He didn’t want to sail in this old hulk today or any other day. But it was too late to draw back now.
‘Indeed,’ replied Rawcliffe tersely. ‘Or I would not have paid you such an outrageous sum of money.’
‘T’wouldn’t have been worth the risk, for any less,’ said the captain.
‘What risk?’ Clare grabbed hold of his sleeve. ‘Is the boat not safe? Is it the currents that Jeavons was telling us about?’
No, the captain was not afraid of the currents and the craft itself was seaworthy. It was ‘The Gentlemen’ the captain feared, in spite of saying he didn’t care what happened to his family.
Not that he was going to share any of that information with Clare. It would be better if she saw how Clement was living with her own eyes and made her own decisions about him. If he gave her any warning at all about his suspicions that he’d become embroiled with ‘The Gentlemen’, the chances were she’d think he was trying to poison her mind against her brother and she’d go into the meeting bearing him a grudge. Which Clement would then pounce upon, and work on, until he’d managed to turn her against him, somehow.
His stomach clenched.
‘You have no need to be nervous,’ he said as he ushered her down to sit on the cushioned bench. ‘The captain is just trying to add a little touch of…the exotic to this trip, that is all. A little excitement.’
‘Just being in a boat is excitement enough for me,’ she said, looking about her keenly as the captain, and the lad who acted as his only crew, began looping ropes and hauling sails, and shouting completely indecipherable remarks at each other.
‘Oooh,’ she cried, as the boat dipped, and lurched under the auspices of a particularly playful gust of wind. She clung to his arm, her eyes wide as she watched the shore recede. She flinched when the sails made a loud cracking noise as the wind filled them completely and bore them out to the deeper waves of the Channel.
‘Oooh,’ she cried again, as the ketch plunged down the side of one wave, then soared up the crest of the next.
‘It’s…it’s…’ Her hand went up to the brim of her bonnet, which was making an attempt to escape from her head, dislodging a handful of hairpins in the process. ‘I imagine this must be what it feels like to fly.’
‘The sea is a touch rough,’ he said as the ketch plunged through the crest of a wave, showering them both with salt spray, ‘for you to be making your first trip.’
‘I don’t care,’ she said, turning to beam at him. ‘It’s the most exhilarating experience I have ever had. Although—’ her smile dimmed ‘—I must say, you don’t look as though you are enjoying yourself. Are you not,’ she said, searching his face with concern, ‘a good sailor?’
How like Clare, to show concern for him when he was on the point of betraying her. Just like the way she’d tried to console him when he’d heard about Archie’s death, even though he’d been in the process of exacting some petty revenge upon her.
His stomach, which had been so tense from the moment they’d awoken that he’d been unable to do justice to his breakfast, was now positively roiling.
‘Look at the horizon,’ said Clare, gesticulating out to sea. ‘I believe that is supposed to help.’
It wouldn’t. The thing that was making him sick to his stomach was the thought of losing her regard. The dread that after Clement had worked on her, she’d never look at him like this again. Never cling to his arm this way, let alone hug him in the street. He’d lose it all. And without her warmth, he’d go back to living in the cold isolation that had been his habitat since the day she’d spurned his first proposal of marriage.
Unless he explained…
Explained what? Even his two best friends had assumed he was so calculating that he’d marry his enemy’s sister just to get close enough to him to find the proof they needed to bring him to justice.
Besides, he’d left it too late. If he’d only told her the truth in the first place, she might have listened. But now, if he told her that getting even with Clement hadn’t even occurred to him when he’d pushed her into marriage, that it was only an additional benefit…