Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

H it again and again with soft but lethal shots. At this rate it wouldn’t take the French to put him to bed with a cannonball—Miss Flora Conway would see him consigned to the deep with her fatally sweet frankness. He would be well advised to find a way back to safe harbor.

Instead, he moved nearer. “What an astonishingly way of flirting, you have, Miss Conway.”

“Flora,” she repeated with quiet insistence. “And I am very glad to find we are flirting.”

“I am not flirting with you, Miss Conway,” he asserted, using the shelter of the dark foliage to hide his lie. “I am attempting to understand why you are flirting with me.” Why a woman of her caliber would have anything to do with him on so slight a temptation as his charm. He had never, in all his months of observing her, seen this sort of singular attention in her. She had always been engaging, but he had never seen her lower her chin and gaze up at someone the way she was doing now. “Why a young woman of your beauty and understanding and solvency would want to have anything to do with a man of my poverty.”

She looked up at him, her eyes as luminous as beacons, her smile as soft and dangerous as a shoal. “Because you’re interesting .”

“Miss Conway, I beg you.” He tried one last time. “You know nothing of me. I could be a spy for the damn French, for all you know.”

That suggestion astonished her—she drew back, frowning, as if she were trying to see him better in the dim light. And then her face cleared. “I think if you were, you would not be so poor.”

Impossible. “You really have found me out, Miss Conway. But you must not think?—”

“What I think, is that you intrigue me, Captain.”

Oh, that was infinitely treacherous. And infinitely promising. “My dear Miss Conway, you must not persist in this determination to see the best in everyone—especially when there is no good to be found. It is a terrible characteristic.”

“So noted.” She smiled with a sort of impish delight. “And you are a terrible cynic—terrible because, deep down, you don’t want to be so cynical, do you?”

More treacherous still. Deep down, he wanted impossible things. “My dear Miss Conway?—”

“Oh, no.” She held up her hand. “Don’t attempt that pedantic tone with me, for I have seen behind the veil and there is no unseeing. You, Captain Balfour, penniless Earl of Kinloch, are a secret idealist. And perhaps even—” She paused for effect. “Even a romantic.”

“Miss Conway,” he protested.

She cut off his lament with a wave. “Flora. And don’t bother. I won’t believe you. You use cynicism to hide your true self. To arm yourself against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—which, I admit in your case, have been extraordinarily outrageous.”

There was nothing he could say—no protest that might ring true. Because she was right—he wouldn’t be so damned cynical if the world didn’t keep letting him down. If it didn’t keep forcing mediocrity upon him—and everyone else, too. “Only madmen could live in this world and be their true selves.”

She reached out impulsively to touch his hand. “And you are a little mad, I think. Mad enough to care.”

Damn his eyes. The slight weight of her hand nearly tipped him over. He felt utterly upended, as if sand was shifting under his feet, even as he tried to shoal himself up.

“I am mad.” He proved it by turning so that they faced each other, standing so close that his legs brushed against her skirts, so he could indulge in his latest folly—raising her hand to his lips and bestowing upon her small, gloved knuckles, a kiss. “Mad enough to do as you want and flirt with you. And anything else you might ask of me.”

“Go on.” Her voice was the barest whisper.

“Shall I?” He lowered his voice to match hers, everything intimate and confidential. “Shall I tell you what I think you really want with me, Miss Conway?”

“I want…” She swallowed and took a shallow breath, but she did not look away. “First—for you to call me Flora.”

“Lass,” he teased. He let his hand brush against the soft satin of her skirts, barely causing a ripple. And yet he knew she felt it because she sighed and shifted—into the wake of his touch, not away.

“Is it so hard to say a name?”

Damn his eyes, yes. It was too hard. Too intimate. Too soon. Somehow, for all the time he had wasted watching her from afar, he was loath to hurry her along. Even now. Especially now. “Far too difficult. I am a simple sailor, lass, and not a poet to recite sonnets to your name.”

“I need no poems, Captain. Nor promises, either.”

Deeper waters, still. “You are beautiful enough to inspire them. Surely you know that?”

She shrugged, an elegant little hitch of her satin-clad shoulder. “Beauty is as beauty does, my sister used to say.” She drew back enough to strip off her evening gloves, though she kept hold of them, slowly throttling them to death.

It was good to know she was as at sea as he.

“I cannot take any credit for being beautiful as I had nothing to do with it,” she went on. “It is certainly not an accomplishment.”

He tried a different, but no less true, compliment. “You are as insightful as you are beautiful.”

A hint of a smile warmed her lips. “Then perhaps I may take credit for the insight, although it was my sister who helped me—rather forcefully at times—to form my character and my intellect.”

He could not picture Flora Conway being forced to do anything she did not want to do—she seemed too…. Too much herself to be a subject to persuasion. “Time well spent.”

“Thank you.” She graced him with the sunrise of her smile and the chill in the room seemed to retreat a little. “As I hope this time will be with you.”

The tide had already turned within him, the current of attraction was too strong to resist. Jack squared his feet to feel more on solid ground, because despite every gentlemanly instinct he possessed urging otherwise, he knew he could not avoid what was, clearly, his fate. “And how would you like to spend this time?”

“In…education.” She chose her words carefully. “You, if you’ll forgive me for being bold, would seem to possess knowledge I should like to acquire.”

“And you’re quite sure none of those other fellows will do?” He gestured vaguely to the floors above them, where various of his more solvent peers still presumably paraded about.

“The bags of pants, you said?” Her look became skeptical. “I suppose Colonel Crathie might be persuaded?—”

He could not let her even contemplate the thought. “That tired old war horse,” was the kindest, most gentlemanly thing he could say.

“Just so,” she agreed. “So, no, none of them will do. Because they seem to lack something you have.” She leveled him with her forthright, solemn gaze. “Something I can’t quite name.”

He could name it. Because he had felt it too, from the very first time he had seen her, this near magnetic attraction. This craving for her presence. This want.

“Something I felt the moment you spoke to us this evening,” she continued. “A sort of surprising recklessness.”

Damn his eyes, yes. Reckless was exactly the right word. It was reckless in the extreme to let himself hope. And damn near insubordinate, to flout Augusta Ivers’s direct orders.

Not to mention bloody dangerous to his heart.

“You’ve felt this way before, then?” He had to remind himself that however long he had worshiped her from afar, he didn’t really know her.

“Perhaps,” she admitted. “But not so…strongly or deeply. Or instantly.”

He didn’t know whether to be elated or leery. “And, if you will forgive my impertinence—I assume you’ve been kissed?”

She did not give way to embarrassment, though her cheeks pinked hotly. “Do you think me a practiced sort of flirt, Captain Balfour, because I have come away with you like this?”

“Oh, yes,” he said easily enough, “because you were right—we were flirting. Quite delightfully. I enjoyed it. Very much. And I should very much like it to continue.”

“Good,” she said on an exhalation. “As do I.”

He took the opportunity to step near to her. Her eyes were astonishingly clear in the moonlight. “You are a wonderfully frank lass for someone who has never been kissed.”

This time her response was more arch than embarrassed. “I didn’t say that I had never been kissed. I was out in London before we came here, Captain. Certain experiences practically come advertised with a girl’s first season. Some kissing was inevitable.”

“I imagine it was,” he agreed graciously. “Entirely inevitable for a lass so beautiful as you.”

The look she gave him was leveling. “ You’ve kissed and been kissed, I assume?” she asked, keeping him on an honest, even keel.

“Aye,” he answered truthfully. “Once or twice. Not as much as I’d like.”

That made her smile. “Really?”

“I’m a navy man, lass, away at sea for years. There was no one I wanted to kiss on my ships.”

She laughed, just as he had hoped, and it was everything for him to stand still and enjoy the happy sound without catching her up in his arms and whirling them both around until they were drunk on the simple pleasure of indulging in their attraction. “Just so. Some experiences come with the job.”

He liked this pride, this certain confidence in her own experience. There was nothing missish about her. “I think, my very dear Miss Conway, that you have simply not been kissed by the right man.”

She pressed her lips between her teeth, before she asked, “And are you—or are you willing to be—the right man, Captain?”

Was he? Against Lady Ivers’s direct advice? Against all codes of gentlemanly conduct? Against his own better judgment?

“Aye, my dear Miss Conway. I most certainly am.”