Laura Kinsale (21 page)

He evidently thought so, too. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Why didn’t you pull it up high enough?”

“It was too heavy.”

An excellent explanation, she thought. Unfortunately, it came out with no more authority than the earlier one.

He chewed his cheek, and looked at the horizon. After a long minute, he said in a careless tone, “I suppose the flowers were blooming, after the rain.”

Tess frowned. “The flowers?”

“Did you collect many?” He looked at her intently. “I’d be interested to see them.”

“I didn’t collect any—” She stopped suddenly, aware of the tightening of his mouth, “—flowers,” she finished lamely.

“You didn’t.”

Tess shifted uncomfortably beneath his scrutiny. “Well—” she said, in hasty explanation. “The conditions—haven’t been very good. For collecting.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

Tess swallowed.

“You set me up,” he went on, in a dangerously level tone. “This is all some crazy scheme, isn’t it? She knew you were here all along. She let me think—do you know what I thought?” His voice rose. “Do you have any idea what it’s like, to spend three days—seventy-two hours—on your feet searching every square inch of one small island? Dear God, Tess, do you know what it’s like to come to the end of that island and realize there’s nowhere else to look?”

She did not raise her eyes. She couldn’t. And in her silence she knew she condemned herself.

“Damn you!” he shouted. “What is this, some new way to squeeze me? Where’s the percentage? Do you think there’s more money in it?” His voice was shaking with rage. “Maybe Sydney’s Grand Tour wasn’t enough—Mahina Fraser thinks she ought to have a piece of my hide, too, right? Well, I’ve got news for you, Tess. There isn’t any more. You’ve got it all. You’ve got my ship, you’ve got me so damned deep in debt I’ll never get out, you’ve got me acting like a madman be
cause I thought you’d been eaten alive by a pack of sharks—Jesus, you’ve got my
mind
; I sit there on that ship and I think about you; day and night, I think about—” He stopped. The look he gave her would have seared metal.

She bowed her head. It was a dressing-down that she deserved. She was sorry, sorry…and immeasurably glad. He thought about her. The idea was a heady antidote to remorse. After a moment, she asked in a small voice, “Are you hungry?”

“No,” he said coldly.

“I caught an eel.”

“An eel.” If she had caught an old shoe, he could not have sounded more disgusted. “How the devil did you catch an eel?”

She looked up through her lashes. “It wasn’t easy.”

“I hate fish.”

She managed not to smile. She said softly, “There’s enough for two.”

By the time Tess finished washing the tin dinner plates it was nearly dark. She fussed about the campsite, trying to control the nervous flutter of her fingers as she stored the cooking utensils. A splatter of large raindrops began to fall, hissing in the coals. Gryf cursed, and Tess hid a smile, thanking nature for falling in so well with her scheme. She gathered her kit and ducked inside the shelter, leaving him to make the inevitable decision by himself.

It was not until the rain was a downpour that he made it. The rustling of the carefully stocked palm fronds which covered her tent had become a roar before his streaming figure appeared at the open end of the hut. He knelt there, looking so sodden and out of temper in the wan light of her oil lamp that she wanted to
laugh. Instead, she wordlessly handed him a towel. He rubbed vigorously at his hair and face, ran the towel across his bare chest, and looked down with disgust at the puddle of water that formed beneath his dripping trousers.

It was impossible to speak over the noise of the rain. Tess indicated the area she had cleared and padded with a blanket and a length of worn-out canvas cloth. With the gear she had stacked about, the shelter was just large enough for two people to lie down full length. He moved onto the canvas and sat, not looking at her.

When he was settled in the center of another accumulating pool, Tess began to put The Plan into effect. She sat back on her own blankets and turned the lamp down to a mere flicker. In the half-light, she leaned to unbutton her sturdy boots and slowly pulled them off, setting them aside. Her white-stockinged toes peeked from beneath the heavy skirt; she contemplated them a moment, and then summoned all her courage. Her heart beat faster at her own daring as she inched the skirt upward, all the way to the garter just below her knee. She slid the stocking from her leg, careful to leave a generous length of ivory-smooth skin exposed to the lamplight.

From his puddle, Gryf was close enough to touch the slender, bare calf she revealed. His fist clenched on a fold of wet cloth. With baleful fascination, he watched as she removed the other stocking and stretched her graceful legs before she curled them beneath her. The folds of her skirt fell randomly, leaving two pale, soft feet free to his gaze. He realized he was holding his breath.

Gryf didn’t buy the innocent shyness in her lowered face for a minute. She was out to torture him. As she loosened pins and shook her dark hair into a shimmer
ing fall, he made himself close his eyes. When he opened them again, he looked deliberately away at the canvas that lined the interior of the hut, but even there she haunted him, for her shadow fell across the expanse. She was brushing her hair, and with every rhythmic move of her shadow arm, his mind’s eye saw the sensual stroke as clearly as if he ran his fingers through the silken fall himself.

The beat of the rain lessened. Gryf continued to stare at her shadow, which was almost still after she had laid the brush aside. In silhouette, her head was bent. As suddenly as it had begun, the rain stopped, leaving only the quick, musical drip of water off the leaves.

His gaze slid inexorably back to the coy gleam of exposed skin beneath her skirt. Her toes curled and uncurled. At the movement—so small, so artless—he was seized by a violent desire, a fury; weeks and months of frustration crystallized into a single moment. He sat frozen, trembling, the need to touch her clamped like a vise onto his throat. He was afraid to move. Afraid to breathe. He heard her rustle among her toiletries. She sighed, a soft, preoccupied sound, like a child or a puppy settling down to sleep. With a sudden twist he turned away and flung himself down and prayed for self-control.

The quick movement startled Tess. She had seen him watching her, the telltale lowering of his eyelids, the way his jaw tightened. She should have been pleased: it was what she had intended. Instead, an apprehensive excitement welled up in her. She forgot what The Plan had called for next. Hina’s careful instructions, so clear and simple seemed to have flown completely out of Tess’s head. She was supposed to make him kiss her, and then…what?

“Gryf?” Her voice was tentative, softly husky from nervousness and distress. “Are you going to sleep?”

He grunted, and did not turn. She saw the long muscles in his back twitch. Though he lay still, tension lined the whole length of his body, as if he might spring up and leave at the slightest provocation.

“Please.” Her fingertips grazed his shoulder. “Could we talk?”

“Go to the devil,” he said hoarsely.

Tess wet her lips. It wasn’t working right at all. Her best chance, and she was failing even before she began. Perhaps she wasn’t bold enough—in his irritation at being stranded on the island, he might not even have noticed her overtures. Obviously, the situation required more forceful measures. She spread her fingers across his damp, smooth shoulder and ran her hand with a slow deliberation down his back.

He moved, startling her again, so that she leaned instinctively to restrain him from leaving. The gesture was unnecessary. He rolled onto his back and gripped the dark cascade of loosened hair that had fallen across his chest, glaring up at her. “What is it you want from me?”

Tess parted her lips, could think of nothing to say. She was awkward suddenly, embarrassed: did he really not know?

He curled his fist in her hair. Without thinking, Tess leaned away, resisting the confinement and the prickling pain. His eyes narrowed. He released his grip with a suddenness that made her rock backward a little. “So talk.”

She could not meet his eyes. “All I want—” Her throat closed. She felt foolish and helpless, and when he moved as if to turn away from her again, she reached for his hand and grasped it. In desperation, she blurted,
“I want you to love me. I—That’s it. I wanted to tell you.”

For a long moment, he was utterly still. Her heart seemed to fill her ears with its pounding, waiting for him to answer.

“Love you,” he repeated, and there was a baffled note in his voice, as if he had never heard the words before.

Mortification stung her cheeks. Stupidity—how could she have been such a mooncalf as to tell him that way? She looked down miserably and compounded foolishness with folly by interlacing her fingers with his. “Please,” she whispered. She brushed his callused palm with her thumb, felt him trembling.

The feathered touch sent a renewed rash of heat through Gryf, and along with it came the suspicion that had wavered momentarily with his astonishment. “I don’t believe you,” he said gruffly, praying to God that she would release him and go away. The thread of control was stretched impossibly taut; it seemed that he would die of it, ripped apart into a thousand tiny pieces by the strain. “What of Eliot?”

A shadow touched her face. Guilt, he thought, and hated Stephen Eliot with an all-consuming hate. She sat back, trying to withdraw her hand. Gryf closed his fingers over hers, so hard that she drew in a soft, hissing breath. She tore her hand away, began to speak in a choked voice. “Stephen and I—”

“No.” A sudden, perverse panic overcame him at what she was about to say. He half-rose to take her by the shoulders. “I don’t want to know.” He pressed her down, buried his face in the midnight tumult of her hair. “Forget Stephen. Forget him.” The words were harsh against the smooth skin of her throat. The feel of her, the supple strength, her body…he was lost. “I’ll love
you—Tess—ah God, yes, I’ll make love to you if you want me.”

He found her lips, kissed her, an assault that was long and fierce because he could not bear to end it. She was soft under him, the cotton of her blouse scratchy dry against his chest. He let his weight bear down, not believing, not sure if this was real, all his dreams, a thousand nights of wanting, holding her while his hands ran over her arms and up again to her breasts and face, defining her shape, her living contours. She moved—resistance or acquiescence; he was beyond caring. The rain began again, rising to a white roar like the blood that sang in his ears. It deafened him, the noise: the blood and the rain. It defied all caution. He needed her, wanted her, knew himself willing and glad to burn to smoking ash in possessing her.

Tess sank beneath him, bewildered and pliant, unable at first to comprehend the sudden change in circumstances. Her hands fluttered, and then found the hard muscles of his arms and fastened there of their own will. His kiss hurt her—it had hurt before, she remembered, but it was a welcome pain. She opened to it, to the pressure of him, the wonderful suffocating weight.

He dragged his mouth from hers, and Tess gulped air, nursing her bruised lower lip with her tongue. His warm breath touched her, grazed the soreness, then moved lower. She had no time to summon reason or resistance. His searching mouth found her nipple. The touch made her gasp; it was unexpected, frighteningly intimate…her simple scheme became suddenly warped, twisted, expanding into something new and completely out of her control. He suckled, wetting the rough cotton, tugging at her gently and then leaving the peak to kiss the soft underside of the swell created by his upward pressing hand.

Tess reached for him, encountering damp curls and heated skin, not knowing if she meant to make him stop or urge him on. His hands slid downward, caressing her hips through the heavy skirt, and back up, working the lower button on her blouse. She felt wicked and eager—too weak—oh sweet Heaven, she was weak. It was too hard to listen to the voice of warning in her head, too easy to submit as his fingers moved upward; his mouth nuzzled an ever-wider opening, and then his tongue seared her naked skin as he dragged the tails free of her skirt.

He sat back suddenly on his knees, and the touch of night air on her breasts made her stiffen. She would have pulled her gaping blouse together, but he reached to stop her, his fingers closing hard on her wrists. The sound of the rain filled the space around and between them, obliterating words. She relaxed her arms, and he let go, slowly, as if she could not be trusted. There was no smile on his face, no trace of love. The lamplight was failing: in the dim, rain-scented shelter he might have been a vision—her sullen angel, glittering dully against the shadows.

He took her hands and raised her as if she had no strength of her own. Indeed, she had none: it had vanished in the realization that they had passed far beyond mere flirtation and teasing. He touched her now as if he owned her. She let her head fall back as his fingers circled her waist beneath the opened blouse and moved upward. His thumbs curved under her breasts. He took their rounded weight in his palms and bent toward them, gliding his tongue over one pink, excited tip. Tess groaned, a vibration in her throat that was lost in the thunder of the rain. The blouse slid from her shoulders, falling in a heap around her hands.

It was like a dream, a pagan ritual, as he pleasured
her in slow motion and silence. She felt his hardness, his tension—the desire that was so compellingly clear in the bulging contours of his wet trousers. Her own passion was a spreading heat, a softening between her thighs. She pressed his head between her hands, drew him up, kissing him with the same fierce eagerness he had shown to her. She welcomed his exploring tongue, met it with her own, searching, enlacing, until suddenly he pushed her down with an animal growl.

He drew back, onto his side, peeled off the damp trousers with quick, rumbling movements. Tess watched him in wonder; he was all tan and gold, leonine, stretching full length against her, his manhood a taut pressure on her thigh. He kissed her breasts, freed her hands from the tangle of blouse, loosened her skirt, and came to his knees again to lift her and rid her of the imprisoning folds. His ministrations were immeasurably gentle; she felt very young, humble and yet wild, willing to trust and be guided. Happiness flooded her as he slid his hands over her body, claiming each uncovered curve. He knew. He understood at last. She was to be his, now and forever.