“Forgive me but . . .”
The voice was refined but wrong. Not the one he’d dreamed of and wept for. Micha whirled around to see a man, well dressed and stately, some twenty years or more his senior. “What?”
“Are you—do you need some assistance?”
“I’m not for sale.”
The stranger flushed. The fact he did not recoil or retreat, however, was an answer all of its own. “That was not the proposition I intended.”
“So thereisa proposition?” Micha leaned back on his hands, caught somewhere between hostility and intrigue, wanting to be left alone and also terrified to be.
“No.” The man’s flush deepened. “I’m sorry. I’m not in the habit of—I saw you this morning.”
“You better not be following me.”
Wisely, the stranger made no answer, seeming to recognise that any he could make would be damning.
Micha thought about walking away. There was nothing to stop him. Instead, he said, “Scant few reasons for a gentleman to be hanging around the docks.”
“I was bidding farewell to my youngest son. He’s spending the spring and summer travelling with his tutor before he goes to university. Not quite the grand tour. But he’s ready enough to have his own life, I think. As ...” There was the slightest of hesitations. “As am I.”
“And what does that have to do with me?” asked Micha.
The man offered a self-deprecating smile. “Very little.”
“Yet here you are.”
This was a familiar conversation to Micha. Not the words exactly. But the cadence of it. The dance that was not a dance. The fencing match where nobody knew if the foils were tipped. If they would comeaway bleeding. Except Micha wasn’t sure if his companion was quite so familiar. Despite his air of elegance, there was something unexpectedly open about him. Or Micha was himself too open—had been left that way, defenceless in the wake of love—when he should have been wary.
“Well I . . .” Another hesitation. “I thought you were . . .”
“What?”
The man glanced away. “Beautiful.”
“You should probably be careful,” Micha said finally. “Going around telling strange men you think they’re beautiful.”
The gentleman turned back to him. There were threads of green in the gold of his eyes. Threads of grey in the brown of his hair. “Do I need to be careful with you?”
It was not a question Micha knew how to address. “I’ve been a whore, you know.”
“Haven’t we all,” returned the stranger, with a lemon twist of irony in his refined voice.
“Some of us more literally than others.”
“Perhaps that just makes you more honest.”
“I suppose”—Micha stirred the pebbles beneath his feet—“you’d like to fuck.”
“I think I’d like to know your name first.”
“Oh, you’re one ofthose.”
“What does that mean?”
It had been old bitterness that had spoken on Micha’s behalf. “Ignore me,” he muttered. “My name is Michael. Michael Dashwood.”
“Mine is ... well.” Once again, the man blushed very slightly. “It’s Galahad, but in my defence my mother is Welsh. My friends call me Gale.”
