"Too bookish" had been used to describe her on more than one occasion, and that came from men who spent just as much time with their books as she did! The descriptive "cold fish" and the ever-popular "painfully proper" had also been applied to her, according to Kelsey.
Meredith sighed. He was grateful for her help, and that was the limit of his feelings for her. She hadn't seen desire in his eyes, she'd seen gratitude. And all his talk about honor was simply a smoke screen so he wouldn't have to kiss her again!
He didn't find her sexually attractive in the least. She had waited for him each night, hoping that he'd need comfort and come to her. But when she awoke at dawn, she found the other side of her bed cold and empty. With a body as unremarkable as hers, was it any wonder he had thought she was a boy that first night?
"Merrie-girl!"
Meredith blinked hard, bringing her thoughts back to the present. She forced a smile and waved at Griffin, suddenly uneasy in his presence. Could he tell she'd been thinking of him?
He stood up in the cockpit. "She is a fine little sloop. With this boat, I could sail across the Atlantic and back by myself!"
"We're going to Bath," Meredith said, "and no farther."
He sent her a powerful smile and her knees grew weak. "Ah, but Merrie, I would show you the world, if I could. Come on board, and we'll sail away this very moment."
At his casual words, a tremble of uncontrolled regret shook her to the core. If only it were so simple. If only he wanted her. But no matter how far they sailed, nothing would change the fact that they were simply friends, two strangers who had been thrown together by fate.
"Come, Merrie, let's take a sail around the harbor. I need to practice."
With a hesitant nod, she picked up the groceries and headed toward the boat. Griffin deftly leaped onto the dock and took both bags from her arms, then helped her into the cockpit.
"All right," Merrie said. "You're the captain."
"And you'll make a fine first mate, Merrie-girl. Now, go forward and cast off that line for me."
Meredith arched her eyebrow at his suddenly stern manner, then did as she was told. Today, they would sail for fun. But tomorrow, they would sail to Bath, and once again they would try to find a way for him to return to his own time.
And if they succeeded, Griffin would be gone from her life. Forever.
The salt breeze skimmed across the water, kicking up sprightly whitecaps on the blue surface of the wide Pamlico River. Mare's-tail clouds trailed across the azure sky, the colors a reflection of the sea below, where their white-sailed sloop sliced through the water.
Meredith sat in the cockpit and watched Griffin steer the boat before the brisk wind. They'd been on the water since sunrise, sailing across the Sound and up the Pamlico River. After their sail around the harbor the previous afternoon, Griffin had easily adjusted to the new technology of the sloop, instinctively knowing which lines controlled which functions. She was right-sailing hadn't changed much in the nearly three hundred years that stood between them. But then, Griffin had spent most of his life on the water.
They passed the time in idle conversation, Meredith relating stories of the breezy days she'd spent on her father's shrimp boat, wrapped in a blanket, her nose stuck in a history book; and the sunny days they'd spent in the harbor, her father teaching her to navigate the little sailboat he'd built for her. He'd been a man who loved the water and she had inherited his fascination with all things seaworthy. But like her father, she was wary of the weather, always keeping one eye on the horizon, ready for the worst.
She had hoped that talk of her life would encourage Griffin to speak of his own. She knew of his father and mother, but was still left to wonder just who Griffin Rourke really was.
Meredith sighed inwardly and stared up at the sky, watching a gull dip and sway on the wind. Though the day hadn't been conducive to enlightening conversation, at least it was perfect for sailing. Out on the Sound, she had bundled up against the wind. But once they reached the sheltered waters of the Pamlico River, the afternoon sun had warmed her. They ate a picnic lunch while still under sail near Pamlico Point, the place where the river emptied into the Sound.
It was nearly dinnertime when they made the turn into Bath Creek, a wide tributary more aptly compared to a river than a stream. The shallow draft of the sloop made navigating simple, but Meredith kept her eyes on the charts, anyway. The colonial town sat on the water's edge, much as it had in the early 1700s, when it served as the first port of entry and the seat of colonial government in North Carolina.
Griffin seemed suddenly still, staring beyond the bow of the boat at the small waterside town. The breeze fluttered in his hair, the only sign that he was a mortal man and not some marble likeness of an ancient sea god.
"Do you recognize anything?" she asked softly.
He nodded slowly. "Some. The shoreline looks a bit changed."
"More than a few storms have roared through here in the past three centuries," she explained.
"There are more houses in some places and less in others, but they have changed also." He cocked his head toward the bridge that spanned the creek ahead of them. "And that wasn't there."
"None of the structures from your time have survived. But there are some clues that have been found." She pointed off to the starboard. "Blackbeard had a home over there, on Plum Point, isn't that right?"
He nodded again, silently studying the wooded area. "He has built himself a fine home, for a pirate," Griffin murmured, as if he could see the house in his mind's eye. "Teach fancies himself quite a gentlemen. He hosts lavish entertainments at his home. And he boasts that there is not a home in the colony to which he wouldn't be welcome for dinner." The last was said with more than a trace of bitterness.
She found it so strange to hear him speak of Blackbeard as if the man were still alive. He didn't say much, but Meredith could see his anger toward the pirate simmering near the surface. Still, she felt a familiar sense of satisfaction in his simple explanation, the same feeling she had when she found an original source to confirm one of her historical suppositions. Everything he'd told her so far had slipped into the annals of history without much dispute.
Suddenly, she wanted to know everything she could about Blackbeard. If speaking of the pirate might keep Griffin here longer, then so be it. She would ask all the questions she wanted, without guilt or remorse. And her book would be better for Griffin's time here.
She would write down everything she told him and they would talk for hours about his experience. And then, when all the questions had been asked, she would know that he had been brought forward to help with her work and not to encourage her fantasy. But would he then disappear from her life? Or had Griffin Rourke been brought here to stay?
"There is a depression in the ground, right over there," she said. "And ruins from a foundation. And in a shallow field between the point and Bath, there was a round brick oven which we think was used by Blackbeard to boil tar for caulking his ships."
"I know the oven you speak of," he said distractedly. "I have seen it many times. When the tar boils, it can be smelled for miles."
"It's not there anymore. So many tourists came to visit it, they trampled the farmer's field, so he covered the oven with dirt and plowed it over. You can also see the ruins of the foundation of Governor Eden's house over there." She pointed across the port side.
"This seems familiar, the land and the water, yet it is not."
"Do you think you can find the place where you fell in?"
"It is here," he said.
"Here?" Meredith asked.
Griffin moved to drop the sails. She scrambled to the bow and grabbed hold of the anchor and heaved it in, playing out the line until she felt the anchor hit bottom. The boat drifted and then slowly stopped as the anchor held. As she crawled back to the cockpit, she saw Griffin smiling at her.