Page 24 of Hooked By a Hero
Tumbrill shook his head and marched off. Dick stayed where he was for a while longer, as if he could somehow bully Caspian into making the wind more favorable. When Caspian barely reacted and gave him nothing to work off of, he, too, walked away.
Days continued in the same manner. The passengers were quiet and wary, Tumbrill and Dick bickered as much as they crowed over their coup, Elias went to heroic lengths to help the sick and injured aboard the ship and to maintain morale, and Caspian felt wearier and heavier with each day that passed.
“Caspian, you’re not well,” Elias said after another week had passed. “Is it a fever? Have you been out in the sun too much?” He placed a hand on Caspian’s forehead.
Caspian smiled, despite how ill he felt. He had moved back to sit against one of the blocks that some of the rigging ropes were tied to while an able-bodied seaman took the wheel. “I am well enough,” he said, though he wasn’t certain how true that was.
Elias made atskingsound, which had Caspian smiling even more. “You do not have a fever,” Elias said, shifting to hold Caspian’s face in both hands and to tilt it up so he could look into Caspian’s eyes with the assessing gaze of a physician. “You’re clearly overwrought in some way, though.”
“I feel much better with your hands on me,” Caspian replied in a low voice.
The seaman at the wheel tensed, but he kept his back to the two of them. Elias glanced over his shoulder at the man, then tugged Caspian’s sleeve, urging him to stand and walk to the side of the ship with him. There were far fewer people in that little corner, and the constant rush of the waves against the ship’s hull as they cut through the water hid what they said well.
“Tell me,” Elias said, leaning as close as a lover might. He touched Caspian’s face again, pretending it was medically necessary. “How do you truly feel. You’ve been growing paler and paler these last few days. I know something is wrong and I…I could not bear it if anything happened to you.”
Caspian’s insides fluttered. Elias cared for him. They were in the middle of horrific danger, their lives might end at any moment, but Elias cared for him, and that was all that mattered.
“I swear to you, I am well,” he said, lifting his hand on the ocean side of where they spoke to touch Elias’s face in mirror of him. The way they stood, the people scattered around the deck might not notice.
Elias huffed through his nose and fixed Caspian with a stern look. “You are not well,” he said.
Caspian lowered his head. His shoulders stooped with the gesture, which was proof that Elias was partially correct. Caspian wasn’t as fit as he’d been letting on for the past week or so. He knew precisely what the problem was, however.
Since the mutiny, he hadn’t been able to take his daily swim. There were too many people watching his every move, for one, and for another, his physical presence on the ship was necessary to keep the veil that prevented Dick and the others from recognizing Ruby, Lady Adelaide, and the others as women in place. That sort of separation from the sea was not natural for him, however, and he was beginning to feel the effects.
“Tell me,” Elias said, arching one eyebrow, like he knew Caspian was holding back.
There was so much Caspian was holding back, but there was no way to explain everything as well.
“I am merely overheated,” he said, standing a bit taller as an idea came to him. “Standing in the sun all day has been a trial.”
“Yes,” Elias agreed, still staring at him suspiciously. “And yet, you’ve managed to keep your skin as porcelain as ever.”
A shiver of caution slipped through Caspian. Elias had noticed. “I’ve taken great pains to keep most of my skin out of direct sunlight,” he lied. “And it is cloudy today.”
“Very cloudy,” Elias said, glancing up and around at the thickening clouds. “I pray we are not in for another storm.”
Caspian half prayed that they were. That way, he might be able to swim for a while and reinvigorate himself. Although doing so would still put the women at risk.
“I think I might feel better if I could sit in a bath of sea water for a while,” he said, raising his eyebrows slightly in the hope that Elias would find his expression adorable and irresistible.
Whether he did or not, Elias laughed. “You wish to take a bath in sea water?”
“I think it would do me an ocean of good,” Caspian replied with a grin.
He wasn’t certain it would actually be enough. The trouble wasn’t so much his absence from the water as his inability to really swim. He couldn’t imagine how he would explain that necessity to Elias, though, particularly as the man was a doctor. Everything Caspian was doing now and had been doing for the past three weeks was foreign to him. It was the same as if he was fluent in a second language and spoke that language frequently. He could do it easily, but it was not his mother tongue.
“If a bath of sea water is what you want, I will see about finding?—”
Elias’s sweet words were interrupted by Dick’s growl of “What have we here?” from halfway down the main deck.
Elias and Caspian both turned to see what had caught the vile man’s attention. Caspian’s heart caught in his throat as he looked up into the rigging, where Dick was looking, to find Ruby in the process of climbing down. She had a loop of rope over her shoulder, but had frozen when she noticed Dick watching her.
“No!” Elias hissed, pulling away from Caspian. “He’s found her out.”
Caspian winced and pushed away from the railing to follow Elias. He’d let his guard down and turned his focus to Elias instead of shielding the women.
That was the nicest explanation for why Dick stood just below Ruby staring up at her with a vicious grin. The more alarming explanation was that his absence from the water hadgone on for so long that he was losing what little ability to protect the people he cared about entirely.
