“Will you be all right?”

 “Yes. No?” she whispered. “I’m just so tired.”

 “The night is catching up with you, so rest for a bit. Then we’ll talk about who those men were,” Sutherland said, his voice neither menacing nor kind as he lightly grasped her shoulder and pushed her down. He squeezed it firmly once, letting her know without words that he wanted her to stay put, before releasing her to walk over to the basin. He brought back a soaked cloth and began washing her scraped hands.

 Nicole looked up at him one last time as he brushed at a smudge on her face, trying to decide if she could trust him, knowing she didn’t have much choice. She couldn’t tell anything. His face could have been made of marble for all the emotion it showed. Nicole unwillingly drifted to sleep and dreamed that Sutherland said in disbelief, “Her eyes are blue.”

 Derek didn’t make as large a dent in his bottle as he’d intended while he sat and watched over the girl curled in his bed. He’d definitely not predicted his first night with her to be like this. Usually he was impatient to bed a woman and get her gone, but she had been afraid and possibly hurt. Still, he wasn’t resigned to having her sleep here the whole night.

 He was, he had to admit, proud that tonight he’d overcome his natural selfishness in order to do something considerate. Why he was being so charitable to a prostitute, he had no idea. It must have been the liquor affecting his brain, because the girl could be prickly and rude, and he certainly did not get involved with women for more than purely physical reasons.

 That’s just what he needed to be doing, taking on the troubles of a young prostitute. As if he didn’t have enough weight on his shoulders.

 Even more remarkable, he was experiencing the wholly unaccustomed feeling of protectiveness. He wanted to kill the two who’d chased her. She’d put up a good fight, which was most likely why she’d survived. Hell, the little spitfire had actually drawn blood from someone.

 The idea that she was a fighter intrigued him, probably because he had let go of so much so easily.

 Oddly, she hadn’t behaved like a prostitute. No innuendos gone stale from overuse or practiced pouty smiles. And only minutes after she’d kissed him and made him want her with a surprising ferocity, she’d had to drag her feet back into his cabin. He’d automatically reached for a drink because she’d disconcerted him. A slip of a girl likely a decade younger had made him ill at ease on his own ship.

 Derek didn’t know why she didn’t practice her wiles on him, wiles he would have known how to proceed with. This girl had only looked at him with a tilted head and open curiosity, until her eyelids slid over those dark eyes, blue eyes, as she began to fade.

 He’d almost experienced relief when she’d passed out. Yet that was crazy. If he understood one thing on this bizarre night, it was that he wanted to sink into her lithe body. Sink into her until she eased the ache her abandoned response had created. Damn, how she’d responded to him.

 Turning his mind from that gripping image, he took a long pull of drink. The way things were going now, she’d have to spend the night in his bed. He grimaced at the thought. With him, that just wasn’t done. Had never been done, in fact.

 He reached over to shake her awake, but his hand stilled on her shoulder. She lay like the dead, as she had for hours. Her silky skin shone white as porcelain except for the pale lavender rings under the sweep of her lashes. But if he didn’t wake her, where the hell was he supposed to sleep?

 For the space of several minutes, he stared down at the girl. It wouldn’t make a difference if he slept with her for the few hours left till dawn. It wasn’t a monumental thing, damn it!

 Decided, he slipped off his boots and clothes and slid in next to her. Her body burned like a little furnace in the bed, and being near her warmth was comfortable. Seemingly of its own volition, his arm covered her waist and brought her to him.

 Derek was aware that he protected her, and on some hidden plane he felt good and strong, if only for a few hours. He pulled her small body closer still and breathed in the soft scent of her hair.

 He was, though not completely—never completely— pleased. Until he thought of the strange moment of hesitation he’d just had as he stripped off his clothes. It certainly wasn’t modesty, but for some reason he had a fleeting impression that his state of undress would make her uneasy. Ridiculous, of course, since she’d probably spent most of her nights like this with dozens of different men.

 His last thought before drifting to sleep was how much that fact bothered him.

 When a soft ray of light flitted through the window and warmed her face, Nicole woke in a dismayed flash. Her rapidly blinking eyes spied a tanned arm sprinkled with golden-tipped black hair wrapped around her.

 Captain Sutherland held her in his bed.

 She slowly twisted her head back. In sleep, his face was softened, though certainly not relieved of the dark weariness that had marked it the two previous nights. She felt a tug of emotion, a pull toward him that differed from the physical attraction that had surfaced so powerfully before.

 She made herself look away and took a mental inventory of her body, concluding that most of her clothes were on. Her shirt, her pants—her eyes widened and the blood rushed to her face. Sutherland pressed against her backside. At least, a very hard part of him did. It would appear that although she was clothed, he certainly had nothing to…restrain him.

 Captain Sutherland held her in his bed with no clothes on.

 Alarm quaked through her. Last night she’d been so disoriented. She’d welcomed his advances mainly because she was glad to be alive and safe. Right? So what would she do now if he awoke and touched her breasts again? If he pulled her down next to his unclothed, aroused body? Astonished by her own answer, she understood that she could not remain with him any longer.

 Besides, her father was no doubt searching for her even now, barking at people who hadn’t seen her, shaking those who might have. Somehow she had to get out of this position and back to her ship. But his arm was unwieldy, anchoring her to him as if he’d never let go. Slowly, she pried it off her torso, not daring to breathe the whole time it took to lower it gently to the bed.

 She grinned in relief, then jumped at the sound of his voice, deep and gravelly with sleep as he mumbled something from his dreams. After what seemed like eternity, his breathing deepened again, and she risked slipping to the floor.

 Her whole body was stiff and unmanageable as she walked, but she finally found her stockings, still wet, so she drew her boots on untied over her enormous borrowed socks.

 Fully dressed, she wobbled away from Sutherland, away from the compulsion to slide in next to him and have him wrap his warm arms around her again.

 Before she made it to the door, her eyes leveled on his desk. The calculations. Could she leave them as they were? Although Sutherland could have done anything he wanted to her last night, he hadn’t hurt her. No, he’d saved her life.

 As swiftly as she could, she padded over and ran through the numbers again. Finishing in very little time, she finally walked out of his cabin and past Sutherland’s openly curious crew.

 As soon as she stepped off the Southern Cross, one of her father’s search parties spotted her. As they pulled her away, the lot of them, just primed for a fight, threw aggressive remarks and lewd gestures at the Southern Cross ’s crew. Not even half an hour later, they’d ferried her to her father, along with the story of her night’s accommodations. He was livid, and he wasn’t the only one, if the crew’s behavior was any indication.

 When her father finally cleared the nosy crew out of the chart room, he had his temper under control, at least regarding her. “I know you’re tired,” he began with a grimace, obviously in response to her drained face, “but I need to find out what the hell happened last night.”

 “I am beyond tired—”

 “Please, I need to know who did this to you before you go rest.”

 Nicole sighed, but then smelling the pervasive scent of coffee, a tinge burned, she relented. They’d been up all night looking for her. She tried to limit her story to just the attack, focusing her tale on that part, but she couldn’t steer him from the subject of Sutherland.

 Nicole hoped to get a reprieve when Chancey, the big, blustering Irishman who was like her second father, ambled into the room. She gave him a beseeching glance as he dropped his immense frame in a chair behind his captain in an unconscious display of added authority.

 Cornered like that, she decided to make it sound as if she’d sought Sutherland’s help in absolute desperation. If not for him, she stressed, she wouldn’t be here this morning—and he had not compromised her in any way. But her father seemed concerned only with the fact that she had spent the whole night on his ship. She cringed each time his hands clenched as he strode around the cabin.

 “Christ, what were you thinking, going to his ship like that?” Lassiter demanded again.

 Nicole imagined what he’d do if told she didn’t have any say in the matter. She answered honestly, “I was terrified those two men would catch up to me. I thought I’d be safe with Sutherland.”

 “I can certainly think of one thing that isn’t safe with a man like him,” he half-muttered, slanting Chancey a knowing look. The man responded by crossing his thick arms over his chest and grunting in agreement.