Cloudy with a Chance of Marriage

“Over my dead body,” she said, even though she adored theatrical evenings. “Let’s get back to the point that forces me to venture over here—you’re disturbing the peace, sirrah.”

“Hardly. We’ve had no one running naked down the street in the last two days.”

“Fancy that!”

“And not a single one of my guests has sung a word of any song outside.”

She put a finger to her mouth, pretending to consider his words, then dropped her hand. “You know, you’re right. They only sing in the house now—with the windows wide open. And sometimes”—she drew in a breath and said low—“the singer is wearing only a tricorne hat.”

“That’s Lumley again,” he said as if he were talking of the weather.

Speaking of which, didn’t this unrelentingly cheerful man notice they had bad weather here on Dreare Street? All the time?

Jilly’s heart was pounding so hard, she needed support. So she leaned forward and put her hands on either side of the door jamb. Captain Arrow leaned back a fraction of an inch.

“If I”—she whispered—“have to come over”—she pulled back to take a breath —“one more time—”

“Yes?” He leaned forward again. “What will you do?”

She closed her eyes a brief moment, then opened them and stared at him. “I’ll go mad.” It was as simple as that. “I’ll go stark, raving mad.”

Before he could answer her, she turned around and marched back to her store, directly through a plump cloud of fog that refused to be dispersed by the weak morning sun overhead.

* * *

Miss Jilly Jones.

Already Stephen adored her. He always did the outliers. Perhaps because he was one himself. Of course, his new neighbor was doing her best to be true to type. She excelled at appearing bookish. Prim. A bluestocking with no sense of humor. A woman to be avoided at all costs.

But no other prim miss he’d ever met had grasped door jambs and leaned into his face as if she’d like to bite his head off. He was a sea captain used to giving orders, not taking them, by God. This cheeky Miss Jones showing up flinging commands about was something new. Truth be told, he’d never met a woman as unmanageable, which made him admire her a great deal. It also made his blood hot for her. She was a challenge, that one. And Stephen never turned aside from a challenge.

Hadn’t he risen to the challenge of being named an Impossible Bachelor not long ago with his three best friends, Harry, Nicholas, and Charlie? And he’d come out of Prinny’s ridiculous albeit amusing wager unscathed, unmarried, and as unrepentant a bachelor as he’d ever been.

When Miss Jones left his front step, he instantly determined that he wanted to have a scorching flirtation with her. Other than sell his house, what else did he have to do?

He had a strict rule that he didn’t seduce virgins, so bedding her was out of the question. But imagine what creative machinations he’d have to go through just to steal a few kisses! Grabbing a delicious tendril of her hair and wrapping it around his finger would be practically out of the question unless he were good … very good. And if he could slip a hand up her gown at least to her knee, then his short stay on Dreare Street would go from being mildly entertaining to memorable.

This was one war he’d have to be very cunning to win.

He was crestfallen when she entered the bookstore and pulled the door shut without looking back out to see if he were still there. It was a good move. Pretend indifference to the enemy—shake their confidence. His own strategies would have to be put in place, he realized. Miss Jones was too substantial, obviously, to fall for his good looks alone, a fact which delighted him. Infatuated young ladies bored him.

He wanted a real dalliance. A real one, of course, engaged his mind.

And Stephen had a brilliant mind. He chose not to emphasize that point when he was out of uniform. It was something to do with his need to relax, to disengage, to not be the leader always. As captain of a ship in the Royal Navy, he’d always been at the center of things, interconnected by necessity to every man on board. It was an exciting but exhausting way to live.

Perhaps he was addicted to lack of sleep, loud noises, near-death experiences, and chasing enemies. Settling down in a quiet, peacetime navy held no appeal for him, which was why he was leaving it, despite the Admiralty’s hope that he’d take command of a man-of-war.

Neither was he tempted to resign himself to a subdued gentleman’s existence on land, complete with a demure wife, several adorable children, and a second career in banking or international trade.

Give him lots of money—more than his pension was worth—so he could live beholden to no one. Give him noise and bluster. Boxing and horse racing. Bawdy girls and boisterous men.

His own sailing vessel.

A pied-à-terre in Paris.

Give him something out of the ordinary.

Give him Jilly Jones.

CHAPTER TWO

In the late afternoon of the day of her useless conversation with Captain Arrow, Jilly heard a loud popping noise from his house. She looked up from smoothing a page in her nearly blank accounting book and saw a young man at a second-floor window drop a bag of water onto the pavement.

“Bull’s-eye!” the fellow cried.

A roar of approval went up from the group of well-dressed gentlemen gathered on the street.

Jilly sighed. For goodness’ sake, when would a constable ever arrive and throttle the lot of them?

“I often wonder,” she heard her clerk, Otis, remark to their lone customer of the afternoon, a small, elderly woman perusing a copy of Pride and Prejudice, “if Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth had a few secret trysts before they made their nuptial vows.” He chuckled and looked into space. “Who could have resisted Darcy?”

“Well,” the elderly woman speculated, one hand to her lips, the other balancing the book, “I’m not sure —”

“If,” Otis interrupted her in dramatic tones, which made her nearly drop the book, “if Darcy were too much a gentleman to propose an illicit liaison, then don’t you think Elizabeth must have been driven so mad by desire that she seduced him instead?”

The old woman stared at him.

“It’s quite a titillating thought.” Otis took the book out of her trembling hands and placed it back on the shelf. “It’s our only copy,” he confided to her in an earnest whisper. “Let me show you something else.”

Dear God. Jilly watched her assistant sway gently down the aisle toward her meager collection of atlases, crooking a finger at the tiny woman to follow him. The shop would be bankrupt within a month if the mayhem persisted at Captain Arrow’s house and if Otis didn’t learn to sell books.

Her father’s ex-valet didn’t seem able to part with any of them, except for the atlases, but what was Jilly to do? She couldn’t cast him out in the cold, for heaven’s sake. He’d been devoted to her father and, after his death, her only trusted friend.

“You dress very well for an older man,” she heard the little lady rasp, “but you’re quite mad. Almost as mad as those people who live next door.”

A few seconds later, the bell at the front door tinkled, and the door shut with a loud bang.

“And you have a lovely day, too!” Otis flung after their lost customer with all the sarcasm a frustrated, impoverished bookseller could muster. “That atlas was just the thing for you, if you’d only listened to reason. And how dare you call me an ‘older man’? I’m not a day over thirty.”

“Otis,” Jilly called in a warning voice.

He’d been thirty for as long as she could remember. He twisted around to face her, his large feet crossed in outrageous saffron-colored shoes, his tailcoat swinging madly.