Windswept (18 page)

Minutes later the tea was left cooling on Nora’s bedside table while she pressured her cousin for answers. “What’s going on, Fanny? What are you doing with Mr. Hyde?”

Fanny pouted and sat on Nora’s bed. “Don’t give me that look,
cherie
…the one that clearly identifies me as the spider and poor Mr. Hyde as the fly.”

Nora sat at her vanity, removed the net that held her hair and began brushing the loose tresses that fell around her shoulders. She smiled into the mirror at her cousin. “Sorry, Fanny. It’s just that I wouldn’t have assumed he was your type.”

“Why not? Because he is slightly built, and I would make two of him?”

“Partly.”

Fanny sputtered with mirth. “You’ve always known I like men I can hold in the palm of my hand.”

Nora pinched her cheeks and combed her eyebrows to a fine arch. “Very funny, but tell me truly. Are you interested in Dillard Hyde?”

“I’ll tell you, cousin, if you tell me something first.”

Nora pressed a crystal perfume dauber under her earlobe and caught her cousin’s expectant expression in the glass. “Tell you what?”

“Tell me why a young woman who suffers from acute food indiscretions brushes her hair until it gleams and applies cologne to her sensitive places before going to her sick bed. A single, well-bred young woman anyway.”

Deep down Nora had to admit she’d been preening for Fanny’s benefit. She wanted to be caught, because she just had to tell someone. Pivoting on her vanity stool to face her cousin, Nora exclaimed in a loud whisper. “I’m going to meet him, Fanny. Tonight, down by the jetty.”

Fanny grinned and pulled a feather from a seam in a pillow. With a puff of her breath, she blew the feather into the air. “Really? I never would have guessed…”

“You knew!”

“I suspected. All one has to do is talk to this captain of yours to know there is a kismet between the two of you that cannot be denied. If not tonight, then sometime.”

Nora flung herself on the bed, sending Fanny falling into a mound of pillows. “That’s right. You talked to him today. What did you say?”

“Nothing. You’ll find out,
ma
petite
, that you can learn a lot more by holding your tongue with a man and listening to the subtleties of his dialogue. It’s not so much what he says as how he says it. I only spoke with Jacob Proctor for fifteen minutes, and during that time, your name was brought up a half dozen times.”

A revelation! “And how did he say it?”

“In frustration. In terror.” She smiled. “In awe.”

“Oh, Fanny…”

“So, that is that.” Fanny rose from the bed and pulled Nora after her. “And as for Mr. Hyde, that is a subject for another night. But now you must get ready to meet your hero.”

She fluffed the ends of Nora’s hair and pulled at the capped shoulders of her ivory gown.

“How do I look?” Nora asked.

“Like an angel.”

“This dress has no sleeves,” she said, reaching for a shawl. “I suppose I should take this.”

“
Oui
, I suppose.” Fanny adjusted the already low bodice of Nora’s gown to reveal even more of her breasts. “But don’t use it unless it drops to around thirty degrees tonight.”

“Fanny, you’re horrible!”

“It’s true, I am. But you, my angel are not. Take this advice from the cousin who loves you. Follow your heart,
cherie
, but don’t let it lead to anyplace you don’t want to go. Now I will check the back stairs to see that no one will witness your escape.”

Nora looked through the palm trees to a silver sea glittering under a full moon like diamonds on a black table top. And Jacob Proctor, also a contrast in light and dark in his white shirt and black trousers, sensed her presence, turned from the water and looked toward the trees.

The wind pressed the front of her skirt against her legs and billowed the rest out behind her. It lifted her hair off her shoulders and back and cooled exposed skin that had warmed the moment she saw him. Her heart beat fast, and she pressed her palm against her bodice to hide the telltale rise and fall of her chest.

What would she say when he reached her? She should think of something clever. Perhaps she should remain silent to see what he would say to her. How she hated the first awkward moments between a man and a woman when no one knew who should speak first or what topics would be broached during clandestine meetings such as this one.

Her first and only word slipped out on a soft breath. “Jacob…”

He said nothing at all. He threaded his fingers through her tangling hair, lay his thumbs on her cheeks, and took her mouth in a kiss that lasted only seconds. But it was long enough to shatter the awkwardness she’d feared into a thousand pinpoints of light that shimmered in her mind. When he pulled away, he passed his hand through the crook of her elbow, rested his palm on her arm and took her to the water.

There was a palm tree a few feet from the sea, a sturdy, proud one that had refused to give in to the ravages of winds and storms. It swept gracefully low to the sand and then grew upward to the sky again. Jacob had lain a Shetland wool blanket over the trunk. Circling Nora’s waist with his hands, he lifted her onto a low-hanging tree branch. Resting an elbow next to her, he said finally, “I owe you an apology.”

Still reeling from his kiss, she felt empowered. She lay her shawl on her lap and gave him a sideways teasing glance. “You owe me several, Captain.”

He smiled. “You’re probably right, but unless my misdeeds occur within the same day of my apology, I can scarcely remember what they were. Selective forgetfulness I call it.”

“Then I shall have to be satisfied with the one you do remember.” Looking at him from under purposefully arched brows, she said, “Apologize at will, then, Jacob.”

“All right. It was presumptuous of me to call out Hadley as I did today in the warehouse - to attempt to turn you over to him as if it were a foregone conclusion that it was where you wanted to be.”

“Yes, it was presumptuous.”

“I assumed, wrongly I suppose, that Hadley is your suitor as well as your houseguest.” His tone was more questioning than definite. The captain was on a fishing expedition.

Nora trifled with the trim on her shawl. She enjoyed the direction this conversation had taken. “No, you’re right actually. Lately Theo has been attentive enough to be termed a suitor.”

He
harumphed
. A quick, decisive little snort of displeasure. “Much to His Honor’s delight, I imagine.”

Nora shrugged. “Much to Mama’s actually. My father couldn’t care less about my feelings for Theo Hadley.”

“Yes, I’m sure. He only has explicit opinions about one particular contender for the position of suitor…a certain wrecker for whom the judge has an intense dislike.”

Nora lingered over every detail of Jacob’s face, from his intense charcoal eyes to the firm set of his lips. “Why, Captain, are you hinting that you have been courting me? Because if you have, you certainly go about it in the strangest possible manner.”

Those lips curled slightly at the corners as his hand moved to settle on her shoulder. His fingers caressed the skin over her collar bone and moved up her neck to her earlobe. “Miss Seabrook, if I were courting you, you would certainly know it. You wouldn’t have to ask.”

His touch sent a shiver of anticipation skidding up her spine. What coyness she’d pretended took flight on the breeze that ruffled the fronds above her head. She let her gaze be swallowed by the smoldering embers of his eyes. “Why, Captain, what would you do to prove it to me?”

With one step, he was in front of her. The hand that had been striking a path of delicious sensation down the column of her throat slipped to the sensitive skin above the bodice of her gown. He lay his other hand flat on the trunk of the palm tree next to her, trapping her with the press of his hips against her knees.

“I would do this,” he said, and his forefinger began exploring a lazy, silky trail above the edge of her bodice. He skimmed the swell of each breast and returned.

“And this,” he said. He bent his head until all she could see was the golden sheen of his hair against her skin. His lips moved to where his hand had been, and he kissed her neck, her shoulder, the crest of each breast that suddenly strained against the punishing confinement of satin and lace.

“I see,” she breathed. “Yes, all of this would make me think that perhaps you were courting me.” Her words came out on a trembling sigh and were barely audible above the lapping of water along the shore and the low, husky murmurs that lips make against skin. His lips. Her skin.

With his hip, he parted her legs and stepped between them. His hands circled her waist again, and he lifted her up and against his chest. With his mouth hovering just inches from hers, he said, “But none of these things would convince you as much as this…”

She closed her eyes and held her breath, waiting, wanting the crush of his lips on hers. But he teased her. He only brushed his mouth over hers. His lips were slightly parted, slightly damp. He moved across her mouth from one side to the other. The tip of his tongue flicked out, pressed briefly against the line of her lips and withdrew, only to do the same thing again and again. A journey of but an inch or two, as he seared his way from corner to corner, took a lifetime.

It was wonderful. Sublime. A kiss for the ages, but it was not enough.  A moan escaped her lips. Her arms went round his neck. She wouldn’t let him go, not until he did to her what she wanted and needed.

“And finally, this,” he said against her mouth. With his hands splayed firmly on her spine, he took her lips in a scorching kiss that exploded in her brain like a riotous fountain of stars. She opened her mouth to him and he plunged inside. His tongue rode the ridge of her teeth, slipped along the insides of her cheeks, and finally circled with her own.

He drew his head back but still held her close. The tips of her breasts remained in exquisite contact with the hard plane of his chest. He moved his thumb across her lips removing the moisture his mouth had left.

Slowly she opened her eyes and met his heated gaze. She saw beyond the molten pewter of his eyes, into the farthest corners of his longing. How could she have thought this man cruel? How could she have thought him confounding and misleading? How could her father suspect him of heinous crimes? How could anyone think him anything but gentle and passionate? Definitely passionate.

“So are you, Captain?” she said.

He placed a finger under her chin. “Am I what, Nora?”

Her words, earnestly spoken, almost pleading, crossed the charged space between them and struck a direct route to his conscience. “Please tell me yes, Jacob. Tell me you are courting me.”

He walked away from her, toward the water. What did he think he was doing? The look in her eyes could have felled him sooner than the snapping of the tallest mast on the
Dover Cloud
in a hurricane. This was no game to Nora. This little
courting yes, and courting no
nonsense. There was no dissembling with Nora Seabrook. In matters of the heart there was only trust and honesty, and he saw both in the shimmering aqua of her eyes.

What a fool he was! To think he could rid himself of her foothold in his life and his dreams by stealing this night alone with her. What did he think was going to happen on this beach tonight? That he would kiss her and find the act distasteful? He already knew that was not possible. Did he think he would touch her skin and find himself repulsed by the feel of her? One look at the soft ivory of her face and shoulders convinced a man otherwise. Did he think she would screech and scold him like a harridan when he tried to get close to her? Then he was indeed the greatest fool because there was only passion and sweet longing in this woman.

There was no ridding himself of Nora Seabrook. There was no getting his fill of her either. She was everything he desired and all he couldn’t have. Only distance and time could keep him away from her. And even those would not shake her from his heart. What kind of man was he to treat her the way he had tonight, as if she were an experiment for the abating of his hunger, a hunger he now admitted could only be satisfied by claiming her totally.

He knew what kind of man he was. Deep down he knew. Deceitful, selfish, and most of all, weak. Maybe the wicked curse upon his family had already begun its insidious claiming of his soul.

He heard her climb down from the tree trunk. She came beside him and put her hand on his arm. The muscles tensed all the way to his shoulder. How could she touch him without getting scorched?

“Jacob, what’s wrong?” she asked.

Her simple question had a thousand answers and yet not one to comfort her. “You know, I can almost see it,” he said. “In my mind’s eye it’s as plain as the day I sailed away over eighteen years ago.”

Her fingers tightened on his arm. “What? What can you see?”

“England in 1839. We sailed from Dover, and I can still see the cliffs, the roofs of the few rugged cottages on the hilltops. I’ve never been back, but I can still see it.”

“Jacob, what does all this mean? What are you saying? Who sailed away with you?”

He looked down at her. Her eyes were filled with wondering. She cared what he would tell her. If she only knew there were no explanations. He’d spent half his lifetime looking for them, and still he was no closer to the truth. There was no explaining why some things happened. “It’s nothing, Nora. Nothing to concern you.” He stepped away from her again, and she dropped her arm. That was how it should be.