Chapter Thirteen
George Harwood stepped out into the cool night air and slammed the heel of his hand against his forehead.
Stupid, stupid man. How could he have allowed himself to become so carried away?
It had been a truly trying week, and it had all started with her.
That beguiling, dark-eyed creature who, despite his having spent no more than a few hours in her company, had somehow managed to irritate and arouse his senses in equal measure.
Miss Bella Bennet.
He should simply have ignored her when he saw her wandering around Falmouth like a little lost duckling in search of its mother.
He should have kept walking when he saw her again with her very vocal aunt, standing outside the tea shop and regarding him so suspiciously.
He certainly should not have accepted the dinner invitation when he already knew he was unlikely to get through an entire evening without her sharp tongue lashing at him.
Damn it, she was beautiful. That was what it came down to, and was that not ridiculous?
He was a man of eight and twenty, his parents long gone.
His father had been a middling country squire who had left George little but debt and bitter memories of a pompous old man who had very little time for his active son.
George had joined the Navy at fifteen and worked his way through the ranks.
While other men of his age had been distracted by women, gambling or drink, his focus had been absolute.
He would build a life for himself, one that relied upon no one but George Harwood.
There had been dalliances, of course, and a few evenings when he had drunk too much and made decisions he regretted in the cold light of day, but they had been few and far between.
Yet from the moment he had laid eyes upon Miss Bella Bennet of Derbyshire, he seemed to have lost whatever good sense the Navy had beaten into him.
He had caught sight of Sly Trevethan only once in the past two weeks, slipping away towards the harbour after the Bennet ladies left the tea room, and the glimpse had yielded him nothing useful.
His contacts whispered that a large shipment of brandy and other high-value goods was to be smuggled through Falmouth very soon, but he had yet to find any hard evidence that might allow the Customs men to prevent it.
It was as though every rogue in the town had gone to ground at once, leaving him doing nothing but chasing his own tail and thinking about a pair of beguiling dark eyes and full lips.
The woman haunted his dreams. And in his dreams she was far more agreeable than she was in waking life.
She was everywhere and nowhere, a maddening combination of lean, supple limbs and curves a man could very easily lose himself in.
He had awoken more than once in an embarrassing state he had not endured with regularity since he was a teenage boy.
When they had sat together in the tea shop and he had been forced to watch her lick delicate crumbs from those full pink lips, he had thought he might go mad from the wanting of her.
He had desperately wanted to reach across the table and pull her towards him, her aunt and society at large be damned.
And then Miss Bennet had looked at him as if he were something unpleasant she had just discovered upon the sole of her shoe.
She had accused him, if accused was even the right word, of Lord knew what, simply because she had witnessed one conversation with somebody who did not meet her exacting standards of society.
The comment had been so surprising and so inappropriate that it ought to have cooled whatever mad ardour had taken hold of him. But no, his spiral into insensibility continued, and he had wanted to kiss the comment from her lips.
After leaving the tea shop, he had been forced to escape into a nearby alley and take several long, deep breaths before he could manage to bring himself under control.
It was as though she had put some sort of curse upon him.
The beguiling witchy woman with the acid tongue and large dark eyes that a man could drown in.
When the invitation to dinner had arrived, he had known he must not go.
Not only because it would mean spending another evening in the same room as Miss Bennet, but because he had finally received word that there was likely to be some movement at the docks later that night.
Surely that ought to have settled the matter.
Unfortunately, his treacherous heart had whispered that no self-respecting smuggler or henchman would attempt anything before midnight, and George had lied to himself that he would simply attend the dinner, sit apart from the object of his obsession and torment, then excuse himself early.
He had taken one look at her and forgotten himself entirely.
She had appeared looking like some sort of woodland goddess in a simple cream muslin gown, her dark hair arranged high upon her head with loose curls falling around her face, and fresh flowers and pale ribbon woven through the arrangement.
From that moment there had been no other word for it, he had been lost, taken over by the certainty that the only thing that mattered in this world was to increase his proximity to her.
He had said anything he could think of over dinner to keep her talking, to keep her attention fixed upon him.
Even when she looked at him with those hard, suspicious eyes, his ridiculous heart had leapt because her attention remained on him.
His worst mistake had been asking her to dance.
She moved like a nymph, light and airy and filled with joy as she passed through the figures of the country dance.
Each time the pattern brought them together and his hand touched her waist or took hers, his body cried out in pure delight.
George Harwood had never danced more than once with the same lady in a single evening.
He knew the implications perfectly well, and he had simply never met a woman he believed worth the trouble.
Tonight, he had danced with Miss Bennet three times.
By the end they had both been breathless and glowing, her neat arrangement of curls coming undone as a few pins gave way to the dancing and sent dark strands tumbling around her face. She looked like a painting.
Then Lydia Bennet, Lydia Bennet of all people, had rebuked him for his behaviour.
It had been like having a bucket of cold water thrown over his head.
Lydia Bennet, outspoken widow and one of the most unconventional women in Falmouth, thought his behaviour improper.
Mrs Bennet's expression had brought him back to himself, and he was no longer certain that he would have left at all without it.
He might have danced and danced with Bella until morning.
He might have married her there and then if she had asked it of him.
An impertinent slip of a miss from some grand house, who had clearly been cast out or run away over some sort of bad behaviour.
It was madness. He had always thought that one day he would marry, and in his mind this imagined lady had been beautiful, certainly, but also practical and demure.
There would be no great passion in it. He wanted shared goals and stability.
Love, ideally, but a gentle sustaining kind, not the kind that drove a man to madness.
He would give his children the solid foundation he himself had lacked.
So why could he not stop thinking about the most unsuitable woman he had ever had the misfortune to become acquainted with?
George walked slowly down the street, looking up at a clear sky scattered with stars.
The moon hung low. It was a perfect night for moving cargo under cover of darkness, with just enough visibility to get the job done, but not so much to draw unnecessary attention.
He looked at his pocket watch. It was a quarter past eleven, still enough time to get into position and observe what he needed to make his report.
And all George could think was that the stars glittered like her eyes had in the candlelight.
He shook his head at himself once more. "Stupid man," he muttered quietly.
A few sailors stumbled past him on their way home from a tavern, but the port that bustled with noise and movement during the day had grown quiet, which only made the thoughts rattling around his head seem louder.
As he reached the streets just behind the harbour, George began to walk more slowly.
He heard the whisper of footsteps behind him.
Damn it. He had been so caught up in his own dangerous dreams that he was about to be set upon by the very gang he had been charged with observing, and it would serve him right for behaving like such a mooncalf.
George stepped neatly into the shadows of a narrow alley, hoping to confuse his pursuer or, ideally, lose him altogether. At that moment, a feminine squeal broke the silence.
"Clara! Watch where you are putting your feet. You have just trodden on my foot."
"I am very sorry, miss. I just don't like bein' down here at night. Gives me the collywobbles, it does."
George closed his eyes. Oh God no, anything but her. She truly must be a witch as no mortal woman could upend a man’s life so completely.
"We are perfectly well," came another whisper, although Miss Bennet's idea of whispering would have carried across a moderately sized ballroom.
"I simply wish to see what this maddening man is up to.
No one leaves a party after eleven o'clock at night on business. Certainly not respectable business."
"But what does it matter, miss? It ain't like we can do anythin' about it."
"Whatever he is involved with, if he is mixed up in some sort of underground goings-on, then we ought to know. We are here, right in the middle of it."
"Right in the middle of gettin' our throats cut, more like."
"Clara, I cannot see him. Can you?"
"No, miss."