“I know, but…this would not be an embrace exactly.”
He hesitated, then crossed the small cabin and slid his arms around her, taking her in a light but protective grasp.
Gratefully, Kate buried her face in his chest. She could feel the steel warmth beneath the cambric fabric of his shirt.
When a short while later he reached up to smooth her hair tenderly, she let out a sigh. She felt safe with Deverill; she always had. She wished he could stay here with her all night long. She needed the sense of security he gave her. But of course they couldn’t spend the night together without the benefit of marriage.
For a time he simply held her. Then pressing a light, chaste kiss on her forehead, Deverill stepped back.
When she looked up at him regretfully, he reached up and gave a featherlight blow to her chin with his knuckles. “Buck up, sweetheart. If you need me, I will be close by. Only two doors down from yours.”
The calm timbre of his voice was reassuring, so Kate forced herself to let him go. When the door closed behind him, she took a shaky breath.
She had to be brave. Even a fraction as brave as Deverill had been when he went off to fight a war he had never wanted.
Still, she knew it would be a very long night.
Leaving Kate in distress like that was hard, but protecting her reputation was more important, Brandon decided.
Falling asleep was also hard, he shortly discovered. The moment he shut his eyes, memories assaulted him—brutal recollections of hostilities against various British warships. The explosions of cannon fire. The stench of gunpowder and smoke and blood. The agonized cries of wounded, dying men.
All dredged up during his confessions to Kate this evening.
Confessions that were unfamiliar and foreign to him in their intimacy. Merely the fact that he’d disclosed his own nightmares to her was frankly remarkable.
He hadn’t always been so closed off. The change had begun with his homecoming after his first successful battle at sea. With blood on his hands, he hadn’t wanted or deserved the hero’s welcome he’d received. Neither had he expected his family’s macabre relish at his defeating the enemy so soundly. His father had been triumphant, his mother gleeful, his younger brother excited.
At least his brother’s naïveté came from being fed tall tales of glorious naval victories during his sheltered and pampered youth. But, Brandon acknowledged, he should have predicted his parents’ responses. His father had always been reserved and dictatorial, his mother proud and aloof. Both were possessive and vengeful when it came to preserving their dynasty and business investments.
Locking his jaw, Brandon rolled over in the narrow bunk and punched his pillow. For certain, he never wanted to become like his father, nor would he ever want a wife like his mother.
An image of Kate leapt into his mind. The contrast between the two women was so stark. His mother was cold
and selfish while Kate was warm and generous and passionate.
Kate reveled in emotions—and was trying her damnedest to draw them out of him, despite his resistance.
Since the war, he’d forcibly constrained his emotions. Deliberately focused on forgetting the dark memories. Purposely avoided the pain that any sort of feeling brought. Yet tonight, for the first time in years, he had truly lowered his defenses.
Just as astonishing, sharing his feelings with Kate had felt…good. Strange but good.
Tonight Kate had also made him aware of something else: For a long time he had felt alone. Alone and incomplete and empty. As if a part of him was missing.
His heart, perhaps?
If so, could she help him find that missing organ?
It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Kate invoked his protective instincts—mightily—yet he sensed she had something he badly needed: That comforting feeling of sharing. Of togetherness. Of completeness.
Even more profound, the elusive prospect of joy that was genuinely alien to him.
He would never be the kind of man to let his emotions rule, Brandon knew, but more and more of late, he felt sensations bubbling up from the dark crater where he had long ago buried them. Something resembling hope.
Another realization struck him: He could try to become the man Kate wanted him to be. Not only to win her hand in marriage, but for his own sake as well.
If he could let himself feel, perhaps he could banish the emptiness inside of him. More crucially, perhaps he could fulfill the promise of a future with Kate that even now seemed maddeningly out of reach.
—