“Clearly, I did not if I ran away from it,” Madeline replied a little too easily. Immediately she regretted it; she did not want to give away her entire backstory to this near stranger, no matter how handsome he was. His smile grew slowly again, and her heart began to beat faster.
Was she getting sick? It was the only explanation that made sense.
“Good point.”
Caoimhe decided to take pity on poor Madeline and sent her to collect some empty tankards that had been left at various tables. Madeline gave Caoimhe a look of pathetic thanks and went off to do her job, but as she left she heard Harland’s slow chuckle.
“You better behave,” Caoimhe admonished him.
“On the contrary,” Madeline heard Harland reply. “I think behaving is the last thing I want to do with her.”
In any other context, Madeline would be disgusted. Who did he think he was, saying such things about her within earshot? However, as she walked away she could not help but feel a slow burn deep in her belly, and she wondered what it meant.
That night, when the tavern had closed and the two women worked together to clean the bar, Madeline tried desperately to focus more on mopping the floor than on the look in Harland’s eyes when he watched her from across the room. Caoimhe looked over at her and gave a little chuckle.
“What’s gotten into you?” she asked. “I do not know you very well, of course, but I am fairly certain that you are not acting like yourself.”
Madeline shook her head, pausing her mopping. “I do not know, I think that I am falling ill or something of the sort. Earlier I felt all hot and cold, perhaps all this traveling has caught up to me.”
Caoimhe did not look convinced, but she did look amused, and she leaned on the bar and gave a little grin.
“Oh? Tell me more about this mysterious illness that has suddenly befallen you.”
Madeline gave a deep sigh that sounded far more dramatic than she felt. “My heart… and my head. And when I looked at…” She cut herself off, thinking about Harland and his stupid, terrible, handsome face. Caoimhe looked fit to burst with laughter.
“Looks like you are in love!”
Given everything she believed about herself, this shocked Madeline to the core, and she shook her head wildly, her chocolate-brown curls bouncing over her shoulders.
“It is not like that at all!” she insisted. “How could I love him? I do not even know him.”
“Do you think he’s handsome?”
“A blind person would think he’s handsome.”
More laughter.
“Does your heart go aflutter when you look at him?”
Madeline snorted. “Do not be ridiculous, I’ve only seen him for one night.”
“You know,” Caoimhe said. “He seemed rather taken with you as well.”
Madeline’s heart did a little dance of fear, excitement, and some other emotion that she could not name. She could feel her cheeks reddening, and it made her feel utterly foolish to care so much about a person whose last name she did not even know.
“Well,” she replied. “That’s…something.”
Truly, she did not know what to say, and under Caoimhe’s knowing grin she felt as though she might suffocate.
The two of them exited the front of the tavern with the intention of walking around the side, mounting the stairs, and heading to bed. As they did so, Caoimhe’s face grew a little sheepish.
“It is nothing fancy, but you can have a room all to yourself, if you are inclined. I am the only one who lives up here. Another lady did once, but she did not last long. She ran off with a sailor a year or two back, and it is only now that we’ve finally gotten around to replacing her.”
Madeline did not understand why, but there was a tone to Caoimhe’s voice that implied that she was ashamed of where she lived, and as she opened the door to the small home above the tavern, Madeline could not see why. There was a homey little sitting room and a bedroom or two just off of it. It was clean and respectable, and Madeline fell in love with it immediately.
“It is perfect,” she breathed. Caoimhe looked away so as not to show her facial expression, which was a mixture of relief and embarrassment over having been worried at all.
“Your room is this way,” she said, heading down to the end of the hall. Madeline followed, excited to be sleeping in a bed that she could call hers, and trying to forget the fact that no matter how much she had tried to shed her image of coming from wealth, it seemed as though it followed her anyway.
Her new bedroom was small—far from the large, sumptuous room that she had fled just days before. It was a little dusty, having not been occupied in a while, but the bed looked clean, with a straw-stuffed mattress covered by a little homemade quilt. Madeline walked over and touched it, feeling the softness of the thing and loving it intensely, even though it was the first quilt she had ever seen.
Caoimhe looked sheepish. “That is one of mine,” she explained. “I had an extra one so I put it here for the next person…who I suppose is you.”
The moment of tenderness passed rather quickly from Caoimhe’s face, and she brushed her hair out of her eyes. Suddenly she looked very tired, and Madeline did not blame her. An ache had begun to seep into her bones. As Madeline set her travel bag down on the bed, Caoimhe became all business.
“I usually make breakfast in the mornings. Carson would never eat otherwise, and that cook does not know his way around much.”
“I never learned his name,” Madeline said as it began to dawn on her.
“The boy? Liam. Carson found him wandering around one day, figured he could make himself useful somewhere, but I suppose we haven’t found out where yet. Ah, he’s a good boy, if he could ever get the courage to speak. But I am talking too much, you must be exhausted.”
Madeline was about to tell her that it was fine, she wasn’t too tired, but whatever she might have said was soon swallowed up by a yawn. Caoimhe smiled and shook her head.
“You did well tonight, and I think you’ll be well suited for this, but I do want to give you a little measure of warning.”
“Oh?”
Caoimhe’s smile turned a little sad then. “Men like Harland are handsome, and they say such lovely things to a pretty lady, especially a new pretty woman as innocent as you.”
Madeline wanted to protest, to say she wasn’t innocent at all, not in the least, but she bit back her words because, in all honesty, she was pretty innocent, no matter how much she did not want to be.
There was something in Caoimhe’s expression that gave Madeline pause, however. She narrowed her eyes, studying Caoimhe’s face and its look of discomfort. A question began to form in Madeline’s head, one she wasn’t sure she wanted to ask but also did not think she couldnot ask of this woman who clearly knew more about the world.
“Caoimhe…” Madeline chewed on the words she wanted to say, unsure of whether or not she would offend the other woman by asking at all. Caoimhe’s dark eyes looked fierce for a moment, as though she knew what was coming, but she allowed it to come anyway.
“It wasn’t Harland, if that is what you are going to ask,” she said, answering the question for Madeline before she could even form it. “But I’ve known men like him. All women like me know men like him.”
“What’s a woman like you?” Madeline asked without thinking. Caoimhe looked very sad then.
“Not a grand woman, like you probably were going to end up being,” she replied. “One day I hope you’ll explain what happened to have brought you to a place like this.”
Madeline wanted to protest again, but Caoimhe had already turned on her heel and disappeared out of her bedroom. She sat on the bed, thinking about who she was and who she could be, desperately hoping that she would actually become the person she wanted to become and fearful that the person she once was would always be hanging over her head.
It stayed on her mind as she crawled into bed. It was not nearly as comfortable as the feather-stuffed mattress she had grown up using, but it was hers, and for some reason that made her treasure it all the more.
All she had to do, she decided, was not think about that Harland…no matter how much she wanted to.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Harland was not at the tavern the next day, and Madeline decided that she most definitely did not care if he ever showed up at The Admiral’s Arms again. At least that is what she told herself, even as she quickly glanced up whenever someone walked in. The falling feeling in her stomach when she realized that it wasn’t him had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she wanted to see him again—in fact, she barely remembered that his name was Harland. She most definitely did not remember that his hair was such a light blond that it almost looked white, and that his eyes were exactly two shades darker than the sea. She did not think about any of that. Definitely not about how he had been the tallest man she had ever met, and how it made her wonder how he acted as a sailor on a ship. Did it get too crowded below deck? She did not think about how he was the only sailor she had ever seen who wore glasses. She did not care about any of that. Perhaps he was somewhere far away from her now, and perhaps that momentary flirtation did not have anything to do with her.
Caoimhe wasn’t fooled one bit by this act, but Madeline did not care if she was fooled or not, mostly because she insisted that it wasn’t an act. She wasn’t staring dreamily at the docks in the hopes of catching a glimpse of him.