Nathaniel stretched out along the upper deck and leaned as far down to the now motionless paddle wheel as he could without plunging headfirst into the blades. Two crewmen lay beside him, holding lanterns down to light the scene of destruction.
Two of the paddles, rather than resembling shallow buckets, now looked like nothing so much as kindling. Whatever had hit them had been more than the normal debris floating in the river. This was the sort of log that plagued rivermen after heavy storms, mostly in the spring when the river ran high from mountain snow runoff. Even with the rain of that day—no, the previous day now—no logs should have gotten free enough to float down the river and smash his blades.
“How do things look?” Billy asked from behind Nathaniel.
“Bad.” He began to clear the rubbish away from the steel frame. “Two blades gone.” He slid a little farther forward, and heard a feminine gasp.
The princess should be in her cabin, not out in the chill and mist watching him dangle upside down over a paddle wheel. Even with his guts feeling as splintered as the blades, a thread of heat at her presence traced through his middle. Maybe she wasn’t as self-absorbed as he thought she was.
But unattainable, like his future.
He yanked a sliver the size of his forearm out of its pin as though he could so easily remove thoughts of Miss Renfrew and her glorious hair from his mind. “Once I clear this away and we’re not sending splinters flying around like shrapnel, we’ll have to limp back to Cold Spring and make repairs.” He slammed the broken wood onto the deck and grabbed the next piece of splintered wood so hard, an edge tore through his glove and into his palm. He hissed through his teeth at the pain and kept working to clear the frame of what remained of his precious paddles.
He carried replacement paddles with him. Accidents happened. This could be an accident. He couldn’t prove otherwise. But accidents like this were rare in the fall with the river low, with the amount of traffic that had gone before him, and Lancaster’s boat so close ahead.
Close enough ahead to have tossed something off his vessel and straight into the Marianne’s path. Not a sure way to cripple a boat. Nathaniel might have seen the debris even in the dark, but more than one thud had sounded against the deck. Lancaster had made as certain as he could to cause damage.
Nathaniel removed the last of the mangled blades and pushed himself back onto the deck. “All right, let’s get underway again and go back to Cold Spring.”
Billy gave him a questioning look. “Shouldn’t we go ahead—”
“Moving downstream with two missing buckets will be easier than continuing up.” Nathaniel made no attempt to disguise his impatience.
Miss Renfrew’s face paled in the yellowish glow of the lanterns. “Was that village not an hour and a half ago?”
“Yes, about six miles back.” Nathaniel gave her the brutal truth. “We’ve been traveling slower than usual as it is, and now we’ll lose more time, as we’ll have to wait for morning to make repairs.”
“Of course that is necessary.” Her accent sounded even more precise and clipped than usual. “But you have injured your hand. You should take care of it.”
“No time.” His palm throbbed, but they needed to get out of their anchorage in the middle of the river before another boat came along and caused an accident.
“But, Captain Black—”
“Excuse me, Miss Renfrew, I have work to do.” He took a step toward her.
She stepped aside. “Well then, I suppose I may as well get to my cabin and rest.” Her chin a little too high and firm, she spun on her heel and marched away.
Billy grinned. “Upset her ladyship. She don’t like not getting her way.”
“No.” Nathaniel gazed after her. A tightness settled over his chest that had nothing to do with the sabotage to his boat and too much to do with the female who had vanished into her cabin.
“Let’s get underway.” Nathaniel spoke too harshly, as though everyone dawdled after receiving orders.
He strode off to the wheelhouse steps and took them two at a time. He wouldn’t trust anyone else with the piloting in this maneuver. Even before the engine commenced with its thumping, hissing rumble and the paddles began to turn, he gripped the wheel. Pain shot through his right hand. Probably splinters of wood left in the gash. No time to concern himself with it now. He couldn’t remove fragments without light. No light aboard now. He needed all the night vision he could conjure.
Slow, slow, slowly they backed. The paddle frame rattled. Nathaniel gritted his teeth and peered into the mist. The jackstaff swung to starboard, its canted tip pointed at an ancient oak towering above its neighboring trees on the hillside. If he kept that in sight, used it like a compass apex . . .
Heat rose up through his boot soles. Too much heat. Someone had overstoked the boilers for these speeds. Miss Renfrew might appreciate it if some of the heat reached her cabin, but not if they all exploded. Must not think of her and her big, bright eyes, a little too bright in the lantern light. She was too cool, too self-possessed to cry over a delay. She was—
The current caught the boat, shoving it starboard, yanking Nathaniel’s thoughts away from the princess to his boat, the true love of his life.
For another month if Lancaster had his way.
Lord, I’ve done a good deed taking this female aboard against my will, surely you will honor that.
Maybe. Maybe not. God didn’t seem inclined to favor him of late.
If getting them to Cold Spring without further damage to the boat was evidence of God’s favor, then he was paying attention. Once facing downstream, the Marianne limped back to Cold Spring. They moored at the dock and shut down the engine and boilers. Enough heat would remain in the latter to keep the crew warm, though a few decided to seek lodging on shore where they could sleep in real beds.
Nathaniel headed for his own cabin. He hadn’t slept for nearly twenty-four hours, and the strain of the day weighed down his limbs like anchors. But Miss Renfrew’s door stood open, and a light glowed from within. He continued down the passageway until he stood in the doorway.
“Miss Renfrew?”
She glanced up from the book on the table before her, then rose, divesting herself of a quilt wrapped around her shoulders, all in one graceful motion. “Captain Black, I was waiting to ensure you had seen to your hand.”
“That’s . . . kind of you.” He gazed into her sleep-shadowed eyes, and felt as though the boat moved a mile beneath his feet. “It’s just a scratch. You didn’t need to sit up waiting for me.”
“I could not sleep.” She pursed her lips a moment and looked away. “The delay concerns me. If I do not reach Albany in time—” She shifted her shoulders in a motion too fluid to be called a shrug, and smiled at him. “So I may as well take a look at your hand.” She held out hers.
Nathaniel laid his hand in hers. His palm was at least twice as broad as hers, his fingers more than an inch longer. Her skin felt as smooth as the finest China silk he had ever carried. His must feel like emery grit in comparison. Yet she held his hand steady, lifting it closer to her lantern.
“You have splinters, I think. It is difficult to see with the blood.”
Blood that didn’t make a princess squeamish.
Her hand beneath his, the hint of lavender around her, her very calm when faced with the sort of gash that most females squealed and backed away from, set his insides vibrating like the deck beneath the engine.
“Shall I wash it for you?” She glanced up at him, her gaze as cool as the temperature inside the cabin, completely unmoved by their nearness. Except that her hand trembled ever so slightly beneath his.
He drew away. “I’ll go wash it myself. No sense in you getting your basin dirty.”
He wished that basin were forty miles away rather than forty feet. Distance between himself and this unflappable female, who left him feeling anything but levelheaded, was a good idea.
“Lord, I shouldn’t have brought her aboard,” he muttered to himself, as he poured icy water from his pitcher into the basin and sponged the blood away from his gash. Contact with the wound sent air hissing through his clenched teeth. Splinters in there for sure. He should pull them out himself.
He would have done so. He would have stayed away from her ladyship, if he had cut his left hand. But his left didn’t have the dexterity he needed.
He returned to find her waiting for him with a metal object that looked like something out of a torture chamber—small metal pincers.
“What,” he asked, “is that?” He indicated the metal claws.
She laughed, a genuine trill of amusement. “Tweezers.” She touched one finger to her perfectly arched eyebrows. “You do not believe these grow like this, do you?”
“Now that I notice, I suppose not,” he couldn’t resist saying.
Her cheeks turned pink, and she laughed again. “I suppose that puts me in my place, does it not?” She seized his hand with surprising strength, showing a little more than necessary. “Shall I get to work?”
“If I tell you you have pretty eyes, will you promise to not cause me too much pain in your doctoring?”
“No need. You have already complimented my hair.”
He had. The truth. With her head bent over his hand, her hair shone in the lantern light like a waterfall of honey. He raised his left hand. If she had not chosen that moment to swoop in with those tweezer things and pluck a splinter from his palm, he might have reached out and touched one of those glossy tresses.
He shoved his free hand into his coat pocket. “So why is it that you can doctor, but you can’t cook?”
“The lady of the manor is expected to play apothecary, but cooking is beneath her.” The slightest hint of sarcasm tinged her tone.
Nathaniel grimaced. “Are you a lady of the manor?”
“Obviously not, or I would not be here.” She drew another, longer splinter out.
He flinched.
“Terribly sorry. Just one more, I think.”
A pity.
No, he must be worn to a nub to have just thought having the final splinter pulled out of his palm a pity. It wasn’t the doctoring; it was having an attractive female holding his hand with gentle competence and kindness. It was the notion that a competent, gentle, and attractive female was the sort of wife he needed.
She probed at the cut with those tweezers. He welcomed the prickle of pain. It distracted him from stupid notions.
“You were raised to be lady of the manor?” he asked.
“And endured the dubious pleasure of three London seasons.”
“London—gentle there, if you please. I need my hand intact. Now what—what is a London season?”
“Where I got trotted out like a mare for the highest-ranked bidder.” She replaced the tweezers with her fingertips, light, gentle, probing. “The marriage market.”
He flinched. “You’re a widow then?”
“No, I did not take. Then my father died, so I missed the next season, and then my mother died, and after that, I was quite on the shelf with no dowry to make up for my lack of looks.”
She delivered the speech with such coolness, Nathaniel suspected a great deal of pain and disappointment lay beneath the surface of her tale. He considered telling her that her looks were more than passable. No, she wasn’t pretty in a conventional way, but with her beautiful eyes and soft lips, she caught a body’s attention.
But maybe compliments weren’t a good idea. They were far too alone for words that steered close to flirtatious.
“Are you alone in the world now?” he asked.
“I have relatives. A cousin inherited the title and land, but staying around was unwise. My mother, my father, my brother are all—gone.” She released his hand so abruptly it fell as though not attached to his arm. “That should do it.” She kept her head bent as though still examining his wound. “It should be bandaged, but I expect you need the use of that hand, so just keep it as clean as you can.”
Dismissed like the lady of the manor sending a servant back to his duties.
Half a day ago, he would have wanted to leave her in Cold Spring to find her own way to Albany. At that moment, he sought for words of comfort.
“Any lady who has the courage to jump over open water onto a boat to get where she wants to go is going to get on in the world just fine.”
“Courage?” She flashed a smile at him. “Do you not mean stupidity?”
“Well, there’s that too.” He grinned at her.
She blinked, and tears glinted on her long eyelashes. “Now let us hope that risk was not in vain. Do you—” Her lower lip quivered. “Do you think we will have any more disasters?”
“This wasn’t a disaster, just a minor inconvenience. We should still reach Albany by Wednesday.”
“Then I shall pray we have no more inconveniences, minor or catastrophic.”
“You do that, and so will I.”
If not for the loss of revenue, he wouldn’t in the least be bothered if their journey took many extra days so he could spend more time with this lady.
And in the morning, he realized he would obtain his wish and that he had spoken incorrectly when saying the broken paddles were only an inconvenience. They were a disaster, for his replacement buckets were no longer in their storage compartment.