Tender Wings of Desire Read online

  This caught Madeline’s attention.

  “What do you mean?”

  Caoimhe gave a little shrug. “There’s always been something about him that implied that he was having more fun than just making ends meet. Since he’s here, I thought it was just his personality. That is a gift, isn’t it? To be able to treat everything like a holiday no matter what you are doing. I wish I had that.”

  Madeline nodded, hoping that he was no longer looking at her. She snuck a little glance; he definitely still was. She looked away again. Caoimhe found all of this immensely entertaining.

  “Isn’t he a dish?”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Madeline replied, not even bothering to pretend she wasn’t lying. That only made Caoimhe laugh again and turn in his direction.

  “Hey, Harland!” she called over to him. Madeline was utterly mortified.

  “Don’t!” she hissed at the woman she thought was going to be her bosom friend.

  Harland looked over, his eyes still alluring, his smile still twinkling, and Madeline tried to keep her composure and not strangle Caoimhe where she stood. She decided that it would not be a good idea to strangle the woman who had given her a job. Madeline may not have been wise in the ways of the world, but she did know that.

  “Come over here!” Caoimhe said to Harland, causing Madeline’s heart to sink to the bottom of her ribcage in mortification. Perhaps, if she were lucky, she could just melt into the floor and stop existing.

  Even worse, Harland stood up and walked down the bar to sit in front of them. Although Caoimhe had called him over, he only seemed to have eyes for Madeline. This made her nervous, and to combat it she smoothed her hair down, as if that movement would chase away the fluttering she felt in her stomach.

  “What would you like from me, Caoimhe?” he asked with his eyes sparkling.

  “I am just asking you to be nice to our new worker,” she said with a wink. “She’s come a long way, dare I say. This may be her first job.”

  Madeline wondered if it were possible to sink into the floor and disappear. Harland leaned on the bar and looked at her with interest.

  “Is it? How old are you, lass?”

  His accent definitely sounded too cultured for an American farmer, and being a sailor meant that he wasn’t a member of the gentry. Did they have gentry in America? Did it matter as much as it did here? Madeline was finally beginning to regain a little of the composure she had lost since she first laid eyes on the man. Finally, she felt some measure of who she was returning, and it gave her enough strength to look into his eyes.

  “Old enough,” she replied daringly. He laughed.

  “A grown woman who has never worked a day in her life? You must have had quite the upbringing.”

  “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.

  “I am just admiring the view,” she said defensively.

  “Oh yes,” Caoimhe said with a wink. “Because that view changes so very often.”

  “You are unkind!” Madeline protested.

  “I am not!” Caoimhe insisted. “I am being…sisterly. Haven’t you ever had a sister before?”

  That part of the conversation gave her pause. Did she want her new life to include a sister? Would she have to invent some new story for herself in order to fit into this new world? How could she possibly explain Victoria to a person such as Caoimhe? Victoria, a girl who only wanted to marry, and marry well, and be a beautiful lady of a house for the rest of her days? More importantly, how could Madeline explain herself—a woman who’d had that life handed to her on a silver platter—only to throw it all away to work in a tavern by the sea?

  In her first week, Madeline had been nervous that one day her parents were going to walk into The Admiral’s Arms. Any ship that looked even slightly as if it might be carrying the gentry made her run and hide in the back, just in case one of them came in to have a drink before riding off to whatever manor they might be living in. Madeline knew that her fear was ridiculous; she was a solid two days’ ride from anywhere she would be known, and Mistle-Thrush-by-the-Sea was one small town in a sea of small towns. Finding her now would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

  However, a small part of her, a part that she did not want to admit existed, felt a little sad at the notion that her family had already stopped looking for her. Why would this bother her? It made her feel so incredibly silly to care about such a thing, especially knowing that she had been the one to leave.

  Did that matter? She was the impulsive teenager; she was the runaway bride. Her decision to leave had nothing to do with her love for them, but would her leaving change their love for her? Wasn’t a family’s love supposed to be eternal?

  After a week, she wrote a letter.

  Dear Mother and Father,

  I want you to know that I am safe where I am, although I cannot tell you where I am. I wish you well and hope that my sudden leaving did not cause you any undue pain, although I am not so arrogant as to believe that my actions did not cause some distress to the family, and for that I am truly sorry. It was never my intention to hurt anyone, and I hope that I have not hurt anyone now, but I accept that I might have.

  There is no way I could explain why I have done what I have done. There’s no excuse for what I have done, and for that I apologize. I just want you to know that I am safe, have the potential to be happy, and will never forget the family I love.

  Please tell Victoria that I hope that she will become happy in her life, however that happens, and tell Winston that I trust that he understands.

  All my love,

  Madeline

  She thought about sending it—she almost did, but instead she tucked it away in the bottom of her traveling bag, now emptied of clothing, and hid it under her small, modest bed.

  “He does this sometimes, more often than you would think,” Caoimhe said as Madeline looked longingly out the window at the beginning of her second week of work. Madeline did not know what she was talking about and told her as much. Caoimhe rolled her eyes for effect and swatted at her with a towel.

  “If that is your face when you are lying, you better not try to play cards with the sailors when they’re on leave.”

  Perhaps he was out to sea; as a sailor, that was his job. Perhaps he only came by once every six months, and Madeline had met him the night before he was to ship out forever. She did not know, she probably did not care, and she most definitely wasn’t thinking about him.

  Instead, she focused on getting to know the people she was working with, setting her sights first on Carson. He did not seem to mind, as he had taken to her with an almost brotherly affection. Madeline enj
oyed it because there were parts of him that reminded her of Winston, which was bittersweet.

  “I was never something so fancy as a lord,” Carson explained. “But my father did better than most in his family. As a banker, he made a decent wage. We did not grow up so bad.”

  “How did you end up here?” Madeline asked, and she was genuinely curious. This did not seem like the fate of a banker’s son, but then again being a barmaid did not seem like the fate of a lord’s daughter. Carson rubbed the back of his neck.

  “When my Pa died, he did not leave us much—had most of his assets wrapped up. I ended up joining the British Navy, which worked for a while, paid a decent wage, and when I got out I bought this little place. Decided it was as good a place as any to have a business, get married, have children.”

  “Are you married?” Madeline had no idea if this was a rude question to ask or not.

  “I was married,” he replied. “She died. Thank providence that Caoimhe came around when she did, or else I would have come undone.”

  At that moment, Caoimhe brought several freshly washed tankards to the bar. Carson fell completely silent, and Madeline quickly looked away from her, lest Caoimhe become aware that they were discussing her. Of course, being a woman of some intelligence, Caoimhe wasn’t fooled one bit. She looked at Madeline and then at Carson, her eyes narrowing slightly before she moved off to help one customer or another.

  “It is good that you had her when you did,” Madeline said quietly in the hopes that Caoimhe could not hear. Carson just nodded before averting his eyes and going back to work.

  Later on, Madeline wondered how long Carson had been in love with Caoimhe, and if he even knew that was the case.

  By the end of the week, Madeline had most definitely forgotten about Harland, which was why it was such a surprise when she walked out of The Admiral’s Arms one night and came face to face with him.

  He was leaning against the very hitching post she had tied Persephone to the first day she arrived at Mistle-Thrush-by-the-Sea. His arms folded over his chest, he looked at her as if she were the only thing he wanted to see at this particular point in time. Once again, she felt that dizzy, sick feeling of being both hot and cold at the same time, and as she walked to him she felt as if her knees were screwed too loose, that she might trip and fall at any moment. If that were to happen, she both desperately wanted him to catch her and also could not stand the idea of him touching her.