Whispers of Heaven (26 page)

"How can I not?" she whispered, hugging her arms close to her body. "I have been promised to him since I was born—I pledged
myself to
him over two years ago. He loves me."

"Do you love him?"

She kept her face turned away, for fear he might see the truth of her love betrayed in her eyes. "I don't want to hurt him."

He pushed away from the edge of the fountain and straightened, coming to stand behind her. "Even if marrying him hurts you?"

"You see," she said, smiling sadly, "that's why I need you in my life. To remind me that there's another way to look at things."

He laid his palm against her cheek, urging her around until she was looking up into his dark, intent face. "And this thing between us, this wanting? Where does that fit into your life?"

A terrible pain gripped her heart, stole her breath. "I don't know."

"Yes you do. Whether you marry your Mr. Harrison Tate or not, there can never be anything between us." He nodded his head toward the blackened, tragedy-haunted ruin beside them. "You know it, and I know it."

They didn't see the boat until they left the ruins of the formal garden and took an overgrown path that wound along the water's edge.

Its staves smashed, its upended white-painted hull smeared with mud and brown seaweed, the ketch's small boat lay amid the reeds that lined the upper part of the estuary. "Look," she said, pausing on the path, her hand coming up, unthinkingly, to touch his sleeve. "Who'd have thought the force of the storm would drive it all the way up here?"

A faint ripple disturbed the surface of the water, rustling the reeds and setting the boat to rocking, gently, on its ends, the movement slow and sluggish and a bit sad. Then something about his stillness drew her attention to the man beside her, and what she saw in his face stole her breath, and turned her sadness to fear.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Beatrice was in her rose garden snipping spent blossoms, a pair of secateurs in hand, a basket looped over her arm, when Jessie let herself in the gate from the yard.

"Jesmond," Beatrice called, lifting her head to peer out from beneath the wide-brimmed straw hat she always wore in the garden. "If I could have a word with you, dear?"

Jessie hesitated only a moment, then made her way through the concentric rings of Bourbons and damasks, rugosas and ramblers, that were her mother's greatest joy. Unlike her children, Beatrice's roses grew in strict conformity to her wishes. And they seldom died. "Your garden's looking lovely this year," Jessie said, kissing the air beside her mother's pale cheek.

"Do you think so?" A slight frown puckered the bridge of Beatrice's thin, aristocratic nose as she stooped to snip off a spent bloom. Beatrice might allow her gardeners to water her roses and tend the rest of the park, but she always insisted on pruning and deadheading the roses herself. "I must confess, I am rather worried about black spot. We've had so much rain."

Jessie laughed softly. "I'm convinced your roses wouldn't think of succumbing to something as ordinary as black spot."

"Hmm," Beatrice said, stepping back to critically assess the symmetry of a white Bourbon. "You were a long time coming back from the funerals."

Jessie kept her gaze carefully fixed on the bloom before her. "I decided to go for a walk along the beach afterward."

"While you were gone, I had a visit from Captain Boyd."

Jessie looked up. "Captain Boyd?"

An unusual touch of color tinged Beatrice's cheeks, making her look both younger and prettier. "The captain of the frigate, the
Repulse.
He mentioned that he saw you at the cove yesterday. With That Woman."

"You mean Genevieve Strzlecki?" Somehow, Jessie managed to keep her voice light, casual, although her heart was thumping wildly.
I'm not a child anymore,
she reminded herself.
I can't be beaten, or locked in the tower room and kept on bread and water for days.
And still, all she could find the courage to say was, "I took shelter at the cottage when the storm struck."

"Really, Jesmond." Beatrice shook her head and tssked in that way she had. "She is not at all a proper person for you to know. You never seem to give a thought to what people will

say."

The ribbons of Jessie's hat suddenly felt too tight. She untied them with swift, angry jerks, and pulled the hat off. "On the contrary, Mother, I seem to do nothing
but
worry about what people will say, with the result that I live my life in accordance with everyone else's thoughts and wishes instead of my own."

Beatrice stared at her daughter with that puzzled, faintly apprehensive expression Jessie knew so well, for she'd seen it often enough, all the years of her growing up. "I'll never understand you," Beatrice said, cinching her lips down into a thin, sour line that was also familiar. "Perhaps Harrison will be able to manage you better than I have."

At the thought of being "managed" by her future husband, Jessie felt a wave of panic surging through her. She told herself that Harrison loved her, which surely meant he liked her as she was. Once, she had believed that. Only, she was beginning to worry that it wasn't true, and that in marrying Harrison she would be exchanging the critical, disapproving frowns of her mother for those of a husband.

Jessie swung away, her gaze sweeping the upper verandas of the house. "Where is Warrick? Do you know?"

"Really, Jesmond. We were discussing something of importance here. Warrick rode off shortly after midday, to return that ridiculous donkey to its owners. I told him I saw no reason why he shoul dn't send one of the men, but he insisted on doing it himself. He seems to have no notion of the degree of dignity to be expected from a landowner of his station. And look at this," she continued in the same tone of voice, her secateurs snipping viciously at the offending bush before her. "Black spot. I knew it. I've always had trouble with this particular bush. I'm seriously considering having it removed."

Jessie stood, the sun warm on the black satin of her dress, and watched, silently, as her mother attacked the rosebush, her problems with her unsatisfactory children temporarily forgotten. She became aware of a strange heaviness in her chest, an ache that was like a sadness for things lost, or perhaps for things she'd never had but wanted desperately. It was a feeling that was to stay with her the rest of the day, although she never came any closer to understanding it.

The boy sat on the rough drystone wall that encircled a small, muddy croft beside the house, a knife and what looked like a thin wooden pipe in his hands. He watched Warrick rein in his showy chestnut gelding before the hut's crude door, the donkey braying foul-temperedly and lagging on its lead. An uncut thatch of fiery gold hair framed a delicate, elfin face and a pair of wide changeling eyes that stared up at Warrick. In age, the boy could have been anywhere between thirteen and seventeen, his thin, almost feminine face at odds with his height. He didn't smile, and he didn't move.

"You must be Dicken," said Warrick.

"Aye." The boy shifted his attention back to the wood in his hands, the knife moving with a swift, sure efficiency that had Warrick wondering if it was this knife, this boy, who had ended Parker Jones's life.

Warrick raised himself in his stirrups, stretching his back, the saddle leather creaking. In the distance, a dog barked, although he could see no one, the sun shining warm and bright on an empty hillside of wind-ruffled grass. "Is your sister around?"

"Aye."

Warrick kneed his gelding up to the wall and held out the donkey's lead. "Thank you for the use of your animal."

For one, blazing instant, the boy met his gaze, then shrugged and returned to the pipe. "Take the rope off her halter and let her go. She won't stray."

"Now that I believe," said Warrick, unsnapping the lead. "The beast definitely possesses a decided- aversion to movement."

The boy started to smile, then checked it, as if he knew why Warrick was here, what Warrick wanted with his sister. But then, he probably did know.

Warrick collected his reins and was about to turn the gelding's head toward the stream where he'd first met her, on the off chance she might be there, when he saw her.

She was coming down the slope of the daisy-strewn hill behind the stone hut, a tall slip of a girl with impossibly long legs and a regal neck and hair the color of a sunrise-gilded sea. He cantered the gelding up the hill toward her, and drew rein. She reached up to him, and smiled.

The fragile bones of her wrist stood out stark against her fine, golden skin as he closed his hand around it. With her other hand, she lifted her skirts high, the worn blue cotton falling away from her thin legs as she put her bare foot on the toe of his boot and hauled herself up behind him with a sinewy strength belied by her delicate frame. The movement rucked up her skirts, but she made no attempt to straighten them, simply hugged his hips with her thighs in a way that pressed her bare knees and calves against his taut, hungry body.

"Where do we go?" he asked.

"That way," she said, pointing toward the sea, then sliding her hands up under his coat and around his waist in a slow caress that had his breath hitching in his chest.

* * *

She guided him to a high, grass-covered cliff that thrust out into the sea, the land falling away steeply on three sides in a sheer rock face high enough to make him dizzy, if he looked down at the wave-washed rocks, far below. "Here?" he said.

She slipped from behind him and spun around in a circle, her arms held wide, her hair flying, her faded blue skirts twirling about her. "Here."

"Why here?" he asked, swinging slowly out of the saddle, his gaze never leaving her face as he stooped to tether the gelding to a stunted eucalyptus.

She twirled toward him, a quicksilver spirit of sun-warmed female flesh and cascading silken hair and eyes that flashed provocatively as she drew up, a tantalizing arm's span away from him. "Because when I'm here, I feel like I'm on top of the world." She raised her arms, a mysterious smile curling her lips, her elbows pointing to the sky as she began to unfasten her dress. "I come here whenever I can. I like to take off me clothes and just lie here in the sun."

She eased her dress down slowly as she spoke, making of her body an offering: small high breasts kissed with a sprinkle of cinnamon, narrow stomach tapering to boyish hips. Sunlight gleamed on soft feminine curls and the long length of her thighs. The dress sank to the grass with a whisper. She stood naked before him, and smiled.

He looked at her, and felt his breath leave his body in a hot rush of desire. She stood slim and straight, a golden reed of a girl grounded in green and framed by the blue of the sky and the sun-sparkled infinity of the sea. She was so beautiful, it made his throat ache, just looking at her. To touch her ... to touch her would be an ecstasy, and his hand trembled as he reached for her.

"You look as if your body has been kissed all over by the sun," he said as he spread his hand over her breast and felt her nipple harden against his palm. "You're golden and glowing. Everywhere."

"You kiss me," she said, her eyes dark and compelling. She let her head fall back, her fingers entwining at the base of his neck to draw him down to her. "I want you to kiss me everywhere the sun has touched."

He bent his head and rubbed his open mouth against the delicate curve of her throat, breathed in the scent of her, warm, musky, feminine. So vibrantly alive.

He'd never known a woman who would even think of climbing a sea cliff to slip out of her dress and revel in the warmth of the sun on her naked flesh. He'd never known anyone, man or woman, who was this uninhibited and natural, this careless of common expectations of proper behavior. She partook of life with a wild kind of joy—drank of life, with her eyes wide open and a laugh on her lips. When he was with her, he felt alive himself. More than alive; he felt revived, reborn, as if he'd been dead for years and hadn't even noticed it.

Groaning, he tangled his fingers in the silken warmth of her hair, his thumbs brushing back and forth beneath her chin as he kissed her neck. She arched her back, her breasts pressing against his chest, one of her legs lifting to entwine erotically with his. Then she lowered her head and her mouth found his, and he lost himself in the wild magic of her kiss.

Her mouth was hot and wet and delicious, a seductive swirl of teeth and tongue and carnal promise. He felt reason and self-control begin to slip away as his world narrowed to a whirling vortex of sensation and lust and driving, urgent need. He knew nothing but the soft moist heat of her mouth and the firm ripeness of her naked body beneath his seeking hands and the tingling fire spread by her touch.

She jerked loose his neck cloth, opened his waistcoat and shirt, tore them with his coat from his body. He felt the sun warm on his flesh, felt the sea breeze lift the hair from his damp forehead. With gentle urgency, he bore her down onto her dress in the grass, her legs spreading wide beneath him, her fingers impatient with the flap of his breeches. Then she took his hardness in her hands, and he hissed with the agonizing pleasure of it.

He was mindless now, a lust-driven animal stripped of all pretense of civilization or chivalry. He wanted to bury him- self inside her, hard and deep, to pound into her, to fill her with himself, to make himself a part of her, to feel her legs wrap around his hips and her teeth nip at his shoulders. He was gasping, shaking with the need to be inside her.

Groaning, he fumbled with the French letter he'd brought, and heard her laugh breathlessly when he put it on. "And who is that to protect? Me or you?" But she didn't seem to expect an answer, because she took him in her hands again and put him inside her.

Moist heat clenched around him, consumed him, and he lost his ability to speak. He buried his face in her hair, breathed in the scent of her, kissed her eyelids, her mouth, as his body quivered, wanted. Slowly, he lifted his buttocks, drawing part way out of her, only to drive in again, harder, deeper, again and again, faster and faster. Her hips moved beneath him, met him stroke for stroke, until he was pounding into her, their bodies coming together in a crescendo of passion. He could feel her fingers digging into his shoulders, her nails raking his back; see her eyes glazed, unfocused, glittering.