What a Lady Craves Read Free Page B

and ochers. Nearly enough to blend them with the rock and pebbles strewn over the beach. Almost the hue of the broken timbers of his ship. If he didn’t miss his guess, some of the larger shards of wood down there had once belonged to him.
    The locals already swarmed the shoreline. His childhood days spent along this coast ought to have prepared him for the sight. When a ship went down, the villagers all profited as best they could. Only this time they were combing through his ship, his cargo, the remnants of
his
life; he couldn’t bite back the bitter taste of disgust that coated his tongue.
    Of all the rotten luck.
    His fortunes could damned well change now, thank you very much. He could have sworn he’d cast the pall of ill chance from his shoulders the moment he sailed from Calcutta. Yet he
had
been more fortunate than others. He was still alive.
    Good God, was he the only one, along with Satya? What had happened to his crew?
    He hobbled past a pair of housewives in the middle of the village’s main street, arguing over a length of bedraggled fabric, if it could be termed such. Red silk from China. It would have fetched a pretty price in London. Gone now—ruined and stained with salt water and seaweed—and he could do nothing about it. Yet for these women, the rag was worth the fight.
    Ignoring the pair, he made for a tiny, mud-colored building. Tilly’s Flotsam and Jetsam, a mainstay of his boyhood jaunts to the village, crammed in all manner of oddments to entrance a young imagination, from glass beads that might double as precious stones to a glass bottle containing a frigate. As a child, he’d spent hours contemplating that model ship, its lines distorted by the hand-blown container.
    A bell tinkled as he opened the door. The shop still resembled his memory with its hodgepodge of oddities jammed onto shelves and into corners, from floor to ceiling. If Tilly could find anything in the mess, he was the only one. The glass-encased frigate still held pride of place on the counter at the perfect level to catch a boy’s eye. The scent of dust mixed with the musk of mildew reached Alexander’s nostrils. No, not a thing had changed.
    “Good day to ye.” Tilly grinned, showing off a fair few gaps in his teeth. The passing years had left the proprietor as unchanged as his shop, except the wrinkles and lines on his face had deepened.
    Through a painful breath or two, Alexander inclined his head. “It’s a better one than yesterday, that’s certain.”
    “Quite a storm we had, and that’s a fact.” Tilly chewed out the words slowly, as if he had all day to ruminate over the weather—and doubtless he did.
    Alexander, on the other hand, could not tolerate such a leisurely pace. Not with his head feeling as if it were stuffed with cotton wool and his vision unsteady. “Bad enough for a ship to go down.”
    Tilly nodded. “Arr, it was at that.”
    “So happens it was my ship that went down.” Not that Tilly could have told, since Alexander had borrowed some decent clothes this morning. Unless Tilly came up with his trunk, and that trunk had miraculously escaped the wreck unscathed, he’d have to replace his wardrobe on top of everything else.
    “Is that a fact?”
    “It is. I don’t suppose you’ve had any sailors slog through since yesterday?”
    Alexander held his breath while Tilly contemplated a spot somewhere past him. Perhaps out in the street, those two ladies had come to blows. “Can’t say that I have. Ye and me bothknow they like as not made for the pub. For all that, they probably went straight to Falmouth.”
    Damn, damn, and damn.
Alexander was in no condition to travel the ten odd miles down the coast to the nearest deepwater port and verify that bit of information now. Frustration gnawed at his gut, eclipsing for a moment or two the pain of his injuries. Stumbling as far as the local pub was chancy at best. Falmouth was out of the question until he felt up to the jouncing of a carriage.