Plop.
“Bull’s-eye!” She yelled her delight then drew her head back in the window. “Another! Get me another!”
Lumley and his cohorts raced to get her another bag while Otis clapped madly.
Stephen yanked Lumley to a stop. “What in bloody hell did you put in the rum punch?”
Lumley shrugged. “The usual.”
“The usual? For a lady? I said to make it strong but not that strong. Just enough to make her somewhat malleable to the suggestion that she’s out of order expecting us to be as goody-goody as she.”
Lumley had the grace to blush. “Well, you can’t taste the rum. Not with all that delicious coconut milk and bits of orange in it,” he said defensively and paused. “I like your Miss Jones. She’s the most sporting female I’ve ever met. You should do everything you can to stop being such a vast annoyance to her.”
Stephen glowered at him, but Lumley didn’t seem to notice. His impatient, determined expression suggested he had more important things on his mind, such as filling paper bags with water. He moved on to do Miss Jones’s bidding.
“I think it’s time you went home, Miss Jones,” Stephen said in his best captain’s voice.
She frowned. “Whatever for? We’ve all night. Stand aside, Captain, and let the true merrymakers have their way.”
She looked at him as if he were the dullest man on earth.
Stephen wasn’t used to being considered dull. In fact, the assessment quite wounded him.
And he also wasn’t accustomed to insubordination. He hadn’t tolerated it on board navy ships, and he certainly wouldn’t in his own house.
“Your store,” he said to Miss Jones. “It needs tending.”
“What do you know about it?” she said, flagrantly defying him. “I’m the proprietress of Hodgepodge. I make all the decisions there.”
Well, then.
He turned a steely eye to Otis. “Doesn’t the store need attention, Otis?”
“Surely not, Captain.” Otis was wide-eyed. “It’s closed for the day.” And he turned his back on him and went skipping off to assist Miss Jones.
Good God. What was happening here? Whatever it was, Stephen didn’t like it. He didn’t like it the way a sailor doesn’t like a red sky in the morning, which signaled squalls ahead.
He maneuvered himself closer to his two guests, which involved squeezing in between them at the window.
“It is a late hour,” he lied. Somehow without elbowing anyone in the ribs, he managed to take his watch out and observe the face in an obvious manner. “And I’ve got an early-morning meeting. Do go home now, Miss Jones. You’ll escort her, Otis?”
About an inch from Stephen’s face, Otis gave a sloppy salute. “Demmed right, Cap’n.”
That was better. Sort of.
Stephen gradually moved out his elbows so neither one had any room left and waited for the two of them to figure out his silent message. Somehow, they never did—Miss Jones almost hit him in the eye with her own elbow—but after three more plops, she’d had enough and decided to go home.
“Not to tend to Hodgepodge,” she said, eyeing him askance when she rose from her perch. “But because I’m tired.”
She took Otis’s arm, and he patted her hand. “I am as well. I think.”
Stephen watched the two of them walk ahead of him toward the stairs. But Otis’s shoe, adorned with gaudy rubies and pearls no doubt made of paste, had lost a heel, a fact its owner hadn’t noticed until now. He was so busy looking for it, he knocked over a small table, whereupon a tumbler of punch fell and hit him on the head.
Miss Jones screamed when her friend sank in a heap to the floor.
Stephen immediately went to him, checking Otis’s head and bending over to listen to his breathing and his heart. He stood and grinned at Miss Jones to reassure her. “Don’t worry. He didn’t feel a thing, and I think he’s snoring, actually, so he can’t be too bad off. I’ll get Pratt to escort him home later. You need to go home now.”
“Are you sure he’ll be safe for the nonce?” Miss Jones surprised him when she took Stephen’s much larger hands between her own and squeezed. “He’s my very special friend, Captain. Nothing can happen to him.”
Stephen—master flirt, commander of warships—was touched by her simple devotion to her eccentric companion. “He’ll be fine. I promise.”
“All right, then,” she said brightly, and dropped his hands. “We can go.”
Out on the street, he couldn’t remember the last time a female had looked at him so—with utter trust. Women often looked at him with nary a bit of inhibition, as she was doing now, as well. It stirred his blood. But the trust part disconcerted him. It made him feel noble, especially as she still had flowers in her hair and looked in need of saving.
“It was a fine party.” She yawned, and her bodice almost burst open with the effort, exposing the tops of her breasts. “What a shame it’s over.”
He thought back on the past week. He’d seen the way she’d peeked through her shop window to observe the boisterous goings-on taking place at his house. No one looked that often without wishing they were somehow involved in the merriment themselves.
“Tomorrow is always another day for a party,” Stephen said, suddenly encouraged—encouraged in a heated way—by her bodice and by her unusual complacency. He was a man, after all, a man who’d recently been on a long voyage with no women to charm him.
They stopped outside her door.
She looked up at him, and he was tempted—tempted even though if he were being sensible, he knew she was all wrong for him.
All wrong.
But the primal part of him reminded him she wasn’t all wrong, was she? He saw her lips, plump and pink and half parted. Why shouldn’t he kiss them?
Encouraged even further by her utter stillness—so unusual for an unmanageable miss—he leaned in an inch—
And she stepped back an entire foot. Definitely out of kissing range. Even out of hugging range.
Miss Jones opened her door, pulled it almost shut behind her, and peeked out. “I enjoyed the evening!” she said airily, and gave him a brilliant smile.
He had that same utterly lost feeling he’d had the first time he’d let a line accidentally slip through a cleat, leaving a sail flapping uselessly in the wind and out of his reach.
“I’m, ah, glad you enjoyed the punch,” he said. “It’s a special recipe from the islands.”
“Oh.” That grin again. “It was delicious. But the fumes made my nose prickle, so I poured some into the dead potted palm near the stage after the performance.”
“You mean when you were dancing and dropping bags of water…?”
She nodded. “I was simply having fun. I think. I’m not quite sure. I’ve never had punch before. I feel—”
“Yes?” She had a certain longing look in her eyes that made him want to rip the door open and kiss her.
“I feel—” She hesitated and bit her lower lip. “I feel like…”
Dammit all, she felt as if she wanted to kiss him. He could tell.
She lifted her chin and suddenly looked noble and passionate, like Joan of Arc. “I feel like reading,” she said.
Reading?
She nodded avidly. “Oh, yes. I do it every night before I go to bed.”
Bed. She shouldn’t have said that. He imagined her in a high-necked cotton night rail with a long row of buttons.
She let out a pleased sigh. “Yes, every night I read.”
Of course, on the ship, he read every night, too. But he’d much rather read the curves and sighs of a warm, willing woman, any day.
“I’m reading mythology this week,” she went on. “I adore Hermes.”
“The messenger god?” Stephen was doing his best to turn away from thoughts of undoing her buttons one by one.
“Yes.” She grinned. “The book I’m reading now has impressive illustrations of him. In one picture, he’s standing with his fists on his hips and one knee bent, and
he’s laughing. It’s as if he’s looking straight at me.”
Stephen saw her eyes turn dreamy, and it wasn’t about him. It was about that damned Hermes.
“I suppose you’re not in your cups, then, if you can read about the gods tonight.” He scratched his head, most disappointed.
“Me?” Her nose wrinkled. “In my cups? Whyever would I be?”
Stephen felt extremely guilty of a sudden. “No reason.”
“I’m beginning to think you had a secret plan,” she said stoutly. “I should have stayed more on guard this evening.”
“I’m a wolf, am I?”
She closed the door a fraction of an inch. “We both know what you’re after, Captain.”
He moved forward and said into the crack, “Come back out here, Miss Jones, and tell me what that is.”
“No,” she replied in confident tones. “You already know.”
He sighed. “Can’t you be complacent again? As you were just a minute ago when you were yawning?”
“Complacent?” Her pitch rose a notch.
“Yes, dammit all. Complacent.” He felt like knocking his head against the shop’s stone wall.
“I knew it!” she cried. “You were trying to ply me with punch, so I’d stop complaining about the noise from your house. Either that, or so I’d become another one of your fancy women.”
“Miss Jones.” She’d guessed correctly, of course.
“Don’t ‘Miss Jones’ me.” She huffed. “You’re a sore loser. You could at least admit I’m right.”
“Very well.” He blew out a breath of frustration. “You’re a shrewd woman. Impossible to fool.”
“And you’re an intelligent man to recognize that fact.”
All evening he’d been thinking about the moment their fingers had met around that glass of punch. She was ripe for a man’s touch, and he was heady with longing to be that man.
“Now let’s go back to how you looked when we were navigating the corner,” he said in a husky whisper. “Happy. Sporting. Kissable.”
There was a beat of silence, but it was cut short by her predictable bluestocking gasp. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she hissed through the crack. “I told you I’ve no need to be sporting for you or anyone else. Nor shall I kiss you. Ever.”
The crack in the door became even smaller, but he noticed she didn’t shut it completely.
He leaned on the jamb and saw her eye, unblinking but narrowed. “It would be so much easier for both of us if you’d fall in line.”
That same eye grew wide and offended.
“Not in a million years,” she declared. “How can I sell books when you persist in tomfoolery? I enjoyed being Queen of the Coconut Girls and dropping those bags of water very much. But I’m wise enough to know there’s a time and a place for making merry, and doing so every night and day on a street where many other people live and work is not the time nor the place.” She paused a beat. “Good night, Captain. Please send Otis back when he’s feeling better, with both his shoes and his missing heel.”
She shut the door in his face.
In his face.
Stephen could hardly believe it. If anyone had done that on board his ship, they’d have been thrown into the ship’s brig. And when they were let out, made to scrub the decks with a tiny scrub brush until they gleamed.
* * *
Jilly leaned against the bookshop door and took a deep breath. Captain Arrow was a dangerous man. Thank God he was leaving Dreare Street soon.
Dancing on stage had made her giddy with delight. So had dropping bags of water out the window. Even walking home with the captain had made her happy. Possibly because he was breathtakingly handsome. And funny. He’d made clever jokes all night long, the kind that sometimes took a minute to ponder because his sense of humor was so dry.
Of course, she’d ignored them. She didn’t want him to think he was entertaining in the least.
She was on to his strategy: he’d confessed it himself. He wanted her to fall in line, to make her more malleable, to turn her over to his way of thinking. He believed one could take part in revelries whenever one wanted to, whether one had obligations or not. He wanted her to stop complaining and join his party indefinitely!
Thank God she’d not succumbed.
“Oh, dear,” she muttered, and put her fingers to her lips. She couldn’t help thinking about how close she’d come to seeing things his way, when he’d put his mouth so close to the crack in the door and said the word kissable.
For a split second, she’d had visions of them doing just that. But then she’d remembered.
Hector.
She was married already, and to a cruel, stupid man—a distant cousin, actually—who’d delighted in making her miserable while running through her father’s fortune. From his deathbed, Papa had acknowledged Hector was a crude sort of man, but he was also the true heir. He was kind to marry Jilly and not force her out of her own home, wasn’t he?
Jilly shuddered. If only Papa had known Hector’s true nature. He was the opposite of kind.
But it’s all right, a stalwart voice in her head reminded her. At least you’re free of him now.
Jilly’s mother had owned a small property independent of her husband’s estate. Thanks to the discretion of her family attorney, Hector had known nothing about it. Jilly had sold it off, along with a steady stream of precious family heirlooms, behind Hector’s back, to raise the funds to buy Hodgepodge.
And then she’d run away—in the middle of the night.
She’d been terrified, but the closer she’d come to London, the more exhilarated she’d become.
It was a new life for her. A new life for Otis, too.
Now she yawned and crawled into bed, comforted by the thought that someday she’d be able to go long lengths of time without thinking of her husband.
But she found she couldn’t sleep, and not because she was thinking of Hector. She was thinking about Captain Arrow again. They’d never gotten around to making those toasts to Dreare Street, had they?
“And we probably never will,” she whispered softly to herself. “Not if his aim is to ply me with punch.”
Even as she said it, she felt regrets about what couldn’t be. Because the evening had been unlike any she’d ever known. Diverting, joyful.
With many plops.
She thought back to the sheer exuberance she’d felt dropping those bags of water. And before that, the dancing between the flaming candelabra, surrounded by men in grass skirts.
Hector would have hated every minute of it.
But thinking of him again made Jilly’s chest tighten with fear and loathing, so she closed her eyes and clutched her coverlet close, only to slip into a dream about coconuts and drums.
CHAPTER FOUR
The next morning, a slant of sun—real sun—peeked through Stephen’s window. He felt as comfortable and lazy as the ship’s cat that used to sleep on top of his charts on his desk in his cabin.
“Late to bed, late to rise,” he said out loud, his humor fully restored in spite of his rejection by Miss Jones the evening previous, “makes a man—”
Makes a man what?
Happy?
Relaxed?
He threw off his quilt, and—
The bed promptly collapsed on the floor.
What the devil?
Thoroughly jolted, he was now at a ridiculous angle, his head down, and his feet up. Gingerly, he rolled off the side of the mattress. He’d just bought the frame from a well-respected furniture dealer. It was sturdy and new, of the finest maple.
He leaned over to examine the legs at the top of the bed. Good God, they’d fallen through the floor! Two floor planks had given way. No doubt the gaping hole accounted for the shouts coming from below in the breakfast room, where Pratt, his former ship’s cook, had been charged with the daily morning chore of frying up a rasher of bacon and several dozen eggs, as well as toasting a loaf of bread and making a pot of tea.
Steph
en froze, wondering if his legs were to go through the ceiling next. Carefully, he walked over the seemingly sturdy planks to the door of his bedchamber and looked back at the slanted bed.
Odd, that. Very odd.
He shrugged. Nothing he could do about it at the moment. Might as well have breakfast, if there was any left that didn’t have plaster in it.
“You’ve got woodworm in a beam.” One of his friends winced as he looked up at the hole in the ceiling through pince-nez missing a lens; it had been lost last night in a playful brawl on the roof. “One rubbery creature fell on my toast.”
Gad.
The other men looked near to being sick.
“I’m sure it’s only in that portion of the beam,” Lumley added, his face rather green and his eyes a bloodshot red. “Otherwise, we’d be seeing it everywhere. And we haven’t.”
Stephen eyed the row of beams above his head. The others, if in good condition, would support the ceiling very well, but his chest tightened, nevertheless. “The executor of my cousin’s will told me the house was worn in places, but one doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I’d planned to have it inspected at my leisure.”
Another friend added a few dollops of brandy to his empty teacup and drained it. “I’m sure it’s fine. Except for that one beam, it appears in excellent shape.”
Frying pan in hand, Pratt was none the worse for wear. Always impeccably groomed, this morning he wore one of his more intricately embroidered waistcoats when he slid three eggs and a side of bacon onto Stephen’s plate. “No house is, what you call, perfetto,” he said, kissing the fingertips of his right hand, where several large golden rings sparkled.
The whole table seemed soothed by his smooth Italian accent.
“It’s nothing I can’t take care of.” Stephen picked up his fork and looked round the company as if daring anyone to disagree.
“Aye,” whispered one dapper fellow who’d had both eyebrows shaved off but didn’t know it yet. “If I were you, Arrow, I’d hire a reputable carpenter, the best in London.”
Cloudy with a Chance of Marriage Page 3