“Not.”
“Am.”
Alex made his hands into fists. What he wanted to do was throw her over his shoulder and tie her to a tree. He’d pay someone to free her four hours after they’d sailed away—or maybe it should be six. She could move quickly.
“I don’t like the way you’re looking at me. I’m going and that’s final.”
“And do what? Dress the men’s hair? Mend their clothes? I heard that you’ve had some practice in doing laundry. I know! How about if you do the cooking?”
Cay wanted to rattle off the list of credentials of her artistic education, but she made herself keep quiet. His remark about the laundry reminded her that he knew things about her family that must have come from someone who knew them. The logical person was Uncle T.C., but she’d never known him to talk about much of anything except plants. Whatever the source, Alex knew personal, private things about her and her family. However, it was strange that Alex didn’t seem to know that Cay could draw and paint. Usually, she had a sketchbook and pencils with her. She rarely went anywhere without the means to draw what she saw, but on the night she met Alex, she’d been going to a ball, so her drawing equipment had been left at home. And since then, everything had been so new and strange that she hadn’t thought much about art.
Now, it seemed that Alex’s not knowing about her might be a very good thing. “You said that anyone could draw. If I remember correctly, you said, ‘How hard can it be?’ Can you draw?”
“A bit,” he said. “Believe it or not, I had a drawing master who trained in London.”
“You were meaning to take on the job of recorder for yourself, weren’t you?”
“I thought about it.” Alex was smiling.
She wanted to kick him! What else had he kept from her? “How about if we both do a few drawings and let Jamie decide which of us will record this trip for posterity?”
Alex kept smiling. “Lass, I should warn you that I was the best in my class at drawing.”
“Were you?” she asked, trying to sound impressed.
“Aye, I was. I liked going out into the heather and drawing the animals I saw. If I hadn’t been a horseman, I could have . . .” He shrugged. “What training have you had?”
“Mrs. Cooper’s Academy for Young Ladies,” she said quickly. “We used to paint china teacups.” This was true, but she didn’t tell him it had been when she was four and she’d painted her family’s portraits on the cups—which had made her mother hire the first of several private drawing masters.
“Did you now?” He was smiling so hard it was nearly a smirk. Alex was confident that he’d win any artistic competition. If his sister was good at art, Alex was sure Nate would have told him so, and since he hadn’t, Alex figured that she’d had only a little training. Teacups! She had no idea what a journey like this required. She had to be able to draw fast and accurately.
“Is it a deal?” she asked. “We’ll have a competition and we’ll let Jamie be the judge. If he says that I’m no good, then I’ll return to the boardinghouse and stay there until Tally comes for me. Is it a bargain?”
Alex frowned. She was saying all this with such confidence that he thought there was a trick. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing. I just want to go with you and I’m going to do my absolute best to outdraw you. If you’d suggested pistols at dawn I might try to do that, too.”
“All this so you can go with this man Armitage?”
“That and other things.”
“Tell me, lass, is it the man or his money you want?”
For a moment, she had to fight the urge to slap him, but she refused to sink to his level. “His money, of course, since, according to you, I want to marry men even though I have no love for them. Maybe you think I’m incapable of love. Is that what you think? That I’m too coldhearted to love anyone?”
Alex was blinking in confusion. “How did we go from drawing to cold hearts?”
Cay threw up her hands in disgust. “You’re an idiot, and worse, you’re a male.” She moved past him with a gesture that said she was sweeping aside her skirts so they wouldn’t touch scum like him.
Alex leaned his head back against the wall of the building and looked upward. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that maybe he’d just agreed to let her go on a very dangerous trip into the wilds of a jungle. And the worst of it was that he had no idea how it had happened.
Sixteen
Alex watched Cay walk toward the dock. Her head was up, her chin out, and she walked with the determination of a man about to enter into a fight. In spite of himself, he couldn’t help feeling proud of her. It was impossible to believe that this was the same girl he’d first met.
But his pride in her didn’t quash his resolve to keep her from going on the trip. He couldn’t tell her that the real reason he didn’t want her with him was because he knew that if they spent more time together, he wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off of her. He couldn’t spend more days watching her strut around in her snug little breeches and not touch her. Since they were supposed to be brothers, they’d no doubt be expected to spend the nights together in a tent. How could he do that?
When they’d first started traveling together, Alex had been so angry, so full of rage and hatred, that he could have slept next to a dozen naked women and not taken advantage of what they offered.