Slightly Sinful (30 page)

He found Rachel's hand with his own and clasped it, lacing their fingers together.

And now what? he wondered. Had he healed one wound only to open another? He remembered how he had been in love with her before that night but how he had attributed his feelings to his physical weakness. What he had just done with her had felt very like lovemaking-love making. But he would think of that problem later.

He drifted off into a doze, lulled by his exhaustion and the droning of insects.

S HE COULD FEEL THE SOFT GRASS TICKLING HER BARE legs and feet. The sun had made her dress warm to the touch. Sunlight bathed her face, which was unprotected by either bonnet or parasol. Along her right side she could feel the extra heat radiating from his body. Her hand, clasped in his, their fingers laced, was sweaty. A pair of birds flew overhead to some unknown destination.

Rachel did not believe she had ever been happier in her life. No, that was not it. She knew she had never come even close to being as happy.

She knew too, of course, that she was in love with him, that she probably had been for a long time. But she would not allow that complication to mar her contentment in this moment. He was from a different world than her own. He was far above her socially, she suspected, even if her mother had been a baron's daughter. Of more significance, there was a whole life hidden somewhere in his lost memories, and even if that life did not include a wife or a betrothed, it was doubtless rich with people and experiences in which she could have no part. It was Jonathan Smith she loved. She did not even know the man he had been before she found him, not even his name.

She loved a mirage, an illusion, which just happened to have the flesh-and-blood body of a real man.

She was in love, but it was not and could never be a possessive thing. It was fleeting and temporary, and she was content to let it be so. She would not allow herself to suffer heartbreak when he was gone. Instead, she would simply remember him. And now she had this most wonderful, this most perfect, of all possible memories to take with her into the future she must live without him.

How precious a gift was memory.

And he had lost his!

The enormity of it struck her anew, and she turned her head to look at him. He was gazing back at her with lazy, squinted eyes, the back of his hand, which had been over his eyes a few moments ago, resting against his forehead.

"I don't know about you, Rache," he said, "but I feel like a sweat bath from head to toe."

Had she expected soft, romantic sentiments?

She laughed softly. "Did you not know," she asked him, "that ladies do not sweat, Jonathan?"

"I'll leave you here with your ladylike perfection, then, shall I," he said, "while I swim alone?"

She had been enjoying the heat of the sun, but as she turned slightly toward him, she could feel the muslin of her dress clinging damply to her back. When she raised her free hand to put back an errant lock of hair that was tickling her cheek, she found that it was damp. So was her forehead. The sunshine, in which she had basked a few moments ago, now felt almost oppressively hot.

"The water is probably too deep for me anyway," she said wistfully. "I cannot swim."

"The water is quite shallow in the area around the jetty," he said. "And even if you cannot swim, you can frolic."

She laughed again. "I have never frolicked in my life," she said. And yet she felt a strange surge of longing to do just that, to behave like a child, to have fun for the simple . . . fun of it.

He sat up, releasing her hand as he did so, and pulled his shirt off over his head. Then he hauled off his Hessian boots one at a time and stood to remove his pantaloons. He grinned down at her, clad only in his drawers. The only imperfection Rachel could see on his whole person was the fading scar of the wound on his left thigh. He had a body that was perfectly sculpted, perfectly proportioned.

She remembered suddenly that he had once told her that if there was any imperfection in her person, he failed to see it.

"You are not embarrassed, are you?" he asked her with a grin, holding out his hands to his sides. "You have seen me in less."

"I am not embarrassed," she said. Why should she be? He had just been inside her body. She still felt tender and pleasantly sore where he had been.

"If we are going to frolic," he told her, "that dress is going to have to go, Rache."

She stood and undressed down to her shift. Far from being embarrassed, she felt light and exuberant and free. For the first time in her life she was going to bathe in the outdoors. She pulled the pins from her hair and shook it loose before turning to him and laughing again-for no particular reason except that she was happy.

He was looking at her with narrowed eyes.

"I am ready to frolic," she told him.

"Immerse me in cold water quickly," he said, "before I explode."

Still laughing, Rachel ran down the slope ahead of him toward the lake. She shrieked a few times when her bare feet encountered sharp stones, but she kept going.

CHAPTER XVII

P ERHAPS ONE OF THE MOST ATTRACTIVE THINGS about Rachel York, Alleyne concluded as he caught up to her, passed her, and splashed into the water ahead of her, was that she seemed largely unaware of her extraordinary beauty. She was nothing short of dazzling.

He did not know what sort of life he would discover once he left here and found the missing part of himself. He did not know what sorts of relationships, commitments, devotions, were woven into the fabric of that man's life he had somehow left behind on the ground in the Forest of Soignés. And there must, of course, be some caution about immersing himself too deeply into the new life he had found since then.

But now, at this moment, he was in love with Rachel. And he was going to enjoy the moment. Simply that. The past was hidden behind that curtain in his mind, and the future was even more unknown than it must be to most people. But today was pretty wonderful.

And so was she-both pretty and wonderful.

She set one foot in the water, laughed, and withdrew it. Her legs were long and shapely.

The water was chest-high where he stood a short distance into the lake. Another few steps backward and it would be shoulder-high and then over his head. But there was a sufficient area shallow enough to accommodate someone who could not swim.

She tried the other foot and withdrew it too.

He dipped his hands deep and heaved two mighty handfuls of water at her. She shrieked. And then she jumped in up to her waist and disappeared until only her hair floated dark gold on the surface. She came up sputtering and gasping and clawing at her tightly closed eyes.

While he was still grinning at her, his guard totally down, a great wall of water collided with his face and had him coughing and sputtering too.

She might not be a swimmer, but she was a worthy water warrior.

"Oh," she cried to him after immersing herself again, "this is wonderful. The water is actually warm." She pushed back her hair, which lay sleek over her head and down her back to the water, where it floated on the surface. "How do I swim?"

"After several lessons and much practice," he said. "Were you thinking of challenging me to a race to the opposite bank and back?"

"Teach me," she demanded.

Her timidity with horses-which she was overcoming with great grit and determination-did not extend to water, it seemed.

He taught her how to float, a skill she learned surprisingly fast despite a few sinkings and sputterings that called for some hearty pounding on the back. And even after she had learned the trick of it she could stay on the surface for only a few seconds before sinking gradually from view. But she had made an impressive start.

"I will have you swimming on both your front and your back before the summer is over," he told her before remembering that they were going to be gone from here long before the summer was over.

He left her in the shallow water and struck out into the lake with powerful strokes, reveling in his returned strength and in the cool buoyancy of the water.

There was a tree growing on the bank not far from the jetty, a few of its branches stretching obligingly over the lake. Alleyne swam toward it and noted that at this particular spot the water was deep. And one at least of the branches looked sturdy.

"Where are you going?" Rachel called as he pulled himself up onto the bank, which fell off sharply just here, and water streamed from his body.

"Diving," he said, grinning back at her.

Climbing a tree when one was almost naked was not comfortable going, of course. But he knew it was something he had done many times before. He sat down on the branch and inched out along it, careful not to be taken unawares if it should prove to be weaker than it looked. But it held his weight without either bowing or breaking.

"Do be careful," Rachel called from some distance away. She was standing up in the water and shading her eyes with one hand.

He grinned down at her and stood up slowly on the branch, using his arms for balance. It still held. He had to show off for her, of course. He walked out to the very end of the branch, struck a pose, his body straight, his arms out ahead of him. And then he bent his knees and launched himself off into space, his arms straight above his head, his chin tucked in, his legs together, his feet pointed back.

He cleaved the water and streaked through it, arcing upward a moment before he would have crashed against the bottom. There was the familiar surge of exuberance at having done something daring and dangerous and long-forbidden during his growing years, and then he broke the surface, shook the water clear of his eyes, and grinned toward his equally daring, reckless coconspirators and partners in crime.

But only Rachel York was there, her hand pressed over her mouth and then dropping away as she smiled in obvious relief.

There was a feeling of deep, stomach-churning disorientation.

Who was it he had expected to see?

Who was it? It was more than one person actually. Let him remember just one of them, though. Just one. Please? Please let him remember just one.

Rachel was wading in his direction, a look of concern on her face, but she stopped when she was shoulder-deep and the floor of the lake was still falling away beneath her feet.

"What is it?" she asked him. "You hurt yourself, did you not, you foolish man. Did you hit your head? Come here."

He was treading water. He gazed back at her, but he did not go to her. He swam to the bank instead, pulled himself out, and made his way up the slope without looking back.

There was no reason why he should not remember, was there? His head wound must have healed by now both inside and out. The headaches had gone away except when he strained too much to remember. He had been prepared to be patient. He had been patient. But sometimes panic attacked him like a thief in the night.

He sat cross-legged on the blanket, draped his wrists over his knees, and bowed his head. He tried to concentrate upon deep, even breathing. He tried to bring his consciousness to a place below his chattering, frightened mind.

He did not hear her coming. He knew she was there only when one cool arm came about his shoulders and the other slid beneath his arms to circle his waist. Her head came to rest against his shoulder, facing away from him. Her wet hair fell down over his arm. She was kneeling beside him, he realized. She did not say a word.

"Sometimes," he said after a while, "I feel completely unmanned."

"I know," she said. "Oh, Jonathan."

"That is not my name," he said. "I have been robbed even of my name. I do not know who or what I am, Rachel. I am more of a stranger to myself than you are or Geraldine or Sergeant Strickland. At least you can tell me stories about yourself and I can form impressions of you as a person who is a product of her upbringing, though you have brought your own unique character to bear upon it. I have no such stories of myself. My oldest story is of waking up in the house on the Rue d'Aremberg to see four painted ladies looking down at me. That was not much longer than a month ago."

"I know who you are," she said. "I do not know the what of your life. I do not know any of your stories except the ones in which I have shared. But I know you as a man of laughter and vitality and generosity and daring. I do not believe you can have changed in essential qualities. You are still you. And I have seen your courage in the weeks since I have known you. You may believe at moments like this that you will collapse and let life slip away from you as something meaningless that you no longer value. But you will overcome such moments. I know it because I know you. I do. I wish I could call you by name because a name is important-it becomes part of a person's identity. But even without a name I know you."

He listened to his breathing again, but after a couple of minutes he noticed that he had tipped his head to one side to rest against the top of hers.

"Do you know why I suggested this charade?" he asked her. "I did not even realize it myself until this moment. It was not entirely for your sake, though I did believe at the time that it would be best for you to wrest your fortune from a tyrant who cared nothing for you. It was for my sake so that I would not have to go in search of my identity."