Zoe Archer - [Ether Chronicles 03] (17 page)

F
letcher refused to look at her arse. In theory, anyway. But if Kali was going to wear trousers, trousers that
he’d
supplied, staring at her ripe peach of a behind was unavoidable. If a mermaid swam past a seagoing vessel, or a winged horse soared alongside an airship, he’d look. Yet he wouldn’t feel like such a damned hypocrite.

No, not a hypocrite. He’d been plain last night. He hungered for her. They’d struck a delicate balance, though. One he wouldn’t spoil.

But—
God
. Did she have to have such a pretty arse? Round and pert, perfect to grip. He’d grab hold of her bottom and pull her to him, and they’d . . .

“Find anything more?”

Her voice snapped him out of his trance. Tearing his gaze away from her as she picked over the remains of her cottage, he kicked aside a heap of rubble, revealing the gleam of brass and wood.

“Tools,” he said.

Face alight, she hurried through the wreckage. She bent over to examine his findings, and this time, he made himself stare at the pile of her salvaged belongings. The rain had stopped early that morning, leaving everything slick and muddy. Some of her projects—things he couldn’t begin to understand their function—were beyond recovering, smashed to tiny bits by the fallen roof. Her cooking apparatus now resembled a large crumpled rubbish bin. A few items had managed to survive in decent condition, and she’d greeted them like lost friends.

Her food supplies had been thoroughly spoiled by the rain. And her trunk of clothing had been partially crushed by the roof. The contents had survived, thank God. That morning, he’d given her a midshipman’s uniform, and though she’d expressed some worry about her prosthetic leg and the trousers, her movement hadn’t been compromised at all.

His moral fortitude, however, was being battered against an anvil.

“My rasps and pliers!” She sounded like a child visiting their first Mechanical Twelfth fair. He heard the clink of metal as she placed the tools in her satchel. “That’s nearly everything. Keep an eye out for my hammer.”

“We already found three hammers.” He’d discovered them and the majority of her tools beneath her destroyed workbench.

“Not my repoussé hammer,” she said. “Ah, wait—here it is!” Grinning, she held up a hammer with a wide, flat face and a rounded end.

“Ruddy fantastic,” he muttered.

Placing the hammer into her satchel, she stood. “What’s got your rigging in a knot?” She smirked at her own nautical reference.

“Didn’t sleep well.” As a Man O’ War, he didn’t need much sleep to function, only a few hours, but even that had been tough to come by last night. He’d given his quarters—and bed—to Kali, and slept in what had been the first mate’s cabin. The mattress lay on the floor because the bed frame had been destroyed in the crash, but that hadn’t been the source of his restlessness.

No, he was looking at the reason why sleep was going to be scarce, and she was surprisingly cheerful considering that her family’s cottage had been practically flattened. He would’ve thought that facing more wrecked buildings would trigger memories of Liverpool. But at least here, she’d been able to recoup some of her losses, and that seemed to be the difference.

Her cheerfulness dimmed slightly. “I couldn’t sleep much, either.”

Damn, he’d been so fuddled with Kali in trousers and having her aboard the
Persephone
, he hadn’t noticed the shadows beneath her eyes.

“Are my quarters too cold? Is the bed uncomfortable? There are more mattresses in the ship. I can move them in, and I’ll find something to seal up the windows so no breezes get in. Or was it Four? He likes to sleep on my chest, but if he bothered you—”

She held up a hand. “At ease. Or stand down, or whatever you call it. I had . . . other things on my mind.”

Their gazes locked. Her cheeks darkened, and he realized something—she’d been thinking about him, about their kiss. Just as he had.

“I’ll acclimatize,” she said. “A few days, and it’ll be just like sharing a house with my brother—if I had one.” Then she shook her head. “What a bunch of delusional codswallop. I’ll
never
think of you like a brother.”

Thank God for that.
Because if brothers felt for their sisters anything like what he felt for her, the world would be populated by people with single eyes or extra fingers.

“We’ll work on fixing this place up,” he said instead.

She glanced around critically at the wreckage. One of the walls had caved in, half the roof lay across the field, and the rest of the place was covered in mud and debris. “It seems like a forlorn hope.”

“We’ve got a Man O’ War’s strength and an engineer’s brains,” he insisted. “It’ll come together before you can say . . .” He couldn’t think of a single appropriate engineering term.

“Hydrometer,” she offered. “And I believe I just said it, but my cottage is still a shambles.”

He rubbed his forehead. “I think you were placed on this island to be my personal torment.”

Instead of scowling or taking offense, she only smiled. “Examine your karma.”

“What’s karma?”

“Bringing certain consequences on yourself, good or bad, because of past actions. Could be in this life, or from a previous one, but the result’s the same.”

Fletcher sighed. “I’m doomed.”

T
hey’d brought lengths of rope and planks of wood from the
Persephone
, and from this Fletcher and Kali fashioned a pallet. Apparently, she had used a special device to carry all her belongings from the ferry to the cottage, but this had been destroyed, including the ether tanks the mechanism used. He hadn’t thought to bring ether canisters from his ship, so they were left with a four-by-four foot pallet loaded down with her surviving possessions, ropes lashing them to the wood.

“If you bring me some ether,” she said, “I can jury-rig an apparatus to help us carry all this across the island.”

“Not necessary.” He grabbed the ropes that held her possessions onto the pallet, and began to drag the whole heavy mass behind him.

“Now you’re just bragging,” she said.

“Tighten your screws, madam. This is the fastest way to get your kit to the
Persephone
.”

She didn’t look convinced, and he didn’t blame her. It would have been a quick matter for him to run back to the ship and grab some extra ether. But he wasn’t above a bit of flaunting. The key word in Man O’ War was
Man
. And he was no better than any ordinary man, wanting to show off for a woman.

Moron.
He didn’t have anything to gain with this display.

Except that he wanted it.

After a last, resigned look at her ruined cottage, she turned away and together they made their way back across the island to the ship. The pallet did slow him some, and even with her leg, she’d manage to get ahead of him a little, treating—or tormenting—him with the vision of her hips and arse in trousers.

He’d seen many women in trousers. They still weren’t preferred over dresses, but a woman couldn’t be a shipbuilder or navvy or stevedore if her legs kept tangling in skirts. And he’d be a liar if he said he didn’t sometimes look, but he was always careful not to leer or let his gaze dawdle too long. Nobody wanted to be treated like a thing and not a human.

But, damn and curse him again, because he was mesmerized by the sway and curve of Kali’s hips, the length of her legs, and that delectable bum.

You made your bunk. Lie in it.

Yet how could he learn the feel of her skin if he didn’t know himself? Each day with her, the deadness inside him broke apart, bit by bit. But he was still coming to understand what it was to have her as a friend. What it was to be a man again, not a ghost.

Finally, his torment ended when they reached the
Persephone
and hauled her belongings aboard. She tried to refuse when he ceded his quarters to her, but he wouldn’t be gainsaid. His own possessions had always been minimal, and in less than five minutes, he’d taken up semipermanent residence in the first mate’s cabin. It was smaller, dusty, and littered with broken furniture and papers, but the mattress and blanket were clean. He carried an intact desk into the cabin—someplace for him to read—and with a lantern, all his needs were met.

He’d avoided the other crewmen’s cabins until now. It felt like . . . an invasion of privacy. Some of the men had taken a few things with them when abandoning ship, but there hadn’t been time for much. So Fletcher never looked at their personal letters and telegrams, their framed photographs, their journals.

Now he was living in First Lieutenant Walters’s quarters. Fletcher had seen Walters safely piloting the jollyboat away from the crashing ship, so he didn’t feel quite like a grave robber.

As Fletcher pushed Walters’s belongings into a corner, he wondered. How was the first lieutenant now? He would’ve been assigned to a new airship. They wouldn’t waste a man of his skill and experience on a seafaring ship. Crewmen and officers trained in aerial warfare were tough to come by. A good man, Walters. Young, and eager to learn, but cool in battle. It wouldn’t surprise Fletcher in the slightest if the first lieutenant was promoted after what happened at Liverpool, with the possibility of becoming a Man O’ War.

But no, Walters had had a fiancée. He’d spoken of starting a family. All impossible after the transformation. Though Walters’s fiancée might be willing to accept his metamorphosis and the loss of having children.

A furious banging pulled him from his thoughts. It was coming from his quarters. He hurried down the passageway, but his cabin was empty.

He found her in his washroom, on her back, a wrench in her hands as she worked on some pipes.

“I can’t believe you’ve gone four months without indoor plumbing,” she said without looking at him.

“Captains don’t learn how to fix their washroom pipes.” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the jamb. “There are woods nearby for . . . needs. And I bathe in the stream every day.” Since she’d arrived at the island, he actually bathed twice a day—once before seeing her, and once after.

She eyed him. “You really have been living like an animal, haven’t you?” Shaking her head, she resumed working on the plumbing.

“A healthy, clean animal.”

“This whole ship needs a good fixing up.” She sighed. “All the mechanical and engineering systems are in shambles. I suppose I’ll just have to tackle it piecemeal, or I’ll tear my hair out at the enormity of my task.”

At the mention of hair, he pulled one hand through his own wild mane. “And these fixing-up efforts will extend to the ship’s occupant, too, I wager. Cut my hair, give me a shave. Civilize me.”

She shot him another glance. “I’m not playing Beauty to your Beast. Clean yourself up or don’t. It’s your choice.”

Oddly, he felt a sting of offense that she didn’t care about his appearance. “I thought all women couldn’t wait to get their hands on a man and change him.”

Though she returned to her labors with the pipes, her voice was tight when she said, “Whatever woman tried to alter you was an imbecile.”

“It was my alterations that she couldn’t stomach. And didn’t think I was worth the effort to try.”

She set her wrench down and sat up. Her gaze steady on his, she said, “Then she truly was a dolt. It’s the man himself that matters, and you’re worth every effort.”

The toes of his boots became unreasonably fascinating. He couldn’t tear his eyes from them.

The subject seemed to exhaust itself, because she didn’t say anything else, but lay back down and continued working on the plumbing. They only spoke when she gave him instructions—it still jarred to have someone on his ship telling
him
what to do, but he’d have to adjust to this new paradigm. And, truthfully, he didn’t mind it. They worked well together. Over the course of the rest of the afternoon, he assisted her in getting the
Persephone
’s plumbing back in order. Water was taken from the nearby stream to fill the surviving tanks, and she scavenged from the ship to build pipes and whatever else she needed to make the
Persephone
more of a place one could live in, and less of a temporary shelter.

Watching her work was a pleasure—the intensity of her concentration, the confidence she used to make decisions, even the moments when she stared off into nothingness, thinking. He’d seen his ship’s engineers at work, but those men operated within confined roles, knowing exactly how each part of the airship functioned and what was necessary to keep them running.

Kali knew nothing about how an airship operated, but he saw her learn it, witnessed her encounter problems and propose solutions. And she never questioned herself. She simply thought the issue through and then resolved it.

“Don’t know if my presence here is really necessary,” he murmured as she put the finishing touches on the washroom in his new quarters. Dust and grime covered her, the finest cosmetic he’d ever seen.

“I’d never get the actual heavy lifting done without you,” she answered. “You filled the ship’s water supply tanks, which I never could have done on my own.” Then she grinned. “And the company isn’t bad, either.”

Company
? They’d barely spoken all afternoon, except when she asked him to hand her the soldering iron or hold a piece of metal in place.

She didn’t demand a constant stream of chatter—which he couldn’t have provided if he wanted—and though the sight of her in trousers provided a continual distraction, he’d been just as comfortable here as he’d been at her cottage. Strange, when the
Persephone
had been his solitary home for nearly four months. But she fit in well here.

“You might’ve made a good engineer on an airship,” he noted.

Tightening a valve, she smiled wryly. “Except the British Navy isn’t keen on women in its ranks.”

“That might change.” He leaned against the bulkhead, feeling oddly useless as she continued to work.

“I hope so. For there are many women who’d serve their country, if given the chance.”

His brows rose. “You?”