Page 87 of Peril in Piccadilly
But he shook his head. “I’m afraid not. We’ll find him. I need you to pull yourself together and walk with me, all right? There’s a lifeboat off the side of the ship.”
He nudged me into moving, and then shuffled with me across the deck before he stopped at the edge of the boat where a ladder led downward. I peered over the edge. There was icy black water below, as well as a smaller boat tied up to the bigger freighter, bobbing along.
And there was a dark figure on the deck of the smaller boat, and a familiar pale face smirking up at me. “There you are, Darling.”
“St George,” I said, and I’ll admit that I was happy to see him, if only because he was here to rescue me. Certainly not because I had been concerned that I would never see him, or anyone else in the family, ever again.
“Would you like for me to climb up and fetch you? You can hang around my neck like a monkey on the way down.”
“Thank you, but no.” If this was what it took to get me onto the ladder and down to the lifeboat, I would take it. “You’d probably drop me. Just step aside.”
Tom assisted me onto the ladder and made sure I had a solid grip on the top rung before he let go. “It’s not that far,” he informed me. “Just move slowly and carefully.”
“Yes,” Crispin agreed from below, cheerfully, “no need to rush. The view is lovely from down here.”
That probably implied that he was taking the opportunity to peer up my skirt. Or perhaps not, perhaps he was just watching my derriere coming down. Either way, it gave me incentive to keep going. By the time I was almost at the bottom, he grabbed me around the waist and swung me the rest of the way down, and then he wrapped both arms around me, a bit too tightly, and buried his nose in my hair.
I was too shocked to say anything, to be honest. It was something Christopher would have done, and for a moment it was comforting to lean into the embrace and imagine that it was he who was holding me instead of Crispin. But of course it wasn’t. Tweed is tweed, but Crispin smells differently than Christopher does, and aside from that, he was also engaged to be married and too much closeness in this situation would be a very bad thing.
I freed myself and took a step back. “Thank you, St George.”
“Don’t mention it,” Crispin said and had to clear his throat. It must have helped him get his usual acerbic self back in line, because the next thing out of his mouth was, “Bloody hell, Darling, could you be any less careful?”
“Whatever do you mean?”
I wrapped my arms around myself, because I was standing in a boat on the open water in a short-sleeved silk crepe gown with short sleeves in October, and he made an exasperated noise before shrugging out of his tweed coat and wrapping it around me. “Come sit down.”
He pulled me over to a bench against the small wheelhouse midships of the lifeboat, and pulled me down next to him. And proceeded to wrap his arm around me in an effort to share some of his own body heat.
“Thank you,” I muttered. Thanking Crispin for anything goes against the grain, but under the circumstances he deserved it, and I’ll do what I have to do when there’s no other choice.
“As I said, don’t mention it. How could you have been so careless?”
As to allow myself to be doped, I supposed.
“You were the ones who were supposed to keep an eye on me,” I said indignantly, instead of admitting that I had allowed Wolfgang to dope me and kidnap me without any suspicions as to his motivations whatsoever. “Why didn’t you rescue me?”
“What do you call this, Darling?”
He gestured to himself, and the lifeboat, and Tom, somewhere on the freighter, looking for Christopher and Wolfgang.
Since he had a point, I told him, “I didn’t think he would do something like this. All my focus was on keeping him busy until after supper, when the two of you were supposed to go after him.”
“As we did,” Crispin said, “when he hauled your lifeless body out of the Savoy and loaded you into a Hackney.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t fall on him right then and there.”
“I wanted to,” Crispin said. “Tom held me back. He thought Wolfie might be taking you to where Christopher is.”
Trust Tom to prioritize finding Christopher over rescuing me. And trust Crispin, I suppose, to go along with it. He might love me, but he loved Christopher, too.
Not that I wouldn’t have done the same, of course.
“It’s possible that he’s in one of the other cabins,” I said. “I didn’t open any of the other doors, just in case I found Wolfgang instead. I didn’t want him to realize that I was awake.”
“If Kit’s there, Tom will find him,” Crispin said. After a moment, he added, “I’ll be surprised, though. I’m fairly certain that this was a Gretna Green situation, and the thing with Kit is something else.”
Yes, I was fairly certain of the same thing. Wolfgang had no reason to want to take Christopher to Germany with him. I wasn’t even sure what his reason was for wanting to take me. It wasn’t for love of me. No one who loves someone else would dope their cup of coffee and load them onto a freighter bound for foreign parts without their consent.
