Using Rory’s silk vest to sit on and his shirt as a towel, Alyson dried herself on the rock, attempting to untangle her snarled hair. The sun felt delicious against her skin, and she wantonly basked in its rays. Rory had made her aware of these physical sensations, and she felt delightfully wicked tilting her face to the sky, letting the heat of the sun scorch her breasts.
Knowing she would burn if she lingered too long, Alyson turned on her stomach, allowing the breeze to dry her hair it. Something brushed her bare arm, and she lifted one eyelid sleepily, seeing nothing. She closed her eye, only to feel another petal-soft brush against her buttocks. Worrying about insects, she glanced over her shoulder, but she saw only the brilliant arched bract of a bougainvillea fluttering away. Smiling at the vivid sight, she glanced around, looking for the vine that pelted her with its lovely foliage.
More petals drifted downward, clinging to her hair, gliding along her skin. Like a colorful snowfall, they formed drifts on the ledge she lay on. A sudden suspicion made her look upward.
Rory’s tanned figure crouched on the ledge above, shredding a spiny vine as he grinned down at her.
“Maclean!” Indignant, Alyson hastily sat up and grabbed for the discarded shirt. How long had he been up there without announcing his presence? Gentleman, indeed!
Rory scrambled down the rocks in a few strides, swinging his shirt in one hand, wearing only his white breeches. His flesh gleamed golden, and Alyson could scarcely catch her breath at the sheer physical beauty of him. He swept the shirt from her hands and sat down beside her before she could protest.
“Too much sun and you’ll not be fit for anything tonight.” He surveyed her shamelessly, caressing a tiny brown freckle nearly hidden beneath the curve of her right breast.
Alyson sucked in her breath, but he was apparently too engrossed in his explorations to take advantage.
Rory flattened his hand to travel from the tiny freckle to the valley of her waist, down over her stomach to test the curls below. Alyson did not flinch, but seized this moment to learn more of this man and his strange moods. His proprietary touch tingled her flesh and knotted her stomach, but the sight of his bare flesh caused even stronger sensations.
She desperately wanted to explore him as he did her, but the tense twitch of his jaw warned her that his restraint had a price. So she contented herself with gazing on sun-tinted shoulders and chest, tracing with her eyes the way the muscles flowed and flexed beneath his hair-roughened skin. The soft curls on his chest were darker than the rich auburn of his hair, and she wondered how they would feel against her palm.
When his fingers found the thatch of curls at the base of her belly, Alyson met Rory’s eyes with some alarm. They smoldered with the hidden fire she knew from her dreams, and the knot in her stomach tightened, but still she did not move. She held his gaze, mesmerized by the flickering fires she found in his normally stoic features. It wasn’t relief she felt when he drew his hand away. She did not lower her gaze as he slid his palm to the puckered crest of her breast, then withdrew it completely.
“Do you have any understanding at all of what it means to share a bed with a man?” he asked in an odd, taut voice.
“I think I am learning,” she answered carefully. “Will it hurt?”
“They say it does the first time,” he said with regret. He pulled her shirt over her head, concealing what he’d just touched. “Why me?” he asked, the rougher burr of his voice catching Alyson by surprise.
Squirming into the long shirt and wishing it to Hades, Alyson conquered folds of material and lengths of tangled hair to meet Rory’s gaze again. “Why you?” she questioned, searching for some clue to his meaning.
He had been so gentle with her, making her feel as if she really had something to offer him that he desired above all else. She had felt proud when he admired her. His tone of voice now worried her.
“Why me and not Tremaine?” he clarified. “Or Cranville? Or any of the other men who would gladly have you? I can offer you nothing. Why would you let me be the one to teach you?”
Comprehension came slowly, and as it did, she stared over his shoulder to a fluffy cloud gliding along the horizon. How could she explain the feelings Rory gave to her? Didn’t he have these same feelings? Perhaps not. That was disappointing, but she had learned to expect disappointment. Alan certainly hadn’t returned her feelings, and Cranville never made any pretense at having any. She had always known she was different; she had just assumed that Rory was different too.
Shrugging her shoulders, she brushed aside the question. “Why not? You offered me a choice, and I chose the one I found most acceptable. Are you saying you are regretting giving me a choice?”
Tangling her ebony hair between his fingers, Rory drew her closer, then circled her waist and pulled her into his lap. His quick move had pulled up her shirt, and she could feel his thighs against her bare buttocks. It took immense concentration to follow his reply.
“I regret nothing, lass, but I am going into this with my eyes wide open, and you are not. You are trusting me, when I am the last man on earth to be trusted. Why?”
Now she understood, and Alyson smiled, leaning against his sun-warmed chest and exploring the soft curls there. She liked the way his large hands held her so competently, and she liked the feel of his shoulder beneath her head. She liked a number of other things about this position too, but she wasn’t certain how to enumerate them.
“You won’t hurt me on purpose,” she answered. She knew he might one day hurt her, but in the meantime, he would protect her and be gentle and like her just the way she was. Other than her grandfather, she had known no other man so considerate and understanding.
On the face of it, Rory knew her reply was mad. He was deliberately going to take her virtue and then leave her to her own affairs when they reached London. Perhaps she was so naive as to believe that wouldn’t hurt, but Rory doubted it. She was innocent but not a fool. If anything, he was the fool.
Let’s live for the moment sang a siren song in his head.
He cupped her breast and pressed a kiss to her cheek. He couldn’t seduce her here on the hard rocks. She deserved better than that, but it was growing damned hard to remember that.
“If you’re looking into the future for that silliness, the Sight lies, lass. I am more likely to hurt you than any other.”
Alyson smiled and shifted her position to run her bare leg down his. He wore no stockings and his breeches were unbuttoned at the knee. Naked flesh caressed naked flesh. Rory tightened his hold on her waist, and she leaned against his shoulder.
“Why will you not marry me?” she asked lazily.
“Because I can only bring you hurt.” He couldn’t be angry with her. He knew in her innocence she did not know the pain she caused him. He just wondered where her thoughts had taken her now.
“Why did you come back for me? If it is only responsibility you feel, you could have arranged for me to take some other ship.”
That was a question he preferred not to consider too closely. It was much easier to play the part of older brother acting out of concern, but he was about to put the lie to that act. Abruptly Rory set her down on the ledge so he could rise. “Because I am a fool, no doubt, and meant to honor my promise. When do you mean to answer my question?”
Alyson gazed up at him with that angelic expression that made his soul groan in protest. “I did, didn’t I? If marrying me will cause me pain, and leaving me behind would be unkind, then you are trying not to hurt me. If what I choose to do now will cause me pain later, then that is my choice and not yours. No one else has ever given me that choice.”
Rory stared down at her in blind amazement, not seeing the half-dressed mermaid, but something else, something so long denied that he could not recognize it for what it was. He only knew that she filled him with inexplicable joy instead of shame, that for the first time in years he felt an emotion above and beyond the calculated needs of day-to-day living. He daren’t put too fine a face o
n it, but it could not all be attributed to lust. He wanted her, no doubt, but what she had done to him since that very first day he laid eyes on her had little to do with lust. He was quite probably bewitched.
“You are a naive simpleton, my jo, if ye think I’ve given ye any choice a’tall, but if it pleasures ye to think that, I’ll not be arguin’.” Rory stepped down beside her and caught her by the waist. “There’s more to see. Do ye wish it?”
She held his bare arm to her waist and leaned back against him. “Tell me your story, Maclean, and I will go with you where you wish.”
16
The story Rory related in taciturn monosyllables wasn’t much by any standards, but Alyson listened with her heart.
“I was fourteen and still in school when my older brother James began speechifying about the Jacobites. The fat German king in England meant little to me, and I hardly saw James enough to be better informed. My father spent his time and money on research in Edinburgh, leaving James to administer the estates in the Highlands belonging to our grandmother.”
Rory ran his hand through his drying hair and glared at the lagoon. “James and his cohorts threw in with the royal cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie. When we heard of the troops gathering, we rushed to stop James. Da went to Stagshead, but I took foot to the fields of Culloden. I arrived only to see a generation of Highlanders slaughtered by the bloody butcher, the king’s son, the Duke of Cumberland.”
In the magnificent golden sun of this southern island, with hibiscus and bougainvillea swaying in the balmy breeze around them, the snows of Scottish mountains and the tale he told seemed unreal.
“James died?” Alyson asked quietly.
“Aye, he was murdered,” Rory said angrily. “Whether at the hands of our English cousin Drummond or another of the duke’s troops I canna know for certain, but what I do know is that I saw Drummond standing over my brother’s bloody body. He would have killed James if he had not been dead.”
Alyson heard the heartbreak behind his cold recitation. He’d only been a boy! To see his brother murdered and the blood of all his kinsmen shed across that horrible plain… She could not imagine the depth of his pain.
She listened without understanding as Rory explained how the English king and Parliament took away his grandmother’s lands that rightfully should have gone to his father, then bestowed them on his Drummond cousin. His grandmother had died from the shock of it, and the Maclean himself had been locked away in prison for treason.
“Drummond petitioned to have all us declared Jacobite traitors,” he continued with an undertone of anger she understood better than the politics. “I had to flee the country. My father died in prison, a proud, educated man brought to his knees by shame. For that loss alone, I will never forgive Drummond or the bloody English.”
Her soul wept for the boy he’d once been, the boy whose heart had died almost as surely as his family had. “There is more?” she asked quietly. “How can there possibly be worse?”
“Drummond is driving out the crofters who depended on the Macleans for their livelihood. He is draining the estates to support his London habits. He’s not satisfied with killing my family, he is killing land and people, just like Butcher Cumberland did.”
She heard his deep sorrow as if he’d spoken the words aloud.
The sun was dipping toward the ocean. The tide lapped at Alyson’s feet on the empty beach where they had wandered. Rory had made lunch for her out of turtle and fish, but the pangs in her stomach warned it was near time to eat again. Rory’s competent hands finished weaving a hat of palm fronds for her, and he presented it to her without comment.
She knew the icy snow at his center for what it was now, and silently mourned the man he might have been had fate not intervened. The studious boy had been forced to develop a hard streak that twisted everything he touched until he found its advantage. It would take a harshness and cruelty he did not yet possess to dispose of his powerful cousin.
“You will need to marry a lady with great influence at court,” she murmured. She drew a pattern in the sand with her toe and watched the tide wash it away.
Rory shrugged away such an impossible suggestion. “Even had I title and wealth enough to attract such a creature, I would prefer the kind of fight I understand. The courts and the law drain a man and his pockets. Let us see how my cousin fights when it is just the two of us.”
“You cannot get your land back by killing your cousin!” Alarmed at his tone, Alyson glanced up to the man leaning against the log beside her. His skin had drawn tight over his cheekbones, and there was a hard look in his eyes.
“The land, I’ll buy back. Drummond’s courting bankruptcy even now. I’ve almost enough for what it’s worth, but he’ll not sell it to me. That is why, someday, we’ll have to meet. Now, lass, it is time to go. Have you changed your mind any about me? Shall we sail on to Barbados and find you another ship?”
Rory lifted her from the log and held her against him so Alyson had to tilt her head to see his face. The need to have his arms around her had evolved into a desperate desire to feel his kiss again. Rory had seldom taken his hands from her throughout the day, and now she could see the kiss burning in his eyes as he waited for her reply. He would retreat should she say she had changed her mind, but she would not trade the fires in his eyes for the coldness that would replace them for all the coins in the world.
“I need no other ship but yours, my lord. Will you take me?”
“Aye, I’ll take ye.” Rory’s soft burr spoke of where he would take her, and if she did not understand, there was his kiss to tell her. He bent his head to capture her lips.
Alyson threaded her hands behind his neck as Rory lifted her against him. The heat of his bare chest burned through the thin linen of her shirt. Then his mouth claimed hers, and all of the sensations of this day came together as one, melting what she once had been into some new and, as yet, formless creature.
Rory’s lips caressed hers, making love to her with their tenderness, stroking and persuading until her passion rose to meet his. When Alyson parted her lips in eagerness, his tongue darted inside, teasing her into further response. She strained against him, wanting whatever it was his kiss promised. His hand traveled from her waist to cup her buttocks, pressing her tightly to the hard bulge pulsing against her thigh. Rory groaned and released her lips.
“Ach, lass, I’ll take ye, will ye, nil ye, if we do not return to the ship now. There is time yet to do this with a little more ceremony.”
Knowing nothing of what he meant, Alyson regretfully followed his lead as he set her back on the sand. Gathering up their odds and ends of clothing, helping each other to dress and fasten buttons and ties, touching as often as possible, they prepared to return to the company of others. Hand in hand, they walked around the beach to the cove where the ship was anchored.
A well-fueled fire burned on the sand, outlining the silhouettes of Rory’s crew. Rory tightened his grip on her hand as a raucous cheer broke loose at their arrival.
A retinue of men escorted them toward a pallet of palm leaves near the fire. Alyson marveled at the change in the normally unshaven, ill-kempt crew. Beards had been trimmed or shaved. Clean white shirts had been donned, often accented with colorful neckerchiefs. Dirty hair had been trimmed and washed, queued or braided, until they could almost pass as respectable fishermen. Even Dougall and Jack, who normally maintained a decent appearance, had dragged out coats and cleaned their silver shoe buckles until they sparkled. Dougall had actually donned a cravat.
In comparison, Rory and Alyson were less than elegantly dressed, but no one cared. They were seated like royalty beside the fire, handed pewter mugs of wine appropriated from the officers’ quarters, and entertained with jokes that often left Alyson in bewilderment. Her puzzlement produced even greater laughter as the meal was served and the drinking began in earnest.
Rory’s arm rested reassuringly behind Alyson as she sipped at the strong red wine. He seemed to find nothing odd in
his men’s behavior, and his laughter at their odd jests about strange fruits and stolen treasures came easily. After his horrifying tale, it was a wonder he could still laugh at all.
She enjoyed the way his laughter rumbled up from deep inside him and burst like breakers upon the shore. She liked it even better when he turned those brandy eyes on her with warmth and a deep affection that she could sense even if he did not voice the words. With his fingers, he fed her tempting nuggets from a bowl of fruit.
Rory grinned when she licked the last drop of juice from his fingers, and he kissed the smear of pulp beside her lips. “I bet your grandmother never taught you table manners like that,” he murmured against her ear.
“My grandmother taught me to respect the customs of my hosts,” she replied demurely.
“That could get you into very serious trouble if you continue to keep bad company, lass.” Rory captured her fingers and carried them to his mouth, tasting them one by one, enjoying the way her eyes widened into oceans of blue as he gently sucked them clean of juice.
The tingling she had enjoyed earlier was growing out of control and into a sensation Alyson did not fully understand. She felt warm all over. The tips of her breasts rose into hard aching points against her cumbersome shirt, and she squirmed at the hot moisture forming in her nether parts. Still, the brush of Rory’s lips or hands held her captive.
Her wineglass was refilled with something stronger and sweeter. The jests became tales of the sea, of heroes and villains and impossible feats and beautiful women. Rory’s hand roamed, not satisfied with resting behind her. The fire flickered higher as his fingers traced the curve of her breast and lingered at her waist. He sat contentedly cross-legged beside her, and Alyson’s glance too often traveled to that part of him that made him male.
As the tales grew bawdier and her head swam with the heady nectar in her cup, Rory’s caresses grew bolder. His kisses found the nape of her neck, shivering her spine with excitement. In the shadows, hidden by the unbound length of her hair, he traced her breast, circling the aching tip until she nearly groaned with pleasure when he finally stroked it. The heat had become a raging fire to equal the flames in front of them, and she could no longer raise the cup to her lips to quench it.
Moon Dreams Page 16
