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winsome and unaffected and he was far from blind to her charms.
    Around him, the din of conversation steadily swelled to fill the cramped confines of the dining saloon. Stewards circled the candlelit table, pouring wine. When they’d served the last of the passengers, Captain Raney rose to his feet and waited as a hush fell over the room.
    The captain looked up and down the board. “My lord, ladies and gentlemen, as you all must know by now, we’ve suffered the loss of one of our company.” He turned to Miss Whitwell. “With your permission, I wish to drink to the memory of your father. I didn’t know him long, but I feel privileged to have met him and to have sailed with such a man—a gentleman of boundless energy, a loving father, and a credit to his country.” He raised his glass. “To Lord Whitwell.”
    Unsociable David might be, but he was hardly so callous as to refuse to toast a dead man. He lifted his glass along with the others, joining in the chorus. “To Lord Whitwell.”
    He drank the toast mechanically and set to work on the dinner before him, doing his best to concentrate on his food. Despite a fine cream of leek soup and a roast leg of lamb, however, he couldn’t stop picturing Miss Whitwell’s face as she’d taken her place at the table. For that matter, images of her had been running through his head all day. He liked her shy smile, and the way her cheeks turned rosy whenever anyone paid her a compliment. Then there were her happier smiles—the ones that brought dimples to her cheeks and sometimes even a mischievous glint to her eyes, like the time when she’d told him that awful pun. And her laugh... She had the most musical laugh he’d ever heard, light and silvery and joyful.
    He hoped it was only a misplaced sense of kinship, these feelings he had for her. After all, as she’d pointed out to him just that morning, he’d lost a father too.
    With a grimace, David picked up his wineglass and drained it. Try as he might, he could never forget the day his father died. No, not died —that word was too polite, too commonplace. His father had blown his brains out .
    For some reason, he’d chosen a bright summer day to do it, a day of blue sky and birdsong. The tranquil country afternoon had seemed perfect for fishing, and in his nine-year-old enthusiasm David had escaped his tutor to go poking about the south garden, digging for worms to use as bait. When the shot rang out through the open window, literally only a few feet from his head, the report was so sudden and so loud he froze, his ears ringing and his heart racing out of time. His face felt wet. He looked down to discover blood spattering the front of his clothes. It was only in the next minute, as the servants burst in to his father’s study and raised a hue and cry, that he realized it wasn’t his own blood spotting his jacket, but his father’s.
    Even now, nothing about that day made sense. His mother had died of childbed fever, and his father had been the only strong, dependable authority figure in his life, the one person in whom he had absolute faith. Yet somehow, it appeared that this respected and admired demigod had either been a dangerous lunatic or had committed an atrocious crime against God.
    The ship’s steward appeared again at David’s elbow, recalling him to the present. “More wine, my lord?”
    “Thank you.” As the steward refilled his glass, David looked up the length of the table to where Miss Whitwell sat. Unexpectedly, her eyes met his. He braced himself for her look of wounded reproach.
    Instead she gazed back at him with—understanding?
    He looked away. No. More than likely, the poor girl was simply lost in a fog of grief. He’d sleepwalked his way through the days following his own such loss, and at least he’d had a home and position he could call his own.
    David reached again for his wineglass. In the aftermath of his father’s suicide, everyone had spoken to him in hushed tones, from the servants