'Here, put this on!' He tossed it towards her. 'Sit down by the fire while I fix supper.'
She dared not refuse. It was useless pretending that an eruption was not pending; the very air around them seemed to crackle a warning whenever they came close, even though she had striven all day to ensure that they made no physical contact, had edged sideways to manoeuvre past him in confined spaces, shrinking as if from a leper.
She shrugged into the heavy jumper and felt immediately comforted by a weight of warmth and a faintly oily smell. With a sigh of contentment she curled up in the rocking chair at the side of the fire and watched Rolf positioning spare ribs, cooked earlier that day, on to a makeshift barbecue that he had fashioned out of wire. He was amazingly capable; already he had constructed a refrigerator by filling a wooden crate with perishables and anchoring it with rocks to the shady bed of a nearby stream. But the feat she most appreciated was the shower he had contrived by punching holes in the bottom of a large plastic container unearthed from the boot of the car, stopping the holes with golf tees tied to a string and hooked over the handle of the container so that they would not get lost, then hanging it, filled with water, from the branch of a tree, controlling the force of the water by pulling out the desired number of tees. A sheet of plastic, again filched from the car, provided a curtain of privacy —a refinement she suspected he would have cheerfully done without but one for which she was enormously grateful.
Lulled by the rhythmic motion of the rocking chair and by the heat of the fire-warmed gansey, she nodded off, and was startled awake by Rolf pushing a plateful of barbecued spare ribs and baked potatoes beneath her nose.
'Come along, sleeping beauty,' he teased, 'wrap yourself around these!'
It was a long time since she had tasted anything more delicious than the ribs she held in her fingers and gnawed ravenously, concentrating like a small, hungry animal until every sliver of meat had been cleared from the bones. She then turned her attention upon the potatoes, scooping out the floury, perfectly cooked, centres oozing with butter, then scraping up every morsel leaving the inside of the smoke-blackened jackets perfectly clean.
'Mm…!' She reached for her cup and gulped down a draught of cool milk. 'That was fantastic!'
'You'll get fat.' Sardonically Rolf eyed her slender body enveloped by the voluminous jumper. 'Tomorrow we shall have to begin living on the land, our stock of meat is almost finished.'
She was too comfortably full, too warm and cosy to pay attention to his words. Firelight was flickering against her cheeks and it was too much of an effort even to exert the small amount of pressure required to rock the chair. Once again her eyelids drooped, and when she heard music she thought she was dreaming. But then Rolf's pleasantly-timbred voice, run through with an undertone of amusement, began singing in French to the accompaniment of an ancient melodeon, alerting her ears with the sound of her name.
'A la claire fontaine
M'en allant promener
J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle
Que je m'y suis baigné.
Il y a longtemps que je t'aime,
Jamais je ne t'oublierai.'
She waited until the song was finished, then lifted her lashes and saw him sitting opposite, fire flame reflecting in the depths of his eyes.
'What do the words mean?' she asked, curious but shy. 'Will you translate them?'
She suspected that he had fully intended doing so, and felt dominated when, held by his intense, fire-flecked look, he softly explained.
'A la Claire Fontaine—At the Clear Running Fountain—is a song that was so beloved of the earlier voyageurs it eventually came to be regarded as the French-Canadians' unofficial anthem. It tells the tale of a voyageur who stopped by a clear running fountain and finding it beautiful bathed in it. As he dried himself beneath an oak tree he heard a nightingale singing high in its branches with a heart as gay as his own was sad, for he had lost his lady love. She had asked for a bouquet of roses, which he had refused to give her, and he was regretting his refusal bitterly because he had realised that,' his voice suddenly deepened, 'he would always love her, never forget her, and he wished that the flowers that had caused his downfall could be confined to the depth of the ocean.'
Claire blushed, very conscious of an atmosphere of deep intimacy filling the shadow-shrouded room. She reacted with a flippancy deliberately contrived to combat the threat of hidden danger.
'Pigheaded stubbornness seems to be a failing of your race,' she jibed. 'The wealthy, arrogant voyageur could probably have afforded to buy armfuls of roses, yet he preferred to dig in his heels, simply to demonstrate who was master.'
'Are you drawing a parallel?' he drawled. 'Telling me that unless I accede to your wishes I'll be left bitterly regretting the loss of my love?' He stood up, casting his tall shadow over her crouching form, but when he took a step towards her she jumped to her feet and ran, overlooking in her haste the thick hookey mat that stretched the width of the floor. It tripped her like an unseen foot, sending her sprawling in a heap at the foot of the bedroom door.
Unmindful of dignity, she scrambled upright and fled into her bedroom, pressing her hands against her ears to shut out the sound of Rolf's humiliating laughter.
The sun had risen hours before she ventured out of her bedroom the next morning. She dallied deliberately, waiting until she heard him striding off towards the smithy where yesterday he had spent much of his time experimenting with an assortment of antiquated equipment, then, feeling the humiliated heat would never fade from her cheeks, she crept into the kitchen and began foraging in the dresser for flour, hoping to work off her frustration by copying Rolf's method of making sourdough.
Suddenly the chickens scratching around the door of the cottage began squawking, setting up an ear-splitting din that sent her rushing outside to find out the cause of their obvious panic. Birds were scattering in all directions when she flung open the door, all except the one Rolf was clutching by the scruff of its neck.
He grinned at the sight of her, then nodded down at the struggling bird. 'I think I've managed to pick out the plumpest. We'll stuff it with hot stones and bury it in a pit, if it's left to cook slowly we'll have a moist, succulent bird for dinner.'
A red haze swam in front of her eyes. 'You'll do no such thing, you, you… callous barbarian! That's Henry—put him down, and don't you dare to so much as ruffle a feather!'
His astonishment would have been comical if she had been in a mood to appreciate it. Sounding full of amused amazement, he protested, 'To survive in remote areas one must become conditioned to regarding anything that swims, flies or runs as a moving meal ticket!'
'Not the chickens,' she insisted stubbornly. 'I've christened each one of them, if I had to eat one I'd feel like a cannibal!'
To her horror her voice wobbled and tears—so huge and forceful they could not be blinked back -—flooded into her eyes.
Immediately he realised that she was genuinely upset, he relented. 'Very well, gentle heart, they'll be reprieved, but only on condition that you come with me and help me trap some other kind of game.'
Very reluctantly she agreed to accompany him to the surrounding fields where, in selected spots, he laid down his snares. As they lay in waiting in the long grass with the breeze in their faces and sun beaming upon their backs, he whispered:
'If you see an animal lifting its head, freeze— that's a sure sign that our potential victim is worried.'
'The snares won't inflict pain, I hope?' she pleaded, her eyes troubled.
Brutally insensitive, he chuckled. 'There are four tried and trusted ways of catching food and they can be summed up as: tangle, mangle, dangle and strangle. A tangle snare is a trip wire with a pit to drop the victim in; a dangle trap is one where the animal runs into it and is caught by a loop and is then either hoisted up in the air or hanged. A mangle trap drops something heavy on to its victim and strangling is, of course, carried out by hand.'
Unaware of her horrified stare, he continue
d keeping a sharp lookout for signs of movement, ignorant of the fact that she was classing him in her mind with bloodthirsty Indians who were at least able to make survival their excuse for seizing anything made of flesh as potential food.
Instinctively she tensed at the sight of movement in the grass where the snares had been laid. Five little brown furry bodies with white pompom tails were bobbing their way into danger, a group that looked to her fevered imagination like a mother with a brood of playful children. Nothing on earth could have prevented her from reacting as she did. Jumping to her feet, she clapped her hands in frenzied warning and yelled:
'Go back! Oh, please go back…!'
'Claire, what the blazes…!' Rolf jumped to his feet and grabbed her furiously by the shoulders.
To her own surprise and his, her eyes once again flooded with tears. For a long time he stared darkly, then with a groan of remorse he pulled her into his arms and turned her bones to water with a ragged apology.
'Hell, I'm sorry—I always seem to be giving you the rough end of my tongue! Don't cry, gentle heart, please don't cry.'
He held her loosely within arms that for once did not seem demanding, but gently protective. Claire yielded to an inner force urging her to rest her head upon his accommodating chest and felt the thud of his heartbeats linking up with her own to form a throbbing duet that pounded in her ears. His hold did not tighten, it was as if, conscious of her fawn-like timidity, he was afraid that one hasty movement, one hint of hazard, would startle her out of his grasp and so, being a man of the woodland versed in the ways of nervous creatures, had decided to discard force in favour of the kind of patience and kindness that tames small creatures into taking food from an outstretched hand.
He neither spoke nor moved while she wrestled with her bewilderment, wondering why, though she had not cried since she was a child, twice in the space of an hour, she should have indulged in the weakness of tears; why his torn apology should have plucked such a response from her heartstrings and why, when all she wanted was to be rid of him, she should have been made to feel so utterly secure by the drumming of his powerful heartbeats.
'Claire…!' His voice could not have been steadier, yet it contained a nuance, a hint of barely controlled frustration that caused her to freeze. When his head lowered nearer she did not wait to give him the benefit of the doubt, but jerked out of reach and with a startled, accusing look spun on her heel and began racing, panicky as a startled rabbit, across the fields.
Half an hour later as she sat gazing out of the window of the cottage, mulling over the confusing, strangely poignant interlude, she was jerked into awareness by a query directed from the open doorway.
'Pleasant thoughts…?'
She blushed, wondering what conclusion he was drawing from her daydreaming, from her vacant smile as she sat staring into space.
He was lounging in the doorway, one shoulder supported against a jamb, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of disreputable jeans that he had rolled up to his knees, showing a length of brown calf and bare feet crossed at the ankles. She barely spared him a glance, being already too aware of his look of superb fitness, of the leashed virility contained within powerful chest and shoulders. 'There is a beast inside every man that has to be subdued, whipped and tamed,' he had once admitted. Was the beast ready to purr, or to growl?
'I was wondering…' he surprised her by sounding diffident if such an adjective could ever be applied to him, '… if you would care to come for a sail?'
Biting back a too eager acceptance, she murmured without turning her head, 'That would be nice. Can you spare me a few minutes to change into a more suitable outfit?'
She did not stop to analyse her emotions as eagerly she threw her dress over her head and began searching through her suitcase for slacks. 'He has a preference for bright colours,' she found herself murmuring, discarding subdued browns and creams. She pounced upon a playsuit that had been bought in a rare mood of abandon; when she had tried it on at home she had decided that the bright red shade drained her face of colour and that the skimpy shorts and halter top laid unflattering emphasis upon too-slender limbs and gently-rounded curves. But this time she had to reverse her opinion, for the bright colour looked startlingly flattering against a contrasting tan that had built up imperceptibly during days of glorious weather and the cut of the suit seemed to emphasise perfectly a perkily-rounded bottom and breasts full and firm as pomegranates straining against the confines of the brief top.
Feeling shy and not a little self-conscious, she eventually nerved herself to step outside her bedroom and walk across the kitchen towards Rolf. She steeled herself to rebuff any satirical reference to the scantiness of her outfit, but was unaccountably hurt when at first sight of her his dark eyes grew bleak and hard lines of tension formed around his mouth.
'You certainly know how best to punish a man,' he accused in the tight tone of voice he had adopted since the moment he had assumed that his shouting had frightened her. 'I think I'd rather cope with ostracism than with deliberate provocation!'
They set off in silence to climb a path leading up to cliffs ablaze with gorse and heather, picking their way carefully between fissures that looked as if they might have been formed by a giant hand directing a karate chop, splitting the cliffs from top to bottom into deep, dangerous chasms, and as carefully they negotiated the widest splits in the rock he took her hand and did not leave go until they had descended the path inclining steeply towards the shore.
Pulled up on to the shingle beneath the cliffs was a small dinghy set upon a launching trolley. Rolf left her to see to the rigging, so she began beachcombing, searching deep pools for sea-urchins and starfish, pouncing upon a glint of emerald poking through the grey shingle, then feeling slightly foolish when all she unearthed was a green glass float from a trawl net.
'I see you still nurture childish hopes of finding pieces of eight or treasure from some old galleon,' Rolf chuckled behind her. Claire spun round, startled, and felt bound to defend herself against his mocking derision.
'It's possible—everyone knows that a ship of the Spanish Armada was shipwrecked off the Head. You wouldn't be so quick to sneer if I turned up some ducats.'
'Or even a bottle of rum from an old galleon?' he laughed aloud, looking more relaxed than he had done all day. 'The boat's ready, let's make our way across to the island.'
Before the dinghy was launched he insisted upon her donning a lifejacket, then briefly explained the working of the boat and outlined what he wanted her to do.
'Dinghies usually have a crew of two. Instead of having heavy keels to keep them upright, they have small wooden boards known as centreboards which stop the boat from being blown sideways by the wind. Once we're afloat we may have to hang right outside the boat to stop it from overturning—but don't be afraid,' he soothed, reading correctly her look of apprehension, 'I have no intention of allowing you to drown.'
The thrill of skimming the waves behind a billowing sail was completely new to her. Rolf left her no time to feel apprehensive as expertly he beat to windward, snapping out orders to shift her weight from one side of the dinghy to the other as he changed tack, steering right across the wind. Deeply absorbed, she was taken completely by surprise when the island loomed, appearing like a gigantic horse rising from the sea, with nose still submerged. Inexpert as she was, she could appreciate the superb seamanship Rolf displayed as he steered the dinghy through the small 'eye' and guided it towards the rocky shore.
'Did you enjoy your sail, mon amie?' His teeth flashed startling white when he grinned and held out his arms to lift her ashore.
Claire hesitated, mistrusting the air of jaunty satisfaction that seemed to have sprung from his tussle with the tides; he had challenged nature and predictably he had won. But then Rolf Ramsey always had to win.
Accepting the futility of trying to argue with the man glinting up at her, his straddled legs knee-deep in water, she lowered herself cautiously into his arms and felt an immediate
shock when she was grabbed and held unnecessarily close to his bared, muscular chest.
'It would help,' he suggested, mildly amused, 'if you could bring yourself to put your arms around my neck.'
When reluctantly she slid an arm loosely around his shoulder he punished her by pretending to let her slip. With a gasp of alarm she flung both arms tightly around his neck and hung on.
'That's much better, chérie,' he murmured wickedly, making no effort to move, thoroughly enjoying her embarrassment as he cradled her close with quirked lips hovering a fraction above her quivering mouth. Fear rushed back in full force, fear that her will would not be strong enough to withstand the pressure of his mouth, fear that the weakening ache stirring within her depths would spread its dangerous euphoria throughout her traitorous body.
'Claire,' he whispered, dark eyes smouldering, 'when will you admit that you were born for the sole purpose of becoming my wife?'
She snapped the fraught tension by grating, 'I doubt very much if Jonathan would agree with that theory!'
For a second she seemed in danger of being dumped into the sea. She had made him furiously angry, as she always did whenever she mentioned Jonathan's name, but he managed to swallow back an angry reply and began wading, bleak-eyed, towards the shore.
While he made fast the dinghy she ran up a path soaring the height of the cliff, then disappeared at the top into a blaze of gorse and heather. Feeling free as a bird newly released from a cage, she raced without stopping until she ran out of island, halting at the edge of cliffs shaped like outstretched arms flung around a small, sandy cove. Feeling like a castaway on a deserted island, with only the sky above and miles of empty sea at her feet, she picked her way down to the shore, then, hot and exhausted, stretched full length upon a comfortable bed of sand.
An hour must have passed before she raised her head. Amazed at the number of catnaps in which she had seemingly begun to indulge, she struggled upright feeling hot, sticky and completely unrefreshed. She gazed out to sea, her attention caught by a seal-dark head bobbing above the water, then when an upraised arm waved she realised that it was Rolf frolicking with obvious enjoyment. She glared resentful envy when his voice carried clear across the water.
Marriage by Capture Page 9
