“Shall I come and rub your shoulders, Kennit?”

He turned to glare at her. Who did she think she was, to interrupt his thoughts?

“Why do you think I'd welcome that?” he demanded coldly.

Her voice had no inflection as she observed, “You looked troubled. Weary and tense.”

“You think you can know those things by looking at me, whore?”

Her dark eyes dared to meet his. “A woman knows these things by looking at a man when she has looked at him often over three years.” She rose and came to stand behind him, naked still. She set her long narrow hands to his shoulders and worked at his muscles through the thin silk of the robe. It felt so good. For a time he sat still and tolerated her touch on him. But then she began to speak as she kneaded at his knotted muscles.

“I miss you when you are gone on these longer voyages. I wonder if you are all right. Sometimes I wonder if you are coming back at all. After all, what ties you to Divvytown? I know you care little for me. Only that I be here and behave as you wish me to. I think Bettel only keeps me on because of your preference for me. I am not . . . what most men would wish for. Do you see how important that makes you in my life? Without you, Bettel would turn me out of the house and I'd have to work as a freegirl. But you come here, and you ask for me by my name, and you take the finest chamber in the house for our use, and always pay in true gold. Do you know what the others here call me? Kennit's whore.” She gave a brief snort of bitter laughter. “Once I would have been shamed by that. Now I like the sound of it.”

“Why are you talking?” Kennit's voice cut her musings as harshly as a blunt knife. “Do you think I pay to hear you talk?”

It was a question. She knew she was allowed to answer. “No,” she replied in a low voice. “But I think that with the gold you pay Bettel, I could rent a small house for us. I would keep it tidy and clean. It would always be there for you to come home to, and I would always be ready and clean for you. I vow there would never be the smell of another man upon me.”

“And you think I would like that?” he scoffed.

“I do not know,” she said quietly. “I know that I would like that. That's all.”

“I care not at all what you would like or not like,” he told her. He reached back to lift her hands from his shoulders. The fire had heated her skin. He rose from the chair and turned to face her. He ran a hand over her bared skin, fascinated for a time with the feel of the fire-warmed flesh. It roused him again. But when he lifted his eyes to her face, he was shocked to find tears on her cheeks. It was intolerable.

“Go back to the bed,” he commanded her in disgust, and she went, obedient as ever. He stood facing the fire, recalling sleek skin under his fingers and wanting to use her again, but dismayed at the thought of her wet face and teary eyes. This was not why he bought a whore. He bought a whore to avoid all this. Damn it, he had paid. He did not look at the bed as he commanded her suddenly, “Lie on your belly. Face down.”

He heard her shift in the sheets. He went to her quickly across the darkened room. He mounted her that way, face down like a boy, but he took her as a woman. Let no one, not even a whore, say that Kennit did not know the difference between the two.

He knew he was not unduly rough, but still she wept, even after he rolled off her. Somehow the near-noiseless weeping of the woman beside him troubled him. The disturbance he felt at it combined with his earlier shame and self-disgust. What was the matter with her? He paid her, didn't he? What right did she have to expect any more than that from him? She was, after all, just a whore. It was the deal they had made.

Abruptly he rose and began pulling on his clothes. After a time, her weeping stopped. She turned over suddenly in the bedding. “Please,” she whispered hoarsely. “Please don't go. I'm sorry I displeased you. I'll be still now. I promise.”

The hopelessness in her voice rang against the hopelessness in his heart, steel against steel. He should kill her. He should just kill her rather than let her say such words to him. Instead, he thrust his hand into his coat pocket. “Here, this is for you,” he said, groping for some small coin to give her. Money would remind them both of why they were here together in this room. But fate had betrayed him, for there was nothing in his pocket. He'd left the ship in that much haste. He'd have to go back to the Marietta to get money to pay Bettel. It was all damnably embarrassing. He knew the whore was looking at him, waiting. What could be more humiliating than to stand penniless before the whore one had already used?