a close inspection of her, changed his mind. He handed her the grey, threadbare towel, liberally stained but the best the Silver Boat could manage.
‘Here. Dry your feet.’ It would give her something to do to occupy her mind and her hands, to remove the glassy terror that still glazed her eyes. Then he changed his mind again as she eyed the linen askance and seemed incapable of carrying out the simple task. He supposed he must take charge. Once more he knelt at her feet.
‘Hold out your foot.’
She did so. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not usually so helpless…’
‘It’s shock, that’s all. Don’t flinch—I’m going to remove your stockings.’ He continued to talk inconsequentially, matter of factly as he began to perform the intimate task with impersonal fingers. ‘You need to dry your feet, Madame Mermaid. My mother swore that damp feet brought on the ague. I don’t know if she was ever proved right, but we’ll not take it to chance. Lift your foot again…’
He doubted that his mother had ever expressed such practical advice in all her life, but that did not matter. He felt the muscles of the girl’s feet and calves under his hands tense once more, but he unfastened her garters and rolled her stockings discreetly down to her ankles, drawing them from her feet, placing the sodden items neatly beside her. Her skin, he noted, was fine and soft against the calluses on his own palms, her feet slender and beautifully arched. She owned an elegant pair of ankles too, he thought with pure male appreciation. He forced himself to resist drawing his fingers from heel to instep to toes as he ignored the increased beat of his pulse in his throat when she flexed her foot in his grip. Instead, briskly, he applied the linen until her feet were dry and the colour returning.
‘There. It’s done.’
He raised his eyes to find her watching his every move. Somewhere in his deliberately businesslike ministrations, her fear had gone and her eyes were as clear and blue as the sea on a summer’s day. Remarkable. It crossed his mind with an almost casual acceptance that he could fall and drown in them with no difficulty at all.
He had no wish to do any such thing.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You are kind…’
‘I don’t need your thanks.’
More abrupt than he had intended, disturbed by his reaction to her, Alexander pushed himself upright, picking up the jug to pour brandy with a heavy hand into the smeared glass. ‘Here. Drink this.’
‘I don’t like brandy.’
‘I don’t care whether you like it or not. It will steady your nerves.’
The girl sighed, accepted the glass, sipped once, twice, wincing at the burn of the liquor, then placed the glass on the table at her elbow whilst she untied the satin strings of her bonnet. Alexander tossed back a glass of brandy himself before he turned foursquare to look down at the girl—the lady, for certainly from her clothes and bearing she was of good family. To his amazement temper heated, rapid and out of control. A surge of anger that she should have endangered her life so wantonly. That she might have been swept to her death before he had even known her. For some inexplicable reason the thought balled into fury that he could not contain.
‘What were you thinking, madam, getting yourself trapped by an incoming tide? You could have been swept out to sea if you’d fallen into one of the channels. The undertow of the tide is strong enough to drag you under. It’s happened before to an unwary visitor. Did you not see what was happening?’
The soft summer-blue of her gaze sharpened, glints of fire, as did her voice. ‘No, I did not see. Or I would not have been trapped, would I?’
‘If I hadn’t ridden into the village by chance, George Gadie would have been fishing your dead body out of the bay to deliver it to your grieving family.’ The heat in his words shook him. How could he have been drying her feet one minute and berating her with unreasonable fury the next? She did not deserve it.
‘But thanks to you I’m not dead,’ she snapped, matching temper with temper. ‘Thank you for your help. I’m sorry to have been an inconvenience to you. I’ll make sure it never happens again.’
‘Then it will be a good lesson learned if you’re to stay in this part of the world for long!’
‘I’ll heed your advice, sir.’
She had spirit, he’d give her that. Intrigued by her sharp defence, by the definite accent when under stress, Alexander raised his brows as his irritation began to ebb. The lady did not appear grateful at all. He felt the need to suppress a smile at the heat that had replaced the frozen terror.
‘So we are in agreement, it seems. Now what do I do with you?’
‘You do nothing with me.’ Her eyes actually seemed to flash in the dim room. ‘I am very grateful that you rescued me, of course, but I am perfectly capable of returning home on my own. You are at liberty to ride on your way about your own concerns. Now if you will give me back my shoes, which appear to have vanished in the direction of the kitchen…’
Alexander Ellerdine simply stood and looked at her, torn between amusement and frustration.
She sat and looked back at him, mutiny in her face.
And there it was. The sword of Damocles fell.
Chapter Two
Alexander looked, really looked at the girl—no, the woman, he realised—for the first time.
And he could not look away. His heart stopped for a breathless moment, before resuming with the heavy thump of a military drum.
Not as young as he had first thought, certainly older than her twentieth year, even if not by too many years; her slender figure and compact stature gave her a youthful air. She was extraordinarily pretty with fair hair now in a riot of curls from the wind and the damp, and those astonishing blue eyes. The blur of panic had definitely gone from them. They sparkled like sunlight on waves in a morning sea. Not classically beautiful, he noted dispassionately—her brows were too dark, her nose formidably straight and her chin had a hint of the masterful. Perhaps her lips were a little wide for her heart-shaped face—but that was not to her detriment. Now parted in what could only be a moment of baffled consternation to mirror his own, Alexander felt a precise urge to kiss those lips, to press his mouth against that exact spot where a charming indentation might hover in her cheek if she smiled.
At this moment, to his regret, she looked as if she had no intention of ever smiling at him.
He blinked, mentally ordering his thoughts back into line. To no avail. She was quite lovely and Alexander felt the pull of some intense, deep-seated connection between them. A bond that linked him to her whether he wished it or not. Fancifully he considered its existence, ephemeral but solid in his awareness. Like an arc of light that had managed to seep through the grime-caked windows. Or a tightening of a fist to take up the tension in a rope. Perhaps it was an invisible skein woven from the dusty air in the drab little room. He did not know. What he did know was that it was there between them. An entity that he could not shake off.
It was, the thought crept into his mind to overwhelm it with its novelty, as if he had been waiting for this moment, for this particular woman, all his life.
Again it took his breath and his heart stumbled on a beat.
Whilst Marie-Claude simply sat with her bonnet in her lap, her stockings at her feet, and surveyed the man who stood before her. An even greater shock to her than the threat of the incoming tide had been was that he seemed to be in the same grip of the same blinding discovery as she. It whispered over her skin. This man touched her heart, her mind. Her soul. How could this be? How could she feel this link to a complete stranger?
She took a difficult breath. It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the room so that she must struggle to fill her lungs. And yet there was a strange stillness, as in the eye of a storm. Still, silent, as if waiting for some momentous revelation.
Marie-Claude