Laura Kinsale Read Free Page A

or some color too complex to comprehend, their brilliance outlined with a bold thick fringe of sooty lashes.
    He felt his mouth go slack, his hand dropped, and the details came together in a thunderclap. She was beautiful. Unquestionably, painfully, soul-searingly beautiful, even in a set of baggy, bedraggled foul-weather gear. He blinked and felt his heart contract as it did when the official questions got too sharp and suspicious. The rush of blood should have saved him: in that state of mental panic he could usually summon his best and smoothest lies. Instead, his dockside eloquence vanished. All he could find to say was “Um.”
    Her dark eyebrows arched, managing offense and amusement at the same time. She looked up at him with an absolute lack of fear or modesty. Gryf had a sudden suspicion, a horrible vision of possibilities that solidified into numb certainty. He bit his tongue and tasted blood before he had his voice under control. “Lady Collier?” he ventured, a hoarse whisper of dismay, while he hoped with a forlorn and futile hope that he might be wrong.
    She nodded, with a smile that went through him like light through clear water. He smiled back, the reflex of total desperation. A long moment of painful silence dragged past before Gryf said, “Oh.”
    “And you are…?”
    For an agonized split second, Gryf forgot the name he was using. But the survival habit of years was strong; he focused on a point near her right ear that was a degree less hypnotic than a head-on gaze into those level, sea-colored eyes, and made his tongue form words. “Gryphon Frost.”
    He had the feeling that he should bow, or offer to kiss her hand; the bald statement of his name seemed too abrupt.
    “Of course,” she said calmly. “The captain.”
    Her voice was smooth and melodic, as lovely as her face. Gryf observed a damp black curl that peeked out from behind her delicate earlobe, and wondered if he would ever again in his life see anything as beautiful. He felt the idiotic smile creep back onto his face, remembered how he had laid a threatening hand on her, and wished himself decently buried under eighty tons of ballast.
    “Forgive me,” he blundered. “I thought you were…I mistook you for one of my crew.”
    She laughed then, showing small white teeth, and touched her hand to the floppy brim of her hat. “I can’t imagine why!”
    Gryf wished he could think of some further expression of contrition, something more appropriate to his degree of mortification: throwing himself off the poop deck and drowning might suit. He remembered his own hat, pulled it quickly off his head, and stood there with rain running down his face. “Lady Collier—”
    “Put your hat back on,” she cried. “Or you’ll certainly catch a fever!”
    He obeyed her. The gesture of common sense gave him courage. It was conceivable that she was human, in spite of being an heiress. “Lady Collier, surely you don’t need to concern yourself with stowage, especially on a day like this. We’ll have the plants below shortly.”
    This was not quite true; the plants were last on his list of priorities. Foodstores came first, along with finishing out his cargo with a small purchase of india rubber that he’d managed on his own. Jerome Gould, the earl’s Nassau agent, had loaded the ship with smuggled Southern cotton in the islands, infinitely pleased in the notion that he’d badgered Gryf into going past the safe draft limit again. Gryf had neglected to tell the man that in the process of the new outfitting and paint job, he had arranged to have the load lines placed five inches lower on the hull than the original marks. There was room for another twenty tons of cargo without danger.
    Tess herself was oblivious to the proper loading order of ship’s stores, and she had no intention of being put off again on the subject of the plants. She had dealt with stubborn ship’s officers before. Whatever it took, coaxing or ordering or throwing an