Whispers of Heaven (22 page)

He spun to face her, his sweat-slicked, naked chest heaving with his suddenly agitated breathing. "But I am a convict. Nothing is going to change that. Not even death." He swung his arm in an angry arc over the isolated rows of plain crosses. "Just look around you."

She stood before him slim and straight, the wind plastering her fine skirts against her long legs and fluttering the loose strands of hair around her pale face. "And I am an Englishwoman. What do you see when you look at me?"

His anger collapsed, suddenly, within him. Reaching out a hand that was not quite steady, he brushed the hair away from her face and tucked it behind one ear. "I see you," he said softly. "Only you."

His knuckles brushed down her throat, and he saw a shiver ripple through her, saw her breath catch. And he wanted. ..

He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her firm young body close to his. He wanted to bury his face in her hair and breathe in the sweet fragrance of her. He wanted to taste her lips and feel the softness of her skin beneath his hands. He wanted her in every way a man can want a woman, and he was never, ever going to have any more of her than what he had now.

"For the love of God..."
Somehow, he forced himself to take a step back, and then another. "Ask your brother to assign you a different groom."

She shook her head. "I can't. You know why."

He let out a harsh laugh and swung half away from her, his hands on his hips. "If you think your family and acquaintances would disapprove of your friendship with Genevieve Strzlecki, how do you think they'd be reacting if they knew you'd stooped so low as to kiss your Irish convict groom?"

Her eyes went wide in a pale face. "That won't happen again."

He looked directly at her. "And if it does?"

"It won't," she said quickly. Too quickly.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The girl sat curled up on the window seat in Genevieve's kitchen, a cup of hot cider cradled in both hands, her gaze fixed on the heaving dark waters of Blackhaven Bay, far below. It was only early afternoon, but the coming storm had darkened the day to the gloom of near twilight. A wild wind whipped the sea to a dangerous churning froth and battered the gnarled trees of the Point with a fury that whined through the eaves of the cottage.

Genevieve brought her own cup to her lips and took a thoughtful sip, her attention caught not by the storm but by the girl who watched it. There was something different about Jessie today, some uncharacteristic emotion that brought a faint flush to her cheeks and a sparkle to her eyes and a kind of quick restlessness to her movements. "What is it, Jessie?" Genevieve asked, letting her rocking chair creak gently back and forth. "What's happened?"

Jessie swung her head to look at Genevieve, and smiled. "Am I so obvious?"

She shook her head. "It's not exactly the type of weather one normally chooses for an afternoon ride."

The girl turned to stare again at the ships riding at anchor in the bay, their bare masts thrashing back and forth against the gray sky. The rain had held off so far, but the threat of it was there, heavy, in the lightning-charged air. "I like watching a storm over the sea. It makes me feel so... alive."

"But that's not why you came, is it?"

Jessie let her breath out in a short sigh. "No." She pressed

one splayed hand against her thigh and smoothed the fine cloth of her riding habit. "Harrison kissed me, the other night."

"Ah," said Genevieve, smiling softly to herself. "So that's it. I should have thought he'd have kissed you long before now."

"He has." Jessie bowed her head, her gaze fixed on the agitated movement of her hand. "But not... like that. I..." Her throat worked visibly as she swallowed. "I didn't enjoy it."

"Oh, Jessie."

"Mother says that men's passions are stronger than women's, that with women it's a matter of simply enduring the physical side of love. But it's not that. I know it's not that."

The wind threw a scattering of rain against the window, hard drops that hit as sharply as pellets. And Genevieve understood, suddenly, that air of suppressed excitement she'd sensed. That glow of inner awakening. "There's someone else, isn't there?"

Jessie nodded her head slowly.

"Is he unsuitable?"

A sad, soft smile touched her lips. "Very."

"Do you love him?"

The girl's head came up, her eyes widening. "No. How could I? I hardly know him." She sucked in a quick breath that lifted her breasts. "I mean..."

Outside, the wind shrieked, the bay and its storm-threatened ships disappearing in a swirl of lowering clouds and wind- tossed rain. "But you kissed him?"

She didn't say anything, but a smile broke across the girl's face, a smile so dazzling in its brilliance and just a bit naughty, that Genevieve thought,
Oh, Jessie.
Then the smile faded, and Jessie swung her head away to stare out at the storm, and Genevieve knew a swift stab of uneasiness. "He has a wife already?"

"No. It's worse than that. By far." A quiver of emotion crossed the girl's face, quickly smoothed out by years of training. "There can be no question of anything between us, not even friendship."

The gloom in the kitchen deepened as the rain poured down, streaming across the windowpanes in wind-driven sheets of water. "Then what..." Genevieve's hand tightened around the mug and set it aside. "Ah, Harrison. That's your problem, is it?"

The girl nodded, her eyes wide and confused, her lips pressed into a tense line. "I feel so terrible. He doesn't deserve this. But it isn't anything I've
willed.
It simply ... happened."

"The heart has a will of its own, Jessie. No woman can decide whom she will love, and whom she won't." The wind screamed around the house, almost drowning out the distant boom of the surf against the rocks and the faint but unmistakable peal of church bells. Genevieve half rose from her seat. "What can that be?" she began, just as the kitchen door flew open to slam against the wall with a crash.

Michael, the old emancipist who did odd jobs for Genevieve, stood on the threshold, his oilskin streaming water, his face white with horror. "There's a ship in the cove!" he said with a gasp, trying to catch his breath. "It must have snapped its cables, and now the wind's carried it around the Point and onto the rocks."

Down at the cove, half the bcach had disappeared beneath the heavy black waves that swept into shore to break against the sand with a booming, wind-whipped roar.

With the sea running so high, they'd had to take the long way around, doubling back toward the track to Blackhaven Bay before striking down to the cove itself. Gallagher drove a small cart of Genevieve's, loaded with flasks of hot cider and warm soup and blankets wrapped in oilcloth.

There were others already on the beach ahead of them, dark, cloak-wrapped shapes huddled against a violent sea and a low, pewter-gray sky. "Oh, God," whispered Jessie, one hand tightening on the side of the cart as the terrified, wide- eyed horse lurched to a stop in the deep, rain-drenched sand. "Look at that."

The ship was a small, sleek-hulled ketch, its sails struck, its deck tilted at a crazy angle, for it had plowed into the rocks bow-first, some two or three hundred yards offshore, on the far side of the cove. The momentum of the impact had carried the front of the ship up until the prow thrust into the air and the stern disappeared into the surging sea, the rear decks awash with the swirling, white-tipped waves that crashed against its sides.

"Perhaps she won't sink after all," said Genevieve.

"Her hull's been stoved in," said Gallagher, hopping out to help Genevieve alight from the cart, his shout barely audible above the howl of the wind and the pounding of the rain and the booming crash of waves breaking against sand and rock. "Right now, the rocks themselves are keeping her afloat. But she won't hang there much longer. Eventually the tides are going to suck her off, and when that happens, she'll go down."

Jessie watched him turn toward her, the rain streaming over the sharp-boned features of his face as he reached up to catch her by the waist and swing her to the ground. Her gaze locked with his, her hands clutching at his shoulders, and for one impossible instant, it seemed as if something leapt between them, an invisible skein of charged energy that might have come from the storm itself. Then Jessie took a step back, her arms falling away, her face turning toward the stricken ship. "How long?" she asked. "How long before it slides off?"

The Irishman shrugged. "Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty."

Genevieve had spotted a man she recognized, Jack Carpenter, the publican of the Black Horse. Jessie sloughed across the sand toward them, one hand clutching her hood tight around her throat. "How many people on that ship?" Genevieve was asking, her voice a shout against the wind. "Does anyone know?"

He swung toward them, a broad-faced, middle-aged man with rain-washed skin and gray whiskers and narrowed, worried gray eyes. "Just four. A seaman and three children."

"Children?"
repeated Jessie, coming up beside her.

"Aye. The parents are on their way to take over a run up the coast. They came ashore with the crew this morning, for supplies, but the bay was so choppy, they decided it'd be safer to leave the children on board the ketch. That's the father, there," said Carpenter, nodding toward the cove, "with the captain in the ship's small boat."

Jessie turned to look out to sea, where a small boat could be seen, heaving and lurching with the ugly swell sweeping around the Point, six oarsman fighting hard to wrest control of the craft from the pull of the tide. The two men in the prow could be seen bailing frantically, but Jessie thought the boat must still be taking on too much water, for it rode dangerously low, the waves breaking over the gunwales in a violent crash of white spray.

"They're veering too close to the shore," she said, watching the small boat lifted up and flung forward by the surge of the sea. "They're going to miss the ketch."

"Miss it?" said Gallagher, coming to stand behind her. "Sweet Mary, they're going to
join
it."

She wondered afterward how he knew the rocks were there, submerged beneath the high tide, when she, who had spent so much of her life on this cove, did not. At that instant, the small boat struck with a violence that sent the stem shooting up toward the roiling, lightning-split sky. The men within spilled into the sea to become dark, thrashing specks in a swirl of rain-beaten white foam.

"Ben!"
screamed a woman. Jessie turned to see the children's mother hunched over, her arms gripping her sides, her breath leaving her body in a low keening moan as she staggered to where the breakers smashed against the shore, soaking her dark skirts and throwing up a wild, wind-whipped frenzy of spume that plastered her dark blond hair to her white, wet face. "Oh, God, no. Ben."

Someone grabbed the woman's arm, pulling her back, while farther down the beach, men were already splashing into the surf to catch the gasping, choking sailors rolling in on the giant, curling waves.

"You can see the children," said Genevieve in a tight voice. "There, on the deck."

Jessie looked again toward the ketch. A great flash of lightning lit up the dark, angry afternoon with a flood of jagged white light, so that she could just make out a huddle of small figures beside the starboard rail. The seaman was nowhere in sight.

"They'll have to bring another boat from around the Point," said Carpenter as a heavy wall of water slammed into the side of the stricken ketch with a hissing boom, dashing the great wave into a fan of white spray. Impaled on the rocks, the small ship lurched and tottered, its timbers squealing, its lower decks boiling with foam. Carpenter shook his head. "Problem is, it's going to take time."

"There is no time," said Gallagher, shrugging out of his coat and waistcoat. The rain drenched his shirt, plastered the coarse cloth to his body. "Listen to that. The ship's breaking up."

"What are you doing?" Jessie demanded, her fingers closing around the tensed muscle of his arm as he bent to pull off first one boot, then the next.

He straightened, his gaze stark and hard on her face. Her hand fluttered back to her side, and he went to work on the wet ties of his shirt, his gaze still locked with hers. "I'm going to swim out to it."

"You can't," she said, her voice coming out high and panicky. Rain ran in her eyes. She drew in a quick breath heavily scented with brine and fear. "You can't. You'll be swept against the rocks, just like that boat."

He pulled the coarse convict shirt over his head and dropped it in a sodden heap by his boots and socks. "I doubt it."

"Even if you do make it," said Genevieve, rain dripping from her white face as she stared up at him, "what can you do? One man with three children, and with no boat?"

Jessie watched him turn to look at the older woman. Rain plastered his dark hair to his head, streamed down his angular cheeks and chin and over the bare, sun-darkened flesh of his leanly muscled torso. "I can put at least one child on my back and swim to shore."

"You'll never make it," said Jessie, panic gripping her stomach so hard it hurt.

He swung to face her, his naked chest lifting on a deep breath. "I can try."

"But—"

He reached out, stopping her words with his rough fingers. His eyes were wide and dark, his face gaunt with a fierceness that caught at her chest. The wind howled around them; the rain poured. Breakers piled one on another, crashing against the shore with a deafening roar as thunder rumbled low and threatening across the thick gray sky. For one, suspended moment, they might have been the only people on the beach.

"I can die like Parker," he said softly, so softly she almost didn't hear him, "or I can die trying to save those children." His fingers slid across her lips in a movement that was almost a caress, and she thought she saw him smile. "Which do you think is the better end?"

And then he was gone, running into the boiling surf, his naked torso gleaming wetly, his body arching as he dove into the surging wall of water.