The Scoundrel and I: A Novella (11 page)

She did not take his arm to descend the steps to the street, and she walked beside him to the mews in silence. In the past his uncle’s hysterics had always made excellent entertainment. But the grave mask of her face now made all of that rot.

“I cannot believe what he said to you,” she said, finally breaking the silence. Beside the carriage, she looked up at him. “I cannot believe it.”

He shrugged. “He’s said worse. They all have.”

“Your family?” Lantern light revealed the astonishment on her features.

“Listen to you, worrying about a bit of name-calling when I’ve failed you with that dashed type. I’m sorry, Elle.”

Her brow pleated, and she turned to the carriage and climbed up onto the seat without his assistance. They drove in silence. He felt like a mainmast had fallen over on top of his ribs.

“We’ll devise another solution,” he said.

“Stop saying that.”

“Saying what exactly?”

“We.”

“
I’ll
devise another solution.”

“No, you will not. I will. Alone. This is not your responsibility, Captain.”

“Damn well is.”

“A gentleman should not say such words in a woman’s hearing.”

“A gentleman can say whatever he likes, whenever he likes, and to whoever he likes if the occasion warrants it.”

“
Whomever
,” she said quietly. “But I do not believe that is your sincere conviction,” she said quietly.

“Damn well is at present. Why won’t you let me help you, Elle?”

“You have helped more than necessary. Thank you for it. But I would like you to drive me to the shop now.”

“Is it because I bungled it tonight? Don’t trust me to make it right, do you?”

“No. I appreciate what you have done. Very much. No one—” She turned her face away, giving him a view of the molasses silk he’d had against his cheek three nights ago. By God, she felt good, and smelled good, and he had to make this right for her.

“No one else would have gone to the extent that you have,” she said after a moment. “You can feel perfectly comfortable leaving it to me now.”

“That’s a tub of barnacles, and you know it. I won’t—what did you say?—
feel perfectly comfortable
abandoning you to this now, not comfortable at all.”

“You have no choice in the matter,” she said firmly.

“I damn well do. It’s half my fault and I’ll see this through, devil take it.”

“Captain,” she said, “I must ask you to respect my wishes—”

“While you disregard mine, is that it? Listen here, Miss Flood, a naval officer worth his salt don’t retreat from a battle—”

“
Does not
retreat from a battle.”

His chest filled with the most insane warmth. “Does not retreat from a battle,” he repeated. “He breaks out every gun on deck and pounds away at the enemy whether he’s got a clear shot or not.”

“Captain, while I appreciate the military metaphor—”

“Analogy.”

Her eyes snapped wide. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to grab her up and kiss her rosy cheeks and pink lips and make her sigh.

“While I appreciate the military analogy you have offered,” she said, setting her jaw like an adorable little mule, “with all due respect this situation is not a firefight, and—” She looked past him and then her head swiveled around. “Where are we? This is not Gracechurch Street. I do not recognize this neighborhood.”

He pulled the carriage to a halt along a row of houses on the street lined with flowering trees, and leaped off the box. A boy came and took the horses’ leads.

“Where are we?” she said as Tony came around to her side.

“My house.”

“No.”
She gripped the sides of the seat. “Drive me home. Please. This instant.”

“Please and this instant? Undecided whether to request or demand, are you?” He offered his hand.

“Captain Masinter—”

“Anthony.” He smiled.

“You must take me home.
Now
.”

“I don’t know where your home is. You don’t trust me enough to tell me, though God knows I haven’t given you reason not to.”

A man and woman walking along the footpath stared at them. Tony bowed.

“Evening,” he said pleasantly, then to Elle: “You’re making a scene.”

“I am not making a scene, but if I were it would be entirely your fault.”

He extended his hand again. “Come inside and you can berate me while I find something for us to eat. I’m famished. You must be too.”

“Captain—”

“Oh, look, another of my neighbors out for a stroll. Think I’ll just invite—”

She climbed down and went up the steps and into his house with gratifying haste until the door closed and she rounded on him.

“What do you think you are doing, forcing me to enter your house? A bachelor’s house? At night, no less!”

“Nobody saw,” he said, “except the woman next door poking her nose through a crevice in her draperies. And the stable boy. And—”

Her hands flew upward and covered her face and her shoulders shook.

“How many servants do you have?” she mumbled through the cracks between her fingers. He had the damnedest sense that she wasn’t crying; rather, struggling not to laugh.

“Two. You’ve met Cob. He’ll be somewhere upstairs now, doing whatever it is he does now that he’s got a house instead of a ship to keep in order.”

Her fingers slid down to reveal her sweet eyes. “Mr. Cob served on the
Victory
with you?”

“Cabin steward and all-around mother hen. You had an ally in him tonight, by the by. He didn’t like the idea of breaking into my uncle’s house either.”

“He is a reasonable man, obviously.”

“My cook’s on furlough for the week. But I’m not entirely useless in the kitchen. Miss Flood,” he said with abrupt formality, and extended his arm. “Care to join me in the stateroom for dinner?”

Elle bit back the hilarity lapping at her—hilarity borne of equal parts horrible dread over her future and her need to not let this end—and walked past him to the stairs.

He was in fact far from useless in the kitchen. She offered help but he declined, bidding her sit at the table with a glass of wine and wait. As he prepared dinner with swift efficiency, she watched him and had the dangerous thought that she would like to watch him like this forever.

“How did you learn to cook?”

“Cook-room of a revictualling ship,” he said, arranging two plates and setting one before her. “Two years.” He offered a fork and her fingers brushed his as she accepted it. When he spoke again, his voice was lower. “Three years in the cook-room of the next ship. Nearly got trapped there.” He sat across from her and took up his glass of wine.

“I can understand that! This is absolutely delicious.” She looked up and nearly choked on the mouthful. He was not eating or drinking, but leaning back in his chair, arms loosely crossed, half-lidded eyes intent upon her. She scooped another forkful. “How, then, did you escape a future as a ship’s cook?”

“Bought an officer’s bunk.” He cocked a half-smile. “Some advantages to being a son of a baronet, even a fifth son.”

“I should think there are many advantages,” she said, wiping her lips with a towel. “But son of a baronet or not, you cannot purchase your way into commanding a ship of the line.”

“Can’t you?”

“You excel at your profession, Captain.”

“If you say so,” he murmured. “Finished?”

“Yes. Thank you. You have not eaten so I suspect that you pretended your hunger to make an excuse to cook for me.”

“Did I?”

“And I admit that I was in need of dinner. My situation seems less hopeless now, though I am not at all certain how I will wrest free of this trouble.”

“You won’t,” he said. “We will.” He came to his feet and went to the door.

She reached for her plate. “I should—”

“Elle,” he said with the deviltry in his eyes that made her feel delectably light. “Baronet’s son. War hero. I cook. I don’t clean.”

She followed him up the stairs and into a chamber furnished with masculine accents: wood-paneled walls, a modest writing table, and a comfortable leather-covered chair arranged across from a sofa before the unlit hearth.

Her gaze got stuck on the sofa. And every thought, wish, and fantasy of kissing him crashed into her imagination at once.

She could feel him watching her. Her eyes sought something else—anything else—anything
safe
. It found a large bound volume lying open atop the writing table.

“Oh! This is a captain’s log, is it not? I have heard of such books, of course. But I have never actually seen one. You are the first ship captain—”

Then he was beside her, shutting the book and standing far too close.

“—I have ever met,” she finished haltingly. “May I see it?”

“Only a draft,” he said, taking it up and shelving it behind the desk.

“I should like to see it, nevertheless. You know, of course, about my interest in books.”

“This one’s got nothing interesting in it.” He stood with his broad shoulders blocking the shelf. “Day after day of clear horizons, endless skies, sailors bored to pieces. Dull as caulking.”

“You misunderstand,” she said with a smile, reaching around him. “It is not the content that interests me so much as the format.” She plucked it out again and opened it. She studied a page, then flipped it and studied another. “I had no idea captain’s logbooks underwent rewriting and editing in this manner. I always assumed they were like diaries. Is this sailors’ shorthand that you employed in haste, and this”—she pointed—“the text that you rewrote when you had more time? Or perhaps this part is secret code. How thrilling!”

“No.”

She glanced up. His handsome face was stony.

“Oh.”
She closed the book and reshelved it. “I beg your pardon. I never meant to pry into naval secrets.”

“No secrets in that log. Nothing anybody can’t read,” he said stiffly.

“Then I apologize for—well—for—I don’t know. What have I done?”

“Nothing. You’ve done nothing wrong.” For an extended moment he simply looked down into her eyes. Then he pulled out the logbook again and opened it. “This”—he pointed to the rows of neat, carefully penned sentences—“was written by my first lieutenant.” His voice was tight. “And this”—he pointed to the shorthand—“I wrote.”

“I see,” she said hesitantly.

“You don’t,” he said. “It’s not shorthand or code. It’s nonsense.”

“Nonsense?”

“Look.”

She studied the writing. The hand was firm. But it was not indeed shorthand. It was English—barely. Words were misspelled, even transposed with each other. Other words were missing or simply wrong, and letters were occasionally scribed backward, like the letters on type. Slowly she made sense of the prose, just as the transcription did in the margin above each line.

“I do not understand,” she said.

“That makes two of us.” His gaze was on the page. “Madness of it is, sometimes I can’t even read what
I
’ve written.”

Her heart was beating so hard she could hear it in the stillness.

“Did you never learn—that is, did you not study?”

“Endless school, Elle. When that didn’t take, tutors who plied the stick again and again, trying to force a decent sentence from my pen. Boy can speak, ergo he should read and write. Truth was, I could barely speak. Mixed up words, sounds. Couldn’t read my lessons. Couldn’t read time from the face of a clock. Couldn’t even say what was left or right. Devil of it was, nobody’d acknowledge it. None of ’em wanted to admit the Masinter family had produced a bona fide idiot. Except Seraphina. She tried to help. Number of her books I ruined, throwing them at walls . . . Finally got myself out of there. Ran to the closest port. Signed on to a ship.”

“You ran away from home? When?”

“New Year’s Day, seventeen ninety-nine.”

“But—You could not have been—”

“Twelve.”

A gasp escaped her.

“Plenty of war makes plenty of work at sea, Elle.”

For a moment her throat was too tight to allow speech. She traced the edge of the ship’s log with her fingertip.

“You succeeded,” she finally said.

“Battle opens up the ranks quick. The Admiralty needs men with experience during wartime.”

“I mean that you succeeded in making yourself understood.” With such casual panache, carelessly to the point of charm. But perhaps not
actually
careless. “Your usual speech, the incorrect grammar, it is not sailor’s cant as I assumed, or even fashionable insouciance, I think,” she said. “You have cultivated that speech to deflect attention from actual mistakes that you might accidentally make. Haven’t you?”

He did not respond. She looked up and saw in his eyes the truth of her words.

“In fact you succeeded enormously,” she said. “How did you do it?”

“Hundreds of hours on my knees swabbing decks, daresay. Makes a man desperate to improve himself.”

“Captain.”

He blew out a voluble breath. “Picked up tricks here and there. Navigator on my first cruise was a capital fellow, shared a few ideas. Passenger on my second cruise happened to be a linguist. Said he’d known a boy like me in Ireland, two more in Wales. He was glad to work his experiments again. And I’d time. Plenty of it. Most days at sea are hours and hours of nothing. I would’ve been an even greater idiot not to have succeeded, at least some.”

“You are trying to lessen your accomplishments. That isn’t right. You should be proud. You should shout it out to the world that you were able to overcome this impairment.”

He lifted his hands, his strong, calloused palms facing up, and Elle abruptly needed air. She was probably falling in love with his hands. It was positively ridiculous, but there it was. Then he tugged the cuffs of his shirtsleeves out from his coat. Embroidered into each cuff was a tiny block letter, on the left a P, and on the right an S.

“Port,” he said, spreading the fingers of his left hand. “Starboard.” His right hand stretched wide. “Cob started sewing them in years ago. The old salt said it’d be better to cheat than to mistake it during battle.” He chuckled, then shook his head. “I haven’t overcome it, Elle. Just found ways of getting around it.”