“Hothouse, apparently,” said Malcolm, shrugging. “Errol says a normal greenhouse gathers heat from the sun. This one will apparently have furnaces to assist. It would wilt the stuff in the normal one and the normal one would kill the stuff in the new one with frost. His plants are fussier than a French courtesan.”
Jasper tried to laugh. It sounded more like he’d stubbed his toe.
Malcolm didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy cutting his sausage links into geometrically perfect wedges.
“I found out what my sister has been up to this morning, as it happens,” Mal said without looking up, his voice gone a little lower with displeasure.
Jasper paused, his teeth halfway into his eggy bread. “Oh?” he mumbled through the obstruction.
Mal sighed and nodded. “She got a letter this morning from our father. He didn’t sign it, but I know his penmanship. She’s apparently going ’round to his Wednesday night for dinnerwithout mentioning a damned word of it to me. Did you know about this?”
Jasper still hadn’t finished biting the bread. He had to do that in order to shake his head, almost choking on the morsel in the process. “No,” he said. “Are you sure? She doesn’t… Why would she do that?”
Malcolm grimaced. “Hell if I know. I thought maybe she’d said something to you.”
Jasper shook his head, eyes watering as he coughed into his napkin until the toast had been sent down the correct series of piping within his fool body. “No,” he managed to croak. “Nothing.”
“I’m torn between confronting the little wench or just showing up on Wednesday as though I too were invited,” Malcolm said, spearing his sausage through at long last. “Which do you think is more dignified?”
Jasper blinked at his friend through the salty sheen of his wandering eyes and took a wheezing breath. “I’m not the person to ask,” he said, and he meant it.
It at least got a laugh out of Malcolm and a shrug. “Fair enough. Eat up; we’ve got to go find our jack tars. I’m pleased to hear you’ve already ingratiated yourself with the Templeton-Raths, you know. I knew you could do it, even if I was a bit of a child about it before.”
Jasper gave a nod. “We shall see, anyhow.”
“If you do get in good,” Mal said thoughtfully, “maybe you can convince them that it’s in their best interest to repair the Rusty Reaper, since that’ll be their nearest crane. Someone needs to do it, and neither the harbormaster nor city hall have any interest in the wretched thing.”
“It’s a thought,” Jasper said.
Perhaps the safest sentence in the English language.
A magical spell, even.
For it got him through the remainder of breakfast without having to scramble for quick thinking again until the bill came due, and he realized he’d left all his coin locked in his desk back at EIC.
“Sorry, mate,” he’d said to Malcolm with a genuine shrug of attrition and the most honest thing he could use as explanation. “It’s been a hectic morning.”
*
Libba had walkedvery briskly back to Starling’s Rest.
The drop in temperature and the icy mist in the air had done wonders for her clarity of mind and her temperature of face.
By the time she’d gotten through the door, she hadalmostforgotten that Jasper had said the word “half-mast” to her and drawn her attention directly to the bulge in his trousers. Trousers she had never once pondered the contents of before this morning.
Not once!
And now she wanted to trace the outline of what was happening inside them with her tongue.
She coughed, hesitating in the doorway of her home, and used the knob to fan herself with the full weight of the front door until her thoughts got back into order. Or at least got out of Jasper’s trousers.
She shook herself, pulling the door shut with a smartsnapmeant to startle her thoughts into order.
She wasn’t dazed. Dazed would have been preferable.
She was horribly, vibrantly alert. She was fizzing like a freshly poured pint of ale. She was obsessed with the memory of his tongue in her mouth, his lips on her throat, his teethgrazing the tops of her breasts while his palms had seen to the remainder.
Shit!
