What on earth was Michael up to? One minute they’d been having a simple conversation, and the next thing she knew, he was crawling around the bottom of the boat.
“Michael?” she asked. What was he doing? “Is anything wrong?”
“Don’t move,” he whispered in response, which was not precisely reassuring.
“What is it?” she murmured. That was when she noticed his hand reaching out ever so slowly. His gaze was fixed upon a spot on her lap—the same direction his hand was travelling, and…
She glanced down and there it was: something huge and black and furry, right there on her leg! Anne screamed, rose halfway to standing, and began smacking at her skirts with both hands.
“Anne!” Michael was flailing at her skirts, too. “Hold still!”
“Get it off me!” she shrieked, struggling to flick it away.
Michael leaned forward and caught one of her hands. “It’s all right, it’s not a spider, it’s a—”
The boat was already rocking perilously, but that was the moment their combined weight in the aft became too much. The skiff shuddered, and then the prow slowly began to rise out of the water.
Anne squeezed her eyes shut. They were going to fall in. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. At least half of their pirate adventures had ended precisely this way.
Although she had thought that, at twenty-three, they might have done better.
But instead of falling in, Anne was enveloped in a pair of tree-trunk-thick arms, lifted off her feet, and pressed into a rock-hard chest.
And then, the world tilted off its axis.
She meant that quite literally, because it turned out that Michael had snatched her up in his arms and thrown himself down into the bottom of the skiff in an effort to keep it from capsizing. She found herself lying on top of him, her head cradled on his shoulder, her breasts pressed against his chest, her skirts hitched up around her calves, and her legs tangled with his, as the boat pitched and roiled around them. His arms held her tight and, after a moment, as the boat slowly calmed, she noticed the rapid thud of his heartbeat beneath her ear. Her breath was coming in pants, and she could feel her body trembling. She felt dizzy… disoriented… wonderful.
Wonderful? That couldn’t be right. This should feel… awkward. She and Michael were friends. Nothing more. Although… from her vantage point lying on top of him, she could feel an extremely prominent bulge that had formed in the front of his trousers, pressing into her stomach.
She had been married before. It wasn’t as if she didn’t understand what that was.
Oh, but what was she thinking? There was no point in deceiving herself. That was merely the reaction any young, healthy man would have, finding himself in such a position with any woman. It didn’t mean anything.
Yes, this should feel awkward. It should feel mortifying.
But Anne found that she felt none of those things. Instead, she was overwhelmed by a feeling of rightness, a feeling not dissimilar to the way she had felt when Michael rolled on top of her at that picnic all those years ago. It was as if this was an inevitable conclusion. As if the universe itself had conspired to throw them on top of each other, right here in this boat.
Almost as if they were meant to be together.
Gracious, she needed to stop thinking these ridiculous thoughts and get off him! She struggled to sit up, but only managed to lift her head, and to her horror, Michael immediately caught her eye.
Oh, sometimes it was a curse that she could read his every expression. She steeled herself to see his discomfiture, his disgust, his eagerness to disentangle himself.
Instead, she saw… adoration?
That couldn’t possibly be right.
Could it?
“Anne,” he whispered, and there was a rawness to his voice that made her tremble all the harder. And then his hand came up and framed her face, and he was tipping his head toward hers. Her arms were sliding up around his neck, her own lips were craning toward his, her eyes were squeezing shut, and—
“I say, is anybody in there?”
“Check the water, Robert.” A pair of voices, one male and one female, penetrated Anne’s brain as if through a dense fog. It was the woman who was now speaking. “This is where the scream came from, I’m sure of it. They must’ve fallen in.”
Suddenly Michael was looking at her with a regret so pure, it bordered on pain.
The woman continued, “Oh, how I hope they haven’t drowned! I don’t want to see a dead body.”
“No, look, Margaret! Someone’s there, in the boat. They’re, er, they’re lying down, and—oh my.”
That jolted Anne into action. She tried to scramble off Michael, but her foot slipped and she ended up collapsing back onto his chest.
“I’m sorry,” she called to the couple regarding them with their mouths set in identical grim lines. “It’s not what it seems. Our boat started to capsize, and we lost our balance!”
“Come away, Robert,” the woman said crisply. “I, for one, don’t want to witness this licentiousness.”
“Quite right, dear.” The man squinted as he began rowing away. “I say, isn’t that Lady Wynters?”
“Lady Wynters?” The woman raised a lorgnette to peer down her nose at Anne. “It can’t possibly be. Lady Wynters is the most respectable woman in all of London.”
“Well, she looks just like the woman in that cartoon…”
“Anne.” Michael punctuated her name with a gentle squeeze. She dragged her gaze back to his, and found his eyes were intense. “There’s something I need to ask you. Will you—”
“Yoo-hoo, anybody in there?”
This time, Anne’s attempt to scramble off Michael was more successful, and she managed to regain her seat. The person who had called out proved to be a milkmaid standing on the near bank, accompanied by her cow.
“Oh, good,” the milkmaid said brightly. “I heard somebody scream.”
“Yes,” Anne babbled, “we lost our balance for a moment, but everything’s fine, everything is just fine!”
At this point, Michael emerged from the bottom of the skiff looking rumpled, frustrated, and utterly delicious.
The milkmaid appeared to agree because she gave a low whistle. “Good for you,” she stage-whispered to Anne as she turned to lead her cow back to the meadow.
Michael was staring off into space, by all appearances unaware of his surroundings. Gracious, but this was awkward. Anne looked down and began adjusting her skirts.
That was when she noticed something in the bottom of the boat. Now that the skiff was still, she recognized it for what it was—a large black feather.
“Oh, look at this,” she said, picking it up. “This must have been what was clinging to my skirts. It must’ve come from that duck who tried to steal my strawberry tart.”
Michael did not seem to have heard her. He was still staring blankly across the water. “I always knew that wouldn’t work,” he muttered to himself.
Anne frowned. “What was that, Michael?”
He shook his head, then looked at her, a rueful grin spreading across his face. “I’ll just stay in my seat this time, and I daresay it will go much better.” He cleared his throat. “Anne, I—”
“Ho there, is everything all right?” a male voice called. “We heard someone scream.”
At this point, Michael said a word he wouldn’t normally use in Anne’s presence, although she had heard her brothers say it before. (Well, she had heard Harrington say it. Obviously Edward would never curse in front of a lady).
“Yes,” Anne called to the pair of young men approaching in their own skiff, “that was just me. I thought I saw a spider.”
Both men grinned. “Ah, I see,” one of them called. “Jolly good, then.”
Anne turned back to Michael. He was surveying the Serpentine. There were now a half-dozen other boats, as well as a family playing by the riverbank.
Anne cleared her throat. “I’m so sorry about that, Michael.”
“Hmm?” Michael blinked, distracted. “Sorry about what?”
“You know.” Anne flushed. “Landing on top of you.”
“I’m not.”
“Wh-what?”
“I’m sorry about a few other things. But not that part.”
Anne shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
Michael looked her square in the eye as he took up the oars and began pulling them toward shore. “You will. Tonight.”
Anne was left to ponder that for the rest of the afternoon.