Chapter 11
Archer shoved the final barrel deep into the shadows of the cliffside cave with a grunt.
It was heading to dusk, and he was covered in sweat and sand.
It had taken him a solid two hours to move the smuggled casks into a larger cave, where he could first decant the Rhenish wine and then begin the process of selling, profiting, and enthusiastically hoping not to get arrested.
Wall had offered to come with him, but Archer had refused.
He wanted to think.
More properly—yes, he could admit it, at least in the privacy of his own mind—he wanted to brood. The cove was an excellent place for brooding.
He’d hustled Lady Ruby out of the inn before she could do any significant damage. He’d reiterated his warnings about slavering beasts who ate crucial bodily organs, but even as he’d said it, he’d known it was hopeless.
The Scourge story had not worked, and neither had the bugs or the food or any of their other schemes. They’d made no discernible progress in ridding the house of three ladies-in-waiting, and worse, far worse—
He liked Lady Ruby Ballimore. A lot.
He liked sparring with her. He was astonished by the changes she’d wrought in the mansion and impressed despite himself by her stubborn persistence.
He admired her loyalty and her eyes and all that stubborn, heart-wrenching bravura, and he dreamed—God help him, he couldn’t seem to stop dreaming—about the way she’d felt pressed against his body.
It was a bad stroke. The precise opposite of what he ought to feel. He was not meant to enjoy every moment he spent in her company, and he should not, should not hope that she was enjoying it too.
When Benji Woon had laughed behind his hand in the inn’s public room, Ruby had supposed it directed at her. Archer had thought so for a moment as well—he’d seen Ruby flinch, and his gaze had snapped to Benji.
Benji hadn’t been laughing at Ruby. He’d been laughing at Floss’s tiny, angry kitten, fleeing through the front door with a pigeon twice her size.
But in that moment—in a bright, blazing, impossible-to-ignore revelation—it had occurred to Archer that if someone had laughed at Ruby, he would’ve killed them on the spot.
That did not seem to bode well.
He puffed out a breath and shoved his hair out of his face, an action that left a smear of sand on his cheek. The sand in the cove was dazzling at dusk, Archer had always thought—all flecks of glitter and rippling lines left by the waves.
Golden. Exquisite. Somehow both soft and sharp at once.
Impossible to be free of, once you’d touched it.
Archer ground his teeth and headed toward the water’s edge to fling himself into the ocean and thereby rid himself of the metaphor. But before he could finish peeling his shirt over his head, he heard a familiar squeaky throat-clearing behind him.
He let go of his shirt and spun about. Lady Ruby stood, tucked behind a shelf of rock, not ten feet from the cave in which he’d hidden sixteen casks of wine. Her chin was up, her eyes fixed on the streaked pink clouds, and her expression so innocent that he almost expected her to begin to whistle.
She was absurd. And he more so, because his heart had leapt in his chest at the sight of her.
“Oh,” she said brightly, as if only just noticing him. “Captain Archer. Fancy seeing you on the beach.”
“A coincidence, I’m sure,” he muttered, and prowled toward her. He needed to distract her—needed to keep those damned penetrating eyes directed away from the cave at the foot of the cliff. “Did Lamentation send you down here?”
She locked her hands together, her gloved fingers intertwined. “Erm . . . no.”
“How did you find this cove, then?”
“Well,” she said. The faux innocence on her face was slowly evaporating as her cheeks pinked. “If you must know. I followed you.”
“You followed me?” he demanded. Bloody hell. Had she been watching as he’d moved the wine? Surely not—he knew her well enough to think she would not have remained silent as he blithely committed crimes in front of her nose.
She looked even more guilty now. “Your trail, rather.”
He squinted at her. The light was low, but—yes, her frock did appear to be covered in sand and bits of pink thrift and white campion.
“You followed my trail?” He kept on echoing her words, but only because she was such a fantastic enigma.
Was she some kind of tracker of wild game, in addition to her expertise in Greek statuary and home decorating?
Had she crawled along the footpath looking for signs of where his boots had trod?
No doubt she had. There was no sense in continuing to be shocked by anything she came out with. If she took wing and flew to the top of the cliff, he would have to simply accept it as another talent she’d kept hidden away.
She was quite red now and yes, in fact, her flush did go all the way down to the tops of her breasts, visible above her low-cut bodice.
He cursed himself for noticing.
“In the interest of honesty,” she said, “I will admit that it took me several tries to locate you.”
He was close enough now to put his hand to her elbow, and so he did. He plastered a smile on his face as he gripped her arm, though at this point any effort at charm was mostly reflex. “Lady Ruby, you continue to astonish me. Have you any interest in showing me how you managed such a feat?”
She widened her stride so that he could not spin her away from the cave’s entrance. “As a matter of fact,” she said. “No.”
Of course. Of course she did not. “Then might I escort you—”
“No,” she said again. “I have come down here, Captain Archer, for the express purpose of determining what brings you to the beach so often.”
Bleeding, bloody hell. She could not find these damned casks. He would do whatever it took. Anything.
He turned his desire to wince into a brighter, more enthusiastic smile. “‘Often’ must be an exaggeration—”
“Twelve times,” she said crisply, “in the four weeks since we arrived at Pomeroy House. I can’t think what one would call that frequency other than ‘often.’”
“You pay remarkable attention to my person, Lady Ruby,” he got out. Only force of habit kept the words from emerging through gritted teeth.
But to his surprise, her flush, which had just begun to fade, flared back again, hot and pink. Her lips parted, then shut again, and she glanced to the open neck of his shirt. To where his chest was bared beneath her gaze.
Archer realized he was still holding on to her, nothing but rough sand between his fingers and her skin.
He had not meant to suggest that she had some licentious interest in him. But his blood heated beneath the slow drag of her eyes—more gray than blue in the gathering dark.
Perhaps he had meant to suggest it. Perhaps some part of him had known that beneath the ruthless scrape of her gaze was something hotter, more intent.
That when he was looking at Ruby, she was looking back. Even when she did not mean to.
“I attend to you merely to ascertain the various scopes and shapes of your deceptions,” she said. But her voice had lost some of its mortar-knife edge—gone blurred, just a bit, beneath the sound of the sea.
He stepped closer. Her eyes traced a path from his throat up to his face, and the flush on her skin deepened beneath the red glow of sunset. Her lips parted.
She was not susceptible to his charm. But he remembered the way she’d gasped, almost silently, when he’d touched her skin in the library. He remembered the way her gaze had caught and dragged on his shoulders when she’d found him outside the kitchen.
He thought, with a hot throb of guilt and lust, that she might be susceptible to this.
He could distract her this way. If he moved even closer, he might keep her eyes away from the cave.
“The truth is,” he said, low and soft, “I am very fond of swimming.”
Ruby moistened her lips. This time her gaze did not drop. “You do not appear particularly damp.”
“I had not yet begun.” His mouth curled up. His pulse had risen. He felt the way he’d felt in every naval engagement—as if he must plunge forward or die. “I can show you, if you like.”
“I am familiar with the notion of sea bathing.”
“I am certain you are,” he murmured. He took one of her hands in his and set his fingers to her pretty, fussy glove. He could smell the sea, the honeyed scent of campion crushed against her skirts. Her own velvety warmth.
Slowly, slowly, he slipped one pearl button free. Another.
“I could take you to my favorite pool,” he said. He watched her eyes, her mouth. Her throat. “Show you how deep the water goes. How it feels, cool and lapping over your skin.”
She didn’t say anything. She did not move, except for the way her chest rose and fell.
He unfastened the final button and slid the glove from her hand. He let himself enjoy the slow luxurious glide—because it was an act, because he needed this to seem real.
Her breath hitched.
“I’d close my eyes, while you bathed,” he said. His voice sounded thick to his own ears. “Or else swim with you. If you wished it.”
He’d found her other glove. He pushed against the cool smooth surface of the first pearl button. Slid it through the buttonhole. Let his thumb press against the pulse at her wrist, which galloped as quickly and unevenly as his own.
“Tell me,” he murmured. “Say you want me to take you there.”
She moistened her lips again, and her mouth moved into the shape of a word, which Archer thought—hoped beyond all reason—would be yes.
Both of her gloves were off now. His fingers tangled with hers, then slid up her forearm. He could feel the shape of her. The warmth. The tiny surrender of soft flesh.
His blood beat hot. Longing throbbed like a pulse beneath his skin.
It was at this point that Archer realized he’d lost the plot.
Somewhere between when he’d begun talking and when he’d ended, his mind had unfolded a vision of cool water and damp skin and bare voluptuous limbs, a pale flurry in the dark.
He’d meant to distract her with his words, with his nearness—and now he was the one flushed, heated, imagining—