She started, then laughed. “I beg your pardon? I feel certain you know perfectly well that is not the sort of thing you can say to a lady.”
He shrugged because she didn’t look offended, and he knew she wouldn’t be. “You’ve fooled everyone else, haven’t you?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean?”
He leaned close, closer than was allowed by propriety and all the damned rules. “Meg Swift, with the polite, gentle manners, all pretty flowers and patience.” His mouth was so near to her ear that he had to fight not to nip her lobe between his teeth and tug. For now, he’d wait. Torture them both. Just a little. Her breath caught and he smiled. “They only see your shining hair, they think your silences are filled with acquiescence. But I know you, Meg. You don’t want pearls and sonnets, you want shipwrecks. And they are fools if they don’t see the power in you.”
He pulled back and offered his arm. “Shall we?”
She was briefly disoriented. “Um.” She had to clear her throat and he’d never been happier. She felt something, reacted to him, just as he reacted to her.
“Perhaps they have strawberry ices in the village,” he said. “We will eat them all.”
Eventually.
But first, George appeared to be taking off his shoes.
Again.
At least it wasn’t his trousers this time.
Charlie and Colin stopped, turning to see what had held them up. He saw the moment Charlie saw Meg watching George. She started forward, hand clasped to her hated bonnet, brow stormy. As usual. She’d never been so moody in their awful cramped flat, not even when they were hungry as nine bears. But she needn’t have worried. Dougal could have told her that. Meg was unfailingly kind, and she saw more than people gave her credit for. She wasn’t the type to fret and fuss because an old man had taken off his socks.
In fact, she joined him.
When she kicked off her own boots, Dougal smiled. When she unrolled her stockings and left them in a heap in the sand, her ankles bare, her toes wiggling, he groaned. Then she knotted her skirts up at her knee and all he could think of was licking a line from her ankle to her knee, into the warmth of her thighs. All because of a moment at the beach.
Undone by a bare foot.
Hardly ducal.
As the sun broke through fitful clouds, Meg waded into the cold sea beside George, laughing and gasping.
“You’re a brave girl,” George approved. “The others won’t touch the sea.”
“It’s…refreshing.” Her teeth threatened to chatter but she didn’t look bothered by it.
“Because Dougal used to tell us stories about the kraken growing up,” Colin shouted lazily. “How it would pull us under and eat our bones in a seaweed stew.”
“I was trying to keep them out of the rivers,” Dougal shot back. “Where they were likely to drown.”
“Is that why you snuck seaweed into my bed?” Charlie asked.
He grinned. “Of course. I was merely being a good big brother.”
“You could have just taught us how to swim.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” He had taught them, not long after a boy drowned while searching for lost baubles. It might not have been the Thames, but it was just as dangerous. And just as tempting to think you might find some lady’s lost brooch to sell in exchange for eating all of the potatoes you could buy.
“Seven shells to find your boat,” Meg quoted the riddle. It had been running through his head all morning as well. They’d told the others who had the spent breakfast tying to remember lullabies with the number seven. She nodded to the beach, thick with seashells. “I really do hate riddles. All I’ll see are seashells and it won’t help at all.”
George smiled. “Did you know that in the Caribbean, there is a green flash on the horizon when the sun sets? Not every night, but still, often enough.”
Meg’s eyes widened. “Truly? That’s brilliant.”
“I read it in one of the books at the abbey. There are shelves of stories about the island, and shipwrecks.”
Meg stared at the edge of the sea, thick with periwinkle clouds. “A flash of green when day turns to night. Do you know, if Dahlia took the treasure to the Islands, I’m going to be very cross.”