“Perhaps not, but you have certainly chased me about in a grand manner. I am thinking that I should probably collapse in a heap and see what you would do with my exhausted body.”
“That would certainly be a change,” she said.
“Is it difficult being bound in your—my—bed, unable to chase your prey to ground?”
“Your potatoes are likely cold. Won’t Lin be disappointed? You’ve hardly done justice to her delicious meal.”
Delaney gazed briefly at the lump of mashed potatoes, then back over at her. “What would you say, my dear, if I were to collapse beside you in bed?”
Should she react coyly? Tease him? “Oh, damn,” she said aloud, “I don’t know!”
He burst into laughter, nearly upsetting the tray in front of him. “You are a delight, you know that?”
She felt his words spiral through her body, giving her a brief feeling of utter triumph, and something else that nibbled undefined at the back of her mind. She shied away. “This delight wants to know what you did with your time today. Saint told me you were a busy man. Before Miss Stevenson came, were you involved in business?”
Thrust and parry, he thought. “Actually I was,” he said, shoving aside the table and leaning back in his chair. “I’m expecting one of my ships to arrive from the Orient. It’s due anytime now.”
Shipping! How rich was he? “How many ships do you own, sir?”
“Three. My father was a shipbuilder back in Boston, as is my brother, Alex, in New York.”
“I see,” she said. “How . . . interesting.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and stretched out his legs. “Is your question simply idle conversation, or do you want to know if I’m as rich as you are?”
“I’m very rich,” she snapped. Could the wretched man read her mind? He disconcerted her, left her flapping in the breeze like a loose sail.
“And like me, you’re a nabob. One of those deplorable specimens with pretensions to good breeding and good taste.”
“I was definitely old wealth until my father died. Then everything was . . . different.”
“Tell me how you came about your wealth.”
No harm in that, she thought. Perhaps such a recital would gain his trust, his sympathy. “My godfather died in India. Some years before, his wife and son were killed in a native uprising. He made my father his heir. When my father died, he stipulated that all his money would come to me on my twenty-first birthday. He saved me, litterally. You see, I had no prospects save those of becoming a shop girl and garnishing bonnets, that or continue being a drudge in my aunt’s house in London and fending off her son, Owen. I . . . I much enjoy my freedom.”
“If that is the case, my dear, it would seem to me that the last thing you would want is a husband mucking about with your fortune.”
He was doing it again, she thought, utterly vexed. She said stiffly, “America is not England, Delaney. Everyone is free here, including women.”
“I suppose that is more true than not. You are a complex woman, Chauncey. Perhaps someday you will tell me why a very rich young Englishwoman decided to travel to this particular end of the earth.”
“Have you not sailed on one of your ships to the Orient?”
“Yes, but that is not the point, is it?”
“No, you are right of course. It isn’t the point.”
He watched her intently a moment beneath the sweep of his lashes. Her thick hair was braided and pinned atop her head, with curling wisps framing her face. Her bed gown was frothy pale yellow lace, billowing up about her white throat. Even her hands were soft, white and graceful, the fingers slender and beautifully tapered. He glanced at his own hands and winced. They still looked like laborer’s hands from the months spent in the mining camps.
He wanted her. It didn’t overly surprise him, for she was a lovely woman. He had known women more beautiful, but none of them had drawn him like she did. It was that elusiveness about her that intrigued him. Thrust and parry, he thought again. She would lead him on shamelessly, then draw back abruptly.
“Have you any pain?” he asked.
“Just a bit,” she said truthfully.
“But you refuse laudanum, right?”
“I do not like to be drugged.”