Almost a Lady Read Online Free PDF Page B

am truly not responsible for your presence on my ship.”
    “Then who is, pray?”
    He seemed to consider this for a minute, before saying, “Well, as I see it, you are. You’re the one who slipped beneath the wheels of my carriage, putting your life in considerable danger as I understand. My men actually saved your life.”
    Meg snapped her book closed and stood up, dropping the volume to the bench. “That is the most disingenuous piece of spurious reasoning I’ve ever heard, Captain Cosimo.”
    He threw up his hands in a laughing gesture of defeat. “Pax, Miss Barratt,” he said. “This is getting us nowhere. Now tell me what I may do for you to ease matters a little between us.”
    What a damnably attractive man he was, Meg reflected, angry at the irrelevancy of the reflection but unable to deny it. He had a loose-limbed grace that she’d noticed when he’d climbed aboard the
Mary Rose
in the harbor, and those sea-washed blue eyes were glinting much like the sun-dappled blue water beneath her window. She liked his mouth too. It was wide and full when he smiled, but without the smile it held a calm resolution, an unmistakable authority, that was curiously reassuring. But she wasn’t ready to lower her guard simply because her admittedly unwitting captor could probably charm the hind legs off a donkey if he put his mind to it.
    “I need just two things from you at this point, Captain Cosimo—”
    He held up an arresting hand. “Oh, please, Meg, my name is simply Cosimo. Since we’re sharing this cabin we can surely do without the formalities.” He frowned suddenly, but she could tell it was an act. “You don’t object to my calling you Meg, I trust.”
    “Would it matter if I did?” Challenge flickered in her eyes and her cleft chin lifted with her arched sandy eyebrows. She didn’t like the sound of sharing a cabin.
    “Probably not,” he agreed amiably. “Now, what are the two things I can do for you?”
    Meg folded her arms. “Firstly I would like to know where we’re sailing to so I can decide how to get home from there.”
    “Ah.” Cosimo stroked his chin as he frowned in thought. “Well, at this moment we aren’t sailing anywhere. You may have noticed that we’re becalmed.”
    “I doubt the wind will remain uncooperative permanently,” Meg declared with an icy glint in her eyes and a very dangerous edge to her voice.
    “So far in my experience that has never happened,” he agreed. “So, when the wind
does
pick up, we will continue our voyage to the island of Sark. Are you perhaps familiar with it?”
    “It’s one of the Channel Islands,” Meg responded, some of the anger leaving her eyes and voice. Sark was not so very far from the English coast, and it was a mere spit across the Channel to the French coast. Of course, France would not exactly welcome an English wayfarer at the moment, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to arrange passage back to England from the island.
    “Precisely,” he said with a nod. “I have some business to do there.”
    “And presumably you have contacts among the fishermen . . . the locals . . . someone who could take me back?”
    “It’s not impossible,” he said.
    Meg’s anger resurfaced. “Do you have to be so damnably evasive?” she snapped.
    “Forgive me . . . was I being? I merely spoke the truth. It’s not impossible.” His mouth curved in a half smile. “So much for your first requirement . . . and the second . . . ?”
    “I need a key to this door,” she stated flatly, arms still firmly folded.
    He shook his head briskly. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
    “What do you mean it’s not possible?” She took a step towards him. “There’s a keyhole, there must be a key.”
    “Yes, I imagine there is somewhere. I’ve never had a need of it.”
    “Well, I, sir, do have.” She held his steady gaze with all the considerable resolution she could muster. “I need my privacy.”
    “Yes, of course, I understand that,” he