The Windflower (34 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It happened that Devon was the one who found her. He saw her first from the far end of a sun-dappled meadow where fading day filtered in hazy spikes through the forest canopy. She lay innocently curled in clean elfin nudity under the drooping fronds of an orchid clump. Her back was toward him, the sweet misty flesh strewn with the curling ribbons of her damp hair. The curving line of her cheek and brow were barely visible under the drying gilded fluff that edged her lace.

He said her name once, and then, acutely conscious of the wealth of emotion he had invested in the single word, he disciplined himself into less revealing silence as he ran lightly, rapidly toward her.

Merry had bathed. That finished, she had been about to put her ragged clothing to another cleaning when a headache had struck with sudden savagery. She had lain down for what was meant to be only a moment and had lapsed into the stupor that for her was replacing sleep. Then, though she had begun to believe that she might never hear it again, someone had spoken her name. Her startled senses knew suddenly that she was no longer alone. She turned and saw him.

Finding her alive and evidently unharmed tapped every feeling within him that he had spent the past days trying to contain. His relief was white-hot, searing, a blaze that was too bright to look into.

"There must be some kind of archive where we can have you registered. Two escapes from a pirate ship on the high seas is likely to be a record."

His presence penetrated slowly to her consciousness, and she heard not his words but his voice, the tone fresh and light, charmingly low, alive with intelligence, and not so shorn of feeling as he might have wished.

Her inhalation was a jarring series of broken gasps. Standing would have taken more strength than she possessed at the moment, so she stretched out her arms to embrace the part of him she could reach, which happened to be his leg.

"Devon!" she whispered softly. Her voice was unquavering, a tribute to her hard-won self-possession. The problem was that she couldn't stop saying it. And when she had said it many times, she changed it to, "Is it really you?" Over and over she murmured the words in a broken whisper.

Of all her possible reactions this was one he hadn't anticipated. He looked down at her small oval head, adjusting to her closeness. Against his leg he could feel the warm touch of her very soft breasts, the quick rise and fall of her shallow breathing, the fast beating of her heart. Her hair swirled around his calf and washed like a golden net over his boots as she pressed her lips into the side of his knee. Within the warm hive of her curls the shallow slope of her nose rubbed sniffing against his knee, and he could barely discern that the tip wasn't exactly dry.

This, after days of raw anger, after days of searching for her, forcing himself to accept the state in which he might find her. . . . Hideous visions of what she might have endured, briefly banished on finding her alone, were returning in force. He knew too well the nightmare that life could become for an unprotected woman in these waters. After a long hesitation he lowered himself to her side, and laying his left hand on her head, he stroked lightly over her shimmering honey curls.

She was well-bred and shy about her body. Yet she seemed unconscious of her nudity, her utterly lovely, compelling nudity, and beneath his concern he could feel the thrilling drive of his own desire.

She said his name again, in a voice that sounded shaky, and as if she had tears and hair in her mouth. His fingers searched and pulled clinging hair strands from her barely moistened lips, and as his fingertips brushed her mouth he felt the contact burn in hot channels through his body. Stupid, to kneel here nourishing it. He felt lightheaded, odd, unable to recognize himself in the welter of tender emotions that were a torrent inside him.

Merry, however, saw nothing new in the clean-lined composure of his face. She watched through a nerve-wrenching mixture of revived fear and thanksgiving as he discovered her clothing beneath a citrus tree and handed it curtly to her.

"Try to cover a majority of everything irresistible," he said.

Lithe, dangerous, and familiar, he went to stand against a fallen cedar that supported a straggling growth of prickly pear in its dry roots. Then, hardly giving her time to react to his command, he snapped, "Dress, Merry. Quickly."

The words had been spoken harshly, though in a soft tone. Still, he saw they had startled her. Her nerves were a volatile, as shocked as his, and he watched her unsteady attempt to stand, watched her dropping clothing through her numb fingers and realized with something like despair that she needed help, it showed in her eyes; in the unnatural stiffness of her muscles. Exhaustion; poor nourishment; exposure. She was in no state to receive his questions or the attentions of his body. Yet even as he was making the decision to moderate his immediate need he felt the denial within, realized he was crossing toward her, pulling her close.

It was an act of instinct, of aching hunger that drove his fingers deeper into her curls to bring her face close to his. His mouth hovered just above hers, heating her lips, caressing them with his breath before he brought them softly, softly together. He coaxed against her still lips until they parted in confusion, permitting him access to the wild honey taste of her mouth. His lips stroked over, against hers, drinking her desperation, feeding her his, dragging her tighter, breathing in the heat and wet orchid scent of her body.

The panic of the preceding days disappeared under his warmly ravaging kiss like a mist burned off by sun rays. Her breathing deepened in quick and steady arousal, her mouth moving frantically under his, her blood pounding as his hands trailed lower, exploring the shallow cleft of her spine before returning to give sensitive guidance to the yearning of her mouth.

In a dreamer's sensuality she twisted into his body, absorbing the hard structure of his hips, her heart turning over and over as he brushed his mouth rapidly across her moist and pliant lips. His experienced touch brought back her head, opening her throat to receive his kiss, and then his finger, running lightly up and down her neck, sent shuddering thrills through her pleasure-flushed veins.

"Have you been hurt. Merry? Tell me, Windflower . . ." His voice sounded strange to himself, as though it were coming from an unknown part of his being.

"Hurt?" Dazzled, her tired mind absorbed the word and the path of his hands, cupping her face with poignant tenderness. But there was nothing poignant about the memories that were beginning to intrude. The idiocy again. Here she was, receiving comfort from a source that by custom dispensed anything but. After all that had happened, she had pushed back the knowledge that this man was less than a friend to her. Every living cell in her body burned for him, and against that, reality was a pale supplicant. But he had uncovered her anger, and it became suddenly a titan. "Hurt." The soft word was treacled in sarcasm. "I suppose you mean did Michael Meadows try to force himself on me? Oh, no. No one does that but you."

Emotion came to him in an uncomfortable flood at her show of tired defiance. How typically she could endow raw melodrama with the most prosaic gloss. Posturing around her became a useless exercise in self-delusion. He was still far from being able to fathom the depth of his relief at finding her safe. It was soaring, joylike.

She had pulled away, staggering slightly, thrusting her arms into her shirt like a trooper dressing under a barrage of unexpected artillery fire, fumbling with the drawstring of her trousers. She was breathing rapidly, the sound husky and abrupt, as though it came from an angry child. Yet the bright eyes that burned upward into his held thoughts that were fully adult.

"It might be reassuring," she said, "if you could let me know whether you're rescuing me or simply capturing me again."

They were so close that the slight gust of his laughter stirred the sweat-dewed hair clinging to the curve of her jaw. "This passion for detail. Don't ask too many questions. The answer might not reassure you after all." Was there some way to make himself immune, at least for this moment, to the thick curling quilt of her hair that invited his touch, to the tension in the delicate shadowed face, to the fresh and urgent memory of Merry canopied in orchids? And there was, he remembered, a boatload of hardened cutthroats turning themselves inside out worrying about her. He had seen enough of the extremity of their concern to last him a lifetime. "We could leave. Unless you've developed a great fondness for this little haven?"

One thing Devon did expertly was protect the privacy of his mind. She could almost watch him disappearing back behind his breathtakingly beautiful exterior, as though the process were a physical metamorphosis. Devon was a man, and not a collection of well-composed gears and pulleys connected with leather belts, but as she tried to match his pace toward the lee of the island where the
Joke
was anchored she wondered how that perfect body could function so well without a heart. Pride kept her from being the one to broach the subject of whether or not he understood why she had run away from the
Joke
and whether or not he intended to punish her.

It would have surprised her to learn that he wasn't thinking about punishments at all. For the first time in a life of clear-thinking certainty Devon was learning doubt. And he was finding the lesson a singularly painful one. His motives, his feelings, even the logic of his imprisonment of her were being called up and explored. His conclusions, tentative as they were, were affording him no comfort.

Purple twilight surrounded them as they reached the starlit jumble of limestone boulders and low, spiky vegetation that edged the beach.

Raven found them first, at an odd ticklish instant when Devon had turned to her and hauled her close, inexplicably, startlingly, without speaking, whispering her name. He drew back when he saw Raven, releasing her to the boy pirate's gentle consolations. A single shot from Devon's pistol brought the others, who had been searching too; they joined them like shadows, to see Merry and scold, or tease, or sympathize, as their natures dictated.

It was Raven whose bare, slim arms encircled her lovingly and held her as though she were something precious while they sailed the jolly boat toward the
Joke.
Another time he would have avoided that kind of contact with her because it would have put too many of the wrong sort of ideas in his head, but that worry seemed a little petty just now. Her earlier tide of defiance had faded into a vaporous tiredness, and her hands, clinging to Raven's shoulders, felt to him cold as a polar sea. Gently he separated their bodies and began to rub the chilled flesh of her palms and fingers.

"Hear me, lovey. You've got to start being more careful about your getaways," he said softly. "I'd like to know what possessed you, making sail on the sly with that rascally galley help of Cook's— what's his name?"

"Michael Meadows." She curved herself back into the comfort of his strength.

"It's not like I was the prized plum from the Garden of Prudence myself, but—Michael Meadows! I couldn't believe it. The man don't know his arse from an ax handle," he said, the tartness and worry in his voice softened by his voluptuously slurred vowels. "And where in sweet heaven is he anyway, leaving you on your own like that?"

Even in the dim light he could see the change in her face. With sensible kindness he suggested to her, "Dead, is he?"

Devon had been watching the interchange in a manner that Raven had privately noted fell far short of enthusiasm, so Raven was surprised when the blond man remarked dispassionately, "Dead and eaten. 1 found an interesting fragment."

Getting interested, Raven said, "Don't tell me! What et him?"

"A crocodile," Merry whispered, her wide-open eyes fixed in remembered horror at the elkhorn corals reaching in pointing fingers upward through the eerie green curl of the surf.

Raven's arms tightened around her and held on like armor until they came to the
Joke
and he disengaged his indignantly protesting body from her to deliver her into Cat's ascetic grip. But much later that night, after she had been put to bed, Raven was frank with Will Saunders.

"If that don't beat everything," he said. "That Meadows. There wasn't a piece of responsibility in the whole of him. Just like him to up and get himself eaten and the bits strewn for anyone to come upon, and Merry left to fend for herself. You want my opinion? Eating was too good for him."

In the morning Merry woke in the sturdy bunk of the cabin on the
Black Joke
she had come to think of as her own. Fuzzy sunlight poured through the open windows above, and the ship bucked and straightened in the leaping motion she had learned meant they were at sea with all drawing sails set.

Cat was sitting on the bunk, and he looked as though he had been there for some time. His weight slightly constricted the cotton sheeting over her feet. He was stretched back at an angle, supporting himself on his elbows, his shirt opened to the waist, his hair draping in loose swags over his cheeks and dropping behind the prominent ridge of his shoulders. The light softened him, giving a white glow to his body and the illusion of a flush to his cheekbones with their gaunt sensuality. His eyes, blue-snow colored, were assessing her in a hard way that seemed able to extract silent information from her mind. He waited courteously for her to speak first, and she would have if she could have thought of something clever. Finally he shrugged upright and handed her a glass from the table. Watching him over the rim, she drank down the contents and made a face.