Celine scrambled out of the saddle. As soon as her feet hit the ground she was racing toward the pool. Cord knew every crevice and foothold and was running after her in an instant.
“Celine, wait. I’ll get him.” He sat down and began pulling off his boots, then his socks. He tore a button getting his shirt off.
She was at the side of the pool, staring down into the dark water, when he walked up behind her. He touched her shoulder and she jumped.
“I’m going after the boy. Will you be all right?”
“Of course,” she said. “Hurry, Cord. He’s so close to the edge, one slip and he’ll fall and hit the rocks.”
He stood at the water’s edge, prepared to dive in and cross the pool to where he would begin the climb.
“Cord!”
“What?”
“Be careful, please.”
He sliced through the pool, unable to enjoy the cold shock of the mountain water. When he reached the other side he pulled himself out and without hesitation started to climb up the rocks next to the waterfall. Water roared beside him. There was a fine coat of mist hovering over everything. He had climbed these same rocks more times than he could count when he was not much older than the child clinging now to the slippery rock ledge.
He could hear the little boy whimpering. Now the child had to fear not only falling, but the strange white man climbing toward him. With his mind too much on the boy and not enough on his footing, Cord slipped. His foot shot out from under him and he banged his shin against the rock. He could feel blood trickle over the top of his foot, but he kept climbing until he was within an arm’s reach of Bobo’s son.
“Come over here and I’ll help you down,” he shouted over the water’s din. “Don’t be afraid.”
The boy stared past Cord and down the face of the rock wall, gauging the distance to the pool below, and vigorously shook his head no.
“I’ll take you down and you can see your mama again.”
The little boy shook his head no again.
Cord pressed his forehead to the rock and sighed in frustration. He levered himself up until he was seated on the ledge beside the boy.
“How would you like to climb onto my back? You can ride down.” Cord turned around, hoping the boy would decide to hop on his back. “Come on.”
Bobo and his wife had arrived at the pool. They stood beside Celine, staring up at the tense scene, their voices drowned out by the pounding water.
“I won’t let you fall,” Cord told the boy. “I promise.”
The boy glanced down at his father and mother and then gingerly moved over to Cord’s side. He threw himself at Cord’s back, slipped his arms around his neck and hung on tight enough to strangle him.
“Ease up a bit,” Cord said, loosening the boy’s hold. “That’s it.”
Just as he remembered, it was much harder climbing down than going up. One false handhold, one misstep, and he and the child would go hurtling down onto the rocks below.
Celine stood beside Bobo and his woman at the edge of the pool. Together they watched Cord make his descent, the boy clinging to his neck. She was shaking with fear and anxiety, and the palms of her hands were damp. The huge man beside her had slipped to his knees and was slowly rocking back and forth with his hands clutched together, watching Cord’s every move down the treacherous rock. Sweat glistened on his ebony skin. The massive muscles of his shoulders and arms rippled as he held his clasped hands to the heavens.
The child’s mother cried softly, her face buried in her hands, unable to watch Cord make his way down the rocks. Celine could not take her eyes off him. If he was worried at all, he did not show any signs of it. His progress was steady and sure as he slowly and carefully made his way down. Finally, when he reached the edge of the pool, he waved at Celine. It was an unguarded moment. She had never seen him so openly happy, so triumphant.
“They’re safe!” she told Bobo. “Your son is safe.”
Bobo’s expression was one of a man coming out of a deep fog as he watched Cord swim the boy back to their side of the pool. The young woman snatched the child away from Cord, held him in her arms and buried her face against the boy’s neck.
Cord watched, unable to look away from the joy and innate tenderness of their reunion. The young family had nothing save the clothes on their backs, and even those paltry items belonged to Cord, yet the happiness and love that shone in Bobo’s eyes for his wife and child could never be bought or owned.
It was a luxury Cord could not afford, not at the risk of his sanity.
The slave looked over his wife’s head, met Cord’s eyes and slowly nodded in silent communication.
Celine ran up to him. Sweat dampened her hairline and the wind had made a hopeless tangle of her long mass of ebony curls. She held his shirt and boots in her arms, smiling at him with open admiration and something more, something he didn’t wish to acknowledge, in her eyes. She presented quite a picture with the skirt of his mother’s gown scooped up between her legs and knotted on both sides, exposing shapely calves. His wife, it seemed, was wearing no stockings, only her low-cut, square-heeled walking shoes.
“You were wonderful …”
The sound of the waterfall faded, but not the pounding of his heart. Bobo’s boy was safe, but now Celine would be even more suspect of witchery. Not only had the obeah man lost face, but his power had been greatly diminished when it was Celine and not he who had, somehow, divined the little boy’s whereabouts.
“How did you know where the boy was? I’d like a straight answer this time, Celine. The truth. Not some of the hog wash you gave me on Dundee’s ship.”
She wiped a trickle of sweat from her temple and then pressed her palms to her sun-stained cheeks.
“Are you all right?” she asked, glancing down at the cut on his shin.
“It’s nothing. I’m waiting for an answer.”
“Is there somewhere cooler we could talk?”
“If this is a scheme to get me to forget about this …”
“I promise it isn’t. I’ll try to explain, but I’m so hot right now I can’t think,” she said.
Indeed, she did look like a wilted rose transplanted into the wrong soil.
“Let’s get out of here.”
When her smile faded, he felt as if he had just stepped on a rosebud, but all he could think of was getting her away from here before the others appeared.
He untied his horse and held it steady until Celine had mounted up and he had put on his shirt again. Then he tied his boots behind the saddle and swung up behind her without a word.
This time the pace was slow. She reached behind herself, ran her hands up the nape of her neck and gathered her hair in her hands. Deftly, with a skill Cord could not fathom, she was able to twist her hair into a knot that kept her hair off her neck. Her skin was soft, nearly translucent on the back of her neck, a vulnerable spot that belied her inner strength and stubbornness.
He rode along the open hilltop until they reached the cane fields that carpeted the hillside and swept down to the sea. Various openings signaled the beginning of a maze of pathways that provided passage through the fields. As the trail they were on began to wind back toward the house, he turned in the opposite direction and they began to ride between high walls of cane, heading toward the sea.
The field they passed through would ripen first and then be burned, bundled and hauled to the mill. Right now, he was too angry and confused by what Celine just had done to feel much excitement over the first harvest and milling he would witness as owner of Dunstain Place.
The air was close and dense with humidity between the cane rows. Above them the slender, feathery tips of the stalks whispered on the trades. He felt Celine shift against him and innocently bring him to arousal without any notion of her power over him. She wiped the back of her hand across her brow.
“We’re almost there,” he promised.
Within seconds they had cleared the edge of the cane field. Before them lay a crescent
strip of white sand that bordered aquamarine waters as clear as a looking glass. Lazy, rippling waves teased the shoreline.
“It’s so beautiful.” Celine sat forward, trying to take the beach in all at once. It was an oasis, a private cove protected by the tall, waving cane and the azure sea.
He rode the white gelding to the edge of the water and stopped just out of reach of the foaming tide.
“Give me your shoes,” he requested.
Celine looked over her shoulder, and realizing what he intended, a wide, guileless smile broke over her face. He had to remind himself that he was upset.
She pulled off her shoes and handed them to him without embarrassment. He reached back and tucked them into a saddlebag and then when he saw her beginning to dismount on her own, took her arm and helped her down.
With the abandonment of a child, her skirt still tied up almost to her knees, she walked into the water and began to drag first one foot and then the other through the foaming tide line.
“Now this,” she announced with another grand smile, “is heaven.”
Cord left her playing in the waves as he guided his horse to a spot where a banyan tree shaded the beach, its far-reaching branches extended over the sea. After he tied the reins to a protruding root, he rolled up his wet pant legs, then walked through the warm sand to join her. The breeze blowing off the sea felt degrees cooler than the stifling air in the thick cane.
As he walked up to her, she turned, her eyes shadowed, as if she did not know what to expect from him. And he could not blame her, for indeed he did not know how to deal with his wife.
Unconcerned with getting his pants any wetter, Cord moved past her and kept walking until he was almost hip-deep in water. He raised his arms over his head, sprang up and dove beneath the aquamarine waves.
Celine wished she could follow him in, but she didn’t relish the thought of thoroughly soaking her clothing, or drowning. She watched Cord break the surface of the water. His wet hair was black and glistening as he shook droplets back into the sea. She could not take her eyes off his broad shoulders as he emerged from the water like some mythical sea god.
He walked out of the water not one bit mindful of his soaked trousers and the way they revealed his anatomy. Passing close to her, he took her hand, walked another few steps until they cleared the tide line, sat in the sand and pulled her down beside him.
“You have some explaining to do,” he said. “You told me you had no hand in Dundee’s death. I believed you when you claimed it was only accurate guesses that allowed you to come up with things about Dundee’s past, but there was more to it than that, wasn’t there?”
He was waiting for a logical explanation, when all she had was the truth. Celine pulled her knees up to her chest and began brushing sand off her toes.
“Well?” Despite the heat, Cord felt a chill run though him. He had a feeling that whatever she told him would not bode well.
“Yes, there’s more to it,” she admitted softly. “But I don’t know where to start.”
When he did not comment right away, she looked over at him. He was frowning in concentration, watching her as if he believed she had actually cursed Dundee and wondered what else she was capable of.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
“I’m not certain when it all began, and I certainly don’t know why or how. All I know is that from my earliest memory, I have always been able to see images of other people’s pasts.”
She glanced over at him. If she had just told him she had grown another head he couldn’t have looked more skeptical.
“It’s more or less like fortune-telling in reverse,” she said, fighting hard to find words to explain. “When I was a little girl I realized the visions only came to me when I touched someone. Does that shock you?”
“Let’s just say if I hadn’t seen you use this … this power with my own eyes, I’d be certain you were having sunstroke. But I heard what you told Dundee and I saw what happened this morning when you held Bobo’s wife’s hand.”
“And?”
“Does it happen every time you touch someone?” Cord leaned on his elbows in the sand, his mind working, thinking back, racing ahead.
“It only happens when I will it, when I open my mind and let the images in. I rarely use my gift.”
“Gift?”
“My guardian, Persa, always called it that, although sometimes I wonder if it isn’t really a curse. When I was little, I thought everyone was like me. My mother soon convinced me otherwise.”
“When you held that girl’s hand today, I thought you were going to faint dead away. You lost all color. Does it cause you pain?”
“Only insofar as I can feel what the person who owns the images feels, although never as deeply as they did when the experience was new.”
“So you have the uncanny ability to eavesdrop on someone else’s memories,” His blue gaze was chilling. “When I first laid eyes on you, I felt as if you could see into my soul. Have you used this … this gift on me?”
Celine looked out to the horizon, unable to meet his eyes.
“Yes,” she finally admitted. “I have.”
He sat up.
It was a nightmare. Cord tried to fathom her lurking in his memory, seeing all the things he had fought so hard to hide from himself. Did she know all of it? The trials and loss that had caused him such pain—pain he had tried to hide behind a wall of detachment, or drown in a bottle.
“You’ve looked into my past? Crawled into my mind?”
“It wasn’t like that, Cord …”
He was visibly angry, more so than she had ever seen him. His cool-hearted detachment she could handle; this hard, angry man frightened her.
“When, Celine? When did you steal my memories?”
“When we went aboard the Adelaide, I wanted to know what manner of man I had married. And then the night of the storm at sea, when you held me in your arms … I hadn’t meant for it to happen, it just did. I was so exhausted I was not on guard and—”
In one lithe movement he pushed up and loomed over her.
“What about last night? Did you creep into my mind last night when we were—”
“No! I did nothing of the sort.” She hadn’t thought he could get any angrier, but he surprised her.
“Why not? It seems the perfect opportunity. Here.” He thrust his hand at her. “Touch me now and read my mind.”
“Cord, please, don’t do this—”
He whipped his hand back and indicated the emerald sugarcane field stretched out behind them. “I should have known things were too good to be true. The plantation is salvageable. I have a wife who pleases me in bed. I should have known by now that / never have this kind of luck. Is there anything else you have to tell me? Do you possess any more little secrets or hidden talents that I should know of?”
Secrets?
He was so furious that there was no way she could tell him why she had so readily agreed to take Jemma O’Hurley’s place, that she had married because she was afraid for her life and had to flee the police in New Orleans.
He didn’t wait for a reply, but headed for his horse. He was scared he might kill her, and was afraid at the same time that he might take her in his arms and forgive her everything just to have her beneath him again.
Celine pushed herself out of the sand and shook off her skirt as she hurried to catch up to him. He paid her no mind, simply gathered up his boots and shirt. When he had buttoned his shirt up again, he tied his boots to the back of his saddle, then reached for the reins.
Celine grabbed his arm. When he jerked away from her touch as though it had scorched him, his blatant rejection wounded her deeply. She protectively crossed her arms at her waist and pressed her palms against her midriff.
Persa had warned her that there were those who would never trust her, those who would view her with suspicion if they knew she could glimpse the shadows of the past hidden in their minds. The anger and betrayal she had seen in Cord’s
eyes only confirmed Persa’s predictions. But from anyone else the rejection would not have hurt so much.
She tried to tell herself that he would calm down. She even tried to tell herself that it shouldn’t really matter what Cord thought since, no matter how much she might wish it were different, their marriage was not a love match. Why, then, did she feel as if she were coming apart inside?
She stared at his rigid stance, at the hard line of his jaw in profile. Then, when he slowly turned to stare down at her as if he had never laid eyes on her before, Celine realized with sudden, blinding insight that somehow, someway, over the past few weeks, she had fallen in love with Cordero Moreau.
She had never intended to love him, but surely she must, she reasoned, for why else would it matter to her what he thought?
Why else would it hurt so much to think that he might never touch her again?
What would he do if he ever found out she had done the one thing he had warned her not to do?
She had fallen in love with him.
“Cord, please. I promise, I’ll never open my mind to your memories again without your knowledge.”
He reached out, almost grabbed her shoulders, checked himself, and then quickly dropped his hands. He ached to touch her, to pull her to him and tell her it was all right. The witch. She had him hard for her even now that he knew of her perfidy, of her deception—and surely it was a cruel deception to keep such a dark secret.
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“Because we can’t go on like this for the rest of our lives,” she said softly.
He could barely hear her words over the roar of the rolling waves as they ground into the sand. Unshed tears shimmered in her eyes. He read something deep inside them that he didn’t want to acknowledge. She was looking up at him as if his forgiveness and trust truly mattered to her. It frightened him to know she cared.
Day Dreamer Page 21
