Mal chuckled, turning and setting the beaker down in favor of returning to his coffee.
“What?” she said, looking between Jasper’s stricken face and Malcolm’s laughter. “What did I say?”
“I thought you’d know,” Jasper managed after a moment, scratching at his hair with a sheepish grin. “Growing up on the docks, you learn quickly that anyone who says that exact line to you is a crimp and offering something dangerous, expensive, and impossible to quit.”
“Oh,” she said, brightening. “That sounds correct, then. Good day, gentlemen!”
And with that, she swooped up her beaker and flounced out of the room, back to her laboratory and her scheming.
Jasper gathered his things shortly after, making a mental accounting of all the nonsense he had to catch up with down at the docks after taking the morning off. Making factor had been a double-edged sword, for all he’d looked forward to it since he was a lad.
For one, brief and blessed moment, sometime between opening his eyes and shouting profanity at the God of the Sea, Jasper had thought he’d dreamed telling Libba his idiotic scheme. But no, he must have, for Malcolm to have even gotten a fraction of it secondhand.
He sighed, running a hand over his face, and shook himself.
Well, there was no taking it back now, was there? And besides, he hadn’t beenwrongwhen he’d said he needed to stand out if he wanted a family like that to even take the first notice of him.
He was a shipyard lad. A Brighton boy born and bred.
The Lennoxes had never understood that. If he’d come to them, even as a boy, with ideas that would have impressed his fellow dock rats, neither would have ever even shown a smidgen of interest. Both ofthemwere remarkable.
One had to compensate for that to capture their interest.
And he supposed it only followed that the same logic applied to the disgustingly rich and successful.
So he’d said it. Oh well.
Maybe now he’d get a chance to see if it would work. He just needed to track down his accomplice and make sure he’d been speaking full words to her the previous evening rather than just enthusiastically slurring and touching her lips.
Hehadtouched her lips, he thought.
He remembered that much.
Why the Devil had he done that?!
There wasn’t time to dissect the memory, as it happened, because he stumbled onto her the instant he emerged from Starling’s Rest’s front doors. Libba was sitting on the benches perched in front of the house, in particular, the pair that faced the morning patch of sunlight. She was with Rhys, who was wearing a very sparkly pair of baggy, red trousers as he flipped through a leather-bound book, frowning at this passage or that.
“Of course, I don’t believe he wrote themall,” she was saying airily. “My beloved Kit Marlowe absolutely penned several, and there was also the remarkable Emilia Lanier. Oh, Jasper! Good morning. I was hoping I’d see you.”
“You were?” Jasper said, unable to look away from Rhys’s trousers, which had silver stones on them that flashed blindingly in the morning light.
“I was,” she said, pushing herself off the bench and gliding over the drive toward him. “I was all but prepared to tell you to go to Hades this morning, but after seeing my brother’s reaction to the meresuggestionthat you might have aspirations of your own, I’ve been forced to reconsider.”
He gaped at her, hope beginning to stir in the queasy chamber of his chest. She looked refreshed this morning, as though she’d gone to bed at the chime of dusk and slept withouta single disturbance, despite having been next to him for their crawl home at near dawn.
Her hair was in a loose braid over her shoulder, springy curls escaping both from the plait and the bit around her face. She looked like a fern made flesh, he thought, her skin glinting the same way the smooth fronds in the forest did under the sunlight. The three beauty marks on her left cheek glowed like little embers when she turned her face to meet his.
“Really?” he managed to say, still not quite believing it.
“Somewhat,” she amended, raising her brows. “I won’t participate in a farce of cruelty, Jasper.”
“Wait a bloody tick!” Rhys exclaimed in his Welsh lilt, throwing his hands up from the book he was holding and letting the pages flutter dramatically in the morning breeze. “Idie?!”
“Oh, Rhys, everyone dies,” Libba snapped at him over her shoulder.
“Well, yes,eventually,” he replied, with impatient horror. “They don’t get stabbed while trying to impart levity on a bunch of drama-bent sods in the prime of their lives.Typically.”
“Sometimes, though,” Jasper said, which got a frown from the other man and an attempt at stifling a smile from Libba.
