Betina Krahn (21 page)

“Lady Sophia, Miss Ashton,” Bentley said, setting his cup aside and rising, “I fear I have imposed upon your hospitality long enough. It grieves me to say that I must return to London at first light. Pressing business matters.”

A rustle of surprise stirred through the room. Cherrybottom suggested that he wait until the afternoon so that they might share a coach. Bentley declined, saying that he had calls to pay while traveling back to the city, and had already arranged with the local livery for a horse. Then he paused before Celeste’s chair and asked if she would care for a turn about the garden before retiring.

She looked up at his gentlemanly form, fair hair, and handsome features, and felt strangely disappointed to accept.

He took her elbow as he escorted her out the front doors and down the path to the garden, and he did not release her until she paused to pick some daisies. After watching for a time, he impulsively reached for her elbow and pulled her to her feet.

“My dear Celeste, do you have any idea how you have overturned my world?” He gazed with heartfelt intensity into her eyes. “Words cannot express the tumult and the joy you have brought into my life this day.”

She tensed as his hands closed over hers, crumpling some of her daisies.

“Watching you, seeing your devotion to your dolphins, witnessing your special bond with them, I realized how purposeless my life has been. I see now that my love of the sea is—has always been—my true calling, my cause, my vocation. Emboldened by the example of your courage, I dare to say that today I conceived of a collaboration between us. A partnership. A blending of talents and intellect and effort, in the service of a much greater good.” His hands moved to her shoulders and tightened. “Celeste, you dream of bringing people and the sea together. I want to help you do that.”

She was dumbstruck. “Pet—Mr. Bentley—I don’t know what to say.”

“Then let me speak of the dream I have for us,” he hurried on. “Let me paint for you a picture of the noble venture we could embark upon … educating the world, bringing our love of the sea to people everywhere. We could work side by side, researching, lecturing—”

“Please, Mr. Bentley”—she put up a hand to stop him—“go no further.” She searched for words. “I am only now getting my feet under me. I have much work yet to do here, and my grandmother to care for. I am not at all prepared to enter into such a …
collaboration.”

For a moment he seemed as if he would press his idea, but as he studied the tension and determination in her face, his hands fell away.

“Forgive my impetuousness, dearest Celeste.” He backed
a step, trampling a delicate aster. “Or better, cast it as my noblest flaw … to err by eagerness in the interest of a great and noble cause.”

“There is nothing to forgive, Mr. Bentley. I am heartened that my work helped you to make such an important decision. And I hope that my inability to accept your offer will not interfere with our friendship.”

Disappointment darkened his handsome eyes briefly, but he mastered it to give her a wistful smile.

“Then I shall count myself fortunate indeed to be your devoted friend.”

S
OME TIME LATER
, Mr. Bentley bid both Celeste and her grandmother a good night and a gracious farewell. She rubbed the spot he had kissed on her hand as she watched him climb the stairs for the final time.

She had just received her first and very likely her last offer of … what? What had she just refused? A partnership? There had been a hint of something more personal, but only a hint. If she had encouraged him, would Peter Bentley have courted her on a personal level, too?

It had been years since she thought of such things with regard to her life. Courtship, marriage—the usual womanly aspirations—seemed so foreign to her experience and so unlikely in her circumstance. But if she were to think of such things, would she ever think of them as part of a “collaboration” with P. T. Bentley?

The praise and admiration he heaped on her made her feel awkward and self-conscious. His constant agreement sometimes weighed on her nerves. No, if she were ever to take a partner—whether in research or in life—it would have to be someone who stimulated and challenged her thinking and her conclusions about her work, someone who made her heart pound and her thoughts race and her lips ting—

She looked up and found herself staring into Titus Thorne’s forbidding scowl.

•        •        •

T
HE DARKNESS WASN’T
dark enough … the bed wasn’t soft enough … the night wasn’t passing quickly enough. Celeste lay in her bed, staring at the sagging canopy overhead and watching the moon shadows lengthening slowly across it, inch by wearisome inch, thread by tedious thread.

At length, she gave up and went to the seaward window of her corner room to see if it would open a bit wider. Folding her arms, she stood in the faint breeze and leaned her head against the frame of the window.

As she stared out over the water, letting her mind drift over the momentous events of the day, her gaze caught on something down on the beach. Something—someone—was on the beach, moving toward the water. She leaned out on the windowsill, trying to make out who it was.

Taller than not, she deduced, and wearing a white shirt and trousers. She squinted and made out dark hair. That combined with a certain nuance of movement to align the tumblers of her mind and unlock recognition. It was Titus Thorne.

On the beach in the middle of the night?

Watching him moving along the shore, she thought of the water, the moonlight, and that first night on the dock. In a heartbeat she was fumbling for her sailing smock in the darkened wardrobe and feeling along the floor with her feet for her slippers. By the time she reached the stairs, she had managed to shove her arms into the sleeves and was fastening buttons.

What was he doing down there in the dead of night? Her pace quickened along the moonlit path to the edge of the cliff. The nearly full moon bathed the beach in silver light, silhouetting his form and movements. As she felt her way down the shadowed steps of the cliff, she watched him walking purposefully, with a springy tension in his step, his hands jammed into his pockets and his face turned toward the water.
As he neared the path leading to the dock, he turned abruptly and retraced his steps, still staring at the water.

Pacing, she realized. Then he halted in the middle of the beach and began to remove his shoes and stockings with jerky, impassioned movements. He threw his footgear back up onto the sand with some force, rolled up his trouser legs, and faced the water again with his hands planted at his waist.

“H
OW HARD CAN
it be?” Titus muttered to himself. “Ducks do it. Frogs, fish, and salamanders do it. All it takes is holding your breath and lying down in the damned water … flailing your arms and legs about like some overturned sea turtle.” He rolled his shoulders. “The human body is naturally buoyant in salt water … it’s not possible to sink. For long, anyway.”

Taking a deep breath, he strode out into the water until it reached midcalf, where he froze. For a long moment, he stood there, his fists clenched, feeling his determination eroding the same way the sand was washing away beneath his feet. He shuddered through another bout of self-loathing, then turned and stalked back up onto the beach. He stood there, staring at the water with his chest heaving.

The frustration that had been building in him since late that morning finally erupted in an anguished groan. It was out there, somewhere. A real, living dolphin. He had seen it, been given a chance to touch it. And he had been dying to touch it … to look into its eyes, to feel it move, to listen to its forceful breathing.

Dandified Bentley had bounded out there without a second thought, and Cherrybottom—who couldn’t even reach the ties of his own shoes—had gone barreling into the water, footgear and all, to experience the thing. But
he
—the upholder of science and logic and objectivity, the quintessential “rational man”—had stood on the shore, alone, with his heart in his throat.

The water. That damnable water. It had plagued him his
entire life, robbed him of chances too numerous to mention. Tonight, the sound of it lapping against the shore had drifted into his room and robbed him of sleep as well. He was supposed to get into the water tomorrow with Celeste and her dolphin, and the thought of walking out into that water made him break out in a cold sweat.

During that interminable evening, he had nursed the hope that perhaps, since his seasickness seemed to have miraculously abated, he might be able to—

“Well, well, Professor.” Her voice startled him and he jumped visibly. “What brings you down here in the dead of night?”

He whirled and found Celeste standing behind him with her arms crossed and her chin raised. She was wearing her seagoing smock and her light hair hung loose about her shoulders.

“I … wasn’t sleeping.” He matched her determined stance, hoping that his inner turmoil didn’t show in his face. “So, I decided this might be as good a time as any to test your observations … of … about … dolphins not sleeping.” He raised his chin higher to look down his nose at her. “I have to begin somewhere.”

“Indeed you do.” Her smile contained a satisfaction that escalated his anxiety. When she began to unfasten the buttons of her long smock, he felt the first, tiny trickle of panic.

“Just what in blazes do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

“I can’t sleep either, so I may as well help you.” She paused with her smock gaping open, the hem raised so that she could reach the lower buttons. He looked up from the provocative slice of white cotton widening down her front and found his gaze caught on a torrent of soft, wavy hair that glowed golden in the moonlight.

“Any excuse to throw off your clothing, eh, Miss Ashton?” He turned his head as her smock fell completely open and she shrugged it from her shoulders. “What is it … some bizarre taint in the Ashton blood that makes you and
your grandmother incapable of enduring normal female garb?” When she didn’t answer, he continued with a sharper edge. “You do realize that this is the third time you’ve stripped to your ‘mustn’t-mention-’ems’ in my presence?”

She halted halfway to the water and leveled a narrow look on him.

“You’re keeping count?”

He felt heat creeping up his neck. “Collecting data.”

“On what?” she asked, shifting her weight subtly so that the curve of one hip was now exaggerated.

Damn good question, he told himself.

“Mermaid behavior” was all he could come up with. “Up-and-coming field, mythological females. Considerable interest in it of late. The big disadvantage, of course, is that good specimens are so dashed hard to come by.”

“‘Good specimens.’” She pondered that with narrowed then headed for the water. “You’re swimming in that?”

“Who said I was going to swim?” He stiffened.

“Well, it’s the only way you’ll learn what dolphins do at night.”

“Actually,” he said, thinking fast, glancing toward the dark outline of the boathouse, “I was thinking of taking the boat.”

“The boat?” She laughed. “I thought it was against your principles to set foot in a boat in the dead of night.” When he didn’t move, frantically trying to think of a way to avoid the water, she added: “Don’t worry about your clothes. Take them off and swim in your ‘mustn’t-mention-’ems.’ ”

He stood frozen, feeling his mouth going cottony and that same icy dread stealing up his limbs. “It wouldn’t be proper, Miss Ashton. Both of us, unclad … in the same—”

“Ocean?”
she said, sinking down onto her knees so that only her head was above the water. “You must have been fed nothing but prunes and proverbs, when you were a boy, Titus Thorne. You are, without a doubt, the primmest, most prudish man I have ever encountered.”

“An unimpressive distinction,” he muttered, “considering my competition is a half-wit blacksmith, a pair of senile fishermen, a Napoleonic war relic, and a devil-dodger who thinks dolphins keep secrets from him.”

“Get into the water, Professor,” she ordered, smiling.

“On the other hand, there is something to be said for waiting until daylight. Wouldn’t want to go surprising the creature in the dead of night. Dolphins do have
teeth.”

“But dolphins don’t
bite
.” She began working her way toward him as he stood on the beach.

“How do you know? Just because they’ve never bitten you doesn’t mean that they might not bite someone else. Someone new. Someone with … bigger flippers.”

“Dolphins aren’t jealous of the size of each other’s flippers.” She halted not far from him, bracing in the sand to keep from being washed up by the waves. “Are you coming in, or am I coming out to get you?”

WHEN TITUS HESITATED
, she did come up out of the water to get him. He stumbled back a step, scrambling wildly for an excuse—any excuse.

“R-really, Miss Ashton.”

“Really, Professor.” She planted herself before him in the sand with her arms crossed strategically over her breasts. She nodded to his garments. “You’d better take those off. You will need dry clothes when you come out of the water.”