Why could her brother never understand that?
Her silence didn’t seem to shout to Lord Sheridan that he ought to keep on meandering, unfortunately. He crouched down beside her, his gaze on the water but his presence so very there that she couldn’t help but scowl at him.
This was all his fault. All of it. Not, of course, that she’d found those letters from the islands’ most famous pirate in the foundation of her grandfather’s cottage. But he was the one who promised the Scofields he’d buy anything they found. He was the one who threw so much money at them that they thought they ought to start a bidding war with some other antiquities hound with more money than sense. He was the one—blast him—who had offered such a ridiculous sum for her most prized heirloom that the Scofields sold it to him without even asking her first.
She’d have it back. She would. It was the last thing her mother had given her—a gift for her seventeenth birthday, just a week before her mother’s death. He’d had no right to buy it. It wasn’t for sale, it oughtn’t to have been sold. It was stolen goods, and if she thought she had a hope of winning in a court of law against a family as powerful and connected as Lord Scofield’s, she’d sue them, and him, for its return.
But an island miss, a vicar’s sister, a girl with nothing more to her family name than a small estate on the Cornwall mainland, wouldn’t stand a chance against an earl and a marquess.
Besides. The Earl of Scofield may be a money-grubbing thief, but his daughter was one of her dearest friends.
As for the Marquess of Sheridan . . . he’d made himself comfortable on her bluff, just as he had in her home, and reclined back on his elbows as if he hadn’t a care in the world. As if his cutthroat determination to collect antiquities hadn’t very nearly gotten her killed once already. As if he had some right to be here still, “helping” search for more of Mucknell’s treasure. As if he had a claim to it.
“Remarkable, really.” He nodded to the sea.
She blinked, not certain what conversation he’d been having in his head while she flayed him in her own, but she knew that his observation didn’t directly follow his thought about growing tired of vistas. “What is?” She mentally slapped herself for asking. In their weeklong acquaintance, she’d already learned that it took nothing more than a single word to get Lord Sheridan talking.
So why in the world couldn’t she keep her stupid mouth from giving him those single words?
“The color of the water. It looks nearly Caribbean, doesn’t it?” His lips twitched up. “Were I Libby—Lady Elizabeth, I mean—I’d wonder why. Some . . . what’s-it-called or such in the water? Micro . . . things. Or minerals. Maybe you care for such things too?”
He glanced over at her with a lift of his auburn brows.
She made a point of looking away, toward the waters. Had she met him some other way, in some other place, perhaps she’d think him handsome. If he weren’t a low-down, mean-spirited, dirty rotten thief. “No. Oliver has always been the one to ask such questions.” A memory cartwheeled through her mind, pulling a smile to her lips despite the company. “My mother always marveled at how the three of us were so different. She said that Morgan would be eternally grateful for the beauty of the water, as if it were a special gift from God to him. Oliver would wonder why it was so blue, and I . . .”
Blast. She hadn’t meant to talk to him. She never meant to talk to him. So why had she ended up doing just that each and every day since she came home?
“And you?”
She sighed. “I would wonder where the water could take me.”
He chuckled. Probably thinking her a stupid girl, full of dreams that would never come true.
But no. His chuckle wasn’t cruel, and she wasn’t so unfair as to pretend it was. It was empathetic. As was his smile. “That is the thing about it. I think, anyway. The going, I mean. Or rather, that it’s a veritable portal to anywhere in the world.”
Beth closed the book in her lap and watched the waves roll in. “It is the thing, indeed.”
He nodded, stretched out his long legs, and crossed them at the ankles. “Do you miss him?”
She drew in a long breath. No question about which “him” he meant. Morgan had been gone for only two years—finally snatched by one of the ailments that had plagued him since he was a lad—but she felt the ache of it daily, just as she felt the gaping hole of their parents, who had died only a year earlier. “He never missed a Wednesday morning race. He could never participate—he was too weak. But he’d always be right here in this spot, no matter how ill he was. If he couldn’t walk down, he’d ask Mr. Dawe to wheel him in his chair. He had to cheer on Ollie.” She breathed a laugh and shook her head. “In a lot of ways, Morgan lived through us.”
His nod was simple. Sincere. “And still does.”
Double blast. That was the sort of observation that made it very hard to remember that she didn’t like him one bit.
“Do you ever race?” He nodded to the point, around which the rowers had still not appeared. “Or—well, I suppose I don’t know if you could. If they’d let you, I mean. That is—girls. Are they allowed?”
She chuckled at the thought of pulling at the oars, sandwiched between her brother and his best friend, Enyon Thorne. Or even funnier, in the opposing boat with Casek Wearne—the giant of a headmaster who had long been Oliver’s rival and was now betrothed to their cousin Mabena.
Leave for a few weeks, and the strangest things could happen. Who’d have ever thought tempestuous Mabena would end up with him?
But then, who’d have thought that while she was away, her brother would fall in love too?
She shook her head. “It’s never come up. Not to say it won’t at some point, I’m certain. But for now, none of us girls have any desire to get in the middle of that. Far more fun to watch, and then to take our gigs out later without all that male competitiveness.”
“But you watch from here? I think—didn’t Lady Elizabeth say something about the beach?”
Lady Elizabeth—the girl whose finger now bore Mother’s ring. Apparently one of the reasons she’d been happy to come to the Scillies with Mabena was to escape a marriage to the very gentleman beside Beth now, which Lord Telford—Sheridan’s best friend—was trying to arrange. That motivation Beth could well imagine.
She sneaked another look at his lordship. Handsome enough, yes. But he was a blithering dunderhead, so obsessed with his archaeological and historical pursuits that he didn’t care who he stepped on to get his hands on his next prize. It served him right to have his would-be fiancée snatched from his grasp by Beth’s brother.
And just to poke at him, she ignored the question about why she preferred to watch from the bluff versus the beach and said, “Speaking of Libby. I expect you’re quite fond of her.”
“Oh. Ah.” He cleared his throat, but it did nothing to keep a blush from staining his neck. “She’s . . . well, a fine young lady. To be certain. And your brother! They make a fine pair. Wish them every happiness. And more.”
He didn’t exactly sound heartbroken. More’s the pity. “More than every happiness? Wouldn’t that then get into things that are not happiness? Rather rude of you.”