Teresa Medeiros

by Once an Angel

  Trini’s voice boomed out. “You benevolent gentlefolk have shared your sumptuous repast with me. Now I beg for the privilege of repaying the favor.”

  He vaulted out the window, returning with a platter of glazed meat. The exotic aromas of honey, cinnamon, and passion fruit wafted from the steaming dish, making Emily’s mouth water.

  She clutched Justin’s arm. “Please tell me it’s not—”

  “Good old-fashioned English pork, my dear. A favored delicacy of the Maori.”

  She slumped in relief. Even Penfeld perked up as bottle and platter were passed around. The shadows of dusk lengthened across the hut, but the gathering darkness did not pierce their warm glow of laughter and conversation.

  As Penfeld rose to light the lanterns, Emily leaned against the wall, content to watch the emotions dance across Justin’s face and hands. She’d found most Englishmen to be stilted in both speech and manner, but Justin’s fingers were eloquent extensions of his voice. He spoke briefly to Trini in Maori, the foreign words rolling like song from his tongue. Trini rose and disappeared out the window again.

  “His comings and goings are enough to make a kiwi dizzy,” Penfeld said, splashing a healthy dose of rum into his tea as Trini bounced back into the hut.

  The native knelt in front of Emily and offered her a calico-wrapped package.

  “For me?”

  Trini nodded. “For that most elegant of womankind, the veritable apex of feminine pulchritude—”

  “Did he just insult me?” she asked Justin.

  His shoulders shook with suppressed laughter. “No. He said you were lovely.” The warm glow in his eyes made Emily wonder if he shared that opinion.

  She tugged open the package. Nestled within the worn folds were a skirt of woven flax and a thin scarf of flowered calico.

  She held the skirt up to the light, admiring the exquisite workmanship. “It’s stunning, Trini, but I mustn’t accept it. Look what I’ve done to poor Penfeld’s coat.”

  Penfeld offered a toast to that, sloshing rum on his immaculate trousers.

  Trini spoke rapidly to Justin in Maori. He grunted a reply. The native took the skirt and laid it across her hands once again, saying simply, “Not for Trini. For Em.”

  For Em. Not borrowed from a befuddled valet. Not outgrown by some snobbish teacher. For Em. Virgin flax woven to hug the curves of her body. She looked around at their expectant faces, wondering how she could have allowed them to become so familiar and so dear in such a short time. Her gaze stopped at Justin. A wistful hunger touched his smile.

  She offered Trini her hand, hiding a flinch when he brought it toward his teeth. “My most marvelous gratitude, Trini Te Wana,” she said.

  He kissed her palm with the suave charm of any London swell. Emily gathered her gift and withdrew to the other side of the hut, terrified Justin might hear the tiny cracks shooting through her frozen heart.

  Justin reclined on one elbow and tipped the rum bottle to his lips. The liquor spread its warm haze through his veins. Behind him Penfeld was snoring. The valet had forgotten to put any tea at all in his last conch shell. Trini had confiscated Justin’s watch and was twirling it over the lantern, watching darts of light dance across the hut in drunken fascination. Conversation had long ago declined, as it tended to do when stomachs were full and bottles empty.

  Sighing, Justin allowed his gaze to lead him to the same hopeless place it had all night. To Emily.

  She sat, hugging one leg, her chin pillowed against the satiny curve of her knee. A jagged tear in Penfeld’s coat exposed a creamy shoulder burnished with freckles. The lantern light tipped her chestnut curls with flame, haloing a profile as fragile and inscrutable as porcelain. Her eyes followed the spin of his watch as if hypnotized.

  He closed his own eyes for a weary moment, wondering if they’d somehow wounded her with their kindness.

  When he opened them, Emily was staring at him, her pensive expression hardened to something more feral. For a chilling instant he would have sworn she hated him.

  Then the lantern flickered, Trini began to hum softly, and the moment was gone.

  Too much rum, Justin assured himself uneasily as he tipped his hat over his eyes and eased into stupor.

  Justin awoke to darkness. His head throbbed and his mouth tasted as if Fluffy had been tramping through it. No nightmares though. The thought gave him little comfort. He had learned long ago the seductive danger of drowning his dreams in rum.

  Penfeld’s rumbling snores assured him it was still night. He stumbled to his feet, hoping a trip into the moonlight would relieve more than his aching bladder. His eyes adjusted poorly, and he stubbed his toe on Trini’s prone form. A sliver of moonlight beckoned him into the night. He was already fumbling at his dungarees when he hit the door.

  He stumbled a few feet away, then stopped, his back to the hut. His shoulders slowly relaxed in relief.

  “Feel better?”

  A rich note of humor tinged the feminine voice. An icy heat knifed between Justin’s shoulder blades and crawled all the way to his hairline. Dear God, don’t let her see me blush, he prayed.

  “Quite,” he said gruffly, making crucial adjustments with frantic hands. He hitched his thumbs in his waistband and swaggered back to the hut as if he had known she was there all the time.

  Emily sat in the sand, staring glumly at the fragments of china gathered in the circle of her legs. An elfin frown crinkled her brow.

  She swept a floppy curl out of her eyes, leaving a pale smudge of flour on her cheek, and held up a teacup with no handle. “I made some paste for Penfeld’s tea set.”

  Justin wondered how long she had been sitting out there alone. Shadows stained the fragile skin beneath her eyes. Her efforts seemed to have yielded little more than sticky fingers and sandy china. As they watched, a gaping fissure split the cup she was holding.

  Her bereft sigh was more than Justin could bear. He ducked into the hut and returned with a small jar. “Kauri gum. Hand me that teapot and we’ll give it a try.”

  Emily’s grin swept away the last of the rum’s stale fog. Their fingers brushed and lingered as he knelt and took the spoutless teapot from her hand.

  Penfeld threw open the door, inviting the brisk morning air into his lungs. He had awakened to an empty hut and was mortified to have outslept Justin. It wasn’t that his master required any assistance wiggling into his dungarees, but a proper valet should always rise first.

  He balled his hands and stretched, shading his tender eyes against the sunlight. He lifted his foot but mercifully glanced down before lowering it, realizing he was about to tread directly on someone’s fingers. He hopped backward. His eyes widened as he took in the spectacle before him.

  Justin and Emily lay in a heap, entwined like a pile of sleeping kittens, her arm looped across his stomach, his head pillowed on her thigh. Emily’s cheeks were flushed. Justin’s dark hair stirred in the morning wind. Beside them in the sand lay one of the sweetest sights Penfeld had ever seen.

  The sun gleamed across the silver tray, kissing the sleek curves of the porcelain. They had rescued a handful of cups, the teapot, and the sugar bowl. What did it matter that the china was webbed with thick brown gum and crusted with sand? Or that the spout of the teapot now hung upside down like the trunk of some morose elephant? Penfeld thought it all unbearably lovely.

  He drew out his starched handkerchief and dabbed at his cheeks. “Silly sand,” he muttered. “Always blowing in my eyes.”

  Later that same morning Emily danced around the hut, delighting in the musical sway of the flaxen skirt. It hugged her hips, then flared around her legs in a graceful bell, granting her giddy freedom of movement. After nearly lynching herself, she had even managed to tie the calico scarf around her breasts in a makeshift bandeau. She wished Miss Winters could see her now. The flowered material bared enough skin to send the poky old headmistress past death into rigor mortis.

  She folded Penfeld’s ragged coat with tender hands. She
was worse at sewing than she was at pasting together teapots and wouldn’t have inflicted her seamstress skills on her worst enemy.

  Not even on Justin.

  Her hands paused in their motion. Her worst enemy, she thought. The man who had sat with her until dawn, using his exquisite patience to piece together shards of broken porcelain to cheer his friend. The man she had vowed to somehow destroy.

  She tossed the coat on Penfeld’s pallet. Today was to be her first taste of real freedom, and she refused to dwell on such dark thoughts. The slant of the sun warned her she had slept past noon. Such decadence made her shiver with delight. She started for the door, but could not resist one last peek at Penfeld’s tea tray. She had awoken alone on her pallet to find it displayed proudly beneath the window.

  The sun illumined bulbous cracks patched with amber gum, but Emily had to admit it was a valiant effort. She leaned forward, lured by a hint of her reflection in an unbroken stretch of silver. She tugged at one of her curls. It popped back like a coiled spring. She sighed. Why couldn’t she have been born with a straight fall of iceblond hair like Cecille du Pardieu?

  The door swung open, and she thrust her hands behind her back, embarrassed to be caught primping. Miss Winters would never have tolerated such vanity.

  Justin ducked beneath the lintel. “Thought I’d come back and see if Sleeping Beauty had decided to rise. I was beginning to wonder if you were ever—” As his gaze lit on her, he stopped.

  Emily held her breath as he reached up and slowly pulled off his hat. An odd tingle swept up her body in the smoldering path of his gaze. Their easy banter of the previous night perished in its flame.

  Laughing shakily, she spread her arms and spun around for his perusal. “Do I look like a native? Would Trini be pleased? Of course Trini wouldn’t be pleased. He would be exultant. Or rhapsodic. Or—”

  “You look fine.” Justin’s tone bordered on surliness.

  She caught a tantalizing glimpse of something pained, almost stricken, in his eyes. Then he donned his hat, tilting it forward as an effective veil.

  She flitted around the hut, gathering a towel and a wicker basket. “I thought I’d go down to the beach and dig some clams for supper. I’m weary to death of this dusty old hut.” She started for the door.

  “No!”

  His yell startled her so badly, she dropped the basket.

  She felt her jaw drop as he threw his body across the door. “You can’t go out there! I absolutely forbid it.”

  Chapter 6

  Like you, Claire, my friend has been blessed with the ability of keeping a cool head under fire.…

  Justin knew he was behaving like a madman, but he was helpless to stop. The same impish demon who had driven him to return to the hut at midday had taken his little pitchfork and twisted it deep into Justin’s heart.

  He had opened the door, expecting to find the bedraggled waif he had carried to the pallet after Penfeld had awakened him that morning. But the fairies had come while he was in the fields, leaving in her place one of their own—an ethereal vision of womanhood. Her loveliness pained him, opened up a raw chasm of hunger in his heart and in his arms. He wanted to cover her shy smile with his lips, to ease her back down on the pallet and beg her to adore him with both her woman’s body and her child’s heart.

  She had tried to tell him she was grown, but he had refused to heed her warning. Until he had heard the teasing whisper of flax against her thighs and traced the exquisite cling of the fabric across her full breasts, it had been less painful to pretend she was just a funny little moppet, a minor annoyance to his well-ordered existence.

  But when he walked through that door, his neat existence had crumbled like sand before an irresistible tide, and he had ended up flung across the doorway like a pagan sacrifice.

  “You can’t go out there,” he repeated. “I won’t have it.”

  Emily’s brow folded in a stormy frown. Justin knew he had made a mistake. Forbidding Emily anything was like tossing a haunch of beef to a starving lioness.

  She crossed her arms and tapped her foot on the dirt floor. “I beg your pardon.”

  “I’m sorry, but I simply cannot allow it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not safe. There are too many—uh—um—”

  “Tigers? Cobras? Bears?” she offered.

  Bears? He wanted to reply that there were too many other men out there. Maori warriors, undeniably handsome even by English standards. Virile Polynesians whose bronze muscles gleamed with sweat and whose bones never ached, not even after long, hot hours in the sun. Strutting young heroes in the first flush of manhood with not a gray hair among them. Justin searched his mind frantically.

  “Cannibals!” he almost shouted. “Too many cannibals. I’m disappointed in you, Emily. How could you have forgotten?”

  “And you think they might want to gobble me up?” She swept her tongue across her pearly little teeth.

  Justin wadded his hat into a ball. His body was strumming like a piano wire strung to reckless limits. God, she was luscious. She was in far more danger of being gobbled up in here than out there.

  “They might,” he replied, refusing to commit himself.

  “How odd. I distinctly remember Trini telling me the surrounding tribes were all friendly to whites. He said they even fought side by side in the recent land wars against the hostile natives.”

  Luscious and gifted with a good memory, Justin thought. A lethal combination. “There are still hostile Maori to the east of us in Rotorua who have been known to send out marauding parties.” Her lower lip inched out, and Justin groaned. “I’m simply asking you not to go out alone. I’ll come back and take you out later.” Much later. Preferably after it was pitch dark and there was no one to ogle her but him.

  She tossed back her curls and struck a long-suffering pose. “So until then I’m to remain your prisoner in this hut?”

  Justin was torn between laughter and painful desire. Her words summoned up some very naughty images of fur rugs and silken chains. Once again he thanked God she had fallen into his hands instead of some less scrupulous man’s. His own scruples were wearing thin fester than he cared to admit.

  She had worked herself up to a full pout now. Justin decided it best to go before she started throwing things. She was standing dangerously near the skillet, and he didn’t want to spend another sleepless night gluing together teacups. He donned his hat, wondering how it had gotten so misshapen. He dared a last glance from beneath the shelter of its brim and caught Emily’s expression in a moment of rare honesty. She wasn’t angry. She was hurt. As she watched him go, it had become impossible for her to hide the forlorn tilt of her lips.

  He crossed to her and nudged her face up with one finger. “I’ll be back for you. I promise.”

  Unable to deny himself, he touched his lips to hers in a brief caress. Her shiver of response rocked his soul. As he turned to go, the look in her fathomless dark eyes made him wonder which of them was truly the prisoner.

  • • •

  Justin’s words haunted the lonely hut.

  I’ll be back for you. I promise.

  Those were the last words Emily’s father had ever spoken to her.

  They had faced each other in Miss Winters’s elegant parlor, awkward and at a loss for words for the first time in Emily’s memory. The fawning headmistress had offered them the room for their farewells. She had assured him she would spare no expense for her cherished new pupil and her doting father, a man they all knew had a healthy investment in the booming New Zealand gold rush. Frost had webbed the windows, but a cheery fire had crackled on the hearth.

  Eleven years before, when he’d been only twenty himself, David Scarborough’s lovely Irish bride had died, leaving a squalling red-faced infant in her place. He delighted in telling his friends that he and Emily had grown up together. He was more than father and mother to her. He was her dearest friend. They’d never been separated, not even for a night, and now he was goin
g away.

  Emily was afraid to look at him. Snowflakes melted on the cape of his greatcoat. His own unruly curls had been tamed by a top hat of polished beaver. She thought he had never looked taller or more handsome. Or less like her daddy. She comforted herself by studying his leather shoes, memorizing each familiar knick and scuff, ignoring the trickle of the tears down her cheeks.

  He folded her face in his kid gloves, his voice choked with a helpless agony that mirrored her own. “Claire. My sweet, my darling …”

  She had buried her nose in his waistcoat, savoring the scent of pipe tobacco that always clung to him. He had touched his lips to her hair and whispered, “I’ll be back for you. I promise.”

  Then he had turned and gone, leaving her standing alone in a blast of icy air.

  “He would have come back, too,” Emily whispered to the silent hut. “If it hadn’t been for you.”

  She curled her lip in a snarl. How dare Justin make a mockery of her father’s words! How dare his lips caress hers as if she were still a child to be pacified with a kiss and a promise! Promises were only as good as the men who made them.

  She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “As if your words mean spit to me, Justin Connor!”

  She snatched up the basket and threw the towel over her shoulder. Justin had been lying to her. The furtive dart of his eyes had given him away. Being a skilled kisser did not preclude being a bad liar. He probably wanted her safely closeted in the hut so she couldn’t discover what dark deeds he accomplished in the glaring light of day. She marched across the hut, fully intending to tell him where both he and his mythical cannibals could go.

  She threw open the door. A half-naked savage sprang into her path, swinging his club in a whistling arc. Emily froze. He shoved his face into hers. She recoiled from the fishy stench of his breath. The sunlight shining through her hair seemed to mesmerize him. Muttering under his breath, he wrapped one of her curls around his grubby finger, baring his yellowed teeth in a fearful grimace.