Chapter Fourteen #2
It certainly felt like a prize as Michael pushed past the other seafaring folk to reach the stage. A man with a red handkerchief tied around his throat thrust out his hand and Michael placed a guinea into it cheerfully.
“Now, will you help me with—”
“Why the devil are you giving that man money?” asked a harassed, weedy-looking man with cracked spectacles and a ledger.
Michael’s stomach dropped. “But I thought—”
He whirled around but the man with the red handkerchief had gone.
Blast.
“It happens,” said the man with the ledger, sighing heavily. “A guinea, please.”
Michael was in half a mind to go back and ask Phylis what the hell he was supposed to do about his stolen guinea but decided to set it aside with good grace as a part of doing business with such rogues.
He’d never felt more alive.
The small trunk was heavy, far heavier than he had thought. Michael had almost carried it six feet away from the stage before he hesitated, turned back, and approached the man with the ledger.
“What?” the man said distractedly.
“Please may I have the key?” Michael said politely.
The man blinked. “What?”
“The key. The key to the trunk.” Honestly, it was not complicated. “Where’s the key to the…?”
Michael’s voice faded away as he realized the awful truth.
The man with the ledger waved him away irritably. “Bought as seen, you know that. Right, you’re the man who bought the barrel?”
It was with a sinking feeling that Michael half-walked, half-staggered over to Phylis with his most definitely locked trunk. “It’s locked.”
“I thought it might be,” she said lightly. “You paid your guinea all right?”
Michael considered telling her that he had been painfully cheated out of his first guinea but decided against it. She already believed him a fool for immigrating. He didn’t need her to know that he was.
“I suppose I’ve just bought a very expensive door stopper,” he said dryly.
“Or paperweight.” Phylis slapped her hand against her thigh. Her lovely, shapely thigh. “Come on. Let’s get you onto the Dreamer. I’ll get Drummond to look at this.”
Michael’s spirits rose considerably. “On the Dreamer?”
He had not requested another visit onto her ship, and she had never proffered one. Their agreement to be friends while they were both still in London was one that they had made, Michael felt, out of duress.
He didn’t want to lose her. She didn’t seem to want to lose him.
Yet their lives were sailing off into two different directions, taking them places that the other could not follow.
And he hated it.
“Can you lift that thing?”
“Of course,” Michael said with some bravado. What, was he going to ask her to help carry it?
Around five minutes later, he rather wished he had. The trunk could not have been more than a foot square, but it weighed so much, he actually thought it was filled with nothing but rocks. He had to hope he hadn’t just purchased a guinea’s worth of rocks.
And the Dreamer felt a long way away.
“Will you be able to carry it across the gangplank?” Phylis asked as they reached her mooring.
Michael hesitated. His pride warred with his common sense, but there was no point in forcing something that could not be done. Better to be carried over by another than for it—and him—to end up in the Thames. “No.”
She examined him curiously. “You know, I cannot think of another man I know who would have admitted that.”
It did not do much to improve his mood. “I know.”
Phylis reached out and squeezed his hand. “And I admire that. Drummond!”
Her first mate appeared a moment later, and after stepping across the gangplank as though it were nothing but a casual walk down Oxford Street, the man carried the trunk over to the Dreamer.
His captain followed him, and after a moment, she halted and turned back. “Aren’t you coming?”
Michael nodded, not quite sure what had held him back.
It felt different, being back on the Dreamer without Phylis angrily trying to explain how awful his immigrating would be. The place felt…warmer. Larger.
“Come on. We’ll have a drink after all that excitement.” Captain Seaton, who had somehow become more captainy now that they were here, lightly rapped her fingers against the ship’s rail. “Drummond! After you’ve got that thing open, tell the crew they’ve got the afternoon and evening off.”
Her first mate did a little jig. “Good.”
“And there’s to be no fighting,” Phylis said severely.
The man’s face fell. “Bad.”
“Yes, it would be bad, indeed, if I find out I owe a tavern money for destroying their furniture,” Phylis said darkly, in a way that made Michael almost certain that she’d been forced to pay such damages before. “Now be off with you. I don’t want to see the sight of ye till morning.”
Drummond saluted her. “Yes, Captain.”
It was strange, the way she so easily slipped into leadership. Michael followed her as Phylis congratulated a sailor on the birth of his child, chided a cabin boy gently, and told Cook not to bother doing dinner as the crew, including himself, was being given shore leave.
And then she was striding along a corridor and Michael was entirely lost in the belly of the Dreamer and she was walking through a door—
“This,” Phylis said quietly, her cheeks pinking as she shut the door behind him, “is my cabin.”
It was…wonderful.
Michael had never seen anything like it. The place was beautiful; small, yes, but there was everything one needed in here.
In one corner, a large bed—not quite a four-poster, but with splendid bedlinens that looked considerably more expensive than what one would expect on a ship.
There was a desk in the opposite corner, and an armchair near the door that looked well-worn but comfortable.
And a bed. There was a rug on the floor with a pattern he had never seen before, and a bowl of fruit that looked like it was nailed down.
The bowl, that was. Perhaps it was nailed down.
And a bed.
Do not think about it, Michael told himself firmly as Phylis threw herself into the armchair and groaned with delight.
Do not think about the fact that the two of you are here alone, on a ship where the crew is about to leave.
Do not think about how much you want her.
Do not think about the delight you’ll find in her arms—
Damn it. He was thinking about it.
“So how did you like your first nautical auction?” Phylis beamed.
“I think I’ll be able to answer you once I find out what’s in that trunk.” Michael chuckled, leaning against her desk and trying not to notice the swell of her breast. “You are so impressive, you know.”
That gained him a raised eyebrow. “‘Impressive’?”
“This—This life you lead. It’s exhilarating.”
Phylis snorted. “It’s just a Wednesday.”
“I know. That’s what makes it so impressive,” Michael said impulsively, revealing to her far more than he probably should have. “You live a life of danger and mystery and risk—”
“I try to reduce the risk as best I can,” she pointed out.
“Still. It’s far more invigorating than anything I usually do,” he admitted with a wry smile, trying not to look at the bed in the corner.
Don’t look at the bed in the corner.
Don’t look at the bed in the corner.
Don’t look at the—oh, hell, he looked at it.
“You know, each day I spend with you, I think it is not possible for me to admire you more,” Michael said quietly. “And I am proven wrong every time.”
Phylis’s smile softened. “Perhaps I like you being proven wrong.”
“I’ve never been more pleased to be more wrong,” he quipped, standing upright and walking over to her. “But then, I’ve never been wrong about how I feel about you.”