He believed it to be true. He had to believe that he could be more than what he’d been: a thief, a convict, a disgrace.
His crew needed him to be more. And if he had to lie and cheat to keep them fed, well—someday he could make it up to them. Someday, perhaps, he would be safe enough to change.
He tightened his fingers around the glove he still held. Broke her gaze as he stepped back. “It’s dark,” he said. “The tide’s coming in.”
Her lashes fluttered as she glanced down to where the waves had met his boots. If she remained, the sea would cut her off from the rocky path she’d used to follow him down to the cove.
“Go back before you’re trapped down here,” he said.
She did. Her skirts brushed the sand as she turned—away from the cave that held the casks. Away from him.
Go back, he thought,before you get hurt.
Chapter 12
“Ruby.”
Ruby rolled over and pressed her face into her pillow, shutting out sound and light in a pile of down.
“Ruuuuu-beeeee.”
She batted a hand in the direction of the voice—it was Tamsin, crisp and vigorous and far too alert—and tried to sink back into the dark heat of her dream. The cove. The sand. Captain Malcolm Archer, gleaming in the sunset, the roar of the ocean, his hand on her waist, her heart beating like a drum as he set his mouth to her—
“Ruby. Wake up.”
She groaned into the pillow. She did not wish to wake. She had a vague sense that her dream—hot and blurred and pleasurable—would give way a reality that she did not particularly wish to recollect.
“Do you think she might be ill?” That was Alice’s sweet, worried voice. “She seems fevered and she’s making a dreadful sound.”
Ruby flopped over, her eyes still clamped closed. “I’m fine. I’m perfectly well. I only... fancied a lie-in.”
“It’s eleven o’clock in the morning!” Tamsin sounded scandalized.
That made sense. Ruby had not been able to sleep until dawn, what with the way she kept tossing and turning and alternately quashing her memory of her encounter with Archer in the cove and fantasizing wildly about what would have happened had it continued.
She had an excellent imagination, on top of what she’d read about inAristotle’s Masterpiece. In her mind, Archer had...
No. Sherefusedto dwell upon it for a second day running. He was an irrepressible flirt, and she a foolish wallflower. He’d only murmured hot words and removed her gloves to throw her off her course. He’d had no intention of kissing her or caressing her or hiking up her skirts and—
She squeezed her eyes shut harder. “Perhaps Iamfevered,” she muttered. In herbrain.
“Sit up,” said Tamsin ruthlessly. “Open your eyes.”
“We’ve brought tea,” Alice said, “and bacon too. I stole it out of the pan myself while the household was distracted.” She sounded a trifle smug at this minor crime.
Ruby opened her eyes, shoved herself into a seated position, and accepted a cup and saucer from Alice. The plate was empty; Vanessa, in the corner, appeared to be gnawing on the bacon.
The windows in the chamber sparkled now, and someone—probably Tamsin—had thrust aside the filmy drapes Ruby had hung. Sun poured into the small room. Ruby had whitewashed the walls one evening when she’d been unable to sleep, and then had picked out the elaborate white scrollwork in a deep blue-gray paint, the color of the sea at dusk. The floor was covered in a fanciful blue-and-white unicorn rug she’d found in one of the lower parlors, and more lacy fabric swathed the four-poster bed. She’d cleaned the bedding with hot water and lye and a rough brush she’d turned up in the stables, and—
The room looked beautiful now. She’d known it would.
It had occurred to her, these last weeks, that she loved it here at Pomeroy House. Loved the immense cliffside manor with its oddities and its dogs. Loved her own freedom, and the sense that she knew how to set things right.
She loved matching her wits with Captain Archer’s.
She’d told herself her treks across the cliffs and down to the beach were for the purposes of investigation—for determining what he was truly about when he was not attending his duties at Pomeroy House.
The truth, she feared, was simpler. She wanted to see him.
