The Windflower (22 page)

"Don't be afraid," he said. "We don't punish maladroit ladies here by making them unbritch publicly." His lips brushed her delicately, barely touching her skin. "You and I probably aren't ready for anything as audacious as polite communication, but should we see if we can manage a crude facsimile?"

Light-headed from his touch and from the effort not to show it, Merry nodded. He turned her in his hands to face him and then stepped back and released her.

"Subjective evidence to the contrary, my sweet captive, I don't make a habit of carrying off and maltreating very young women, be they ever so unwisely bed warmers for my enemies. You amuse me, and that's probably going to save your life, but at best your presence is damnably inconvenient. Why don't we get rid of one another? I'm willing to make you one final offer: For the answer to my question, only one, I'll give you your freedom, plus a payment in gold, the sum to be your choice, within reason. And I'll make sure that you'd never be traced as the information source."

The telltale blush was still staining her cheeks, brightly spread like cheap rouge. She ought to have told him to stop right there. She
would
have told him to stop right there if her jaw hadn't been paralyzed with wrath.

He said, "All I want, Merry, is the name of either of the two men who were with you that night at the Musket and Muskrat."

His searching gaze was thorough, and Merry, having more than a nodding acquaintance with the swift processes of his mind, worked quickly to damper the telltale indignation. There would be no saying "How dare you! Do you think that I'd sell out my brother and my cousin for your filthy money?"

"I won't do it," she said with dignity and received back a long, cool stare before he shrugged and answered her good-humoredly.

"It's your life, angel."

"And now," said Merry, her expression brittle and sparkling, "you'll turn me over to the crew?"

"Will 1? It isn't likely to do me much good. They seem to have already turned themselves over to you. Baubles for the fairy queen; toadstool umbrellas for the pixies; you have your own sorcery, don't you?"

It was not easy to tell precisely what he meant, but it didn't imply a great deal of trust. "I suppose," she said, "that you're disappointed not to find me lying dismembered on the deck."

"Try to see things sometimes in shades of gray, Merry. I'm interested in a little sensible compromise; the less I hurt you along the way, the better. You might try taking some of the responsibility for finding an intelligent solution."

"But I thought we already had one," she responded quickly. "You were going to sell me into slavery—"

"Did I say that?" His vivid eyes twinkled appreciatively in mock surprise.

Furiously, "You know you did! Why are you smiling about it now? Did you mean it, or were you just trying to frighten me? It's as Cat told me, isn't it? That you're out to buffet my—my emotions." She could not bring herself to say the word
guts.

Slight as it had been, he caught, understood, and grinned at the hesitation. "Merry—" The dying sunlight graced her, pinking the white porcelain cheeks, where the skin was as finely textured as a young child's. There were times when her eyes became so wide and susceptible that their expression, like that in a caricature, was almost silly, a structural trick of sumptuous facial bones. It was hardly the kind of thing he would have expected to find endearing, and he might not have, had it not been combined in her with a dazzling lack of awareness. Not once had he seen her use her looks as a weapon, which was amazing, because it was a remarkable one, and it was not as though she had many. He would've sworn she'd been raised in a mythological kingdom where there were no mirrors. "I'm ho more immune to sorcery than the next man," he said softly, gazing down into her blue eyes, fixed on him with an infant's unwinking stare. "Hoodlum though I am, I'm not going to barter away your seductive little hide." Nor was he ready to take the chance of setting her free until he learned something about who and what she was; and while, for that reason, he had tried to scare the truth out of her, Cat, as usual, was correct. You cannot keep a young and obviously fragile person in a state of constant terror.

"Then you'll release me?" she said, almost sick with hope. "Please. You've admitted you don't want me."

"No. You'll leave when you talk, Merry."

It was having to make statements to her of just that kind of stagy vulgarity that was most offensive to an intellect that knew better. Melodrama, which he'd always hated, seemed to be an integral part of the abductor role. The corners of his lips teased upward into a smile. "And you misunderstand. 1 said you were inconvenient—but not that I didn't want you. I do want you. Or have you forgotten?"

His hands found her waist in a movement that was swift and graceful, and Merry was drawn into a firm embrace before she'd had time to begin the work of relaxing the hard knot in her throat. Inside her skin was a body that was reeling, a heart bouncing painfully into ribs that seemed not to fit any longer in her chest. His clothes and hers, under normal circumstances perfectly adequate, were suddenly a shockingly thin layer, a sparse weave of threads that allowed too clearly the caress of one body by another. Exploded was the happy fiction that it had all been Morgan's drugs, the first night with Devon in his cabin, that had made her dissolve like ice crystals in an oven. As little as she knew about intimacy, she was getting a very strong hint from that space in her body where the blood was starting to convene; it had certainly vacated her head. Everything neck up was cold and giddy, and everything neck down was hot and swimming. And everything from her waist down was boiling like spiced stew.

She tried desperately to strain her hips away from him, and all she got for her pains was the flat of his spread hand sliding down her back, and then, resting on a part of her body she never mentioned by name, he cupped her gently back to him.

"Don't," he said, and in his voice there was a smile. "That's the best part."

All she could do after that was to close her eyes and pretend she wasn't there. His hands, behind her, were moving idly, discovering as though for the first time the down-soft hollows and fertile curves. Aware of the stiffly held angle of her head, he lifted one hand, threaded under the heavy surface of her hair, and massaged the back of her neck until her cheek relaxed against his chest and her body rested from its resistance.

"Where are we now?" he murmured. "Are we admitting we like it, or are we still pretending we don't?"

Clinging hopelessly to some remnant of pride, Merry said, "Why do you think it's
pretending
I don't?"

"Well." His hands drifted downward again and lifted her lightly into him. "There's the faintest trace"—he moved her softly-—"of a response." Bringing up her face, he smiled at her with eyes so rich in warmth they could have melted cold lead.

She was trying to find a good answer as he tilted her head back and laid careful kisses on her eyelids, with their delicate shadowing of blue-veined tracery. Her cheeks burned under the graze of his lips, and then he moved lower, pressing his mouth over hers and spreading the rounded fullness, probing slowly through the velvet flesh. Faint and pressureless, his fingers played in the dainty lines of her ear. The hand supporting her back rocked her back and forth with languid sensuality. Under the press of his body Merry ached in colors; the reds of the shore fires, the brilliant russets fading in the western sky, the white milk-mist from the distant stars; she tingled every hue in the prism. The world was a collection of sweet and vivid light beams, and she was one of them, and mindless, a spinning miscellany of liquid cells. When finally he lifted his head, his breathing sounded soft and even to her, while she could barely pull the air in and out of her sore lungs.

She said, "If you're done, just prop me there against the foremast.''

His laughter was quiet and enticing. "Don't you think we should go below and explore this in more detail?" When she said no in a voice that was weak but desperately convincing, he gently put her against the mast and let go. They'd made enough of a spectacle already, and though the crew would certainly expect him to express his possession by handling her when he wanted, it was not a good idea to present her too rashly as a love object. There were any number of men on the
Joke
who couldn't be trusted alone with her. He read that back in his mind, grinned suddenly, and added himself to the list.

Merry's hair had tumbled forward, a silky spill over the rise and fall of her high breasts, a waving arcade to her exquisite features. Her eyes were deep wells of stabbing blue.

"All we do together is fight or—or kiss," she said. "I think I'm becoming deranged from it."

"Dear me. Is that a plea to expand our relationship or a revised way of suggesting you want to end it? What can you do, besides fight and kiss?"

"Pick oakum," she said wretchedly, "and cry. I can't imagine the first would interest you, and you've already seen the second, so couldn't we have a truce?"

A gleam of humor lit Devon's eyes. "That's audacious of you, considering that traditional activities during a truce include, but aren't limited to, tending the wounded, exchanging prisoners, and plotting like a demon what your moves will be when hostilities resume."

"If that's true, you've got no reason
not
to want one," she retorted, encouraged and disoriented by the relatively mellow tenor of his mood. "The wounded are all on my side; unlike you, I've got no prisoners to exchange; and it's perfectly obvious that you could plot rings around me." He was still smiling a little, but he made no response, so she added unhappily, "1 know it may not matter much to you, but I have a family who must be very worried about me."

"Write them a letter and I'll post it."

"I'm sure you would," Merry said bitterly. "After you'd read it."

The accusation moved him not at all. "I'll be the first to admit that being the kidnapper has immense advantages over being the kidnappee. I wouldn't be in your shoes for all the mussels in Dublin."

"They are
not
my shoes. They belong to Cat, as does the shirt, and the britches. The gunpowder under my fingernails is Morgan's. The bruises on my wrists are yours. All that's left of me is a bit of white ash and bone meal encased in skin."

She turned then and made the escape her pride had withheld from her earlier and, plunging down the darkened staircase, ran flat into Cat, who was coming up. He was more than a head taller, but she was on the stair above him. Their faces were nearly level as he stood, a thin, pale-haired shadow before her. With unruffled practicality he advised her to use the handrail or she would break her neck on the steps.

As he passed her, going up, she said brightly, through choking tears, "You must be worn to a rug, you've been working so hard this afternoon avoiding me."

He checked in mid-stride, with a reluctance she could almost taste.

"You really don't want anything to do with it," she whispered. "Do you. Cat?"

There was a short silence, and then he sat down on the stair, the new moonlight a frosty cap on his colorless hair, the hard bones of his face shaded.

"No." An extended pause followed before he asked, "You've been talking to Devon?"

"I wouldn't call it talking. He circles around me like a carnivore and bites when the urge takes him. There's no more mercy in the man than there is milk in a male tiger."

"Panic won't help."

"Thank you," she said. "I needed a slogan. Panic won't help. That's an apt one."

It was warm in the stairway. Musty air scented with dried varnish fought off breezes from the deck, and the hatch opened to a purple, star-spotted heaven. Merry could barely see his hand as Cat waved it over the empty space beside him in a silent invitation. She joined him gingerly; the step was narrow. They sat together, not touching, and he said, "What was he? Angry?"

"I haven't the faintest notion of the workings of the man's mind. See a brown spider spinning on a rock; as soon know what
it's
thinking. I was buried under an avalanche of finesse."

"If there's an avalanche of anything, it's metaphors," he said. "Do you think you can tell me what happened without crucifying the language?"

A pause came in which Merry did a lot of fidgeting. Finally, "He kissed me."

Three short words, and the tone in which she said them revealed more to him than she would have liked. Long habit kept emotion from his face, though she couldn't have seen it in the dim light anyway. None of this was as easy for the long-haired boy as it had been two weeks ago; not that it had been exactly painless then. He had already done his best for her with Devon; but Devon had experienced hypocrisy in every possible permutation, and it would likely take a deposition from God to make the man trust that Merry's sweet surface went bone-deep. Nor had Devon any reason to be either rational or lenient with respect to anything connected with Michael Granville. The set of scarred fingers that Cat had clasped loosely around his opposite wrist were tense and icy.

"You'll have to accept it," he said, the slow words following one another in chilly succession, "if you won't tell him what he wants to know. I've told you already, and nothing's changed. Damn it, Merry, you know—or you ought to know—that a man and a woman who desire each other and share a bedchamber will inevitably—"