Page 30 of The Steel Rogue
“But he didn’t make your heart pound.”
“No.” She looked past him to the east just as the glow of the sun curled into the horizon and tinted the dark sky into a deep blue. “But I didn’t need it to. Not after what happened in the fire. That fire took everything from me—who I was. So I haven’t needed what I did when I was a child for a very long time.”
He followed her look to the sky. “The men will be rousing soon.” He motioned to the forecastle deck in front of them. “Shall we step up?”
She nodded, moving in front of him to climb the ladder that led upward to the forecastle. She stepped away from the top of the ladder and Roe popped up next to her.
They walked to the front of the ship, stopping at the railing, and she set her hands atop. The first true rays of golden sun jumped above the horizon. They watched them in silence until the orange red orb crested beyond the unending vastness of the sea.
Roe shifted, turning fully toward her as he flicked his head over his shoulder to the main deck and then looked down at her. “It was good?”
Her legs felt a thousand times lighter and she couldn’t curb the glee of it from her face. “It was glorious.”
A smile crept up to his dark grey eyes, so genuine, so heartfelt, that it lit the silver flecks shining in the glow of the morning rays. “Then you’ve made me a happy man.” He held his hand out to her. “And it is back to bed for you.”
Her hand lifted and she set her fingers into the warmth of his palm.
The jolt of his hand squeezing her fingers made her pause in her steps.
Without the slightest inkling it was coming, whatever had just happened in that instant shifted the world around her.
Shifted everything she thought she knew of him.
Everything she wanted to think of him.
And she wasn’t sure she liked it.
~~~
“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
Her breath stuck in her throat, Torrie set the tattered book next to her on the bed and her gaze drifted off onto the never-ending horizon of the sea meeting the sky, blue on blue.
Frankenstein.She’d heard of it, though had never thought to read the novel. Not until she saw Vally finish the last page of the worn copy a day ago, and she inquired on it. His face somewhat ashen, he pressed the book into her hands, telling her she should read it for herself.
It hadn’t taken but five minutes before she was obsessed, her fingers delicately flipping the pages wrinkled and barely legible from long dried salt water stains on them.
Her toes flexed on the bed, pulling the muscles of her calves tight. Three days of stretching her legs in the darkness with Roe just before daybreak and she was feeling light again—not weighed down by the unyielding tightness of her scars.
Just as she was about to pick up the book again, the door to the cabin slammed open and the mess of two men struggling with each other spilled into the room.
Torrie tossed the book to the side and lunged to the foot of the bed, her fingers grasping at the handles of the swords sticking up out of the open chest on the floor. She grabbed a hold of the gold filigree handle of the Toledo sword just as she realized one of the men was Roe.
Roe twisted, dragging a man a good head taller than him into the room. Weston—the man’s name was Weston if she’d heard correctly on deck a couple days ago.
Grunts, feet shuffling, muscle against muscle until Roe found leverage and yanked up on Weston’s wrist, twisting it behind the sailor’s back.
With a growl, Roe forced Weston into a spin and shoved him face first into the wall by the door, his right hand twisting Weston’s wrist even higher up the man’s back. He sank the length of his forearm across Weston’s neck, brutally locking him against the wall.
“Let me go you lily-livered bastard.” Weston’s bellow filled the room.
Roe shoved him harder into the wall. “Not a chance, you ass.”
“You fucking whore’s teeth offspring.”
Roe twisted his forearm hard into Weston’s neck, digging his elbow into the man’s back. “That the worst you got today?”
“Get your bloody hands off me.”