Dreaming (11 page)

“Ah, I see. I was wondering what you had to be so jubilant about. How did you come to that conclusion?”

“It’s very simple. I’m surprised you didn’t notice.”

“I lost the ability to be surprised years ago.”

She cocked her head and looked at him, as if she were trying to understand him. Despite its innocence, the look was penetrating.

Don’t look too close, hellion. There are no pretty little dreams inside here
. He gave a hard stare meant to quell her a bit.

“You and I do seem to see things differently. Do you suppose that’s just one of the differences between man and woman? It must be,” she said, unfazed by his look and answering her own question before he had a chance to respond. “It couldn’t possibly be us.”

“God forbid.”

She smiled at him. Once again his cynicism had gone sailing past her.

Odd thing: He felt like an ass.

“Do you still want to know how I know they’re not going to kill us?” There was a tinge of gloating to her voice.

“By all means, do tell.”

“You don’t feed people you’re going to kill.”

His first instinct was to ask her if she’d ever heard of a last meal. But he realized that the less she knew the better—for both of them.

And perhaps it was the fact that the men had no eyebrows that had made them look so bewildered, or perhaps it was something else, but whatever, he felt no threat from them. As a matter of fact, the smugglers had looked downright fearful. His gaze drifted to the hellion. He laughed to himself. Perhaps they had good reason.

“Ouch!” She dropped her spoon and rubbed her lips. “Too hot.”

He watched her blow lightly on her food, then shook his head and glanced down at his own bowl. He set it aside. His gaze swept the dank room and saw no means of escape. Whether the smugglers were dangerous or not, they still needed to escape.

His wound wouldn’t hinder him. He glanced down at his arm. It was sore but not unbearable.

He glanced at the dog. He was unbearable.

At that moment Gus was lying quietly beside his mistress, his snout atop his paws and his whiskered lips sagging to the floor. A pair of bloodshot eyes looked directly at Richard. The beast lilted those lips in a snarl, but he made no sound.

Richard ignored him and looked at his mistress. She had relaxed and was leaning back against the crate behind her, her eyes closed, her face full of peace.

He found that ironic, considering that she brought little peace to those around her. “Dreaming again, are we?”

“
Ummm
-hmmm.”

He doubted his own face had ever worn such a quiet look. “So tell me, hellion, what are these incredulous magical dreams of yours?”

She opened her eyes and smiled the you-are-so-wonderful smile that usually irritated the hell out of him. Instead of feeling irritated now, he felt the spread of some elusive unnamed emotion, but before he could counterbalance it with some sharp caustic comment, she spoke: “Dreams can be anything one wants that is special to them. Take, for example, the servants at home. I taught our gardener to dream. He chose to dream about roses, prize roses. The coachman dreamed he was playing cricket at Lord’s. The stable-boy dreamed of jockey’s colors and the
Newmarket
races. The cook chose soufflés, chocolate soufflés.
Ummm
.” She gave him a little grin. “The dreams don’t have to be incredulous. They are magical because of how one feels about that which they’re dreaming.

“I can dream about blue skies and puffy white clouds and chattering birds in the middle of a winter storm. I can dream that I danced every dance. I can dream about . . . . ” She looked him in the eye as if she was going to admit she dreamed of him, but to his surprise she didn’t. She looked away.

“Sometimes I think of romantic myths. Perhaps I’m a titian-haired princess riding a runaway horse. And fresh from his dragon slaying comes a knight atop his white charger. He rides across a bridge just in time to save me.”

Ah, he thought, she didn’t need to speak of him because she’d turned everything into her own romantic tale.

She looked back at him and gave him a misty smile. “Dreaming is magical because no matter what the tale, I can be whomever I want. Either the most romantic or the most tragic figure I can think of.”

She gave him a direct look. “Did you ever notice that in those romantic tales, the women always have long and lovely titian hair? I imagine Helen of Troy and Juliet both had titian hair.”

She paused and sighed. “I’ve always wanted titian hair.” She grabbed a curly strand of her brown hair and held it in front of her, frowning at it as if it were curling earthworms.

“Don’t you think I’d look more dramatic if I had titian hair? Oh, you needn’t answer that.” She dropped her hair. “Of course you do. Men always look fairly upon women with titian hair.” She stared at her hands.

He had wanted to speak, his usual sharp biting words that would tell her this was the cruel world, not some bloody adventure; to tell her that she should give up believing in fairy tales and to tell her how foolish she was.

But for the first time in his life the caustic words wouldn’t come. He’d used them on fools, on friends, and he’d spent years spitting them at his father, yet when he looked at her, he was suddenly at a loss for something to say.

She had managed to get him kidnapped by smugglers, had set fire to him, and had even shot him, yet he couldn’t say what came naturally. He couldn’t tell her to be quiet, to give up all her idiotic dreams of princesses with titian hair and knights on white horses.

And most of all, to tell her that caring for him was an absolute lost cause. He wasn’t a hero, and probably would never be one.

“
Letty
,” he said more sharply than he’d meant to.

She straightened and looked at him questioningly.

He looked away and tried to find the right words. The Earl of
Downe
at a loss for words. No one who knew him would believe it.

He glanced up at her again. She sat there, waiting, an expectant look in her eyes. She placed too high a value on him and his words. It was a responsibility he could shirk easily, because he didn’t want to mean anything to her. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to, and he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to look into her eyes and see her heart. He didn’t want to be part of her world.

He caught the high color in her cheeks and found himself thinking of things that he’d never thought of before. He’d never noticed a woman’s skin, whether it was dewy or soft or pale.

Yet he noticed hers. He came to a new understanding of why throughout time poets compared a woman’s skin to a white rose. Of all the women he’d seen and flirted with, of all he’d even bedded, he’d never once been intrigued by something as simple as the look of their skin.

He stared down at his own hands and realized they were rough and hard, weathered. He wondered whether he could still feel softness with those hardened hands.

For one brief instant, he knew that he might have given her almost anything should she have asked. The air around him turned heavy and was strangely silent, as if the world had suddenly stopped. There was an odd tightening in his chest. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought it was his heart. But he’d stopped caring long before, when he’d lost the ability to believe that the future held anything for him.

He knew with surety that he could never give her what her eyes begged him for. He willed with every ounce of his being for these strange feelings to pass. And the seconds turned to minutes.

“Your food’s getting cold,” he said finally, giving a curt nod at the bowl in her hand while he blamed his addled sense on the fall.

She blessed him with one of those smiles that seemed to irrationally irritate him, then set a cup of water aside and took a bite of stew. “This is quite good.”

Self-preservation made him look from that smile to the food in her hand until he’d blocked her out with thoughts and smells of food. He’d had nothing in his stomach but the brandy he’d known he would need, for the courage to walk through the front door of his estate for the first time in two years.

One couldn’t confront old ghosts sober. But all those glasses of false courage were now nothing but a sour memory in his empty stomach. He felt his stomach tighten. He was hungry after all.

A loud slurping sounded from behind him. He turned around.

The hellhound quickly sat back on his haunches, staring at him, his canine face set in a sly and truly satisfied grin.

With a sick feeling Richard looked down at his bowl—his empty bowl.

And Gus burped.

Chapter 6

The lock slid open with a rusty scrape that
Letty
could feel clear through to her teeth. She turned just as the door cracked and a musket barrel poked through the opening. The musket quivered, and after a slight pause,
Philbert
stuck his gray-haired head inside. He quickly tossed a large soup bone toward Gus. It landed with a loud thud and rattled across the wooden floor for a foot or two.

One would never have known that Gus had just eaten Richard’s food from the way he pounced on that bone. Like an animal starved, he hugged it between his large paws, then clamped his teeth around it, his droopy eyes darting left, then right. He stood up and trotted around the hold, tail wagging and ears flopping, as he proudly displayed his prize.

He carried it as if it were a brace of pheasants. He pranced past a tight-jawed Richard three times, then settled into a corner and began to ravenously gnaw on the bone.

“Excuse me, Mr.
Philbert
?”
Letty
said, ignoring Richard’s bullish snort.

The smuggler looked up and pointed the gun barrel at her, using the door as a shield. “I’m not
Philbert
.”

She paused, a little apprehensive. It was
Phelim
, and the last time she’d seen him he was being carried out unconscious. She supposed he would not be too pleased with her. She gave a tentative nod and searched for the correct thing to say.

From his appearance, she figured he had come out fairly unscathed. After all, he did have his eyebrows. Just for good measure, she decided a compliment was the most politic. “Mr.
Phelim
. You look well.”

“I’m not
Phelim
.”

Her mouth fell open. “Another brother?”

He nodded. “Aye.”

She held up three fingers.

The man nodded. “Triplets.”

“Oh.” She cast a quick glance at Richard, who sat in a corner near a brandy barrel. His knees were drawn up, his injured arm resting on one of them, while he watched Gus from narrowed eyes that made him look as if he were ready to snatch the bone away and eat it himself. “Have you ever met triplets before?”

Richard said nothing. He just watched Gus the way the Duke of Wellington might have eyed Napoleon across a battlefield.

She sighed and turned back to the other brother. “Gus ate Richard’s food. I believe he’s terribly hungry. Do you suppose someone could fetch him another dish of stew?”

The man remained in the doorway, the musket still aimed at her and his stance very cautious. After one of those long strings of male silence, he frowned and shook his head slightly, then appeared to think long and hard. He shrugged at the room in general and turned toward Richard. “Sorry,
yer
lordship. The crew ate everything and there be no meat left to stew.”

Richard slowly faced them and, through a tight humorless smile, said, “We could always stew Gus.”

Gus looked up from his soup bone and smacked loudly.

“He doesn’t mean that,”
Letty
told the man. “He wouldn’t stew Gus.” She looked back at them and wondered which one of them was going to outlast the other, Richard or Gus. At that moment it appeared that Gus was winning.

She crooked a finger at the newest brother. He shook his head vigorously and hugged the door a tad closer to his stocky chest.

She moved closer, not minding too much when he took two steps backward and raised the gun a notch, the knuckles on one hand turning white from gripping the door. She supposed he had his reasons. She glanced back at the repaired wall. The blast had shaken the entire ship.