“I will be fine,” he said, and his smile was just as self-assured as she would expect it to be.
CHAPTER 62
Normally, she’d make something for breakfast—until Mr. Wilson’s visit, she had had to stop making biscuits because she had run out of butter—and she’d take it down to Kallias. They’d watch the sunrise together and laugh and play; it was the perfect way to start the morning.
Now she had butter, and biscuits were baking away, but it was this ass behind her who intended on eating them, not her beloved Kallias. It made her hate him all the more, that he dare—even unknowingly—steal a single second from her and Kallias.
She could feel his eyes on her back. She did not turn around, hoping it was clear her back was the lack of invitation that she meant it to be.
“You haven’t asked my name,” he said at last.
“No,” she agreed.
He actually gave a single incredulous laugh. “My God, are you always this hospitable?”
She turned. “Are you always so rude?”
“Me? Rude?” he asked, dumbfounded, as if it was the most ludicrous thing he had ever heard. “Miss Wains, I have no idea what could have given you that impression, save my reaction to your own rude behavior.”
“Mybehavior?” She had to laugh herself. This man was ridiculous. “At what part while saving you was I rude?”
“In what part was I?”
He seemed to genuinely not know and she smiled in disbelief. “Perhaps when you assumed I shouldn’t be the lighthouse keeper. Or a woman out alone. Or maybe when you assumed I couldn’t read. Maybe when you suggested what I should or shouldn’t do or what Iwas capable of.”
He looked all the more shocked but at least he stayed quiet.
And when the biscuits were done, she doled him out a few on a plate and the rest on another. “When I come back, I’ll look at your wound. Depending on how the waves look, I’ll row you to town where a real doctor will see you. If the sea is too rough though, that’ll be up to you. I imagine too much jostling is hard for the wound.”
He still looked too flabbergasted to speak so she took her plate and left.
Given he was looking for survivors, she wasn’t sure if Kallias would be back, but she went to the spot anyway.
He wasn’t, and though the sunrise was one of the most beautiful she had ever seen and the biscuits tasted like heaven, it was empty without him.
CHAPTER 63
When she returned, the man was lying back on the sofa, looking painfully bored. He turned his head at her entrance.
“The waves look fine,” she said.
He looked so miserable she expected the news to be welcome, but instead he frowned all the more and turned his attention back to the ceiling.
“I am not well enough to go.”
“That is exactly why youshouldgo. I am no doctor and—”
“Oh, what’s a doctor?” he said. “What will they do that you have not done already?”
She frowned. “I do not know. Probably because I’m not a doctor.”
“Well, I think you’ve done a marvelous job. Couldn’t be better. You must know second and third aid too.” He rolled his arm as if to prove it, but the wince proved the opposite.
Was he still drunk? She scanned the room for the bottle and found it on the window indentation—for the windows were carved-out recesses within the walls of the lighthouse. It still was half gone, the same as how she had seen it late last night.
“Besides, as a lighthouse keeper, you must stay at the lighthouse, and I am in no state to row.”
“There are exceptions,” she said. “Getting survivors the help they need is surely one of them.”
