Unbuttoning Miss Matilda by Lucy Ashford

Author:Lucy Ashford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2019-05-06T18:15:33+00:00

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Matty had indeed put on her nightshirt and climbed into her narrow bed down below, but she kept the lamp burning for quite a while and listened to Jack Rutherford tramping about overhead, tripping on a rope and cursing under his breath. All was quiet now, which meant that hopefully he was asleep—but awake or asleep, he worried her more and more. Because she still couldn’t understand why he’d been so eager to come along with her.

Perhaps he needed to get out of London in a hurry because of debts, or maybe some of his fake antiques had landed him in hot water. Nothing about him would surprise her, yet she had blindly put her trust in him.

Oh, Matty. You fool.

And she was a fool in more ways than one, because whenever Jack Rutherford merely raised his eyebrows at her in that teasing way of his, she felt her common sense vanishing into thin air.

She’d always been caught between two worlds—she knew that. She didn’t truly fit into the lives of the canal folk, or the genteel society of the Oxford scholars her father had once known. So far it hadn’t mattered in the slightest, because marriage was the last thing on her mind—indeed, men in general were the last thing on her mind. She shivered a little as the dark memories she thought she’d swept aside threatened to resurface.

But there was something about Jack Rutherford that unsettled her badly. And it wasn’t just that he was handsome, it wasn’t just the way he teased her. Strangely enough, she felt there was something vulnerable about him—indeed, sometimes those merry blue eyes of his looked almost haunted, as if he, too, was remembering things he’d much prefer to forget.

Something inside her was hurting a little, for him. Slowly she rose from her bed to extinguish the lamp, telling herself she was being completely ridiculous—he wouldn’t want her sympathy, and most certainly he wouldn’t want anything else from her.

Suddenly she found herself recalling that woman—Vanessa—who’d been at his side at the London auction. Now, she was much more his type—beautiful, worldly, sophisticated. Matty was the very last kind of female Jack would be attracted to. And anyway, how could he even feel any liking for her, when all she had done—most of the time anyway—was to order him around?

‘Aye aye, Captain,’ he liked to say with a grin.

At least she offered him some amusement, she thought rather tightly to herself. And in return, he was helping her to fulfil her promise to her father.

‘I’m so sorry I let you down, Papa,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry I was so weak. So stupid.’

Forcing back the bitter self-rebuke, she climbed back into her bed and tried to concentrate on sleep, for she had a long day ahead of her tomorrow. But still she lay awake—chiefly because she was all too aware of that scoundrel of a man on the deck above. She was pretty sure that he wouldn’t be having any difficulty at all in slumbering soundly.

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