“You know, marriage. An engagement. That kind of …” He trailed off. I saw him go a little dead behind the eyes, steeling himself for my reaction.
I shoved him back, propping myself up on my elbows. “As if I’d want that! I’m seventeen. I have more important things to do.”
He regarded me with a strange half smile. “You’re not like anyone else, are you?”
“And you’re a liar, Markos. You said you hadn’t thought beyond this. You thought enough to come up with that little speech, didn’t you?” I flopped onto the pillow. “Marriage. I’m going to be a captain and a privateer. I’m going to be the terror of the seas. Whoever marries you will have to wear pretty dresses and go to parties and learn the names of a hundred boring politicians.”
“Oh, pretty dresses. That sounds like torture.” He whispered, “You’re really all right with this?”
But I was. The thought of any more change was too much to bear. Just for once I wanted to do what I wanted and let fate go stuff itself.
“Why are you smiling?” I asked.
“Because,” he said, “finally we’re doing something I know how to do.” He touched my linen undershirt. “Yes?”
“Yes,” I said impatiently against his hair, trying to untangle his jacket from his left wrist. The buttons were caught.
He fumbled with the ties at my waist. “Yes?” His hot breath tickled my ear.
I pushed up against him, and he grunted. “Yes.” I kicked my underthings down the bed.
He wrestled off his own clothes, and I remembered I’d seen him almost naked that one time on Heron Water. I hadn’t bothered to look very closely, because to be honest, I had not expected anything impressive.
Well. That had been a mistake. But it wasn’t only his bare body that made me gasp. He was covered in purple bruises and wore a tight bandage around his ribs.
“Hush.” He dipped to kiss my lips. “The physicians say I’m fine. It’s only sore.” We were pressed skin to skin. I felt him shaking, his breath an unsteady flutter in his chest. “Caro? Yes?” Catching his lower lip between his teeth, he waited for an answer.
“Why do you keep asking me?”
“Because.” A line appeared between his eyes. The muscles in his arms were tense. “I made a mistake that other time. I don’t want to do it again.”
“Oh.” I kissed him, but again he drew back. His lips slipped from mine, still stubbornly waiting. “Yes to everything,” I said.
The serious look on his face nearly killed me. I couldn’t figure out when he’d become so important in my life. It was like trying to name the moment you learned to breathe air. I tried to will myself to stop being nervous, but after all I liked him so much more than I had liked Akemé. So it wasn’t the same.
I felt him all over my skin, even the places he wasn’t touching. Curving my hands over the peeling sunburn on his shoulders, I thought my heart would burst out of my chest. Warm, his skin was so warm. And solid. And real.
A strange, hot hitch in my heart made me pull him close.
“I didn’t think I would see you again,” I whispered.
“I didn’t think I’d see you.” He buried his face in my neck, inhaling. “You shouldn’t have come back for me. It was dangerous and stupid.”
“That’s me. Dangerous and stupid.” I grinned, and that banished the possibility of tears.
What he did next banished them even further.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
A wherryman’s voice carries. It is both a blessing and a curse.
For us it was a blessing, because I heard Pa before he even stepped onto the dock. I flung off Markos’s arm, crawling to the porthole. It was my parents, sure enough. Kenté trailed behind them and Daria skipped between, wearing a flowered dress and a man’s hat.
“You have to get out!”
Markos began throwing on clothes. “I thought riverfolk didn’t have notions about their daughters’ purity.”
“They don’t. Well, not my parents anyway.” I added, “I think.”
He tucked his wrinkled shirt into his trousers. “Wonderful.”
“Ma might. But what can she possibly say about it? She took up with Pa, and they aren’t married.” I tried to scoop my hair together into something that didn’t resemble a bird’s nest. “It’s just embarrassing.”
There wasn’t much space in the cabin, so we kept bumping elbows and knees while we dressed, which somehow felt more intimate than what we’d done last night.
“It could be worse,” Markos said. “If we were in Akhaia I’d probably have to face your father at dawn.”
I stared blankly.
“A duel,” he explained, straightening his jacket. “How do I look?”
I smirked. “Your trousers are open.”
He swore.
“If Pa thought you’d hurt me, he wouldn’t bother to fight a duel with you. He’d just shoot you.” I buckled my belt. “Pretend we’re just eating breakfast together.”
“Which doesn’t sound at all suspicious.” He trailed a finger down my cheek.
A thrill shot through me at his gentle touch, but I pretended it hadn’t affected me. I unlocked the cabin door, and we climbed out into the common room. I was still wriggling into my boots.
He caught my hand. “How far away were your parents?”
“The end of the dock.”
Before I could ask why, he swung me against the wall and kissed me. I couldn’t help running my hands up around his neck. His skin was warm, and he smelled like me. We smelled like each other, I suppose, an appealing mix of sand and sweat and sleep. And probably other things that my parents, being neither stupid nor inexperienced, would recognize.
I couldn’t bring myself to push him away. His lips were soft and his tongue strong and lazy. He gripped a handful of my shirt at the small of my back. I wanted to crawl inside his jacket and stay there all morning.
“We have to stop,” he said, pressing me against the full length of his body. And then, no matter how much I felt like melting into him, I stepped aside. One of us had to halt this madness.
It felt so strange, after all I’d been through, to be accountable to parents again. I heard footsteps overhead and the hatch cover shifting.
Daria was the first down the ladder. Markos grabbed her from behind, lifting her. “Little badger.”
She squealed, but I knew she loved it. Tapping him on the nose, she said, “You look happy again. I’m ever so glad.”
“Hush, monster.” He tweaked her hat, and my heart flip-flopped. Seeing Markos being a good brother made him even more handsome. “What in the world are you wearing on your head?”
“My pirate hat. Nereus got it for me.” She peered at me from under its skewed brim. “It’s just like Caro’s.”
My parents and Kenté came down the ladder, and suddenly it was all noise and hugging and everyone talking at once. Pa’s gaze jumped from me to Markos and then back to me. I knew he wasn’t fooled by the three feet of space between us.
“But how’d you find out I’m not dead?” I asked.
Ma went briskly to the stove and began to pour coffee. “Nereus told us this morning.”
“Nereus? I didn’t—when did Nereus—?”