The Least Likely Bride

by Jane Feather

  Eighteen

  ANTHONY STRODE up the snaky path to the clifftop. He held Olivia’s hand tightly. When she stubbed her toe on a rock and stumbled, he caught her up against him. “You’re so cold and wet,” he said in almost chiding tones, trying for a minute to warm her shivering body against his own icy wetness. “What madness could have brought you out on such a night?”

  “I knew … I just knew there was going to be a wreck. I thought maybe I could stop it. It was c-crazy, I know, but I couldn’t seem to help myself.” It was the best she could do for the moment.

  “It took twenty men to stop it,” Anthony pointed out. “And why would Lord Granville’s daughter have any interest in wrecking? It’s a vile and vicious thing. Not to mention dangerous. If we hadn’t been there, or if the battle had gone the other way, and you’d been spotted by the wreckers, they would have killed you as soon as look at you. Surely you understood that?”

  Olivia made no answer. Her teeth chattered.

  Anthony shook his head and began to walk fast again. They were striding along the undercliff path, and the wind and rain were less fierce under the overhang. He stopped suddenly and Olivia almost ran into him.

  “Where are we?”

  “A safe place,” he said. He pushed his rain-darkened hair out of his eyes. “It’s not the most comfortable spot, but at least it’s quiet and dry.”

  He turned aside from the path and seemed to walk into the cliff, Olivia’s hand firmly in his. And they were in a dark place, suddenly silent, as the storm raged outside. It was cold and Olivia’s teeth were chattering like castanets. The hood of her cloak had long since blown off, and water dripped from her hair down her neck.

  “This way.” He drew her with him across a floor where the sand scrunched beneath her boots. Her eyes grew slowly accustomed to the darkness, and she could see that they were in a large cave. Then they were in a passage, narrow and dark, and she clung to his hand, the flat dry warmth of his palm comforting her. The passage opened out into a smaller space than the first.

  Anthony dropped her hand and she stood still in a darkness that was more profound than it had been before. She heard him moving around, then flint scraped on tinder and light glowed from a lantern.

  Olivia looked around in amazement at the rudimentary furnishings of this inner cave.

  Anthony pulled blankets off a straw palliasse. “Get your clothes off while I light the fire.” Urgency made his tone brusque. He tossed a blanket across to her, then busied himself at a round stone hearth in the center of the cave.

  “Won’t we be smoked out?” Olivia shrugged out of her cloak and doublet and stood shivering.

  “There’s a natural flue in the roof.” He looked up from the hearth. “Hurry up, Olivia! Get out of those clothes. Don’t just stand there!”

  His gaze rested on her breasts, pink and round beneath the sodden white chemise. Her nipples were hard dark points against the pink.

  “Dear God,” he said softly. “What is it that you do to me?”

  “What you do to me,” she responded as softly.

  The comforting crackle of catching wood filled the cave. He straightened. His gaze held hers and this time her shiver was not due to cold and wet. “Take your clothes off, Olivia!”

  He watched her through narrowed eyes as she flung aside her wet clothes. Naked she drew close to the fire. On some distant plane she realized that she was warm again. She could feel the fire against her side. She looked up at him and saw her own face in the dark irises.

  He put his hands on her shoulders, cupping the curve where they met her upper arms. He ran his hands down her arms and the fine hairs prickled. He took her hands, turned them palm up. They were filthy, encrusted with sand and dirt. He held each hand in turn and lightly smacked the grime from each palm.

  There was an edge to his caresses. An edge that Olivia sensed had to do with the battle he’d fought with the wreckers. A lingering residue of the savage intensity that had defeated the enemy. Something in herself responded. She tugged her hands free and undid the buttons on his shirt with rough haste, heedless when one flew off into the far corner of the cave. She unfastened his belt buckle, slowly, making of each movement a deliberate act. She slithered the belt through its loops and unfastened the buttons of his britches.

  Her nails raked his flanks as she pushed his britches over his hips. She heard his quick indrawn breath. Then he kicked his feet free of the britches and caught her face between his hands.

  His mouth was hard, relentless, offering no quarter. And Olivia asked for none. She pushed her hands up inside his opened shirt, over his ribs, up to his shoulders. She thrust the garment from him until he stood as naked as she.

  His hands went to her bottom, pulling her hard against him. She caught his lower lip between her teeth, drove her tongue within his mouth on her own exploration. She would not be dominated by his urgency; her own met and matched his in a competition that escalated with each breath. Her hands were everywhere, following their own instincts. She gripped his buttocks, sliding a finger into the deep, narrow cleft between them. She ran her flat palm over his belly, dipped a finger into his navel, slid down to clasp his penis, moved back between his thighs to cup the hot swelling globes. She was on tiptoe now, pressing herself against him, giving herself to his hungry hands, feeling the heat of her own arousal, the flowing juices, the absolute desperation of their shared need.

  They slid to the floor beside the fire. Olivia was unaware of the hard sand-covered rock beneath her. Her hips rose to meet his penetration and he gathered her up, lifting her off the hard floor, holding her, his hands flattened on her back, protecting her, as they rose and fell together in a silence that sang with all the sweetness of a cathedral choir.

  And when it was over, when he held her tightly against him, rocking her in the aftershocks of passion, she pressed her lips to the fast-beating pulse at the base of his throat and thought that if she never experienced such joy again, she would die content.

  But when the world reasserted itself, she understood the stupidity and the futility of such a belief.

  As the glow of lovemaking faded she moved from his embrace, and he let her go without protest, reaching for the blanket that lay discarded on the sandy floor. He put it around her shoulders, then rose to throw more wood on the fire.

  Olivia drew the blanket tight around her as she stood up too. She was tense now as she watched him dress again. She couldn’t help the unworthy hope that their lovemak-ing had driven all questions about her presence on the beach from his mind … that she would be spared her confession.

  “So you thought to stop a wreck single-handed, my flower?” He raised his eyebrows, his gray eyes suddenly uncomfortably penetrating.

  She clutched the blanket at her throat with one hand and stepped closer to the fire, the sand soft as silk beneath her feet.

  “I have to confess something,” she said, keeping her head lowered, her eyes on the fire.

  Anthony was suddenly very still. She could feel his stillness, hear the soft in and out of his breath. “Go on,” he said.

  “I think it was probably unforgivable,” she said. “I know you’re going to be very angry and you have every right. But I hope you’ll understand why it happened.”

  “You’re alarming me.” He clasped the back of her bent neck, his hand warm and somehow reassuring. It gave her the courage to speak.

  “I thought it was you,” she said.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “The wreckers,” she said simply. “I thought … and then I think I thought that maybe I could persuade you to stop.”

  Her words hung in the cave’s dank and stuffy air. For an eternity there was no sound but the crackle of the fire. Slowly Anthony’s hand dropped from her neck. It left a cold place where before it had been warm.

  When at last he spoke it was in a tone of utter disbelief. “You thought I was one of those filthy vermin? You thought I could do such a thing?”

  Olivia
turned to face him. She forced herself to meet his eyes, where incredulity mingled with a deep anger. “You said … you said in Portsmouth when you gave me the c-clothes that they’d c-c ome from a wreck.” She tried to control the stammer but her agitation was out of hand.

  “I didn’t say I had caused the wreck.” Anthony’s voice was now very cold and soft, and it was impossible to imagine the way they had loved a few short minutes ago.

  “I thought you did. It’s what I heard you say. You sounded so c-casual, as if it was quite natural…. You’re a smuggler, a pirate. Everyone knows that smugglers are often wreckers. You were on the island the night of the last wreck, and the goods from the wreck were in Wind Dancer’s hold.”

  She extended one hand in a gesture of appeal. “What was I supposed to think? I didn’t know anything really about you. I still don’t,” she added. “I don’t know why you are as you are … why you do what you do.”

  There was a challenge in her voice now, but Anthony didn’t answer it. He stood with his hands on his hips, feet braced on the sandy floor. His icy regard never left her countenance.

  After a second, Olivia continued in the face of his silence, “We’d been living a dream, an idyll on the beach and on the ship. It wasn’t real. And then I saw everything with new eyes, as if the dream was shattered and I was seeing the real world again. And in the real world, piracy, smuggling, and wrecking go hand in hand. I’d seen you c-capture the Doña Elena. I saw you steal her c-cargo. I heard you tell me the c-clothes c-came from a wreck!”

  And at last he spoke. “I don’t understand how, when we had loved together in the way that we did, that you could imagine I could do anything that vile,” he declared with soft savagery. “Was that why you threw dishonor in my face?”

  She nodded dismally. “Only for that.”

  “Not piracy, nor smuggling, nor the fact that I am an enemy of your most honorable father? Not the fact that I will do everything I can to outwit him, regardless of honor?” he asked with bitter irony.

  Olivia winced. “No, none of those things.”

  “Isn’t that somewhat illogical?”

  “What we have together has never been logical,” she answered with desperate truth.

  “But believing that I was a wrecker destroyed what you felt for me … what we had together?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “But it made it impossible for me to lose myself in the dream anymore.”

  Anthony bent and threw more sticks on the fire. The flames threw his shadow huge against the wall of the cave. “Trust,” he said with the same bitter irony. “You said you loved me, Olivia, out there on the beach. There can be no love without trust. Lust, certainly. But not love. It seems to me, Olivia, that you are confusing love with lust.”

  “I do trust you,” she said in a low voice.

  He straightened. “You haven’t trusted me, Olivia, since the day we met. How long did it take you to tell me about Brian Morse? Would you ever have told me if you’d continued to believe him dead?”

  “I c-couldn’t tell anyone that,” she said painfully, searching for the words that would convince him, would banish the cold angry hurt from his eyes and voice. “I felt it was my fault, you see. When I was little I thought that perhaps, perhaps I had made him do it.”

  Anthony looked at her in dawning horror. He saw reflected in her dark eyes the child she had been, violated, terrified, guilt-ridden, driven into a silence as deep as the grave. “Oh, no!” he exclaimed softly. He reached for her, holding her tightly, stroking her wet hair, his bitterness falling from him. In the face of what Olivia had suffered, her mistake, hurtful though it was, became irrelevant.

  “I know now it was stupid of me to believe such a thing of you. But I started to feel that men were never what they seemed and I had allowed myself to be blinded by … by passion, by desire…. And I had brought this whole wretchedness upon myself. If I could have asked you … but I couldn’t bring myself to talk of it. Just as I couldn’t talk about Brian.”

  She looked up at him, her cheek resting on his chest. “I am so sorry. Can you ever forgive me?”

  He gazed down at her, a rueful expression in his eyes. “It’s true that I am not always what I seem,” he said. “And it’s true that you know very little about me.”

  “But I should have known what you couldn’t do, couldn’t be,” she said insistently, perversely feeling that by accepting her excuse so readily, Anthony had failed to realize the magnitude of her error.

  “I would like to think that you should have known,” he agreed with a faint smile. “But perhaps I didn’t make it easy for you.”

  “You can’t blame yourself!” Olivia exclaimed. “Of course I should have known.”

  “Well, let us agree that of course you should have known. That you did me a grave injustice, but there were extenuating circumstances,” he said solemnly. “Now, must you expiate your crime further or can we put it to rest now?”

  “You really do forgive me?” She searched his face.

  “Yes,” he said. He was remembering her radiance as she’d run to him across the beach. Her bubbling declaration of love. “Do you love me, Olivia?”

  “Yes,” she said simply. “And I think you love me.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, rubbing his knuckles along the line of her jaw. “And I don’t know what the devil we’re going to do about it, my flower.”

  “There’s nothing much we can do really. Things being as they are. You being who you are, me being who I am.”

  He cupped the curve of her cheek in the way he had and said only, “Get dressed now. We must go.”

  Olivia wanted to cling to this moment. Once they left the cave, went out into the cold night, it would be finished. The dream finally broken. “Couldn’t we stay here by the fire just a little longer?”

  Regretfully, Anthony shook his head. “It will soon be dawn and we have work to do.”

  “Yes.” Olivia relinquished the dream. She scrambled into her clothes. They were still very damp and felt wretched against her warmed skin. Her chilled fingers had difficulty with the buttons of her chemise, and Anthony moved her fingers aside to button it himself. His palm lightly cupped each breast.

  Fleetingly she put her hands over his. “I meant to tell you. After you’d left last night, Giles was talking to my father about some people called the Yarrows. He said they were being taken to Yarmouth Castle.”

  His face in the faint light of the dying fire paled beneath the sun’s bronzing. “Bastards!” he said softly, his hands falling from her breasts.

  “Giles said he thought the goodman would tell everything he knew without much persuasion,” she said, her eyes anxious. There was no softness in the cave now. Only harsh reality.

  “Aye, I’m sure he has that much sense,” Anthony said grimly. “Not that he knows very much.”

  She said hesitantly, “My father told Giles not to hurt them.”

  Anthony regarded her with a frown in his eyes. “Am I supposed to believe that?”

  “Why would I lie?” she asked quietly. “I love you, remember.”

  “You might wish to put your father in a good light,” he suggested, watching her closely.

  “I don’t need to do that,” she stated. “I don’t need to defend him to anyone.” She added softly, “Any more than I need to defend you.”

  Some of the grimness left his expression, and a tiny smile warmed his gaze. “I’m probably a little harder to defend. Poor Olivia, divided loyalties are the very devil.”

  Olivia said nothing.

  He reached out and tipped her chin. He kissed the corner of her mouth, repeating softly, “Poor Olivia.”

  “I’m not ‘poor Olivia,’ ” she said with a touch of indignation. “What are you going to do about the Yarrows?”

  “Get them out of there,” he responded. Suddenly he laughed; his teeth flashed in a crooked grin and the reckless gleam was once more in his eyes. “I foresee a very busy day.”

  Olivia regarded him wa
rily. She knew of old that this exuberant amusement accompanied his most dangerous exploits.

  He turned and stamped out the embers of the fire, then blew out the lantern. The darkness was complete. Olivia stood still as stone.

  “Give me your hand.” His own closed firmly over hers. “Follow me.”

  She stuck closer than his shadow, if he could have had one in the darkness, back down the narrow passage and into the outer cave. The sound of the wind and the waves was much diminished now as they stepped out onto the narrow path. The rain had stopped and there was only the melancholy steady dripping from the bushes and scrawny trees clinging to the cliffside.

  Olivia shivered in her damp clothes. “God, it’s cold.”

  “Run, it’ll warm you up.” Holding her hand, he began to run with her along the undercliff away from St. Catherine’s Point.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To Ventnor. We have a rendezvous at dawn, if you recall. We’ll borrow a horse at Gowan’s farm, just around the next corner.”

  “Brian,” Olivia said, her voice curiously flat.

  “Exactly so.” His fingers tightened over hers as he turned to climb up another path to the top of the cliff. “Ah, good. Gowan’s left his ponies in the field. Now, which one do you think would be strong enough for the two of us?” Whistling between his teeth, he surveyed the three horses standing sheltering under a giant oak in the middle of the field. “The chestnut, I think. He has a nice broad back.”

  He sounded as carefree as if they were embarking on a midsummer picnic instead of standing in wet clothes in a sodden field at daybreak after a sleepless night.

  “Why do you need me?” Olivia asked suddenly.

  “Because, my flower, I need to do this as expeditiously and as quietly as possible. I need bait for the trap, and you are going to be that bait.” Still whistling, Anthony set off towards the horses.