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‘Goat? Where the blazes did that come from?’ Quin demanded as the protesting animal was heaved over the side of their felucca. The steersman grinned and tied it to the second mast where it bleated irritably, rolling its strange slit-pupilled eyes at her.
‘I sent a message when we were loading,’ Cleo said. ‘We cannot count on getting fresh meat every day and it will go off quickly in this heat when we do. We may need the goat.’
‘And who is going to be the butcher?’ he demanded, then cursed under his breath when she simply smiled. ‘Me, I suppose.’
‘Then catch fish and we won’t need to lay a finger on it, except to milk it,’ Cleo said. The goat was actually in milk and she’d had no intention of killing it unless things got really desperate, but it was amusing to tease Quin. ‘You are very squeamish. Don’t you hunt things?’
‘Not things I am living with,’ he said as another villager heaved a sack full of greenery on board. The goat stopped protesting and started munching. ‘And it smells.’
‘Poor Delilah.’ Cleo leaned forward and put her hands over the goat’s ears. ‘You will offend her.’
‘That does it.’ Quin looked disgusted. ‘I refuse to eat something with a name. Delilah, indeed!’ He saw she was laughing at him. ‘What is so amusing?’
‘You! You are a big tough man and yet you are sentimental about a goat you have only just met.’
‘It is not sentimentality,’ he protested, but he was grinning. ‘I will catch fish and if you give them names as I haul them out I will hand them to you, all slimy, to gut.’
Cleo shrugged. ‘I always do.’
The laughter faded from his face. ‘You should not have to. You are a lady, not a kitchen drudge.’
‘A lady?’ She held out her hands with their calluses and the black stains where the pomegranate juice had got on to her fingers and the half-healed cut from cutting up meat for the skewers.
Quin caught them in his and turned them so they lay curved upwards on his broad palms. His fingers closed over as he stroked the swell at the base of her thumbs. ‘A lady,’ he repeated. ‘Are you not?’
My grandfather is a duke. Or was. Is he still alive? ‘My father is a baronet. I thought Americans were not impressed by titles and rank.’ Her hands trembled a little at the gentleness of his touch. So unfamiliar, this sensitivity.
‘We know how to look after the women under our protection, like any gentlemen.’ He seemed in no hurry to release her hands, even though it brought them knee to knee. When she looked into his eyes they were intent and darkened by something that only increased her perturbation. Desire? Longing? Or simply the concern of a friend?’
‘I will never live like a baronet’s daughter does in England,’ she said when she found her voice. ‘If...when I get away from my father I will have to work for my living.’
‘Don’t be so certain.’ Quin shifted his grip so their hands were palm to palm, his fingers sliding up to press against the pulse points in her wrists. ‘Like a bird tramped against a window pane,’ he murmured. ‘The beat of little wings.’
‘I am not trapped and I am not a powerless little bird.’ Cleo tugged her hands free and slid back on the bench seat. ‘There was nothing I could do here, deep in the desert, but once we reach civilisation I will—’ She broke off at the intent look on Quin’s face. ‘I will be independent. I have lived at the whim of men for too long,’ she finished. It would be just like him to decide to protect her from whatever she wanted to do. When she knew what it was.
Quin twisted round to get his back against the mast again and tilted his broad rush hat, the better to study the toiling soldiers. ‘Laurent is efficient,’ he remarked as though nothing had just occurred between them. ‘He has had to be, I suppose, for them to survive. Bonaparte left this army in a parlous state when he made his grab for power.’
‘At least under him the killing of civilians in France has stopped.’
‘You think it safe to go there? To find your in-laws perhaps? I would not advise it. France is a country at war on every front. You would do better to go to England.’
So much for any little fantasy that he might ask her to go with him to America. Not that she wanted to be with him, of course, but it would have been protection on the journey and she would like to satisfy her curiosity about Quin Bredon.
Laurent came striding over. ‘We are ready. I would have you remember that I am in command of this troop, Monsieur Bredon.’
‘But of course,’ Quin rejoined. ‘You command your troop, I command my feluccas and we sail in convoy with you while it suits me. I will see you at dinner, Capitaine. Or in Cairo.’
