Page 40 of Echoes of the Sea (Storm Tide #2)

Nearly twenty-four hours after kissing Amelia, Kip knew it had been the most amazing, incredible, terrible mistake he’d just about ever made.

He’d enjoyed every second of it. And he’d known in an instant that the connection he felt to her was unlike any he’d felt before.

It had changed everything and, in so doing, had brought a horrible truth crashing down on him.

She’d kissed him in return, with too much feeling for him to doubt any longer that his was not the only heart on the line. She felt this pull and this connection just as much as he did. And that was a problem.

Kissing her as he had, alone in his bedchamber, was considered unacceptable in this era, no matter that The Beau had pushed those boundaries to the breaking point over and over again.

But that wasn’t the reason he was castigating himself now.

He wasn’t an acceptable match for her. That plotline had played far too often in various episodes and seasons for him not to know it was going to be a problem now.

He’d kept his distance from Amelia since that moment in his bedchamber.

He’d kept quiet during dinner and had gone directly back to his bedchamber afterward.

He had thrown himself wholeheartedly into his carpentry work the next morning, and he was now standing in his bedchamber, donning one of the new sets of clothes Mrs. Finch had arranged to be made for him “posthaste.” She’d taken one look at his wardrobe and declared that no one with any degree of observational skills would ever think he was a gentleman of means taking a tour of the countryside dressed as he was.

Just as she’d had clothing made for herself that made her seem the aunt of a gentleman of means, she’d seen him provided with enough pieces to at least begin the act.

He was wearing a complete set of them just then, the sort a gentleman would wear during the day in just such an estate as this.

And Mrs. Finch was eyeing him rather too critically for his peace of mind.

He’d seen that expression on the faces of costume designers and casting directors when they weren’t entirely certain they were equal to the needed miracle an actor was challenging them to conjure up.

“You at least look less like you stole your wardrobe off an abandoned clothesline.” The dryness of that declaration made him grin.

“I only hope I play the role well enough to help Miss Archi-bald. That’s my entire goal in all this.”

“If you’d really like to be a help to she, then quit being so buffle-headed.”

He was taken aback but only for a moment.

Mrs. Finch had a knack for shocking him with the declarations she made, but she always delivered them in a way that forced his shocked silence into an immediate burst of laughter.

He wished he were truly a gentleman of leisure and could adopt her as his aunt and travel around the country, listening to her snarky commentary.

It would be an “absolute lark,” as Tennyson Lamont would have said.

“Do you love Miss?” Mrs. Finch asked with her usual frankness.

He’d learned to return her bluntness with bluntness of his own. “It doesn’t matter if I love her or not.”

“Love always matters. Only the bitter say otherwise.”

He shook his head. “I’m not saying love doesn’t matter. I’m saying what I feel for her doesn’t change the reality of our situation. Nothing can change it, and I need to remember that.”

Mrs. Finch turned to grab the top hat from his dressing table. As she did, she muttered, “Seems to me, men in the future are cowards.”

Again, a moment’s shocked silence led immediately into a burst of laughter. “I think that’s kind of unfair.”

She spun back and held the hat out to him.

“My parents didn’t much care for my late husband when him was courting me, but him didn’t simply shrug and abandon the effort.

That courage meant us had twenty wonderful years together before I lost he.

Us would’ve missed out on that life if him’d been as easily defeated as you are. ”

He set the hat on his head, knowing Mrs. Finch wanted to see how it looked on him. “This hasn’t defeated me easily , I assure you.”

“But you have let it defeat you,” she said. “Are you not worth fighting for, Kipling Summerfield? Is Miss not worth fighting for?”

“Of course Miss Archibald is worth fighting for.”

Mrs. Finch eyed him, gave a quick nod, and then waited. But waited for what?

After a moment, she said, “You didn’t answer the entirety of my question.”

The bit about if he was worth fighting for. “I’m nobody. In this time and this place, I am literally nothing.”

“In your own time and place, who were you? Who were you before the tides?”

Kip pulled the hat back off and tossed it onto the table. “According to my father, I have always been nobody. Worse than that, I was a nobody plagued by stupidity.”

She didn’t look moved by the recitation of his family misery. “Doesn’t matter what him or anywho else said you were. You need to decide who you are and if who you could be is worth fighting for.”

“What if I don’t know how to do that?” It was an admission he wasn’t sure he would have made to anyone else. Probably to Malcolm. But no one else.

“I suspect Miss Archibald knows how,” Mrs. Finch said.

“A lady doesn’t live as a poor relation in the home of a man like Mr. Stirling, where her is shown in countless ways that her’s not worth fighting for, then grow into a lady who has worked tirelessly and planned and replanned and strategized and restrategized as much as her has since being here if her hasn’t learned the trick of fighting for sheself when no one else thinks her’s worth it. ”

“I won’t burden her with this. I won’t be a weight around her neck.”

Mrs. Finch lifted an eyebrow and eyed him, but not with disapproval or the rejection he’d often seen on his father’s face. It was disappointment, and that was infinitely worse. “I suppose that answers the second part of my question.”

Feeling both offended and defensive, he said, “I already told you she was worth fighting for. She absolutely is.”

Mrs. Finch didn’t so much as wince. She held his gaze and said firmly, “Words are empty if there’s no action to fill them.

If Miss is truly worth fighting for, then you’ll fight.

And if her’s not, you’ll stoop your head and say there’s nothing to be done, that nothing can be fixed, and you’ve given up. ”

“You make it sound very simple.”

“And you make it sound overly complicated.”

“Which part of this doesn’t feel complicated to you?” He’d have paced if he weren’t certain that wasn’t what a gentleman of 1803 would do.

“What bit of it is feeling insurmountable to you?” Mrs. Finch asked.

“All of it.” He threw his hands up in the air.

“Name one part at a time.” Her bluntness was perhaps less endearing in that moment, but it also was exactly what he needed.

“A gentleman who could claim a place in Miss Archibald’s life wouldn’t have a profession; he’d be a gentleman.

But for a gentleman to survive, he either has to have money or connections, preferably both.

I have neither. So either I try to get a job—the only usable skill I have is carpentry, which would put me irrevocably below her station—or I try to assume the role of a gentleman in order to have some claim to the rung she occupies, but with nothing to live on and nowhere to lay my head. ”

“So pick.”

“Pick what ?”

“Which path you want to take. You could be a carpenter in this era and move forward with that.”

“Without her?”

Mrs. Finch shrugged. “Perhaps.”

He didn’t like that idea. But he also didn’t like the idea of starving to death.

“Or,” Mrs. Finch continued, “decide you want to attempt to find a place in the world of gentlemen.”

“A person doesn’t just simply join that set.”

“Brummel did.”

If Kip didn’t keep his wits, Mrs. Finch would convince him of impossible things. “Brummel had connections to trade upon.”

“You have one in this very house,” Mrs. Finch said.

“You mean Miss Archibald?”

She nodded.

“Her station in life comes through her uncle, who doesn’t have her best interests at heart. Beyond that, I don’t think she has any significant connections in Society.”

“Not yet,” Mrs. Finch said. “But her does know that world. Miss may have ideas, but you’re so determined not to burden she that you won’t let she help you.

It’ll tell she pretty clearly that you don’t think having she in your life is worth fighting for.

That you won’t even make a decision about a path forward, even if you have to change that path because it doesn’t prove the right one, tells me you believe your father more than you believe Miss Archibald.

I’ve seen the way her looks at you. Her doesn’t think you’re nothing. ”

That comment hung in the air between them, and Kip began to feel a shift in the waters he was navigating.

But before he could ponder it even the tiniest bit, Jane rushed through the doorway, a panicked look on her face. “Mr. Stirling’s carriage has been spotted on the sea road. Him’s on the way to Guilford.”