A Week to Be Wicked (Spindle Cove #2)(18)

“Or caves.” To his offended silence, she replied, “Don’t deny it. I can tell how hard you’re breathing.”

“I’m not—”

“For heaven’s sake. You’re fogging my spectacles from here. Do you have a fear of small spaces?”

“Not a fear of them,” he said.

Her silence communicated skepticism.

He muttered, “A dislike. I dislike small, dark spaces.”

“You should have mentioned this before we entered a cave.”

“Well, you didn’t give me much opportunity.”

“Shall we go back out the way we came?”

“No.” In this larger chamber, with the benefit of candles, the cave wasn’t so bad. But he was not swimming through that tomb of a tunnel again. “You say the entrance is above water at low tide? Then I’ll wait for low tide.”

“That could be hours. People will wonder what’s become of us.”

He marveled at the “us” in that sentence—that it hadn’t even occurred to her she might swim back and leave him there alone. He’d noticed this about her, over the months. She couldn’t even contemplate the idea of disloyalty. Which was why she so disdained him, he supposed.

She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Oh dear. We’ll have to go to Scotland now. If anyone notices we’ve disappeared together this morning . . . if anyone saw us kiss last night . . . if your lover decides to gossip . . .” She lowered her hand. “Separately, those things might go unobserved, but all three of them? In all likelihood, I’m already ruined.”

“That’s an extreme conclusion,” he said, ignoring that each separate event looked rather damning. “Let’s take this one crisis at a time. How many candles do you have?

“This, and one other.”

Colin did a swift mental estimate. Three, four hours of light, perhaps. More than enough. A violent shiver wracked his body. “Are you chilled?” He could think of worse ways to pass a few hours than huddling with a woman for warmth.

She reached into a rocky niche. “I keep a blanket here.” Crouching beside him, she shook it out and draped it over them both. She kept a buffer of several inches between their bodies.

The warmth seeped through his wet clothing. “I don’t suppose you keep any whiskey here?”

“No.”

“Pity. But still—candles, blanket. You must spend a great deal of time in this . . . place,” he said, after fumbling several moments for a more diplomatic word than “hellhole.”

He felt her shoulders lift in a shrug. “Geology is my life’s work. Some scientists have a laboratory. I have a cave.”

A dozen mocking rejoinders jostled for prominence in Colin’s mind, but he sensed that teasing her on this point would leave him too vulnerable. She was a scientist. She had a cave. And he was an aimless aristocrat who had . . . nothing.

She said, “I had it all sorted out. There’s a stagecoach that runs between Eastbourne and Rye. It passes by on Tuesdays and Fridays, just around six. If we walked to the main road, we could flag the coach down. Take it to the next town, and from there go north. We’d reach London tomorrow night.”

Ah, to be in London tomorrow night. Bustle. Commerce. Society. Clubs. Glittering balls and gilded opera houses. Skies choked with coal dust. Lamps shining in the darkened streets.

“From there,” she said, “we’d catch the mail coach.”

“No, no, no. I told you the other night, a viscount doesn’t travel on the mail coach. And this particular viscount doesn’t travel in any coach.”

“Hold a moment.” The candle bobbed. “How did you think we’d be traveling to Edinburgh, if not by public coach?”

He shrugged. “We’re not traveling to Edinburgh at all. But if we were, we’d have find some other conveyance.”

“Such as what? A magic carpet?”

“Such as a private post-chaise, with hired postilions. You’d ride in, and I’d ride out on horseback.”

“That would cost a fortune.”

He shrugged. “When it comes to travel, I have conditions. I don’t ride in coaches, and I don’t travel by night.”

“No night travel either? But the fastest coaches all travel by night. The journey would take us twice as long.”

“Then it’s a good thing we’re not going, isn’t it?”

She lifted the candle and peered into his face. “You’re just making excuses. You want out of our agreement—”

“What agreement? There was never any agreement.”

“—so you’re plucking these ridiculous ‘conditions’ out of the air.” She ticked items off on one hand. “No closed carriages. No travel by night. What kind of grown man has such rules?”

“One who narrowly survived a carriage accident,” he said testily. “At night. That’s what kind.”

Her face softened. So did her voice. “Oh.”

Colin drummed his fingers on the stone. He’d forgotten that she wouldn’t know this. In London, everyone knew. The story passed around ballrooms and gaming hells every season. Skipped from matron to debutante, gambler to opera singer—always in mournful whispers. Have you heard about poor Lord Payne. . . .