The Bride's Rescuer

by Charlotte Douglas

  Cameron’s hands shook as he worked. With her lead, he might never catch her. The coast stretched north for over a hundred miles of wilderness. He had little hope of finding her, the proverbial needle in a haystack.

  But he had to try. He couldn’t allow her to disclose his location. And, if anything happened to her, the blame was his. If he hadn’t refused to take her to Key West, she wouldn’t have taken flight.

  Mrs. Givens thrust a basket of food and water into the skiff and he shoved off, steering north along the coast. When daylight faded and a storm approached, he sailed on into the gloom, hoping for a glimpse of white sail. With the thousands of keys and tiny islets along the coastline, he could pass within a hundred yards of her and miss her altogether.

  And if lost among the Ten Thousand Islands, she died of exposure and dehydration, he would have yet another death on his conscience. Even his self-imposed exile could not atone for that. He sailed on into the night, trimming his sails against the gathering storm, and searching every shoreline for signs of the sailboat. Twice, unable to judge the water’s depth in the darkness, he ran aground on sandbars. Twice he climbed out into the waves to push the skiff free.

  Ready to admit defeat in the pitch-black gloom, he caught sight of a huge white form, floating in the water and partially hidden by a nearby key. With a sinking heart, he recognized his sailboat.

  But he saw no sign of Celia Stevens.

  Chapter Four

  In the pitch darkness of the storm with waves pounding his tiny craft, Cameron fought to guide the skiff around the tiny island of mangroves and closer to his sailboat awash in the breakers. He’d have missed the capsized boat altogether if it hadn’t been illuminated by a brilliant flash of lightning.

  Cupping his hands to his mouth, he yelled, “Miss Stevens! Are you out there?”

  The howling wind snatched his words away and drowned them in booming thunder. If he was going to locate the woman, he had no choice but to wait for the storm to pass.

  With a gaff hook, he grabbed a loose line from the sailboat and tied it to the skiff. Then he furled his canvas, dropped anchor and prepared to ride out the gale. His hopes for finding Celia diminished with the wind, and his conscience rebuked him for his treatment of her. He’d been selfish, just as she’d accused him. How could she know that his selfishness was the only thing that had kept him alive these past six years?

  His rationalization brought him little comfort. In just a few days, he’d grown fond of the woman fate had washed onto his beach, and he couldn’t bear to think that she had perished in this latest storm.

  The squall died, and the torrential rain abated just before sunrise. In the pale twilight before dawn, Cameron spied a piece of canvas the wind had tossed onto the mangroves along the shore. He weighed anchor, grabbed an oar, and rowed to the tiny spit of land. After beaching the skiff, he made his way over the sand to the remnant of sail, fearful that this time Celia had drowned in the storm, and if he found her at all, it would be only to bury her.

  As he neared the canvas, he noted that it had landed over a mangrove branch as if to form a tent. Then he heard the distinct swat of flesh against flesh and a muttered curse.

  “Blasted mosquitoes and no-see-ums,” Celia’s angry voice grumbled. “You’re eating me alive.”

  Relief and happiness flooded him at the sound. “Hello!” he called.

  Silence reigned for an instant, then Celia poked her head around the side of the canvas. Welcome shone briefly in her eyes before she scowled. “It’s you.”

  He glanced around and opened his arms in a gesture that took in their surroundings. “Under these conditions, I would think you’d be glad to see me.”

  She clambered from beneath the sail, dusting sand from her legs and clothes. “You’re the one I’m running away from.”

  “If you want me to leave—”

  “No!” Panic tinged her voice. “I was beginning to feel like Tom Hanks.”

  “The actor?”

  “Cast-Away,” she explained, then shook her head. “I forgot. You haven’t seen a movie in the last six years.”

  He couldn’t help grinning, not only because he was elated that she was safe and well, but also at the irony of her situation. “You don’t have much luck with boats, do you?”

  “I’m fine with boats. Weather’s the problem.” She jerked up her chin and glared at him. “Even the best of sailors is little match for the storm that just passed.”

  He nodded, conceding her point. “What do you intend to do now?”

  She narrowed her eyes and considered him warily. “Since I’ve come this far, I don’t suppose you’d take me the rest of the way to Everglades City?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

  She bristled with outrage. “I won’t tell anyone who you are. And I couldn’t find your island again if I tried, so your hideaway is safe.”

  “I can’t take that chance.”

  “You mean you won’t take it.”

  They were back to the same argument, one he would not allow her to win. “Are you thirsty? Hungry?”

  She flicked a delectable pink tongue across dry lips. “My supplies ran out late yesterday afternoon.”

  Without a word, he went to the skiff, grabbed a water bottle, Mrs. Givens’s basket and a dry blanket, then returned to Celia. He spread the blanket on the sand and motioned for her to sit.

  “We might as well wait,” he said.

  She eyed him with suspicion. “For what?”

  “The tide. When the water’s deeper, I’ll refloat and bail out the sailboat.”

  She sat crosslegged on the blanket, and he handed her the water bottle. While she drank, he spread the remaining contents of the basket on a napkin and helped himself to a ham biscuit.

  “You’re lucky, you know,” he said between bites.

  “Ha!” She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Held captive in the wilderness. Some luck.”

  “I could have missed you in the storm. How long would you have lasted out here with no water, no food and no real shelter?”

  Instead of answering, she picked up a biscuit and bit into it angrily.

  “Think of it this way,” he said, “in three months, you’ll be on your way home.”

  She cut her eyes toward him with an I-don’t-believe-a-word-of-it look, then returned her attention to her biscuit.

  After eating, he lay back on his elbows. Celia still showed no inclination to talk to him, but in spite of her chilly silence, Cameron felt the most relaxed and satisfied he’d been since before his arrival on Solitaire. He attributed his good feelings to the beautiful woman at his side. She had made his life interesting for the first time in years.

  With a full stomach and his worries about Celia over, he was tempted to drift off to sleep, until an image of Celia commandeering his skiff and sailing away again brought him fully alert. With a sigh, he noted the incoming tide. After removing his boots and rolling up his pants legs, he waded into the surf toward the capsized boat.

  CELIA REMAINED ON THE blanket, watching Cameron struggle to right and bail out the boat. She could have helped him, but she was too blasted mad. Other feelings warred within her—frustration at her aborted escape and relief that she’d been rescued.

  Cameron, on the other hand, appeared to suffer no emotional pangs of any kind. He was whistling cheerfully, even while tussling with wet sails. Bad enough that he looked so damned happy. Why did he have to look so irresistibly appealing as well? With his shirt stripped off, sunlight glistened off the gleaming muscles of his chest and back. Reluctantly, Celia had to admit she’d never seen a more handsome or seductive man. Luckily, her temper helped her keep her distance.

  She’d already had enough bad luck with men, almost marrying one who quite possibly intended to murder her for her money. She had no intention of falling for the strange recluse Cameron Alexander, even if he was the most intriguing man she’d ever met.

  He took most of the day to put the sailbo
at to rights, and she was relieved to escape the islet as hordes of mosquitoes and midges descended for an evening feast. Her resolve and anger, which she had stoked all afternoon, wavered when he carried her in his arms to the righted sailboat. The warmth and closeness of him took her breath away.

  Once in the boat, she distracted herself from Cameron’s proximity by studying the skiff that he was tying to the back of the sailboat. A canvas sail furled around a makeshift mast in the boat’s center and a rough rudder on the floor of the boat explained how Cameron had managed to catch up with her so quickly. Only the most adept sailor, however, could have survived the recent storm in such a craft. Cameron was evidently world-class.

  As he climbed aboard, she hunkered down with her back toward him, afraid to face him until she could gather her whirling thoughts and tamp down her unwanted attraction to him. They were returning to Solitaire, she reminded herself, her prison for the next twelve weeks.

  If not forever.

  Once the sails had filled and the boat skimmed swiftly along the open water, she braced herself for a torrent of angry words and accusations at her escape attempt, but Cameron remained as silent and unfathomable as the water’s depths.

  Unwilling to meet his eyes, she studied the gathering darkness along the shore, the gentle wave action of the gulf, the smudged pastel palette of the fading sunset on the clouds—anything to avoid the self-satisfied expression of the man at the tiller.

  Above, the high, thin cry of the curved-beak curlew sounded as the flocks made their way to their inland rookeries for the night. Cameron shifted his gaze to watch their flight, then looked away quickly when his glance fell upon her once more. He rolled his neck and shoulders, and she realized how they must ache from hours of fighting the makeshift tiller of the skiff against the storm, then hours more refloating his sailboat.

  Her skin burned from extended exposure to the sun and wind, and her eyes watered from the hours of glaring sunlight bouncing off the water, and she wondered if Cameron was as uncomfortable.

  She stared into the wide stretches of empty, open water, yearning for the appearance of a Jet Ski, wind-surfer, or a cabin cruiser filled with tourists, anyone who might rescue her from Cameron and return her home. But the sailboat and the skiff towed behind it were the only vessels visible on the endless waters of the gulf.

  They had been sailing for almost an hour before she finally gathered courage to speak. If she had to remain with him, she needed to keep their interaction on polite terms. She called to Cameron above the snapping sails and splashing water. “I haven’t thanked you for coming after me. I’m grateful.”

  Her words weren’t a lie. Just as surely as his refusal to help her had driven her into the wilderness, he alone had rescued her from almost certain death from exposure.

  He stared at her with his strange amber eyes, and in the failing light, she couldn’t tell what emotion, if any, lurked behind them. “No need to thank me. It’s my fault, after all.”

  She nodded in agreement. What he’d said was true enough. She turned her attention to the shoreline again, all of it monotonously the same, towering mangroves giving way inland to tangled woodlands, saw palmettos and cabbage palms, a scene that remained constant as the boat drank up the miles. The solitude surged toward her, as if to draw her into its depths once more.

  She turned to Cameron to stave off the loneliness. “How did you find me? I counted on your heading south for Key West.”

  The wind had dropped, the snapping canvas had quieted, and she no longer had to shout to be heard over the curling water.

  He hooked the tiller beneath his arm and rummaged in his shirt pocket, extracting a pipe and tobacco pouch. “Yesterday morning, I was in my study, bringing my journals up to date, a task I’d never neglected until you washed up on my beach.”

  She didn’t know whether to feel flattered or to apologize, but feared if she interrupted him, he’d retreat into silence again. After he’d tamped fragrant tobacco into the bowl of his pipe with his thumb, then put a match to it, he held the tiller in one hand, his pipe in the other, and continued his story. He related how Mrs. Givens had spotted Celia’s departure and alerted Cameron, how he and Noah had outfitted the skiff with sail, and how he’d set off at once to overtake her.

  “All the while,” he said, “I feared you had too great a lead, that I would never catch you.”

  She shuddered at his words. The man was unswerving in his determination never to let her leave.

  She tried again to read his face, but darkness had set in, and she could only wonder whether concern for her safety or for the return of his boat and the safeguarding of his hideaway had driven Cameron so relentlessly in his pursuit of her.

  The blackness of the night closed in around them, broken only by the faint light of the waning moon, myriad brilliant stars and a green phosphorescence dancing on the water. The barking cough of a panther punctuated the stillness of the dark maze of wilderness directly to the east. From another part of the glades came the guttural snarl of a bobcat. Celia shivered again, wondering what might have happened to her if Cameron hadn’t found her.

  “It was already storming when I reached this area last night,” Cameron said, “and I almost gave up hope.”

  He muttered something so soft and low she barely heard it, but his whispered words made the hair stand up on the back of her neck. “If you had died, I would have another death on my conscience.”

  Another death?

  Who had died, and why did Cameron feel responsible? Her curiosity burned, but she kept her questions to herself.

  The wind freshened, carrying a hint of autumn in the dry air. Exposed to the cool night air, her skin broke out in goose bumps, and her teeth began to chatter as the chill seeped into her bones. She thought longingly of hot coffee.

  “Miss Stevens.”

  She had drawn herself into a ball to stay warm, and when she lifted her head at his call, Cameron beckoned her to sit beside him. By then, she was so miserably cold, she’d have sat by the devil himself to stay warm. She climbed back to where Cameron sat in the stern, and he pulled her next to him, wrapping his free arm around her while the other guided the boat.

  “Better?” he asked.

  She nodded, then laid her head against his chest to maximize the warmth his body offered. She couldn’t avoid inhaling the scent of sunshine, salt spray and the pleasant masculine musk of the man himself. Beneath the hard muscles of his chest, his heart thudded against her ear. Above, the sails cracked, reflecting the colors of the night.

  “‘Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that the winds were lovesick with them.’” The words from Shakespeare sprang automatically to her lips.

  “Antony and Cleopatra?” Cameron asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You like literature?”

  “I love books. That’s why I bought a bookstore.”

  “I’m fond of books myself,” he admitted.

  “Let’s make a game,” she suggested. “One of us quotes a line about ships or sailing and the other has to guess the title or the author.”

  The nearness of the man had stirred dangerous emotions best ignored, so she had proposed the game as a diversion.

  “My turn, then.” He thought for a moment. “‘But in a sieve I’ll thither sail, and, like a rat without a tail—’”

  “That’s too easy. Macbeth. But one easy one deserves another. ‘And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.’”

  “Sea Fever,” he answered instantly, “by John Masefield.”

  She’d had her ship, she’d tried her escape and she’d failed. In spite of the attractiveness of her captor, she was still a prisoner. Frustrated by her lack of freedom, exhausted by her ordeal, she couldn’t contain a deep, choking sob.

  Cameron tightened his hold as she cried herself to sleep against the broad width of his chest. She roused only once during the long night—or maybe she’d simply dreamed—when Cameron brushed the hair from her forehead and pressed his
lips there.

  “Celia Stevens.” He had uttered her name like a long sigh. “What have you done to me? And what am I to do with you?”

  WHEN CELIA AWOKE LATE IN the afternoon of the day of their return to Solitaire, her twelve weeks on the island stretched before her like an eternity and the questions that had plagued her since her arrival swarmed like no-see-ums. Why had Cameron hidden himself away on the island? Was he an outcast? A fugitive from justice?

  She shook away such thoughts. Except for his insistence on keeping her prisoner—or, as he asserted, a guest—and his brief spurt of anger when she’d lighted her signal fire, Cameron didn’t seem dangerous. His actions toward her had been both courteous and kind. Mrs. Givens had hinted that he suffered from a sickness of the spirit, but Celia couldn’t picture Cameron as mentally ill.

  She sighed and pushed the disturbing thoughts away. She would have plenty of time to learn more about Cameron and his island hideaway. Delving into his secrets would give her something to do for the next three months. Resigned for the moment to her captivity, she dressed and went downstairs to find Mrs. Givens in the front room, polishing furniture.

  The housekeeper pushed a gray curl off her forehead and smiled. “Ah, the slugabed has arisen. I left something for you on the kitchen table. It should hold you until dinner.”

  Glad Mrs. Givens hadn’t chastised her for her unsuccessful escape attempt, Celia thanked her and continued through the house to the kitchen. Considering the wilderness Celia had plunged into of her own accord, the housekeeper probably doubted Celia’s sanity.

  Mrs. Givens hadn’t been awake earlier that morning when Celia and Cameron had docked the sailboat in the early dawn.

  “Do not attempt to leave here again,” he’d warned as they walked through the sea mist toward the house.

  Celia couldn’t tell if his words held the tenor of a threat or a plea. He’d left her then, and she hadn’t seen him since. She’d stumbled upstairs to bed and fallen asleep fully clothed. When she’d awakened a few moments ago, she’d washed away the sand in the basin in her room and donned the borrowed garments from Mrs. Givens, leaving her saltwater and sand-filled clothes to launder later.