Heart of Steel - Meljean Brook [38]
And perhaps Yasmeen would take to wearing a robe and demurely folding her hands, too.
Gritting her teeth, she pushed down the worsted wool blanket and swung her legs around. A film of ice covered the water in the washbowl. She shivered through her quick bath, and dressed in the new clothes that felt as stiff as her body. They’d wear in, eventually. Within a half hour, her damn knees would loosen up, too.
Rubbing warmth into her hands, she paced her tiny cabin, listening to Vesuvius’s crew go about their duties on the deck above. When the ship’s bell rang the hour and she could walk without shuffling like an old woman, she joined Barker and Jannsen, the ship’s surgeon, in the wardroom for breakfast.
Jannsen looked up from his book when she entered, and watched her over his reading spectacles as she crossed to her chair and sat. “You look well.”
“I slept well.”
“Did you use the sleeping draught?”
“No.” She preferred to smoke her opium—and she preferred to wake up aching rather than to wake up needing more. She knew better than to take a draught every evening; too many people went straight from a surgeon’s tender care to the bowels of an opium den. She glanced at Barker and narrowed her eyes. “Why the fool’s grin?”
“You owe me a drink. Tenner saw you leave the ship.”
Ah, her midnight excursion. When they’d been sailing out of London, she’d bet the quartermaster that she could slip away from Vesuvius without being noticed. Last night, she hadn’t even tried to be furtive; she’d asked Tenner to help her lower a dinghy to the water.
But she’d pay up, simply because of how good it had felt to be out and about again—almost as good as it had felt to straddle a naked Archimedes Fox’s chest. She hadn’t expected to take such pleasure in meeting with him. Even now, she couldn’t fathom how the anger that she’d carefully nurtured for months had been disarmed. Perhaps it had been his unabashed joy upon seeing her alive, and his earnest apology for his part in it. Perhaps it had been the dangerous stillness that had overtaken him when he’d determined to avenge her crew. Perhaps it had been the rough shadow on his jaw, the laughter in his emerald eyes, his easy grin.
Perhaps it was the fire that spread through her veins, kindled by every ridiculous word he said. If he hadn’t smelled like a bilgewater trout, she’d have stayed a bit longer and burned it out. No reason not to. They’d played a short game of chase through obstacles of his identity and the sketch, but Yasmeen wasn’t playing anymore. She had a single purpose now: to find the pig bastards who’d attacked her lady. It would take time and money, but she’d happily spend both.
Outside the wardroom’s porthole, the sky was dark, with only a faint lightening in the eastern sky. Work would begin soon. If today’s salvage expedition went well, she’d have reason to celebrate. There were worse ways to go about it than riding the sheets on a handsome man with a lean body and a silver tongue.
Not many worse ways, but still tempting enough to try it out once or twice.
Because the thought of that silver tongue made her feel generous, she said, “After I have my strongbox, I’ll buy you a drink and a pound of Guajaca coffee.”
Barker’s eyelids became heavy, as if his latest ladylove had just whispered into his ear. A weak version of the brew was a sailor’s staple, but as Barker often rapturously described it, the difference between the strong Guajaca blend and the drink aboard Vesuvius was akin to the difference between cream and whey.
Yasmeen rarely drank either, though the beans had once lined her strongbox with gold. To her mind, coffee was simply proof that civilization still existed in the New World after the Europeans and Africans had fled the Horde, whose khans and generals had believed that everyone beyond the Ural Mountains was a soulless barbarian. Yasmeen wasn’t inclined to agree with that belief, except for when she drank the barbaric piss that New Worlders called tea. But coffee was supposed to taste like barbaric piss, and the French and Liberé had