“You’re so worried about his feelings; what about mine? Did you think for one second what it felt like to have you leave our engagement party on the heels of another man? Did it occur to you how that would look? You’ve embarrassed me in front of my whole family. I can’t even try to save face by taking you back to the party because you’re half-drunk and dressed like that.”
Jaxon seemed to suddenly realize he held her with much more force than he intended and released her as if he picked up a hot pan with bare hands. With a grunt of frustration, he turned and strode away from her as fast as his uneven stride allowed, leaving Charlie standing alone in the middle of the street.
Charlie stood unmoving, watching Jaxon’s retreat. The lump in her throat choking her, but the tears that burned her eyes refused to fall as though the uniform transformed her back into the emotionless person she was raised to be. The longer she stood there, the more she felt herself shutting down until she felt like the hollow shell her father brought aboard the Arcadia at the age of six.
Charlie stood in that street long past the time it took for Jaxon to disappear from sight. She didn’t move as sailors moved about and as a handful of wagons and carriages plodded down the street. She had no concept of time. She only felt the burning knot in her stomach growing. The overwhelming emptiness she felt as a child was swallowing her and she didn’t know how to pull herself back to the surface.
“Come on, Charlie,” she heard Morty say. “Let’s go back to the ship.”
In her fugue state, she heard the words, but it was as if he were speaking a foreign-language. She didn’t understand them. Morty put his arm around her shoulders and guided her back to her cabin on the ship.
“Go to bed, Charlie. You’ll feel better in the morning, I promise.”
Morty opened the door, pushed her gently into the room and pulled it closed behind her.
She didn’t know if she stood there for minutes or hours, but eventually Charlie’s brain began to function again in a rudimentary sort of way. Morty told her to go to bed. She knew how to do that. The first step was to lock the door. Charlie automatically reached into her pocket, but found it empty. Her keys had gone to the bottom of the ocean with Jimmy’s corpse.
How could she go to bed if she couldn’t accomplish the first step of going to bed? She had locked the door to her father’s cabin to keep Byron out before she boarded Jaxon’s ship. Her father’s keys were locked inside. And Byron’s keys went down to the bottom of the ocean—not that it mattered—he didn’t have keys to her cabin, but she supposed she could have slept in his bed if she had the key.
Jaxon Bloodworthy didn’t sleep longer than thirty minutes at a time the whole night. He kept reaching out for Charlie, but when he didn’t find her, he woke up and the memories of the evening rushed back with harsh clarity. He gave up trying to sleep when the sun came up. His decidedly foul mood forced him to look for distraction, anything that would occupy his mind and keep him from reliving the previous night’s events.
Since his ship was finally home, Jaxon decided work would be the distraction he needed. What little belongings Charlie had were at his townhouse, nothing belonging to her was on the ship and the last thing he needed was to see little reminders of her everywhere he went.
If anyone had suggested he wanted to go to his ship to get a glimpse of Charlie on hers, he would’ve growled a denial at them. His ship was back. He was captain and had duties that no doubt needed to be tended to immediately.
Jaxon stopped at the galley before heading to his cabin. Breakfast wasn’t ready yet, but he was able to secure a tankard of coffee to help him wake up. Jaxon sipped at the hot brew as he made his way down the passageway to his cabin. His leg was more than a little achy, it really hurt, probably more from the mishap on the dance floor than from chasing Charlie all over town. If it wasn’t feeling better by this evening, he’d soak it in the hot bath. But without Charlie to massage it, he didn’t know if it would help.
Jaxon reached out and grabbed the doorknob to his cabin and found it locked.
“What the hell,” he muttered under his breath. There was no reason for the door to be locked. Daniel needed access to the charts and sextant inside while he was in charge and Jaxon kept anything of value locked up in the small safe inside.
It took Jaxon less than five minutes to locate Romy in his hammock in the forecastle. He woke up his half-gypsy crewman and told him to get his lock picks and follow him. Romy wasn’t a man to talk about his past, but over the past few years, Daniel had befriended the untamed gypsy and found he was a man of many hidden secrets. One talent was the ability to pick nearly any lock.