Games of Pleasure (2 page)

Something bobbed, appearing and disappearing among the swells.

Ryder shaded his eyes. A scrap of wreckage, perhaps? Whatever it was, it had vanished.

He took a deep breath. Salt air filled his lungs. Rollers surged up the Channel. Spume splattered onto cliffs. Waves dashed and sucked on the shingle far below.

He loved this land. He loved Wyldshay, his ancestral home, his joy, his burden. He loved his family. His father, the aging duke, who delegated more and more responsibility to his elder son. His mother, brilliant and demanding and a light in society. His sisters, who would soon be fielding suitors of their own. And his younger brother, Wild Lord Jack—the wicked, interesting boy with the face of an angel who had left home long ago to drift about the world— gone again now with his new bride to India, while Ryder was left to both the duties and privileges of being the heir.

He had never resented it before, but now a small disquiet seemed to be gnawing at him like a mouse at a grain sack.

Ryder shrugged and urged his horse forward just as the flotsam lifted, closer to shore than he had expected. Dipping and spinning, it tossed haphazardly toward the headland.

He pulled up abruptly. A dinghy. Foundering, without oars, without rudder, spinning straight toward the rocks.

Yet something fluttered, almost out of sight behind the prow—a scrap of fabric?

Someone lay in the slosh of water in the bottom of the boat.

The gelding sank its haunches. Hooves slid on mud as the horse hurtled downhill through the jumble of dislodged trees and shrubs. Pebbles rattled, then showered past, when they reached the shingle. Riding full-tilt toward the surf, reins dropped onto his horse's neck, Ryder shed hat, cloak, and jacket. His heart hammered as he plunged his mount into the sea.

The gelding swam strongly. Cold water broke over Ryder's chest, soaking him. The saddle turned to soap beneath his thighs. He urged his horse to swim faster, his hands filled with wet mane and reins like damp rubber.

The sinking craft had disappeared among the waves.

The gelding's breath roared like dragon fire. Ryder shouted. The ocean swallowed the sounds in an infinity of moisture.

He circled his horse, shouting like a madman, when the little boat suddenly wallowed down the face of a breaker. Cold spume broke over Ryder's face.

Half blinded, he grasped at the gunnel.

A woman. Almost naked. Ivory flesh shone blue-white beneath her corset and a scrap of soaked chemise, her thighs and arms bare to the cold rain and the sea. Beaten iron-salt hair plastered over white neck and shoulders, streamed like seaweed across a slim waist. Just clear of the bilge, her half-hidden face lay pillowed on one outstretched arm.

The next wave tore the boat from his fingers.

Ryder tugged the swimming gelding back toward the dinghy. A rope trailed from the bow, coy as an eel. Reaching from the saddle, he grabbed at it. Skin ripped from his palm as the next wave lifted the boat, and his grip on the rope tore him from his horse.

Cold ocean, loud with bubbles, closed over his head. Kicking strongly, Ryder grasped the end of the gelding's tail. Fighting water, he looped a knot between tail and rope. As he surfaced and his horse turned back toward land, a flailing stirrup iron struck him hard on the elbow.

He cursed and hauled himself into the dinghy one-handed.

She was alive. As Ryder lifted her she groaned, her head falling back to expose her white throat. A red bruise marked one cheek. Streaks of color spoiled the flesh of her arms. He knew an instant of livid fury before he forced his mind back to the problems at hand.

The boat wallowed deeper as another wave broke over it. The nerve screamed in his elbow, numbing the muscles from wrist to shoulder. Nevertheless, he propped the woman against his own body with one arm and hooked a foot under the seat to jerk off one of his boots. He began to bail as if his life depended on it—though
his
life was not at stake, of course.

He could still swim to shore with one arm. Yet he probably could not carry her with him without both of them foundering.

Her
life, then. Her life depended on it.

A woman. A stranger. Her bones as lovely as glass. Her long legs entangled in beauty and threat. Her hair a cloak of mystery. Her face damaged by a man's fist. Other than the purple fingerprints branded onto her flesh, her body might have been carved from marble beneath the little stone ridges of crumpled wet fabric. A sensuous, enchanting body, ripe with female invitation.

He cursed again and kept bailing.

Freed of its burden of water, the dinghy lifted. The horse swam nobly, driven by instinct straight back to the beach. The woman coughed and opened her eyes. The deft curve of her waist burned beneath his palm as she coughed again, then thrust both hands back over her head, pushing the sea-tangled hair from her forehead.

Her breasts lifted, nipples shining dark beneath the soaked fabric.

She looked up at him from bleak chocolate eyes, her lashes spikes of distrust.

He met her accusatory gaze without flinching. Of course he was aware of the shadowed triangle between her thighs; her breasts thrust up in deliberate invitation by her corset; her naked legs and cold white feet—glimmering beneath torn silk stockings as if she had run unshod over stones. Did she think he was villain enough to pay attention to anything but rescuing her? To feel anything but this white-hot anger at her unknown assailant?

“It's all right,” he said. “We're almost ashore. You're quite safe now.”

She shivered and crossed her arms as if hugging herself, moving as far from him as space on the seat permitted, yet her mouth quirked with a kind of wry bravado.

“So who are you?” she asked. “Sir Galahad?”

 

 

REMARKABLE eyes glowered at her beneath strongly male brows: glass-green, storm-tossed eyes, clear yet feral, like the deep ocean. Neatly barbered hair dripped water over a face ruggedly designed to please women. His soaked shirt plastered vigorous muscling. Drenched breeches painted inflexible thighs.

A tall, powerfully built man, wet as a seal. Young and strong and lean—and splendid in his masculine certainty.

“I am Ryderbourne,” he said.

Miracle choked back a small laugh, dismayed at how bitter it tasted.

Just that:
Ryderbourne.
With the assumption that anyone would then know exactly who he was. Even though his was only a courtesy title, as the elder son and heir of the Duke of Blackdown his precedence was just below that of a marquess. His given name, if she remembered correctly, was Laurence Duvall Devoran St. George, but he was known as “Ryder” to his friends.

The select handful of friends!

He was only whispered about by the amusing young gentlemen who whored and drank and gambled away both youth and fortune. A proud scion of St. George, slated to become one of the most powerful peers in England. Why be surprised if Lord Ryderbourne carved a rarefied path of his own?

Miracle had occasionally seen him from a distance in London, of course, fawned over like royalty. He did not look so different now, even soaked to the skin. Lean muscles bunched and coiled as he bailed. Though his green eyes remained wary and cool, he was as attractive as they came.

So the Fates laughed as they spun their webs and decreed nothing but more trouble! Miracle would far rather have been rescued—if she had been destined to be rescued at all—by a grizzled old fisherman with a comfortable wife.

Fortunately, since they had never moved in the same circles, Lord Ryderbourne was unlikely to recognize her.

The keel scraped on shingle. The horse stopped, fetlock deep in surf, and shook itself like a dog. The duke's son tugged on his salt-ruined boot and sprang from the boat. His feet splashed as he waded to the horse and rubbed its black neck. The gelding blew through its nostrils and shook itself again. The duke's son untied the rope from his mount's tail, then strode away over the shingle to retrieve clothes he must have abandoned there earlier.

The horse waited, watching him.

He returned to hold out a heavy cloak. He had shrugged into his jacket and donned his hat. He seemed impervious to the chill rain.

“Who did this to you, ma'am?”

Miracle ignored the cloak and stared at the ocean. Whitecaps reared ever higher beneath lowering gray clouds. In spite of that odd moment of incipient hilarity, her heart felt numb, as if she were desperate. Goose bumps rose on her arms.

“No one did anything, my lord. There was an accident.”

“You've been beaten.” His voice resonated: rich and deep, with a piercing intelligence. “You've been robbed of your clothes and cast adrift. By whom?”

She shook her head and shivered again, worried that she might do something hideously inappropriate, that she might laugh out loud or break into bawdy singing.

He threw the cloak in a belling sweep to land about her shoulders, then held out one hand.

“Never mind. I'll get you to shelter.” His mouth was set in the imperious lines of habitual command. “Come! You will die of cold.”

Miracle clutched the front of his cloak in both hands. “If I only had oars, I would row right back out there.”

His eyes darkened, like the glass-clear shadow in the trough of a wave. “You planned to take your own life?”

“Oh, not deliberately.” She suppressed the mounting impulse to laugh. “However it might appear, I'm not so melodramatic.”

“Neither am I. What's your name?”

There was insistence in it. He would not leave her alone. He would feel obliged to be gallant. There was not much she could do about it. So in defiance of fate, Miracle met his gaze and told him her third lie.

Her first falsehood had been to cling deliberately to a few more moments of blissful oblivion when she had regained consciousness in the boat, looking up at him through slitted lashes before she had been forced to acknowledge him at all.

Her second lie had been to deny that she'd been thrashed.

The third was the name that now spilled without thought from her tongue, though it was not one she had ever used before.

“Miss Elaine Sanders, my lord.”

“Then, come, Miss Sanders!”

He reached into the boat and picked her up in both arms to cradle her snugly against his chest.

As if the sea had already defeated her, Miracle surrendered. Further struggle seemed absurd.

She gazed up at his face as he carried her toward his horse. His mouth was beautiful, like a carving, yet the grim lines seared her heart. He ought to laugh, not frown like a gargoyle. Of course, he did not know whom he held so completely at his mercy. Would he drop her right away, if he knew? Or would he demand one fast, sensual exchange, then leave her with a guinea? Intoxication bubbled madly in her heart, like champagne poisoned with wormwood.

“I had it wrong,” she said. “Sir Lancelot.”

Lord Ryderbourne stopped. His heart beat strongly beneath her ear. “What?”

“It was Lancelot, not Galahad, who rescued the woman from the water.”

He stood silently holding her, while the rain thickened. The retreating waves sucked on the shingle with the grinding sound of a troll at dinner. The boat bobbed away.

“Elaine,” he said at last. “She was also an Elaine. But that water was magically boiling in a tub, not the frigid ocean. The rescue was Sir Lancelot's first miracle—”

“—and his last, because it cost him his virginity and thus his mystic strength.”

“I'm not a virgin,” he said with precision.

As if she really were a madwoman, her gathering hilarity spilled into open laughter. Yet Lord Ryderbourne held her securely in his embrace, until Miracle finally choked down a mysterious rush of tears. Quivering like a fish on a line, suddenly drained of all emotion, she snuggled blindly into the warm cloak.

Lord Ryderbourne strode forward again.

“I might suppose, based on the nature of this conversation, that you're not a blushing maiden yourself. Yet I believe you're in shock, Miss Sanders. It's clear that you've been battered by a human fist, in spite of your protestations to the contrary. Death, if I had not intervened, was the inevitable outcome of your abandonment in that boat. I trust you're at least glad to be alive?”

Alive! Yes, she had come face-to-face with death. Yet against all odds she was alive! Was that sufficient cause for hysteria? Or was it simply a reaction to the disaster of having been rescued by this particular man?

“Since it's the only life that I have, I must thank you, Lord Ryderbourne, for your rescue. Now, if you would kindly set me down here on this beach, I can make my own way from here.”

“No.” He tossed her up onto the saddle, then swung up behind her. “You're more hurt than you know. You're coming with me.”

“You're abducting me?”

“You're without clothes, without money, wet through, and half frozen. You have no shoes. I'm continuing to rescue you. From yourself, if need be.”

He gathered reins and the gelding pranced forward, then bounded up the muddy path and onto the cliff road at the top. Lord Ryderbourne turned the horse to canter straight into the oncoming night. A goose girl sheltering under a tree stared at them as they flew past. A handful of sheep scattered. The sea turned sullen as the rain began to pelt down in earnest.

In twenty minutes the horse clattered down the cobbled street of a village, where a handful of thatched stone houses tumbled haphazardly toward a beach. Fishing boats were drawn up on the foreshore. Nets stretched on poles planted in the shingle.

They rode into the yard of the single inn. The Merry Monarch seemed grand enough, yet neglect hung over the rain-soaked yard and empty stalls. Paint peeled. Only one person came out to greet their arrival, a groom in a shabby coat.