The Legend of Lyon Redmond (21 page)

She ducked, flinging her arms over her head.

He shook his head and sighed, gustily and funereally. “We're going to have to work on your catching, Eversea, if you're ever going to be a decent wicket keeper.”

He dropped his arm, leaving the moon in the sky, and strode forward.

She laughed and scrambled to catch up to him, her bare feet sinking into the silken sand, and she found herself savoring every step, because every step brought her closer to him.

He remembered to stop to wait for her.

A
H, CEILING, MY
old friend
, Lyon thought mordantly.
We meet again
.

He wondered if ceilings would always remind him of Olivia.

They'd silently gone their separate ways into separate chambers once in the house.

And he'd stripped out of his clothing and climbed into bed, and waited in vain for sleep, and it was just like old times.

He was a little older, perhaps a little wiser, infinitely more jaded. He'd been stabbed at and shot at, and he'd done a fair amount of stabbing and shooting. He'd amassed a fortune through a piquant blend of ruthless opportunism, lawlessness, and idealism, and he'd earned his sense of near invinci
bility, not to mention the calluses on his hands and on his heart.

And yet here he was, lying perfectly rigid, like a man attempting not to jar a grave wound. As uncertain and burning, burning, burning with untenable lust as if he was a boy again who had just touched his first breast.

And all it had taken was a few moments in her arms.

He was darkly amused at himself, and at everything, really.

In some ways this suffering was truly operatic, the stuff of legends. Tragic, consuming, all the doomed and star-crossed lovers nonsense, etcetera. She was his Achilles' heel, his Chiron wound that would never heal.

On the other hand, surely nothing could be more mundane. For there would
be
no myths, no operas, no plays, no flash ballads, if men and women before the two of them hadn't performed this particular fruitless pas de deux over and over since the beginning of time.

He'd thought that he'd wanted to show her his house in Cadiz to prove to her how wrong she'd been. To show her what she
could
have had.

Now he knew it was because he simply wanted her to know that he was worthy of her. Which is all he'd ever wanted.

And she was right. He hadn't quite seen it before, but he
had
pushed her. He knew how precious her family was to her, especially since she could have lost her brothers in the war. She'd had enough uncertainty in her life. And yet he had demanded of her that they go forward into uncertainty, together.

He had simply thought love was enough.

He shifted restlessly in his bed.

He could have taken her tonight.

Her perhaps ought to have taken her tonight.

He could still take her tonight. She was lying only a few rooms away.

He knew how to use Olivia's own passion and sensuality to get what he wanted.

But what then?

He had enough honor and breeding to not relish cuckolding a man like Landsdowne. Or to deflower a woman who was engaged to another man.

But when he peered beneath the veneer of that rationale he knew the truth:

He might have survived being shot and stabbed.

But Olivia Eversea was still the razor who could slice his callused heart to ribbons.

She always had been.

He wondered if she always would be.

And God help him, he wasn't certain he was brave enough to live through that again.

So when he finally slept, he slept alone.

M
ORNING POURED THROUGH THE
window, sea breeze scoured clean, the light so pure and brilliant everything in the room merged into a single soft glow, the walls, the windows, the curtains, the floors.

Everything apart from a gleaming jar of marmalade and the shining handle of the knife protruding from it.

Lyon was sitting at the table, a small stack of fried bread on a plate next to him, steam rising from a cup next to his elbow.

She slid into the chair across from him and propped her chin on her hands.

He poured a cup of coffee from a surprisingly fine porcelain pot and pushed it over to her.

“It will singe your eyebrows off.” His voice was still gravelly from sleep, and it affected her senses as surely as if his fingers had played with the short hairs on the nape of her neck.

He watched, waiting for her to taste it.

“
À votre santé
.” She raised it in a toast, took a sip, and winced.

“Eh?” he said happily.

“Eh!” she approved, and took another bracing
sip. “It's marvelous. It's what I always imagined lava tasted like.”

“Turkish,” he said shortly. And smiled faintly.

She smiled at him. A pair of mauve shadows curved beneath his eyes, and she suspected she sported a matching set. Clearly neither of them had slept well, if at all. They had metaphorically set each other's bodies on fire and then gone their separate ways to smolder in their respective beds.

She wondered if he'd memorized his ceiling the way she'd memorized hers. She'd probably lost any weight she'd gained on this journey by tossing and turning violently.

But he'd been very right to stop that kiss last night.

“You look piratical,” she said. And dangerous. And appealing. And human. And vulnerable.

And the black whiskers made his eyes seem even bluer.

His eyes flared an instant at her choice of words. Which had not been idle.

He smiled swiftly and swiped a self-conscious hand over his chin. “
You
look . . .”

His eyes finished the sentence for him.

If one could make love with a single look, he'd just done that.

He reached for a slice of fried bread and slid the plate over to her, along with a jar of marmalade. Her favorite.

“All the luxuries of home,” she said. Her voice was a little faint, after that look.

She seized the knife and spread the marmalade over the bread as if she were one of Genevieve's beloved painters.

He watched her, bemused.

She paused to admire her handiwork before she took a bite.

“Does it have to be completely covered?” He sounded fascinated.

“Yes,” she said easily.

He smiled at that.

They knew each other so well, but there were so many other things they didn't know, the homely humble things.

She bit into it. Heaven. Bread and marmalade had never tasted so marvelous.

When she finished chewing she said, “I should like a bath.”

He paused mid-chew and studied her with faint surprise, then flicked a glance over her, as if to ascertain whether she was indeed dirty.

“I'm a woman,” she pointed out. “The tolerance for sand in my various crevices is no doubt lower than your own.”

“Fair point.”

He watched approvingly as she tore into her bread again like a starved wolf. She'd never been this hungry in her life.

“I know just the place,” he said at last. Sounding mysterious.

“The
place
?”

“I haven't a bathtub yet, per se, and as you likely have noticed, no household staff to see to it if I did have one. You see, when it's just me and I want to thoroughly bathe, I . . .” And he gestured with his chin out the window.

“You aren't going to tell me to wade into the ocean!”

“I'm not going to
tell
you to do anything. You made it clear how you felt about that.” He said this with a sort of relish. “I'll just show you.”

He took another bite of his own bread, then studied her face.

He put the bread down.

“You'll love it,” he said gently, and with total confidence. It was both irritating and hopelessly magnetic, as usual. As if she were a mare who spooked easily, and the whole point of his life was to lead her to things she loved.

“J
ONATHAN HAS HIS
own investment group, you say?” he said suddenly. “I've had my ways of staying abreast of the news, but I hadn't heard this bit.”

They had set out into the beautiful morning. He'd thrown a few things into a knapsack, cheese and bread and a little bottle of wine and a couple of rolled-up blankets, and he was swinging it in his hand and whistling some unidentifiable tune. It meandered so much she suspected it was his own invention, which made her smile.

That brilliant blue sky above them was the very color of happiness, as cheerful as a carnival canopy. The sun was gentle but brilliant, the air softly humid, and she wondered at the fact that she hadn't thought to bring a bonnet, or wear stockings. She'd seized her reticule, more out of habit than from necessity, though it contained a comb. How quickly she'd taken to becoming a heathen.

“
And
they say he'll be running for Parliament,” she reminded him. “He's passionate about child labor reform.”

Lyon shook his head in wonderment. “There must have been a woman involved.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because women are why we do anything.”

She thought about this. “A generalization, surely.”

“But sadly, it bears up under analysis.”

He shot her a mischievous look, knowing analysis was very nearly Olivia's favorite thing.

She smiled, enjoying being known.

“Jonathan may not have done it at all if you hadn't left Pennyroyal Green.”

He looked at her sharply then.

And fell into a silence that had stretched on long enough to take on something of the feel of a brood.

She knew, no matter what, that he had missed his family, too.

“Are we waxing philosophical this morning, Olivia?” he said finally.

“It's generally how I wax, when I do.”

He laughed.

She wondered if for the rest of her life the sound of his laugh would make her heart launch, because it made every single thing about life better, the way salt or marmalade did.

They mounted a gentle rise, which was when she became aware of a rushing sound, a constant, soft roar, distinct from the pulse of the ocean breaking on the beach and rolling out again. As they crested the rise, he reached for her hand.

“We'll be heading down in a bit, and the ground can be a bit shifty here, so . . .”

She gave him her hand. It was engulfed in his, and she suddenly felt shy and solemn and girlish.

“Don't trust my agility?” she said lightly.

“Oh, it's not that. I just don't want to go tumbling to my death unaccompanied.”

She laughed, and then gave a little gasp as he tugged her forward and then down a fairly steep slope, flexing his arm expertly, effortlessly, for all the world like a rudder on a ship. His strength was both shocking and humbling and innate. She might as well have been gripping a steel bar.

With a little jump they landed on a narrow strip of golden beach.

“All right, then,” was all he said.

She couldn't speak.

They were nestled in a sort of basket made of towering stone and sheer cliffs.

A turquoise jewel of a pool shimmered at their feet, spreading in a gently wavy oval for perhaps fifty or more feet, then curving, like the tail of an apostrophe, into another smaller pool that disappeared beyond an enormous outcropping of rock. Its surface shivered, delicately disturbed by the waterfall at its far end, an endless pour of foaming water about as tall as Lyon and about the length of two landaus, if she had to guess, across. She couldn't see its ultimate origin; it spilled from another craggy hill out of sight above them; and it ended by tumbling down staggered ledges of stone before it emptied into the pool.

Behind it was a soft and shadowy recess of stone. Flat from the looks of things.

It looked for all the world like a lacy white curtain over a stage.

“Eden.”

She hadn't realized she'd said the word aloud. It was more like an exhale from the very depths of her soul.

“Precisely what I thought when I first saw it.”

They admired it in silence for another moment.

“And now you take off all your clothes and stand beneath the waterfall and wash.”

Her head whipped toward him.

He extended his hand and opened it ceremoniously. In it was a bar of soap. It looked very white against his browned hand.

She stared at it.

Then looked warily up at him.

“It's French, the soap is. Have a sniff.”

“I believe you,” she said dryly. “The sentence prior to that one is what gave me pause.”

Another silence. During which they locked eyes, and a good deal was thought very loudly but not spoken.

“I'll stay in here.” He made a sweeping motion at the little curving portion of the pool that disappeared behind the outcropping. The little tail of the apostrophe. “And perform my own ablutions. It's quite shallow throughout, and I daresay even you can stand up in it. I won't be able to see you and you won't be able to see me. Though if you stand behind the water you ought to be somewhat veiled, regardless of where I am.”

She turned toward the waterfall. Then back to him.

Then back to the waterfall. Then back to him.

“Do you . . . need some assistance? With laces, stays, and so forth?” he said almost stiffly. “Or would you prefer to keep the sand in your crevices as a souvenir of your sojourn here?”

“I can manage,” she said tautly.

“Intrepid as always.”

She snorted softly.

“I'll keep guard, and I'll protect you from any encroaching seagulls or vengeful mermaids.”

“Vengeful, are they?” She at last gingerly reached for the soap.

She was reminded of the time she'd handed a pamphlet to him. That first touch of his skin against hers, illicit and cherished. The fuse that had lit all of it.

His hands were still long and elegant, but brown and hard now. But now there was a faint scar across one. They looked well-used. As though he'd spent the past few years wielding weapons. And other quite dangerous things.

Did he ever tremble now? Or had he seen and touched enough women to shave the edge off wonder forever?

“Oh, mermaids are a jealous species,” he said softly, as if he could hear her thoughts. “They often make very cutting remarks about other beautiful women.”

She was so enchanted by the image of fuming aquatic maidens smacking their tails indignantly she immediately forgot to be nervous.

It was also the first overt compliment he'd given her since she'd first laid eyes on him again, and it was absurdly potent enough to make her blush.

She couldn't remember a time she'd changed color in the presence of Landsdowne, or any other man, really.

Apart, perhaps, from when she'd gone pale upon reading “The Legend of Lyon Redmond.”

Which made her think of Landsdowne, and his hands, strong and square and aristocratic, the signet ring gleaming as he stirred sugar into his tea and confessed to maybe, possibly, mildly disappointing another woman when he became engaged to Olivia.

And here was Lyon, who was incapable of doing anything mildly, yet again offering her something new, something she might or might not be equal to, something that might or might not be wise.

“Take this, too, because you'll need to dry off.” Lyon thrust the rolled blanket at her, and she tucked it beneath her arm. “You can walk right up to the waterfall, and tuck yourself behind it. You'll see.”

And then she suddenly reached up pulled her ribbon loose and gave her head a good shake, giving her hair up to the breeze, which immediately began tossing it about like a new plaything. And then she kicked off her slippers and lunged to seize them
up in one hand, hiked her dress to her calves in the other—let him admire
that
view—and set out toward the waterfall.

“For all you know,
I'm
covered all over in iridescent scales,” she said over her shoulder.

“Good God, I hope so. Then all my dreams will have come true.”

Her laughter trailed her, unbridled and musical as that waterfall.

I
T WAS THE
one thing that had been missing, he realized. That sound more than nearly anything meant “Olivia” to him.

He stood and drank it in.

She sounded free and
happy
. An innocent sort of happy. It was like birdsong after a rainstorm, when birds all sang their fool heads off, throwing their hearts into it.

She should always be this happy.

And then he noticed something on the ground nearby, a scrap of shining fabric.

She'd dropped her reticule.

He picked it up, and a comb and something folded into a tight, white square tumbled out and unfurled on the way, fluttering to the ground.

He picked it up gently, frowning, and ran it through his fingers.

And then all at once he knew what it was.

His thumb found “LAJR” embroidered in the corner.

How had she gotten it? The handkerchief was spotless, apart from a tiny drop of blood.

And then he remembered: it was from the night he'd left Pennyroyal Green. The night his father had hit him.

She'd kept it this long.

And she'd carried it with her folded in a tight square.

He closed his eyes, and once again, his chest exploded with light, like the first time he'd held her in his arms.

Perhaps this was all they would ever have—an hour or two of bliss here and there, strung together like jewels by interludes of longing and loss. Perhaps they were destined for nothing more than a few pockets of time, tucked away into their lives, hidden from everyone and everything the way this cove was hidden from the rest of the beach.