“I was returning to the library and overheard your conversation.” He tried to bite back a smile. “She doesn’t understand subtlety.”
Eleanor’s shoulders sagged with relief. She hadn’t been found out. “I didn’t mean to imply anything, Dante, really.”
“Don’t you dare apologize,” he interrupted, barely containing his laughter. “You might have been perfectly serious, but she didn’t take it that way. She wouldn’t. You see, to her, another woman in my home means only one thing.” His gaze was warm and there was hidden meaning in his tone.
Understanding dawned, and Eleanor blushed. “Oh, but surely she couldn’t think that I—” Her gaze flew to his, and she couldn’t finish the sentence.
Dante merely laughed again. “Do you care what she thinks, Eleanor?”
“I’m not quite sure,” she admitted. Actually, she didn’t know what she felt. In the first place, she would never willingly hurt another person, but…“I have to admit, seeing her so completely unravel before my very eyes was quite extraordinary.”
Warmth lingered in his steady gaze. “Marguerite might be many things, but she is not extraordinary.”
Eleanor frowned. “But…she’s your…mistress.”
He finally glanced away. “Was. She was, Eleanor. She is no longer welcome here.”
Eleanor felt light-headed, almost glib. “Oh, but I’m sure she won’t be the last.”
He looked at her, his countenance oddly introspective. “Why would you say that?”
She straightened, taken aback by his question. “Well, I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I guess I was thinking…” Her words trailed away before she regained her mental balance.
“There you go, Eleanor, thinking again.” He gave her a teasing smile.
She laughed, understanding that he did not mean to insult her. “Come to think of it, you didn’t help the situation much, lingering so suggestively over the word…tea.” She gave him a wicked smile.
They laughed together, and Eleanor couldn’t remember when she’d had such a good time.
“Eleanor,” Dante said after he’d caught his breath, “come sailing with me tomorrow.”
Later that evening, when he was alone, he realized he’d been thinking about Eleanor a lot. She wasn’t beautiful in the normal sense. But she had remarkable eyes, eyes that were wide and intelligent and gathered in everything around her. And her hair was uncommonly luxurious, even though he had never seen it down. And…and her hands. They were small, yet he knew there was strength in them, for she was not a woman to sit about and do nothing.
Horace entered the den. “Will there be anything else, sir?”
Dante motioned to the chair across from him. “Sit a moment, will you?”
Horace complied.
“What did you think of my guest today?”
Horace raised one eyebrow. “Which one?”
Dante cringed, then laughed softly. “Mrs. Rayburn.”
Horace studied his employer, then turned his gaze to the fire. “I do believe she is the only woman who has been here and read your papers, sir.”
Nodding, Dante replied, “Yes. She’s quite intelligent.”
One corner of Horace’s mouth lifted briefly. “Yes, sir, she is that.”
“When I first met her, she annoyed the hell out of me,” Dante admitted.
“They will do that, sir.”
“I mean,” he went on, perplexed at his own feelings, “at one point she laughed at me, and another time she actually slapped me across the face.”
“She did seem like she could be a lively companion,” Horace commented.
Dante cleared his throat, a little uneasy. “She’s rather stiff though, don’t you think?”
“Stiff, sir?”
“You know,” Dante hedged, “kind of…resistant to…pleasure, if you get my meaning.”
Horace offered a knowing smile. “If you permit me to say so, sir, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”
Dante mulled that over. “Well, I don’t know—”
“She requested to wash up before tea. I sent her upstairs, giving her directions to the small water closet next to the linen cupboard.”
“And?” Dante probed.
“I believe she took a wrong turn and ended up in your room, sir.”
“In my—” He shot Horace a look of pure horror. “My bedroom?” At Horace’s nod, Dante sank deeper into his chair, appalled. “And she didn’t run from here, screaming?”
“No, sir. But she did have a very becoming blush to her cheeks when I met her on the stairs.”
After Horace left, Dante ruminated on their conversation. While at first he was dismayed that Eleanor should have seen his erotica, he finally decided that if they were going to be friends at all, she would have to accept who and what he was: a man who so enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh, he hoped he was still able to perform well into his twilight years. She didn’t have to like it, she surely wasn’t expected to participate in it, but she had damned well better accept it.
There had to have been at the very least a dozen reasons why Eleanor should have refused his invitation: It wasn’t proper. She had work to do. It wasn’t proper. The children at the orphanage would miss her. It wasn’t proper. Sylvester was supposed to call on her that evening. And, above all, it wasn’t proper.
In the end, she acquiesced. After all, he had promised to bring Victor, and Eleanor knew it was time for her to get to know the boy better. And with Victor along, it wasn’t like they would be alone together. Besides which, Dante had promised that he would have her home before anyone even missed her.
The sun wasn’t up yet when she crept, like a thief in the night, from the house. No novice to the mercurial changes in the weather when on the water, she dressed for the occasion, drawing on an old pair of Amos’s woolen drawers over her own, beneath her gown.
At her request, Dante picked her up two blocks from Calvin’s home. He helped her into the carriage, and she snuggled beneath a lambskin lap robe.
She glanced in the back seat. “I thought you were picking up Victor first.”
Dante expelled a long breath of air. “He woke up with a fever this morning.”
The brief flash of alarm didn’t come as a surprise. “Oh. Then…we’ll be alone?”
He slanted her a glance. “Does that make a difference?”
She sighed. “Well, it isn’t proper, Dante.”
He was quiet a moment, then asked, “Because you’re betrothed?”
She flushed. “Oh, it isn’t that. And I’m not, you know. Not yet, anyway.”
“Do you wish to be?” His voice was cautious.
“To Sylvester? Oh, I don’t know. He’s a kind man. Quite persistent, really. It…it wouldn’t be a bad life.” It wouldn’t be the life she, in her foolishness, had dreamed about, but she’d almost given up on those silly fantasies.
“I only said that because you had made me so unbelievably angry that day.” She didn’t even like to think about Sylvester. Why had he brought it up?
Dante made a noncommittal sound in his throat. “Yes, I can be rather pigheaded at times.”
She turned and gave him a curt not. “And pompous, and arrogant, and insidious, and vain, and—”
“All right, all right,” he conceded. A dry chuckle escaped. “You certainly know how to knock a man down to size.”
“I’m just being honest, Dante. I’m sorry that I can’t titter and swoon over you like other women. My forthrightness has gotten me into trouble more than once, I’m afraid.”
He laughed again. “I can believe that.”
She gave him a playful punch on the arm.
They arrived at the wharf and Eleanor lifted her gaze toward the ocean. “Oh, Dante,” she said, her voice hushed. “Look.”
Dante followed her gaze, and together they looked into the most beautiful sunrise Eleanor had ever seen.
The sunrise, as beautiful as it was, had concerned Dante at first. There was something about it
that had been unsettling, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He was a fair sailor, considering the number of times he had been to sea, but his expertise was not in weather warnings. He had always hired someone else to watch the signs.
At the wharf, he had observed Eleanor carefully as they boarded his craft. It was loosely styled after a Dutch canal boat, small yet hardy, and although the canal boat had a flat bottom, Dante’s was fashioned for rougher waters, having a keel, or centerboard, that was lowered to prevent the boat from being blown sideways by the wind.
And not surprisingly, he discovered that Eleanor was a reliable, even capable, first mate. She knew starboard from port, fore from aft, she clearly understood that masts, yards, and booms carried the sails, and that shrouds and stays held up the masts. She never questioned his directions, and the only time he had to repeat them was when the wind carried his voice away.
As they sailed passed Castle Island, Dante had relayed an incident that happened fifty years before of a duel that had been fought because one man had accused the other of cheating at cards. A young lieutenant was slain. His friends got his killer drunk, led him to a small chamber deep within one of the fort’s lowest dungeons and shackled him to the floor. Then they sealed up the entrance and left the man to die.
Dante had been both amazed and amused by Eleanor’s reaction. Unlike any other woman he knew, she did not plead with him to stop or pretend to be fainthearted. Instead she had asked if they had ever found any proof of the story. To his knowledge, they had not. But that was Eleanor—pragmatic, factual, and sometimes irritatingly logical.
They had skirted Lovell’s Island, where he had regaled her with stories of buried pirate treasure, shipwrecks, and ill-fated lovers who had frozen to death in each other’s arms. There was even a secret tunnel leading to a mysterious fort.
He had planned to have their picnic on Great Brewster, for although there were few trees, wild roses grew in profusion. The intertidal zone and the tidal pools were rich with blue mussels, barnacles, starfish, horseshoe crabs, and sea anemones, living fossils whose history went back hundreds of millions of years, and he had decided Eleanor would enjoy that.
Now she stood at the tiller, facing the wind, her splendid chestnut hair escaping its pins and whipping freely behind her. She looked quite magnificent.
She turned toward him, frowning as she pointed at the sky. Dante’s gaze followed, and he felt a stir of alarm. A fog bank crept over the water from the ocean. It came at an alarming speed.
“Can we turn back?” she shouted.
He approached her and took the tiller. “We won’t make it.”
She gazed at him, her eyes wide, but not frightened. “What will you do?”
He motioned to his right. “That’s Great Brewster over there. It’s where I had planned to stop, anyway. We’ll pull in and hope this thing blows over.”
But the fog rolled in upon them, thick and wet and cold, obliterating the shoreline. All Dante could do was pray.
Twelve
The fog shrouded everything in a misty gray cloak. It was like blindness; Eleanor could hardly see her hand in front of her face. Shivering and wet, she dragged herself from the cold water, weighed down by her drenched clothes. “Dante!”
“Eleanor, are you all right?”
His voice came from somewhere in front of her. She followed it, wishing she could push the vapor aside, like a veil covering a doorway. “Yes, yes. I’m fine. Are you?”
“Yeah.” He sounded disgusted, “Just damned angry, that’s all.”
She found him beside a drifting piece of the wreckage. “Where are we?”
“I’m not sure, but if I had to guess, I’d say Middle Brewster.”
Eleanor peered into the fog, seeing nothing. “How can you tell?”
He bent and picked up a piece of the keel, then tossed it away with disgust. “We smashed against an underwater ledge. Middle Brewster is famous for its hidden ledges and jagged rocks that lie just beneath the surface.”
Small pieces of wood washed ashore. “I suppose the hull is damaged,” she murmured.
Dante came and stood beside her. “I can fix it, but it might take a while. And it doesn’t make any sense to leave now, not in this fog.”
She began to shiver again.
Dante swore. “You’re freezing. Wait a minute.” He left her, waded into the water, and returned with a large package—and the picnic basket!
“Come on,” he urged. “If we’re where I think we are, there’s a thicket of small trees over this way.”
She tried not to shake too much, but her clothes felt like they were frozen to her skin. “What do you have in the package?”
He put his arm around her to warm her; she leaned into him. “Provisions.”
“W-what k-kind?”
He rubbed her arm as if trying to get her circulation going. “A blanket, a box of matches, and a bottle of brandy, among other things.”
She moved her feet methodically; they felt like chunks of wood.
They stopped, and Eleanor could see nothing but a vague, dark shape in the distance. “Here we are,” he said. “I’m going to start a fire.”
Eleanor collapsed, shivering uncontrollably. “What can I do to help?”
He tossed the package of provisions on the ground in front of her. “Can you open it?”
Slightly peeved that he would think she was helpless, she snapped, “Of course I can open it.”
With a wry chuckle, he left her, no doubt to search for wood.
Eleanor fumbled with the twine that held the oilskin package together. Once it was open, she discovered a wool blanket, the matchbox, which she carefully set aside lest her wet clothes should dampen it, a bottle of brandy, and some small tools, the uses of which she couldn’t be sure, a long flannel shirt, and a pair of lightweight trousers.
Everything was laid out on the oilskin when Dante returned with an armful of twigs, branches, and driftwood. He dropped them on the ground then arranged them, tenting them against one another. Eleanor pushed the matchbox filled with sulfur matches toward him, and he started the fire. When it caught, it popped and hissed, crackling the wood, snaking into the muzzy air.
“Get out of your wet clothes,” he ordered.
She didn’t balk. “All of them?”
He tossed her the dry flannel shirt, then turned his back. “All of them.”
Eleanor turned away, too. With cold, numb fingers, she disrobed, spreading her clothes over the ground, praying they would dry. Amos’s wet, wool drawers gave off an offensive odor, and she wrinkled her nose against it. When she got down to her chemise and drawers and hesitated. “Dante—”
“Eleanor,” he interrupted abruptly from behind her, “take off your underwear and lay it by the fire. It will dry in no time.”
With a sigh, she did as she was told, then slipped quickly into the shirt. Despite the fact that she wore little, she felt better.
Dante had stripped, too. He wore the dry lightweight trousers, but his chest was bare. The dragon gleamed in the firelight. He lay the oilskin on the ground near the fire and motioned her to sit on it. When she did, he draped the blanket around her shoulders and handed her a cup. “Drink it.”
She took a whiff. Brandy. “Shouldn’t we eat something first?”
He handed her a rather soggy piece of chicken. “Your wish is my command,” he replied, his voice laced with sarcasm.
It was delicious. She devoured it, along with a very mushy biscuit, then sipped the brandy. They sat together companionably; words seemed unnecessary.
She felt so at ease with him. It didn’t make any sense at all. She took another swig, her stomach beginning to warm. There was a pleasant buzzing in her head. She remembered what she’d been thinking about the day before, after she’d trespassed into his bedroom. “Dante?”
He rose and hunkered near the fire. “Yes?”
“We’ve sort of become friends, haven’t we?”
“Yes, you could say that,” he answ
ered.
“I have something to ask you.” Last night when she’d gone to bed, she had mulled it over and over in her mind. It was a daring idea, bold, to be sure, and not at all like her. Now, with the brandy buzzing in her brain, she wondered why the thought had bothered her.
“What is it?”
“Well, if I should ever marry again—”
“Sylvester?”
She shrugged. “Perhaps, if he asks me.”
Dante was quiet for a long moment. “What about it?”
She wasn’t so tipsy she could blurt out just anything; she still had some of her senses left. “Let me preface my request by admitting that I mistakenly entered your very private bedroom the other day, and I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t leave immediately.”
“Oh?” His voice was cautious.
“I do apologize for that, but…you really do have some very…interesting art.” Despite her buzz, her cheeks got hot.
He chuckled, a deep, husky sound. “It’s called ‘erotica,’ Eleanor.”
“I know what it’s called,” she replied, sharper than she meant to.
“Then say it.”
She glanced sideways at him. “What?”
“Say the word, Eleanor.”
With a little snort, she rejoined, “What will that—”
“Say it.”
She cleared her throat. “E…erotica. There. Are you satisfied?”
“Not very,” he murmured, almost under his breath. She noticed he was smiling.
“Stop grinning like a fool and let me finish before I sober up and realize that what I’m about to ask you is insane.”
He poured her another spot of brandy. “Sorry. Go on.”
“Well, as you are completely aware, I am a rather…stern and straightforward woman.”
“Stiff.”
She cocked her head at him again. “What?”
“The first word I thought of when we met, was ‘stiff.’ Like your clothes and your body had been dipped in starch and set out in the sun to dry.”
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