A Scandal to Remember (39 page)

She wrapped her hands around his back, molding her soft supple body to his chest, felt the pillowed push of her breasts against the taut skin of his chest. He let them sink with their mouths and tongues enmeshed, but she thrashed away from him.

She shot to the surface and he came up next to her, to hear her gasping for air. He reached for her to steady her and buoy her up, but she mastered her fear and her memories. “I want something different,” she said. “Something new.”

And he thought she meant that she wanted to erase the memories of the shipwreck and the dark water closing over her with a newer, better experience of the water, but something just as lasting.

“I’ve got you.” He kissed her again. “I’ll hold you up.” He cupped one hand beneath her nape, and the other across the small of her back, until she tipped her head back into his hand and floated upon her back, a pale, erotic lotus blossom upon the surface of the water.

She half closed eyes that had gone wide and dark with arousal, but his gaze had already strayed because the pink tips of her breasts were tightened into buds, pointing skyward, begging for his kiss.

He covered her with his mouth, tonguing and sucking until her back arched and her hips rose to the surface—the pale topography of her another island he wanted to explore. His own body tightened and stretched in response, his erection curving away from his body. He slipped behind her and floated up underneath, his hands cradling and teasing her breasts, his fingers rolling and tweaking the furled sensitive peaks. The slight weight of her body above his assuaged his savage need to have contact with her only a little. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

He pulled them back toward the sand, towing her slowly, taking his time. Kissing her ears and nose and eyes and lips, until his thighs were out of the water, and he sat, waist deep in the shallows, with water lapping across their bodies. Out of the water her breasts took on a pleasant gravity in his hands, full and round. He fitted her snug against him, with her back against his chest. His rampant erection assuaged by the heat and friction between their bodies, the caress of skin against skin. His cock held between the taut globes of her sweet arse.

He kissed the side of her neck, and worked his way down along the long slide of sensitive tendon to the delicate line of her collarbone. Wrapped his legs with hers and teased her thighs open. He could see the soft tangle of hair covering her sex. Splayed his dark hand across the taut white flesh of her belly, sliding lower, scooping his thumbs across the erotic little hollows at the top of her thighs. Placed his hands on the inside of her thighs and pulled them wide apart, so he could look down over her shoulder and see her. So she could look down and see his hands on her body, and watch what he did to her.

Because he knew he was already aroused beyond all expectation and all experience. Nothing could compare to the feel of this woman in his arms. Nothing could compare to making love to her out of doors in the broad daylight, where there was no mistaking the flush of her skin and the heated response of her heightened breathing.

It was new and different and supremely, extraordinarily erotic.

*   *   *

Making love out of doors. Living with a man, with her lover, sharing everything that she had and everything that she was, as openly and honestly as the first man and the first woman in the Garden of Eden. It was all new and different and absolutely marvelous.

She felt as if she were discovering who she really was beneath the layers and years of duty and arranging things just so. She was emerging like a snail from within its shell to find that she was beautiful.

Because she could see that she was beautiful in his eyes.

Just as he was in hers.

And she wanted to see him. She wanted to meet him eye to eye, lip to talented, taut lip. She turned in his arms, and crawled atop him, straddling his waist, clasping her heels together behind his back to snug herself up tight, and press the wanton part of her body against him.

She liked that she could look at him, and kiss him, and be an equal to him in this new dance they did together. All she had to do was whisper his name into his ear, and he was there, his mouth on hers, warm and firm. She did as he did, and learned from him, taking his lip carefully between her teeth, and worrying at it for a long, sweet moment before she bit down enough to show him that she wanted him at least as much as he wanted her.

She liked that she could wrap her arms around him, and hold him close, and run her fingers through his short, wet hair. She liked that he could close his big strong hand around the back of her neck, and pull her close, and hold her face still before him to kiss her tenderly. And then not so tenderly, but with heat and need and hunger.

She liked the warm sound of abandonment that flew up from her throat, and the answering sound of possessiveness that came from his.

And then he did the thing that she liked best—he looked into her eyes, and held himself perfectly, absolutely still, and looked at her. As if she mattered to him. As if she were the only thing in the whole of the world that mattered.

And he said the words that he knew would enflame her. “I want you, Jane. I want to put myself in you, and feel the sweet heat of your body.”

And what she heard, and what she saw when he spoke so, and looked at her with those relentless, unfathomable green eyes, was that he cared for her, and would care for her as long as possible.

And she knew that she loved him.

And knew she would go on loving him until the end of her days.

When she was old and gray and nodding in her armchair before a warm fire at home on the Isle of Wight, this was what she was going to remember. This moment with this man looking at her as if she were the rarest creature in creation. Looking at her with admiration. Making her love herself. Sharing the most extraordinary time of her life.

“Thank you,” she whispered in his ear.

“You are welcome.” He smiled and kissed her and raised her up just enough so that he could find her entrance before he lowered her slowly upon him.

She could not look at him then, could not bear the erotic weight of his gaze without flying into a hundred pieces. She ducked her head, and set her lips to the pulse in his throat. She could feel the hectic beat of the blood in his veins, and taste the salt tang of his skin. She did as he had done, and plied her teeth along the strong tendon at the side of his neck, nipping her way back toward his mouth.

And when she kissed him, he took her bottom lip between his teeth and bit down, just enough, just enough to arouse her and mark her as his.

Her breathing fractured, and her eyes slid shut against the liquid silver glare of the water. Her breasts rose, and fell against his chest in blissful torturous friction, each breath sending a tongue of flame licking deeper, and deeper still.

And he felt it too. His head went back, and his eyes clamped shut in an attitude of blissful agony. “Jane, Jane, Jane.”

And she answered with her body pressing in time to his, following the cadence and the gentle lap of the waves against her back. And then there was nothing else but him. Nothing but his heat and his care and his passion. Nothing but the bliss he gave her like a gift.

A groan of pure uncensored pleasure shuddered out of him and into her, and he began to stroke in and out of her—long languid thrusts she felt from the pebbled tips of her breasts all the way down the tender insides of her thighs and on to the toes that dug into the coarse, wet sand for purchase. It was too much and not enough. It was everything.

And then his hand slicked down through the water between them to find the very center of her being and touch her just so, sending her careering over the edge. Losing herself to him, and finding herself all at the same glorious moment in time.

Chapter Twenty-three

“We can’t stay here forever, you know.”

Jane looked across the low burning fire at Dance, who stared into the glowing coals as if they might foretell the future. After the few blissful days of sun, the wind had shifted to the southwest, and brought back the yellow-streaked, dismal dawns. In the face of such foreboding gloom, the warmth of the fire had seemed comforting.

“I know,” she hedged. “But it seems silly to think about it until the boat is repaired.”

He had gone at it with a vengeance the afternoon before, dragging woods of various kinds down from the hill, and fashioning a sort of mallet with some of her collecting tools.

“What is the great hurry?”

He looked at her then, and it was as if he were suddenly standing twenty feet off instead of two, so great was the distance in his gaze. “You are a naturalist, Jane. Surely you know the natural consequence of our copulation.”

The word itself was a slap. “Copulation?” As if they were animals and had not chosen this physical intimacy, this spiritual bond with one another of their own accord and free will. As if he had not treated her with infinite care. “Don’t be deliberately cruel.”

“I’m not trying to be cruel.” He ran his hand through his hair in a well-recognized gesture of frustration. “I’m trying to be a realist. You could be with child. Or you will be shortly if we keep on the way we’ve started.” His scowl was small and tight to cover the rising color in his cheeks. “It’s inevitable.”

“Not so inevitable as all that.” They had never discussed such an intimate thing before. Indeed, she had never discussed such an intimate thing with
anyone
before. She had never discussed with anyone that her courses were irregular at best, and that they had stopped months ago at the start of the voyage, long before she had ever even dreamt of physical intimacy with him. “I have no reason to think that I am fertile. Indeed, I have reason to think the opposite.”

“Jane.” He shook his head, and suddenly there was no distance between them, because he had come to her, and had put his arms around her and was holding her tight. “We can’t stay here forever. We can’t. Sooner or later we will need to leave. Or someone—anyone, friend or foe—could find us. We have to be prepared.”

The practical part of her—the part that made lists and weighed possibilities and arranged everything just so—agreed. “I know it can’t be forever. But why can it not be for now? Why can we not enjoy this time while we are here?”

He laughed, a rueful sound full of self-rebuke. “Devil take me, Jane. If I enjoy you any more, I’d be a cad.”

She would not accept such one-sided logic. “How can you be a cad if I enjoy you as much.”

“Do you really?”

“How could you have any doubt?” He was looking at her in a way that made her feel rather like she was the specimen being examined. Rather like he was taking note of each and every movement or muscular twitch, or the variations in her coloring.

But he could not be. He wasn’t like her. He wasn’t a scientist. He wasn’t observant. He was just a man with nothing better to do now that he was beached like a whale upon the sand. He was frustrated and out of sorts, without any real employment for his talents. And resentful that she did.

“Surely someone else must be missing you?” He would not let the matter drop. “Your family? The other J. E. Burke?”

“I don’t know.” She gave him the bitter truth. “I don’t think so. I honestly have no idea if they would even take me back after what I’ve done, were I to try and go home.”

“Won’t you? Where else would you go?”

The question was like another slap, stinging her face with unexpected heat. “I don’t know.” She let the terrible silence stretch out horribly between them, hurt that he could not, or would not see what she had thought so obvious—that they would somehow be together. That their time together meant something more. That she meant something more than a temporary mistr—

She could not even think the word.

“Were I you,” he finally said, “I would not be so quick to abandon my family.”

“But I have. And it is done.” And then it occurred to her—that she knew nothing of Dance beyond her own experience of the man. She knew he was kind and loyal and brave and steadfast—almost to a fault. But she had no idea—she had never asked—if there were others in
his
life. A family, or God forbid, a wife.

No. No, he could not be so cruel.

But fate had been cruel before.

That truth made her feel light-headed and dizzy, as if she were still at sea in the bobbing little pinnace. But she gathered her courage like fistfuls of sand, and asked. “What of you? What of your family?”

He looked at her, and his expression was so bleak, her heart felt as if it had been torn into ragged tatters. “I have no family.”

Jane had braced herself for a blow that didn’t come. “No family? Surely there is—was—someone?” People had to come from somewhere and someone.

“My mother passed away some years ago. While I was at sea.”

The hollowness in his voice rebuked her. “I’m so sorry.”

He tried to be philosophical. “It was years ago. After Trafalgar.” He rested his elbows on his drawn-up knees. “I didn’t know it until quite some time after. I was posted to a new ship in the aftermath of the battle and the hurricane that nearly did for us what the French and Spanish never could. But the letter from the parish vicar finally reached me nearly a year after she had died. And by then…” He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. “I had been away for six years by then, and had already ceased thinking of her very much.”

Jane suddenly thought of her own mother. She had never thought that her mother would not be there when she came back. She
had
worried that someone so concerned with appearances would not welcome her back into her home, but she had never thought that she might be dead. It was a sobering thought.

“And what of your father?”

He blew out a breath as if he had been holding it in expectation of the question. Dance turned to look at her. “I have no father.”

Again, Jane had to stifle the urge to point out the scientific impossibility of such an occurrence, but he amended that statement on his own. “At least I never met him.”

He waited while the cold hard truth of the matter settled into her mind. “Oh. You mean—”