Page 100 of Go, Rogue

She stops speaking and stands, staring at him with those eyes that are so damnably, oceanically blue a man could drown in them.

“Oh.” She says it softly. “What more do you want?”

He reaches out his hand to her to draw her near. “I want to be back on my ship with you in my arms and weeks to go before we arrive in any port. Somewhere far-flung and desolate except for us. And less bloody hot. I want to not think about this catastrophe a moment longer. Not tonight anyway. And I want, for just once in my life, to have a good choice to make instead of a long list of shite ones.”

“You’ll make something good of this, Andrew,” she says so earnestly that he very nearly believes her. “I know you will.” She cocks her head. “Listen.”

The rain he knows has been coming begins to fall. And not the slow-forming drizzle of London, either. This is something else entirely—a sudden, torrential, tropical downpour.

“Aye. I hear it.”

“Will it flood the roads, do you think?”

“Likely. For a time, anyway.”

“Well, then. I suppose I’ll just have to stay here and pretend we’re back on The Elphame.”

She tugs lightly on his hands so that he rises. Pain floods through his leg at the movement, and he knows he fails when he tries to cover his flinch.

Catherine watches him move and knows it hurts him. She nearly tells him to wait, that there’s no rush, but he turns to look at her with so much want in his eyes that she doesn’t.

She’ll give him whatever she can, because she wants the same. To be here, together, in a world apart from everyone and everything else. To lay in his arms and hold him. To inhale that scent of his—peat and rain and oceans and mountains and wild ginger and plumeria. The best of Scotland and Jamaica. Just like him.

The best, she thinks, of everything.

She settles herself on the bed of grass and beckons him over. He tries again to cover the grimace he makes when he moves but she notes it anyway. She wonders how it makes him feel, a man who’s always been so hale, now hobbled. Another thing they’ll have to speak of—but not tonight.

Tonight is for love. For kisses and embraces and intimacy. For delicious dreaming and that blissful dichotomy of passion and trust that she’s only ever felt with him.