Chapter Eleven
It was when Michael’s face fell that Phylis really started to laugh.
“You’re joking,” he said under her laughter. “You’re joking!”
“I am not joking,” said Phylis, joy rippling through her in waves as she took in the astonished expression, the horrified eyes, and the way Michael had inexplicably—or perhaps quite explicably—started clinging on to the railings by the dock.
It had been her idea. After spending almost three hours in that circulating library and finding herself not only relaxing into his presence, but wondering how on earth this English gentleman thought he was going to suffer being on a ship for sufficient time to reach America—let alone Australia—the idea had occurred to her, and it was just too perfect.
So Phylis had issued the invitation.
“I’d love to take you out on my ship sometime,” she had said enthusiastically as the pair of them had stepped out of Norton’s Circulating Library into the brilliantly warm air. “Why not meet me on the docks this Sunday at…oh, two o’clock?”
He’d agreed, not bothering to hide his smugness with his puffed-out chest. “So an invitation, after all? I’d be delighted.”
The dockyard bell had chimed twice only a few minutes ago. Michael had been early, as she’d known he would be.
It looked like she was much better able to predict him than the other way around.
“But… But that isn’t… You said…”
Phylis giggled as she watched Michael struggle to articulate his shock. “I said I would take you out on my ship!”
Michael turned to her with both an arched brow and a gaping jaw as he stuck out a hand to point before him. “But that isn’t—I thought you meant the Dreamer!”
And well he might have, but Phylis had been most careful in her invitation. She had not actually said which vessel she would be taking him out on, had she?
“You absolute minx,” Michael said, a smile slowly creeping over his lips. “You’ve done this to punish me, haven’t you? For still wishing to immigrate?”
“Maybe,” retorted Phylis with a grin, shoving her hands in the pockets of her trousers. “Are you angry?”
He wasn’t. He wanted to kiss her, she could tell. There was a fiery heat in those blue eyes of his sometimes, when he wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss her so furiously, she could barely stand, and it was a shame that she had absolutely no intention of letting him.
If his antics beneath her skirts were anything to go by, he would be very good at it, indeed…
“You don’t want to go on the river, then?” Phylis said as innocently as she could manage while still laughing at the man. “You don’t want to come out in my ship?”
Michael turned to her, mischief in his eyes. “A very wise person recently informed me that such a vessel would be a boat, not a ship.”
It was absolutely ridiculous that she was so fired up by his statement.
The man listened to me.
Why did that matter? Men listened to her every day of the week.
But they were her crew; they were paid to listen and to obey. To have a man, a gentleman, to boot, actually listen to her and take in her words…it was electrifying.
“If you don’t want to come out on the Daydream, just say so,” remarked Phylis with a shrug, as though it mattered not to her one way or the other.
Even though it did.
When this man had started getting under her skin and distracting her so completely from her work, Phylis could not tell.
It had to have been before her visit to Almack’s and the black ball, for why else would she have gone…
but she could not recall the moment when this irritating, arrogant charmer had somehow become the one person she wanted to see every day.
And the trouble was, she was in the eye of the storm.
Phylis knew it. Knew that at some point, this would all change. It would all come crashing down and the storm would rage and he would leave her.
Or she would leave him. That was probably more likely.
“I didn’t say that I didn’t want to, but is there even room for the two of us on there?”
Phylis blinked, the docks and Michael coming back into focus as she glanced over to her boat.
And it was definitely a boat, not a ship. She’d bought it a year ago and kept it in the hold of the Dreamer, even though it restricted the cargo they could take. It was a little indulgence, a delight of her own to have a small rowing boat that she could take out and be alone in.
On a ship the size of the Dreamer, one was rarely alone.
And now, for the first time since she had purchased it from that African man in the Azores, she wanted to be in the Daydream with another person.
Not that she was going to look too closely into that fact, needless to say.
“I thought you could learn to sail,” Phylis said blithely, giggling at the sight of Michael’s face. “Fine, not sailing, exactly, but rowing is an important skill—one you might actually have to use.”
The horror on Michael’s face intensified and he actually took a shrinking step back. “What do you mean, ‘might have to use’?”
Phylis tried hard not to roll her eyes and to remember that the poor man had been starved of useful knowledge since the day of his birth. How on earth could the man know about anything if he had never been told?
“In a shipwreck, it’s not exactly every man for himself…but it can be,” she said lightly. “Come on.”
“‘It can be’? What, you’ve been shipwrecked?” Michael almost stumbled over his own feet as he rushed after her.
Phylis shrugged. “Of course.”
“How did you survive?!”
“Oh, it wasn’t a total wreck, not exactly. But the Dreamer has been beached and wrecked at least twice in my lifetime,” Phylis said with another shrug as she stepped down off the dock and into the waiting arms of the Daydream.
The instant her feet were both in the little boat, a calmness spread across her that she always—and only—ever gained when she was offshore.
At sea.
The phrase was used, she knew, by people to describe when someone was lost, confused, unable to find their way back.
That had always confused her. Whenever Phylis was at sea, she felt calm, at peace, absolutely certain not only of where she was, but where she wanted to go. There was nothing in her mind that could rattle her like the steadiness of stone beneath her feet.
For a moment, she wasn’t quite sure, therefore, what felt so unsettled.
Then Phylis turned back and looked up at Michael. “Aren’t you coming?”
The man was, for some reason, hesitating. “I… I’m not a good swimmer.”
Phylis turned away briefly to collect herself, clamping her lips together. “Then you’d better hope you don’t fall in. Come on.”
And she held out her hand.
The moment elongated, stretched, frozen in time and yet tender. Tenderness was thrumming through Phylis’s body as she looked up at Michael, her silent request that he trust her matched only by the heat in his gaze as he looked down at her.
He stepped into the boat.
Then he almost fell into the river. “Argrhhhh!”
“Balance, man, balance!”
“Phylis! I’m going to fall!”
Phylis sighed as she grabbed the flailing man. “Just hold on to me. There you go.”
The frantic rocking of the boat slowed as Michael gained his footing, clutching tightly on to Phylis’s waist. And it was, in fact, nice, she had to admit, standing here in her little boat, with Michael’s arms around her waist and his warm chest pressed up against—
Michael’s hands slipped to her buttocks.
Phylis blinked, then glared up at the man, who had his teeth on display. “You weren’t going to fall, were you?”
“Not in the slightest,” replied the rogue.
“Honestly,” Phylis muttered, pulling herself away from the idiot and trying not to feel sorry that his strong arms weren’t around her anymore. “You offer to take a man on your ship—”
“Boat,” corrected Michael helpfully.
Phylis shoved an oar against his torso, making him groan. “Take this.”
Still, she had to admit it had been clever. For a landlubber.
“Right, here’s where we sit. Here, side by side.” Phylis pointed, her cheeks pinking a little as a ship slowly passed them from where they were moored on the dock. “And you—”
“Giving lessons now, are we?” called down a familiar voice from the passing vessel. “Contracts a little thin on the ground?”
She tried to smile; she really did. “Smooth sailing, Pelham!”
“Same to you!” he called down from the bow of the passing ship, and even from this distance, she could see the smirk smeared across his face. “Looks like you’ll need it more than me!”
Laughter and jeers rumbled from the passing vessel, and Phylis worked hard to keep her smile on her face as the idiots passed them. “Yes, yes, very amusing!” she called out before lowering her voice as they sailed past. “You frothy mixture of flotsam and sh—”
“You don’t like him?”
She glanced down at Michael, who had taken his seat in her boat and was examining the oar in his hands curiously. “No.”
“Why is it curved like this?” Evidently, he had already forgotten the laughter, for Michael was not dwelling on the jeers by the gentle curve of the oar. “Does it help, the specific curvature, I mean? Tell me about it. I want to learn.”
And she wanted to teach him.
That was the strange thing, Phylis could not help but observe as she lowered herself onto the boat to sit snugly beside the man she could not stop thinking about. She did want to teach him.
It was something that had never happened before.
Oh, she’d trained new crew members, on the rare occasion that one of her loyal team wanted to stay on land with family or sail on a ship bound for a particular place.
But training a crew member was more about familiarizing them with her habits, not really teaching.
They knew what to do. They knew a clove from a cleat hitch, they knew port from starboard, they knew…
well, usually everything that one needed to know about a ship.
She wasn’t quite sure if Michael knew a sailor had to row backward.
“Look,” Phylis said, picking up her own oar. “See the line here—and the curve? It’s the angle here. You’ll need to be careful when you lower it into the water.”