The Calhoun Chronicles Bundle: The Charm School. Сьюзен Виггс
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to his startling handsomeness, but she wasn’t. Freshly dressed in fitted dark breeches and a blousy white shirt, he looked more outrageously attractive than ever.
She couldn’t help herself. She kept thinking of last night. It changed everything. Last night he had kissed her—too intimately to be dismissed as a friendly gesture, too lightly to be construed as true passion.
His regrets had come almost instantly, she recalled. He’d hastened to return to the house, and the rest of the evening he’d studiously avoided her while regaling his aunt with tales of his adventures at sea.
Isadora had somehow managed to endure the evening by sitting stiffly, her back rigid, nodding when spoken to and pleading fatigue far earlier than she should have, then disappearing into her chamber. She would have been able to get through today if she didn’t have to see Ryan. The longer she spent away from him, the more she could convince herself that their embrace had been a figment of her imagination.
But now she had to look him in the eye by the dazzling light of day. All the feelings he had stirred in her—the warmth, the yearning, the frustration, the ecstasy—had barely cooled and in fact heated anew when he came near.
She angled the flat brim of her straw hat over her eyes. “Was this your idea?”
“Good morning to you, too,” he said cheerfully.
Clearly, the night before hadn’t affected him at all. He was back to being the friendly, unconventional Ryan she’d known from the start.
“I don’t ride, you know,” she said.
“Before you boarded the Swan, you didn’t sail, either,” he replied.
“But there was a point to sailing. I have no idea what the point of riding an ass is.”
“Ah, you’ll see.” He grinned and went over to one of the burros. “Do you know how to mount it?”
She felt a blush splotching her neck and cheeks. “How difficult can it be?”
“I’ll hold its head and you get on.” He reached for the bridle. The animal bit at him, large yellow teeth snapping loudly. Ryan pulled his hand out of harm’s way. “This must be a female.”
“You are so amusing.”
He managed to hold the beast and she surprised herself by swinging easily into the saddle. The animal was small and short-legged, so that helped, and once settled astride, she understood completely why she had been made to wear the gaucho pants.
After they were both mounted, she looked across the courtyard at Ryan and burst out laughing.
“What?”
“Your noble steed,” she said. “What a picture you make. I should call you Don Quixote.”
“You are so amusing,” he said, mimicking her tone. “Come, Sancho. Our quest begins.”
“Our quest for what?”
“You’ll see.” He patted his saddlebag, then kicked his heels into the burro’s flanks. The little animal trotted forward, and Isadora’s mount followed.
She enjoyed the ride too much. She loved seeing the countryside from the back of a plodding burro. Everything passed with delicious slowness. They rode two abreast on the gravelly mountain pathways, winding downward toward the city. The hot, dry sun felt good. The hat brim shaded her face, but she could feel the brush of heat on her bare arms and the backs of her hands.
She and Ryan spoke little as they descended the steep road to the heart of Rio. Isadora kept thinking of the way Ryan had touched her, holding her as if she were something fragile and fine, something he didn’t want to hurt yet couldn’t let go.
Then she remembered that this was Ryan Calhoun. He had probably learned the seductive manner of embracing a woman from his countless lovers, and he’d honed it to a fine art. He had, in fact, come from the arms of another woman as if it didn’t matter whose embrace he shared. She was making a fanciful moment out to be too big an affair. They were together in a scented garden, coaxing an exotic animal out into the light, and the moment had been no more than that.
That’s all it was. That’s all it could ever be. That’s all she dared to want it to be.
“You’re living inside your head, Isadora,” Ryan called to her.
“What do you mean by that?”
He swept one arm out to encompass the view of the harbor, the sparkling waters and the distant mountains. “I’ve brought you to paradise and you’re scowling. What are you thinking about that makes you scowl?”
She felt the rash of a new blush. “Nothing. This is a different mode of travel for me, and I’m not used to it.”
“Well, try enjoying the scenery, and the travel won’t bother you so much.”
He was right, she discovered. Rio was endlessly fascinating, from the Fountain of the Laundresses with its chattering servants and energetic water boys stationed at the spigots to the fashionable rua do Ouvidor, where mysterious, bejeweled donas went about in curtained litters.
They visited the ship and watched the discharging of the cargo. Ryan’s next task was to check the inventory against that of the consignee, then come to a reckoning of a price.
“We’ll sail back with more specie than any other ship in Boston Harbor,” Ryan declared. “A hundred thousand pounds sterling.”
From anyone else, she would have dismissed it as an idle boast.
They tethered their mules at the edge of the vast, busy marketplace. Lusty voiced vendors hawked their wares from beneath gaily colored awnings. Some chanted rhymes or banged wooden clappers to get attention. Mounds of fruit, flowers, fish, cloth and every sort of small ware cluttered the market square.
Ryan took her hand. Isadora felt a twinge of pleasure but immediately denied it. He had grabbed hold of her because the crowd surged around him. Nothing more.
“Let’s shop,” he said.
“For what?” Her gaze took in a veritable banquet of sights and sounds—the fruit, the coffee and vegetables, hammered metals from the mountain mines, jerked beef and cod, ungainly sacks of beans and rice, brilliantly dyed cloth and bamboo cages with exotic birds.
“For everything,” Ryan declared.
She couldn’t help herself. She laughed with delight. No matter how exasperating he could be, Ryan Calhoun made everything fun.
The hours sped by as they walked through the market. They ate melons, letting the juice dribble down their chins. They sent a special fifty-pound sack of coffee to the Swan to take back to the Peabodys as a gift and bought a silver samovar for Arabella’s wedding gift. They picked out silver filigree earrings for Lily and Rose, a tortoiseshell comb for Fayette and a fancy cigar for Journey.
Ryan bought something else from the jeweler, but tucked the small box away before Isadora could see what it was. Doubtless a trinket for one of his lady friends, she thought with a stab of jealousy.
What a calamity it was, finding that she was jealous of harborside whores.
She thrust away the disgusting thought. She would not let it mar her day. If she must fix her hopes on a man, she should be thinking of Chad rather than allowing her attention to stray to such an inappropriate man as Ryan Calhoun. Chad had held her heart for so long. She would not turn her back on him for the sake of an inconstant, swaggering sea captain.
She knew better than to believe she meant anything to Ryan. She told herself to concentrate on her goal to be an asset to the company. She was too smart to open herself to heartache over Ryan Calhoun.
Having settled that issue in her mind, she hurried toward a brightly painted puppet theater. She laughed at the antics of a pair of marionettes, translating the silly story for Ryan.
“They fight like cats and dogs,” she said, pointing