LITMIR.BIZ

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happen to you soon, if you don’t go inside before the storm makes land.”

      “I know, but I want to stay here a while longer. I like the feel of the wind before the rain. And the sea smells so…wild.”

      “Then I’ll sit with you a moment, if you don’t mind. All that awaits me inside are more lists to be checked, and rechecked, to be sure we haven’t forgotten anything.” He sat down beside her, folding the edges of his dark brown woolen cloak over his knees, and Cassandra looked at him, sitting so close beside her, yet with his gaze heading out to sea, his thoughts probably there, as well.

      Jack Eastwood was handsome. Her papa and her brothers Chance and Spencer were handsome; Rian could actually be called pretty, even with his left arm mostly gone.

      But Courtland was different.

      He wasn’t as tall as the others, his build more solid. He wore his light brown, loosely waving hair long, almost to his shoulders, and he’d taken to covering the bottom half of his face with a neatly trimmed beard and mustache. To annoy her, or at least that’s what he said.

      Spence called him a plodder, Chance laughed and said Courtland did things slowly because he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. Rian teased that Courtland had been born an old man, with no adventure in him.

      And her papa said he could think of no one he would trust more to keep a cool head in a crisis.

      Cassandra supposed Courtland was all of those things. Solid. Solemn. Careful. Dependable.

      Did no one else notice the sparkle in his blue eyes? Did no one else see the passion in the man, tightly held in check at all times, and yet begging to be set free, to soar?

      She remembered how it was to be held safe in his arms. Her protector, her knight in shining armor.

      Besides, he was adorable.

      “I hate the way it feels, being here, constantly on guard, waiting for the second shoe to drop,” Cassandra told him, to break the silence. “This is my home, Court. Why does it feel like an armed camp?”

      He pulled his gaze away from the horizon and smiled at her, and her heart did that familiar small flip in her breast. “We’ve always been an armed camp, Cassandra. We’ve just never been so obvious about it before, that’s all. Are you afraid?”

      She shook her head. “Not as long as you’re here, no. You’d never let anything bad happen to me.”

      His smile faded. “Cassandra, you sound like some vacant-headed miss in a fairy tale. We all protect each other, that’s our way. But I need you to be afraid, just a little bit. I need you to depend on yourself, in case I’m not here.”

      She placed a hand on his forearm. “But where would you be, if not here? Are you going to London? I know Chance is going there again, Julia told me, to search for Beales, but you won’t go, will you?”

      He shook his head. “No, I’ll stay here. But there are times when I’m assigned to the ships, and if an attack were to come while I’m at sea on the Respite, I need to know that you will obey Ainsley, do exactly what is expected of you, even if that means boarding the frigate and heading to America. No hesitation, Cassandra, no arguing. I need to know that.”

      Cassandra pushed her tongue forward, to moisten her suddenly dry lips. “But you’d come for me in America. Just as soon as you could?”

      He looked away from her. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea. Once this is over, once Beales is out of our lives, I might decide to travel the Continent for a while, or possibly look for an estate of my own. I’ve been reading quite a bit about farming. A useless enterprise here on the Marsh, but there are some interesting things being done in crop rotation elsewhere in Kent.”

      “Is that so?” Cassandra said, then bit her lip.

      “I know, I’m boring you to flinders, aren’t I? Which means I don’t suppose you’d like to hear about an American inventor I’ve read about for some time now. There’s talk of a submersible boat he might consider testing somewhere here in England, and— Cassandra, stop looking at me like that.”

      “How am I looking at you, Court?” she asked him blinking furiously, as tears were daring to sting at the backs of her eyes. “Am I perhaps looking at you like a woman who realizes that the man she loves would rather sink to the bottom of the sea in a submersible boat than be with her?”

      “Cassandra, please don’t say things you can’t possibly mean, not—what in bloody blazes did you do to your hair!”

      She’d been so angry with him that she hadn’t realized that her hood had fallen back in her agitation, and she quickly raised her hands to her head, attempting to hide the surprise she’d planned to spring on him at the dinner table, when there’d be others there to deflect his anger. “Nothing. I did nothing to my hair.”

      “You cut it,” he said accusingly as she tried, without success, to pull the hood back over her hair. “How could you have—why did you do that?”

      “We didn’t cut it, Court. For pity’s sake, all we did was put it up, see?” She turned her back to him and began pulling out pins, letting them fall to the ground as she pulled and tugged at her annoying curls until they tangled around her fingers, tumbled down past her shoulders, all her childish ringlets blowing crazily in the breeze from the Channel.

      “Thank God,” he said, reaching out to touch a thick ringlet that had fallen directly between her eyes.

      “Yes, yes, thank God,” Cassandra said, pushing the lock of hair behind her ear, not that it did much good, for her hair was so fine, even though she had masses of it, that it just fell into her face once more, it and several others. “You say that because you don’t have to brush it, Court. There are days I wish I could be sheared, like one of the sheep. I hate my hair. I loathe it. It…it makes me look like a baby.”

      He looked at her for a long moment, and then shook his head. “Someday you’ll change your mind about that, Cassandra. Probably the first day you step into Society and the gentlemen trip over themselves, rushing to your side.”

      “I don’t want gentlemen tripping over themselves, Court. Why do people think I should want that? Morgan says she’ll give me a Season, and then amuse herself by turning away the undeserving, vetting all those who propose marriage to me, and even have Ethan place bets at his club as to who first will compose an ode to my stupid, upturned nose.”

      Courtland smiled. “Your nose isn’t stupid, Cassandra. It’s delightful, and fits your face very nicely. Although I believe I’d rather Julia introduces you to Society. Morgan would probably help you fall into scrapes every second day.”

      “It doesn’t matter, because I’m not going into Society, joining a gaggle of simpering little girls on the lookout for an advantageous marriage. Papa will go to America, I’m daily more certain of that, and I will have no choice but to go with him, the unmarried daughter, the spinster. And all because you, Courtland Becket, are the biggest fool in nature.”

      “Because you love me,” he said, pulling the hood up over her hair, tucking her curls away from her face. “Cassandra, you have no idea what that word even means. You’re too young.”

      It was an old argument, and she had no new answers.

      “My mama knew she loved Papa when she was no older than I am now. A year from now, she was a mother. I’m not a child anymore, Court, except to you.”

      “You’re a child as long as you act like a child, Cassandra,” he told her, putting his hands on his thighs, as if preparing to stand, walk away from her.

      But not this time. This time she wouldn’t let him dismiss her so easily. As Morgan had told her just the other night, it was time she took the initiative.

      “Is this the action of a child?” she asked, grabbing on to the edges of his cloak and pulling herself toward him.

      Before

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