A Light For My Love by Alexis Harrington

Author:Alexis Harrington
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: historical, seafaring
Publisher: Alexis Harrington

CHAPTER EIGHT

The next morning, Jake slouched down the back stairs to the kitchen, grumpy and taciturn. Before he reached the door, he detected the scent of hot biscuits and coffee. Aunt Gert hailed him as soon as she saw him, her ceaseless cheer blasting him like the noonday sun. The glare of it almost made him flinch.

"Well, here's our shipping baron now," she teased loudly from her post at the stove. "Did you have a good time at the party, Captain Chastaine?"

Jake grunted unintelligibly and snagged a buttermilk biscuit from the table, sidling around Susan Price to reach the blackberry preserves on the other side. Susan turned her unblinking pansy eyes on him—if he had been a more superstitious man, he would have sworn those eyes were trying to steal his immortal soul. He cut the biscuit in half and smeared the preserves on both surfaces, then mashed them back together to make an oozing sandwich.

"China looked so lovely in her dress, too—just like a princess. Didn't you think so, Jake?" Gert pressed on, wielding her cooking spoon like a scepter.

Offering a noncommittal noise similar to the last, Jake made a sour face and went to the stove to pour himself a cup of coffee. He felt Aunt Gert peering at him sharply, but he wouldn't meet her probing blue eyes.

"Well, I swear on Casey's bones," she said, invoking their old dog's memory "A body would think you and China had gone to a funeral last night, the way you two are acting. Pinched up as a pair of tight shoes, the both of you. You're mumping around, and she's upstairs complaining about a headache and asking for a breakfast tray in her room. Don't young people know anything about having fun anymore?"

It didn't seem to be a rhetorical question; she turned on Jake like a white-haired terrier who wasn't going to give up until she had an explanation. "Did you two have a difference?"

Jake nearly choked on his coffee. As fond as he was of Aunt Gert, he thought her mind usually had to struggle just to stay even with itself. But now and then she showed a flash of astuteness, and not always at the most convenient moment. An irritable directive for her to keep to her oatmeal pot sprang to mind, but he caught it before it slipped out.

Rather than answer a lot of questions and suffer through another meal with Susan Price's eyes boring into him, he turned and left the kitchen to return Cap's chair to the back parlor. He'd meant to do it last night, but after Dalton Williams arrived to deliver his speech, nothing that followed had been part of Jake's original plan for the evening.

He hadn't expected to feel the possessiveness toward China that had sprung to life despite his efforts to squelch it. He'd not intended to arrange to be alone with her, or to kiss her, especially after she'd so snippily forsworn him upstairs and left with a swish of her skirts.

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