A Midnight Clear (5 page)

He raised his head, frowning as he remembered the conversation with Suzanne. He’d also made a commitment to her sister. And to Frances, indirectly.

Frances manages everything. She has no time to know what makes her happy.

He perhaps couldn’t convince her to marry him… but he could keep his promise to help her figure out what made her happy. To give her that time.

But first, he needed information from the source itself. No more skulking around.

He pulled out a pen and paper and began to write:

Dear Miss Dumfries,

I understand that you have no wish to become a Navy wife. And I have no wish to force you into such a thing. I also have no desire to use a connection with you or your father to further my career. I regret if my intentions toward you were unclear.

What I wish is to get to know you. I already know you could not be happy as an officer’s wife. I have already declared my duty to the Navy. But between those things, we might find a friendship, one we could both enjoy. (I must confess, I also promised a particular someone I would see to your happiness, and I fear for my life should I let her down.)

Let me declare my intentions then: I wish for you to be happy. So tell me, Miss Dumfries: What would make you happy? What have you dreamed of enjoying? Tell me and I’ll make it happen for you.

Yours,

Midshipman First Class Joseph Reynolds

Frances fiddled with the bow on her dress. She hated trimmings. Did she need a beaded bow to make it a party dress? She should never have let Suzanne talk her into it. And she never should have said yes to Dana Robbins—he of the octopus hands and the insincere smiles.

Right then, as if her thoughts had conjured him, he wheedled around the table. “One lemonade, as ordered.” He set it down and leaned over her, waiting for… something.

What could he want? “Thank you,” she offered.

No, that must not have been it. He kept looming.

“I… that is, do you want to dance?” She hoped he’d say no. She wasn’t a great dancer, but neither, she’d discovered, was Dana. His style of leading was somehow both oozy and overpowering. She’d wanted to leave after the first dance, but that would have attracted even more attention than the admiral’s daughter walking into a dance on a midshipman’s arm for the first time in more than a year. No, she’d gotten herself into this mess: She had to see it through.

Which wasn’t even to acknowledge the real reason she didn’t want to dance sitting across the room. She could feel
his
—Joe’s—eyes on her.

“Nah.” Dana answered her question as he slouched into his chair next to hers. “We can sit this one out.”

Frances sent up a silent prayer of thanks and sipped her lemonade. It was weak and room temperature and it reminded her of the ratafia in Georgette Heyer.

At the thought, she snuck a glance at Joe. He’d arrived without a date, which had pleased her unaccountably. However, he’d danced plenty, with seemingly every girl in Annapolis—except for her, of course. At the moment, he was sitting without a partner in front of an enormous papier-mâché turkey, which tied into the night’s Turkey Trot theme. Somehow he still looked dignified even with the bird behind him. Dana couldn’t manage that feat without it.

Even now, chatting with the boy next to him and gesturing absurdly during some story about a training drill, Dana looked foolish. His entire air was entitled, without any reason to be.

“I was sorry the Admiral wasn’t there when I picked you up,” he said, turning back to her. The words were pitched entirely too loudly. They carried even over the band playing “Little White Lies.” Several heads turned toward them.

“He’s often late at the office,” she replied, softly enough that he canted toward her. That wasn’t the outcome she wanted—particularly when his breath reeked of alcohol.

She’d wondered if that was what all those long trips to the men’s room had been about. Now she knew for sure.

“A hard worker, the Admiral?” Dana said, or shouted rather. He needn’t have bothered: Everyone knew who she was.

“Disciplined too. Almost ascetic,” she said drily, trying to calculate her father’s daily intake of scotch.

But true to form, Dana didn’t get the message. “He loves art?” At this, he draped his arm over the back of her chair and resumed his looming.

She pursed her lips. She didn’t care that Dana confused
ascetic
and
esthete
, but she couldn’t see a man who didn’t understand when she was making a joke.
There was no way she could get through this evening.

She’d accepted Dana’s offer in no small part because of Joe’s note. She wasn’t comfortable by what Joe seemed to think he saw when he looked at her. She might have taken over some extra responsibilities when her mother had died, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t have any fun. And it really didn’t mean that she didn’t know what she wanted out of life.

All the flowers and the books and the journals and the brief, annoying conversations: He didn’t,
he couldn’t
, have sensed all of that about her. It was wrong. He was wrong. He had to be.

And so she’d broken her rules with the next boy brave enough to ask her out directly. It had been the wrong thing for the wrong reason, but she’d paid enough for her mistake.

She leaned as far away from Dana as she could without toppling over. “Mm. Look, I feel a headache coming on.”

“Oh, too bad. Do you want me to see if one of the girls has something?”

“No, I’d really rather leave.”

He tipped his body so no one else could see. “I have”—he pulled open his coat to reveal a flask in his interior pocket—“this. A tipple might help.”

She shook her head firmly. “I don’t think it will. I want to go home.”

“Are you certain you don’t want to stay for a few more dances?”

“We’re not dancing now.”

“But there are more people to meet.”

Oh yes, because that was what this was truly about. She stood and picked up her evening bag. “I don’t want to spoil your night. I can find my way home.”

He relaxed into his chair. “As long as you don’t mind.”

She was astonished. Her entire purpose had been served when she’d arrived with him; now he didn’t need her anymore. She didn’t mind
per se
, but she couldn’t believe that he—even he—would abandon her when she’d told him she didn’t feel well. At least his rudeness meant she didn’t have to navigate a goodnight kiss.

“Not at all. I would rather go.” She made some apologies to the others seated at their table and went to retrieve her coat.

She was explaining to the girl at the check counter why she didn’t have the claim ticket when Joe rounded the corner.

He blinked several times, looking around. “Where’s Robbins?”

“Back at the table, I think.”

“You’re going home alone?”

She nodded as Joe dug in his pocket and set his ticket down on the counter. Surprisingly, he was not grinning in triumph at finding her alone.

The girl held up Frances’s coat. “Is it this one?”

“Yes.”

Joe held out his hand and the girl annoyingly gave it to him. “Mine too, please.” He turned toward Frances. “Allow me.”

She wanted to decline, no matter how courtly he was. She wanted to be at home. She wanted none of this evening to have happened.

But instead, she set down her bag and turned. She could feel his eyes on the back of her neck—why hadn’t she worn her hair down? When she slid one arm into her coat, his gaze was replaced by his breath because he’d come closer. He would have to, of course. It was the nature of the task, but Joe reconfigured distances. This wasn’t a few feet: It was close enough to hear the way his clothes rustled, to smell his after-shave.

She glanced up at him, over her shoulder, and the heat and open wanting in his eyes made her feel as if he were taking her clothes off, not putting them on and… why was she thinking about that? Joe was never going to see her without clothing.

She pulled her coat on as fast as she could and whipped around. She grabbed her bag and opened it to search for some change with which to tip the girl. One of her mother’s rules was never to leave for a date without some mad money, and somehow, Frances had done precisely that. She was out of practice and ill-prepared for cads.
 

But Joe was already putting money down and shrugging into his coat. “I’m taking you home,” he said to her. “I won’t brook any argument.”

Of course he wouldn’t. He’d already proven he didn’t understand
no
when it came from her lips. She watched as he pulled on his gloves and coiled his scarf around his neck. It was a lovely long thing knitted in blue with yellow stripes. She wanted to ask who had made it for him, but she didn’t dare. She didn’t want to know anything more about him.

Outside, several cabs were waiting. He opened the door of one and she slid in and gave her address.

When Joe was next to her, he asked quietly, “Can you tell me why you broke your rules for Robbins?”

She chuckled and looked outside. Of course he saw Dana as a threat and not as a diversion—or a horrible mistake. He didn’t know her quite as well as he thought. She rubbed her fingers over the glass. The inky, foggy night smeared against the windows.

When she spoke, she didn’t answer Joe, at least not directly. “I do too have fun.”

He shuffled in his seat and waited for her to go on.

“And I know what I want and not just what I don’t want.”

“Oh good. I’ve been waiting for weeks for you to tell me. What do you want?”

She didn’t have the courage to look at him as she said, “I want to fly. Not like you fly, not literally, in a plane. I want… freedom. Not to be without obligations, but to find freedom within them, somehow. And this must sound insane.”

He scooted closer, until she knew that he must be directly beside her. He wasn’t touching her, though she didn’t trust herself to look at him again.

“It doesn’t sound crazy at all,” he said softly.

“So I said yes to Dana to prove it was true. And because he seemed safer than you.”

“What’s unsafe about me?”

You make me think irrational things. You make me suspect all my rules are wrong. You make me doubt everything I know about the world. And if I’m wrong about everything, there’s a chance I could end up with nothing.

All she said was, “I’m back to not dating midshipmen.”

“I told you I’m not asking you to date me.”

She laughed without any humor. It scared her that he was lying. It scared her more that he might be telling the truth.

Down this way, danger lurked, but she asked what she wanted to know anyway, “What do you want, Joe?”

“I want to fly too. And I want to serve others.”

She nodded. How very proper of him. “How do you know when you serve you’ll keep something for yourself?”

“Service, duty—they refill the well, they don’t drain it.”

Tell me that in a few years
. It was easy for him to spout that—he hadn’t been in Navy life as long as she had. But she didn’t say anything.

The taxi turned one corner and then another. They were nearly at her house now. She might never be alone with him again.

So she took a deep breath and looked at Joe. His gaze—wondering, intense—was on her.

“Is that what I am to you? Service?” she asked.

“No, pursuing you is entirely selfish.”

Before she could process his comment, the car came to a shuddering stop. Joe paid the driver. He opened the door, stepped out, and then offered her a hand. This was one of those moments, one of those choices you might make without realizing it was a choice, without knowing it was a moment when everything might change. Except Frances could feel the weight of it pulling against her, riveting her in cab as she pondered.
 

Did she exit on her own, and stick with the rules she knew and trusted? Or did she take his hand and change the game? And if she did—what he if were cold and ambitious and awful?

All of the little choices, the trivial ones, about bows and dresses and dates, were adding up to the only big choice a woman had. It was never merely a cab ride or letting him touch her again—never mind that they were both wearing gloves—it was everything. It was the rest of their lives.

Based on Joe’s expression, he knew it too.

In the end, she placed her hand in his. His fingers closed around hers, warm and certain. Something surged in her, and she rose to meet him.

He didn’t let go of her, though of course she hadn’t expected him to. Joe was giving her a choice, but he was going to take every inch she yielded.

The cab squealed off, whipping around a corner.
 

“You should have asked him to wait.” She kept her gaze on the last spot the cab had been. “You’ll never get another here, and it’ll be a long walk back to the barracks.”

“I won’t be cold.”

The air around them was thick with fog. Each of their exhalations added to it, until it seemed as if they were in a circle of light surrounded by clouds.

“Feels like winter,” she said, needing to fill the space with something, anything.