“How romantic.” Even after all these years, it was plain the couple were still in love.
“Indeed it is, as I daresay not many find their soulmate at fifteen.” Ada began to slather a slice of bread with butter with a wistful smile. “But because we started young—”
“Too bloody young!” interrupted Tom, purely to make everyone laugh. “She took advantage of my lack of sense and then she took advantage of me!”
His wife carried on as if he wasn’t winking inappropriately at Simpkins. “—we’re already up to eleven grandchildren with another expected any day.”
Georgie had just popped a third, much bigger, chunk in her mouth to chew when Ada surged to her feet, her spoon once again raised at the ready as she bellowed toward the hallway. “Where do you think you are going when luncheon is on the table?”
It was Captain Kincaid who answered. “I’m sorry, but I have to report to my ship straightaway, Ada.”
“Not until tomorrow, you don’t, so sit your backside down at this table, young man, and eat first.” Ada’s eyes had narrowed as she sighted him down her spoon. “Don’t make me come fetch you.” The spoon turned slowly to point to the chair next to Georgie’s—which was, horrifically, the only empty seat left. “I’ve not seen hide nor hairof you for a year, so you’ll spare me a few minutes before you hurry to escape us again!”
Marianne nudged Georgie, then whispered, “This house makes Uncle Harry twitchier than we do.” Another new piece of information she wished she did not find intriguing.
“But Ada—”
“Don’tbut Adame, you scallywag!” She shook the spoon rather than her head. “Sit, Harry, or I’ll be forced to drag you by the ear like I used to!” She rolled her eyes at Georgie’s mortified expression, assuming that she had paused with a mouth full of bread because she was shocked to hear anyone speak to the master with such disrespect. “I changed his stinky bottom as a baby and he’s felt the sting of this spoon more times than anyone else in this house ever has, and all of them well deserved, so he knows better than to disobey me.”
Those smiling eyes flicked back to the captain and they brooked no argument. “Sit! Tell me all you’ve been up to. And don’t think you can skip over any detail you included in one of your monthly letters, young man.” He wrote a servant letters every month? Now that was another intriguing detail about the wretch that Georgie wished didn’t charm her. “As I’ll be wanting to hear all from your mouth just as I always do because I’ve got a million questions.”
“Just as she always does,” added Tom with an unsubtle wink to everyone while Georgie sensed the captain approaching the table. Then willed the floor to swallow her up before she was forced to sit next to the wretch.
“Five minutes,” he said while scraping the chair out with the same thwarted belligerence of Felix after he’d been refused permission to walk his dog at the inn. “Then I really do have to go.”
Satisfied, Ada sat and served him a giant wedge of a meat pie, the enticing aromas of rich, softly stewed beef and gravy filling thekitchen. But not quite filling it enough that Georgie’s stupid, wayward nostrils didn’t inhale the spicy essence of the captain’s cologne as he reluctantly slid into the chair next to hers.
It made no difference that he had ensured that there was a respectable gap of several inches between them. Her pathetically needy body blossomed with awareness regardless.
ChapterTWENTY-TWO
Harry had sat beside Miss Rowe during luncheon for twenty interminable minutes and she hadn’t so much as glanced his way for one second of them. Instead, she’d behaved as if he didn’t exist at all. While he undoubtedly deserved her frostiness and definitely needed her indifference if he was going to resist his inconvenient yearning for her, he could not bear the thought he had hurt her feelings. He had been so absorbed with guilt, he hadn’t given the bloodyBoadiceaa single thought during the short forty-minute sail from Cawsand to Plymouth.
But with the entrance to the Royal Navy Dockyard looming, he needed to push all his regrets to one side. Easier said than done after he had overheard her telling Ada some of her troubled family history before he had tried to sneak out. Now he hadn’t just been a cad to an innocent governess in his employ—which was unconscionable enough—but he now knew that the strong-willed and seemingly indomitable itch he couldn’t scratch was all alone in the world, bar the few friends she had made at Miss Prentice’s School for Young Ladies.That she had been rendered fatherless while still in the crib and motherless under such dreadful circumstances while about the same age as Marianne. His family had always driven him to distraction, but he could not imagine how lonely his life would be without them. Blasted Flora might well be the bane of his life, but she had always been a shoulder to cry on when fate had been cruel and vice versa. Through the best of times and the worst of times, they had always had each other.
To have no one must be horrendous. Isolating and frightening. It certainly explained why Miss Rowe was such a feisty character. She had had to face everything life threw at her alone, and that took grit.
Still, it must have been terrifying for a little girl to witness her mother deteriorate with illness. Smallpox was such a dreadful way to go. He’d borne witness to an outbreak here in Plymouth, years ago, that swept the dockyard and had killed so many so indiscriminately and so quickly it beggared belief. It had been horrendous to watch as a powerless adult from the periphery, so he shuddered to think what it must have been like for a child in the thick of it. Especially a child imprisoned in the depressing family quarters in a barracks where stiff upper lips were expected and everyone would have been too busy soldiering to help her get through that traumatic ordeal. With her father already long gone…
In which case, why had she been dragged from barracks to barracks until the age of sixteen?
There was another story there and one, no doubt, judging from her speed at changing the subject at luncheon, that wasn’t a nice one either. She had hinted as much last night before he had hauled her into his arms and kissed her.
I only have to hear the dreaded wordsIpswichorPrestonor, heaven forbid,Newcastle, and a part of me dies.
Why the blazes had an orphan traveled from barracks to barracks until she turned sixteen? And more importantly, what had happened to her there to give her such bad memories? He hated the thought of someone else upsetting her almost as much as he hated himself for it. He needed to apologize. Set the record straight. Try to find a way to tell her that it wasn’t her fault he could not presently indulge his heart when…
“It’s good to be back on the water.” Simpkins encroached on his reverie. He waved at the heavily armed guards on the harbor wall and then pointed to Harry’s uniform, which was all they needed to see to allow them to sail straight past.
Harry had decided to don the full pomp and ceremony of his dress uniform, complete with the blessedly roomier and freshly cleaned newer breeches, to intimidate the lazy layabouts on the bloodyBoadicea. He had also put it on to remind himself of who he was and to refocus his mind on what he had been sent here to do. Except he was still unable to focus on anything, currently, but her.
“I’ll bet you’re excited to see your ship and to get her shipshape, Captain?”
“Very.” A complete lie. Dread now joined all the guilt and confusion he was feeling. It settled like lead in his stomach. “I fear there will be a lot to do but, as one of the greats said, Alexander, I think, there is nothing impossible to him who is prepared to try.”
Harry sincerely hoped that was the case, at least where theBoadiceawas concerned. Just as he had everything crossed that this unwelcome, and suddenly torturous, stint in Plymouth would reinvigorate his enthusiasm for his naval career. He was being given a brand-spanking-new flagship, after all, and that was a momentous honor. One few of his contemporaries would ever experience. He should be happy about it.
Surely?
