Gallant Match

by Jennifer Blake

  “My skirts,” she gasped, “they—”

  “I know. Don’t breathe.”

  She glanced down, saw something flash silver in the water. An instant later, she felt the press of a knife blade at her waist. She froze as it jerked once, twice. Then he was ripping at her clothing, dragging her tight-sleeved bodice and clinging skirts from her. He thrust them away, letting them sink so she floated light and free beside him.

  “I—I can swim,” she said, trying to push away from him as he supported them both.

  He released her, though his warm fingers trailed over her back, along her arm. “I remember. Come on, then.”

  They struck out, breasting the waves shoulder to shoulder. Dodging floating debris, skirting other swimmers, they made for a clear stretch of water and the promise of land beyond it.

  It was only when they were some yards away from the ship that Sonia realized neither had given a thought to the lifeboats. There would be no room, she was almost sure. More than that, the Mexican man-of-war was making ready to pick up the survivors. It was unlikely they would allow those in the launches to escape. The rescued might well become prisoners of war, particularly the men.

  To avoid that uncertain fate seemed the best course. If they drowned in the attempt, it was still worth the chance.

  Before they had gone a dozen yards, Sonia realized she was slowing Kerr down, that he could easily have outdistanced her. It was not surprising given his superior strength, but it distressed her all the same.

  The shore was also farther away than it had seemed from the ship’s deck, farther than she had ever tried to swim as a skinny teen wearing her cousin’s pantaloons. The waves that lifted her were higher, deeper and stronger as well. More, it had been years since she last paddled in the river. Her arms were losing their strength, the back of her nose burned and her breath was labored from the strain of trying to keep up with Kerr.

  She rolled over, changing to a backstroke. “Leave me,” she said in hoarse recommendation as a wave slapped into her face. “I…need…rest a minute. I’ll come…behind you.”

  “Not likely.”

  “But you…”

  “I made a promise.”

  “Don’t be…ridiculous. It was never meant…for this.”

  “You’re wasting your breath.” With barely a pause, he reached across her and grabbed her wrist. Flipping her to her stomach again, he tucked her fingers into the waist-band of his trousers. “Hold tight. Help any way you can.”

  She grasped the cloth, feeling against the backs of her fingers the warm flesh of his muscle-wrapped side. He surged once more for the shore.

  It should have been humiliating, being towed like a child. Instead, it felt right, somehow, and gratifyingly secure. Matching her pace to his then, she pulled with one arm, kicking mightily, as they cleaved through the water.

  Time ceased to have meaning. Fear, doubt, concern for her aunt and the other passengers was an ache in Sonia’s heart, but the need to help was banished from her mind by its impossibility. All of existence narrowed to the watery world around her and the man at her side. Their goal of the far-off line of trees, the rhythm of their progress and the need to breathe and stay afloat were the only realities. It seemed they might go on and on forever, caught between ship and shore, making little headway but striving, earnestly striving, to live.

  All clamor from the Lime Rock and the Mexican ship died slowly away behind them. Wisps of fog drifted over the water, gathering, thickening again, above their heads. The splashes as they dug into the waves, the rasping of their hard breaths were muffled sounds held close around them. Sonia gave thanks that it was so, hoped that their existence would be forgotten in the excitement, that they would be presumed drowned.

  The waves turned to foaming surf around them. Gritty, powdered coral shifted between Sonia’s legs and the water seemed to grow thick with finely ground gold. She and Kerr struck the shelving brown sand beach at the same time. He staggered to his feet, pulling her upright beside him. Holding on to each other, they waded from the surf with faltering steps, falling face-down as they reached the tide line.

  Solid ground.

  It felt miraculous, even if the wave-packed sand was littered with broken shells, fish bones and bits of rotted wood. Its greatest virtue was that it didn’t move. Sonia could have lain there, slept there, for aeons.

  Kerr groaned, then pushed up on his hands and rolled to his back. Propping on his elbows, he stared back out to sea.

  “What is it? They aren’t…”

  “No,” he said in answer to the question she could not bear to complete. “The Mexicans seem to be searching for survivors, though it’s hard to tell.”

  She sat up to glance around, seeing at once what he meant. The fog had grown denser along the shoreline where the land blocked the wind. The Mexican ship and what was left above water of the Lime Rock were like ghost vessels with their masts appearing and disappearing in the mist.

  “You don’t think they will look for us?”

  Kerr turned his head to stare at her a long moment. His gaze brushed the deep décolletage and shirred cap sleeves of her corset cover under her corset that protected it from perspiration and kept it from pinching her skin, the bedraggled and semitransparent batiste of her ruffle-edged pantaloons. Something hot and disturbing unfurled inside her. She lifted her chin a fraction while blazingly aware of her seminude state.

  His face tightened and he turned away. After a second, he hauled himself to his feet with a wrench of vein-traced muscles. “Best not wait to find out.”

  The abrupt move startled a sandpiper so it scuttled away, leaving an embroidery trail of tracks on the wet sand. It did not excite the flock of pelicans that perched on a rocky outcropping some dozen yards away. They sat watching them like wise and suspicious old men, waiting to see what they were going to do. Moving slowly to prevent startling them into flight that might alert those around the foundering Lime Rock, Sonia pushed to a crouch and eased behind the outcropping for concealment. She straightened then, turning toward the junglelike wall of greenery beyond the beach. Kerr joined her, his fists on his hip bones as he narrowed his eyes to search the towering growth.

  It was a dark green tangle of frond-crowned palms hung with lianas, of exotic-looking shrubbery, luxuriant, sensual flowers and clumps of plants wrapped around the crotches of trees like diapers on babies bottoms. Anything could be hiding in there from the look of it, particularly if it was poisonous, venomous or dangerous to the touch.

  “What are we going to do? Where can we go?” she asked in a whisper.

  A deep breath swelled Kerr’s chest before he squared his shoulders. “We’ll do what we have to,” he answered. “As for where we’ll go, the only direction I see is inland. There should be a river or stream of some kind, judging from maps I’ve seen. Find it, and we can follow its course. With luck, it should lead to a village of some description.”

  “And if there isn’t one?”

  He didn’t answer, nor did he attempt to persuade her to his idea. He simply strode off, making toward the dense jungle growth. Sonia stared after him with her lips parted. Then she narrowed her eyes. “Monsieur Wallace!”

  He stopped. “What now?”

  “Did you never hear of ladies first?”

  “This isn’t a lifeboat.”

  He had seen that mass breach of conduct and disapproved of it, judging from the grim note in his voice. It made Sonia feel marginally better. “It isn’t a promenade, either, but manners still apply.”

  He took a deep, tried breath, for she saw it lift his chest. “You know where you’re going, do you?”

  “Does it matter? The point is—”

  “The point, mademoiselle, is that whoever goes first will meet head-on with whatever is waiting for us in there.” He waved toward the green wall of growth. “The one walking behind will have a good chance to run for it. You want to break trail, be my guest.”

  She swallowed hard as she considered it. “No,�
�� she answered after a long moment. “That won’t be necessary.”

  “What I thought,” he muttered. Or Sonia thought he did. She couldn’t be sure since he walked away again.

  His shoulders were so impossibly wide, tapering to a narrow waist and hard-muscled thighs like a statue of some ancient gladiator. He moved with that same athletic ease in his own body and with the innate grace that came from limitless strength. His oak-brown hair, slicked back by seawater, glistened with copper highlights in the morning light. He seemed so sure of himself, so positive about what they should do, also when and how they should go about it.

  It was supremely irritating.

  It was also a vast relief.

  Moving with care, stiff in every joint and strained in muscles she had never expected to use, Sonia took a step after him. Once begun, she followed without complaint.

  Seventeen

  Walking away from Sonia was the only way Kerr could keep his hands off her half-naked body. What kind of brutish idiot was he that he could see her prostrate on the sand, exhausted from the ordeal just behind them, and want nothing so much as to take her in fierce possession where she lay?

  Men had such impulses after facing death, he knew; he’d felt them himself following dawn meetings at the dueling oaks. This was more than that primitive need to prove he still lived. It had in it a touch of the elemental, a pledge that he would allow nothing to harm Sonia Bonneval, not now, not for all eternity.

  He of all men had no right to such a vow. It must, no doubt would, cancel out one he had held before him like a grail for more than four years. And what use was a man who would discard one obligation for the sake of another, like a child taking a lick from every bonbon in the box?

  She was so tender, so impossibly smooth and pale where no sun had ever kissed her skin, and certainly no man. He longed to touch her, to run his hands over every inch of her in the lightest of explorations, smoothing his way into hollows, dipping into crevices while she sighed and moaned and gave him access to all she had. His fingers burned with the need so he shook them as he walked. His neck ached with the urge to turn and impress the sight of her in wet, clinging dishabille upon the backs of his eyes for all time.

  No. He could not look, dared not look.

  He had made her half-naked, had cut her clothing from her body as she swayed with the waves, yielding in his arms. It was his ultimate fantasy come to life. When old and toothless, rheumy-eyed, half-blind and lost to all physical pleasure, he would remember that moment and he would smile. It had been, in some strange manner, like slicing away her defenses, leaving her at his mercy. To strip away what was left, the few tattered scraps of unmentionables and damnable corset that he should have taken care of before, would be no more than a moment’s work. And then…

  No.

  Yes, and the swim through the heavy sea with her breasts pressing into him with every stroke she made and her thighs, the softness between them, twining around and against him. He could feel the sensation down his side still, like the burn of stinging nettles. If he checked, he thought he might find scars from it.

  That, too, would remain.

  God, he was just a man. What was he supposed to do? He wanted her with a desperate ache that nothing less than her surrender could assuage, had longed for just that since he had wiped black tears from her face while rain fell around them.

  It was the one thing he could never have.

  He had promised to deliver an unsullied bride.

  He would do it if it killed him.

  It well might.

  He tramped ahead, blind to everything except the hot thoughts that ran through his head. Sonia followed, keeping up better than he expected. It was all the walking about the Vieux Carré done by ladies like her, he thought, from town house to market, cathedral to modiste, shoemaker to milliner. That and the endless daily visits between friends during the season, the promenades on the levee and nights of dancing until dawn.

  It was perhaps a long, hard hour after they left the coast that a movement caught his eye, a shift of mottled color sliding away on his right side.

  The hair on the back of Kerr’s neck stirred, rising in the awareness of danger as he halted. He turned to stone in place, barely breathing.

  It was a rattlesnake as big around as his arm and twice as long. The reptile eased away, sliding over the forest floor with the faintest of dry rustles, disappearing between one patch of shadow and the next.

  Cursing under his breath, Kerr wished passionately for his sword cane now sinking beneath the waves with the Lime Rock. He hated being without it. Seldom had a blade of some kind—épée, foil, rapier, saber or sword cane—been out of his reach these past few years. A pocketknife was no substitute, though it weighted his trouser pocket where he’d thrust it after divesting Sonia of her heavy outerwear.

  He glanced back at Sonia. She stood quite still. Whether she had seen the snake or only taken her cue from him, he wasn’t quite sure. The first, he suspected, since her eyes were wide with alarm and she breathed quickly through parted lips.

  He had better put what couldn’t be helped from him and collect his wits, he told himself in silent resolution. If he didn’t, they could both die here in this Mexican jungle and never be heard from again. The pelicans and parrots would shriek over their bones, the ants would carry away all the rest, and that would be the end.

  Summoning a smile, he held out his hand. “Might be best if you keep close. I wouldn’t want to lose you now.”

  She came forward, stepping daintily in her stocking feet that were already filthy and showed red scratches through the rents in the silk. Her hand slid into his, clasped, held.

  Kerr’s heart lifted inside him, but he said nothing. Turning, he walked on with every sense honed to such slicing alertness it was near pain. He welcomed that ache as an antidote to the craving he could not bear half so well.

  “Have you any idea where we are?” Sonia asked after a moment. “I mean, where along the coast.”

  “Somewhere below Tampico, judging from a quick look I had yesterday at the captain’s charts.”

  “So we will try to head north?”

  He stared ahead, his gaze quartering the undergrowth. “Vera Cruz is south.”

  “Yes, but Tampico is a port. If it’s closer…”

  “By the time we make it that far and wait for a ship, then wait again for the right tide and weather conditions so it can clear the bar that blocks the harbor, we can be where we were going in the first place.”

  Sonia stopped, snatched her hand from his grasp. “You can’t mean we are still going to Vera Cruz!”

  He let silence stand as his answer. What had she expected? Could she really think the sinking of the Lime Rock canceled out all obligations so they could sail for New Orleans from Tampico?

  Maybe she was right, after all. They were half-naked, coated with sand, their skin itching from dried saltwater. Marooned on a strange coast where every blood-sucking critter known to man whined around them, they were days away from where they should be. They were also without food, water, map or even a compass to get them there. The smart thing would be to seek civilization and throw themselves on the mercy of anyone who looked able to help them out.

  Kerr couldn’t do it. He’d come this far and wouldn’t turn back now. He had his knife, the silver from Bonneval that he’d been too wary to leave where he’d bunked, a decent knowledge of wood lore and a handy sense of direction. Mexico had a longer history than the United States, particularly in this southern region. The Spanish had been here more than four hundred years, so it must be chock-full of towns and villages where they could barter for food and some kind of transportation to Vera Cruz. All they had to do was find one.

  “You are the most heartless man I’ve ever encountered,” she said, her hot gaze searching his face. “Have you no thought at all for how I feel, no understanding of the escape we just made? Can you not think beyond this stupid loyalty to my father? He will not appreciate it, I promise you.
”

  “It’s nothing to do with him.”

  “Then it’s this man you’re so determined to find. Why is that? What do you want from him that you’ll walk into a war to get it?”

  She had the wrong idea by the tail, but he didn’t intend to correct it. “War may have been declared,” he said in evasion, “but I doubt it will mean much to us.”

  “I daresay you would not have predicted the attack on the Lime Rock, either.”

  “The battle lines have all been on the northern border. To send an army by ship to this neck of the woods will take weeks, even months, even if the generals decide on Vera Cruz as the logical port of entry to take Mexico City. I’ll be in and out long before then.”

  “But I won’t.”

  He shook his head. “That’s up to your future husband.”

  “In other words, you refuse to be responsible for what happens to me.”

  She had him there, though he had no intention of admitting it. “We talked about this once already. No need to go over it again.”

  “Then I see no need to follow along meekly where you lead.”

  He dropped his voice to a threatening rumble. “I could always carry you.”

  “You wouldn’t find it so amusing this time, or so easy.”

  “You’re quite sure of that, are you?” He waited, poised on the balls of his feet, to see if she meant to run. He almost wished she would for the excuse of catching her, hefting her over his shoulder as he had on that night outside her papa’s town house. Anything that would allow him to touch her seemed a fine excuse at the moment. He wanted that, needed it with pure dumb longing so strong his muscles clamped into rock hardness to prevent him from reaching for her.

  Thank God there was only disgust for him in her face. If there had been invitation in any form he could not have been responsible. How in hell he was supposed to keep his hands off her until she was decently covered again, he had no idea.

  A mosquito was feasting on the curve of her breast just above the low neckline of her corset cover. Without thought or plan, he reached out in swift reprisal, crushing the insect into a mere gray streak tinted with blood.