Chapter Four #2
She blinked rapidly, frowning, almost as if realizing for the first time that someone other than her father and herself was involved in this personal nightmare. “Why would you do that?”
He gave her a lopsided smile. “Oh, someone should think well of me before I sail.”
She was a captain’s daughter. She knew the tides. “You only have a few hours before you sail. You should sleep.”
“I wouldn’t sleep anyway,” he said lightly. “I might as well be useful.” Ha! If his family, let alone his friends, could hear him, they’d fall over laughing. And yet she looked genuinely concerned, as though she weren’t worrying about enough as it was. Thrown, he grabbed his hat and departed.
IT TOOK HIM ALMOST three hours, but he eventually found Captain Jasper lying on a beach outside the town, cuddling an empty bottle.
The tide was already soaking his hair and the left side of his body.
Another few minutes and he would drown unless he woke up.
Durward only knew he was alive from the harsh snoring noise which all but drowned out the sounds of the sea.
No wonder his daughter was angry with the idiot. And no wonder she was afraid to leave him.
Durward set down the lantern he had “borrowed” from the doorstep of the last alehouse in town and hauled Captain Jasper’s body out of the water.
He extracted the bottle from his limp grip, filled it with sea water, and poured it over the drunk’s face.
Together with a few slaps and an ungentle kick, it was enough to revive him.
“Wha’-wha’... What’s going on? Carina?”
“You don’t deserve Carina,” Durward said grimly. “Get up, you mess of a man. You’re going home, though I should leave you to drown.”
Discovering his companion was not his daughter, Jasper took exception to being moved, even taking a swing at Durward that was so wide of the mark he barely had to duck.
Instead, he seized Jasper by his coat and shirt front and hauled him to his feet, shaking him and then holding him upright for several moments.
After that, getting him to walk was easier, though it was a long journey back into town, holding him up for the most part, though he gradually took more of his own weight.
They walked mostly in silence, Durward because he had begun to grasp the full scale of Carina’s problem, and there was no point in even beginning to address it until Jasper was sober.
Jasper probably required all his energy to remain upright and keep putting one foot in front of the other.
He’d also begun to shiver from his wet clothes and the chilly night.
No curtains twitched as they finally approached the captain’s house. Finally, all the neighbours must have been asleep, although, as Carina opened the door to Durward’s quiet scratch, they might have heard her involuntary, “Oh, Papa!”
“Perhaps a warm drink,” Durward suggested.
Jasper himself was quite compliant going upstairs to bed, though his shivering was now alarming.
He sat like a child while Durward stripped off his wet things and towelled him dry, before putting him in a night shirt and shoving him into bed just as Carina appeared with a mug of tea.
Jasper’s shaking hands could not hold it, so she did, folding his hands around the mug beneath hers.
“He got wet on the beach,” Durward explained. “I think he just needs to get warm, but I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“No, you’ve done enough,” she said intensely. “I can never thank you for this.”
And tomorrow, he thought, she would go through it all again, or something very similar. He stared at her for a moment, taking in her tragic, angry eyes, her unbearable, lonely anxiety, and the sheer character behind her beauty. It all seemed to wash over him like a tide of understanding.
I would do anything for you.
The shock drove him from the room, though he suspected her attention was all on her father once more.
Durward had never been in a kitchen in all his pampered life.
But she had made tea in a large pot already, so it was easy enough to pour another two cups.
He even found a plate of fruit tarts that had clearly been made for an evening meal treat.
He put that on the old wooden tray too and carried the lot back to Jasper’s room.
Her eyes widened with shock. But she took the cup from him, and a few moments later, ate one of the tarts.
She seemed bemused, unused to help of any kind, unsure how to deal with it.
The utter loneliness of her troubles cut him to the soul, so although she had a reputation to maintain, and he a ship to catch in another couple of hours, he could not leave her.
Possibly for the first time in his life, it struck him that he rarely considered other people.
Even with his duels, which he had swaggered into, more than ready to die, had he ever considered their effect on his opponents or anyone else? It struck him that if Jasper needed a kick, so did he.
But mostly, he just thought of Carina, with admiration and a growing, strangely wonderful feeling he had no name for.
He began to talk, mainly to distract her from her worry. He even made her laugh sometimes. Until she discovered that though her father still shivered, his skin was hot.
“I’ll fetch the doctor,” Durward said grimly. “Where is he?”
The doctor was furious at being disturbed before dawn. “There’s nothing I can do for Jasper. He’s a hopeless drunk and cannot pay a physician. Go to Mrs. Green and she’ll give you something for the—”
He broke off as Durward’s purse landed on the table beside him with a loud chink.
“And,” Durward said unpleasantly. “I will be back for it should your patient die.” He handed the doctor his hat and bundled him from the house.
CARINA WASN’T SURE when it was she fell into exhausted sleep, slumped in a chair by her father’s side. But when she woke with a start in her own bed, disoriented and anxious, the old mantel clock told her it was after seven o’clock.
In panic, she threw off the bedclothes and stumbled through to her father’s room. He appeared to be sleeping peacefully, though she felt his forehead with some trepidation. His skin felt blessedly cool and dry.
Weak tears started to her eyes, and she hastily blinked them away. The empty chair on the other side of the bed, which Durward had brought in the previous evening, was empty.
Relief turned suddenly to desolation. If it was seven, his ship had sailed two hours ago, and she hadn’t even been awake to say goodbye. She couldn’t remember going to bed. She blinked down at her old, crumpled gown. She would never have gone to bed fully dressed!
Her whole body flamed for Durward must have carried her to bed before he left.
Slowly, she walked around to the chair in which he had shared her vigil over her father, and sank into it, as if to absorb the very last of his presence.
Embarrassment burned, and yet there was warmth there too.
He had helped Papa. Helped her. There was hope.
Not just for her and her father but for him.
For the young man’s desperate, inexplicable hurtle toward his own self destruction.
“Find your peace,” she whispered, “and your happiness, wherever it leads you. You deserve it.”
And perhaps she and Papa did too.
Going back to her own room, she washed in the remaining cold water and put on her second-best gown to give her time to launder the old one.
Then she brushed and put up her hair. And realized he must have removed the pins last night, for she had wakened with her hair loose and no pins upon the pillow.
She blushed all over again, imagining those long, aristocratic fingers in her hair, intimate and deft. Strong, too, by the way he handled his horses. How had she not wakened to his touch? To being in his arms...
Imbecile. How like me to have fallen for a handsome face only once he has gone! Her lips trembled into a rueful smile, laughing at herself, because that was easier than missing a man she had barely known.
She marched down to the kitchen, then raked out and relit the cooking fire. She was scrubbing the kitchen table when the back door opened without warning and Lord Durward walked in with a basket full of food.
The brush fell out of her hand with a clatter.