She was reminded of the time she’d handed a pamphlet to him. That first touch of his skin against hers, illicit and cherished. The fuse that had lit all of it.
His hands were still long and elegant, but brown and hard now. But now there was a faint scar across one. They looked well-used. As though he’d spent the past few years wielding weapons. And other quite dangerous things.
Did he ever tremble now? Or had he seen and touched enough women to shave the edge off wonder forever?
“Oh, mermaids are a jealous species,” he said softly, as if he could hear her thoughts. “They often make very cutting remarks about other beautiful women.”
She was so enchanted by the image of fuming aquatic maidens smacking their tails indignantly she immediately forgot to be nervous.
It was also the first overt compliment he’d given her since she’d first laid eyes on him again, and it was absurdly potent enough to make her blush.
She couldn’t remember a time she’d changed color in the presence of Landsdowne, or any other man, really.
Apart, perhaps, from when she’d gone pale upon reading “The Legend of Lyon Redmond.”
Which made her think of Landsdowne, and his hands, strong and square and aristocratic, the signet ring gleaming as he stirred sugar into his tea and confessed to maybe, possibly, mildly disappointing another woman when he became engaged to Olivia.
And here was Lyon, who was incapable of doing anything mildly, yet again offering her something new, something she might or might not be equal to, something that might or might not be wise.
“Take this, too, because you’ll need to dry off.” Lyon thrust the rolled blanket at her, and she tucked it beneath her arm. “You can walk right up to the waterfall, and tuck yourself behind it. You’ll see.”
And then she suddenly reached up pulled her ribbon loose and gave her head a good shake, giving her hair up to the breeze, which immediately began tossing it about like a new plaything. And then she kicked off her slippers and lunged to seize them up in one hand, hiked her dress to her calves in the other—let him admire that view—and set out toward the waterfall.
“For all you know, I’m covered all over in iridescent scales,” she said over her shoulder.
“Good God, I hope so. Then all my dreams will have come true.”
Her laughter trailed her, unbridled and musical as that waterfall.
IT WAS THE one thing that had been missing, he realized. That sound more than nearly anything meant “Olivia” to him.
He stood and drank it in.
She sounded free and happy. An innocent sort of happy. It was like birdsong after a rainstorm, when birds all sang their fool heads off, throwing their hearts into it.
She should always be this happy.
And then he noticed something on the ground nearby, a scrap of shining fabric.
She’d dropped her reticule.
He picked it up, and a comb and something folded into a tight, white square tumbled out and unfurled on the way, fluttering to the ground.
He picked it up gently, frowning, and ran it through his fingers.
And then all at once he knew what it was.
His thumb found “LAJR” embroidered in the corner.
How had she gotten it? The handkerchief was spotless, apart from a tiny drop of blood.
And then he remembered: it was from the night he’d left Pennyroyal Green. The night his father had hit him.
She’d kept it this long.
And she’d carried it with her folded in a tight square.
He closed his eyes, and once again, his chest exploded with light, like the first time he’d held her in his arms.
Perhaps this was all they would ever have—an hour or two of bliss here and there, strung together like jewels by interludes of longing and loss. Perhaps they were destined for nothing more than a few pockets of time, tucked away into their lives, hidden from everyone and everything the way this cove was hidden from the rest of the beach.
Still.
He watched her go with bemused wonder at fate, his lungs constricting a little with yearning. That ever-present desire that always had its claws in him and seemed to doom him to restlessness.
She loved him. She always had.
He knew it as surely as he knew the color of his own eyes.
And he was just as certain then he’d been born loving her, as surely as he’d been born with blue eyes. It was that simple. That permanent.
And if it was a curse, then he didn’t know what a blessing was.
Now he knew what must do, for her sake and for his.
OLIVIA TRIPPED DELICATELY along the beach in her bare feet until the damp sand butted up against cool silvery-gray stone, its jagged edges polished through who knows how many centuries of rushing water. She took a step up, easing past the waterfall into the recess behind it. It was deep enough so that the smooth back wall of the arcing cave was dry, if cool, and the damp, earthy, mineral smell was a perfume. She inhaled deeply.
She peered out through the curtain of water.
On the shore was a little stack of clothes and a pair of boots and a blanket spread out neatly, which meant Lyon had adroitly stripped and must already be in the water.
Men. Bless their heathen little souls.
And in for a penny, in for a pound.
She could accomplish this quickly if she didn’t pause to mull. It was an easy enough thing to slip her dress off over her head once she’d finished with the laces, and after that, she slipped off her shift. She folded all of it neatly and stacked it against the stone wall.
And just like that, she was entirely naked outdoors and about to step beneath a waterfall, which wasn’t a very English thing to be or do.
Though she wouldn’t be at all surprised if one of her brothers had done it once or twice.
She stood, simply enjoying being nude, unfettered by anything that defined her, like fine English clothing. The air was warm and dense and velvety, a caress, and it turned mundane acts she’d never given much thought to—raising her arms, walking in bare feet, giving her head a toss to pour her hair down her bare back, shake her hair down her bare back—into sensual ones.
She stepped beneath the water and gasped, and then she laughed in shock.
The contrast between the cold water and the silky air was a brand new kind of bliss. She held the soap beneath the water and rubbed it between her palms.
Too vigorously as it turned out.
“Damn!”
The stones amplified her voice as if she were on stage at Covent Garden.
The soap leaped for its freedom from her grasp and landed with a splash in the pool below and immediately began sailing away.
LYON DUCKED BENEATH the water and burst to the surface swiftly. A quick little baptism, an attempt at clearing his head.
It was a mercy to surrender his thoughts and tension to the cool buoyancy of the water. He floated on his back, watching a gull ride the breeze above him just because it could.
Then again, the gull had its own hunger to contend with, and it lived for its next meal.
Freedom—from anything, really, whether it was the past, one’s family, from a seemingly hopeless love—was really rather an illusion, he’d learned.
Something bright and white caught the corner of his eye, and he blinked.
A bar of soap was drifting merrily by.
He shot out an arm and seized it, then stood upright.
He knew in a flash what he had in his hands:
Leverage.
The thing with which to bargain.
Also: potentially a terrible mistake.
He could let it go sailing out to the ocean.
He could tuck it into his knapsack and pretend he’d never seen it.
He could have done a dozen or more things more advisable than what he did next. He raised his voice.
“Did you . . . perhaps lose something, Olivia?”
A silence. A telling and almost palpable hesitation, during which
he could practically hear the gears of her mind clicking away over the sound of the waterfall.
Let your body have the say, Olivia.
“Did it . . . find its way to you?” The acoustics were such she scarcely needed to raise her voice. It was pitched a little higher. She was tense, too.
“It drifted on by en route to Le Havre, and I seized it.”
In the silence that followed it felt as though the world itself held its breath.
“Do you want it?” he asked.
The words were gruff. He didn’t bother to disguise the tension in his voice.
So much hinged on her next word, and he didn’t know which answer he wanted most.
It turned out to be:
“Yes.”
Chapter 20
HE WENT TO HER immediately and without another word.
He never second-guessed decisions. It was a quality he’d inherited from his father, born of arrogance and privilege, tempered through one test after another over the last few years.
He swam into the larger pool and stopped abruptly.
His breath whooshed out when saw the suggestion of her body, veiled by the pouring water. Her head was tipped back to allow it to run the length of her, as if she were a fountain carved of marble.
And he’d held her body close to his before, through layers of muslin. He’d often thought over the years that it wouldn’t matter what Olivia looked like beneath her clothes. She could be sporting the head of a girl and the body of a rhinoceros and he’d still feel that frisson.
She was most definitely sporting the body of a woman.
Through the water he saw her in profile: a suggestion of a small, up-curving, rose-tipped breast, a waist that flared eloquently into a round white arse, long slim white limbs.
The impact was as total and instant as a lightning strike. It sizzled along his spine and he thought his head might pop off away from his body and join the circling gulls.
And he was on shore and out of the water swiftly, soap in hand, before she even saw him.
SHE TURNED WITH a start when he appeared.
They stared at each other, like Adam stumbling across Eve for the first time.
Or very like that first time in the ballroom, when time had stopped and they had stared.
“No scales,” was all he said, finally.
She couldn’t speak. When she saw him, the blood stampeded to her head and her ability to form words had clearly been trampled in the process.
A new sort of logic asserted itself. This sudden weakness in the face of extraordinary male beauty was perhaps an evolutionary thing. The point of which was to stun the female into helpless, willing submission.
Nude we ought to look vulnerable, a little absurd, she thought. But Lyon looked as right out of clothes as an actual lion did in its own skin, and he looked as comfortable standing there as he would be in a ballroom or the deck of a ship.
Then again, she didn’t know why anyone would bother with modesty if they looked like him. His lean body was everywhere gradations of sun-touched gold, darker on his arms and legs and face, his hips and lower on his belly paler. He seemed etched from muscle, shining hard quadrants on his chest, downright lyrical slopes of his shoulders, vast enough to turn his torso into a veritable “V,” to the lean bulge of thighs, to the concave scoops on each side of his buttocks, each just about the size of the palm of her hand if she had to guess.
There were a few worrisome scars on him, one that was most definitely from a musket ball.
But there was his penis, of course, already beginning to curve toward his belly out of a nest of black curls from merely the thought and sight of her.
Olivia had an epiphany born of lust: He was only overwhelming when I resisted.
If I surrender to what we both want, everything is simple.
She knew he thought her beautiful, because it was reflected in his face. But more thrilling was the intent she saw there. It was primal and absolutely implacable.
He intended to take her.
She wanted very, very badly to be taken.
There was no thinking or right and wrong. There was only now. But suddenly fear and exhilaration seemed of a piece.
“Perhaps you need help with washing the back of your neck, Olivia? I imagine it feels sticky.”
She stared at him mutely. All of her faculties were engaged in absorbing how he looked nude, and with luck it would be branded on her brain forever.
And he moved to stand behind her. As it were the most natural thing in the world. She closed her eyes. She could feel the heat of his body, and the press of his swelling cock against her buttocks. Her heartbeat ratcheted.
He lifted her heavy wet hair gently, as if she were indeed a wild animal who might balk or bolt.
And he applied the soap to the back of her neck with feather strokes of his fingers. Quicksilver rivulets of sensation communicated to her groin and her nipples ruched tighter and every other part of her body stirred, clamoring for the attention he was giving to just a few square inches of it.
Her breath came more swiftly, in ragged gusts.
He cupped his hand in the flow of the waterfall and trickled the water from his fist over her neck.
And then he slowly slid his hands around her waist, laid his lips against her throat where her pulse beat, and opened them into a slow, scalding kiss, drawing his tongue along that tender, hidden place beneath her ear.
And blew a soft breath over it.
She moaned a soft, long, low, carnal animal sound.
It was the sound of begging, and he knew it.
He immediately abandoned any notions he might have had about subtlety and lost whatever grip he had on his own desire, and God only knows what became of the soap.
Because his hands were on her now, callused and hot as they learned and reclaimed her, sliding over her wet skin to her hips. He pulled her harder against his body, and she arched into him like a shameless cat, savoring the glide of her skin against his, teasing his cock. His hands journeyed up her rib cage and cupped her breasts, reveling in the satiny weight of them, and his breath, his tongue, his lips in her ear, on her throat, sent fresh shock after fresh shock of pleasure through her. He left little bonfires of sensation everywhere his fingers touched, until she was burning and restless and comprised of need.
He thumbed her nipples, and she gasped. He did it again, harder, and again, until she was rippling against him, urging him on.
His hands slid boldly and swiftly over her belly, down her thighs, over the damp between her legs, his fingers sliding into her cleft, an inexorable and determined exploration.
“Olivia,” he breathed slowly in her ear, and gooseflesh arose over her arms, and just like that, her name became a part of her seduction.
His hands delved between her legs again, and his fingers dipped into the heat and damp and pulsing ache of her, stroking and circling, hard and skilled and very strategic, and she moved against him, with him.
“Lyon . . . Lyon please . . . please . . . more . . .”
And then he suddenly spun her and she found her back against the slick cool of the stone, and his mouth fell on hers hard. Their groins fused as she arched into him, her hands latched around his neck, and she savored the friction of her nipples against his burnished skin. He slid his cock against her, teasing her, teasing himself, bringing both of them to the very brink of madness.
A devouring kiss was broken when her head thrashed back.
Her voice was a raw scrape. “Please . . . Lyon . . . I want . . .”
She didn’t know what she wanted, but he did, and she trusted him.
He scooped a hand beneath her thigh and he guided his cock into her with a swift thrust.
Her knees nearly buckled but he wasn’t about to let go of her.
And it was a wordless, nearly savage coupling, of years of longing and anger and love and every other thwarted emotion. She wrapped her hands around his head as he buried his face in her neck, and then she slid her fingers
and dug them into his shoulders, clinging, her eyes never leaving his until his lids closed and his breath rushed hot from between his parted lips. And then she slid her hands to his hips and gripped, wanting to feel every thrust, rising to meet him as his cock drove into her again, again, and oh God again. The world was the rush of the falls, the sound of their bodies colliding, the roar of their breath, the exquisite pressure of an ever-building need she thought might kill her before it was met.
Until she shattered into glittering fragments, the bliss blinding and indescribable.
She nearly crumpled as a raw and nearly silent scream shredded her throat. She heard it from somewhere outside her body.
He held her fast, relentlessly racing toward his own release, his breathing a storm now.
And then he went rigid. It was her turn to hold him fast when his release wracked him again and again, and his cry was one of almost pain.
She fancied she could still hear their voices mingling and echoing over the water.
HIS SHOULDERS MOVED in a great sigh, and she savored the rise and fall of them, and the feel of his smooth, hot skin beneath her palm. His back was a fascinating network of muscle beneath satiny skin.
They clung to each other like shipwreck survivors.
His face was tucked into her throat, and her hands moved over his back gently, soothing him as the storming rush of his breathing and hers became more even.
There were a lot of things she ought to be thinking.
But with every breath she drew in and breathed out, all she could think was at last at last at last.
LYON FELT AMAZING.
Newer, cleansed, deliriously good, suffused with well-being and love for all mankind.
All because of a petite girl who could be so fierce and relentlessly clever when she was clothed, but when naked was all delicate pink and cream and saucy, almost whimsical curves, and who made love like an animal.
The contrast delighted him.
He hoped he hadn’t bruised her.
He was fairly certain he’d be sporting bruises where her fingers had dug into his hips and shoulders. He knew a sizzle of very masculine satisfaction at that thought, and at the sound of her scream, and at the way she’d clung to him in order to withstand the pleasure.
The Legend of Lyon Redmond Page 23
