Time & Tide - Original Wattpad Version

Chapter Sixteen: In Which Jessie Meets the Competition

If there is any such thing as 'perfect happiness', I'm certain that nobody has it. Despite what Jane Austen her muck might have any of us believe. Francis and I spent the rest of the miserable ride endeavoring to pretend to be happy while sitting across from each other, both of us moping. It was was obnoxious. I wasn't happy. Francis certainly wasn't happy, being all quietly despondent. Miss Martin was confused and probably frightened, Mr. Lewis was dangerous and angry. And I had no doubt that wherever, whenever my family and coworkers were, they were despairing of never hearing from me ever again. And the other passengers and the crew of my downed plane were dead.

'Perfect happiness' - as described in those romance novels I had liked so much in my previous life - could bite me. This Anne Radcliffe, Bronte Sisters gothic heroine bullshit was miserable.

I wondered, briefly, if perhaps someone else from my flight might be going through this same nonsense. If anyone else might have survived. Could another ship have pulled someone out of the wreckage, or had even those who had lived through the crash as I had sunk to the bottom of the ocean? And just me and my stupid luck, and a yellow inflated lifejacket that had been meant for someone else had prevented me from following down after.

Francis and I stopped for dinner in a public house south of London. I'm miserable with maps, and getting directions straight in my head, but I knew we were south, at least. There was a pub meal of more overboiled vegetables and coldish meats, some sort of savoury pie that wasn't half delicious, and the beer was fantastic. It reminded me of all the best microbrews from back home, and slowly, sip by sip, I grew morose and sank back into my chair, clutching my mug. My turn to be the cranky, sullen one, I guess.

"Miss Jessie?" Francis said, after our empty plates had been cleared away.

"I just miss home," I said softly, and covered a trembling bottom lip with another healthy slug of hoppy amber brew.

"Of course," he conceded. And then slowly, tentatively, as if testing the ice on a newly frozen pond, he asked: "Will you tell me about it?"

"What's to tell?" I asked with a shrug. "I live in a coral condo complex with in-shell cleaning service and a parking spot for my seahorse."

He grinned slyly at me and reached forward and took my ruined hand between his. He pressed it gently, then leaned forward and fanned his lips out over the knuckles.

"Uh. Okay, what now?" I asked, staring at him.

"I have been thinking," Francis said softly. "That nobody here knows who we are. Of what we are to one another."

"Well, they're getting a pretty good idea now," I hissed, ducking my head low so no one else in the crowded public room could read my lips. "What the hell are you doing? What about your precious Miss Gale?"

"She is not here, and you are." He sent a flirtatious, smouldering look up through his eyelashes at me, and pushed his kisses onward, over the rim of my glove. They were wet and warm against the underside of my wrist, moist against the cuff.

"I'm confused," I said. Flutters ran up my skin, tingling in the bend of my elbow, lancing into my chest, making my heart stutter and my breath go shallow. "I thought we were done. You're marrying her."

"Yes, but you have made it clear that your desire for pleasure --"

"Where did you get this idea that--"

"Do you think people don't talk to one another, Jessie? That the grooms didn't see you playing the rake with Miss Martin? That they wouldn't tell me?" Francis' hand slid up my arm, his face lifting, tucked close, breath warm against my neck.