“Caroline, wait—”
But it was too late. She marched inside, her head held high, the crowd of curious onlookers parting before her like some great biblical sea. She grabbed her sister by the arm, and this time was successful in hauling the girl to her feet. David stumbled inside, determined to speak with her, desperate to know why she was so upset. But she brushed past him, the open terrace doors providing the easiest escape possible.
He came to realize the room was engulfed in silence. Finally, someone cleared his throat. “How did it go then, Cameron?”
David fixed the inquirer with a stern glare. “A gentleman does not kiss and tell.”
Mr. Dermott snorted with laughter, a harsh, mean-spirited sound. “Oh come on, it’s just a bit of good sport. We all want to know. Was it like kissing a boy for you too? Took a bloody impressive wager to get me to kiss her, I can tell you.”
The snickers he had detected earlier from the crowd returned, growing in volume and meaning. Clarity descended, swift and unfortunate. Young men were infamous for such wagers. During his years at Cambridge, he had been little different, having once wagered—and lost—an entire month’s allowance on the outcome of a race between two very uncooperative snails. He had no idea why young men did such things. Perhaps it was because their brains were not yet fully formed.
Or because their cocks unfortunately were.
No matter the reason, men of a certain age were undeniable idiots. They hurt people for no reason other than their own sport or their own selfish, shortsighted needs.
He ought to know.
In that moment, David understood who among this crowd had convinced Caroline of her inadequacy. And he was tempted to reach his hand down Dermott’s throat, just for the privilege of ripping out his vocal cords.
The man was an utter fool. While David might not have felt attraction for Caroline, at least not in the strictest sense of the word, she had definitely felt feminine during those scant moments in his arms, both in the softness of her lips and the breathy sighs that had escaped her. And no matter his limited corporeal reaction to the two-minute interlude on the terrace, no matter his resolve to not become involved, his emotional response to the crowd’s taunts was undeniable. He wanted to protect Caroline from the likes of all the Brandon Dermotts in the world.
And he knew of only one way to turn the tide of speculation.
He raised a brow, sweeping the crowd with a lingering gaze. Dermott and his followers were like inexperienced pups, panting their exuberance and wagging their tails when they had no true notion of how to please a woman. David might be lacking any capacity for true love, but he had brought plenty of women to completion since he had been their same regrettable age. He almost felt a little sorry for the female faction here tonight, with only young men like Mr. Dermott to show them how it was done.
“It was not in the least like kissing a boy,” he said lazily, letting his mouth curve upward. “And I assure you, ladies, if Mr. Dermott carries that interpretation of Miss Tolbertson’s kissing skills, he surely hasn’t kissed enough women.”
Chapter 7
IT WASN’T ENOUGH for Caroline to retreat, stumbling through Brighton’s dark streets, dragging Penelope behind her. She needed space. She needed escape.
She needed the swim that had been denied her some hours before.
Mama was already asleep, taken to bed by her headache some hours earlier. Bess had waited up, but Caroline sent the yawning servant off with apologies for keeping her so many hours past her usual bedtime. She ensured Pen had at least stepped out of her dress and found her mattress before her sister fell asleep.
And then Caroline let herself out the front door.
A full moon lay over the ocean, guiding her feet faster than she would have thought possible. She had never done such a foolhardy thing before. Surely it was a poor idea to trot in slippered feet along the treacherous footpath, guided by nothing more than a midnight moon. Surely she flirted with calamity to swim at a time of night when the more frightening varieties of sea life patrolled shallow waters.
But her memory of the night’s humiliation suffocated her good sense and honed her internal compass. This was not a night for sane arguments, or careful considerations.
David Cameron, the man she had dreamed of for eleven long years, had kissed her.
Her cheeks heated, and refused to be placated by the evening breeze. Yes, he had kissed her. Expertly, with the skill of a man who knew what he was about. And then he had laughed at her. Well, he wasn’t the first man to kiss her and display such a reaction.
But God help her, he was going to be the last.
She stuffed her self-doubts into the same dark corner where she kept her other secrets. They sat below the surface of her skin, clamoring for attention. By the time Caroline reached her swimming cove, those secrets were starting to chafe. She had never fit in among the popular crowd, not even when she tried very, very hard to hide her oddities. The only person who had ever come close to accepting—indeed, encouraging—her had been her father.
Her mother was convinced of the need to reform her, and they remained locked in frequent combat over things like her wardrobe. Her regrettable height. Her too-brown skin, and her insistence on traipsing about Brighton without a chaperone. Her mother only meant to help, she knew.
But Mama couldn’t help Caroline with this. The die had been cast, opinions formed. The parlor game tonight showed Caroline where she stood among Brighton’s seasonal crowd. Any opportunity she might have once had at finding a respectable match with a gentleman from the summer set was gone.
The only surprise of the evening was that she had survived most of the dinner party in relative obscurity before cresting the peak of mortification.
The moon shadows stretched out all around her as Caroline peeled off her dress and underskirts. Her corset came next. She pulled the pins from her hair with frantic fingers and welcomed the mantle of security as her heavy tresses fell across her shoulders.
The humid air settled over her bare skin like a sigh of relief, dampening her shift and easing her mood. The scents of marine life and moisture combined in an aromatic symphony, and it was a song she knew well. No other section of beach smelled as this one did. The indented cove and the steep cliff walls caught the scents off the ocean and held them fast.
She lifted her face to the chalk cliffs, the usual chatter of the swallows silenced by night. By daylight, she knew every crevice, every occupied nest above her. She had spent hours lying on a nearby rock, waiting for her hair to dry, staring up at the cliff face. But at night the contours of the place seemed different. The stark white geologic formations, peculiar to this part of Britain’s coast, were almost iridescent in the moonlight. She felt as if she were standing in a magnificent spotlight, and the ocean was her stage. The evening’s comedic failure receded as she took a step forward. The surf churned about her ankles, a parody of polite applause.
She had long since stopped trying to analyze why she was so drawn to the water, even to her own ruin. Perhaps it was her father’s legacy, an inheritance as indelible as the color of his hair. Or perhaps, through his own example, he had imprinted her with the things he loved. She could remember his obsession with the ocean as surely as she could still recall the smell of his pipe tobacco. Swimming was her most significant connection to her father, the last personal thing he had shared with her before he died. She cherished the memory, even though too often she felt plagued by the unwanted eccentricity.
Tonight she was grateful for his gift.
She pushed farther into the surf, until her hands skimmed the roiling water. The tide was nearly at its lowest point. Following the turmoil of the afternoon’s high spring tide, the water was calm tonight, and the pebbles along the ocean floor shifted to accommodate her progress. She gave a gasp of surprise as she stepped on something that wriggled away beneath her feet, but it wasn’t nearly enough to dissuade her. She was used to the risks of the ocean, be they dangerous eddies, stinging
jellyfish, or sharp rocks. And so she drew a breath, filled her lungs, and let her body pitch forward into the waves.
She welcomed the rush of cool water over her head, filling her ears. The sound of the ocean was like a soothing balm, muffling the din of the night’s humiliation and the shriek of her internal voices. She glided effortlessly, knowing that the world below the surface was far calmer than the one that awaited her atop.
But as always, her body eventually demanded air.
She surfaced to noise of a different sort. An angry shout in a familiar voice.
“You stupid girl!” Tension snapped at her from the shoreline. The calm she had been seeking deserted her, chased by the anger in the voice.
She had come here to reflect on the indignity of the night. Alone. But David Cameron, the man who had caused that indignity, stood two dozen yards away on the shoreline, bristling in the moonlight. She didn’t know much about men, but if she had to hazard a guess from the sound of his voice, this one was very, very angry.
And she was all but naked.
Caroline sank down in water that regrettably came up no higher than her hips. The full moon was unbearably bright, and there was no doubt that David would be able to see every lack of curve beneath the soaked fabric, should he come close enough and be inclined to look.
The overhead moon illuminated his progress along the shore. It was too dark to see every detail, but the whispered shadows of night only made her look harder. He paced, the rigid slant of his shoulders speaking louder than words.
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” he demanded, raising his voice to reach her over the sound of the ocean.
Anger began to edge out her initial panic. This was her hidden cove. Her chance to swim. He didn’t belong here, no matter how the sight of him, touched with moonlight and rage, sent her stomach tumbling. He had no business coming here, chastising her.
Tempting her.
He took a step toward her. She took a complementary lurch back.
“Any idiot knows you shouldn’t swim alone,” he shouted. “I recall you even telling me that once, although you clearly don’t heed your own advice.” He ran his hands through his hair in a tension-filled swipe. “Christ, Caroline, do you know how frightened I was when I saw you go under and not immediately come up?”
That gave her pause. He might have laughed at her after the kiss on the terrace, but he wasn’t laughing now.
“How did you know where to find me?” she demanded. “Did you follow me?”
His anger was palpable, thickening the air between them. “I took a guess.” His moonlit silhouette shrugged out of his evening coat. “An accurate one, it seems. I suspected as much after the kiss.”
Her gasp was indignant this time. How dare he bring the kiss into this . . . this . . . well, whatever this was. “I don’t recall inviting you to take that liberty,” she shouted back at him, striving to reach him over the sound of the water. “In fact, I recall warning you against it. So if you didn’t enjoy it . . .”
“I could tell from the way you tasted.” He retreated several steps to toss the coat onto a large rock that rose up, dark and menacing, behind him. Her rock, she thought, a bit uncharitably. “You tasted of salt, but not of perspiration. I couldn’t figure it out at first. But now it all makes sense.” He headed back toward her, and then she saw him strip off his waistcoat and toss it onto the shore. “Perfect. Bloody. Sense.”
She took a quick step backward through the water, shocked to hear in such indelicate terms how she had tasted. Somewhere nearby, the ocean floor dropped away and plunged to several feet or more over her head. She was paying far more attention to the man on the shore than to the water, and that was a sure guarantee for disaster.
And yet, she couldn’t look away. Her eyes followed the arc of his shirt as it joined his waistcoat’s insouciance on the shingle beach. “What are you doing?” Her voice sounded faint to her own ears.
His shoes were kicked off without ceremony, and then his trousers followed suit.
Surely he wouldn’t. Surely he couldn’t.
He entered the water and began to close the distance between them in great, gasping strides. As he advanced on her, his shape became clearer, more distinct. Caroline’s earlier restrained panic began to jerk on its rope at the sight of so much of David Cameron’s exposed skin. And yet it was impossible to keep her eyes averted from the sight.
Her thoughts were flying, fast and furious, scattering to the wind and then coming back to coalesce on him. This was no childish dream, to be stored away and cherished in girlish naïveté as the years passed by. David Cameron was no longer a young man in a soaked military uniform. He was a hard, angry male, and he was clothed in so little it might as well have been nothing. Far from providing adequate cover, the night’s strong moon made his skin glow like polished granite. The ribbed slant of his abdomen drew her eye in a southerly direction before the ridge of muscle dipped into smallclothes she feared might soon turn as translucent as her own shift.
Though it was shallow where she stood, he dove into the last stretch of waves and finished the meager distance between them with an enviably constructed breaststroke. She stared at him, her mouth agape, as moonlight and water sluiced off his powerful arms. How could this be the same man who had once almost drowned on this stretch of beach?
“This isn’t proper,” she gasped as he came within arm’s reach. “I . . . I am not clothed, David.”
“We have already established you aren’t the sort of woman who cares overmuch about propriety. You wouldn’t be here risking your foolish neck, forcing me to take a midnight swim, otherwise.”
“I thought you couldn’t swim,” she protested.
He seized her around the waist and jerked her close. “I never said I couldn’t swim. I just can’t swim as well as you, mermaid.”
She could feel his pulse thumping in the grip of his fingers, there against her waist. “Then again,” he went on, his mouth lowering to her ear. “I don’t believe I’ve ever met another soul who could.” The last words were growled onto her neck, fanning out in tendrils of unwelcome warmth.
Dimly she realized he was pulling her closer to shore. The feel of his hot hands through her woefully insufficient shift broke the fragile hold she had on her panic. She dug her protesting feet into the ocean floor, rocks and sand scattering beneath her desperate toes. “It is none of your concern,” she panted.
He reacted by flexing his fingers into her protesting skin, as if to prevent her from bolting into the waves. “You are my concern, though I wish to God you weren’t. So tell me, Miss Tolbertson. Why do you come here, alone, risking your life on a lark? And just as important, why in the deuces are you pretending to be someone you aren’t?”
Chapter 8
DAVID WAS SO angry he could have shaken her till her teeth rattled.
It wasn’t only the hour-long walk he had just endured for the second time today, or the fact that she had left him thinking far too much about a kiss that should not have meant anything. He was angry that his suspicions about her had been correct. How could she be so reckless? He had danced with the intelligence sparking behind those kaleidoscope eyes. It boggled the mind, then, that she had thrown herself into this dangerous current.
Although, now that he was here, he had to acknowledge the water lapping around them seemed less intense than his memory predicted. In fact, compared to the churning surf he had glimpsed here just this afternoon, the ocean seemed about as dangerous at this moment as a half-filled hip bath.
As if in agreement with his unspoken thoughts, she struggled against him, her shoulders pummeling his chest. He was struck by her lissome strength and, by contrast, the softness of her water-slick skin.
How could he have missed it?
She had a swimmer’s build, all broad shoulders and narrow waist. He had thought her lanky when he had first seen her this morning, as if during some crucial years she had grown too fast and eaten too little. But now he readjusted that t
hinking.
She hadn’t grown into her body, her body had grown into her. She kept her form hidden behind the most god-awful frocks, but it you looked closely enough—or wrapped your arms around her—it was impossible to miss. What Dermott had intimated at the dinner party, that she was a girl with masculine leanings, was nothing close to the truth. She had her secrets, but Mr. Dermott had not hit upon them.
And David was a fool to have not seen it before.
“Let me go!” she gasped, rewarding his conjecture with a sharp elbow to the ribs. “I promise I am perfectly safe.”
His spleen protested the onslaught, but his grip remained firm. “You’ll forgive me if I lack a certain trust, given that not eight hours ago you assured me that ladies don’t swim.”
“Ladies don’t!” She spat the words with vehemence, her lean body writhing against the prison of his arms. “And I didn’t claim to be a lady. But a proper gentleman would not handle me in such a fashion, lady or no.”
He lowered his head and brought his lips flush against her ear. “If you recall, lass, I once told you I wasn’t a gentleman either.”
He felt her shocked intake of air, and his grip loosened. Nothing like reminding himself of his shortcomings to bring the matter home. If memory served, he had also once told her she should avoid men like him. And yet, where were they?
Stripped to their underclothes, drenched in seawater, grappling under a midnight moon.
He had spent the last eleven years avoiding the sort of entanglements that might lead him to become involved in an innocent young woman’s life. And he had just leaped into a raging ocean to save Caroline Tolbertson.
Even if it wasn’t actually raging tonight. And even if she appeared in no need of his proffered aid.
She took advantage of his slackening arms to twist herself ’round to face him, bringing her hands up to push against his chest. “I am in no danger, David.”
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