Devon felt his heart lift on unexpectedly soft wings toward her. “Take my hand,” he offered. “I’ll help you.”
She stared at him as if he’d tried to pass her a fanged ostrich. Then, dismissing this small but swooningly delightful opportunity for moonlit romance, she closed her umbrella and made a nimble leap. Devon held his breath, but she landed neatly on the trawler’s deck with a complete lack of coy, feminine vulnerability and only the mildest dishevelment of her hat.
Devon’s heart swooped back and curled up inside him. With a self-mocking smile, he leaped after her.
Then came the difficulty of operating the trawler.
“I see the wheel,” Beth said, sheltered once more beneath her umbrella as she surveyed the deck, “and piles of rope, and clearly the chimney holds some purpose. But how does it all go together to create locomotion?”
Devon pushed back his wet hair and sighed. “To be honest, I don’t know. But we’re scientists; surely we can figure it out.”
There was no chance to do so, however, because just then another obstacle arose: the trawler’s four occupants rushing from the cabin, clad only in long woolen underwear. They appeared about as happy to be hijacked as might be expected.
“Merde!”they shouted.“Qu’est-ce que vous faites, connards?!”
At once, Beth and Devon leaped back. “Why are they calling us flycatching loons?” Beth asked, her umbrella trembling.
“That’sfou fatal contopus,” Devon told her. “I’m fairly sure they mean something more earthy.” Drawing a gun from a holster beneath his coat, he pointed it at the fishermen.
“Enlever mon passeur de perruches!”he commanded.
The men glanced at each other, frowning confusedly. “Take off, my budgie smuggler?” one hazarded.
“Er…” Devon did not avert his attention from them as he asked Beth, “How do I say, ‘we’re birders and we need you to follow that ferry’?”
“Don’t ask me,” she said. “I will never move them in French, unless it be to laugh at me.”
He turned his head then to stare at her. “Really? Shakespeare, at a time like this?”
“Anytime is a good time for Shakespeare,” she replied patriotically.
“This is what you learn at Oxford? With such an impractical education, you have no hope of winning Birder of the Year.”
“And—and Yale offers an education so practical, it may aswell be a technical institute!” she retorted, clearly unfamiliar with sniping, but giving it her best shot. “I suggest you just go home and await my award acceptance speech.”
Devon grinned. His hand longed to reach up and brush away a raindrop glimmering on her cheek. Other parts of his body expressed longings so Shakespearean he almost laughed at the irony. “You are a martinet,” he told her amiably.
“And you are scandalous,” she countered.
“Ahem,”contributed a fisherman.
Returning to his senses with a jolt, Devon turned to find all four men leaning back against a large equipment box, arms crossed, watching the scene in fascination. He scowled. Gesturing with his gun toward the misty sea beyond, he ordered them in brusque English to follow the ferry. And apparently the barrel of a Webley Mark I spoke a universal language, because they jumped to obey.
While the fishermen worked, Devon kept his weapon trained on them. Beth, however, paced the lantern-lit deck, chewing her thumbnail with no consideration for the glove encasing it.
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” she told the captain.
“Please forgive us,” she told the first mate.
“You are ever so kind,” she told the two crew members, smiling with the kind of warmth that suggests something is about to burst into flames.
“Really, justdreadfullysorry,” she reiterated to the captain.
And so on, until the fishermen ended up assuring her it wasperfectly fineshe had pirated their boat. Whereupon she relaxed and began instead to ask about their operations, mingling hand gestures and pidgin French, apparently intent on getting her mariner’s license at the end of the journey.
The fishermen patiently explained each rope’s purpose and the fundamentals of steam engineering, and even let her steer the wheel for a while. Not a mile out to sea, they began bringing her tea, and jam sandwiches, and a coat that she declined on the basis of being quite warm, thank you (although Devon, smelling it from where he stood on the other side of the deck, suspected she preferred freezing to stinking of old fish). In return, she taught them several bird whistles and extracted from each man a promise to never shoot down an albatross should they happen to stray into the Southern Hemisphere while trawling for mackerel.
Devon watched all this with a cynicism that had been polished by years in the ornithology field. The woman truly was fascinating, and he would have gladly kissed her in Calais had the ferry’s horn not interrupted. When she laughed with the fishermen, everything inside him sighed with a longing he could not repress. But…
