‘Then it’s good I’m alone.’ Elise looked up at him with a forced smile. ‘With my mother and William away from London it will be harder for him to reach them.’
She was starting to understand. Dorian reached up his free hand to push a strand of hair out of her face. ‘You’re not alone, Elise.’ She had him for whatever that was worth. He definitely came with disadvantages. He was a magnet for Tyne. He’d cost Tyne his ship and an expensive cargo of Russian guns for the Turks, a deal that had taken over a year to put together. But he could defend her. ‘I’m here.’
‘For how long?’ The question was ruthless. In one simple question she’d united the business and pleasure sides of their relationship, linking them irrevocably together once more.
‘For as long as it takes, Elise.’ It was the best answer, the most honest answer he could give. He would not leave her open to Tyne’s treachery, but neither could he articulate anything permanent about their relationship. Nor could he articulate anything temporary. He wondered if she’d thought of that.
‘And then?’ Elise pushed on, seeing only the temporary nature of his answer. ‘Where will you go after this?’
‘It will depend.’ Dorian shrugged. ‘It’s not a priority right now and it won’t be a priority until Tyne is dealt with and you’re safe.’ He wanted to kiss her, wanted her to stop thinking about the future and start thinking about right now.
A coy smile hinted at her lips. ‘What is a priority, Dorian Rowland?’
‘You.’ He was hungry for her. He had to know she’d let him protect her, that his disclosures hadn’t driven her off.
‘Right here? Out in the open?’ The prospect of something so risky spoke to her. Her pupils widened, her pulse quickened.
‘Yes.’ Dorian kissed her neck, his free hand in her hair, drawing her, urging her close to him. They had all afternoon. He would take this nice and slow.
‘No.’ He felt her body tense in resistance, a mirror to her words.
‘No?’
She gave a rueful smile. ‘Apparently there’s one woman in the world who can resist Dorian Rowland.’ She looked down, away from his face. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t.’
Dorian blew out a breath. ‘Is it because of the things I said that night? I had no right. They were unconscionable and they were untrue.’ He’d regretted those harsh words the moment he’d spoke them.
‘No. We were both angry.’
‘Then what? Don’t you trust me, Elise?’ The words sounded ridiculous coming from him after all he’d told her. He’d run arms, he’d stolen arms, he’d destroyed another man’s ship in retribution. Why should she trust him?
Elise scooted away from him and stood, surely a bad sign. Most of what he wanted to do on a picnic blanket required sitting down at least.
‘I trust you to protect me against Tyne.’ But not from himself. He thought he understood. He rose, too, prepared to persuade her otherwise. Her next words stalled him full force. ‘Dorian, there’s something else. Charles came with two offers today. The other was a proposal. Charles has asked me to marry him.’
And she was considering it. He wanted to shout, ‘No, you’re mine!’ but he had no idea what that meant—did it mean he wanted to marry her, or merely that he wanted to sail away with her and make love on sandy beaches until they tired of one another? How could he promise anything to her?
Dorian schooled his features into bland neutrality and cocked an eyebrow. ‘Are congratulations in order? Have you accepted him?’ Surely his instincts weren’t wrong. She couldn’t have, not when she’d been his not so very long ago.
Her own features mimicked his in their neutrality, some of the earlier stiffness returning to their conversation. ‘No, I have not. I just thought you should know.’ I will not be sleeping with you or kissing you, putting my mouth on you, or anything else until the situation with Charles is resolved.
Dorian studied her face, watching for some telltale give-away. ‘Will you accept?’
‘I don’t know,’ Elise answered slowly. ‘It will depend on what happens with the shipyard, I suppose.’ There was a flicker of hope in her eyes that suggested it depended on more than the shipyard, that it might depend on him.
‘We haven’t done very well today.’ Elise gave a little laugh. ‘I still don’t know whether or not to take the offer. Either of them.’
Dorian laughed. At least she wasn’t going to run home and accept Charles’s proposal. He still had a chance if he wanted to take it. ‘We might be doing better than you think.’
She shot him a dubious look. ‘I would hardly call inviting all-out war with an arms dealer doing “better than we think”.’
‘If you sell, it’s more than understandable.’ He would hate that decision, though, and she would come to hate it, too. It would haunt him all his days to see that yacht in Tyne’s filthy hands, but if it kept Elise safe, he would live with it. ‘If you choose to resist, I’ll protect you to the best of my abilities. Either way, I can’t make that decision for you, Elise…’ he gave a wicked smile and leaned in close to her ‘…but I can do this.’ His hand cupped the sweep of her jaw, just before he kissed her.
He tasted the sweetness of her, the strawberries and wine mingled on her lips, he felt the small straight ridges of her teeth where his tongue ran over them. Most of all, he felt compliance, ever so briefly, before she remembered her resolve, but it was there. And that meant there was hope indeed.
‘I told you, I can’t,’ Elise protested softly.
‘But I can. Charles didn’t propose to me.’ Dorian kissed her again just to prove his point.
Elise stood at the launch gate of the shipyard. In her hand was the rope cord that would send the bottle of champagne sailing into the side of the yacht. Excitement and trepidation coursed through her in equal parts. The breeze off the water toyed with her hat and she reached a hand up to steady it. The wind was good. In spite of overcast skies, conditions for the test sail couldn’t be better.
The momentous day was finally here. She was well past the point of no return and had been for much longer than she’d realised. Since the beginning there had been no question of selling the yard, or even of selling the boat, even if she was only now coming to realise it. She understood it now, though, standing on the launch site while the sun rose with Dorian beside her. This boat belonged to her, it was a product of her plans, her designs, her efforts.
Yet for all the pride she felt in the moment, there was a loneliness, too. Past launch days had been huge festive events, her father a great showman. The launch gate had been crowded with invited guests. Other yachts of invited celebrants had been moored in the river to join the sailing, and a select few would be aboard the prized vessel. There’d been food and champagne and a rousing speech from her father. Even the members of the royal family were present on occasion.
Today there was no such pomp. Today there were only a handful of people: herself and Dorian and enough crew to get the boat launched. She’d named the yacht Sutton’s Hope and Dorian had made her hold up a lantern last night so he could see well enough to paint the name along the prow. The paint had dried just in time.
‘This is it, Elise, give the rope a good yank.’ Dorian came to stand beside her, the last of the preparations done. Dorian, not Charles, was here with her, came the reminder. Dorian had helped her realise this moment, a moment Charles had not been in favour of from the start. Charles had scoffed at her ambitions. Dorian had embraced them. That should count for something.
Dorian was dressed in buff breeches and a thick sweater against the early morning chill. He looked well rested in spite of the late night. Elise knew she did not. She’d hardly slept with her mind so occupied with the yacht launch, the contretemps of Damien Tyne and Charles’s proposal. She’d spent most of the night weighing Charles against Dorian, although her practical side didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if she had to choose. Charles had asked for her hand, Dorian had asked for nothing.
‘Elise, the rope,’ Dorian prompt
ed again with a smile.
She let go and watched the bottle give a satisfying smash against the side. Her father would have loved to have been here. She’d not dared to write to William or her mother with an update. William didn’t know yet that he’d signed on for a membership with the yacht club.
Elise helped Dorian and the other two crew members get the yacht under way in the river, but she was eager to stand at the railing and feel the wind in her face and feel the roll of the boat beneath her. She was nervous, too. Would the great experiment with the buoyancy bags compensate for the narrowness through the centre of the boat? It would be absolutely tragic if, after all this, the design simply didn’t work.
For the trial, they’d planned to sail down the Thames to Gravesend. The route was the standard below-the-bridge racing course used by the yacht club. It would be a good chance to see how the sails tacked in the wind. Already she could feel the cutter rigging picking up the breeze. The boat felt fast. She could hear Dorian calling out instructions. She didn’t remember the point at which everything fell silent on board, only that Dorian had come up behind her and boldly wrapped his arms about her, his body warm and comforting.
‘She’s doing magnificently,’ Dorian reported. ‘The cutter rigging was exactly the right way to go. The new cut on the sails has made an enormous difference with the windage.’
Elise smiled. ‘That’s precisely what I wanted to hear.’
‘The Hope is fast, Elise.’ Dorian’s voice was at her ear, low and intimate. she should dissuade him from such liberties. It wasn’t fair to Charles or to Dorian or to her. If she meant to accept Charles, it was the height of cruelty to tempt herself like this. She didn’t need to compare kisses to know Charles did not rouse her, could not rouse her, like Dorian did. There would be none of the pleasure, none of the fire she felt with Dorian. But there would be honour and Charles would respect her. No, that would be misleading to think so. What kind of respect? Respect only if she acceded to his wishes. He would never countenance something like today.
‘How fast?’ She was fishing for compliments now.
‘Fast enough to outrun them all.’ Dorian blew in her ear. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.’ She’d thought about it all last night in the long dark hours: about keeping the yacht, about rejecting Charles, about sailing away from London. Let Tyne and Hart have the shipyard if she could have Dorian. Fanciful notions all. If Dorian was right about Tyne and Hart, her ethical conscience wouldn’t allow conceding to such blackguards.
‘Thought about what?’ She breathed in the wind-tinged scent of him, a man out of doors and in his element.
‘About keeping the yacht and racing it on your own.’
‘Oh, that.’ So not about keeping him, then. What would he say if she said she’d thought of sailing away with him?
‘You could pay the workers from prize money.’
‘That’s a big risk. What if we didn’t win?’ She had no cash reserves to pay those wages. She was worried enough about paying them in the very near future. She had no buyer. She’d have to sell off furnishings if one didn’t materialise soon.
‘We’d win, Elise. She’s a champion in the water.’ Dorian sounded confident. It made her want to believe in so many impossible things.
‘There’s a regatta right after the opening trip, with a four-hundred-pound purse and a silver cup, sponsored by the royal family. They’re calling it the Saxe-Coburg Cup in Albert’s honour.’
‘You are surprisingly well informed for someone who shuns polite society.’ Elise gave him a suspicious smile. This was the perfect opportunity to bind him to her just a little longer if she dared. ‘To do such a thing, I’d need you at the helm. Would you do it?’ They’d not finished that discussion the night of the fire and he’d been reticent. She turned in his embrace, her arms about his neck, Charles forgotten for the moment. It was hard to remember much of anything when she was with Dorian.
Dorian swallowed hard, his jaw clenching. ‘If it’s what you want, I’ll do it.’ She didn’t pretend to understand all the reasons why he was so reticent to associate with society, but she knew the decision cost him mightily.
Elise beamed and rose up on her tiptoes to kiss him full on the mouth. ‘Can we sail the yacht ourselves?’ she asked softly, her mouth inches from his.
‘We could manage.’ He gave her a teasing wink. ‘You’re not the only one who can innovate. I borrowed some mechanics from ketch rigging and adapted them to your cutter rigging to make the yacht more efficient for a small crew.’
‘I am suitably impressed. Put the crew aside at Gravesend with fare to get home and I’ll give you a proper thank you.’
Dorian grinned. ‘And Charles? Does this mean you’ve refused his offer?’
Elise nodded, more solemn now. ‘I don’t think I ever could have accepted him, not when I really thought about it.’ There was more to it than that, but for now she was interested in kissing Dorian with the wind in her hair and her decisions made. There would still be a fight ahead of her. She didn’t believe for a moment simply making decisions solved her problems. She would continue to persevere. Maybe there was a miracle out there for her where she could keep the shipyard, keep the boat and maybe, just maybe, she’d find a way to keep Dorian without needing him too much.
‘She’s a beauty.’ Damien Tyne handed off the binoculars to Maxwell Hart. ‘Just look at her.’
‘That’s my fiancée you’re talking about,’ Charles said tersely, raising his own binoculars to his eyes, his horse shifting under him on the bluff as they watched Sutton’s Hope pass in the sunrise.
‘I meant the boat, but the comment suits either way,’ Tyne teased meanly. ‘I don’t know if I’d use the binoculars if I were you. You might not like what you see. It appears Rowland shares our assessment of the latter.’ He elbowed Hart and the two of them laughed.
Charles grimaced, his anger rising as he stared through the eye piece, watching Dorian come up behind Elise and wrap her in his arms. ‘How dare he!’ Charles spluttered. No gentleman behaved so boldly with a woman.
‘How dare she?’ Tyne inserted with a sideways glance in his direction. ‘It doesn’t look to me like she’s overly upset. In fact, they look quite cosy, quite comfortable with one another as if…’
‘Don’t even say it,’ Charles ground out. He’d thought the same thing. They looked much too easy together for this to have been the first time. The way Rowland was whispering in her ear, the way she turned in his arms, laughing up at him, confirmed those jealous suspicions. Rage boiled through Charles. ‘I’d like to see him dead.’
Tyne laughed. ‘That can be arranged, my young friend. That most definitely can be arranged.’
‘Not yet,’ Hart cut in sharply in a tone that made Charles think Tyne wasn’t truly joking. ‘There’s still a chance she might accept the offer and then any nasty conclusions to our business with her can be avoided.’
‘Always the optimist, aren’t you, Maxwell?’ Tyne shook his head. Charles looked between the two. When he was with them, he always felt as if there was another game going on between them that he and the others weren’t privy to; that somehow this was about more than a simple business venture to build fast boats.
‘I can’t afford not to be. I have to live here after you leave to soak up the rays of the Mediterranean,’ Hart reminded Tyne. ‘Raising the ire of the Duke of Ashdon might not bother you, but it will make business on this end deuced difficult for the rest of us. It won’t matter if we have the yard and a fast boat once Ashdon gets done.’ That was more like it. Charles understood that sort of rationale. Hart knew what was good for business.
Tyne groused and scuffed the toe of his boot through the dirt. ‘When’s the opening trip?’
‘Five days, why?’ Hart asked.
‘Let’s give her until then. If she’s not responded to the offer affirmatively by the opening trip, I get to work my magic.’
Charles felt a shiver. He didn’t mind Tyne and Hart carving
up Rowland between them, but now they were dragging Elise in, too. ‘Now see here, Tyne, my father and I won’t stand for seeing Elise hurt.’
Tyne gave a cold smile, his gaze fixed on the boat growing smaller in the distance. ‘She’ll come out of it all right if she’s smart. So will you, Bradford.’ Tyne turned and fixed him with a stare. ‘Don’t get any ideas about betraying us at this late date. She’s not the only one who needs to play this smart.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Are we agreed then, Maxwell? Opening trip?’
Maxwell Hart gave a nearly imperceptible nod, the line of his jaw set grim and tense. ‘Opening trip it is.’
Chapter Twenty
‘I’ve put the crew off. I gave them money for fare back and a pint or two.’ Dorian came up behind Elise and wrapped her in his arms, enjoying the feel of her as she sank into his body. This was one of his favourite positions with her—his arms about her, the two of them at the rail of a boat. They had stood this way, too, the night they’d gone to Vauxhall.
‘We have the boat to ourselves,’ he murmured in her ear. She turned and put her arms about his neck, her eyes dancing with life, her cheeks flushed from the wind. She looked utterly alive in his arms. There would be seduction today. Their bodies were primed for it with the thrill of the morning sail. The privacy of the cove he had anchored them in ensured it. But he was going to have to decide very soon what to do about her. Their time together would end. After the opening trip there was nothing to hold him here except the personal. Would she ask him to stay? Would he be willing to pay the price staying demanded? Or would she come with him if he asked? Could he make her happy in Gibraltar? That was a fantasy that had taken up far too much of his nights lately—sailing away with Elise and finding the happy ever after.
‘I do not like the look in your eyes one bit.’ Elise laughed up at him, but he feared she’d seen too much. Perhaps she understood, too, that this affair could not go on indefinitely without reaching a resolution. It was time to redirect. ‘Come eat, Elise. I’ve got our picnic laid out.’
A Lady Dares Page 17
