Page 189 of Once an Angel
She swept a floppy curl out of her eyes, leaving a pale smudge of flour on her cheek, and held up a teacup with no handle. "I made some paste for Penfeld's tea set."
Justin wondered how long she had been sitting out there alone. Shadows stained the fragile skin beneath her eyes. Her efforts seemed to have yielded little more than sticky fingers and sandy china. As they watched, a gaping fissure split the cup she was holding.
Her bereft sigh was more than Justin could bear. He ducked into the hut and returned with a small jar. "Kauri gum. Hand me that teapot and we'll give it a try."
Emily's grin swept away the last of the rum's stale fog. Their fingers brushed and lingered as he knelt
and took the spoutless teapot from her hand.
* * *
Penfeld threw open the door, inviting the brisk morning air into his lungs. He had awakened to an empty hut and was mortified to have outslept Justin. It wasn't that his master required any assistance wiggling into his dungarees, but a proper valet should always rise first.
He balled his hands and stretched, shading his tender eyes against the sunlight. He lifted his foot but mercifully glanced down before lowering it, realizing he was about to tread directly on someone's fingers. He hopped backward. His eyes widened as he took in the spectacle before him.
Justin and Emily lay in a heap, entwined like a pile of sleeping kittens, her arm looped across his stomach, his head pillowed on her thigh. Emily's cheeks were flushed. Justin's dark hair stirred in the morning wind. Beside them in the sand lay one of the sweetest sights Penfeld had ever seen.
The sun gleamed across the silver tray, kissing the sleek curves of the porcelain. They had rescued a handful of cups, the teapot, and the sugar bowl. What did it mar-ter that the china was webbed with thick brown gum and crusted with sand? Or that the spout of the teapot now hung upside down like the trunk of some morose elephant? Penfeld thought it all unbearably lovely.
He drew out his starched handkerchief and dabbed at his cheeks. "Silly sand," he muttered. "Always blowing in my eyes."
* * *
Later that same morning Emily danced around the hut, delighting in the musical sway of the flaxen
skirt. It hugged her hips, then flared around her legs in a graceful bell, granting her giddy freedom of movement. After nearly lynching herself, she had even managed to tie the calico scarf around her
breasts in a makeshift bandeau. She wished Miss Winters could see her now. The flowered material
bared enough skin to send the poky old headmistress past death into rigor mortis.
She folded Penfeld's ragged coat with tender hands. She was worse at sewing than she was at pasting together teapots and wouldn't have inflicted her seamstress skills on her worst enemy.
Not even on Justin.
Her hands paused in their motion. Her worst enemy, she thought. The man who had sat with her until dawn, using his exquisite patience to piece together shards of broken porcelain to cheer his friend. The man she had vowed to somehow destroy.
She tossed the coat on Penfeld's pallet. Today was to be her first taste of real freedom, and she refused
to dwell on such dark thoughts. The slant of the sun warned her she had slept past noon. Such decadence made her shiver with delight. She started for the door, but could not resist one last peek at Penfeld's tea tray. She had awoken alone on her pallet to find it displayed proudly beneath the window.
The sun illumined bulbous cracks patched with amber gum, but Emily had to admit it was a valiant effort. She leaned forward, lured by a hint of her reflection in an unbroken stretch of silver. She tugged at one
of her curls. It popped back like a coiled spring. She sighed. Why couldn't she have been born with a straight fall of ice-blond hair like Cecille du Pardieu?
The door swung open, and she thrust her hands behind her back, embarrassed to be caught primping. Miss Winters would never have tolerated such vanity.
Justin ducked beneath the lintel. "Thought I'd come back and see if Sleeping Beauty had decided to rise.
I was beginning to wonder if you were ever—" As his gaze lit on her, he stopped.
Emily held her breath as he reached up and slowly pulled off his hat. An odd tingle swept up her body
in the smoldering path of his gaze. Their easy banter of the previous night perished in its flame.
Laughing shakily, she spread her arms and spun around for his perusal. "Do I look like a native? Would Trini be pleased? Of course Trini wouldn't be pleased. He would be exultant. Or rhapsodic. Or—"
"You look fine." Justin's tone bordered on surliness.
