An Improper Proposal (35 page)

But then, just like last time, she moved against him, lifting her hips so that just the tip of his hard staff entered her soft warmth—just the smallest fraction of an inch she moved, taking just the tiniest piece of him into her. But that was enough. Next thing he knew, he’d let out a sort of shuddering groan, and he’d thrust himself deeply into her, so deeply that he was afraid he might have lanced her to the ground. And maybe he’d meant to. Because if he could spend the rest of his life right there, exactly where he was, embedded between her legs, her long, smooth legs, wrapped so tightly around his thighs, he’d die a happy man, indeed.

And then, just as he was marvelling at the feel of her, the immense heat that radiated from her core, the incredibly tight grip in which she held him, all without even being aware—he was certain she couldn’t be aware of it—of the power she had over him, he felt her arms tighten around his neck, and her back arch. The hot skin that held his erection so firmly prisoner began to spasm, and he realized that, incredibly, she was climaxing, without his ever having moved. Muscles he doubted she even knew she had caressed him, teased him, tried to pull him more deeply into her. He groaned, and dropped his head down so that he could press his mouth, still drenched in her dew, on hers.

This time, when he climaxed, he was no more controlled than before. Only now she had soft sand beneath her, instead of hard rock, so as he pounded her body with his own, he knew he wasn’t hurting her. And when he’d finished, and was able to lift himself up to look at her, to make sure she was still whole, she smiled up at him with an expression that could only be called smug.

“I thought,” she said huskily, “that you were going to go look for firewood.”

He lifted a strand of her hair and brought it to his lips. “I changed my mind,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she said, “to change it any time you like.”

Payton could not remember ever having been quite so happy. Oh, she supposed that back when she’d been younger, roaming the decks of her father’s boats in her bare feet and pigtails, she’d been happy enough. And in the days before Miss Whitby, when it had been enough for her simply to sit next to Connor Drake, now and again, at mealtimes, she’d been happy, too.

But not since she’d become a woman—and she considered that this momentous occasion occurred sometime after her seventeenth birthday, when Mei-Ling had announced that she was returning to her own family, her job being done—had she ever felt this content, this calm, this … well, happy.

She probably hadn’t any right to feel so self-satisfied. After all, they were still in mortal danger. The
Rebecca
or the
Nassau Queen
could come into view on the horizon any minute. They still had to hide their evening campfires, and stay off the beach as much as possible. But what did that matter? She was marooned on an island with the man she’d been in love with since she was fourteen years old. What was more, he loved her. She was solidly convinced of his love. Besides the fact that he freely admitted it—and at the oddest moments, too, like when she’d just washed her face and was stumbling around, looking for something to dry it with—he proved it a thousand different ways, every single day. She had only to utter the slightest wish—a fancy for lobster for supper, for instance—and he granted it. She was the luckiest girl alive, and she knew it. She had even made a truce with God, and forgiven Him, at long last, for robbing her of her mother. She felt that, in making Drake love her, God had more than made up for any injuries done to her in the past.

And yet, happy as she was, she had to admit to a certain wariness, where Drake was concerned. Not that she felt she had anything to fear—for instance, that should they ever be rescued, he’d leave her for someone else, someone who wouldn’t so easily be mistaken for a boy, or who actually knew what in the hell had happened to her maidenhead—but because of something Georgiana had said once, when Payton had asked her why she’d married Ross. She had naively supposed that Georgiana was marrying her brother because she loved him, and now, of course, she knew that her sister-in-law really did love Ross … at least, in her own way, which wasn’t in the least the way Payton loved Drake.

Anyway, Georgiana, who was several years older than Payton, had taken the opportunity to offer her husband’s sister a little advice: “It’s always better,” she’d said, “for a woman to marry a man who loves her just a little more than she loves him. That way, she can always be certain of having the upper hand.”

Payton had never forgotten this piece of advice. She had no idea whether or not it was accurate, though she did rather suspect that in Ross and Georgiana’s case, it might be. And she had to admit it was causing her some worry, since she knew good and well that she loved Drake with every fiber of her being, with all the fervor and fierceness of a first love. She was not at all convinced that he loved her more than she did. In fact, she couldn’t see how he could: he was, after all, a man of the world. He’d surely met dozens of women who were far more worldly and exotic than Payton. If, after they were rescued—and she was quite certain they would be, some day—he stayed with her, how was Payton to know whether he was staying with her because he really loved her, or staying with her because, after everything they’d done together, her brothers would kill him if he didn’t?

It was a dilemma. Not one that bothered her hourly, or even daily, but one that occurred to her sometimes late at night, when she lay in his arms, looking up at the stars. Drake was hardly one of those poetic types of lovers—he rarely told her that he loved her without employing an expletive in the sentence (he loved her like hell, or like the devil) and he had certainly never sung the praises of her beauty (except to observe, once, that her feet were shockingly small, compared to his own). But still, she felt that be really was attached to her, in his way. She gathered this not so much through the way he made love to her—which was often, and generally quite emphatic—but from the subtle clues he dropped here and there, most likely not even realizing he’d revealed them.

Take, for instance, the fact that they were trapped together on this island. They could hardly get away from one another. In fact, when she wanted to be alone, she had to wait until he was asleep, or was fully occupied stalking some small beast for supper. The rest of the time, he was talking to her, or making love to her, or simply staring at her, something he did with irritating regularity, to the point that now, when she caught him at it, she heaved a coconut in his direction, if one was handy.

But despite the fact that they were hardly ever out of one another’s sight, it seemed as if Drake could not stand to be without her company. Even when she was sleeping, he did his level best to wake her. Head-over-heels in love with him as she was, Payton was still firmly aware of the fact that Drake had faults, and one of the most irritating was his tendency to wake very early in the morning. Since there wasn’t a great deal to do on San Rafael, Drake occupied these early morning hours devising ways to wake her. He didn’t dare, after their first few mornings together, simply shake her awake. He’d tried that, and nearly had his head bitten off for his trouble. Nor could he try more erotic methods of rousing her—she had wakened, plenty of mornings, to find his face buried between her thighs, and had generally responded by placing a foot on his shoulder and shoving him away.

So Drake had taken to “accidentally” waking her. Some of these “accidents” had included the very loud blaring of a conch shell (he’d had to blow on it, he claimed, to make sure there wasn’t a conch inside; she liked conch for breakfast, didn’t she?); a shower of spring water from an overturned gourd (he claimed to have tripped); and, Payton’s favorite, a butterfly that just happened to perch on her nose as she slept (he stridently denied having sprinkled pollen anywhere near her face, though when she’d rubbed it, telltale yellow had come off on her hand).

What was most infuriating of all was that every morning, after waking her with these preposterous excuses, Drake took no more time explaining them away than it took him to unlace her shirt. And then, next thing she knew, he was kissing her, and she forgot all about how furiously angry she was at being roused with the dawn, and actually proceeded to kiss him back! It was extremely hard to stay angry at someone who was capable, with the merest kiss, of rendering you senseless. Payton feared Georgiana wouldn’t think very much of her, had she been aware of how she was conducting herself in this, her very first love affair.

And if Georgiana had happened to witness her behavior one particular evening, after a delicious supper of roast parrot—she’d quickly gotten over her soft-heartedness—and mangoes, she’d have probably disowned her. Having tied off, the final knot in a hammock she’d spent, quite literally, days creating out of vines, Payton urged Drake to hang it between two palm trees, down on the beach. Since it was evening, and there was no chance of them being spotted from beyond the shoals, he agreed, and they set off, Drake observing dryly that, considering the amount of time she’d put into the creation, she might have woven something more useful than a hammock. A fishnet, he said, was what they wanted, so he wouldn’t have to spend all his time trying to will the fish to come to him: he could just spread out his net and wham! Dinner.

Payton, skipping along behind him, ignored him. It was a beautiful evening—like all the evenings they’d experienced on San Rafael—and she was looking forward to enjoying it from the cradle of the hammock she’d made—if it proved strong enough to support her weight. She wasn’t at all certain it would. Which was where Drake came in. She fully intended to make him try it first. If it did not break under his superior weight, she knew it would be safe enough for her.

How Drake might have liked it, had he known she’d required his presence merely as a test subject, she never knew, since she wisely kept it from him. But once he’d strung the hammock up, he didn’t even ask her if she wanted to try it first. Instead, he lowered himself onto it, gingerly at first, then with growing confidence.

“I say, Payton,” he declared, giving the crude netting beneath him an experimental bounce. “This thing’s perfect.”

Then, lifting his feet from the sand, he stretched out in the hammock, which groaned only a little bit beneath his weight.

“This,” he said, to the moonless sky. “This is the way to live. What have we been thinking, sleeping on the ground? We must have been mad. Come here, Payton, and try this.”

But Payton, who’d been standing to one side, watching him, had another idea. She never could say how it occurred to her, or what made her think of it. Maybe it was the way Drake had lifted his arms above his head, revealing the pale skin and silken hair of his underarms. In any case, instead of joining him, Payton reached out and, using a bit of vine she’d had left over, she tied Drake’s wrists to the sides of the hammock.

“Payton,” he said, sounding only mildly curious. “What are you doing?”

Making sure he was well and truly secured—she pulled on each of his arms to be certain of it—Payton started to remove her trousers. “Remember,” she said, “when you were chained to the wall in the hold of the
Rebecca
?”

“I’m not likely to forget it.”

“Well, this is what I wanted to do you while you were in there.” She pulled off her shirt. “Only you would never have let me. Not then.”

His eyes, which were normally so light in color that they still occasionally unnerved her, went dark, the pupils wide as pennies, as he gazed at her. “Payton,” he said, his deep voice rich with amusement. “What are you up to?”

Standing by the side of the hammock, she leaned down, her bare breasts pressing up against his arm. Ordinarily, he’d have reached for them. He was inordinately fascinated by her breasts—so much so that she no longer considered them abnormally small, but rather the absolute perfect size for Connor Drake’s palms. But he couldn’t touch them this time, couldn’t play with them, as he was fond of doing, bringing first one, then the other of her nipples to his mouth, because his wrists were securely bound.

“Payton,” he said, in a different tone of voice. She felt the muscles in his arm leap beneath her breasts. She ignored them, and reached for the buttons on the front of his trousers.

Now he tried to break the bonds that were tying his arms up over his head. “Payton,” he said, when he found he couldn’t, not without causing the rough fibers to cut into his skin. “This isn’t funny.”

She leaned over and kissed him on the lips. “I know,” she said. “And don’t worry. I’ll cut you loose.” She slid her mouth down the side of his prickly face—his beard was something to see, it was so bushy and wild—placing her lips against the place in his throat where his pulse beat. “I’ll cut you loose,” she assured him again, in a husky whisper. “When I’m ready.”

Then she ran her fingers lightly over his chest, feeling the raised imprints of old scars, the flat nubs of his own nipples, which were brown and for the most part lost in a field of golden hair. She found one, and pinched it gently between a thumb and forefinger. “Docs that feel good?” she asked him.

“It does not,” he said. “I want you to go and get the knife right now, Payton, and cut me loose.”

“Do you?” She raised a leg and slipped it over him, then raised the other, until she was sitting astride him in the hammock. The vines groaned a little, but held, to her relief. She looked down at him triumphantly. “Do you still?” she asked, leaning down to nip, with her teeth, what she’d pinched between her fingers before.

She knew perfectly well what his answer was going to be. She could feel him growing hard beneath her. She let go of his nipple and licked it gently instead.

“Well,” Drake said, in a different tone of voice. “Maybe …”

She moved her head, raining small kisses down his rib cage; past the scar from an old knife wound; toward the place where the tawny hair that covered him all over grew thickest.

“Payton,” he gasped out, as she moved aside the front piece of his breeches.