“Yer duty?” Cullen seethed. “And exactly what would yer ‘duty’ entail?”
He fancied he could hear an audible gulp from the other side of the blanket.
“You know…what a man expects from his wife.”
“WhatIexpect is for my wife to come to me because she loves me, because shewantsme. I’ll accept nothing less. So, until ye have feelings for me, please do us both the courtesy of staying on yer own side of this wall. He gave the blanket a kick with his bare foot. And if ye care at all, my given name is Cullen MacCloud, not ‘Dr. MacCloud’ when we are in the privacy of this cabin.”
With that, he gave his pillow another vigorous pounding and tried lying on his other side, in the hope of coaxing sleep to return, soon. However, another part of his body refused to stand down from high alert, so he finally gave up, threw on his clothes, and found his way to the top deck to pace until fatigue claimed him again.
Willa fought off tears after the sound of her husband’s pounding footsteps faded. Now what had she done wrong? She was ready to perform her wifely duties. Lots of couples ended up in the same predicament as she and Cullen.
Why was the stubborn Scot she’d married so insistent that she had to care about him? She shivered. He even insisted she should “want” him, whatever that meant. How would he know the difference? She could pretend, but had no idea what it would take to convince him she was in thrall to his charms.
She only wished he would let her endure the whole mess of submission, and soon. By her reckoning and the check marks in her journal, she had only a day or two of relative safety left before the next onset of her menses.
She lay dry-eyed for long minutes, staring at the ship beams above her head, remembering the last time she’d assisted at a birth aboard this ship. The captain’s wife had refused to remain home alone for her confinement.
Melissanda Still had died in a pool of her own blood, her stillborn child in her arms. Dr. Morton had done everything he could to save her, but could not overcome the great destroyer of women, childbirth. Willa, who had gotten to know the young woman quite well, held her hand until the end, when the light faded from her eyes and her grip slackened. Willa was just fourteen.
In the midst of one of his many turns around the deck, Cullen came to a kind of peace about his marriage. If the woman he was bound to never came to love him as he thought she should, who should he blame? If not love, might they one day at least share mutual respect? That would be a good place to start. He had nothing but respect for the former Wills, then Willa, Morton.
Before he met Willa, if anyone had told him he would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a woman in a surgery rent by the screams of a patient amidst blood and broken bones, he would have called the man a fool. And fool was he for assuming Willa would react to their marriage like a normal lass in love. Willa had not led a “normal” life.
When he returned to the cabin, he snuffed the burning candle in the lantern he’d left outside their cabin. He tried to make as little noise as possible, considering his hulking frame, but froze mid-stride to his side of the blanket “wall.” Once his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he could sense the outline of his wife sitting up on her bunk. He said nothing but moved carefully toward her and settled gingerly next to Willa on the narrow space.
When she didn’t flinch or move away, he brushed her cheek with his calloused fingertips. The dampness he encountered went straight to his heart, like a too-blunt knife scraping away rotten wood.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know what you and your family did was meant only to help me.” The silence stretched on so long, Cullen was afraid to move, torn between the need her lemon-lavender scent aroused in him and an intense fear of making a wrong-headed move. A move that might send her galloping off and away from him for good.
He could see her long, white, tapering fingers working at the fastenings at the neck of her nightdress. Instinct from God-knows where made him enclose her hand in his and bring those sensual fingers to his mouth. He suckled them one by one before touching his lips to her forehead and easing her back down onto her pillow.
“No,” she protested, reaching for his arms and trying to push herself back up. “I have to get this over with. I have only…”
Cullen put one finger against her lips. “Shhh, lass. I don’t want to be something like the pox or the plague, that ye have to ‘get over.’” He gently pushed her back down and covered her with the blanket. “Yer not ready to love me,” he whispered. “But that is not yer fault. It’s my job, big dolt that I am, to court ye and convince ye I’m worthy of being yer husband.”
If asked to describe the emotions tearing at her heart, Willa would be unable to summon the words. Her mind and heart seemed to have slammed down a gate between them.
She’d begun the evening determined to seduce her husband and get the inevitable shaming over before the window closed on the few “safe” days she might have this month. Now, she wasn’t sure what she wanted. For the first time in her limited experience, she could begin to see why women became pregnant despite the horrific risks and the best of intentions and precautions.
Cullen’s touches and suckling of her fingertips had shot straight to her quim, bypassing both her heart and mind. After he’d returned to his side of the “wall,” she’d heard some restless thrashing for a few minutes before a silence punctuated by the soft snoring whufflings she’d come to associate with the stubborn Scot’s deep sleep.
A week later, Willa stepped onto the gangplank with Cullen at her side, the crisp morning air turning their breath into puffed clouds. They’d spoken little during a hurried breakfast with Captain Still in his quarters, but now when Cullen took one of her hands in his meaty paw and gave her a shy look, she didn’t pull away.
Her return smile was not forced, in spite of her self-consciousness at the stiff, odd looks they were getting from various members of theArethusa’screw sloshing water and scrubbing the decks. The attitude now directed to her as a woman was unsettling, compared to the easy companionship and acceptance she’d enjoyed over the years as a man. The questioning looks in their eyes at every packet of medicinal powders she’d given them, every suggested treatment, was confounding, not to mention unsettling, after years of assumed trust when she was Wills Morton.
As a result of her husband’s seemingly endless patience, and the blanket “wall” he’d erected, Willa had spent many nights in her darkened share of the space listening to his whispered tales of his childhood in the Highlands, and finally relenting to share some of her experiences on the ship at her father’s side in the surgery: the moans of dying men, the horrible screams of men having limbs cut off. She admitted that her father was well loved by all the men of the crew for the speed and efficiency with which he performed amputations. And she’d shared the good things, like the night before she’d gone away with Cullen, when she’d saved the beautiful mare at the stable dying in the throes of a difficult birthing.
Cullen hadn’t returned to her side of the blanket since the fateful night he’d first touched her. The “safe” part of the month had passed, but she lay each night wondering if he would return, listening for the now familiar sounds of a man deep in slumber. The way he’d fall asleep in the middle of an argument was maddening. Whenever she’d marshal a rebuttal to some wrong-headed idea of his about running the surgery, she’d hear soft, whuffing snores from the other side of the blanket.
She’d made arrangements to return to the dressmaker’s shop for additional fittings of the work dresses she’d ordered for the long voyage to come. The ship had been provisioned for the journey of many weeks to St. Helena, in addition to a side trip the captain had just revealed would make the voyage even longer. They were to divert to Gibraltar to deliver two unnamed passengers before continuing back out into the Atlantic to sail south to Napoleon’s remote prison island, more than five thousand miles away.
The long walk to the modiste’s shop brought a warming glow to her cheeks she could feel in the nip of early morning air. She sneaked a secret look at Cullen and was oddly pleased by the fact he seemed to enjoy a brisk pace without slowing to accommodate her. She kept up easily, enjoying the stretch of her legs after so many days of sitting on a stool in the surgery, preparing doses of treatments for the months ahead.
“What machinations and intrigues are going on behind those gray eyes this morning?” Her husband was teasing her again.
She gave him a gentle push against his solid, immoveable frame. “There’s so much to be done yet. I suppose I’m going over the many lists swirling around in my head.”
“You are not alone. You do know that. I’m here.”
