“Will you be comfortable sleeping on the floor?” she asked, looking at him with big eyes. But her gaze was unfocused and he knew she didn’t quite see him.
“Of course,” he lied. “Go to sleep. I’ll turn the lights down.”
“Not yet.” She shook her head, and her eyes seemed to go on swerving even after she stopped. “I can’t sleep without reading first.”
“Darling, I don’t think you’re going to have that problem tonight.” He walked around the bed, feeling braver now, for she was more like a lost girl than a beautiful half-dressed woman, and his only desire was to ensure she went to sleep without vomiting all over the sheets. He arranged the blankets around her. Finally she closed her eyes—then flung them open again. He smiled in sheer self-defense.
“You said you’d assassinate me in my bedchamber,” she recalled. “How will you do it? Will you suffocate me with the pillow?”
“Maybe,” he said, drawing a loose strand of hair away from her face. “What do you think, would that be all right?”
“Tiring,” she said. “It apparently takes more effort than you’d think. What about a knife to the heart?”
“No, too messy. This is a very nice quilt and I wouldn’t want to ruin it. Poison?”
“Do you have any with you?”
He shook his head. She was so lovely, “pale as the dustiest lily’s leaf.” He rather thought his heart beat sighs, not blood, looking down upon her.
“Well then, that won’t work,” she said, her voice fading. “You’ll justhave to strangle me.” She closed her eyes again, muttered something about rope burns, and drifted to sleep.
Ned watched her breathe for a while longer, then went about the room, turning off the lamps, removing his coat and boots, almost tripping over her corset, before approaching the bed. There was enough space that she’d never realize he slept beside her, and in the morning he could rise before she woke. Granted, this was rather unprincipled logic, but after all, he reasoned, what else could one expect from a pirate?
He turned back the quilt... then abruptly reversed the action, took a pillow, and tossed it on the floor. With a rug beneath him and his coat as a blanket, he made a bed that turned out to be as uncomfortable and intractable as his honor unexpectedly was. Up on the actual bed, cozy and warm, Cecilia muttered about dynamite, obviously having a pleasant dream. Listening to her, Ned felt his heart soften. He would keep her safe, he vowed—including from himself. Even if it left him with bruises and good grief was that a nail beneath his hip?
Shifting from side to side, trying without success to get comfortable, he finally sighed and went frustrated, noble, like a gentleman, to sleep.
11
a sudden awakening—cecilia disappears—the senselessness and insensibility of readingwuthering heights—flaccid faculties—they are introduced—the danger of hair combs—whispers in the dark—the herald of the dawn
The feeling was not like a gas explosion, but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling: it acted on Ned’s torpid senses and forced him awake. He did not wait for the sense of alarm to ease into understanding before he reached beneath his pillow for the knife he always kept there. He found nothing. Instantly rolling to his knees, he groped under the rug for a gun that was also absent, before realizing that he wasn’t under attack—he’d simply forgotten to arrange his weapons the night before. Considering he woke every morning in the same manner (an occupational hazard, since pirates, secret policemen, and traitorous henchmen of mad poetic tyrants were all at risk even when fully conscious and not bleary-eyed and, ugh, drooling a little), it was remarkable he’d not prepared his comfort knife as usual. And then he remembered.
Cecilia Bassingthwaite.
He stood up, pushing the tangled hair from his face, and looked at her sleeping in the bed. Except she wasn’t—sleeping, or in the bed.
She was gone.
“Damn,” he said.
Striding across the room, he noticed her gown was no longer on the floor, although the corset was, like the shell of propriety she had discarded last night. Ned stepped around it and knocked on the bathroom door.
“Madam? Are you in there?”
Silence.
Opening the door, he ascertained that she was not inside, and swore again.
Language, chimed half a dozen female voices in his head, but he ignored them.
The sun was only now emerging, its tentative light barely illuminating the room. Hopefully this meant she’d left not too long ago. He checked the pockets of his own clothes and found money, switchblade knives, the maître d’s fob watch. So she hadn’t paused for robbery. Did that leave her under-resourced, or were her pretty lacy drawers already weighted down with coins and secret weapons? He should have checked last night. For that matter, he should have tied her to the bed.
That thought, mingling with memories of her drawers, and the bare calves beneath them, made him groan. He hastily pulled on his clothes, wondering what was the best plan for chasing after her. Would she continue to Lyme Regis with the hope of stealing Lady Armitage’s house on her own? Or would she ride back toward Blackdown Hills? If Ned guessed wrongly, he would be heading in the opposite direction while Cecilia got herself into more danger than even a girl trained by Jemima Darlington could handle.
“Let’s think about this clearly,” he said aloud as he sat on the end ofthe bed to put on his boots. “She’ll suppose that I’ll expect her to try for the Armitage house, and so she’ll go north instead—but she’ll know I’ll figure that out, so she’ll try to trick me by riding to Lyme Regis—unless she realizes I’ll guess that too, in which case she’ll be halfway to Blackdown Hills by now—and yet surely she’ll know that I know that she knows she can’t trust me, which means she’s heading for Armitage—although on the other hand—”
“Coffee?” she asked.
