It was only as they drew near to Shanghai that she sought him out again.
“Here,” she said, handing him a few sheets of paper. “Lightfoot says he’ll give it a try. I thought you might want to go over it beforehand.”
He shuffled through the pages. It was a scheme for sending telegraphs through an erratic connection. It involved special paper and some tightening of the rules for sending dots and dashes. Repeat message five to six times, she had written, and overlay results. Random current interruptions can be identified upon comparison of the streams—
“You two really came up with a way for me to send telegrams while at sea?” He shook his head.
“Well, we don’t truly know if it will work, do we?” She looked over at him. “I only did it for fun.”
“Just for fun. Well, you’re going to have a lot of fun in Shanghai.”
“Hmm.” She looked over at the coast.
They were close now. That storm felt even closer. But he couldn’t shy away from her completely. They had to talk about what was to come.
“You don’t look excited,” he mused. “You look nervous.”
She exhaled. “I’m going to be in Shanghai. I told you perhaps a little of what that meant.”
“Do you think there’s any possibility you could meet your family there?”
She shook her head emphatically. “It will do me no good to hold out real hope. I can scarcely manage the false variety.”
A breeze skittered across the deck, tugging at her skirts. She smoothed them back into place.
“I need a new thing to hope for.” Her voice was very soft, scarcely audible above the ever-present sound of the screw propeller turning water.
“Have you any notion what that will be?”
“I like your idea.” She looked across the sea, looking west toward the mainland of China. “Maybe one day I might be able to clean up a mess for someone else when it couldn’t be done for me. I think I’ve accepted in my mind, if not my heart, that the reunion I’ve imagined so many times—one where we see each other at the end of a long and dusty road—will never happen. But if I do my work well, maybe others won’t need to be separated.”
Grayson turned to look at her. She was still staring out at the mainland. There was a quiet agony of surrender in her eyes, at war with the certainty of her jaw.
He’d been wrong this whole time. The storm wasn’t coming. It was here.
Mrs. Smith wasn’t an intelligent, attractive woman whom he would forget after a few months away. That was more likely to describe what she would do with him.
She was in this endeavor with him—to finish what his brothers had started, and to finish it well. His business, his feelings, her feelings… They were all intermingled, and he couldn’t ignore any of them. He was feeling things, looking at her like this—feeling the sharp pain of giving up on seeing family that he loved dearly, feeling the torture of releasing connections with his loved ones, feeling the isolation of being alone in the world, unable to reach out. He hadn’t wanted to feel it for himself, but it had slipped in sideways, reflected by her emotions.
He felt all those things, and that was the point where he truly felt the rain fall around him. He wasn’t going to forget her. Not someone who took her misery—one she’d been bearing since she was a child—and turned it into a sincere desire to make the world a place where others didn’t suffer as she had.
This moment of affinity stretched between them, connecting them. Useless thing, connection. Grayson despised it. What was he going to do with that? Tell her that he felt this way? Pointless. He was going to leave in a matter of days, and he was used to bearing his emotions alone in any event.
It wasn’t just that he wanted to reach out and touch her, to cup his hand against the cheek that was reddening in the wind, to pull her close and shelter her from the weather. It wasn’t just that he wished everyone else were very far away so that he could kiss her the way he wanted.
He’d told her back in Fuzhou that he didn’t really know what it was like to kiss someone he truly wanted. That he was a single-lightning-strike sort of person—attraction happened swiftly and then passed on.
The thing was, Grayson had actually been struck by lightning thrice in his life. Freak accidents, every single one—and never direct strikes, but side splashes, the leap of current from one tall object to him. He had scars on his right arm as a memory from one of those strikes.
He didn’t know how he’d survived those and yet his brothers… He took a deep breath, refusing to think of that.
He’d told her that he was a single-lightning-strike sort of person, and yet he’d known as he’d said it that he was the sort of person who attracted lightning.
The storm was here. He thought he’d insulated his heart, but a few inches of rubber were nothing for a bolt of energy that could cross the heavens. He didn’t want to feel this. This yearning. This want. This desire to keep her safe, this connection. He didn’t want it.
He had known something was going wrong, that there was danger, but he’d justified all his conversation with her as business. Telling himself it couldn’t hurt. He should have recognized the danger he was in. He should have protected his heart better.
How could he have? He hadn’t realized he still had one.
“Captain Hunter?” She turned her wide eyes on him, and he felt himself falling. “Is something amiss?”
He nodded. “I smell a storm. It’s a big one.”
Her eyes grew wider. Her expression was curious and delighted. “You can smell storms? How does one smell storms?” She inhaled and let out a deep breath, inhaled and let out a deep breath, as if searching for secrets in the scent of the world.
God. He was lightning struck by her. All the way through, and he didn’t have time to feel like this.
What could he do? Grayson gave in and told her.
Chapter Thirteen
They landed in Shanghai in utter confusion. Amelia had expected something like Fuzhou in tea season, except maybe larger—busy docks swirling about a busy river, with residences a little farther away. She had been found just outside Shanghai, and so she’d hoped it would prove familiar and comfortable, even if she had no memory of it.
It did not. Shanghai wasn’t just Fuzhou but on a different scale—it felt as if it were on an entirely different planet. Ship after ship after ship, with so many flags painted on them, half of which she didn’t recognize. A hall that had to be navigated, paperwork presented to her, everyone shouting, all the noises echoing, in layers of unknown languages.
Benedict guided her through the confusing morass of customs at Woosung, confidently telling her where to sign and what everything meant even when the noise reverberated to the point of headache.
Leaving that cacophony did little to alleviate her confusion. The foreign concession in Shanghai was nothing like Fuzhou. Everything seemed made in the English style—and bigger, taller, grander, with more squares and statues. She was, at first take, the only Chinese person in sight and that made her nervous.
Benedict seemed to recognize her discomfort—good—but dealt with it by directing a bewildering flow of information at her.