Seize the Fire (27 page)

"Stuff," he said, panting with exertion.

"Can't…I can't…do…" Her head drooped as he yanked her bodice open. "Die here…die…"

"You ain't going to die, my dear." He pulled the dress off, revealing a plump, limp figure in white pantaloons. "Though I suppose it's just your style—something melodramatic and martyred. Too bad there ain't a tyranny worth defying in three thousand miles. Sit up."

He dragged her into the dry bedding, piling more dead grass on top, weighting it down with the frozen cloak. Then he burrowed into the lumpy nest beside her, contorting himself to strip off his own clothes and her damp pantaloons with difficulty. He pulled her cold nakedness against him, grunting at a hard shape that wedged beneath his bruised torso. As tussock dust and grass settled around them, he sneezed.

He pressed his body against her buttocks, breathing heat on the nape of her neck. Trying to get closer, he thrust his leg up between hers and wrapped one arm around her waist, sliding the other under her head. He bent over her, rubbing his palm across her belly, blowing his own warmth in deep breaths against her throat, her cheek and her temple.

He hugged her to his chest, feeling her grow warmer already. He spread his palm around something soft and full and interesting, and buried his face in the curve of her neck. Through the salt and cold she smelled unmistakably female, and his body, battered and exhausted as it was, had an instant answer for that. He pressed himself into the round shape of her naked bottom where it curved suggestively against him, feeling an age-old heat source begin to burn.

He hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. He was clearly a hard-core case of skirt-smitten, if he could think lustful thoughts under these circumstances. But he did, taking full advantage of the situation to apply himself with more masculine hunger than high-minded altruism to the task of rubbing and warming and breathing on her soft white skin.

He lifted one cold hand and kissed her wrist, keeping his lips conscientiously pressed to her pulse until the chill changed to heat. He explored her breasts and caressed her belly, careful not to miss an inch of plump surface. He warmed the tender dimple above her fanny with a humanitarian application of his heated body, stopping there only because his bruises warned him against more vigorous activity with agonizing insistence.

He settled for the gallant course, sliding closer and contributing his best warming effort: pushing the most smoldering portion of his anatomy into the inviting crevice between her thighs, giving heat and taking it, breathing raggedly against her shoulder.

"Going to…die…" she mumbled.

"Yeah," he muttered, with a slow, exquisite pressure into the cushioned curves and valleys of her. "Die and go to heaven."

How dare you!"

Sheridan jerked awake with a gasp and a groan. It was barely light. He held his ribs and bit his lip as she rolled and thumped against him in her frantic search to find her clothes.

The movement tore the grass nest apart, letting icy particles of snow sift through and sting his bare skin. He didn't answer; he was having a hard time catching his breath amid the pummeling from her hands and elbows. She found her cloak and sat up, dragging it around her with most of the tussock-cover. Frigid air flowed over Sheridan's body.

"Oh," she said, drooping her head into two fistfuls of cloak, "I feel dizzy."

"You need…water." Sheridan managed to get the words out amid a convulsive shudder. By pained degrees, he reached down into what was left of the dry nest and found his pants, still damp and stiff with salt, but warmed from the heat of their bodies.

His battered muscles protested every move. It was one continual panting, shivering grimace to sit up, locate his stockings, shake the grass out of them and pull on the trousers. Amid a host of pressing matters, modesty was not high on the list. He looked up in the course of the process to find Olympia staring down at his body.

He stared back, tying his flap. "Impressed?"

Her face was pale and uncertain. "It's just that…I've never seen…" She closed her eyes. "Oh. My head's…spinning."

"Very gratifying. But maybe you'd better lie down." He bit down on his lip and carefully eased into his shirt.

She obeyed him, subsiding into the lumpy cushion of turf and pulling the cloak up to her nose. "I feel ill," she said plaintively.

Sheridan worked himself into his pea jacket. He didn't feel so wonderful himself. He'd last eaten thirty-six hours before and had his stomach bashed in in the meantime. His boots were frozen solid. He forced his feet into them and clenched his teeth against the aching cold, breathing puffs of vapor through his nose.

The weather was bitter; the low gray clouds sliding past, a few streaks of dawn pearl behind the silhouetted bulks of the tussocks. Grainy snow barely dusted the ground. Above the murmur of the wind and surf, a single sea gull circled. Sheridan crawled to his knees and levered himself painfully to his feet, dusting off the clinging white particles of icy snow. He grabbed the bucket and hobbled out onto the frozen pond where he'd found her. In the center of it, he used his heel to break through with a kick that sent excruciating pain up his whole body. He drank as many frigid handfuls as he could stand and then limped back with the bucket to the shapeless mass beneath the tussocks.

She fussed and whimpered and tried to tug at the cloak until he dropped down on his knees beside her. "Come along," he snapped. "D'you think I don't know what you look like in the buff? I spent the night pressed as close as I could get to the Royal Bo—"

"Never mind!" She fumbled with the cloak and got up onto one elbow. Her breath came in short, uneven gasps, mingling in little clouds with his.

Sheridan helped her, put his arm around her bare back and pulled her upright, wincing at the move. He rested the half-full bucket in her lap.

She stared into it numbly.

He shifted, giving her a gentle jog. "Drink."

She cupped her quaking hands and put them in the bucket, shivered and took them out, empty and dripping.

"
Drink
, for Christ's sake! I've got no patience with you."

She bit her lip. "Why bo-bother?" she whispered. "Look at this p-place. How are we going to live?"

Sheridan wanted to shake her. "Drink," he said again.

She was shivering uncontrollably. She began to cry, soft dry sobs of despair. "We d-don't have any sh-ship's stores. No f-fire. No shelter. No dry c-clothes. We can't live. What do you think we're going to d-do?"

He looked down at the top of her head. The dawn gleamed on her tousled, wind-matted hair and touched the bare skin below. Beneath his arm he could feel her trembling.

"I don't know," he said.

She took a shuddering breath. "Why didn't you just let B-Buckhorse shoot us and be d-done with it?"

He let go of her. "What bloody kind of a question is that? Because I want to stay alive, damn it all." He hauled the bucket aside, shoving himself to his feet. "I want to stay alive, and this is how I know to do it. One day at a time. One minute at a time, if that's the way it is."

He stalked painfully across the frozen clearing toward the beach. At the first tussock he had another thought. He stopped and went back.

"I'll take the bucket," he said, "since you've decided to end it all. Forgive me for not putting you out of your misery by shooting you on the spot, but someone stole my gun." He regarded her sourly. "You ought to be dead by midnight, at any rate. I'll come back tomorrow. I could use the cloak."

Olympia lay shivering, sick and angry with herself and with him and with the universe. Her head pounded with an ache like an iron bell compounded of hunger and cold and thirst. She wanted to die, but found she didn't even have the courage for that—not here, not this way. The prolonged misery of it was too much.

She clutched at her damp, cold clothes, trying to sit up. Each time she lifted her head, dizzy nausea spun around her. She puffed and gasped and finally inched into her sodden dress. She couldn't manage the chemise and pantaloons, or the buttons, so her back was bare to the freezing wind. Lying on her side, hugging the cloak around her with shaking fingers, she stared dismally across the snow-dusted ground toward the pond. Grass stems near her eye formed black, fuzzy arcs across her vision. She could feel her heart laboring in her breast.

She waited, hoping he would come back. He did not. Finally, when the sun was a dim silver glow, hours up through the fleeing low clouds, anger and need overcame the sick muddle of distress and she worked herself onto her knees.

She could not stand. The nausea overwhelmed her. The pond seemed a hundred miles away, its fractured center already frozen over with a dark, thin film of ice. Olympia stared at it, crying.

On hands and knees, she began to crawl. Snow crunched under her palms, burning cold against the skin unprotected by Sheridan's bandage. When she reached the ice, it froze to her fingertips, pulling skin from her palm when she tried to move. For a long moment she simply sat swaying on her knees, clutching her hands beneath her arms and staring at the black-and-silver network of fractures. It looked like a shattered window into the infinite night sky. She struggled around until she could scoop up a frigid handful.

It stung her throat and made her teeth ache, and for a moment she feared her body would reject it. But a roll sideways and a brief rest seemed to control the sickness.

Living began to look possible.

Her head still pounded. In her other life—as she had come to think of England—that was a familiar sign of missing a meal. Out on the washes with Fish, she'd stayed until the task was done: till a decent count of plovers was netted, or a good catch of mallards and wigeons bagged. She'd often rowed back to his cottage in the late morning with her head splitting from a skipped breakfast. But here there were no handy tins of biscuits she'd brought from home, no steaming cups of tea, sweet with sugar and cream; no Fish to spit thick slices of bread on the firedog's prongs for toast and butter.

She bit her trembling lip. But the tears seemed finally to have left her. She was too hungry to cry, too weak and cold. With a careful struggle, she rose slowly to her knees and then lurched to her feet.

At the sudden movement, the nearest tussock exploded with motion. An owl took wing, spreading a flash of white underwing, before it landed again on another tussock and stared at her with flat yellow eyes.

Olympia wondered, for the first time in her life, what roasted owl tasted like.

Not that she had any chance of finding out, with no gun and no fire.

The wind stung her cheeks. She could hear the sea, a steady roar in the direction of Sheridan's footprints. All around the pond, grass tussocks much taller than her head rustled ceaselessly, like a crowd of whispering, waving sentinels. She walked unsteadily toward the path he'd followed, wincing with each step on her frozen feet. Just a few yards into the tussocks, she came in view of the shore.

Wind pounded her face. The pale sand, marked by low tide and dark rocks, spread away in both directions. A short distance down the beach, she saw the boat pulled up into the shelter of a notch in the clay bank. Covered with a camouflage of tussock on the ocean side, the green-painted pinnace was barely visible from where she stood.

The scene was deserted. Even Sheridan's footprints in the sand below the bank had been wiped out by the tide that had come and gone while she lay helpless.

Good
, she thought defiantly.
I hope he drowns. I hope he breaks his leg and dies in agony. I hope 1 never see him again.

She eyed the dismal coast and the island rising behind her to low hills. There was not a sign of life anywhere.

Wrapping the cloak around her, she scrambled down the bank to look for him.

It was late afternoon before Sheridan made it back to the pond. In one hand he had the bucket with his meager offerings: one crab, a dozen mussels, and as much green seaweed as he could fit in around them. Under the other arm he clutched three pieces of driftwood as if they were bars of solid gold. It had taken him all day to collect everything, working miles down the coast, climbing on the rocks, dodging waves and frigid spray. He'd nearly bought it once, when a stray breaker had taken him by surprise and knocked him off his perch and into a tidal pool, washing him brutally against the rocky walls. He'd barely saved the bucket, and lost the big cache of mussels he'd been collecting all morning.

He didn't try to replace them. He couldn't. He could feel himself near the edge of endurance, wet and cold and starving, so he just took as many as he could scrounge on the way back to the pond. He had to eat something soon, and Her Highness would undoubtedly be ready with the next royal complaint.

But she wasn't there.

He stood at the edge of the frozen puddle, shivering and frowning. After a moment, he set down the bucket and the wood and went back to the beach, trudging toward the boat. He called her name.

No answer.

A quick search around the pinnace showed small footprints of indeterminate age. They wandered off down the beach and into the tussocks. He was about to turn back, reckoning that if she was strong enough to get lost, she was in adequate shape to stay alive, when her plump figure tumbled out of the tussocks a few yards down the bank.

She caught her balance and pulled the cloak around her with one hand. "Where have you been?" she demanded.

Sheridan eyed the cloak enviously. It covered every inch of her, head to toe. He lowered his eyelashes and gave her a mocking bow. "Damned near killing myself trying to come by something for dinner, Your Highness."

"Well, you shouldn't have."

"Excuse me. I suppose we should have had a debate and a referendum on it first."

She huddled in the hooded cloak, her body hidden, her bright hair a frame around her owlish face. A day and night without food didn't seem to have harmed her; she looked as chubby as ever. Chubbier, beneath the voluminous wool. Sheridan stood watching her, feeling his way around the notion that he was relieved and glad to see her. He concluded that any company must be better than none in desperate circumstances.