‘‘Yes, there. That’s right. Very good. Now here . . .’’
Winds gusted off the water and pushed at her back. For the first few yards of the climb she had felt drops of spray splattering her ankles. Now she could hear the waves slapping the bluffs where they had stood. He had been right: to have remained any longer would have meant being swept away.
By now the water must indeed have swallowed the ledge completely, but she never once looked down. Never gave in to the perverse temptation, because Lord Wycliffe had told her not to, and a conviction gripped her, stronger than any she had ever known, that as long as she trusted him and did what he told her, they both would live.
‘‘You’re doing just fine, Sophie. Not much farther.’’
‘‘Child’s play,’’ she lied.
Grip, pull, step. It became a rhythm inside her, commanding her limbs when her brain seemed incapable of coherent thought. Don’t think; just climb.
A screech ripped the fabric of her concentration, and the flashing brightness of a gull’s wings flapped at the corner of her eye. Her foot slid out of its notch, sending down a shower of sand. Sophie yelped as she slipped several inches. Scrunching her fingertips into the rock face as tightly as she could, she clung, just barely, while her heart thrashed so violently she thought the force would dislodge her tenuous hold and send her crashing. She attempted to regain her foothold, but her shoe slipped off the rock again. She froze flat to the cliff, the sharp stone biting into her cheek.
Almost instantly the earl’s face, strong and confident, was beside hers, so close she could feel the vibration of his voice against her brow. ‘‘You’re all right. Lift your foot a few inches to the left.’’
‘‘I can’t move.’’
‘‘Of course you can. You’ll find a solid foothold just to the left of where you tried. Do it now, Sophie.’’
She couldn’t. With the wind snapping as if to pluck her free, she couldn’t move an inch, not a fraction in any direction. The very thought sent waves of nausea pitching in her stomach, her head. Sky and stone began to spin.
‘‘Sophie.’’ The gentleness gone, he pronounced her name like an order. ‘‘Raise your foot and move it to the left. Do it, Sophie. Now.’’
‘‘I can’t . . . I want to, God knows I do, but—’’
‘‘Listen to me. Listen to my voice. Don’t think about anything but what I’m telling you. You can do this. You’ve come this far, more than halfway. We can’t go down. We must go up. I’m going up and you’re coming with me. Now lift your foot and find the foothold. Do it for me, Sophie. I know you can.’’
‘‘Good thing one of us does,’’ she whispered, and inched her foot to the spot he indicated. The toe of her shoe found purchase.
He gave a soft laugh. ‘‘There you are. Now put your hand there, right above mine. And the other one there, do you see?’’ He gestured with his chin. ‘‘Good. No, don’t grip the weeds. You don’t know if they’ll hold. Right, now the other foot . . . and up, yes, that’s it.’’
He literally talked her up, grip by grip, until they had nearly reached the top, where storm erosion had done its job to create more manageable footing with broader slopes and deeper furrows. She resisted the urge to scramble the rest of the way, knowing a single misstep could still send her plummeting. But, oh, she longed for firm ground beneath her more than she’d ever wished for anything; she would have made any bargain for an assurance that she would make no last-minute mistakes.
‘‘Let me go first.’’ Chad’s solid thighs came up against her backside as he eased around her, leaving an imprint of heat to penetrate her thin cotton underpinnings.
He disappeared over the rim of the cliff, and she experienced an instant’s panic at being without him, left alone between the distant, snarling water and the garishly bright sky. Then his head and shoulders reappeared. His hand dangled above her. ‘‘Catch hold. I’ll pull you up.’’
For this final, dizzying scrap of the journey, her eyes squeezed shut and didn’t open until her chin smacked the turf of the headland. Relief poured through her in weakening torrents. She lay flat against the ground, cheek to the grass, arms outstretched as if to embrace the earth and thank it . . . simply thank it for being there beneath her.
‘‘We made it . . . oh, good heavens, we made it. I can’t believe we did it . . . that I did it.’’ Tears welled in her eyes, rolling off the bridge of her nose and trickling into the grass. She fisted her hands around clumps of weeds, half unable to accept that she was safe. ‘‘Thank you, Chad. Thank you. If it weren’t for your faith in me, I could never have—’’
‘‘It’s Chad now, is it?’’
Something in his tone, a cold edge she had not heard previously, made her lift her face from the ground. At the sight of him standing over her, she sat up in alarm. His eyes were fierce, fever bright in a face gone deathly pale. His nose was pinched, his lips a thin, grim line. Blood from the cut on his forehead had caked in his eyebrow and was smeared across his cheek. Sophie’s gaze dropped to his side, to the scarlet streaks staining his white linen shirt.
‘‘Good heavens, I’m sorry. You’re hurt. We had better—’’
In a blur of movement he was on his knees before her. He seized her face between shaking hands and shoved his own face close. ‘‘Faith in you?’’ he bellowed. ‘‘Do you have any idea how many small deaths I died watching you struggle up that cliff? What the bloody blazes did you think you were doing, strolling along that ledge?’’
Before her startled wits could recover sufficiently to form an answer, he crushed his lips to hers in a savage, bruising kiss.
Sophie St. Clair’s mouth tasted of fear and urgency and a passion as riotous as the crashing, foaming ocean below.
But damn it, he hadn’t meant to kiss her. Hadn’t a clue what he was doing until his lips were on hers and a raging heat filled his mouth, so alternately sweet and fiery he wanted to roll with her across the headland, holding her and kissing her until the sheer exertion of it left them exhausted and shaking and breathless.
On the other hand he wanted to strangle her and make damned certain she never did such a foolhardy thing again.
He tore his mouth from hers and pushed her to arm’s length. ‘‘How could you have been so reckless? So unthinking? Do you not know the faintest thing about tides, Sophie? They aren’t fixed. They move. They change. Did you never once look up at the watermark on those bluffs and realize that ledge would be gone at the high tide? Are you that unbelievably—’’
He broke off. His hands had slid to her shoulders, and he realized he was shaking her in emphasis of every shouted word. High color blistered her cheeks. Her eyes were wide and glistening, and her lower lip, crimson with kisses, trembled like the tips of the grass in the wind. The sight of her made his loins sizzle, yet cooled his temper by several degrees.
‘‘Stupid?’’ came her tremulous whisper. ‘‘Is that the word you’re searching for?’’
‘‘No.’’ He released her and sat back in the grass, ripping out a handful and flinging it to the breeze. He shouldn’t have kissed her. It had only made the prospect of her death that much more real, that much more horrifying. ‘‘I never knew from one moment to the next if you would make it. I only knew I had no choice but to urge you on.’’
He allowed himself a glimpse of her reddened eyes. Her high, smooth cheeks were mottled by tears and fright. Her small frame shook beneath a scanty layer of cotton. And those lips . . . still bright and swollen from their brief skirmish with his.
He looked away. He didn’t want to feel sorry for her. Didn’t want to comfort her.
Didn’t want to desire her.
No. He wanted to vent his searing anger because of what she had put him through. Not because he had almost drowned. Not even because of the ghastly specter he had seen—thought he’d seen—in the waves . . .
No, he wished to rant loud enough to shake this headland because every inch of the way up that cliff his heart had clogged h
is throat from fear of her falling, of his possibly having to watch her tumble to her death knowing he could do nothing to prevent it. Not a damned, blessed thing . . .
‘‘I’m sorry.’’ She avoided his gaze, contemplating the ground instead. The fingers of one hand smoothed across her lips. ‘‘I truly don’t know about tides. I grew up in London.’’
‘‘Even the Thames has tides.’’
‘‘Yes, but not like this. The sheer speed with which it came . . . I’d never imagined—’’
‘‘You haven’t answered my question. What the hell were you doing?’’
‘‘Aunt Louisa wouldn’t let me borrow the dinghy.’’
‘‘Borrow the dinghy?’’ His anger fired anew. ‘‘Of course she wouldn’t let you. If the currents didn’t send you smashing into the rocks, you’d have been swallowed by the Devil’s Twirl, you—’’ He stopped short of using her own words, of saying, you stupid, stupid girl.
‘‘The devil’s what?’’
He studied her in amazement. Shook his head. Clenched his fists as he tried to tamp his roiling frustration. ‘‘Do you never stop to look before you leap?’’
Wary defiance sparked in her eyes.
‘‘No wonder,’’ he said very low, very deliberately, ‘‘you came to such ruination in London. You never once stopped to consider the risk of what you were doing.’’
She recoiled as if he had slapped her. Admittedly part of him regretted the words the moment he’d uttered them. But the part left quaking from their near brush with death couldn’t help needing to punish her a little for her blithe disregard for her own welfare.
‘‘I told you I would inspect that coastline,’’ he said to her bowed head and crumpled shoulders. She flinched at his tone, as cold as when he had discovered one of his servants stealing from the collection plate at church. He glared down at her small figure huddled on the grass and knew another moment’s regret. His mention of London had opened a painful wound.
Then he pictured that same small frame floating facedown in the water, her skirts billowing with the tide, her dark hair trailing like seaweed.
‘‘I told you I would take a boat out, and I told you that I would do so alone, that the waters were too dangerous for you. What didn’t you understand about that, Sophie?’’
Raising her eyes without lifting her face, she glowered at him through the spiky wetness of her lashes. ‘‘Too dangerous, too complicated, too shocking . . . for a woman.’’
‘‘What are you going on about?’’
‘‘I saw those lights, that ship. I have every right to investigate.’’
He threw back his head and laughed. ‘‘Playing at being a newspaper reporter, are you? Shouldn’t you leave that to your dear old grandfather?’’
‘‘Don’t say it like that. I’m not playing at anything.’’
‘‘No? Then why these senseless escapades?’’ He pushed to his feet and offered a hand to help her up. She merely glared at it, then up at him.
‘‘You appeared safe enough in that sailboat,’’ she said, her voice low and slightly shaking. ‘‘There would have been little risk in allowing me to accompany you. You speak of danger, but perhaps what you feared was what I might have seen.’’
Something inside him went still. ‘‘What are you implying?’’
‘‘What are you hiding?’’
The question momentarily robbed him of breath. What made her ask such a thing? What could she have heard about him? Guessed about him? Apparently she could somehow see the guilt he carried inside him, without having the faintest understanding of what it meant.
Oh, he was hiding a great many secrets. Secrets that would turn her blood cold and transform her mildly suspicious gaze into one of fear and hardened loathing.
And yet perhaps fueling her mistrust would help keep her safe.
He extended his hand again. ‘‘Come. We had better get you home.’’
Her mouth pinched, her eyes still holding him in their narrowed gaze, she accepted his help and came to her feet. ‘‘You’re going to escort me home?’’ Her tone implied he had taken leave of his senses.
‘‘Yes. We’ll have to walk, I’m afraid. I left Prince in the village.’’
‘‘You’re going to take me home,’’ she repeated, ‘‘dressed like this?’’
His gaze dropped and he took in all he had missed in his anger, in the passion of the kiss, and in his lingering panic at how this day might have ended. Ah, but he saw her now, all of her.
She hugged her arms across the delicate camisole covering her breasts, but not before he glimpsed the dark circles of her nipples beneath. He perused the tiny waist cinched by her corset, the roundness of her hips, the shapely lines of her legs, amply displayed by her damp and clinging petticoat. His insides stirred; awareness pulsed. She shifted her feet self-consciously and coughed.
‘‘I see what you mean.’’ With difficulty he drew a breath past a constricted throat. ‘‘We’ll go to Edgecombe. I can at least find you a cloak to put on. It isn’t far. We’ll keep to the headland and avoid the road. With any luck we won’t be seen.’’
‘‘What of your friend?’’
For a moment he didn’t know who she meant. Then his gaze lighted on the distant flash of a sail as the Irishman maneuvered his craft back toward the village. ‘‘You mean Grady. I paid him rather handsomely this morning. We can only hope it was enough to persuade him to see the sense in holding his tongue. I’ll try to head him off later, before he wanders into the Gull.’’
After that they walked in silence, she in her underthings, he in his stocking feet. He tried to assist her over the rugged terrain, but she would only snatch her hand away, hoist her petticoat and continue on, her gray eyes sparking like thunderheads, her pretty features set and determined.
Her quick steps set her a few yards ahead of him. He watched the twitching of her delectably round backside, certain he detected an eyelet pattern adorning the drawers beneath her petticoat. He studied the vigorous swing of her arms, long like a dancer’s, and so slender he wondered how she had mustered the strength to climb.
His eyes were drawn higher, to the inviting curve of her nape and the sweeping line of her backbone dipping into her camisole. He longed to trace his fingers down that line, explore each tender ridge of her spine with his thumbs, her nape with his lips, while burying his nose in her hair.
Such notions crossed a dangerous line. Between his mounting debts, the permanent blotch against his name, and the unknown purpose for which he had been summoned to Penhollow . . . what could he possibly offer a woman like her?
Of all the questions hanging over him, that was the simplest to answer. Nothing. Just being with him posed a risk to her welfare. At some point whoever had ordered him to Penhollow—a member of a murderous gang—would approach him and make demands, the nature of which he could only guess at. He didn’t want Sophie anywhere near him when that happened.
When they arrived at Edgecombe he stopped her in the forecourt. ‘‘If there is anything to be discovered here in Penhollow, I insist you let me be the one to uncover it.’’
Her expression became guarded, vaguely defiant, and a sense of urgency rose in him. ‘‘I understand your passion for adventure,’’ he said. ‘‘It happens to be something we share. But this is more than adventure. The Cornish landscape poses hazards at every turn, most often in the very places one would least expect. Bogs, mist, treacherous tides . . .’’
Smugglers. Murderers. Need he speak those words to make her understand? But that would raise questions; she would wonder how he, a nobleman, could know of such things. He resorted, instead, to simple reasoning. ‘‘You don’t know this country. Can’t begin to comprehend it.’’
‘‘And you do?’’
‘‘I grew up in Cornwall, so yes, I understand it a good deal better than you. And you can’t but admit that as man I’m better equipped than you to handle the challenges that might arise.’’
At the indignant curve
of her eyebrow, he held up a hand. ‘‘As you yourself pointed out yesterday, I am freer to move about this village and ask questions. It only makes sense, then, that you let me. I won’t keep anything from you as long as you agree to put your safety first.’’
She remained silent for a moment, her eyes narrowing. ‘‘You wish me to stay safe?’’
‘‘By all means, yes.’’
‘‘You understand my passion for adventure?’’
‘‘I do.’’
Arms folded, she stepped closer. ‘‘I am afraid, Lord Wycliffe, that you understand precisely nil. I’ll admit I made a near fatal mistake today. You are correct that I do not know this country as well as I might, and this morning I did not respect the land as I should. I failed to take into account the strength of its power, but that is not a mistake I intend to repeat.’’
She paused, pursed her lips and opened them with a little smacking sound. ‘‘You saved my life, and for that I am grateful. I apologize for the risk my behavior posed to your welfare. But it is not your ongoing task to protect me. I am amply burdened with an overprotective father and a domineering grandfather. I need no other males attempting to rule my life. And for your edification, it is not adventure that I’ve a passion for. It is truth, my lord. Truth. A concept you would do well to familiarize yourself with. Now, if you might lend me a cloak, I shall be on my way and inconvenience you no further.’’
With that she swept past him into the house. Confound the woman. With her pride, her lofty ideals and her stubborn refusal to see his point, she seemed intent on making this situation as difficult as possible. If trying to reason with her wouldn’t work, so be it. If she needed frightening, he would comply, though he would loathe himself while doing it.
Her last words echoing in his brain, he shot forward into the dimness of the hall and caught her wrist.
Chapter 8
‘‘Turn around, Sophie, and look at me.’’ His large hand closed around her forearm tightly, insistently. ‘‘What the devil did you mean by that accusation?’’
Slanting shadows cloaked his brow, his mouth, leaving only his eyes, piercing her with an emotion that frightened her. She wished to yank free of his hold, put distance between them, but what safety would she find in this man’s house, this chilly, gloomy Edgecombe, where she had been warned never to go?
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