Chapter 19
Chapter
Catherine is exhausted but she isn’t sleeping. She lies awake in bed and ruminates, while McGann once again places his bedroll on the floor. She wants to tell him to come lie beside her, to feel the warmth of his arms and bury her face in his chest.
But they’ve only agreed to a fake marriage. And fake married people do not sleep in the same bed as truly married people. So, she watches him instead. He lies on his side, and the full moon casts its silver glow through the window, illuminating the outline of his back and broad shoulders.
She remembers the first time she came to Nowhere for her fighting lessons, arriving straight after a ball.
Luckily, her fiancé Pembrooke hadn’t been in attendance that evening, so she hadn’t needed to stay long.
She’d complained of a migraine to her mother and then slipped away, to the tavern instead of back to Chester House.
She twists in bed while she thinks about that night and how it was another time she didn’t tell her family where she was going. Another time she thought of herself before them.
She turns onto her back, restless, only to then stare at the ceiling.
“Menace,” comes McGann’s voice from the floor. “Can you not sleep?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ll try to be quiet.”
He snorts at that, uncharitably, she thinks, although she’s smiling. She really does have a hard time remaining quiet or still.
“Why don’t you tell me,” he says, “what it is that’s got your thoughts all turned about?”
“I was remembering when you taught me to fight.”
“Aye? What about it in particular?”
She turns back to him, watching the moonlight trace his features as softly as a lover’s touch might.
“How I arrived that first evening. So excited to begin.”
“I recall. You read the Gaelic right off the walls. Shocked the hell out of me. And you were dressed in the most ridiculous—”
“I’d been at a ball!” Catherine interjects.
“So you said at the time.” She can just make out his smirk in the dark. “But it was still the most ridiculous contraption I’d ever seen. Layers upon layers of—whatever the bloody hell that was.”
“Lavender silk tulle,” she says, a little wistful sigh in her voice. “Embroidered tulips at the hem and waistline.”
“Aye. And so wide you could barely fit through the door, much less down the stairs.”
“It was a beautiful dress.”
“Nay,” he says. “It was just a dress, worn by a beautiful woman. One who had no business, mind you, in a tavern in Covent Garden with the likes of me.”
“Perhaps,” she says, remembering how he looked when she first entered the bar. “But what if I told you I think you’re beautiful too?”
He makes some harrumphing noise, but she lets the memory wash over her anyway. How she left the Ball and made her way to Nowhere via a hired hack. How nervous she was that night, her palms sweaty beneath her gloves, her heartbeat thumping insistently in her chest.
She was afraid of entering the tavern, afraid someone might recognize her. So she stood outside in the dark, questioning her decision to be there at all. But she needn’t have bothered, because as soon as she made her way inside, all she saw was him and none of the rest of it mattered.
The whole of the ton could have walked in the doors at that moment and she still wouldn’t have left. Not with the sight of Andrew McGann, leaning against the back wall, waiting for her.
How is it, she remembers thinking, that he can make a lean look like that? Feral and dangerous and inviting all at once.
How could a lean make her stomach flutter?
It shouldn’t, the idea is ridiculous, but her stomach didn’t care what her brain thought, because as soon as she walked into the room and caught the glint in his emerald eyes and the languorous tilt of his body, she felt like she’d drunk too much champagne and spun about a Maypole.
“You’re here,” he said to her, as if he hadn’t expected her to come.
She nodded, still feeling light-headed, dizzy almost, as she made her way into the empty main room of the tavern.
It was beautiful inside, definitely not what she’d expected from the nondescript building tucked away at the end of an alleyway in Covent Garden.
The outside was bog-standard dull, but the inside was magnificent.
The long, polished bar was made of a rich, warm mahogany.
Behind it, stacked on glass shelves, were bottles upon bottles of whisky, amber liquid that glimmered in the candlelight.
The ceiling was coffered and inside each square was a different plaid pattern, painted in rich, deep hues.
Across the threshold hung a sign that read: An àite sam bith.
“It means Nowhere,” McGann told her, “in Gaelic.”
She remembers how she glanced up at him then and tried to settle her disorientation.
But she couldn’t. He was still leaning against that wall, still staring at her with those eyes.
And then she took in his dark hair, curled onto his forehead.
And his long, muscular thighs. How he wore no overcoat and had his shirt sleeves rolled up so she could see his forearms.
“I know what it means,” she’d said and tried not to stare at those arms.
There were muscles she wasn’t even aware men had cutting through his skin.
Not that she’d been privy to many masculine forearms, but she’d seen her father’s, and the earl’s weren’t even in the same realm as these.
It was like the difference between granite and a pillow.
Or a fat tabby lapcat and a lion. It was–
“Ahem.” McGann cleared his throat and she threw her eyes back to his face. “Do you mean to tell me,” he asked, “that you read Gaelic, lass?”
“I do,” she’d said, getting a hold of herself. “I took a fever in Scotland when I was a child. There was nothing else to do while I was bedridden but read whatever tracts the library held.” She shrugged. “To do that, I had to learn the language.”
Back in the captain’s cabin, Catherine glances down at that same man, laying on the deck beside the bed. “Why were you without an overcoat that night?” she asks.
“Because I’d been scrubbing the storeroom floor,” he says. “No better than a charwoman, down on my hands and knees.”
“You never said.”
He makes a small shrugging gesture and she can just make out the movement of his shoulders in the dark. “I wanted it to be clean for you. You’re an earl’s daughter.”
“An earl’s daughter you were about to knock down onto the floor.”
“Aye.” He laughs and it makes her insides feel just as melted and viscous as they had that night. “That I was.”
“I had no idea what was coming,” she says, “as I followed you into that storeroom.”
He’d reached for her hand so solicitously and helped her remove her gloves. His bear-paw fingers releasing tiny pearl button after tiny pearl button from their clasps.
She remembers how she held her breath, her skin tingling each time another part of the underside of her wrist was bared. Such that by the time he’d finished, she was near to shaking and she’d wanted there to be a thousand more buttons for him to undo, just so she could revel in the feeling.
A million buttons.
But instead, he’d slipped the gloves off her hands, leaving her feeling warm and liquid in the aftermath.
He examined her quietly for a moment before he turned from her and walked to the door. He fished a key out of his pocket and inserted it into the lock, clicking it closed. And then he turned back to her.
She hadn’t made a move. She’d been staring at him, still dazed from all those buttons.
She shook her head to get ahold of herself. “Now then,” she said, blinking briskly to cover her embarrassment. “What first? You said there were basics you could teach me tonight.”
“What’s first?” he’d growled, coming toward her. “What’s first is that you never, ever let a man lock you in a room.”
“Oh,” she said, “I—” but he had already crooked a foot behind her ankle and with just a tug on her slippered feet, toppled her onto her backside.
“Ow!” she cried, startled from the impact. She knew she’d bruise from that.
“My apologies.”
He held a hand out to help her up, which she grasped. But instead of hauling her to her feet, he used that hand to drag her across the floor.
“And second,” his voice dropped lower, to a more menacing register, “is that you never, ever trust a man you don’t know.” He paused and then added. “Best not to trust the ones you do know either.”
Now, moonlight limns McGann’s face in the captain’s cabin, where he still lies on his back and laughs at her re-telling. “You see why I cleaned the floor,” he says.
“I do.”
“I was trying to teach you the first lesson of fighting, which is to be careful. Always and in every situation. Watch your surroundings and trust no one, because you’ve no idea what a man will do when his back’s against a wall.”
“I know,” she says, “you said the same at the time. Run whenever you can. Only fight if you must. And never let yourself be put in a situation you’ve no way out of.” She pauses. “But this is my story, so let me tell it.”
“I was there too,” he says. “I know what happened.”
“Yes. But there are things we need to say to each other, Andrew. We were both there, but I’m beginning to understand just how different our experiences were.”
He makes a noise, as if inviting her to continue.
“The next night, when I returned… it was the night I realized that my fiancé was in love with someone else.”
He makes another noise now, something guttural, but she presses forward. She needs to say this to him.
“I was engaged to Henry Pembrooke, as you know, and I’d just had word that Chester, my cousin, you’ll recall, had finally signed the betrothal papers.
We had to read the banns still, of course, and plan the wedding.
But Mother was certain we could manage it in time for a winter wedding. So all was as I thought it should be.