Page 17 of The Steel Rogue
Her hand dropped away from him. “I’m sorry, but yours was the first one I saw when I woke. I keep a chamber pot on my bedside table because I wake up too often having to heave from the dreams. But this isn’t my bed and there was no pot to be seen when I woke. So I went to your boot. It was the first thing I saw. ”
He stilled, his look pinning her. “The dreams?”
Her mouth clamped closed. The words had left her tongue without thought and she would give anything to have them back in her mouth.
“What dreams, Torrie?”
“No.” She shook her head. “No. I don’t look back. And especially not with the likes of a bastard like you.”
What should have sparked his ire and sent him storming out the door only made him grow more still, his voice dropping low. “Yet you do look back.” His dark grey eyes pierced her. “At least in your dreams. What are they?”
She shook her head, her arms wrapping around her stomach.
“If you don’t look back, then what is the bother with telling me what the dream is that makes you wake up retching?”
Her jaw shifted to the side as she met his stare. He was twisting her into a corner. Admit she looked back all the time, or tell him about the damn dream. Devil.
She sighed, her arms clamping tight across her middle. “It is only in my dreams. I am back there. Back in the day after the fire. The pain of my burns, the pain of losing my family. I heaved for days. Heaved and retched until my body was exhausted and I would pass out. Then I would awaken and I would heave again and again. They didn’t think I would live past the first days.”
“But you did.”
“Aye.” Her eyes closed, her head shaking, her left hand flitting in the air. “It is nothing, now. Nothing can compare to that pain, but I sometimes dream of that day and my body thinks I am in that agony again and I wake up heaving, needing to vomit.”
“Sometimes? You said you keep a chamber pot by your bedside for when it happens. That doesn’t sound like sometimes. That sounds like often.”
Her bottom jaw jutted out. “It is what it is. I manage it and I don’t let it go past those moments after awaking.”
“Except when you decide you need to be the one to mete out justice and follow the bastard you want revenge against into the most dangerous part of town?”
Her mouth closed, her tongue grinding along the back of her teeth. She looked down at his hand still holding the boot and flipped a finger out toward it. “Why would you leave your boots in here anyway? If you’d worn them like a proper man, I never would have retched into them.”
He shrugged, looking down at the well-worn black leather. “I don’t like them, wearing boots. I lived too long with none on my feet.”
His mouth stayed open, about to say more, but then he closed it and abruptly turned from her, exiting the room with a lopsided stride and closing the door behind him.
He took his boot with him.
~~~
A polite knock on the door sent Torrie to her feet in front of the bed.
Her mouth closed, it was silent long enough, that the knock echoed into the room again.
Too polite.
Mr. Lipinstein wouldn’t be that courteous. No. He had a right to any and every thing in this room and would never lower himself to knocking.
She hadn’t put her stockings and boots back on, so she bent slightly at her knees, letting her skirt drape all the way to the floor to cover what little of her ankles could be seen. “Come.”
The short door cracked open and a man almost as tall as Mr. Lipinstein ducked into the room. “My lady, I have been requested to bring you on deck.”
She blinked hard. Overlooking the rumpled clothes of a sailor, the man was handsome. Strikingly so. Not only that, he held himself with the air not of a deckhand and there wasn’t the common slur in his words she’d heard before in sailors. A passenger, perhaps?
“On deck? What for?”
“Forgive me, I should have introduced myself.” He inclined his head slightly to her. “Desmond Ulrich, first mate. Call me Des.”
“So you are a sailor.”