Chapter 10
Plastered to the wall of an inn in St. Petroc’s, half hidden in the shadows and clutching a bottle of sour wine, Ruby considered at what point her life had canted so abruptly into deceit and subterfuge.
Could it, perhaps, have been when she’d decided to forge a letter from her father and pretend to be a lady-in-waiting to a princess?
No, she decided. That wasn’t it.
Her life had taken a sharp left turn on the day she’d first met Captain Malcolm Archer.
It had been four days since she’d found the book on Italian architecture. Four days since he’d . . .
Had he given her the book? She did not know. Her body went hot and flushed and unsettled every time she considered the notion.
Was it some new misdirection? Some bizarre sideways sort of charm?
She forced herself to recall the many ways he’d tried to coax and flatter her. He was a rake. A liar. He was, she had begun to suspect, some sort of pirate king who’d taken over Pomeroy House and had disposed of its proper staff, though hopefully not through means of outright murder.
She could not trust him. But she—
Oh heaven help her. She wanted to. Some part of her—some small, foolish, absurd part—wanted to believe that he’d bought the book to please her. Because he’d known she would wish to have it.
It was dreadful. A nightmare. She refused to admit his duplicitous charm might be working.
Under no circumstances, she’d told herself, are you to let Captain Archer get the better of you.
She’d persuaded Tamsin and Alice to walk with her down to St. Petroc’s despite Captain Archer’s warnings.
She’d made vague reference to the acquisition of more candles, but in truth, she meant to find out what the villagers knew about the Scourge and, beyond that, the true nature of the staff of Pomeroy House.
They’d been in the village for roughly a quarter of an hour when Ruby had seen Captain Archer duck into a bustling public house.
With a hissed word to Tamsin and Alice, she’d followed him.
She watched his familiar broad-shouldered form sweep right up the stairs and into the connected inn, and she promptly ordered her friends to stay in the pub, collect whatever gossip they could find, and wait for her to return.
Alice had blinked. “Do you mean to confront him again?”
“No! No. I’m going to follow silently. Watch from the shadows. Unravel whatever scheme he is currently about.”
Tamsin’s auburn brows had looked very skeptical. “Do you think he might be . . . enjoying a mug of ale from the pub?”
“He’s gone upstairs to plot,” Ruby said firmly. “I know it.”
Alice had snatched a three-quarters-full wine bottle from an abandoned table and thrust it into Ruby’s hands. “Here,” she’d said. “Take this. In case you need to explain why you’re wandering the halls. You can say you’re delivering this to a patron.”
Ruby suspected Alice had a grandiose notion of the level of service offered by this establishment, but she nodded and clutched the bottle to her chest as she headed up the stairs.
As she strode down the corridor, she listened hard for Captain Archer and whatever “nefarious purposes” sounded like.
She took a rather rash sip of wine from the bottle and shuddered.
Perhaps Captain Archer had come upstairs to meet with a fellow pirate.
Or to do away with more unsuspecting servants.
Perhaps he’d come to craft a life-sized model of the Scourge of St. Petroc’s and set it in her bedchamber.
Perhaps all of his machinations were an elaborate facade to hide the fact that he was wanted by the Crown for a lifetime of unsavory crimes.
At the corridor’s final door, Ruby stopped abruptly.
She’d heard something. She was certain of it—a sort of long, drawn-out squeak. She squeezed close to the door and pressed her ear against the rough surface.
Yes—there it was again. Another squeak, and another, almost rhythmic. And then she heard a familiar low voice emit a strangled oath.
Her jaw dropped, and she clapped her free hand over her mouth.
It seemed she had found Captain Archer. And his activities were not so much nefarious as—
The rhythmic squeaking started up again.
Oh God. Sweet merciful heavens. Her face was on fire and her ear was still pressed to the door.
Had he really taken himself off to the inn in the middle of the day for a liaison? Had that choked-out oath been the sound of pleasure? Was that what a man sounded like when he was in the throes of passion?
And why, why, why had her stomach dropped at the sound?
This had not been a good idea. She was perfectly willing to confront Captain Archer over his schemes and his falsehoods. She was not prepared to confront him with his trousers off and in the middle of—the middle of—
Ruby spun hastily away from the door, which turned out to be another critical error of judgment. As she whirled, the wine bottle—unbalanced and still mostly full—slipped from her hand and launched itself full bore at the doorjamb.
Her heart flipped over in her chest as she felt the bottle slide free from her grasp.
As she watched in horror, it hit the wooden frame with a hearty thwack.
She flailed, caught it before it crashed to the floorboards, and held back a little whimper of dismay as vinegary wine sloshed over her glove.
And then, before she could move or think, the chamber door came open.
“Lady Ruby?” Captain Archer demanded. His tone was all incredulity, and his shirt was open at the neck again, baring half a foot of glistening chest. His hair and face were flecked with white plaster dust.
She met his glacial blue eyes and said feebly: “No?”
He looked up and down the corridor, then caught her by the arm and began to drag her inside the chamber.
Ruby dug in her heels, and more wine sloshed across her forearm and Captain Archer’s sleeve. “No,” she said again, “truly, Captain Archer, please permit me to leave you to your privacy.”
“To my privacy?” he said incredulously, and then she was inside the room, the door flung shut behind her. “If you meant to leave me alone, then why in God’s name did you track me down and . . .”
He trailed off.
Ruby had slammed her eyes closed the moment she’d crossed the threshold, but curiosity overcame her at his extended silence. She cracked open her right eye.
He was glaring at her. His arms were folded across his chest, which caused his pectoral muscles to leap into sharp relief.
There was no naked paramour in the room with them, which was something of a relief.
On the other hand, the room was covered from end to end with various linens, chunks of fallen plaster, and an extraordinary amount of rope.
Honestly. Rope. It wasn’t even dark out.
“What are you doing here?” he said finally. “Do not prevaricate. I warned you not to leave Pomeroy House.”
“You said it was not safe,” she allowed. “But we brought a pistol. And Vanessa.”
He looked baffled and outraged beneath his plaster dust. “Who the devil is Vanessa?”
“Alice’s puppy.”
“Oh well, if you’ve a puppy then—” He broke off, his eyes narrowing. “What are you looking at?”
“Nothing!” she said, which was a lie. She’d been staring at the open window and wondering if it was large enough for a recently postcoital adult to exit from.
“Is something about to leap through that window and attack me?”
“No!” She paused. “I hope not. I was wondering if—ah. If that’s where your companion departed from. The window, I mean.”
“My companion?” he repeated. He looked her up and down. “Are you drunk?”
“I beg your pardon,” Ruby said frostily and then realized she had gestured to the window with the wine bottle.
“Foxed. Fuddled. Three sheets to the wind.”
“Of course not. I was downstairs with Alice and Tamsin and the puppy, and then I was . . . upstairs. Coincidentally.”
“I can’t believe this,” he said. “You’re positively soaked.”
“I most certainly am not. And you ought not cast stones, Captain Archer. Shouldn’t you be attending to your duties at the manor? Not . . . not . . .”
“Not what?” His eyes gleamed with suppressed mirth. “Don’t leave me in suspense.”
“Whatever it was that you were doing!” Her mind kept providing remarkably vivid illustrations, most of which had been inspired by a book called Aristotle’s Masterpiece that Ruby had borrowed from Belvoir’s Library last year and that had not, it turned out, been about Aristotle.
“I am trying,” Archer said, “to hang these four hammocks for Mrs. Enys.”
Ruby blinked. Surely the second, third, and fourth hammocks were superfluous. “Mrs. Enys?”
“Floss Enys,” he clarified. “The innkeeper, ever since her husband died. She has four sons and only the one spare bedroom during the high season. She can’t squeeze four beds in here, and the boys have grown too tall to share, so I told her I could try affixing hammocks to the beams. It’s how we slept on—my ship. ”
Four hammocks. For a widow’s four growing sons.
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Ruby said. “You must be joking.”
She’d spent the last four days building a thorough case against him in her mind—ever since she’d looked at his handsome face and flushed cheeks and known he’d bought the book for her.
He was a rake. A pirate. A liar.
A rakish lying pirate who had, apparently, come all the way down to St. Petroc’s to help a widowed mother of four.
Her heart performed some acrobatics in her chest, which she did not appreciate. It had absolutely no right to involve itself in her feelings about Captain Archer, who was a dreadful flirt and expert dissembler and—God help her—loyal and inventive and kind.
No. No. This was a disaster.
“Well,” she said, “best of luck with your ropes.” She gestured with the wine bottle again. Goodness, the scent emanating from it was certainly pungent. “I’ll be going now.”
He did the thing again with his arms and his chest. Ruby forced herself to look at his plaster-dusted hair instead.
“Absolutely not.”
“No?” She raised her brows. “Do you mean to tie me up?”