Free Gallant Match by Jennifer Blake

below.
    They stopped at the cabin presumably reserved for the use of her aunt and herself. The mate who haddirected them nodded and went away. As Sonia put her hand on the door latch and pushed it open, Kerr moved to block her way.
    She gave him a look of fulminating interrogation, but he only ducked his head and entered the small cubicle. Stopping in the center with his hands on his hips, he surveyed the dim corners, the Persian carpet that was its one spot of color, the bunks stacked one above the other with their tightly tucked sheets and blankets, the small commode table inset with a basin and pitcher and with doors underneath to conceal a chamber pot. It was not a difficult inspection since he could have touched the walls with his outstretched fingertips.
    His gaze alighted on a small trunk sitting at the foot of the bunks. Without ceremony, he caught one handle and slung it out into the corridor. That done, he gestured for her to join him.
    â€œWhat was that?” she asked in disdain as she crossed the threshold. “Someone else in occupation?”
    â€œA mistake,” he answered, his hands resting on his hip bones. “I’ll attend to it.”
    No doubt he would, one way or another. “One you anticipated?”
    â€œOn some vessels it’s first come, first served. I doubt you’d find the owner of the trunk an agreeable bunkmate.”
    She barely repressed a shudder. “No.”
    â€œFigured. In spite of the face paint the other night.”
    She had no one to blame for that remark except herself, as much as she despised acknowledging it. Turning from him, she held the door, standing stifflybeside it. “I hope you have no expectation of taking the trunk owner’s place?”
    â€œNever crossed my mind.”
    â€œYou have seen me settled. I require nothing else except for you to leave me.”
    He pursed his lips but didn’t argue. Nor did he try to hide the gleam of sardonic amusement in his eyes. Moving to the doorway, he ducked through it, inclined his head in a bow and took the heavy hatchway from her, pulling it shut behind him.
    She let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, permitting it to sigh between her lips like a child’s deflating pig bladder. She had almost feared…
    What precisely had she been afraid of? That Kerr Wallace intended to stay with her as a guard? That he would make himself at home in one of the two bunks? That he would take liberties because of the peculiar situation in which she had landed herself?
    He need not, of course, have made it so clear that he was disinclined. No, even if nothing he had done suggested his thoughts might take that direction.
    Mon Dieu, but she could not remember when she had been so aware of a man’s virile strength, his superior height and reach. If he had decided to stay, how could she have stopped him?
    He had not, nor was he likely to in the future. To him, she was nothing more than a responsibility. It was only that he’d laid hands on her, carried her as if she weighed no more than a peck of dried beans, clamped her to him so her knit britches rasped against the stubble of his jaw.She had felt the muscle in his cheek move as he clamped his jaws together from some reason she could only guess. She was not used to such treatment. Never in her life had she been in such an embarrassing position.
    It wasn’t that she had no knowledge of the rough-and-tumble ways of boys. She’d run wild for some years before putting up her hair and resigning herself to her lot as a female. Many were the mornings she’d sneaked out of the house with her cousins, the children of her father’s younger brother. They had played marbles in the dirt, walked the tops of brick courtyard walls, jumped the ditches that ran muddy with sewage and slops after a rain and fought barefooted and bare-fisted with the gangs of rowdies from beyond the Vieux Carré. She’d learned to