Vixen (49 page)

“Certainly they both involve the participation of a fallen woman,” Hugo stated blandly, catching up the thick golden mass clustering on her shoulders and twisting it around his wrist. Then he let it fall again, concealing the blue-black stripe where her brother’s whip had fallen. It was over and Jasper had paid the price.

Chloe, unaware of the fleeting thought, smiled and drew her hand in a lazy caress across his stomach. “And
a fallen gentleman, I would have said, since, in my experience, it takes two.”

Hugo stroked her hair. “Well, perhaps we should expand your experience and see what difference the blessing of the church makes.”

He spoke so softly that for a minute Chloe didn’t understand what he’d said. Then she did. She sat bolt upright. “Are you going to marry me?”

“Someone has to,” he said with an air of solemnity. “You’re not safe in Society unmarried … or do I mean Society isn’t safe?”

“But … but you said Society would think you were taking advantage of your guardianship.” She frowned down at him, still unsure that he really meant what he was saying.

“Society can think what the hell it pleases,” Hugo responded. “The question is: Do you wish to marry your guardian, lass?”

“But you
know
I do. I’ve been saying so this age. Only you wouldn’t listen.”

“No, a lamentable failing,” he agreed, his eyes smiling. “I’ve had the most foolish tendency not to listen to you. However, I begin to understand that you always mean what you say, and that, in general, you know what’s best for you.”

“And for you,” she flashed.

“Conceited minx.” He caught her head and drew her face down to his. “I’ve known what’s best for me for a long time, sweetheart, I just needed to be convinced that it was best for you too.”

Chloe dropped her mouth to his, her body moving over his, fitting herself to his curves and hollows, reaching a hand down to guide him within her. Pushing backward, she sat on her heels, moving her body around him, her eyes languorous, her hair tumbling over her shoulders.

“I do know what’s best for you.” she said with a smug smile. “I’ll prove it to you.”

“Be my guest, lass.” Hugo linked his hands behind his head and watched her face, enjoying his own passivity as much as Chloe was.

“I suppose,” she said, running her flat palms over the ridged muscles of his abdomen, “I suppose you’ll want to keep control of my fortune.”

“Oh, I’m sure we can come to some satisfactory compromise,” Hugo said, the green eyes sparking.

“But …” Her hand moved behind her, sliding between his thighs. “But I don’t imagine you’ll compromise over my wardrobe?” Her fingers moved wickedly, deftly.

“No …” He closed his eyes on an exhalation of joy. “That’s one area in which you patently don’t know what’s best for you, so there’ll be no compromises.”

“Not even when I do this?” She put her head on one side, regarding him with narrowed eyes as her fingers pursued their intimate course.

“No, you crafty little fox.” Gathering her against him, he rolled with her until she was lying beneath him. “I can be cozened just so far.” He laughed down at her rather startled expression and kissed the tip of her nose. “But don’t let that stop you from trying, lass.”

“As if it would … as if anything could,” she said softly, no longer mischievous. She touched his mouth with the tip of a finger. “I love you.”

“And I you, little one. With every breath I breathe.”

Holding her gaze with his own, he moved within her until it seemed her breath was his and his hers, until their blood flowed as one, and the future purged of the past was born of the transcendent glory of their fusion.

I
t was the dark hour before dawn. Rain fell in a ceaseless
torrent upon the sodden clifftops, smashed straight as stair-rods onto the churning, white-flecked sea beneath. Great waves rose in the Channel and surged around St. Catherine’s Point to curl and break upon the jagged rocks in a thundering relentless roll, sending white spray into the darkness.

There were no stars. No moon. Only an occasional flash of lightning to illuminate the island crouching like a whale at the entrance to the Solent, its downs and valleys black with rain. The melancholy sound of the bell buoy off the rocky point pierced the rushing wind, bringing warning to the ships battling the summer storm in the seething Channel. Warning and a welcome sense of security.

A small boat plunged into the troughs, the men at the oars grim-faced as they fought to keep the fragile craft upright. They approached the bell buoy, the boat vanishing into the waves, then bobbing up like a piece of driftwood. From the stern, one of the men hurled a rope around the buoy and hauled the boat hand over hand until it was touching the rocking buoy, and the rhythmic sound of the bell was deafening amid the roar of the water and the wind and the ceaseless battering of the rain.

No one spoke; the words would have been torn from them anyway, but they had no need of speech. The oarsmen shipped their oars while the man in the stern held the boat fast to the buoy and one of his companions swiftly, deftly, with hands of experience, wrapped thick cloth around the bell’s tongue, silencing the dull clang of its warning.

Then they sprang loose from the buoy and the small craft headed back to the beach. As they pulled against wind and tide, one of the men raised a hand, pointing to the clifftop. A light flickered then flared strongly into the wind, a beacon throwing its deadly message into the storm-wracked night.

Willing hands waded into the surf to pull them ashore, hauling the boat up the small sandy beach. The men shivered in their soaked clothes and drank deep of the flasks thrust at them. There were maybe twenty men on the beach, dark clad, shifting figures, blending into the darkness of the cliffs as they huddled with their backs to the rocks, their eyes straining across the surging sea, watching for their prey.

There was a sudden brighter flare from the clifftop, and the men moved forward as one.

And she came out of the darkness, white sails torn and flapping from her spars, the strained rigging creaking like old bones. She came heading for the light that promised a safe haven and with a dreadful grinding and splitting she met the rocks of St. Catherine’s Point.

Screams rose to do battle with the wind. Figures flew like so many remnants of cloth from the steep yawing sides of the ship, plunging down into the boiling cauldron of the sea. The vessel cracked like an eggshell and the watchers on the beach raced into the foam, eyes glittering, voices raised in skirls of triumph. Desperate men, women, children, drowning in the maelstrom around the sinking ship, called to them, but they slashed with cutlasses, hammered with broken spars, finishing by hand what the sea would not do for them.

They dragged chests, boxes, bodies to the beach. They plundered the bodies, cutting off rings and ripping away fine garments, prancing around the beach in a mad and murderous dance of greed. Above them on the clifftop the fire was quenched and all was darkness again, only the sounds of their madness competing with the wind and the rain and the sea.

Out beyond the point, another ship wrestled with the storm. She carried no sail and her master stood at the wheel,
holding her into the wind. His slender frame was deceptive, belying the hard bunched muscles, the strength in the long slim hands that fought the storm that would tear his ship from him, while he listened for the warning bell off St. Catherine’s Point.

“The beacon’s gone, sir.” The helmsman shouted in his ear against the tempest’s roar.

The master looked up at the clifftop where the betraying flare had shown and now they could hear the screams that were not the screams of gulls in the wild night, and under a great flash of lightning, the stark outline of the vessel on the rocks sprang out, for a second hideously illuminated.

And still there was no sound of the bell off St. Catherine’s Point.

A strange and heavy silence fell over the ship, its men for an instant falling still in their fight with the storm. To a man they had all sailed these waters from boyhood and they knew the hazards. And they knew that the worst danger of all came from the shore.

“May God have mercy on their souls,” the helmsman muttered, crossing himself involuntarily.

“She looks like a merchantman,” the master returned, his voice cold and distant. “There’ll be rich pickings. They chose a good night.”

“Aye,” the helmsman muttered again, his scalp crawling as the screams of the dying were lost in the crash of the waves as they pounded the broken-backed vessel to so many shards and splinters.

T
he sun shone hot and bright upon the now quiet waters
of the English Channel. Olivia Granville strolled the narrow cliff path above St. Catherine’s Point, for the moment oblivious of her surroundings, of the fresh beauty of the rain-washed morning after the night’s storm. She bit deep into her apple, frowning over the tricky construction of the Greek text she held in her hand.

The grass was wet beneath her sandaled feet and long enough in places to brush against her calves, dampening her muslin gown. A red admiral was a flash of color across the white page of her book, and a bee droned among the fragrant heads of the sea pinks.

Olivia glanced up. The sea stretched blue and smooth as bathwater to the Dorset coastline faintly visible on the horizon. She drew a deep breath of the salt- and seaweed-laden air and for a moment allowed her attention to wander from her text.

It had been an interminable winter. When King Charles I had escaped his informal jail at Hampton Court and fled to the Isle of Wight, putting himself under the protection of the island’s governor, Colonel Hammond, the protracted negotiations with Parliament had perforce moved to the island. Olivia’s father, the marquis of Granville, was a leading Parliamentarian and one of the foremost negotiators, so he had moved his family, his three daughters, and his very pregnant fourth wife, and installed them in a thatch-roofed house in the village of Chale, just a few miles beyond the great stone
walls of Carisbrooke Castle, where the king now lived, a royal prisoner treated like an honored guest.

The house was cramped and draughty but at least it was outside the castle. For Olivia and her father’s wife, her own best friend, Phoebe, such accommodations were infinitely preferable to life in a military compound. The king’s accommodations in the castle were spacious and comfortable, but nothing could disguise the military nature of his surroundings.

Olivia had grown up in her father’s great stone fortress on the Yorkshire border, and during the early years of the civil war that had torn the country apart she had grown accustomed to a life lived to all intents and purposes under siege; but the last three years, when the war had moved south, had been spent in a mellow stone manor house just outside Oxford. A very different, altogether gentler environment.

She had grown soft, Olivia thought now, with a half smile, stretching under the sun’s warmth. Her northern resilience eroded by the south’s mild climate and gentle vistas. She was accustomed to deep snow and bitter cold, and the damp drizzle of a southern winter offered no challenges to the soul. It brought a dank chill that seeped into her bones, and the northeast wind blowing off the sea was a vicious thing indeed, but it grew monotonous rather than menacing.

But here now was summer. And it was as if the winter had never been. Here were brilliant skies and the wonderful expanse of the sea. She had never before known the sea. There were moors and mountain ranges in her native Yorkshire, and winding rivers in the Thames valley that she had called home for the past three years, but nothing to compare with this wondrous sense of expansion. This vast vista where sea met sky and promised only infinity.

Olivia threw her apple core far out across the headland and felt her soul lift, her spirit dance. There were sails out there, pretty white sails on lively craft. Below her, gulls wheeled and drifted on the currents of warm air, and Olivia envied them
their wonderful freedom, the ability to give themselves to the current without purpose or necessity, but for the sheer joy of it.

She laughed aloud suddenly and took a step closer to the edge of the cliff. She stepped into a patch of undergrowth. She stepped into nothing.