Cloudy with a Chance of Marriage

Stephen watched the two of them walk ahead of him toward the stairs. But Otis’s shoe, adorned with gaudy rubies and pearls no doubt made of paste, had lost a heel, a fact its owner hadn’t noticed until now. He was so busy looking for it, he knocked over a small table, whereupon a tumbler of punch fell and hit him on the head.

Miss Jones screamed when her friend sank in a heap to the floor.

Stephen immediately went to him, checking Otis’s head and bending over to listen to his breathing and his heart. He stood and grinned at Miss Jones to reassure her. “Don’t worry. He didn’t feel a thing, and I think he’s snoring, actually, so he can’t be too bad off. I’ll get Pratt to escort him home later. You need to go home now.”

“Are you sure he’ll be safe for the nonce?” Miss Jones surprised him when she took Stephen’s much larger hands between her own and squeezed. “He’s my very special friend, Captain. Nothing can happen to him.”

Stephen—master flirt, commander of warships—was touched by her simple devotion to her eccentric companion. “He’ll be fine. I promise.”

“All right, then,” she said brightly, and dropped his hands. “We can go.”

Out on the street, he couldn’t remember the last time a female had looked at him so—with utter trust. Women often looked at him with nary a bit of inhibition, as she was doing now, as well. It stirred his blood. But the trust part disconcerted him. It made him feel noble, especially as she still had flowers in her hair and looked in need of saving.

“It was a fine party.” She yawned, and her bodice almost burst open with the effort, exposing the tops of her breasts. “What a shame it’s over.”

He thought back on the past week. He’d seen the way she’d peeked through her shop window to observe the boisterous goings-on taking place at his house. No one looked that often without wishing they were somehow involved in the merriment themselves.

“Tomorrow is always another day for a party,” Stephen said, suddenly encouraged—encouraged in a heated way—by her bodice and by her unusual complacency. He was a man, after all, a man who’d recently been on a long voyage with no women to charm him.

They stopped outside her door.

She looked up at him, and he was tempted—tempted even though if he were being sensible, he knew she was all wrong for him.

All wrong.

But the primal part of him reminded him she wasn’t all wrong, was she? He saw her lips, plump and pink and half parted. Why shouldn’t he kiss them?

Encouraged even further by her utter stillness—so unusual for an unmanageable miss—he leaned in an inch —

And she stepped back an entire foot. Definitely out of kissing range. Even out of hugging range.

Miss Jones opened her door, pulled it almost shut behind her, and peeked out. “I enjoyed the evening!” she said airily, and gave him a brilliant smile.

He had that same utterly lost feeling he’d had the first time he’d let a line accidentally slip through a cleat, leaving a sail flapping uselessly in the wind and out of his reach.

“I’m, ah, glad you enjoyed the punch,” he said. “It’s a special recipe from the islands.”

“Oh.” That grin again. “It was delicious. But the fumes made my nose prickle, so I poured some into the dead potted palm near the stage after the performance.”

“You mean when you were dancing and dropping bags of water…?”

She nodded. “I was simply having fun. I think. I’m not quite sure. I’ve never had punch before. I feel—”

“Yes?” She had a certain longing look in her eyes that made him want to rip the door open and kiss her.

“I feel—” She hesitated and bit her lower lip. “I feel like…”

Dammit all, she felt as if she wanted to kiss him. He could tell.

She lifted her chin and suddenly looked noble and passionate, like Joan of Arc. “I feel like reading,” she said.

Reading?

She nodded avidly. “Oh, yes. I do it every night before I go to bed.”

Bed. She shouldn’t have said that. He imagined her in a high-necked cotton night rail with a long row of buttons.

She let out a pleased sigh. “Yes, every night I read.”

Of course, on the ship, he read every night, too. But he’d much rather read the curves and sighs of a warm, willing woman, any day.

“I’m reading mythology this week,” she went on. “I adore Hermes.”

“The messenger god?” Stephen was doing his best to turn away from thoughts of undoing her buttons one by one.

“Yes.” She grinned. “The book I’m reading now has impressive illustrations of him. In one picture, he’s standing with his fists on his hips and one knee bent, and he’s laughing. It’s as if he’s looking straight at me.”

Stephen saw her eyes turn dreamy, and it wasn’t about him. It was about that damned Hermes.

“I suppose you’re not in your cups, then, if you can read about the gods tonight.” He scratched his head, most disappointed.

“Me?” Her nose wrinkled. “In my cups? Whyever would I be?”

Stephen felt extremely guilty of a sudden. “No reason.”

“I’m beginning to think you had a secret plan,” she said stoutly. “I should have stayed more on guard this evening.”

“I’m a wolf, am I?”

She closed the door a fraction of an inch. “We both know what you’re after, Captain.”

He moved forward and said into the crack, “Come back out here, Miss Jones, and tell me what that is.”

“No,” she replied in confident tones. “You already know.”

He sighed. “Can’t you be complacent again? As you were just a minute ago when you were yawning?”

“Complacent?” Her pitch rose a notch.

“Yes, dammit all. Complacent.” He felt like knocking his head against the shop’s stone wall.

“I knew it!” she cried. “You were trying to ply me with punch, so I’d stop complaining about the noise from your house. Either that, or so I’d become another one of your fancy women.”

“Miss Jones.” She’d guessed correctly, of course.

“Don’t ‘Miss Jones’ me.” She huffed. “You’re a sore loser. You could at least admit I’m right.”

“Very well.” He blew out a breath of frustration. “You’re a shrewd woman. Impossible to fool.”

“And you’re an intelligent man to recognize that fact.”

All evening he’d been thinking about the moment their fingers had met around that glass of punch. She was ripe for a man’s touch, and he was heady with longing to be that man.

“Now let’s go back to how you looked when we were navigating the corner,” he said in a husky whisper. “Happy. Sporting. Kissable.”

There was a beat of silence, but it was cut short by her predictable bluestocking gasp. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she hissed through the crack. “I told you I’ve no need to be sporting for you or anyone else. Nor shall I kiss you. Ever.”

The crack in the door became even smaller, but he noticed she didn’t shut it completely.

He leaned on the jamb and saw her eye, unblinking but narrowed. “It would be so much easier for both of us if you’d fall in line.”

That same eye grew wide and offended.

“Not in a million years,” she declared. “How can I sell books when you persist in tomfoolery? I enjoyed being Queen of the Coconut Girls and dropping those bags of water very much. But I’m wise enough to know there’s a time and a place for making merry, and doing so every night and day on a street where many other people live and work is not the time nor the place.” She paused a beat. “Good night, Captain. Please send Otis back when he’s feeling better, with both his shoes and his missing heel.”

She shut the door in his face.