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He pulled her tightly to him and bent his head, caught the scent of milk and honey on her lips, smelled the crushed herbs and grasses beneath her bare feet, heard the roar of the sacrificial bulls in his ears.
Make love to her, every instinct screamed. No one will know. You want each other... The ground lurched beneath his feet and became the wooden deck of a ship. The scents of a night-time forest became tarred rope and sea salt, the roaring was replaced by the flap of a sail and the scream of a gull.
‘We’ll be over the side in this sea,’ Quin said and was surprised to hear how steady his voice was. ‘We’ve changed tack, which is why she is rolling so much more. Come and sit on this hatch cover—much safer.’
Cleo looked at him out of wide sea-grey eyes, her face pale under the golden tan, her lips parted. She had felt it too, that wildness, that reckless attraction. Thank God we’re on a ship, Quin thought. Nowhere to go, no privacy. No risk of this getting out of hand.
‘My clothes are wet,’ Cleo said. ‘I will go and change. I expect we will meet at dinner.’
Quin watched her go and forced his mind into some semblance of calm common sense. He could not seduce the granddaughter of a duke—not that much seduction would be needed, it seemed. He especially could not seduce the granddaughter of this particular duke.
The ship gave another lurch and settled into a new tack. Quin began to pace up and down the deck, glad of the exercise as a distraction from physical and mental discomfort. Leaving aside the moral issues, he was on a mission and he could no more compromise it out of desire than he could take money from a foreign power or gossip about state secrets.
To be utterly practical, he lectured himself, you cannot afford to make a mull of this. He had worked too hard to reach his present position and to risk it now for a few snatched kisses, perhaps a tumble in some empty cabin, was insanity. He was a mongrel pretending to be a pedigree animal. One day, with the right wife by his side, and with hard work and good fortune, he would rise to the top of his profession, serve his country well, gain his own title, sire sons to carry it on and shake off the stigma that he felt like a brand, however politely the whispers about his birth were ignored by society.
And he had to believe this was for the best for Cleo, however much she might try to kick over the traces when she discovered she was being handed over to her grandfather and not released into the life of independence she fantasised about. She was a well-bred young lady, however unconventional her upbringing, and she had a place in the haut ton. It was her destiny, Quin assured himself, and he owed it to her to make sure she achieved that position. She had saved his life and she had trusted him enough not to betray him to Laurent.
He just wished the nagging feeling would go away that he was clipping the wings of a falcon and pushing her into a cage. If only he did not have to deceive her.
* * *
‘How long will we have ashore in Syracuse?’ Cleo asked as the ship glided to anchor in the bay. She tilted the parasol madam had lent her to shield her eyes and studied the town that rose from the bay, a hill studded with buildings in golden stone.
‘The ship sails tomorrow as soon as they have filled the water casks and unloaded some cargo. I will need a few hours to make calls. I can see no reason for you to go ashore, Miss Woodward.’ Quin glanced at her, then back to the letter that had been rowed out to him from the shore.
‘Shopping, exercise, sightseeing,’ she said, modulating her terse words with her best smile. It was wasted as Quin folded the paper and tucked it into the breast of his coat.
‘You need nothing, there is the entire deck to walk on in the fresh air and the sights of Syracuse are infested with sailors, beggars, pickpockets and the riff-raff of a dozen nations.’ He glanced at her with scarcely concealed impatience. ‘I do not have the time to escort you and I do not know the crew well enough to trust any of them either.’
‘It cannot be worse than Cairo.’
‘True. No one is shelling it, there does not appear to be hand-to-hand fighting in the streets and I believe it is free of the plague, but then one can say that of many cities around the Mediterranean and I would not want you wandering about in any of them.’
Quin looked quite disgustingly fit, healthy and well groomed. The wind-blown man who had strolled around on deck, and occasionally even climbed the rigging, was suavely formal now. Not that she was going to show him that she thought so.
‘Why are you dressed like that?’ The wave of her hand took in pristine white linen, knee breeches, black stockings, buckled shoes and a strange flat hat under his arm. The embroidered baldric supporting a dress sword was visible between the edges of his coat as it crossed his chest, a flamboyant dash of colour beneath the midnight blue of his tail coat.
