Free From Kiss to Queen by Janet Chapman Page B

sleep, Jane.”
    He covered her head with the blankets, holding her tightly until she sneezed again and finally settled down. Within minutes both of them were snoring—Jane with ladylike grace and Mark with relieved fatigue.
    *   *   *
    W ell, the next boat she saw blew her spy theory to smithereens. Countries didn’t call out aircraft carriers for mere spies trying to get home to Daddy, did they?
    Jane was running out of theories. If Mark wasn’t a criminal or a spy, then he must be . . . well, the president or prime minister’s nephew. But if their next rendezvous turned out to be a Sputnik space rocket, she’d have to guess
Mark
was the president.
    â€œYou connect with the most amazing boats,” she saidto the man standing beside her as they approached the largest ship she’d ever seen. “And they just keep getting bigger and bigger. I can’t wait to see what’s next,” she drawled—the effect she was going for ruined when it came out as a croak.
    â€œThey don’t get any bigger than that, angel,” Mark perfectly drawled back, even as he zipped her jacket up to her chin.
    He’d gotten her back inside the submarine, but only after promising it would stay on the surface and the hatch would stay open. Hating the boat almost as much as she hated her fear of it, Jane had stopped in the control room and tried to apologize to the captain for exposing all of them for her sake. Mark had gruffly said she needn’t apologize for anything, then swept her up in his arms—right in front of the captain and the entire crew—and carried her back to their room after a loud, English command to leave the hatch open. That last had been for her benefit. Heck, she wasn’t even sure the captain or crew spoke a word of English.
    Mark had left her alone to dress, telling her he needed to check on some details, after showing her where the communications panel was and making her promise not to lock the door against him. A man would be right outside—for her convenience, he’d quickly added, not to keep her from leaving. And no one would come in until she allowed it.
    Jane had found her clothes all cleaned and folded on the stripped bed, and then she’d found her brace. It had been sitting right out in the open on the desk, and she could only hope Mark hadn’t noticed. She didn’t like thefact that all men saw was her limp, and she sure as heck didn’t want this particular man seeing her brace.
    Sister Roberta would tell her she was vain.
    But Jane was just plain embarrassed. She especially never wanted Mark to see her skinny, scar-marked ankle and curled foot. It would disgust him, and remind him that she was just a crippled nobody from the backwoods of Maine. She liked that he thought of her as a heroine. Heroines were somebody—at least to the person they’d saved.
    Mark had knocked on the door ten minutes later and led her back to what he explained was the sail tower. But instead of climbing the ladder, she’d stopped and thanked the captain and the crew again for being so patient and understanding. Everyone in the control room had smiled at her, their heads bobbing in unison.
    And then Jane had really looked around.
    And then she’d gasped hard enough to stumble backward. It was like being on the set of
The Hunt for Red October
. Sophisticated equipment busily blinked and beeped and pinged, men were scattered about looking just as busy, and there was a real live periscope!
    Seeing her line of vision, Mark had grabbed her hand, telling her they had to be
underwater
for the periscope to be effective. Shuddering, Jane had let him help her up the ladder and back into the fresh air. Now they were watching the aircraft carrier—which Mark had told her was named the
Katrina
—grow larger and larger as they came closer and closer.
    â€œThe
Katrina
’s not in American waters, is she?” Jane