Owen stopped just in time to avoid skittering down a steep creek bed. He could break his own fool neck, is what could happen to his hero. He looked more closely at the rock fall. A scrape of dark turned earth and the sharp smell of broken pine twigs alerted him to the fact that someone had scrambled down it recently.
He made his way down the rocks, following the creek along its course. After a few yards, a little waterfall tumbled down from the top of the far bank. Over its rushing chatter, he could hear the oddly echoing sound of lapping water. There must be ... yes, there was an opening behind the falls. A moment later, as his vision adjusted to the dim light, he found himself surrounded by pale limestone and running water.
Owen had scaled mountains and glaciers, had hiked into volcanic calderas, had swum in the open ocean, but he’d never been in a place like this. He touched the walls and found them damp and cool; the stone had the lambent gleam of beeswax. The anger and irritation he’d been cultivating all day began to deflate and drain away, soothed by the sound of the running water and the loveliness of the smooth, white stone. Faintly, he heard little splashes coming from somewhere ahead, their source hidden by a sharp bend in the stone.
He had followed Jo to apologize, to scold, to let her know that he wasn’t going to be ignored any longer. Now the idea of speaking at all seemed foolish. It was as if he had wandered into a strange church, in the middle of a holy service conducted in some language he did not understand. He took a few more quiet steps into the cool grotto and suddenly saw the warm, yellow flicker of refracted candlelight.
Jo.
She floated serenely in the still blue water of the grotto. She was undressed; water sluiced off her shoulders and breasts, which were visible under the wet fabric of her slip.
She should have seemed vulnerable in her nakedness. Instead, he felt as he did when he came upon a wild animal confident in the sanctity of its own lair. There was that same breathless pause as he waited for her to register his presence, and flee.
It seemed as if he had been standing there for an hour or more, and still Jo Wilson appeared to be completely oblivious to his presence. Perhaps he was in the shadows. Perhaps she was ignoring him. He should leave, and yet he stood transfixed. Good God, what a fine woman. Her skin was paler in the light reflecting off the cave walls, her hair floating free and loose around her. The water was almost unnaturally blue.
She ducked under the water and quickly bobbed back to the surface. Owen smiled at this evidence of playfulness from the stubbornly starched Mrs. Jo Wilson. She was a seal, perhaps, or an otter—some sleek and lovely water creature that would look him straight in the eye and then simply slip away from him with barely a ripple.
A moment’s pause, and she was back under the water. Owen waited for her to break the surface once more. Another minute passed without so much as a ripple. Obviously the woman could swim, but he doubted she was a pearl diver, able to hold her breath so long. He shifted uneasily, and his heart began to pound. After another long minute with no sign of her—not even a bubble—he kicked off his shoes, shrugged out of his coat, and waded in after her.
• • •
From the little stone hollow on the other side of the underwater passage, Jo heard loud splashing in the outer grotto. A fish? No, the sound was far too loud. Good Lord, another person? She ducked quickly back through the little channel. As she broke up to the warmer air of the main pool, she saw Owen Sterling, soaking wet, his eyes wide and his face drained of colour.
“Jo!” he barked. In this small quiet space, his voice was like a gunshot. She startled and lost her footing a bit on the smooth stone. She ducked and spluttered as he caught at her arm and pulled her upright.
“Owen! What on earth?” He drew closer; the wake of his movement washed against her. She suddenly remembered that she was practically naked and clamped her free arm across her chest.
“Have you lost your mind? Are you all right?” he demanded.
“No! I mean, yes. Yes, of course I’m all right.” She shook her arm free of his grasp and pulled away. “Were you following me?”
“You disappeared!”
“I did not ‘disappear.’ There’s another little cave just through there.” She waved vaguely.
“That’s not what I meant. You’ve been avoiding me all day.”
“What? I was not avoiding you. I was busy. Campaigning for Wilson’s. Perhaps you’re too self-absorbed to remember that I have a business to run.”
That was too much—she almost flinched as soon as the words left her mouth.
“Busy?” he spat. “You think I’ll believe that it’s pure coincidence that after I kissed you, you decided to spend all day campaigning like a two-bit politician? After we’d agreed to carry on just as before?”
“It’s better than slinking around feeling sorry for myself. I refuse to be distracted by ...” She looked down at the water, then up at him again. She tried to focus on his face, not the contours of his strong shoulders, visible through the wet fabric of his shirtsleeves. “I refuse to look back a year from now and say, ‘If only I hadn’t lost focus, if only I’d tried a little harder, if only I hadn’t hidden away and let people slander me.’” The stone walls amplified her rising voice until it sounded like she was shouting from a megaphone. “So, yes, I suppose I was ignoring you.”
There was an awkward silence then. Neither she nor Owen seemed quite sure where to look.
“Did you really think I would drown in four feet of water?” she asked, finally.
“If I’d known it was only four feet of water, I wouldn’t have made such an ass of myself,” he replied. “In fact, I’d very much appreciate it if we can agree that when you tell this story, I saved your life.” His rueful smile was as good an olive branch as any.
“It serves you right for sneaking after me, at any rate.”
“Yes. I am thoroughly chastened.”
“Well. As long as you’re chastened, you may as well take the two-penny tour.” She reached across the space between them and took his hand. He looked startled for a moment—the water had hidden her motion—and then he allowed her to draw him along to the far wall.
“Am I to understand that you have a secret grotto inside of a secret grotto?”
“Of course. All the most fashionable ladies do. We just duck under and through and we’re there. You’ll want to close your eyes. The water stings a bit if you don’t. And watch your head.” He nodded and tightened his grip on her hand. Down, under, through, and up.
The water was shallower and cooler, and the light much dimmer. The view, however, was stunning. Baroque arabesques and whorls of limestone swirled down from the roof and along the walls, pristinely and startlingly white. As Owen surfaced beside her, she watched his reaction carefully, even though she could barely see him. It felt important, somehow, that he appreciate this place. He stood silently and did not let go of her hand. She ruffled the water around her thigh with her free hand.
At last, he let out a long breath. “I spent all of today rehearsing ways to tell you that kissing you yesterday was a mistake, and that I regret it. But it wasn’t, and I don’t. That may make me the worst bounder in the Northwest, but I am not sorry I kissed you, Jo Wilson. And I don’t want to pretend that my interest in you is purely professional.” She felt more than saw him move closer to her. He skimmed his slick hands up her arms, gently and almost tentatively, as if she were a skittish horse.
She had never met anyone like this man. He seemed so sure of himself in the rough-and-tumble world of outdoorsmen and so charmingly at sea everywhere else. He smiled and laughed freely, and he made her smile and laugh, too. She barely knew him, but she closed her eyes, savoring the touch of his hands along her skin. It had been so long since she’d been touched like this. If he wanted to hurt her—if he was still after a juicy story and thought he could get a little lovemaking in the bargain— he could simply join the queue of her ill-wishers. Things had been going so wrong for so long. She needed to let herself bel
ieve that something would go right. That everything could be as simple as letting Owen Sterling kiss her.
She placed her own hands on his chest, and Owen inhaled sharply. His arms slipped around her waist, and their lips met. That first kiss in her office had been sudden, a rush of surprise and jangling response. This, though, felt inevitable. Their bodies fit together so beautifully. They took their time, exploring the contours of each other’s lips. The kiss deepened slowly, incrementally, until they were both breathing in little moans, their hands impossibly tangled in and under their wet clothing.
Owen, finally, broke the kiss and rested his forehead against hers. She raised her hand to brush along the rough stubble of his jaw, and he leaned the weight of his head into her touch. He seemed almost as hungry for tenderness as she was. He pressed his lips into the cup of her hand, and she laughed, feeling suddenly giddy. She felt his answering grin against her palm before he pulled back to look at her.
“My God, Jo,” he said. His voice was ragged around the edges. “I think we need to get back to dry land before I lose the ability to walk.”
She laughed again and led him back under and out into the candlelit main grotto. Together, they half-swam, half-splashed across to the wide rock ledge where their clothes lay, Jo’s in a neat stack, Owen’s coat crumpled in a hasty pile.
He pulled himself up onto the ledge and turned to take her hand and haul her up after him. Her mouth went dry; the way his soaking shirt and trousers clung to his body, he might as well have been nude. The evidence of his desire for her was unmistakable. A wave of basely physical need tightened across her stomach and between her thighs. Lord, perhaps she was lost to feminine modesty and decorum after all. Still, with Owen’s wide, openhearted smile, it was impossible to feel properly depraved.
Jo took his hand and joined him on the ledge. In the candlelight and without the sheer veil of the water, she felt suddenly exposed and reflexively drew her loose, wet hair across her bosom. Owen reached across her and brushed it back behind her shoulders.
“Let me look at you, Jo,” he said.
“Don’t you like a lady to have a bit of mystery?”
“But you’ve got something better than a bit of mystery.”
She raised her eyebrows. “And that is?”
“You’ve got me, of course,” he pronounced with an exaggerated seriousness that was undermined by the glint in his eyes. He smothered her response with another kiss, drawing her tightly against his chest. Playfulness quickly became something more as his hands and lips roamed across her body, teasing and stroking and caressing.
The cool air of the grotto began to raise goose bumps on her arms. Her wet chemise suddenly felt clammy.
“Owen,” she gasped. “We’re going to catch pneumonia.”
“Mmm hmm,” he agreed, his face nuzzling into the tender space between her neck and shoulder.
“We should ... oh! We have to get out of our wet ... things.”
That got his attention. Almost before she could finish the thought, he was bare-chested, his eager hands rucking the soaking-wet chemise up around her thighs, her hips, up over her head.
She did her best not to blush or hide herself from his gaze. “Jo,” he breathed as he drew her slowly against him, skin against warm skin for the first time. “You are so beautiful.”
They didn’t speak again until she reached behind him and pulled her carefully folded skirts and petticoats into a frothy pile at their feet. Owen’s eyes widened at the silent invitation. Feeling bolder and more brazen than ever before in her life, she let her hands trail down the golden-brown hair of his torso to the straining buttons of his trousers. “You still seem to be overdressed.”
She fumbled with the closures for a moment before Owen took over. Freed, his cock jutted hard between them; she reached for it and stroked along its hot length once, slowly. Owen groaned in the back of his throat and pulled them both down atop her tumbled skirts. “Not yet. You’ll kill me if you keep touching me like that.” Even as he said this, though, he slid his own fingers between her legs.
She closed her eyes and surrendered to the sensation of his strong, sure fingers parting her folds, searching for the center of the yearning ache that was radiating through her body. Her back arched as his tongue lapped at her breasts, circling her swollen, tender nipples. A low, animal moan escaped her as she felt herself tighten and coil around the places where Owen teased and licked and fondled. She began to writhe against his hand.
“Yes, Jo. Show me.”
One endless moment later, the orgasm broke over her, and she called out wordlessly before she sank back into the warm reality of Owen’s body against hers. He kissed her deeply before he lifted himself up over her. She wrapped her legs around his hips and sighed as she felt his cock probe gently between her legs. She lifted to meet him—how easily they moved together—and he paused. His question was unspoken but clear: was this too far?
“Please,” she gasped, softly. Her heart was beating so hard that her fingertips pulsed. He closed his eyes and sank his head against the curve of her neck. Even though she had not made love in more than four years, she felt no pain when he entered her, only a rush of sensation as his cock filled her. She gripped his back as he thrust and stroked, her fingers following the familiar hard planes of the muscles there. This time, however, their roles had reversed. He was the one finding sources of tension, building it up with each stroke until they were both incoherent with need. She clung to him as, finally, the force of his climax slammed through him, sweeping her along into her own white-hot oblivion.
They lay there, spent and entangled, until the last of the mismatched candles began to gutter.
• • •
Darkness had fallen by the time Owen walked Jo back to Wilson’s. They’d dressed in candlelight, their clothes still damp. He’d tried to lend a hand with the complicated series of undergarments and dresses that made up a modern woman’s outfit. Dresses over dresses over more dresses, all fastened with fiddly little hooks and clasps and buttons.
“I’m surprised women don’t need a university degree just to get dressed in the morning,” he said.
She smiled. “And you thought you had it rough with your wool suits.” She attempted to brush the wrinkles from her shirtwaist. “I’ll have to get this pressed before tomorrow.” She grimaced.
“Ah,” he said. “I almost forgot about tomorrow.” The word lingered in the air. Even the magic of this place couldn’t banish reality forever.
She dismissed the word with a wave of the hand. “Tomorrow will come soon enough,” she said. “And what will happen will happen.” She tied the bow at her throat and tried to twist her curls into some semblance of order. “There.”
He smiled at her. Even in wrinkled, half-sodden clothing, she was so beautiful. “Did you bring a lantern?” he asked. She was snuffing the last valiant little candle, and its smoke twisted in a little spiral that mimicked the stalactites above.
She grinned. “Don’t need one. Take my hand.”
He did, feeling that same spark of contact, and she led him, nimble and sure-footed as a mountain goat, through the grotto. Even in the dark, the white walls and spires seemed to faintly glow, as if lit from within. Soon, they emerged into the moonlight. The wind was fresh with the scent of warm earth and pine as they crossed the creek bed and scrabbled up the cliffside. The way home was clearly imprinted in Jo’s mind; she moved with ease despite the dark, the rough terrain, and the heavy, damp fabric. All Owen could do was hold her hand and try to keep up.
When they reached her front door, he hesitated. In Fraser Springs, every window seemed to have a curious face peering out of it. He wanted badly to grab her by the waist, pull her hard against him, and kiss her in front of every last pair of prying eyes. With the meeting tomorrow, unfortunately, he knew better than to risk it.
Jo seemed to have the same thought. She had dropped his hand and was clearly trying to suppress a smile. “The path is just over there. You simply turned l
eft when you should have turned right.”
He gave her what he hoped was a solemn expression. “Thank you, ma’am. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t found me.”
“You’d probably still be wandering out there.” Her lips quirked into a smile. “And there are wolves up in the hills.”
He feigned a look of shock. “Why, I could have been torn to shreds.” He dipped into a bow. “Thank you for your ... assistance.”
Even in the dark, he could see the genuine smile spreading across her face. “The pleasure was all mine.”
Chapter 18
The town of Fraser Springs was unnaturally still on the morning of the meeting. The wind had quieted, leaving an oppressive mugginess. Even the birds were silent, the way they were before a storm. The droning mosquitos seemed to be the only living things for miles.
At breakfast, Wilson’s patrons sat in a quiet tableau, occasionally glancing at the boarded-up window as if expecting something to come bursting through. Humidity slicked the walls and fogged the glasses. Jo could barely stomach a bite of bread. Doc Stryker had come over for the morning meal, but even he picked at the edges of his bacon and stared off at nothing.
Around 10:00 a.m., the sound of hammering and sawing echoed off the buildings and the water.
“They’re building a platform,” said Nils, who had just arrived. “Right there by the wharf. Miss Jo, I think they plan to escort you out on the next boat.”
The Scandalous Mrs. Wilson Page 10
