He said solemnly, “I’m not sorry we were together today. And as I look ahe—”
“Please do not make promises, North—please,” she said. “I know better than anyone the realities and responsibilities of a nobleman. You’ve barely scratched the surface of what your life will be like at Syon Hall.”
They’d reached the rock on which she’d stretched her clothes. They were damp but not dripping. She gathered up her purchases and folded them into his coat.
“Not everything will be mandated,” he predicted. “I would not survive it if it were so.”
“Your wife and heirs will be mandated,” she said, “trust me. And I will not be your mistress. I am no one’s mistress.”
She said it like a vow. It seemed important to say the words, and he did not contradict her. The topic was sensitive, clearly. He could not address some potential future for them in an afternoon, not when pirates and an ocean lay between now and when... and when hedidreturn to Syon Hall and when he would marry whomever the bloody hell he pleased.
For now, he would allow their time together to marinate. Let her remember the happiness and understanding and passion.
He was glad he’d told her,I know how your story ends. He didn’t know exactly what it meant, but he knew the ending was happy.
He could wait.
She could not evade him forever. Middlesex was not so very large.
He would wait.
Chapter Eighteen
Isobel was in possession of a very durable pair of buckskins.
Like all of the clothes she’d formerly worn to ride horses and scale walls and tangle with pirates, the buckskins had been originally made for a boy. The britches had traveled home from Europe and lived in the bottom of her trunk at the Starlings’. After that, they had progressed to her flat above Everland Travel. She’d gone to throw them out several times, but something always held her back. When she’d packed for Iceland, she’d tossed them in the trunk as an afterthought.
Now she slid them on and dropped the linen shirt from Godfrey’s over her shoulders. Taking up her new dagger, she cut the tail from the shirt, leaving it to hang only so far as her hips.
Her hair, which annoyingly she would leave entirely unbound, tangled in the neck of the shirt and fell over her eyes. It would be in her way, but yellow hair, entirely unbound, was a known distraction to men, and she would need every advantage.
Plucking out several strands, she plated loose braids here and there. She took up the feather ornamentation and pinned it just above her ear. As a Lost Boy, she’d adorned her hair with feathers, beads, ribbon, and freshor dried flowers. It had felt provocative and wild, but now it seemed a little like dismantling a hat and hanging bits of it in her hair.
Tucking her hair back, she was just about to mold the red-and-black striped fabric around her hips when a knock sounded on her cabin door.
“Isobel? Twenty minutes.” It was North. The sound of his voice set off a rain of shimmers inside her chest.
“Are you...?” he went on, speaking through the door. “Having second thoughts?”
She squeezed her eyes shut. She was not having second thoughts. In fact, her determination mounted with every passing minute. The longer she remained in Iceland, the more wrenching it would be to return to her old life. And her old life was the key to her survival. Her old life would not shatter her heart.
She looked at her stockinged feet, the buckskins, and the linen shirt. She was clothed enough to open the door, surely. It wasn’t as if she was dressing, more like... layering. And she was not back to her old life yet.
“No,” she said, pulling open the door, “no second thoughts. Have Shaw and his men gone?”
She stepped away to mold the striped fabric around her waist like a skirt.
“Yes,” he said, “I sent them ahead to—”
He stopped talking.
He said, “No.”
She looked up. “No, they haven’t gone?”
His expression was the most gratifying mix of disbelief and admiration. “No,” he corrected, “you cannot be serious about this... attire.”
More shimmers tumbled in her belly.
