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“Barnard, what if you didn’t have to sail again?” The words burst from Rafe without any of the delicacy he’d planned.
The question finally drew the boy’s pale eyes upward for longer than an instant. “What?”
“I can’t guarantee anything, but what if you had the choice?” He was making a blunder of this. He only thought to understand the boy’s wishes. “Would you sail out again, or would you stay?”
“I’d do just about anythin’ to keep off another ship, sir.”
Rafe smiled faintly. Nodded, then stared at his hands. “Do you think you could keep out of trouble while Miss Sophie and I see about it?”
“Is Miss Sophie here?” Barnard sat up straighter, looking over his shoulder.
“No, no I’m afraid not. It’s not that she didn’t want to come, I assure you. She asks after you often.”
The boy’s smile revealed a gap between his front teeth. “She does?”
Rafe was glad he couldn’t see his own expression. He sniffed and took a deep breath. “She does.”
twenty-one
On her thirtieth pass about the room, Sophie turned the key to lock her chamber door. The click was deafening. Probably loud enough to wake the entire house and send them—her parents and the ever-scrupulous Anne—to her door. She didn’t loathe the woman anymore. The maid was all hard edges and sharp teeth, but pain had made her that way. Sophie could understand that.
“Just sit, you ninny.” She needed to quit talking to herself. It was a foul habit formed from loneliness.
Her reflection in the dressing table mirror made her breath stick. She had been wrong, earlier. She did need to at least plait her hair. Between the unbound wildness of it, dark tendrils rippling about her dressing robe and past her breasts, and the high color of her cheeks from circling the room … Well, she looked like a lady propositioning a man to take her to bed. Wanton, even if it was in a lush, sensual sort of way.
She reached for the ribbon and set it down. Her fingers hovered over her brush and then rescinded. Her eyes wandered to the silk and lace profusion Anne had wanted to cram over her skull. That was certainly a diverting option, one that might even dampen her own ardor. There was nothing appealing about a matronly nightcap.
She had plenty of years yet to be a matron. But if her parents intended to marry her off to a scoundrel like Lord Hansbury, who was renown for his rakish ways and utter inability to commit to a wife prior to now, why should she behave like a prude?
Heavens, this was to be the first time she and Rafe met without pretense. Yes, she wanted to learn the outcome of his meeting with Vice Admiral Crofton as quickly as possible, but she saw, as plain as her own wide-eyed reflection, the truth:
She had invited him here, to her bedroom, because she wanted him. She wanted to acquire all manner of his intimacy like priceless stones, each different in their beauty. Hushed confidences and private jokes, bared skin and swept tears.
She had looked risk in the eye and blinked at it like a doe-eyed pup, ruthlessly, willfully, belligerently choosing him.
A scratching at the far wall made her jump. She turned her head in time to see the rounded impressions of fingertips pressing against the window, and then it was swinging open, and Rafe’s leg swinging in.
She ought to stand. Greet him properly, like she might a guest in the drawing room, or at least help him navigate his gangly limbs past the window casing. But she sat, her body half turned toward him, and stared.
He overcame the window in a series of tiny, ill-placed movements, but it was to his credit that the job was done quietly. When his polished shoes found purchase on the carpet, he turned to ease the window closed.
Sophie hadn’t realized the two candles on the table had been spluttering against the night air until their flames steadied, gaining strength and painting him in delectable swaths of light and shadow. Her muscles tensed, fingers clutching at the insufficiency of her primrose dressing gown and the backs of her thighs going rigid against the chair edge.
Forbidden. That’s how he appeared. He must have dressed like this to make a good impression on the vice admiral and come directly here afterward. He was tamed and dark, pressed into a suit of rich navy wool. The white of his collar stood out, sharp and heavily starched, pointing upward toward the clean lines of his jaw. Even his recalcitrant copper locks had been tamed. Had his hair been trimmed? What she knew for stubborn half curls had settled into long, sweeping waves that gave him the air of a gentleman.
He was already her gentleman, whether he knew it or not. His manner and virtue gave him that distinction in a way a suit of clothes could never hope to aspire to.
“Good evening.”
His voice brought her to her feet with a tremulous smile. “Good evening.”
It was absurd, dreamlike, to see him here among the familiar objects of her bedchamber. Candlelight ghosted over his face, leaving his eyes to blackness but revealing the right side of a smile. He took two steps nearer. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you shocked to see me.”
I am. For no conscionable, earthly reason. Her mind was scrounging around for a witty return when her gaze matched the trajectory of his own. His smile had fallen, but oh, what she would have given to remove the shadow from his eyes!
They blazed roadways of warmth through her robe and over her skin, setting off little fireworks between her vertebrae. He was too done up to be seen properly, but the strangled movement of his white silken cravat suggested a swallow. Curse nightcaps. Curse propriety. If she had it to do over, she would only be tempted to wear less, so that she might receive an additional instant of this worshipful attention.
“Did it go well?” She slipped her hands behind her back and let them mingle, one set of fingers tugging at the other as if to remove an imaginary glove.
