Certainly the lie about Prince George’s benevolent need to see Luke retrained as a farmer?
She didn’t need to know this because he’d made it up. On the spot.Lies.For no reason other than to distract her from asking again for the truth. Prince George didn’t care if Luke was a farmer, butcher, baker, or resting in eternal slumber at the bottom of the sea.
He paced the perimeter of this room, scowling out the windows. Every few minutes, he stopped to check the library door. She’d excused herself to—what? Prepare a treatise on all the ways he was unfit? Find a reference book calledA Proper Miss’s Guide to Smugglers? Escape down the terrace steps and run into the fields?
After a quarter hour with no sound, Luke’s anxiety beat out his instinct to give her space. With heart pounding, he peeked through the library door.
“Miss Allard?” he called carefully. The room appeared empty.
“Here,” came a voice from behind the desk.
Thank God.He exhaled. She hadn’t gone.
Luke stepped into the room, searching shadowy corners and the dark aisle between shelves. When he rounded the desk, he found her kneeling over a stack of periodicals. The wide, yellowy pages of theLondon Timeswere open before her, one palm planted in the center. When she looked up, a tear skipped down her cheek.
“What’s this?” he asked. The words came out in a rasp.
He knew, of course. One glance at the headline, at the portrait of his own face, and he knew.
She sat back on her haunches. “Is this what really happened?”
He opened his mouth and then closed it. He’d never been a glory seeker. The hero worship had been the worst part of the attack, after the loss of crew and Linus being taken prisoner. He loathed fanfare and fawning. And now here it was on her face.
“Will you get up?”
“Is this true?” she asked.
“How did you find this?”
“It wasn’t difficult. There are so many articles. It happened last year. The papers say you swam for days. In the open sea. Your crew was drowned, your boat scuttled.”
“It was more like one full day and two half days.”
“Lord Fernsby. You kept him alive so the orders could be passed along. You signaled the passing ship—a lone man waving his arm in the vast, open sea—and they saw you.”
“I was very motivated not to be missed.”
“Your crew,” she said, her voice breaking, “lost. While you survived.”
And now Luke took a step back, almost as if she’d given him a shove. He blinked.
“So many killed,” she whispered, looking back at the paper.
Luke turned his face away. No one acknowledged the dead crewmen—no one. His friends were an afterthought compared to his feats of endurance and the delivery of Fernsby’s bloody dispatch. Forgotten—or, if not forgotten, worth the sacrifice.
“I’m so very sorry, Captain Bannock,” she whispered. She climbed to her feet.
He watched her rise without offering a hand. He dared not touch her.
“Yes, well...” He could not finish. Shockingly, appallingly, his throat had tightened. There was something about the haunted way she’d asked, and the look on her face; there was something in the fact that she’d thought of his friends at all. He alone remembered; he missed them in the light of day and he was tortured by nightmares of their screams at night. No one cared about the friends he’d lost or the defenseless old man he was trying to recover.
Through blurred eyes, he watched her step over broadsheets and journals, picking her way to him. Her face was blotchy, her dark lashes spiked. She whispered, “I am so sorry, Captain. There is no reward great enough to replace the losses you’ve suffered. Youarea he—”
He kissed her. Hands free, bodies separate, he simply leaned in. There was too much promise in holding her—she would give comfort, and the comfort would lead to pleasure. Luke was afraid of both; he didn’t deserve them, didn’t want them. He would not touch her, but he could kiss her. For ten seconds, they could unite. He kissed her because she had a generous, open heart. And he kissed her to thank her for saying what no one else remembered to say. He kissed her to shut her up.
The relief of kissing her—finally, after a day of nuzzling and touching and tucking—was so great, he almost didn’t notice that she wasn’t kissing him back. But he wasn’t a schoolboy, he knew how kissing worked—more importantly, he knew how kissing didnotwork. Something wasn’t right. He was just about to pull away, when her mouth parted, just a fraction... a breath... just enough for the very tip of a tongue. And then she slanted her head. Luke realized: she wasn’tnotkissing him, she waslearning how to kiss.
He encouraged her, flicking his tongue against her slightly parted lips. She responded with her own, tentative flick, and their tongues met. He gave her the tiniest little swipe, a tickle, a flirtation. For a heartbeat, she froze; but then her tongue sought him again. She slid her hands up his chest to clasp his lapels.
