He turned his head then, and caught her watching him. The fire crackled and flared between them. The warm wind sighed. “I haven’t thanked you,” he said suddenly.
She shook her head, not understanding. “For what?”
“For staying with me, back there at the gorge. For saving my life. Thank you.”
She felt a strange smile tug at her lips. “So now we’re even.”
An answering gleam lit his eyes. “Are we?”
“I think so.” She held her hands out to the fire, although she was no longer cold. “Tell me about your ship,” she said, her gaze carefully fixed on her spread hands. “When it went down and you were blamed. How did it happen?”
Whatever comfortable camaraderie had developed between them was gone in an instant, leaving a chill so palpable that she shivered, feeling suddenly intrusive and insensitive. He stood abruptly, the dancing flames throwing dark shadows across the hard features of his face. “You’d better get some sleep.”
She stayed where she was, her head falling back as she looked up at him, her heart surprisingly heavy with regret. “And you?”
“Don’t worry about me,” he said, and walked off into the night, leaving her alone with the fire and her thoughts, and a strange, inner yearning that she came to realize was something she’d always sworn she never suffered from.
Loneliness.
Chapter Fourteen
FROM WHERE JACK sat, the distant sea was an undulating, moon-shivered expanse of midnight blue that seemed to stretch out, empty, forever. But he knew it was an illusion. There were thousands of landmasses out there, including one small jewel of an island named Rakaia, its volcanic slopes and fertile valleys cloaked in luxuriant tangles of green, its reef-sheltered lagoon teeming with a life-giving abundance. If he closed his eyes, he could see it, see its palm trees dancing in a warm wind, see Titana’s beautiful, beloved face, so pale and deadly still.
Usually, Jack was careful not to close his eyes.
It was at night when the memories came crowding in on him, bittersweet memories of peace and love and laughter, and a soul-deep grief that haunted him still. When they grew unbearable, he drowned those memories with alcohol, or numbed himself with kava. But sometimes, as now, he forced himself to look back, to remember. And the cost was, inevitably, this blinding, wracking pain that distorted his vision and pounded through his head like a self-imposed penance, a kind of mental flagellation that left him weakened but cleansed.
He tipped back his head, his eyes open wide as he stared up at the star-filled darkness. Ten years. Ten years was a long time to run, to hide from the past. He found himself wondering, idly, about India McKnight, about what her reaction would have been if he had answered her, if he had told her the truth about what he had done. And then he wondered at himself, for he was not usually given to thoughts of that kind.
The pain in his head was growing worse, making sleep impossible. He sucked in a deep breath of warm, tropically scented air, then let it out slowly in a sigh. It was going to be a long night.
After Jack Ryder left her, alone beside the fire, India decided to haul out her pencil and set to work jotting down notes in her clothbound book until he returned. But she’d written no more than half a page when her head began to feel heavy, and the words on the paper blurred. Her pencil slipped from oddly nerveless fingers. She thought about retrieving it. Instead, she laid her head down on her open book, and slept.
She awoke to a chorus of exotic birdsong and the steamy golden heat of the rising sun. Sudden memory of where she was, and why, jerked her up into a sitting position. She threw a quick glance around, and found that she was still alone.
A hideous, heart-stopping, breath-stealing fear bloomed within her, the fear that Jack Ryder had abandoned her here in the middle of this sodden, dripping rain forest, within uncomfortable proximity to any number of cannibals, practicing and Christianized.
She rose shakily to her feet, her back pressed against the smooth stone wall of the mountain behind her, one splayed hand against her heaving chest as she stared out over the twittering, swaying, intimidating mass of jungle green that separated her from the tiny French outpost on the lagoon-sheltered coast far, far below. “Oh my God,” she whispered.
A cheery whistle warbled vaguely to the tune of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” split the exotically scented air, then ended abruptly as Jack Ryder materialized out of the dark green gloom. “I thought you might like some breakfast,” he said, swinging a stalk of bananas down from his shoulder. “They’re a bit green, but the rats get them when they’re completely ripe.” Knife in hand, he hunkered down on the far side of the dead fire, then paused to slant a lazy grin up at her when she stayed where she was, frozen by an odd combination of relief and indignation. “What’s the matter, then? Did you think I’d run off and left you to fend for yourself?”
She pushed away from the rock face and tried to act nonchalant, which wasn’t easy when her hands were still shaking. She shoved them behind her back. “Why didn’t you?”
He settled on his heels, his eyes narrowing as he stared up at her. “You’re still wearing my shirt, remember?”
She’d forgotten that. Running her hands self-consciously up the sleeves of the man’s shirt that covered her arms, she turned to the tumble of surrounding boulders where she’d laid out her clothes to dry last night. Her boots and stockings were still there, and her blouse, and her chemise and drawers. But her camisole, corset, and every single one of her petticoats were gone.
She spun to face him. “What have you done with my clothes?”
He sat at his ease with one hip propped on the edge of a rocky ledge, a half-eaten banana in his hand. “Reduced their weight.”
A wave of impotent fury threatened to swamp her. “You had no right.”
He took another bite of his banana, and let out a sound that was halfway between a grunt and a low laugh. “You’ll still be wearing twice as much as you ought to be.”
“As much as I ought? I’ll have you know that when I fell into an animal pit in East Africa, I would have been killed if the thick, multiple layers of my clothing hadn’t kept me from being impaled by the sharpened stakes at the base of the trap.”
“Yeah? Well, the islanders here don’t dig animal traps, so you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. It’s a wonder you don’t have a heatstroke, tramping through the jungles of the world wearing what must be a goodly percentage of one day’s productive capacity of Britain’s mills on your back all at the same time like that.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” India snatched up what was left of her clothing, and retired behind the nearest large boulder to put them on with quick, angry jerks. It said something about the effects of her forced intimacy with this man over the past twenty-four hours that she did so without a second thought.
His voice reached her from the far side of the rocks. “Believe me, when we get down into the lowlands, you’re going to thank me.”
India yanked her chemise on over her head. “I doubt it.”
“Well, let’s put it this way: you would if you were honest.”
“If you knew me better, Mr. Ryder, you would realize that I am always scrupulously honest. And that I never accept heat or discomfort as an excuse for abandoning the trappings of civilized deportment and behavior.”
“Jesus. You remind me of someone I used to know.”
“Who’s that?” India asked, wriggling her split tartan skirt up over her drawers. “Your mother?”
“No.” He paused. “Simon Granger.”
In the act of buckling her belt, India looked up, then cinched it tight. “I am ready,” she said, and stepped from behind the rock.
He straightened slowly. He didn’t say anything, but a strange smile played around the edges of his lips, deepening the dimple in his cheek and bringing a soft light to his eyes.
“What is it?” she demanded, resisting the urge to cross her arms over her full, corsetless breasts.
“Nothing. Here.” He held out a banana, his smile broadening to show his teeth. “You’d better have something to eat.”
They followed an old, overgrown fey trail that wound along the crests of ridges of gray granite darkened by lichens and only haphazardly shaded by carabeen trees and pines undergrown with mountain palms and native rhododendrons and dracophyllums, all twisted and stunted by the endless force of the trade winds. The air here was clean and clear, the view out over the sun-warmed massed green of the lowland rain forest and the sparkling, purple-blue tropical seas beyond so impossibly gorgeous that it took India’s breath.
“Need to rest?” Jack Ryder asked, glancing back at her as her steps faltered.
“No,” India said with a smile, and brought up one hand to catch back the hair blowing loose around her face. “It’s just . . . beautiful.”
“Yes, it is,” he said softly. Something in his voice made her glance over at him, but by then he’d already turned his back to her, and they pushed on.
As they dropped down into the foothills, the undergrowth of palms and ferns gradually became more lush, the smooth-barked, buttressed trunks of the satinash and carabeens and cedars stretching high overhead to form an increasingly thick canopy of intertwining green. For a time, the trail they followed ran beside a mountain stream that sometimes whispered softly over smooth jumbled stones, sometimes tumbled away into short thundering waterfalls that filled the air with a sweet, cooling mist.
It was beside one of these waterfalls that they paused to eat, the clear, calm pool at its base shaded by filmy ferns and orchids and deep green mosses that almost hid the remnants of an ancient stone house platform built at the top of the stream bank. The bamboo-and-grass hut it had once supported had long since vanished back into the tropical growth of wait-a-whiles and pepper vines and creeping figs that rampaged over it.
India had noticed several such platforms as they worked their way down from the highlands. Now, nibbling absently at a papaya plucked from a nearby tree, she drew out her notebook and began making a quick sketch of the abandoned ruin.
“Where did they go, do you think?” she asked, her attention all for her sketch. “The people who built these stone foundations, and the fey trail we’ve been following?”
“I think we met a lot of them in that cave.”
She glanced up to find him leaning against a boulder, his head tipping back as he drank deeply from their canteen. “They were the victims of warfare, you think?”
He lowered the tin container, and shrugged. “Some, maybe. But disease is more likely. They say there were no mosquitoes in these islands before the white man brought them. No elephantiasis. No malaria. No venereal disease or influenza.”
“A Garden of Eden,” India said softly. “Where people ate each other.”
He let out his breath in a huff of what might have been laughter. “You just can’t seem to get past that, can you?”
India’s pencil slashed across the page in broad, agitated strokes. “I have always sought to understand and sympathize with the various cultures I encounter on my travels. But I draw the line at people who want to eat me.”
“Maybe. But think about this,” he said. “Those natives who captured you, they might have been planning to eat you, but it would never occur to them to let anyone in their tribe go hungry. All their food—everything—is shared equally. Yet when I was in London, I used to see rich, fat men in silk waistcoats and gold watch chains walk right past ragged women and children who were starving in the streets. Starving to death. In the midst of so much wealth and plenty.” He pushed away from the rock. “And we call these people savages.”
India sat silent, her notebook forgotten in her hands, and watched him stoop beside the pool to refill the canteen. And it occurred to her, suddenly, that she had seriously underestimated this man when she’d dismissed him as a careless, heedless renegade.
Replacing the canteen’s stopper, he rose to his feet. “Are you about finished there? I would like to reach La Rochelle sometime before the monsoons hit.”
She smiled softly, for the monsoon season was still a month or more away. “What makes you think you’ll be safe in La Rochelle, anyway?” she asked, tucking her notebook back into her knapsack as they started downhill again.
He shrugged. “This is a French island. Which means that unless the Barracuda is willing to provoke an international incident, their ability to act here is limited. And international incidents aren’t good for a navy man’s career.”
“They do marvelous things for the sale of travel books, though.”
He glanced back at her and grinned. “What made you decide to choose this way of life, anyway? I mean, traveling around the world by yourself, writing travelogues.”
“When I was a little girl, I wanted to grow up to be Marco Polo.”
He laughed softly. “Now, that’s a rare ambition. How did you manage to come so close to achieving it?”
India stepped carefully over a fallen log. “My aunt was married to a man in the British foreign service. After my mother died, I went to Egypt, to live with them.” Her father had sent her to live with them—sent her away from him, away from her home, away from everything and everyone she’d ever loved, but she wasn’t going to tell Jack Ryder that. “I seized every available opportunity to explore the country, and I wrote about my experiences in a book I called Up the Nile to the Valley of the Kings. It was successful enough to enable me to finance an expedition to Russia.”
“In the Land of the Tsars.”
She was so surprised, she drew up short. “How did you know?”
“I read it,” he said, not pausing. “You were young, to be traveling by yourself.”
“I was eighteen.” She moved to catch up with him. “My aunt and uncle were childless, and they’d never been particularly happy about having me come to live with them. I think they were relieved when I wanted to go off by myself.” While her father . . . her father hadn’t even responded to her letter telling him she was going.
“It seems an unsettled, lonely way of life,” he said, his attention all for the vines in their path.
She looked at him in surprise, for it was not at all the sort of thing she’d have expected a man like him to say. “You’re alone. And relatively unsettled.”
He let out a sharp laugh. “I’m a wanted man. Besides . . .” He paused to dash his shirtsleeve across his forehead. “I have Patu.”
“Why is he with you, if he’s not your son?”
He gave a careless shrug that struck India, watching him, as entirely too calculated to be casual. “I woke up one morning after drinking kava, and found him piloting my yacht for me. He said I needed someone to look after me, and I couldn’t seem to convince him that I didn’t.”
The airy way in which it was said didn’t fool India. The man could easily have rid himself of the half-European, half-Polynesian boy if he’d really wanted to. The fact that he hadn’t said something about the kind of person he was, something that made her look at him in a way she didn’t want.
India watched the man ahead of her, watched the way the iridescent green light filtering down through the leafy canopy above danced over his broad, strong shoulders, watched the way his head fell back, his tanned cheek dimpling into a fleeting smile as he studied the vivid green and yellow parrot flitting through the branches of the giant satinash overhead. And she found herself wondering at what point in the past twenty-four hours she’d gone from fantasizing about seeing this man hang to hoping he somehow managed to get away.
She said, “Even if you escape the Barracuda this time, they’re not going to give up trying to capture you. You know that, don’t you?”
He glanced back at her, his smile broadening into a devil-damn-the-world grin. “I know it.”
“It doesn’t worry you?” It would terrorize her, the knowledge that someone was after her, waiting for her, watching for her to make one unwary step.
He shrugged. “What’s the point in worrying about it?�
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“You could do something about it.”
He gave a low, harsh laugh. “Like what? Try to prove my innocence?”
“Could you?” she asked on an unexpectedly emotional exhalation of breath.
For one, tense instant, he paused in the path ahead of her, his back held rigid, his fist tightening around the handle of his upraised machete. Then he let the machete fall, his shoulders rolling into that careless shrug that was so un-British, and so much a part of who this man was. She expected him to say it would be too much trouble, or maybe that it was useless to try to change the opinion of those in power. Instead, he said, “I’m not innocent.”
It was only then that India realized the full truth, that not only did she want this man to escape, she wanted him to be innocent of the terrible thing of which he’d been accused. Somewhere between that tension-filled moment on the edge of Wairopa Gorge, when she’d watched him sacrifice his own chance to get away rather than destroy the bridge and kill the man on it, and now, she’d somehow convinced herself that he hadn’t done it, that he wasn’t responsible for the sinking of that ship and the death of all those men.
And as she followed Jack Ryder down into the dripping, sultry, insect-buzzed heat of the lowland rain forest, she realized also that a part of her didn’t believe what he’d just told her. A man who would risk his own life to save a woman he barely knew and didn’t even like was not the kind of man who would deliberately, knowingly send a shipload of his comrades to their deaths.
Something had happened all those years ago, something dark and secret and shameful. But she couldn’t believe that this man had committed what amounted to mass murder.
She refused to believe it.
By early afternoon, India had to admit—at least to herself—that she found the absence of all those layers of petticoats and the close confines of her corset a relief.
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