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This was the worst possible outcome. Not enough to pay off his creditors, not enough to marry her, not even enough to buy her free of Richmond and send her to America. Worse than not having found the treasure at all. At least then he’d have hope.
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bsp; He’d promised something important to this woman. Despite that she hadn’t believed him, he’d promised to find a way to marry her. Now what could he do?
She grabbed up the coins and began dropping them back into the tiny chest. With clumsy hands, he tried to help.
“There,” she said with a determined nod. After closing the lid and dusting off her hands, Cynthia stood. “We can think while we walk.”
Think. Yes, he needed to think. Conjure up a miraculous solution to this problem. Funny, a few days ago he hadn’t even believed the treasure existed. Somehow he’d traveled from disbelief to total dependence, and now he was lost.
“I’ll go first,” he murmured, dropping down to his knees to ease his legs out into thin air. “Toss the chest down to me before you follow.”
Was it possible he’d been here only a week? No, it wasn’t possible. Because when Cyn dropped the chest and then scooted her legs out over the ledge, he didn’t gasp in shock at the view of her exposed limbs. Her hiked skirts were already a familiarity. A pretty reminder of the intimacies shared the night before.
How, in the space of one short week, could he have wandered from old acquaintance to renewed friend to reckless lover? And how could he move now toward fond memory? He couldn’t.
Cyn inched toward him, her boots scissoring at the rope, trying to catch it between her feet. Lancaster got beneath her and wrapped his arms around her knees to give her some leverage. As she slid lower, he let his arms slide higher, until his cheek was pressed to her bare thigh, her legs clasped tight in his arms.
A small voice floated in like a lapping wave. “Blimey!” it whispered.
Lancaster froze, Cynthia’s skirt bunched on his shoulders. “Oh, bloody hell.” He couldn’t turn to look, so he just eased Cynthia lower as she shimmied down the rope. One of her boots banged into his knee. “Don’t turn around,” he ordered, but it was too late. He looked up to see Cynthia’s neck crane toward the beach.
“Bloody hell!” she yelped, and Lancaster finally dared to look.
Four boys stood frozen in the sand, mouths hanging open as if they’d been stopped in the middle of a song. They ranged in size from tiny to lumbering, but each one seemed entranced with the sight of Cyn’s thighs.
“Drop!” he muttered, and Cynthia let go of the rope. “Pull up your hood.”
She reached for the cloak just as the tiny one pointed. “That’s Miss Merrithorpe,” he said, then added helpfully, “The dead one.”
Two of the remaining pack crossed themselves with shaking hands while the third turned and bolted, ruining any hope Lancaster might have had of gathering them all around and threatening to sell them to pirates if they breathed a word.
“It’s a ghost,” the rather portly child cried out, but the little one shook his head.
“What would a ghost want with climbing down ropes?”
Gads, when had children gotten to be so sensible? Damned observant monkeys, the lot of them.
“She’s not Cynthia Merrithorpe,” Lancaster said quickly. “So of course she’s not a ghost.”
“Begging your pardon, milord, but if she’s not Miss Merrithorpe, then I’m not Henry Johnson.”
“Listen. Henry, is it? This woman is my companion from London.”
The boy’s jaw edged out. “I ain’t heard nothing about a London lady around here.”
“You don’t think Miss Merrithorpe—assuming she weren’t lying dead at the bottom of the sea, I mean—would find herself alone on a deserted beach with a gentleman, do you? Completely improper, and Miss Merrithorpe was a lady.”
The boy looked incredibly doubtful at that. Apparently the delicate flower of femininity argument wouldn’t work in Cyn’s case. “Well then, Henry, what would Cynthia Merrithorpe want with a crumbling bit of cliff anyway?”
Sly intelligence narrowed the boy’s eyes, and Lancaster tried not to cringe. “But what in the world would a London doxy want with those cliffs, milord?”
The other two boys began backing away.
“Grab him,” Cynthia whispered too loudly, and all three spun around and ran.
“Damn it,” Lancaster muttered as he made a short attempt at giving chase. The boys were fast and less hampered by the pull of the sand. Well, all except the big one, but Henry Johnson was the problem and he was already halfway to Neely. “Damn it.”
