“Fine.” But Neil’s response was resigned. Weighted down by God only knew what.
Yet that hand remained on her belly, his chest to her back.
And though that should have eaten up all her attention, in the hour that followed the men’s hard-won dinner, her scrutiny landed on another.
The intruder so close she couldn’t imagine how he had been missed.
Sitting on the floor, jean-clad legs stretched out, and the wall at his back. Not ten feet away. Boots pointed right at her. A man who looked every bit the cowboy yet utterly a pirate, lounged. So relaxed he had melted into the scenery.
Not dressed as finely as the men who’d spent their tickets for a few hours of shared female company. Lacking the tilted hat over his brow or the bit of hay that should have hung from his lips, he watched all around him in the lazy way of someone not to be trusted.
Eyes of an indeciphera
ble color from this distance took in everything.
And everyone made way for him, unless, like Joan, they approached in reverence.
How odd it was to listen to the madame list a quantity of items required for the girls. How easily the captain nodded that he heard her and acquiesced.
He could not have shaved in a week.
Probably smelled more like a man than the perfumed collection at Table #2.
Those boots caught the sun. Polished. Worn yet cared for.
Which spoke about character and habit. Drew Eugenia to slink off the lap of the man who’d traded tickets for a cookie sheet and access to uncovered skin. Yet, it wasn’t facing off against the captain that kept her feet going; it was inspecting those boots.
Crouched down until at eye-level, tapping her finger against metal embellishments, she said, “These might just be the cleanest shoes I’ve seen in six years.”
“Your ass is in the air. Unless you’re offering to the panting crowd, you might want to tuck your tail.”
That voice. Eugenia knew that voice. “It was you who pulled me from the water.”
“That I did.”
Dragging her gaze from those boots, she ignored all the rest of him—the open shirt, the exposed chest, the dark hair shining and in need of a cut—to get directly to the point. His eyes.
Hazel. Lined. Not a day under forty.
“I want off this ship.”
The man might have set a cigarette to his lips and lit it. But there was no cigarette, and lighters were worth more than a fast fuck. “No.”
“I won’t whore for you.” Not ever.
He gave her nothing. “We’ll see.”
“Listen to me, slaver.” She crept nearer, overcoming his legs so they might negotiate eye-to-eye. Woman-to-man. “You’ll be disappointed.”
The corner of his lips lifted. “I doubt it.”
Had he just winked at her?
Asshole.
Confrontation was no different than an elite university’s oral exam. He was no different than any of the men who might have had her in their clutches for a short time. No different than dirt. A prick deserving of the clinical Eugenia who aced every test and never said die. “This is a ship with three-hundred or so men and less than two dozen women. Where, from what I understand, thirty men a night dump their saliva-laden food and drink on two of the aforementioned women. I’m amazed there hasn’t been some outbreak that killed off half your slaves. And, as condoms are no longer produced and those available would have expired last April, I’d rather not be exposed to gonorrhea, which asymptomatic men spread despite the supposed physical examination all these rapist undergo—”
It was so fast his backhand landed on her cheek before she’d seen him go from lazy, lounging cowboy to typical violent male. The taste of blood in her mouth, the throb and heat that came each time a man had put his hands on her, led Eugenia to turn her head right back toward the captain. Again, they were eye-to-eye.