“Let us go,” he prompted, his words strangely metered, as though he’d thought them out just before he’d uttered them.
Mr. Colvin sneered then turned and left the store, the tinkling bell ceasing to raise her spirits as it usually did. With that man gone, she nearly slumped against Mr. Gryffud in relief. Against her, the man stiffened, and in an instant, she realized what she’d done.
Pushing herself upright she coughed to clear the humiliation from her throat.
“I apologize, Mr. Gryffud,” she began, daring to peek up at the man. He was staring down at her, an unreadable expression on his utterly hard yet gorgeous face.
Who is this man?
“No need,” he uttered, his voice deep enough to shake the floor. Again, each word seemed to be stilted—perhaps he wasn’t used to speaking English.
“You aren’t from around here, are you, Mr., Gryffud?” She knew she was being nosy, and probably a little inappropriate—after all, he was a strange man and her stiffest competition, but she couldn’t help herself.
He arched a dark blonde eyebrow. “Jarren.” One single word, and yet it still rang through her.
“Wh-what?” she stuttered, wondering why she was still so close to the man. He smelled good…like leather, linen, and something…exotic.
He arched his other eyebrow until his eyes seemed to dance beneath them.
“My name,” he replied, and she felt the fool.
“Of course,” she said, flushing. “Well, then, Jarren, thank you for coming to my rescue.”
He said nothing, only continued staring down at her, and she felt the weight of his gaze upon her. But it wasn’t a gaze of disappointment or disapproval, as were the looks she so often had received from her father, it was the look of someone trying to decipher something they couldn’t quite understand.
She bit back a grin; she’d never been anyone’s puzzle before.
“I am sorry that I interrupted your business,” she offered, turning to move back toward the workbench that separated the front of the store from the back where she kept all her fabrics and threads. “I can assume that my altercation with Mr. Colvin was loud enough to disturb you.” Of course, that was it. She’d practically screamed at the villain. No doubt Mr. Gryffud—Jarren, had heard and was bothered enough by it that he came to her side of the wall to tell them to keep it down.
Blast! When will I stop being a burden!
Straightening her shoulders, she tipped her chin up and met the silent man’s penetrating gaze.
“It is getting late,” she remarked. “Please don’t let me keep you from your evening.” She meant to turn and dismiss him, and once he was gone, she’d lock the door and then retreat to her small, lonely apartment.
But his voice stopped her.
“Dinner.”
She spun around and nearly collided with him. How had he moved so quickly in such silence? Her breath caught and she peered up into his face, which was so much closer than it had ever been. From this distance, right up next to him, she could see that his green eyes were rimmed in gold, and that his lashes were long, curling up at the ends in a deceptively feminine way. On him, though, it was stunning.
“Wh-what?” When did she turn into a bumbling fool? “What do you mean?”
He drew in a slow breath, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“I…believe I owe you…dinner,” he declared. It wasn’t the words that drew her attention the most, it was the fact that he stopped himself several times before finishing his sentence. Almost as if he was trying to stop other words from escaping.
She opened her mouth to turn down his offer, but he raised a long-fingered hand and pressed a single finger against her lips. Stunned, she held her breath.
“Ni fyddaf yn cymryd dim am ateb,” he murmured, the words both lyrical and foreign. “I will not take no for an answer.”
Heat blasted through her—at his touch and his demands—and Angela didn’t know which excited her more…the fact that he was taking her to dinner, or that he’d actually spoken more than a handful of words to her, even if she couldn’t understand half of them.
And she wasn’t going to say no to a free dinner.
Chapter Five
Jarren pulled out the chair across from his and waited for Angela to sit before he helped her slide it and herself under the table.
After they’d closed up their respective shops, they’d walked the two blocks to the Aurora, which boasted a large and often crowded restaurant. He’d been there once before on his own when he’d first arrived in town, and he enjoyed the food more than he’d expected. The cost was a little high, but with as successful as his little shop had become, he could afford to take a beautiful woman to dinner…even if she’d only meant to dissuade Mr. Colvin from continuing their obviously distressing conversation.
Angela had needed a hero, and she’d looked to him, and he couldn’t express how good that felt.
After they’d ordered their meals—her a meatloaf and sweet potatoes entrée, and him the salted cod, they settled into a silence that was both comfortable and loaded. There were so many things he wanted to know about her—everything, really, but how could he ask her anything without his dratted tongue getting in the way?
“That language you spoke earlier…” she began, and his gaze was immediately ensnared by her lips.
“Welsh.” His answer was quick if a little sharp. He swallowed, reaching out to take his glass of water and wash the lump from his throat.
Seemingly unperturbed by his tone, she continued, “So, you’re from Wales then?”
He nodded, wary of where he knew her questions were going. The more questions she asked, the closer she’d get to all the things he’d wanted to burn then bury. Forever.
“I’ve never met anyone from Wales before.” Angela leaned forward until her clasped hands reached the middle of the table. “How did you come all the way to California?”
And there it was, the question that would lead to the biggest and most terrible question: “You were a smuggler?” He could almost see the disgust in her pretty blue eyes, and he could practically feel the blaze of humiliation burning through him. The tension in his shoulders nearly strangled him, and he reached for the glass of water again, just to give his hands something to do besides tremble in his lap.
She only means to fill the silence with conversation…she isn’t trying to hurt you.
“You don’t have to tell me, Jarren.” Her soft voice interrupted his panicking thoughts. At once relief and embarrassment filled his chest.
That was it, though, he wanted to tell her, to give her a reason to think about him once they parted ways at the end of the evening. For certain, he would think of her, how beautiful she looked in the flickering lights of the candle between them, and how she smelled of apple blossoms, and how her gorgeous blue eyes easily flicked from curious to interested in a blink.
“I was…a sailor,” the words left his mouth in the proper cadence.
She grinned, her face brightening like the dawn. “A sailor?” she blurted, her voice high. “That is so exciting.”
Not for him, it wasn’t.
“Have you traveled to many places, then?” she asked, leaning even closer, the interest in her expression nearly convincing him to tell her everything, to finally, after twenty years, share a part of himself that he’d hidden away.
“Yes,” he answered, his tone one of finality. It was the same tone he used on the ship when answering Cap’n Merrill, who only ever wanted a quick and definitive answer. His gaze caught on Angela’s face and he watched as disappointment clouded what was once an expression of sunshine.
She sat back, and he immediately felt the loss of her closeness and her happiness.
As if it were a drug, he knew he would give her whatever she wanted, just for him to feel her feeling happy.
“England. Ireland. Scotland. Spain. France. Morocco…an-and—” He snapped his mouth shut as he felt the tale-tell signs of his tongue coming unhinged.
Waylon? Is that where she was from? And if so, how long had she been in Aurora Lake?
Forcing his words into a straight line, he asked, “Waylon? Tell me…about Waylon.”
For a moment her eyes lit up, and in the next moment, they turned dark, as though someone turned down the lantern in her soul.
“There isn’t much to tell,” she replied. “I was born there, my parents are pillars of the community,”—she uttered the words like they were made of sandpaper— “and once I was old enough to make my own way, I left.”
Succinct…but lacking the details that would paint a better picture of who she was and where she came from.
You’re one to talk…
“Why here?” he asked, wondering if she would share more about her life in Aurora Lake.
She shrugged. “It was far enough west, and there was an ad in the Waylon Ledger that encouraged small businesses to move into a growing mining town. I’d always wanted to own my own business, to design and sew my own clothes—like Tilly Bartlett—so I jumped at the chance.”
He had no idea who Tilly Bartlett was, but he wanted to know more about Angela’s hopes and dreams.
Hoping to share them with her? A wave of anxiety rushed over him. Was that what he wanted? To be a part of Angela’s dreams?
No… I want to be part of her everything. And it was true. He’d known the moment he’d spied her walking past his shop window that first day that she would be important to him. It was the reason he’d allowed Mr. Colvin to talk him into taking the loan.
The wave of anxiety crashed against him. It’s too much…too soon. He’d only just broken off from his ugly past, the last thing he needed was to seek out something or someone else that could so easily break him.
The waiter arrived with their meals, and he took that as a sign that he should keep his mouth shut, or else say something foolish, or reveal something damning. He couldn’t stomach it if her glittering blue eyes darkened with anger or hatred.
Angela dug into her meatloaf with gusto making him grin at her enthusiasm, she caught his grin and gave him one of her own, even though she’d just forked a heaping helping of the loaf into her mouth.
She was adorable with her cheeks puffed out.
He coughed to hide a chuckle, then began eating his own food. And they ate in surprisingly comfortable silence. Until she broke the silence with another question.
“Why did you come to Aurora Lake, and why open a tailor shop right next to my shop?” He’d been waiting for that question, and he knew the answer was important to her.
Picturing the sentence in an ordered queue, he began, “I wanted a new life…I sew, and Mr. Weismann…off-offered me a p-position—” He paused, getting those pesky words back in line.
“But he died,” she remarked, her brows furrowed, her eyes dropping to his mouth. Did she notice the font of his humiliation? Could she tell that his way with words was skewed and crooked?
He nodded. “Mr. Colvin let me lease the shop…” He let his words drop off, knowing she would figure out the rest.
She popped another bit of meatloaf into her mouth and considered his face as she slowly chewed. She swallowed, then inquired, “You say you sew, is that something you learned as a sailor?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose sailors’ uniforms would require regular mending—”
“Sails,” he interrupted.
Her brows arched, confusion wrinkling the sides of her eyes.
“I me-mended sails,” he offered by way of explanation.
Slowly, as if painfully, she laid her fork down beside her plate.
“You mended sails?” she asked, her tone overflowing with incredulity. “And you went from mending sails to sewing and mending tailored clothing?”
“Yes.”
She tensed. “So, you have no actual experience in tailoring? No real reason why you are succeeding, whereas I am…”
It seemed as though something sucked the life from her.
He knew he didn’t have to answer her, she wasn’t asking him anything, she was methodically stoking her own frustration over what he’d said.
Just imagine what she’d think if you told her the whole of it.
“I do believe I have lost my appetite,” she murmured as she pushed her chair back and tossed her napkin into her half-full plate. “Thank you for dinner, Mr. Gryffud.”
His tongue in tangles, as were his thoughts, he watched her walk away without making a sound.
Chapter Six
Angela threw herself back onto her bed and stared into the ceiling.
He was a sailor who just decided that he wanted to be a tailor. He hadn’t worked his fingers to the bone in an apprenticeship, he hadn’t put any effort into building his own reputation before swooping into Aurora Lake and diluting hers.
No, that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t his fault she was an utter failure at keeping her own business afloat. She couldn’t rightly resent him because he’d accomplished something she hadn’t even though she’d been in Aurora Lake longer than him, and put more of her blood, sweat, and tears into her shop.
Over the last several days, as business waned to nothing, she’d spent most of her time thinking. Pondering. And coming to some conclusions that were hard to swallow but utterly unavoidable.
She hadn’t done all that was necessary to cement her success. She’d thought that since she’d been so popular in the beginning when she had four to five customers per day over five months, that it would naturally continue. She’d been wrong. Apparently, she was a new and interesting thing for the ladies of the town, and now that the newness had rubbed off, she was left with an empty cash box and an uncertain future.
But what could she do to get back on track?
For one thing, you can actually go out and make some friends.
She huffed. In Waylon, she’d had plenty of friends. They’d been children of other moneyed families and only came to visit when their mothers stopped in for tea with her mother. She’d called them friends because they were the same age and seemed to have the same interests; dresses. They loved talking about dresses, but unlike them, Angela had been more interested in making her own, whereas they were interested in the fit and how fetching they would look at the next town dance.
Sighing, Angela retreated into her apartment, leaving the door open so she could hear the bell over the door—if someone deigned to bring her some business.
In her apartment, she washed her breakfast dishes, prepared the dough for biscuits, and checked her stockings to see if any of them needed mending. They didn’t, because she had mended them all the week before.
Frustration mounted as the clock ticked down the hours until all of the shops in town closed, including hers.
Including Jarren’s. It wasn’t the first time that day her thoughts drifted to him. He was handsome, she couldn’t deny that, and he was mysterious having offered next to nothing about himself during their short and quickly aborted dinner. She did know, though, that there was something about him, something thoughtful and deliberate. Whenever he spoke he measured each and every word, and she wondered why.
The tinkling of the bell over the door made her start, her eyes flying wide.
“Coming!” she shouted, hurrying to smooth her skirts and wipe the sweat from her palms.
A grin spreading across her face, she raced into the shop and stopped dead.
It was empty. There was no one there.
Her heart plummeted into her feet, along with the excitement and hope that danged tinkling bell had ignited.
Trembling, she pressed a hand to her forehead, blinking away the sudden rush of tears.
“Of course, it was no one…” she murmured, her throat working to fight off a sob.
Making to turn and head back into her apartment, something on the floor just inside the shop door caught her attention
. She walked to it, bending to pick it up. It was an envelope, her name was scrawled across it in swirling, looping letters.
“Who…” Wondering who had bothered to write her a letter but then not deliver it personally, Angela flipped the envelope over and pulled it open. Tugging the folded letter free, she turned her back on the door so that the light of the sun streaming through the windows would offer light by which to read it.
Unfolding it, she read:
Give up now or die. I am watching. I am waiting. I will come for you, my Flower.
It was unsigned save for the dark red thumbprint stamped at the bottom of the letter.
It was blood.
A scream ripped from her throat, and she shuddered, her whole body shaking so badly she couldn’t hold onto the letter. It fell to the floor, drifting down slowly, as if it were a soft and enchanting snowflake and not a threat to her life.
Behind her, the door to her shop burst open and she swung, alarm racing through her.
“Jarren!” she cried, stunned by the look of utter danger on his face. He looked fit to murder; his nostrils flaring, his eyes hard, his chest heaving.
He hesitated only a moment before he took a step toward her. He stopped just short of her, staring down into her face, his gaze raking over her features.
“Ydych chi'n cael eich niweidio? Beth ddigwyddodd? Clywais i chi'n sgrechian,” he ground out, his words foreign to her.
She blinked up at him, furrowing her brow.
“What?” she croaked, shaking her head as if to clear it.
Jarren stepped even closer, his chest brushing against hers, and his hands reaching up to grasp her shoulders. Heat blasted through her arms and into her belly. She gasped at the sensation, a heady and remarkable thrill that she’d never experienced before.
He continued speaking in whatever language that was until she raised her hand, stopping him.
“Mr. Gryffud. Jarren. I can’t understand you. What language is that?” She watched as realization struck, his face flushing.
The Sailor and the Seamstress Page 3