Part 26 (1/2)

He simply nodded shortly in acknowledgment, then made a mockingly elegant sweeping motion with his arm. ”After you.”

She whipped around and all but fled down the stairs, her footsteps echoing.

Mademoiselle Lilette, whom she'd only now remembered, was waiting on the stairs.

”Thank you, Digby,” he said shortly to her, as if she were a subaltern who'd completed an a.s.signment.

Digby?

Olivia's head whipped around.

Mademoiselle Lilette was staring straight ahead. For all the world as if she were a soldier and Lyon was the commander.

As for the innkeeper, he was nowhere to be seen.

Olivia gave a start when a phalanx of men silently appeared from the night and fell into step with them, and Mademoiselle Lilette joined them.

The gray dawn light glinted off the swords swinging at their hips.

She doubted they were armed only with swords. These were trained men, disciplined and deadly. That much was clear.

But they weren't soldiers.

They looked like mercenaries.

She was politely, matter-of-factly helped into a boat by men who climbed in after her, and rowed out over an inky black sea that gently moved and heaved.

Lyon sat in the prow, ahead of her, like he had in church so many years ago.

He did not look back.

She'd never before been aboard a s.h.i.+p, and the strange, elegant, imposing bulk of it was fascinating. She craned her head and then gave a start as she met the downturned, shadowy gaze of a man in the crow's nest.

”If you'll come with me, Olivia,” Lyon said politely. ”You can wait for me in this cabin while I attend to a brief bit of business.”

Only an insane woman would consent to follow him below deck.

But in for a penny, in for a pound.

She followed him down a steep flight of stairs, though a narrow pa.s.sage, to what were clearly sleeping quarters.

He pushed open the door of a cabin, and waved her in.

”It's safest if you wait for me here. Please don't leave. I've some business to attend to on deck and I'll return . . . apace.”

He'd chosen that word deliberately, she was certain.

It was very nearly a monk's cell of a room. But it was carpeted, if not in Savonnerie, then something fine and Persian in origin, and the bed, nailed to the floor, looked clean and was crisply made with a blue woolen counterpane. A little desk with an unlit oil lamp sitting atop it was pushed against one wall, and a map of the Mediterranean was pinned above it.

Pinned across from that was a print from ”The Legend of Lyon Redmond” collection.

The one of him in the cannibal pot, his mouth a little ”O” of alarm.

She whipped her head toward him, astonished.

Humor briefly glimmered about his mouth. ”I thought it was funny.”

He closed the door and left.

She leaped up and tested the cabin door. She wasn't locked in.

And so she decided to stay where she was, as ordered, because she could think of no other options.

This wasn't where Lyon slept. Somehow she thought she would have known it. There was nothing of him in here. No shaving soap or brushes, no books, no trunk of clothes. It was clearly a cabin for guests.

And apart from pacing restlessly, which was one of her options, the other was to sit and wait. Perhaps pray.

Perhaps remember.

She sat on the edge of the bed. She hadn't a prayer of sleeping, but while her mind had never been more alive, her limbs were weary as the devil.

She leaned back and closed her eyes. Lyon. She thought of the last time she'd opened them to see him next to her. In that clearing, on the heels of new and shattering pleasure, beneath his hands, against his body.

Her eyes snapped open. She did not want to dwell on that now.

And then she frowned.

She was motionless. But she thought perhaps she was dreaming.

And then she saw the chair ever so slightly s.h.i.+ft.

The s.h.i.+p was moving.

The b.l.o.o.d.y s.h.i.+p was moving!

She leaped to her feet and bolted out the door with a slam, raced through the pa.s.sage, clambering, skirts hiked in her hands, up the stairs to the deck.

She whipped her head about frantically. The sails were full and the dock was already alarmingly farther behind them.

She found Lyon instantly, speaking to a member of his crew.

He saw her and went still, and said a single word to the man he was speaking with. It looked like ”Go.”

The man did just that, and rather rapidly.

He strode over to her. ”I thought I told you it was safest to remain where you were.”

”But . . . the s.h.i.+p is moving.” As if it was something they had accidentally overlooked, and could now rectify.

”Yes.”