Had Eversea… kissed her?
The thought pressed the air from him. Isaiah’s hand spasmed into a fist. He flattened it deliberately.
“I’d rather like a few brats of my own,” Finchley allowed wistfully. “Tumbling about the place. After I get my oats sown, of course.”
Tumbling about the place. Children did that sort of thing, didn’t they? He pictured Fanchette eyeing their children with that same fond, rueful indulgence when they were tumbling about. And children could be silly, wasn't that true? Neither his father nor his mother had been able to tolerate rambunctious silliness for long.
Let alone...whinnying.
For God’s sake.
But Isaiah recalled the breath-catching radiance in Isolde's face when she’d turned to wave at her sister. Such...unguarded...love.
Something about that expression had fleetingly made him feel profoundly alone and restless. It had started up an ache in him.
Light. That was it. That was how he'd felt in Isolde Sylvaine’s presence.
Madeof light.
Isaiah took a breath and addressed the business at hand.
“Then you’ll want to grow your wealth now, Finchley. To finance the wild oats, and to support your family. And what better way to do it than to combine talents with similarly brilliant men? Allow me to explain how our club works.”
.
ChapterThree
Jacob leaned forward into the salt spray, gripping the ship’s rail for balance. He remained a bit unsteady on his feet from the fever that had swept through the crew and passengers, killing two of them.
But every morning he sprang from his bunk a little faster, gulped in the tonic of sea air, and rejoiced in the sheer, shocking glory that was being alive. One by one, the rest of the crew and passengers emerged from their berths as if from their coffins, pale, thin, sobered but unbowed and growing more cheerful by the day. They hadn’t fought off pirates on thewayto Barbados only to die on their backs in their bunks going home, after all. They had nursed each other through an exhausting, humbling, grotesquely intimate yet ultimately triumphant ordeal.
He had promised Isolde he’d be home by her birthday, and he could almost feel the shards of his broken promise lodged in his throat. He loathed to disappoint her. Just as he’d hated to leave her.
But as long as Jacob could recall, restlessness had billowed in him like the wind in sails.
He’d literally reeled the first time he’d seen her, as though Cupid had shot an arrow into the bullseye of his heart. He loved her, and Isolde—beautiful, funny, kind, stubborn, fiery, perfectly imperfect Isolde—loved him, too. This incurable Cupid’s wound was the central miracle of his existence. The rest of his life must now necessarily take shape around it.
But within him remained the tiniest cinder of fury at having been so ambushed by love. Control had been snatched from him: he’d been given no say in it at all. Love had yanked his destiny onto another course just when he was on the brink of fulfilling a lifelong dream.
And Jacob had always known he’d had no business courting a woman just when he’d intended to leave on a sea voyage. But he’d been no more able to deprive himself of her company than he could voluntarily cease breathing.
And this was why he hadn’t proposed before he departed.
Because if he had proposed to her, he would have wanted to kiss her.
And if he had kissed her, he knew he’d never have been able to leave her.
And God help him, despite her, despite everything, no matter what…he’d wanted to go on this journey.
He’dneededto go. He did not know how to explain it to Isolde, so he hadn’t tried. He had often felt as though he ricocheted off the luxurious boundaries of his life as though they were the bars of a cage. He fully understood how lucky he was. He was anEversea, for God’s sake. That magnificent house he loved in Pennyroyal Green as well as an outrageous fortune would be his one day. But some force in him needed spending, some voracious curiosity needed sating, before he could settle once and for all to become a husband and father.
At times, his questing nature seemed to him the best, truest part of him.
And at other times, it felt like a fatal flaw. In his weaker moments, his mind would seek out and probe, like the socket of a lost tooth, the image of Isaiah Redmond’s icy composure, enviously analyzing it. Did anything buffet the man? Redmond attracted a certain type of sycophant with his smug, unyielding certainty. But his need toimpressstruck Jacob as gratingly obvious. A terrible weakness.
He invariably found some relief in the memory of Redmond standing over him pointing a rapier at his throat, his eyes glinting hate.Thatwasn’t composure.
On most days, Jacob remained convinced Redmond had tripped him during that fencing match. Because he knew Redmond would not be able to bear losing to him in front of all of those people.
