Merline Lovelace (15 page)

The storm that swept the small island that afternoon brought her some measure of relief. Torrents of warm rain washed the salt from her hair and her skin and her gown. They also battered down the coconut palm shelter.

Undaunted, Jamie set about constructing their permanent facility. Using sharp-edged pieces of coral, he chipped and nicked and shaped an ax head of sorts. With that primitive implement, he cleared a path through the tangle of underbrush to a mango tree set atop the highest point on the tiny island. Its thick, lowhanging branches formed a natural roof. Jamie cut other branches and bent them into a latticework frame that, once tightly woven with palms, became the sides of a small, neat hut.

A very small, neat hut.

Sweat streamed down his bare chest as he tied the
last palm in place with a length of green vine. Hands on hips, he stood back to survey the structure. “Not bad,” he concluded. “Not bad at all.” Sarah duly admired his handiwork, all the while wondering where he intended to sleep. Her unspoken question was answered when he began mounding branches inside the hut for two beds. Two very closely aligned beds.

A bead of sweat rolled down between Sarah’s breasts. She suspected she wouldn’t sleep any better tonight than she had the previous night.

She was right She lay unmoving for hours, worrying about Abigail and Charlie and the older boys, listening to her hut-mate’s loud breathing, and trying not to roll too far onto her side lest her legs tangle with his.

She woke the next morning stiff and itchy again, and quite irritable. It didn’t help her uncertain mood at all that Jamie seemed to be adjusting to their situation with a cheerful good humor. He greeted her emergence from the hut with a grin that, unaccountably, rubbed Sarah exactly the wrong way.

“I found a bush of water-me-eyes,” he informed her. “Would you like a taste for breakfast?”

“I might,” she muttered, tugging at the bodice of her prickly gown, “if I knew what it was.”

He nodded to a small pile of yellow objects shaped much like a clenched fist. “It’s a fruit. I don’t know the exact name for it, only the nickname seamen use to describe its distinctive aroma. It has a rather strong smell, but the fruit is tasty enough.”

Strong, Sarah discovered when she approached the pile of strangely shaped objects, understated the case
considerably. The yellowish balls carried the most repulsive, sour stink she’d ever encountered.

“Ugh!” Wrinkling her nose, she quickly retreated. “You cannot mean to eat that!”

“I do. It’s tart and delicious.” He selected one of the lumpy balls, broke it open, and tore out a section of whitish pulp. “Here, try some.”

“No, thank you.”

“Take a bite, Sarah. It will freshen your mouth.”

“I don’t wish to, I tell you!”

Even to her own ears, she sounded remarkably like Charlie in one of his rare pets. Such grumpiness was not usually in her nature. She could only blame it on her sleepless nights, her nagging worry for her siblings, and her enforced proximity to Jamie.

“You’ll soon see what you’re missing,” he replied with unimpaired good humor.

Sarah made a noise that she would have considered rude in any other circumstance. Her companion lifted a brow, but forebore to comment on her ill humor.

“I cleared a path to a small pool in the rocks,” he said instead. “You can use that as a bathing area. I’ll come along in a moment and help you wash.”

“You most certainly shall not!”

“You can’t use your hands,” he pointed out patiently. “I only wish to be of service.”

“I’ll manage.”

The pool turned out to be little more than a depression in the hardened coral where rainwater had collected. Quickly, Sarah tended to her needs. She made do well enough with crushed leaves to sponge with and a twig to cleanse her teeth, but would have given much for a comb. She settled for tying her tangled hair back with a thin vine, and tried not to think how
ridiculous she must look in her leaf hat and shoes, torn gown, and tangled hair.

Her uncertain temper didn’t improve when she returned to the hut and Jamie looked her up and down, then calmly suggested she remove her dress.

“I do wish you would refrain from these ill-bred, ill-mannered suggestions,” she snapped. “They’re not amusing.”

Even his store of good cheer had a limit, evidently. His black brows drew together with a touch of impatience.

“I’m not trying to amuse you. I’m trying to save you from boiling like an African rock lobster in this sun.”

“I appreciate your concern.” Her caustic tone implied exactly the opposite. “I’ll be fine.”

“Be sensible,” he said, frowning. “We’re alone here. No one will see you if you strip down to your chemise except me.”

“That, sir, is exactly my concern.”

His brow cleared at her waspish retort. “So that’s what has you in a pucker.”

A rueful expression settled on his face as he crossed the small clearing to stand before her. Sarah’s empty stomach fluttered at the broad expanse of bare chest just inches away from hers. Fine black hairs swirled and curled over swelling muscles. Resolutely, she tipped up her chin and met his glinting blue eyes.

“I told you that you would have to say the word before I continue my demonstration, my prickly Miss Abernathy, and so you shall. You have my oath on it.”

In her present contrary state, Sarah experienced a sharp irritation that the confounded man would choose
to put such a burden on her. She didn’t wish to be seduced, of course, but for reasons that she didn’t care to examine at the moment, neither did she appreciate knowing that he wouldn’t even try unless she invited him to!

“Well, that relieves my mind considerably,” she replied tartly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll…”

“Take off the gown, Sarah.”

She blinked at the blunt command. “Did we not just put this to rest?”

“We put to rest the question of when I’ll take you in my arms again and kiss you and slide you up against me, as I did aboard the
Phoenix.
We’ve yet to resolve the matter of your gown. Remove it.”

“I will not!”

A black brow lifted. “Do you wish me to remove it for you.”

“You would not dare!”

“You know me better than that.”

She did, damn him.

“Come, Sarah, I won’t watch you fall prostrate from heat because of misplaced modesty. Take that thing off.”

Calm, sensible Sarah knew she should comply. The irritable, irritated woman stranded on a desert isle with a rogue of the first order set her mouth mulishly.

“You, sir, may have been absolute master aboard your ship, but here we…”

“Sarah,” he warned softly.

“Oh, for pity’s sake! All right!”

Spinning on one heel, she stalked to the hut. Buttons popped from their threads as hands made clumsy by their bandages jerked at the stiff, resisting bodice. A moment later, she stepped out of the smothering black
gown and kicked it aside. Her torn petticoat, which had provided the wrappings for her hands, soon followed. She stood stiffly in her linen pantalets and chemise while her skin drank in air like a drunkard guzzles ale.

Bit by bit, the contrariness went out of her. Innate honesty compelled her to admit the truth. She felt as though she’d been released from a tight, suffocating shroud. Sighing, she tugged her square-necked chemise free of the waistband of her pantalets and let the hem hang freely over her hips to allow more air to circulate. The unbleached linen was stiff with salt, but not nearly as discomfortable without the weight of her gown added to it. She took a deep breath, counted to ten to screw up her courage, and walked outside.

Jamie kept his expression even and his pose relaxed, but the sight of Sarah’s womanly curves covered by only a layer of white linen hit him with the force of a belaying pin rammed straight to the gut. Sweat popped out on his brow at his first glimpse of the darkened centers of her full breasts. The nipples showed tight and small under the thin fabric.

Hellfire and damnation! His shaft had reared like a stallion’s at stud for the last two nights just lying next to the woman. As much as he’d wanted to, though, he hadn’t pressed himself on Sarah. She had yet to adjust to the shock of being stranded, as her pettish humor for the past two days proved only too well. That, on top of her recent bereavement and sudden removal from Macao, would string any woman’s nerves ropetight. Jamie had tried to be patient, had presented a cheerful front and smiled until his teeth ached with it.

Now, those same teeth were grinding one against the other like millstones. If he hadn’t known it would
soon kill her, he’d order the woman to pull the damned gown back on.

His every muscle stiffening, he watched her approach. A tide of red suffused her cheeks. Her breasts rose and fell with maddening, fascinating rapidity. Yet she offered him a smile that made little of the embarrassment that he knew must be curling her soul.

“You were right, you detestable man. I can breathe again.”

She could breathe quite well, Jamie agreed with a silent groan. He didn’t say so, however. He could barely force air through his own throat as it was.

A gleam of reluctant amusement came into the brown eyes that captured his. “I suppose I should thank you, but it quite goes against the grain for a missionary’s daughter to thank the rogue who persuaded her to remove her clothing.”

Despite the ache in his lower belly, Jamie had to grin. “As I’ve said before, Miss Abernathy, you’re a
most
unusual missionary’s daughter.”

L
ooking back, Sarah would realize that she shed her virtue at the same moment she shed her salty black mourning gown. Not in actual fact, perhaps, but in every other sense of the word. Once she stepped into the sunlight wearing nothing but her underclothes, there was no going back.

Along with her gown and her virtue, she also began shedding the burdens she’d lovingly carried for so long. She could do nothing to ease the grief and fear Abigail and Charlie were undoubtedly experiencing. Fretting about them and the older boys did not the least good. Nor could she cause a ship to appear on the horizon or leave this atoll unless the Lord in His infinite wisdom willed it. She could only accept that she and Jamie were stranded together for an indeterminable period of time and, slowly, hesitantly, come to understand the power of her womanhood.

She got her first inkling of that power the very day she first appeared in her chemise and drawers. Tortuously embarrassed, she hunched her shoulders and turned aside whenever Jamie’s gaze happened her way. As the morning wore on, his matter-of-fact manner
and lack of comment about her near nakedness took some of the scorching heat from her cheeks. By noon, she was able to refrain from twisting away and coloring up like a Chinese lantern every time she caught his eye. By the time the late afternoon rains came, she’d almost forgotten the thinness of her garb.

She was reminded of it most forcefully when Jamie returned from an expedition to gather gull eggs. The torrential downpour had just eased to a soft, steady patter. Sarah stood at the edge of the small clearing he’d hacked in front of their hut. Her face lifted to the cleansing, cooling stream and her ears filled with the musical dance of raindrops on the mango leaves, she didn’t notice his approach.

With the startling rapidity that occurred in the tropics, the rains ceased and the sun burst forth in a ball of heat. Refreshed and feeling the first tentative curl of contentment since she’d dropped into the sea, Sarah raised her arms and speared her fingers into the heavy mass of her hair. The tangles resisted her every effort to comb through them.

“The devil take it,” she muttered under her breath, echoing Jamie’s favorite oath.

Giving up the battle, she dropped her arms. She turned, only to start in surprise at the sight of Jamie standing as if turned to stone. The rain had plastered his black hair to his head and brought a slick sheen to his tanned shoulders and chest. The beginnings of a dark beard stubbled his jaw. His drenched, tan-colored trousers clung to his hips and thighs. He looked, Sarah decided with a little flip of her stomach, quite wild and primitive. He was also, she realized, staring at her in the most intense, intent manner.

Never had she felt more exposed. Or more vulnerable. Or, she thought suddenly, womanly.

With everything in her, Sarah fought the urge to cross her arms over her chest and hunch her shoulders once more. If she was to spend the next days or weeks or years in enforced companionship with this man, she could not,
would
not cringe like a frightened maiden every time he looked her way.

Besides, she reminded herself, he was the one who insisted that she remove her gown. With a calm she was far from feeling, she lifted the neck of her wet chemise an inch or two to unmold the fabric from her breasts.

Still he watched her.

Forcing herself to return his unnerving stare, she nodded to the cloth bag he’d fashioned from the remains of her petticoat. “Was your expedition successful?”

“What?” he asked slowly.

“Did you find a nest of gull’s eggs?”

It took a moment or two for her question to penetrate. Frowning, he looked down at the cloth he held gripped in a tight fist. A too-tight fist, apparently. Even from where she stood, Sarah could see strings of yellow seeping through the cloth.

His frown became a scowl. “The devil take it!”

Sarah couldn’t help but smile at the echo of her own words, and the strange tension between them disappeared.

“Perhaps we can strain the yolks through the cloth and separate them from the broken shells. Let me find a palm leaf to use as a bowl.”

He thrust the mess at her with something less than his usual careless grace. “I’ll get one.”

Clutching the soggy bag in her bandaged hands, she sank to her knees on the springy, verdant earth. Jamie returned a moment later with a shiny leaf. She watched while he squeezed a goodly amount of yolk into the shallow dish.

She eyed the pool of yellow liquid with some doubt. “Now what shall we do with it?”

“I never cared much for raw eggs,” Jamie replied, his mouth curling in distaste. “But we need to add some substance to our diet of fruit and fish. If we down the mess in great gulps, perhaps it won’t taste so bad.”

Sarah had no more desire to gulp down raw egg yolks than she had to sample the foul-smelling fruit he’d tried to force on her earlier.

“I’ve a better idea,” she told him, casting a quick glance up at the now broiling sun. “Can you find a flat rock? Or a thin piece of shell? The thinner the better.”

He grasped her intent instantly. “Aye.”

He found a wafer-thin piece of iridescent shell, and Sarah dumped the contents of the bowl onto its curved surface. With a twig held awkwardly in her bandaged hand, she stirred the mixture. To her secret surprise and delight, it gradually began to bubble, then cooked quite nicely. Served up with bananas, sliced and also heated just a bit in a sweet fruit juice, it made a most delicious meal.

Her injured hands made eating awkward in the extreme, however. Try as she might, Sarah couldn’t manage the slippery eggs and sweet, slick fruit.

“Shall I help you?”

She glanced up to find Jamie close at her side. Too close. His eyes glinting in a way that set her stomach
to flipping once again, he lifted a morsel from the shell dish. The tantalizing scent of eggs and sweet-coated bananas and healthy male teased her nostrils.

“Open your mouth, Sarah.”

She could either accept his help, or lap from the shell dish like a puppy. Slowly, her lips parted.

He fed her bit by bit. Bite by bite. Sarah, who had nursed her brothers and sister through every childhood illness and fed them tenderly bits of toast soaked in tea, had never, ever, been catered to like this. She felt most childish, and thoroughly discomfited at his nearness.

“Good girl,” he murmured when she swallowed the last bite.

“Girl? I passed that stage some time ago, I’m afraid.”

His mouth crooked. “Did you? You wouldn’t think so if you could see yourself now. You have juice dribbling down your chin.”

“How ungallant of you to mention it, sir.”

She pursed her lips in feigned reproof, then proceeded to ruin the effect by swiping her fingertips across her chin and licking them clean, one by one. Laughing, Jamie rested his back against a mango trunk and crossed his ankles. Sarah sat beside him, her stomach full and her every nerve prickling with awareness of the muscled calves and lean hips so close to her own.

It was some time before the simple domesticity of the scene struck her. Like the most primitive of couples, Jamie had hunted for their food, and she had prepared it. This small ritual would replay itself day after day, for as long as they remained on their little
island. The prospect sent a tiny shiver of delight down her back.

She gave herself a little shake. She couldn’t think about the possibility of weeks of sharing meals with this man. Or months of lying beside him at night. She couldn’t allow herself to imagine that he was her mate. If she did, she knew in her deepest heart of hearts, she would soon start to believe it.

He wanted her. That she understood. Untried spinster that she was, she couldn’t fail to recognize the heat in his eyes when he offered to demonstrate the delights detailed in the crew’s scurrilous book. But he’d also made it clear that his taunting threat to take an Abernathy sister to wife had been intended only to rattle her. As indeed, it had. He’d formulated his own plan for transporting Sarah and her family to England, one that included an unknown comtesse and a landing at Calais, but did
not
include marriage.

She accepted that, as she accepted that he wanted her…in his own, forthright, lecherous way.

And she?

She wanted him, as well. Quite desperately.

The question now was what she would do about that urgent want. Would she succumb to isolation, and proximity, and the heat that coursed through her veins whenever he looked at her? Would she throw aside the moral strictures of a lifetime and give herself, as she so very much wished to do? Would she…?

The brush of his hand on her arm made her jump. “You’re turning pink from the sun,” he told her lazily.

“Yes, I…”

She twisted around, too quickly, it turned out. He
caught her as she started to topple over. With one pull, he brought her across his lap.

“You what, sweetheart?”

Her heart skipped. “I shall no doubt burn a most unbecoming shade of red. And peel like an onion.”

He traced a finger along the curve of her cheek. “Shall you indeed? It just so happens that I have a partiality for onions.”

“Jamie…”

“Aye?” His thumb shaped her lower lip.

“You promised…that…you would not…”

With slow deliberation, his thumb teased the soft, slick inner surface of her lip. “I promised I would not undertake another demonstration unless you said the word. I keep my promises, sweet Sarah.”

“Then what is this?” she asked breathlessly.

He smiled down at her, his mouth only inches from the one his thumb shaped so seductively. “This, Miss Abernathy, is merely an attempt to convince you to say the word.”

She stared up at him, aching to stroke his stubbled cheeks.

“Say it, Sarah.”

She ached to. With all that was in her, she ached to. He offered her the secret pleasures she’d never known. The chance to experience the full glory of her femininity. But that was all he offered.

“I cannot,” she whispered.

At the utter misery in her voice, his smile softened to a tenderness that splintered her ache into shattering need.

“You can, sweetheart. Say it. One word. ‘Yes, Jamie.’”

Sarah gave a helpless little huff. “Your counting is sadly at fault, sir. That’s two words.”

“Just yes, then.”

“No.”

The single syllable hovered on the air between them. For long moments, neither spoke. Clouds scudded by overhead. Gulls swooped and cawed down by the shore. The turpentine-like scent Sarah would ever after associate with mangoes and this small, deserted island drifted from the forests around them.

Jamie broke the spell. Giving an exaggerated sigh, he lifted her off his lap. “You’re the most obstinate female I’ve ever been marooned with.”

“Oh yes? And how many females, exactly, have you been marooned with?”

“Only one, Sarah, my sweet. Only one.” He rose, and helped her up. “Come, I spotted a bed of dulse during my egg-hunting expedition.”

Confused by his swift change in topics, Sarah scrambled to her feet. “A bed of what?”

“Dulse. Kelp. Or as we sailors call it, sea lettuce. It’s quite tasty when stewed up and, if I remember rightly, has certain healing properties. We’ll collect some and make a poultice for your palms.”

If anyone had told Sarah that she would find the most freedom she had ever enjoyed on a tiny coral reef somewhere along the Malay Archipelago, she would have looked at them in utter stupefaction.

Days passed. Nights. A week. Then another. Sarah’s palms healed. The soles of her feet toughened. Her face and arms burned, peeled in great scaly strips, and began to brown. Her pantalets grew ragged at the
hems, then got shorter and shorter with each inch of linen that unraveled.

And Jamie, to Sarah’s consternation and secret, shameful delight, continued his campaign to convince her to say yes. By turns teasing and annoyingly persistent, he offered her a host of reasons, each one more improbable than the last, why she should abandon her unreasonable stand.

She might eat an unfamiliar fruit and get a bend in her gut that left her permanently unable to experience all thirty-two positions described in the
Ars Amatoria.

He might step on a sea urchin and become paralyzed from the knee down. Or even worse, between his knees and his waist!

They might never get off this island.

They might get off, and never again have the chance to lie in the sun wearing nothing but lazy, contented smiles.

By turns laughing and blushing and primly disapproving, Sarah dismissed his outrageous arguments to relieve her of her maidenhead. But each teasing remark, each casual touch, every hour spent together in exploration of the island or stockpiling of supplies or simple domestic chores made her question her sanity. Why could she not yield? Why could she not take what he offered without asking for more? What more did she want?

She discovered the answer to that question on the morning Jamie was attacked by the tiger shark.

The attack came so swiftly, Sarah at first didn’t comprehend what was happening. She sat perched on a shelf of limestone, arms clasped loosely around her updrawn knees, watching in lazy contentment while Jamie fished in a small lagoon. He stood a good way
out, near the point where the shallow shelf ended and the water deepened from shimmering turquoise to dark cobalt. With a spear fashioned of a branch and sharpened coral point, he stabbed the colorful parrot fish that darted through the waters. Or tried to. At that point, he had succeeded only in stabbing the waves and thoroughly dousing himself.

Seawater glistened in his black hair. The beard he tried to scrape off each morning with a sharpened shell darkened his cheeks. His skin rippled like bronzed silk. Sarah still hadn’t grown accustomed to the sheer, masculine beauty of his body. Even now, after weeks of the most casual intimacy, just the sight of his broad back and lean hips could cause her belly to clench.

So engrossed was she in rapt contemplation of Jamie’s manly attributes that she didn’t immediately glimpse the shadow drifting toward him. When the dark spot caught her eye, she squinted at it in puzzlement. Only after she’d shaded her eyes with one hand did she make out its distinctive triangular shape.