CHAPTER 62
Normally, she’d make something for breakfast—until Mr. Wilson’s visit, she had had to stop making biscuits because she had run out of butter—and she’d take it down to Kallias. They’d watch the sunrise together and laugh and play; it was the perfect way to start the morning.
Now she had butter, and biscuits were baking away, but it was this ass behind her who intended on eating them, not her beloved Kallias. It made her hate him all the more, that he dare—even unknowingly—steal a single second from her and Kallias.
She could feel his eyes on her back. She did not turn around, hoping it was clear her back was the lack of invitation that she meant it to be.
“You haven’t asked my name,” he said at last.
“No,” she agreed.
He actually gave a single incredulous laugh. “My God, are you always this hospitable?”
She turned. “Are you always so rude?”
“Me? Rude?” he asked, dumbfounded, as if it was the most ludicrous thing he had ever heard. “Miss Wains, I have no idea what could have given you that impression, save my reaction to your own rude behavior.”
“My behavior?” She had to laugh herself. This man was ridiculous. “At what part while saving you was I rude?”
“In what part was I?”
He seemed to genuinely not know and she smiled in disbelief. “Perhaps when you assumed I shouldn’t be the lighthouse keeper. Or a woman out alone. Or maybe when you assumed I couldn’t read. Maybe when you suggested what I should or shouldn’t do or what I was capable of.”
He looked all the more shocked but at least he stayed quiet.
And when the biscuits were done, she doled him out a few on a plate and the rest on another.
“When I come back, I’ll look at your wound.
Depending on how the waves look, I’ll row you to town where a real doctor will see you.
If the sea is too rough though, that’ll be up to you.
I imagine too much jostling is hard for the wound. ”
He still looked too flabbergasted to speak so she took her plate and left.
Given he was looking for survivors, she wasn’t sure if Kallias would be back, but she went to the spot anyway.
He wasn’t, and though the sunrise was one of the most beautiful she had ever seen and the biscuits tasted like heaven, it was empty without him.