Chapter Eleven #2
Why was it that she was happier here, talking oar theory with a gentleman who was playing about in boats, than on the Dreamer sailing for Portsmouth, as it was today?
The thought flickered through her mind and could not adequately be explained, which was worrying. Phylis had never had this, a distraction. Never felt like this, hot and cold all over, and if she didn’t spend time with this man, then she would curl up and die.
But it made no sense.
And it couldn’t, not for much longer. Phylis bit her lip as she watched Michael practice putting the oar in the water, just as she had shown him.
Drummond had been clear; despite her success in landing a few accounts earlier in the month, they were running out of enough English contracts to keep things sustainable. They needed to go back to the Continent, back to Amsterdam, and Calais, and Bilbao, and perhaps even farther afield than that.
They had to follow the money, and that meant leaving London. Leaving England.
Leaving Michael.
“Am I doing it right?” he asked eagerly, making a complete hash of the whole thing.
“No,” Phylis said wryly.
“Oh.” Michael’s face fell, and she prepared herself for the three typical responses she almost always received from a man when it was pointed out that he was doing something wrong.
First came the anger and denial. “I haven’t done it wrong! I’m doing it perfectly!”
Then came the accusations. “You’re not teaching me properly. It’s your fault I can’t do it!”
And then came the abandonment. “I didn’t want to learn how to do it, anyway!”
Phylis braced herself. How swiftly would this man, a gentleman to whom everything in life has come easily, move through the three stages?
At least here on a boat he couldn’t get too angry—and if he became completely unbearable, all she had to do was step off the boat and swim up to the dock steps. Perhaps she should just—
“Can you show me again?” Michael asked eagerly, turning to her with such a wide-eyed look of pure excitement on his face, Phylis was startled. “I want to get it right, and you know what you’re doing.”
It was impossible to prevent her jaw from literally dropping.
He… He wanted to learn so much that he was actually asking her for assistance?
“I’m sorry. I’m not a quick learner, it appears,” Michael said ruefully, chuckling at his own incompetence with a shake of his head. “But I want to try again. Can I try again?”
“Of—Of course,” Phylis managed, hardly able to believe it. “Here.”
Instead of taking the oar from his hands, she leaned across him and placed her hands over his own.
Which was a mistake. Searing heat burned her as though he were metal left in the Caribbean sun, and Phylis suddenly found that her shirt was too tight and the sun too bright.
Was that his breath hitching in his throat…or hers?
“Now you…you want to twist like…” Witch’s arse, get a grip on yourself, Phylis Seaton! “Like this. See, not too violently, you’ll tip us over, and—yes, you want to get the oar lower than that in the water. Lower, lower—too low!”
Michael chuckled as he almost lost his grip on the oar, but he managed it drag it out of the catching water. “It’s so much harder than it looks, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Phylis said weakly, removing her hands from his own and wondering whether her cheeks were crimson or a mere burgundy. “So hard.”
What was hard was sitting here beside him and not throwing herself into his arms. What was hard was not kissing him, forcing herself to keep a respectable distance from the man who was such a distraction, Phylis was hardly sure whether she should be called ‘captain’ any longer.
Oh, this was getting so beyond her.
The words of her first mate, which he had muttered in her ear as he had left on the Dreamer for Portsmouth, echoed in Phylis’s mind.
“Just don’t get distracted. The crew misses you.”
And the worrying thing is, Phylis thought as she reached out and adjusted Michael’s grip, I don’t miss them.
Oh, she missed the ocean, the sea, the sailing, the breeze in her sails, and the rushing forward of her ship.
But she didn’t miss the hard work, the tiredness of an evening, the callouses on her thumb and the ink splattered across her wrist. She didn’t miss the exhaustion, the burn of the sun on the back of her neck, the ending of arguments between crewmates who were desperate to let out their anger and frustration on each other in the wide expanse of sea.
No, she wanted to be here. Here, picking up her own oar, and saying to Michael Chance, “Ready?”
His eyes gleamed with excitement. “Ready!”
Perhaps in another life, with another man, Phylis would have snorted at the man’s enthusiasm for playing pretend at her actual life. Perhaps she might even have been offended.
But somehow, this was different. Michael was different. His unrestrained joy at exploring her life… It was giving her the opportunity to see it again, to love it again in a fresh and new way.
And Phylis had to thank him for that.
Well. Not actually thank him. The last thing she needed was for the man to get cocky.
“All righty, off we go!”
They did not get off to the most spectacular start. Michael was taller than her, which Phylis had not exactly considered when it came to rowing beside him. His pull was longer than hers and meant they turned to the right with every stroke before she instructed him to match her own pull.
Then there was the fact that Michael had never learned to steer before. It was not so much a problem; a Thames ferry was most understanding as they shot out in its path, and the captain only shook his fist once at them as they passed.
And unfortunately, Phylis had not really thought much about where they were going and why. It meant they meandered rather more than a typical nautical journey, though Phylis found that she did not care.
What did it matter where they were going, as long as they were going together?
“I still can’t believe you’ve never lived on land,” Michael said conversationally. “I mean, not really.”
“I still can’t believe you’ve never lived on a ship,” quipped Phylis in reply. “Oh, to be stuck in one place, unable to move, find new shores, see new horizons…”
Her gaze meandered from the handsome man beside her to the docks and the city that spread behind it. It was unknown, unsettling somehow in a way she’d never bothered to articulate before.
Always the same. Never changing. Her life was change; it ran in her blood along with the salt of the sea.