Page 47 of The Sea Witch
He shifted enough to make his chains rattle, evidence that she was entirely correct. “Persistent Priestley. That’s what they call me behind my back.”
“Not Pigheaded Priestley?”
“That has less of a poetic ring to it.”
“Fortunate that I’m not earning my bread and rum as a poet.”
Damn it, now he knew she had dimples.
“Hold fast to your dreams,” he said. “If you aspire to iambic pentameter, it can be yours.”
“I don’t know what the fuck iambic pentameter is. Before this, I was a fisherman’s wife, and there aren’t many uses for poetry when you’re gutting striped bass.”
He hadn’t known she had been married. Was the man back home, waiting for his wayward wife to return? Did that faceless husband understand her better than Ben did? Hard to imagine so, since Alys Tanner was here, sailing a pirate ship in the Caribbean, and not standing on some colonial dock as her husband’s fishing boat returned with the day’s catch.
“I can think of a few words that rhyme withbass,” Ben said.
“Is that so?” She glanced at him, an alert heat in her eyes, her tongue darting out to wet her bottom lip.
You couldn’t lie down to sleep beside a fox and then rise in the morning to hunt it. And who was the fox? Who was the hunter?
His silence lasted too long, and he couldn’t suppress the wavering contradictions. Contradictions she surely felt.
“Below deck for you, Sailing Master.” Her voice was wintry. “When we’ve need of you tomorrow, you’ll be made useful.”
She snapped her fingers, and Thérèse must have been standing ready, because she appeared instantly on the quarterdeck.
“Hold a moment.” Ben stretched out his hand. “I could be useful now. Give me something to do. Anything.”
Alys regarded him warily, with good reason. Surely, she felt his mercurial moods. They confused him as much as they did her. Long ago, as a lad, he’d gained his sea legs, but now on this ship, with this woman, his balance was gone and he didn’t know how to regain it.
The pirate captain’s long red hair streamed behind her like astreak of sunset pulled from the sky. Beneath his feet, the deck tilted even more, and the poles reversed, taking with them his sense of direction.
Yet if he was shoved into her quarters once again, he might do something truly foolish, like lie in her berth and imagine her in it with him, and try to convince himself she was different from other pirates, and he wasn’t betraying himself or his blood to wish it so.
“Madame Capitaine?” Thérèse asked.
After a long moment, Alys said, “Some sails need mending.”
“I can do that.” He didn’t like the eagerness in his voice.
“Take him to Fresia,” the captain said to Thérèse. “They’ll set him to his task. Mind they keep watchful over the needle in his hand.”
“Oui, Madame Capitaine.”
Alys didn’t look in his direction as Thérèse led him down the companionway and across the deck to a member of the company.
“I’m Fresia, the sailmaker.” They studied him from beneath a close-cropped mop of salt-and-pepper tresses, their deeply tanned face creased from life on the sea. “You know how to repair sails?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Just Fresia will do, Sailing Master.” They cautiously handed him a thick needle, though their hand never strayed far from the dagger in their belt.
Ben sat and began the slow process of repairing rends in the heavy canvas. The regard of all the women staring at him prickled. And all the while, Alys’s heat continued to blaze over his skin and within him.
Chapter Eleven
Even with the sailing master quietly going about the work Alys had made him do, her gaze kept returning to him like following the North Star.
