Susan stopped dead.Tworich, landed heiresses. Both with common money-grubbing fiancés. And both came down with an acute case of deaf-mute-itis the very night the contracts were signed and the ceremony performed. This wasn’t a case of happenstance. This was the next thing to murder.
Her mouth fell open. That was it.Poison. The only thing the present mistress had “caught” was a husband with access to the same substance her father had used to incapacitate her mother.
Had Jean-Louis Beaune been behind both unfortunate “illnesses”? Or when he’d passed on, had he also passed the family secret on to the new master of the house? Definitely possible. The giant was more than capable of drugging his helpless wife.
“Don’t you think there are awfully suspicious similarities between her case and that of her mother?” she asked Mr. Bothwick.
“I don’t know.” His boots began to splash. “I wasn’t here when Lady Beaune disappeared.” He rounded the little rowboat and began pushing it into the water. “My brother and I moved here four years ago. We didn’t know therewasa Lady Beaune until there wasn’t anymore. And after that, nobody talked about it.
“You weren’t born here?” Susan asked in surprise.
Mr. Bothwick shook his head. “Can’t imagine such a fate. I was always more for city life, until I fell in love with the sea. Still own property back home, though.”
She stepped forward and her shoes squished into wet sand. “Out of nostalgia? Or do you visit often?”
“Out of apathy. I’ve no plans to return.” He swung a buckskin-clad leg into the boat and gripped the thin wooden planks with one hand when a sudden surge of water almost unbalanced him. He reached out a hand. “Come. Get in.”
Susan stared at him, then at the raging sea, with its waves crashing so high and so fast she wouldn’t have risked being aboard a town-sized cargo ship. Then she looked back at Mr. Bothwick. One of his boots sank into knee-high water. The other pistoned alarmingly in the eminently unstable rowboat. He held out an upturned palm and motioned her forward, impatient.
“Are youbammingme?” she burst out, backing up several quick steps.
“Your choices are few, Miss Stanton.” Despite the ice-cold sea lapping at his knees, his open hand didn’t waver. “You can return to town and take your chances there—or you can come aboard with me.”
“In other words,” she said with a gulp, “certain death either way.”
He inclined his head in apparent agreement.
She placed her palm in his.
Chapter 27
He hadn’t thought she was going to do it.
Even when Miss Stanton’s gloved fingertips brushed his ungloved palm, he was sure reason would intercede and she’d run screaming down the beach.
But then they locked hands, palms-to-wrists, and he pulled her inside the boat. She sat in the center of the wooden cross-plank, feet tucked beneath her, hands twisting in her lap. Terrified. But determined.
Evan fell for her a little more.
The waves were calmer today. To someone unused to the sea, he supposed they would still be unnerving, but when were the waters ever truly motionless? Never. That’s why he liked it.
He rowed them away from shore. The ocean sighed, stilled, stretched out around them in a deep blue forever. The sun glittered in the ripples made by his oars. He let them rest, allowing the boat to float freely. Silence, except for the waves slapping against the side of the rocking boat and the occasional call of a bird.
He loved this. Loved the sun, warming his face and his neck and his hands. Loved the bite to the breeze, ruffling his hair and unknotting his cravat. Loved the salt-fresh scent of the sea, the little fish darting beneath its surface. Loved feelingalive.And Miss Stanton—
Seemed to have forgotten her terror entirely.
She wasn’t walking a tightrope above her seat, mind you, but shewasgripping the side of the boat instead of ripping her skirt to shreds, and staring out at the sea in openmouthed wonder.
“Don’t lean too far,” he couldn’t help but tease. “You might tumble over.”
She whipped her head around to face him, eyes overlarge, then smiled despite herself when she saw that he was baiting her. He smiled back. She stuck her tongue out, laughed at his surprise, then returned her gaze to the endless horizon, as if they were but two carefree lovers set adrift for the day with nothing more on their minds than the promise of romance amidst the beauty of the sea.
If only that were true.
Content for a moment to just pretend, he watched her gasp in delight at the tiny fish she’d just discovered a hand’s reach from the surface. She stripped off her gloves and braved the icy coldness to try to touch one. They kept swimming, just out of reach.
“First time in the water?”
