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“Simon Archard!” Emma slapped out a smouldering patch on the folds of skirt covering her thigh. “You had better have an – ouf! – damn good reason for this.”
The big, heavy body next to her, the thick folds of his coat falling across her legs, stirred and pushed up on one arm. Emma eyed him balefully, biting back the flash of relief that pulsed through her at the movement; when she’d seen him fall on the deck accompanied by the harsh retort of a pistol, she’d – well. It was better not gone into.
Instead she inserted a finger pointedly into one of the long tears in his coat, crooking it and tugging it out. “I see you had everything under control.”
“Thoroughly, Miss Bishop. I assure you.”
Emma narrowed her eyes and tugged the coat further away from his torso, revealing smooth, unblemished skin. She didn’t entirely manage to contain her startled outcry. “How did you – “
He coughed once, wrackingly, and then grimaced as he loosened one of the buttons that drew his shirt properly together all the way up to his neck. “You almost sound disappointed, Miss Bishop,” he observed austerely.
Emma gave him a filthy look.
“A mere trick of the light, I assure you,” he said. “Magic tricks are not my purview.”
“Nor mine, any longer,” she said sharply. “So I do hope you keep such reckless stunts as – “ she paused, looking at him. He raised an eyebrow.
Emma heaved a gusty, disgusted sigh. “ – as well-planned as you always have,” she finished.
A thin smile quirked his lips. “Certainly, Emma.” He rose; she clambered to her feet after him, wiping futilely at her soaked skirts. Well, at least she could comfort herself with the thought that in his heavy coat, boots and other layers, he would be dragging no less weight than she.
“I,” she muttered, dredging up her tattered parasol out of the vile greenish mud. “am missing the nice warm murder-filled inn right now."
"I am sure we will return to it shortly," he said. "And it will be no less morbid for the amount of time we have left it lonely."
"Wonderful," Emma said, and gave up on shaking layers of cloying slime off the parasol. "Well, at least it's not maggots."