Page 2 of Runaway Countess (Those Wild Whitbys #2)

Chapter Two

S ebastian Whitby thrust his hands into his pockets and gave a harsh bark of laughter. “Help you? The devil I am.”

The diminutive creature with the wide, frightened eyes and the prim expression sat upright in her wooden trunk as though she were holding court and did not even blink at his refusal. Instead, she gripped the sides of the trunk with her hands and began struggling out of the tight space into which she had wedged herself. The process was causing her some difficulty.

“There is a straw bonnet hanging in the closet,” she said, managing to extricate one leg with a sudden pop. She swung her foot over the side, the edge of the trunk dragging up her skirt to reveal a dainty foot swathed in a thick white stocking. “I’d be much obliged if you could fetch it for me – oh!”

Her left foot was trapped underneath her. As she struggled to free herself, she only succeeded in tightening the noose her gauzey blue overlay had made around her upper body.

Sebastian strode forward and caught hold of her arm. The trunk was deep but narrow, and was full to overflowing of Miss Cartwright.

“Careful!” she gasped. He froze.

“Did I hurt you?”

“This is my best dress!”

Sebastian held his arm steady as Miss Cartwright hauled herself up, pulling hand over hand as though he were a rope ladder. Eventually, she was perched on the side of the trunk, feet dangling an inch off the ground. She leaned on his arm a moment while she caught her breath.

“Thank you,” she said. “Now, the bonnet, if you’d be so kind.”

Sebastian was not feeling kind in the slightest. “Now, listen here, Miss –”

She released his arm and hopped down from the trunk, hunting around beneath the bed until she emerged with a pair of dainty blue slippers.

“I’m afraid it is no use, Captain Whitby,” she said, and lifted her face to him with a half-mad smile that left him temporarily speechless. “It is Captain Whitby, is it not? I’m sure that under any other circumstances, I’d be delighted to make your acquaintance in the proper way. Unfortunately, you have found me at an awkward moment, and I really must be off before anybody discovers me. Am I right in understanding that Lord Beeston has sent you rather than coming to fetch me himself?” She nodded as though in answer to her own question, continuing without pause. “That’s good. We shall avoid at least one unpleasant encounter.” She bent down and slipped her feet into the shoes, then stood up and took a quick glance at herself in the mirror, shaking out the crumples the trunk had left in her gown. “Did you find that bonnet?”

Sebastian folded his arms and leaned against the bedpost to take better stock of her.

Perhaps she was mad. Could she be mad? Any woman who’d agree to marry Beeston surely must be.

Then again, she had evidently changed her mind about doing that. And, somehow, she’d had the wherewithal to climb into that trunk and squeeze an inordinate number of dimples and ruffles and ankles inside it, too.

“That’s enough, Miss Cartwright,” he said. “You must stop this at once. You are not going anywhere.” He was used to giving orders. At sea, his word was law.

Miss Cartwright, however, did not appear to have any naval experience. She simply sighed, flashing him those dimples and another mad smile, and bustled through the wardrobe until she had located a bonnet with a blue ribbon that matched the gauzey blue of her gown.

“I don’t suppose you have any money, do you?” she asked, fastening the ribbon under her chin. “Uncle Fitz never lets me keep any, and I understand it’s rather difficult to book passage on a mail coach without it.”

Sebastian strode to the door and slammed it closed before she could scarper. “Where the blazes do you intend to go by coach?” he asked. “And how do you plan to get to the station – by tramping across Plymouth in your fancy silk slippers?”

She glanced down at her toes, peeping out in embroidered blue silk from beneath her skirts. “They are rather fine, aren’t they,” she sighed. “Aunt Fanny planned out the outfit so carefully. She wanted me to make the right impression, you know.” She kicked up a foot and directed a sigh of regret at the little blue slipper. “Well, it cannot be helped.”

Sebastian placed himself in front of the doorway, hands on his hips. “It certainly can. You are not walking to the coaching inn. You are not leaving this room at all. Not until you give me a reasonable explanation for –” He gestured towards the trunk, the open window, the ridiculous rope of lace and flimsy lingerie which anyone who’d ever climbed the rigging would see could never hold a person’s weight for an instant. “For all this ,” Sebastian concluded, at a loss to articulate the situation any further.

Miss Cartwright’s shoulders slumped. Her eyes were almost too large for her face, round and filled with a mesmerising swirl of brown, green and blue all together, as though they had not been able to decide on just one colour and had compromised with every colour imaginable instead. It was impossible not to notice how they brightened with impending tears.

Sebastian had three sisters and ought by rights to have developed some degree of immunity to feminine emotion. But he had been a long time at sea, where nobody ever shed a tear save the odd cabin boy on his first voyage. With those bright, round eyes in that dimpled face, and the inexplicably na?ve suggestion that she could walk through Plymouth’s raucous harbour in silk slippers and a blue visiting gown, something about this ridiculous creature blew straight past all Sebastian’s defences like a cannonball through a rotten hull.

“I thought you might help me,” she said quietly. “When you didn’t tell Vickers that you’d found me, I thought… I thought…”

She covered her eyes with a hand and turned away. Sebastian’s heart broke a little.

“Now, now,” he said. Soothing words did not come naturally to his unpractised mouth. He remembered the way he’d spoken to the ship’s cat one morning, after the cabin boys had pulled its ears and he’d had to coax it out from beneath a stack of barrels with a piece of dried fish.

Come to think of it, Miss Cartwright and the cat had a fair bit in common.

“It will be alright, Miss,” he said gently, holding up his hands in a gesture of peace. “Lots of young ladies take fright before their wedding day. It’s only natural. Nobody will be angry with you. Let’s just take a moment to catch your breath, and –”

“Oh, no, no!” Miss Cartwright wailed, flinging herself dramatically towards the window. “I’ve ruined everything! What will become of me now?”

“There, there.” Sebastian had rarely encountered a situation he was so ill-prepared to meet.

If it were a question of pummelling an angry fiancé and helping a young damsel to safety – yes, no problem. He’d manage in his sleep.

But he could not pummel Beeston. Hang it all, he was supposed to be helping Beeston, and to start his service by delivering the wounded rogue his bride.

This tiny, teary, terrified bride with eyes that wounded like cannon fire.

“There, there,” Sebastian said again. He stayed by the doorway. It felt safer there.

By the time he realised his mistake, Miss Cartwright was already halfway out the open window.