Page 31 of What's an Earl Gotta Do?
“So,” Anne continued once she’d finished dabbing her eyes, “that accounts for the first few months. How do you explain the following four years?”
Michael cleared his throat. “My father’s holdings near Lake Simcoe have grown to about ten thousand acres. I spent some time there, taking things in hand. Then I started getting requests from all over. If it wasn’t the Royal Navy begging for mast poles, it was the army, desperate for walnut for gunstocks.” He smiled ruefully. “I was everyone’s man in Canada.”
“It sounds as if you were much in demand. But were you truly so busy you couldn’t spare a half hour to pen a letter to your best friend?” Anne asked the question lightly, but Michael could read her well enough to tell that it was no triviality.
He swallowed. The time had come to tell Anne the truth. He wasn’t likely to get a better chance than this, after all.
He laid the oars aside. This chance had come about so unexpectedly, he hadn’t planned out quite what he was going to say.
But he knew one thing: whatever he said, it was going to end in his proposal. And for a proposal, a man was supposed to go down on one knee.
It was just good form.
He rose halfway and inched forward slowly and deliberately. The boat swayed, but not dangerously so. He carefully started to lower himself down.
He glanced up at Anne to find her brow creased. “Michael? Is anything wrong?”
He sought the bottom of the boat with his knee. As he touched down, it slipped on something round. The handle of Anne’s basket. The basket slid out of the way, but the unexpected jolt caused the boat to shudder. Anne flinched.
This caused the rocking to increase—a precarious situation, considering Michael was on one knee. “Don’t move,” he hissed. After a moment he gained some semblance of balance and released his grip on the hull to slowly reach for Anne’s hand.
“What is it?” she whispered. Her gaze dropped down to her lap, following the direction of his hand.
That was when she screamed.
Chapter 10
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.
