Trapped inside the captain’s quarters... with the captain herself.
Safe? Hardly. Not with uncertainty and menace thick about him, like sharks circling bleeding prey.
Chapter Five
“Of your many good ideas, this is not one of them.” Stasia spoke lowly to Alys, as two of the crew set up a hammock at one end of Alys’s great cabin. It was a typical canvas hammock, no different from the other ones used by the rest of the crew. Neither a punishment nor a reward. Or so Alys told herself.
“I’ve run through several scenarios,” Alys answered, “and this is the best option. He knows the Caribbean, better than any of us. Assets as valuable as him don’t simply get caught in our trawling net. If I do this, I’ll need him here, and safe.”
“What aboutyoursafety?”
“The sailing master is shackled, manacled, and unarmed.” She glanced toward the man in question, who stood near the large window and gazed around her quarters with a keen and interested eye.
If he was looking for telltale details that might give him more insight into her, he’d not have much luck searching the great cabin. There was the usual assortment of furnishings taken from plundered ships, including a French tapestry and a collection of gilded Spanish bowls that were nothing like the plain wooden ones she’d eaten out of back home. Alys still couldn’t bring herself to eat from the gilded bowls, though, so they sat unused on her shelves.
When Alys had fled Norham, she’d taken the barest of essentials. Nothing from home held sentimental value, save for a compass, and the seashell Ellen had given her long ago, which now resided in a locked drawer in Alys’s desk.
His sharp gaze fell on one of her few personal possessions that held any true meaning: between books on seamanship and navigation, there was a small painting of a woman reading by the light of a single candle, rendered in the Dutch style. The woman resembled Ellen, not so much in appearance, but in thoughtful, absorbed disposition. Yet he couldn’t know this, and nothing in and of itself in the painting gave anything about her away. Even so, merely seeing him have this tiny glimpse into her made the impossible happen: she blushed.
“I can’t sleep through a mosquito sneezing,” she added. “With those irons on him, he won’t scratch his bollocks without me hearing. Any attempted attack during the night will be met by a spell that summons the energy of a bear snapping saplings to break every bone in his hands.”
