Mermaid of Penperro Page 14

  Hilde heard her and looked up, and saw where she was looking. “It’s disgraceful,” she said, nodding toward the bodice.

  “It’s properly concealing,” Konstanze said. But yes, it was disgraceful, too. She giggled again, nervousness and too much tea making her feel almost sick, her emotions overbright, her underarms damp with perspiration.

  She took a small hank of hair from each side of her face, twisted them separately, then brought them together at the back of her head, winding them into a small coil and pinning it in place. She wound the pearls around the twisted tresses and through the coil. She cocked her head and examined the results, then turned around and with a small handheld mirror examined the arrangement from the back.

  It would have to do. It was at least the eighth style she had tried, and her arms were getting tired.

  The privy was calling, and she got up off the floor, her knees and hips creaking and stiff, and went out the door to the back. She had just returned to the kitchen when the expected knock came at the front door. She gestured for Hilde to remain seated and went to go answer it herself, her heart thudding in her chest. She wiped her damp palms on her skirts and opened the door.

  “Tom,” she said. He was a dark shadow in the driftwood-sided porch, just enough candlelight coming from the sitting room to softly paint the planes of his face and illuminate his white shirt. Her heart thumped painfully.

  “Konstanze, good evening,” he said, and nodded, his dark-rimmed amber eyes meeting hers. She felt a tremor of excitement run through her.

  She stepped back to allow him to enter. He doffed his hat as he stepped into the cottage, the scent of fresh sea air coming with him, his head bent down to avoid the beams of the low ceiling. She felt the absurd urge to step close to him and soak up his presence with every pore of her skin.

  Instead she stepped back and avoided his gaze, not wanting him to guess what wild fancies were dancing through her head. She tried to remind herself that he was a criminal mastermind with warped morals, but the thought only set her blood to racing all the faster.

  She really shouldn’t drink so much tea.

  “Tea?” she offered Tom, and gestured him toward his usual seat.

  He hesitated, then nodded. “Thank you. Are you feeling quite well? You seem a bit flushed.”

  “I’ve recovered completely from the chill of last night. I’ve been sitting too near the fire, is all.”

  “Good. I shouldn’t like to think I’d caused you to fall ill. I wouldn’t be able to sleep with such a heavy guilt on my conscience.” He gave her an amused look from the corner of his eye.

  “It would be the least of your sins,” she said, knowing him well enough now to know that he was teasing her. “I’m surprised you can catch even a wink of slumber, with the life you lead. The angels must be wailing ’round your bed all the night, imploring you to reform.”

  “I usually hear them down in my cellar, breaking into the French brandy.”

  She laughed. “You are a wicked man, and will surely come to a bad end.”

  “I have a feeling you’ll be leading the way.”

  “Now what is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing at all,” he said, and turned away, going to the hearth and warming his hands over the fire.

  She frowned at him, not certain of what he’d meant by his teasing comment. Did he mean she’d be leading him to hell? It wasn’t a flattering notion. Or was it? She gave a little shrug and went to fetch the tea things. He’d been joking, and there was no sense in putting significance where none was meant to be.

  Hilde gave her a knowing look while she was putting together the tray. “You giggle like a foolish girl,” the maid said.

  “I do no such thing.”

  “You think he won’t take advantage of you if you let him, just like Bugg? Eh?”

  “I doubt he’d want to, and I wouldn’t let him if he did.”

  Hilde gave a mimicking giggle and tossed her head.

  “Stop it!” Konstanze said. “Do not mock me.”

  “It’s for your own good,” Hilde grumbled, her tone resentful and contrite both.

  “It is unkind.”

  Hilde gave a guilty shrug and focused her attention on tying off a thread. “I’ve finished the last alteration.” Konstanze took the comment and the shrug as Hilde’s form of, if not an apology, at least of an acceptance that she had been in the wrong.

  “Thank you. I’ll be back to put it on in a few minutes. Will you help me with that?”

  “Ja, freilich, ” she said. Yes, of course.

  Konstanze returned to the sitting room with the tea tray and sat down, Tom waiting until she had done so before he also took a seat. It was becoming a familiar scene, having him sitting across from her while she poured tea. She would not have believed it if someone had told her a month ago that this was how she would spend half her evenings.

  “What did I do to anger Hilde this time?” Tom asked.

  Konstanze glanced at him as she handed him his cup, then turned her attention back to serving herself. “Nothing.”

  “So she’s always that way?”

  “What way?”

  “Angry.”

  “Her bark is worse than her bite. German is not a language that sounds particularly soothing even when used in gentleness.”

  ‘Teach me to say something.”

  “You want to learn German?”

  “Just a word or phrase. Teach me one.”

  “All right then. Bitte.”

  “Bih-tuh?” he repeated.

  “Yes. Bitte. It’s very useful. It means ‘please,’ and bitte schoen can mean ‘you’re welcome’ or ‘here you go.’ ” She gestured to a plate with biscuits. “Would you like some?”

  “Bitte,” he said, smiling.

  She held out the plate, offering them. “Bitte schoen. ”

  “And ‘thank you’? How do I say that?”

  “Danke. ”’

  He nodded. “Danke. ”

  “Bitte schoen, ” she replied.

  “Wait a minute. Are you offering again? Which bitte was that?”

  “‘You’re welcome.’ ”

  “I am?” He smiled, letting her know he was joking. “Danke Konstanze. Danke for teaching me bitte. ”

  “Bitte schoen. ”

  He laughed. “I’ve gone ’round the circle again, and don’t know where I am. Is all of German so confusing? I thought if I could use a little of it on Hilde she’d soften toward me.”

  “I doubt it.”

  They sipped tea for a minute; then he gestured toward the pearls in her hair. “Are you performing a dress rehearsal?”

  She tossed her head, her hand going up to touch and smooth her hair, the gesture embarrassingly involuntary and reminding her of Hilde’s mockery. She dropped her hand, hoping her flirtatious gesture hadn’t been as obvious as it felt. “Do you think it suits?”

  “Turn around.”

  She shifted in her seat, twisting to show him the back, wondering despite herself if he liked her hair, pearls or no. Did he find her attractive? Or was she just an average woman to him, with an average face and figure, and worthy of no special notice?

  “It’s quite nice,” he said. “Wear it that way if you wish. I like it all down, myself.”

  She turned back to face him. Her gaze went to his straight, long fingers, and she imagined the feel of them touching lightly at her temple, then carefully working both pins and pearls free. He would comb out the twisted locks with his fingers, the tips trailing gently across her scalp, then down to the back of her neck.

  “I’ll wear it down,” she said. She looked at his hair, ruffled by the wind. She’d like to run her own fingers through it. Her eyes met his, and she found that he was watching her with a strange intensity. She held his gaze, her lips parting and her breath coming heavily, and felt a contraction at the very base of her loins. The surprise of that sensation made her break the stare, her cheeks heating to think he’d been looking at her when su
ch a thing had occurred.

  “Good,” he said at last, and they both remained silent for several seconds. Then all at once they both spoke.

  “Can I—” he said.

  “How did—” she began.

  “I’m sorry,” they said in unison. Konstanze ducked her head, smiling, and he chuckled, the tension broken. “Please. What were you going to say?” he asked.

  “I wanted to know how our performance went over. Did you hear anything?”

  “It turned out even better than I could have hoped. Not only is Foweather beginning to consider the advantages of life as a merman, but his crew is now convinced that you—by which of course I mean the mermaid—exist. They had been more suspicious than Foweather, not having seen you themselves, but now they are as eager as he to recount to anyone who will listen the night spent chasing you through the fog. They are spending inordinate amounts of time at the Fishing Moon, accepting free beers in exchange for repeating the tale once again. I think it’s the most fun they’ve had since they arrived here.”

  “I almost feel sorry for them, being played for such fools by the entire town.”

  Tom shrugged. “One might say the townsfolk are the bigger fools. They are beginning to believe the stories themselves.”

  “But don’t they know—”

  “Yes.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t try to puzzle it out. For a few moments in the fog even I almost thought you would leap overboard and swim away.”

  “I suppose I can try to take that as a compliment,” she said.

  “At least you don’t smell like a fish, for all that you sing like one.”

  “You’re making it difficult to feel flattered.”

  He wiggled his eyebrows at her, his mouth crooking in a wicked grin, and she found herself smiling along with him. She felt like a cat at the cream, hungrily lapping up his teasing, and she wished she could stop. It was so new to her experience, though, and so pleasing that she knew she would encourage it beyond the limits of decorum. Her fanciful imaginings of handsome strangers had never had this element of playfulness to them, for she hadn’t known it could exist between a man and a woman.

  “Is the costume finished?” he asked.

  She stood, with a quick gesture telling him to remain seated. “I’ll go put it on.”

  “You don’t need to do that. Just bring it out here.” “No … I really think you need to see it on me, for the full effect.”

  “I don’t want to embarrass you,” he said, sitting forward as if prepared to stand and stop her, his expression concerned.

  She wondered what he was expecting her to be wearing. Necklaces or shells, as she had shown him in the drawings, her breasts loose beneath? “Trust me. You won’t embarrass me. Bitte have a biscuit while you wait,” she said, and with a barely contained smile left the room.

  Tom sat and stared at Konstanze’s empty chair, his hands flat on top of his thighs. They had never come to a spoken agreement about what the costume would be. She wasn’t going to come out wearing nothing but a tail and her hair, was she? He both prayed and dreaded that it would be so. He didn’t want to have the image of pink nipples showing through that glossy dark hair haunting his nights, and yet what a vision it would be to behold!

  No, no, no. He had vowed not three hours ago to stop this nonsense of thinking of Konstanze as other than a business partner and an inherited responsibility. He was apparently greatly lacking in willpower. He hadn’t been inside her cottage for more than two minutes before he had started making suggestive comments to her about being led down the path to damnation.

  He was even, Lord help him, beginning to convince himself that she looked at him with some of the same desire that he felt for her. It was ridiculous, of course. She thought him a scoundrel, a “master smuggler,” and endured his company only because she had to.

  But for a moment there, he could have sworn…

  Why was he even thinking about it? She was married. She could come out of that kitchen wearing nothing but a pair of gartered stockings and a smile, and he would do nothing to act on the invitation. He had standards, by God.

  Now he was sounding like Foweather. It was a bad sign, a very, very bad sign. The idiocy of romantic obsession was digging its claws into him.

  He grabbed a biscuit off the plate on the tray and chewed furiously, trying to think of other things than Konstanze in white stockings with red garters. Konstanze with her hair loose around bare shoulders. Konstanze, naked, coming to sit on his lap and wrap her arms around his neck, whispering “I’m yours” into his ear.

  He plucked at his buckskins, trying to find some give in them for the part of him that had swelled against the confines of the narrow trousers. If he didn’t get control of himself he’d have to sit with his hat in his lap. He crossed his legs.

  This would all be so much easier if he didn’t enjoy her company, as well as find her so damned attractive. Her being shrewish or dim-witted would have been such a help. Hell, it would even have helped if she didn’t speak with that educated accent that proclaimed her special simply by the way she said the word ‘tea.’

  After the Eustice debacle he had thought—rather vaguely, it was true—that he would someday find a farmer’s daughter and settle down to raise a family. He had put his dawdling on the issue down to being too busy with business affairs to bother with courting a woman.

  His reaction to Konstanze, however, was making him think that it had been something else at work. Without even knowing it, all this time he had been waiting to meet someone extraordinary, someone who had more to her background than eighteen years of tending sheep and salting pilchards. He’d been waiting to find someone who might have read some of the same books that he had, and who had seen a world beyond the shores of Cornwall. Even Eustice could not claim that.

  Fate, being of a contrary nature, had chosen to put before him a woman he could not have. If he were wise he would learn from the situation, and move on. But when had he ever been wise when it came to women?

  “Are you ready?” Konstanze asked.

  Startled from his thoughts he turned to her voice, and then felt his jaw gape wide, his entire body going stiff in surprise. She was standing there in a silvery green narrow skirt, its waistline low across her hips. Tresses of hair fell forward over her chest, partially obscuring the hands she held over her bare breasts.

  “Good lord!” he said. “Konstanze, you don’t need to do this!”

  “Oh, but I do!”

  And with that she flung her hands wide, baring her chest to his eyes. He twitched and blinked and tried to look away, but his eyes were pulled back and he was powerless to stop himself from staring at the two large nipples so proudly on display. They were larger and darker than he had imagined; unsettlingly so.

  Konstanze lifted her chin, one hand defiantly, proudly on her hip. “Do you like them?”

  He gurgled. “Cover yourself! Good God, Konstanze, have you no shame?”

  “I thought this was what you wanted. ‘Show me breasts, I want to see your breasts,’ you told me. ‘Bare breasts, mermaids have bare breasts with nipples showing.’ ”

  “I never meant you to parade them before me!” He couldn’t stop staring at them. He managed to glance up at her face for an instant, but with an eerie power those nipples drew his attention back downward. “Please cover yourself,” he begged. “Please.”

  “Don’t you want to get a closer look?” she asked, and started to come toward him.

  He tore his gaze away and stared determinedly at the fire. “No. I’ve seen enough.” He could see her, dimly, from the corner of his eye, standing close.

  “The light is much better over here. Come, you want to get a good look. You might not have another chance.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be shy,” she coaxed, and he heard laughter in her voice. It was that hint that she thought she had somehow played him for a fool that got him to turn his head a mere inch, just enough to see a blurred vis
ion of nipples from the corner of his eye.

  They really were unnaturally large and dark. He turned his head a little farther. There was something wrong about the color and shape of her breasts, as well. He turned enough to get a full view, and his eyes widened.

  “They aren’t real,” he said in utter amazement.

  She laughed, a vaguely hysterical sound, and put her hands back up over the false breasts. “It almost feels like they are, especially with someone gaping at them the way you are.”

  “In the poor light, I couldn’t tell,” he said, still not quite believing he had been so thoroughly taken in.

  “That’s the very idea. From a distance or in dim light, no one would be able to tell they were not real.”

  He could see now that what she wore was a tight-fitting sheath of material dyed a fleshy tone, then carefully darted, padded, embroidered, and appliquéd to resemble a bare female torso, complete with navel.

  Except that she wore no sleeves, she was as covered as she would be in a dress. The effect, however, was anything but modest.

  “It’s indecent,” he said.

  “It’s far more decent than what you had in mind!”

  He knew his feelings were illogical, but he couldn’t help it. Those nipples were like beacons, and he hated the idea of someone seeing them and thinking they belonged to her. He hated the idea of Foweather leering at her torso, thinking he was catching an eyeful. “You can’t go out like that.”

  “I can and I will. Hilde and I worked hard on this. It is the perfect solution.”

  “Konstanze, you don’t know how you look. There… there is no subtlety to this,” he said clumsily, gesturing awkwardly toward her outfit. His eyes kept going back to the bits of dark nipple showing through her fingers.

  “I didn’t think you wanted subtle. What good is subtle in a mermaid, if you want her to be a distraction? Really, Tom, I don’t understand you,” she complained.

  “Are you getting angry with me now?” he asked incredulously.

  “I think I am. It took me a long time to come up with this idea, and I think it deserves a little more consideration than you’re giving it.”