Part 29 (2/2)
”I had to name it something, and The Mrs. Sneath hadn't quite the same ring.”
She laughed.
Before she remembered how angry she was with him.
His head turned toward her quickly, and his expression was almost hungry.
But then her smile faded, and silence settled in again.
He placed the bottle of wine in the center of the little desk and extracted the cork with alacrity, then glugged a bit into two gla.s.ses.
He handed one to her.
He lifted his. ” votre sante, Olivia.”
She took a sip. A shockingly excellent wine that launched her eyebrows.
”Spanish,” he said shortly. ”I export it.”
A fascinating sentence to be sure, and it inspired a thousand more questions.
”How did you come to have a s.h.i.+p?”
”I bought it.”
She stared at him. ”It's going to be like that, is it?”
”Like what?”
”Curt, petulant answers that tell me nothing, really.”
”Petulant?” The word seemed to amuse him.
”It's precisely the right word. You can do better.”
He inhaled, then exhaled gustily. ”Very well. I bought it with money I earned by working on this very s.h.i.+p. Supplemented by money I won from men foolish enough to play five-card loo with me. I worked, gambled, and invested.”
He leaned back to study the effect those words had on her. His arms were crossed before him. There were faint lines about his eyes.
How had he gotten those lines?
Five years without him. He'd gotten older, bought a s.h.i.+p, exported wine. And now he had lines about his eyes.
And she had seen none of it.
The muscles of her stomach tightened with something like panic, for all that she'd missed. All that he'd done without her.
The panic subsided and became that unspecific, simmering anger again.
”But what made you . . . want to buy a s.h.i.+p?”
”From Pennyroyal Green I went to London and got work on a s.h.i.+p, because I wanted to go as far away as possible from England.”
They both knew the reason for that, and the statement rang by itself in the silence for a moment.
”And . . . did you?”
He hesitated.
”I went very far indeed.” He smiled slightly. It wasn't the most pleasant smile. It contained memories of things he'd seen and possibly things he'd done.
And, in all likelihood, women he'd made love to.
He'd been doing this while she was in Pennyroyal Green deflecting suitor after suitor and instructing the footman where to put flowers delivered by men who hadn't a prayer of gaining her attention.
Because they weren't Lyon.
Once they'd been able to talk about anything and everything, endlessly. He needed only speak about anything in order for her to find it fascinating.
But another chasm of silence opened up. There were too many things to say. And they had lost the knack of talking to each other.
”You were a member of a s.h.i.+p's . . . crew?” Someone of his refinement and breeding would have been painfully conspicuous.
Then again, Lyon had won the Suss.e.x Marksmans.h.i.+p Trophy and more than one fencing compet.i.tion.
”They'll take any able-bodied man willing to work on a s.h.i.+p, Olivia. They taught me. I learned. I worked. I fought. I won. I didn't need to know how to do anything that I didn't already know how to do.”
He said it very deliberately. Very evenly.
But it was very much a reference to that night in Suss.e.x. What do you know how to do?
In five years he'd risen from menial labor on the deck of a s.h.i.+p to owning and commanding one.
But then, she didn't suppose she ever truly doubted him.
She was quiet. She had a million questions for him.
She dismantled her bread, then realized what she was doing and put it in her mouth instead.
He watched approvingly. ”Eat more than that. You've gotten thin.”
Her eyes flared wide.
His voice was gruff.
He'd likely been pondering how thin she was while she was wondering about the lines near his eyes.
<script>