Chapter Twelve #3
That was good. Wasn’t it? A woman out there in the world on her own, her father gone and he still had no idea what had happened to her husband… It was an intimate thing, wasn’t it, to be considered a woman’s friend?
It was wonderful that she felt so comfortable with his family, Michael considered as the Chances sat around the table, Phylis just to his right. This was what he had wanted. This was why he had invited her in the first place.
But his joy at her familiarity, her clear comfort with teasing Gwen or admiring Teddy’s piano playing…it was marred by something that tasted to Michael like regret.
“My friends call me ‘Phylis.’”
Perhaps a week ago, that would have made him smile, and smile only.
Perhaps a week ago, friendship would have been enough.
Now need, aching need and molten affection, roared within Michael in a heady cocktail of love that he did not understand.
Friendship? How could their connection be reduced down to the base of friendship…when he was absolutely certain he had fallen completely in love with her?
“Tripe,” Gwen announced, glaring at Michael from across the table.
Michael blanched. Oh, hell, did I say all that out loud? Blast, if I said any of it, any of it at all—
“Do you want tripe or don’t you?” his sister asked sharply, waving the tureen at him.
Oh. Right. “No, thank you,” Michael said weakly.
“He’s so full of it most of the time, I suppose,” teased Gwen as she passed the tureen on. “Honestly, I don’t know—”
“Now, then, no teasing your brother at luncheon,” chided their mother gently.
Gwen’s eyes sparkled. “Yes, I suppose I rather did let him have it at breakfast!”
Laughter echoed round the table and Michael smiled ruefully. “Yes, you did—and I’ll have you know, this cravat is a delightful color, and it doesn’t make me look like a corpse found newly in the ground at all!”
Even Teddy had to giggle at that, and when he had told himself firmly that he didn’t mind if she was laughing at him or not, Michael turned to Phylis.
She was grinning. “You never told me how charming your sisters are.”
“Well, these are half of them,” Michael said brightly, “so you’ve only got half the charm today.”
“Yes, you’ll have to meet Jessy and Reeny another time,” chimed in his mother. “How about next Wednesday? I am almost certain—”
“Sadly, I shall be away then,” interrupted Phylis with a smile that looked, at least to Michael’s eyes, a spot sad.
“Oh. That is a shame,” said the viscount quietly, and Michael glanced over at his father, their recent conversation ringing in his ears. “We might have a family announcement to make by then.”
Michael’s jaw tightened. He would not accept it. He wouldn’t—his father would have to be the one to accept that he could not just foist a title on a man who didn’t want it!
“Yes, I’ll be in Dublin,” Phylis was saying quietly, and Michael could not tell whether it was a coincidence, but for some reason, she was refusing to meet his eye. “Another time, perhaps.”
“Another time,” repeated the viscountess, who was doing the opposite of their guest and looking at Michael most concernedly. “And—And you are often here, there, and everywhere are…are you?”
Michael would have groaned if it wouldn’t have been even more transparent than his mother. Honestly, what was she thinking? Matchmaking at luncheon, and to a presumably widowed captain of a ship?
Hardly the bride they would want for the future, and now apparently the very near future, Viscount Pernrith…
“Yes, I’m hardly ever at shore. I love sailing; I truly do. It’s… It’s where I feel most at home,” Phylis was saying lightly, though Michael could have sworn there was momentary tension in her voice. “Never happier than when I’m at sea.”
“It must get lonely.” Michael blinked. Had those words truly come from his own mouth?
Perhaps Phylis noted the resemblance to the sentence he had uttered before they had shared—or perhaps more accurately, when he had given her the most intense pleasure in his power.
As it was, she flushed and still did not meet his eye as she said quietly, “No. No, I am never alone. I’ve learned not to depend on people outside of my crew for companionship because their time with me is so… so transitory.”
Michael’s stomach lurched. Was she trying to warn him away from her—was that it?
The mood broke as Phylis beamed brightly. “And I must say, this is a meal worth staying on dry land for, my lady! What excellent roast potatoes!”
“Oh, it is nothing.” Michael’s mother beamed, and light chatter filled the dining room again. “You know, I once dined with the Duchess of Axwick, and the way her cook prepares a potato…”
How precisely the Duchess of Axwick’s cook prepared a potato, Michael was never to know. His gaze had never wavered from Phylis, and though she continued to look at his mother and nodded at presumably all the right places during the potato story, her hand crept toward his own.
He didn’t even have to think. Michael took Phylis’s hand, and squeezed it, and felt her answering squeeze and understood.
It didn’t matter how much time they had together. It didn’t matter how much time they had left.
As long as they were together until then.