Page 17 of A Shore Thing

“Stop. Now.”

But he hadn’t even gotten started.

“The rake. A genius. Your genius. Kit Griffith—the very artist you sought!”

She didn’t respond.

“Can you believe it? Did you suspect? Your eyes were glued to him, but I thought his cheekbones had caught your fancy. Was it his prodigious talent?”

“I am as surprised as you are.”

“But are you as delighted as I am?”

“I sincerely doubt it. You’re about to turn somersaults.”

“I haven’t turned a somersault in thirty years. But you know, I’d consider it, if this suit weren’t white flannel.” James spread his arms. “I could caper instead. What constitutes a caper? I think it’s a kind of skipping. Skipping in a circle, perhaps?”

He dropped his arms and bumped her with his shoulder. “Muriel. Are you in shock? It often manifests first as stupor. If I had my sphygmograph, I’d check for hypotension.”

Muriel gazed past him, across the fields and rolling hills toward the sea. Perhaps it was a clinical syndrome, this bizarre sensation—a sizzle cased in ice.

Would that make it easier to treat?

James took her wrist.

“Are you counting my pulse?” She jerked her arm away. “I’m not in shock. I suppose I might have guessed he was an artist. It’s artists who move to St. Ives. But he didn’t seem like an artist.”

“Because he wasn’t sitting at an easel? What are artists like?”

She thought of the artists she’d known. Chen Wei, who cultivated dwarf trees in his gardens—some bent ingeniously into the shapes of animals—and contributed satirical cartoons to the newspapers. Pamela Richard, the watercolorist with whom she’d traveled along the Min River, never married, and never long in any one part of the world. Nrityalal Dutta, the woodcut printmaker with the press in Calcutta. A handful of botanical illustrators, most of them botanists themselves, their pictures scrupulous, their personal lives, varied. And then there were the plein air painters she’d observed in St. Ives. Some looked like gentlemen, and others looked like bohemians, and two of the women wore tam-o’-shanters.

“Never mind,” she muttered. “I have no generalization to offer about artists. He’s not what I was expecting, that’s all. Don’t ask what I expected. I’m not sure.”

“Someone less rakish.” James started whistling. A cow stood nearby and swung her neck to look at him.

“Hello, darling,” he said, then narrowed his eyes at Muriel. “You should offer him a night in your bed in exchange for the paintings.”

She tripped and took a short hopping step, her scowl aimed unfairly at the cow. “That’s absurd. I will offer him financial compensation for his paintings, as is generally done.”

“Then what’s the point of his being a rake?”

“There is no point,” she muttered. “Not as far as I’m concerned. It’s an extraneous fact.”

Nonetheless, her heart began to pound. Over the past day and a half, she’d thought of the rake far too often—not the rake. Griffith. It would help if she didn’t think of him as a rake at all, and certainly not as a good rake. A fugitive from every stifling convention, luxuriating in voluptuous freedom, daring her to join him with the glint in his eye, with the curl of his lips.

Not her in particular. That much was clear.

“He’s had at least three lovers named Muriel already.” She spoke with too much heat. “He’s always in and out of women’s beds. The exchange you propose doesn’t even make sense. It’s backward. I should offer something for a night with him.”

“Blimey.” James stopped short and faced her. “You should.”

She cleared her throat. “I didn’t mean I should should. I was critiquing your logic. I meant a night with me isn’t a sufficient incentive for a man like him.”

“Muriel.” James put his hand on his heart. “We’ve known each other a very long time. But believe me when I say you’re a raving beauty.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I might believe you. If you hadn’t once said I resemble a trout.”

“I never said any such thing.” He sounded indignant. “But now that you mention it, you do sometimes give me a troutlike look, a sort of open-mouthed frown. Like right now.”