Page 21 of Echoes of the Sea (Storm Tide #2)

Kip had “fallen in love” with a girl he’d acted alongside in their high school production of The Importance of Being Earnest .

He’d discovered in talking with others in the profession that a lot of people crushed hard on costars during their teenage years.

As they grew up and understood acting better, hearts didn’t grow confused as easily.

So why in the world did he feel this tug toward Amelia?

He’d known her only a few days, and the insistence among this group to stay entirely in character meant he wasn’t exactly sure what was her and what was the part she was playing. Falling for someone’s character was a mistake a teenager made, not a grown man who knew better.

And yet there was so much sincerity in her that he’d begun to believe he was actually seeing the real Amelia Archibald simply reframed to fit the narrative of this time and place.

And when he’d held her hand in the garden shed, her reaction had not been feigned.

He knew what it looked like when someone was playing the role of smitten lady.

The last few months he had been with Giselle, he’d seen it in her face more and more often.

Amelia hadn’t been pretending. His simple touch had at first surprised her, then softened her.

And the way he had reacted to her brief touch the night before hadn’t been fake either.

She intrigued him more than he could have predicted, which confused him.

But it was not nearly as confusing as her easy rattling off of the date: 17th May 1803.

Exactly one day after the date Mick had given him the night before that.

She hadn’t even needed a moment to think about it.

Not just a different year but also a different month and date.

But she’d just tossed it out casually and easily.

She’d said the folktales in the area insisted that time behaved weird on the ocean here.

1803.

Except Amelia really did seem genuine, even when adhering so stubbornly to her character. Kip couldn’t make a lot of sense out of it.

And he’d been sincere when he’d told her he liked spending time with her.

He really did. And Guilford Island had him confused enough that he really needed more information, even if he had to keep tiptoeing around it.

So instead of eating his dinner in his bedroom like he’d been doing, he changed into the pirate-like fancier clothes he wore in the evening and joined Amelia in the dining room.

The dining room was a lot like the ones they’d used on The Beau , just smaller and with much less fancy table settings, the first sign Kip had seen that even a fleeting thought had been given to how ridiculous it was to adhere to unnecessary accuracy when there were no tourists around.

“Thank you again for holding the ladder this morning,” Amelia said between bites of boiled potato. “It was good to finish trimming the boxwood, but I am grateful not to have broken any bones in the process.”

“Do you resent having to work in the garden?” He’d wondered about that. It seemed like a precarious assignment for someone who wasn’t totally sure on her feet.

“I love being in the garden. I always love being in gardens.” Her smile was soft and sincere.

So she had a green thumb. That wasn’t surprising, really. “Do you have a favorite plant?”

“In which category?”

Kip laughed lightly. “You really do love gardens.”

“With all my heart,” she said earnestly. “Even here, where the ocean is too loud for me to ever fully forget it’s there, I love being outside in the garden.”

Kip took a sip of what he’d guessed the last few days was probably watered-down wine. He had no idea why that was what this place chose to serve with dinner. Straight-up wine would be unnecessarily expensive. So why not just water?

Historical accuracy, probably.

“I can’t say I know all the plant categories,” Kip said, “but I’ll try a few. What is your favorite ... flower?”

“Larkspur.” She didn’t pause even a moment to think about it.

He had no idea what that flower even looked like, but the joy in her eyes at simply saying the name made him smile. “Do you have a favorite tree?”

She nodded. “Beech trees. There is a large, old beech tree at the house where I grew up, and it has a very low branch that dips downward and creates the perfect place to sit and read a book.”

“Something I suspect you did often?”

She sighed nostalgically. “As often as I could manage. I love that tree. And the garden it is in is very peaceful.”

“There was an oak tree at my house when I was growing up,” he said. “I climbed it all summer long when I was little, imagining I was Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest making daring escapes from the Sheriff of Nottingham.”

Amelia’s laugh was not in any way mocking or dismissive. She sounded genuinely entertained by his remembered adventures. “That must have been wonderfully diverting.”

“Some of my favorite memories.”

“I once tried climbing to a higher branch in the beech tree,” she said. “I couldn’t manage it, but I always thought it would be quite a lark sitting in the top branches of a tree.”

He still found it odd that her foot couldn’t be surgically fixed, or at least improved. But she’d said it couldn’t be, and she would know better than he.

“Do you have a favorite carpentry project?” she asked.

He’d not really given that any thought. Carpentry was a skill he’d developed so he wouldn’t starve during the starving-actor phase of his career. He didn’t hate it, but it wasn’t a passion of his by any stretch of the imagination.

“I once fixed a broken drawer on an armoire that belonged to my best friend Malcolm’s granny.

It was her grandfather’s, and she was devastated that it was broken.

She actually cried when I finished repairing it.

” That had been one of his proudest moments.

“It meant a lot to Malcom to see his granny so happy. And seeing him happy meant a lot to me. That’s definitely on my list of favorite projects. ”

“Then it isn’t the work that speaks to you most; it’s the opportunity to show kindness.”

He smiled at her. “You make me sound like a saint.”

“Are you a saint?” There was a great deal of mischief in the question.

“Malcolm probably is,” Kip said. “I’m not sure why he keeps me around.”

“To repair his armoires, most likely.”

The very serious answer pulled a laugh from him.

“There is actually one in the east sitting room that needs repairing,” Amelia said. “Perhaps you could fix it as well.”

“Impossible.” He sighed dramatically. “I don’t know where the east sitting room is.”

“I’ll show you.” Amelia stood.

He stood as well. “Lead the way, mon capitaine .”

“ Parlez-vous francais ?” She looked excited at the possibility.

“Sadly, no, other than a word or two.” That had been a slight difficulty during The Beau . Apparently, during the Regency Era, the British upper class usually learned French as children. Americans who grew up lower middle class ... not so much.

He walked beside her out of the dining room.

“You haven’t been to the east sitting room,” she said. “What other parts of the house have you not seen yet?”

“It might be easier to tell you which parts I have seen: The drawing room. The dining room, as of tonight. The book room. My bed-chamber. A few corridors. And the attic. Loved the attic. I highly recommend it.”

He was quickly growing to like the sound of her light laughter. It was something real in this place that seemed so fake-real. Fake-real. He shook his head at that phrase. It weirdly made no sense and total sense all at the same time.

1803. He pushed that from his mind. They were all just very in character; he shouldn’t let the weird date they’d settled on bother him as much as it did.

He and Amelia passed a table with a vase of flowers in the corridor.

“Are these from your garden?” he asked.

“It’s not my garden.”

“Oh, I think it is.”

That brought a grateful smile to her face. “I cut these flowers earlier today.”

He paused and eyed them. “Are any of these larkspur?”

“Do you not know what larkspur is?”

Kip pressed a hand dramatically to his heart. “You have discovered my greatest character flaw: I have no idea what larkspur is other than a flower that you are particularly fond of.”

“The garden here doesn’t have any larkspur, at least not that I’ve found. It might be hiding in the sections I haven’t cleared yet.”

He pulled a small pink blossom from the vase. Then he turned to her and presented it with a flourishing bow. “A flower for m’lady.”

“Are all Americans as humorous as you are?” she asked as she accepted the flower.

“Sadly, no. But it does mean I have the privilege of being the country’s designated jester.”

Amelia kept the flower in her hand as they walked on. “How did a jester come to be friends with a saint?”

“Extremely good luck on my part.”

She offered him another of her soft, kind smiles. “I suspect he would say that he was lucky to have become your friend.”

“He would,” Kip acknowledged. “He is a saint, after all.”

“I would like to meet him some day.” Nothing in the declaration sounded like a fangirl excited to meet the Malcolm Winthrop.

Either she was as unaware of Malcolm’s celebrity status as she was of Kip’s, or she didn’t put as much importance on that sort of thing as a lot of people in their business did. It was refreshing, actually.

Amelia motioned to a lit lantern on a table beside an open doorway. “I haven’t a free hand. Would you carry the lantern inside?”

He took it up and followed her into the dark room.

The lantern was the only source of light, but it did a decent job.

He could see well enough to know the room wasn’t very large, about the size of a kid’s bedroom in the older suburban neighborhood he’d grown up in.

It didn’t have much furniture: two chairs, a very small table, and an armoire.

“Is this the troublemaker?” He crossed toward it.