Beyond Sunrise

by Candice Proctor

  As they descended from the relative coolness of the trade-wind-bathed highlands to the jungle-choked valleys of the interior, the heat became oppressive, the very air a sultry, suffocating blanket that soon had her bathed in a sticky film of perspiration. Her hair stuck to her face, and her remaining clothes hung like a sweat-dampened, uncomfortable shroud that made every step a labor. Once, she made the mistake of resting her hand against the trunk of a nearby pandanus tree, only to let out a yelp as dozens of giant, biting ants leapt upon her. But the worst part, by far, was the mosquitoes. They whined about her in an angry, annoying cloud that would provoke a saint to madness. And India was no saint.

  “I think I’ve figured out why the inhabitants of all these islands are cannibals,” she said, batting uselessly at that endless, whining, bloodsucking assault. “They’ve been driven insane by the mosquitoes.”

  Ahead of her, Jack Ryder swung his machete at a curtain fig that had virtually obscured the path ahead, and laughed. “If they like you that much, you’d better hope we reach the coast before dusk.”

  India studied the man ahead of her through narrowed, hostile eyes. His half-open shirt and rolled-up sleeves exposed vast swathes of naked, succulent flesh, yet the mosquitoes seemed to have no interest in him at all. “When do you think we’ll reach La Rochelle?” she asked, trying hard not to sound too anxious.

  “Sometime tomorrow morning, I hope.”

  Catching the tip of her boot on the root of a vine that snaked across the path, India pitched forward, just managing to catch herself with her outflung hands before she landed flat on her face. “And precisely what do you plan to do if the Barracuda prevents Patu from being there to meet you?” she asked, gritting her teeth to hold back the most unladylike curse that threatened to erupt as she picked herself up from the thick leaf mold and brushed off a rat-sized hairy brown spider she found crawling up her tartan.

  “I can wait.” He glanced back at her. “You all right there?”

  “Quite fine, thank you. Does it occur to you, I wonder, that you might not be welcome in La Rochelle? I’ve heard unflattering things about the French commissioner on this island.”

  “Georges Lefevre? He’s not so bad.”

  Something in his voice made her look at him with interest. “Is he a friend of yours?”

  “We fought a duel once.”

  “A duel?”

  “I made a derogatory remark about Brie, and he challenged me to a duel. To defend the honor of French cheese.”

  He wasn’t making this up. She stared at him. “You fought a duel over cheese? Who won?”

  He laughed. “Georges is at least sixty now, and he weighs a good twenty stone and is blind in one eye. But he’s a hell of a swordsman. It was only sheer luck that we both passed out before any blood was spilt.”

  “You were drunk?”

  “Of course we were drunk. Do you think we’d have been fighting about cheese if we hadn’t been?”

  “I think you delight in behaving abominably,” she said, knowing she should be shocked and censorious, and trying to sound it, although she couldn’t quite keep the amusement out of her voice.

  “Why do you do that?” he asked suddenly.

  “Do what?”

  “Try so hard to sound like a sour old maid. You’re what? Twenty-four? Twenty-five?”

  “I am six-and-twenty,” she said, all sense of amusement vanishing in a blaze of anger and some other emotion she didn’t want to understand, didn’t want to feel. “And I have already given you my opinion of that expression.”

  “Then why deliberately make yourself into something you don’t want to be? You harp on about propriety and decency as if they were the gods to which you’ve sacrificed your existence, when the truth is, your own life has been pretty damned irregular.”

  She stopped short. “There has been nothing irregular about my life—”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “—and it is not only old maids who are concerned with such guiding principles as propriety and morality and decency.”

  He swung around to give her a slow, lopsided grin that brought the roguish crease to his cheek and a beguiling light to his impossibly blue eyes. “Old maids and missionaries.”

  India stared at him, and felt her heart begin to pound slowly, painfully within her. He was too near, and she was too undeniably aware of the muscled power of those bare, masculine forearms visible beneath his rolled-up sleeves, and of the way his half-opened shirt revealed the bronze, sweat-slicked expanse of his chest. She sucked in a deep breath of air, and her senses filled with the earthy intoxication of the virgin forest around them, the darkly filtered green light and heavy, exotic scent and steamy, primeval heat. She was suddenly, deeply afraid, of herself, and of the dangerous drift of her feelings for this man, and of where the increasingly easy camaraderie of their conversations might lead her heart, if she didn’t do something about it.

  “Obviously,” she said, making her voice as prim and repressive as she could, “one can’t expect a man like you to be overly familiar with the opinions and habits of respectable women.”

  “Ho. A man like me?” He put his hands on his lean hips and rocked back on his heels in a rollicking stance that seemed to accentuate everything about him that was so quintessentially, aggressively male. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know full well what I mean.” She swept one hand through the air before him in a gesture that was meant to take in every reprehensible thing about him. “From what I can see, your life is dedicated to nothing more productive than drinking and gambling and consorting with native women.”

  He was still smiling, but in a cold, dangerous way that sent a warning tingle down India’s spine. “That really scares you, does it? The thought of a white man and a dusky-skinned woman together?”

  “I don’t think fright is the word I would use to describe my reaction.”

  She swept past him, meaning to continue down the path, and felt his hand close around her arm, hauling her about to face him again. “What word would you use, then? Mmm? Disgust?” She tried to yank away from him, but he held on to her, his fingers tightening around the muscles of her upper arm. “Tell me, exactly what is so bloody disturbing about the thought of a white man lying with a native woman?”

  She stared up into his hard face, and felt her breath leave her chest in a whoosh. “It’s . . . it’s just not proper.”

  “Why not?”

  “What do you mean, why not?”

  “I don’t think it’s a particularly obtuse question.” He leaned into her, so close she found herself mesmerized by the movement of his lips as he said, “What’s so damned improper about it?”

  “The commingling of the races!” she exclaimed desperately.

  “Yes, that’s what happens when white men lie with dark women. But you still haven’t explained what’s so shocking about it.”

  She stared at him, her lips parted, her breath coming hard and fast, and found herself unable to utter a word.

  “It’s because you have some lofty, arrogant notion that the white race is superior, don’t you? You think it’s wrong for a man to pollute his fine, Anglo-Saxon blood with that of a second-rate people.”

  “What I think is wrong,” she said, enunciating her words carefully, although her voice was shaking, her entire body trembling with fury and fear and this powerful, unwanted attraction, “is for a man to use some simple, primitive creature as an object upon which to slake his lust.”

  His teeth flashed white in his tanned face as he gave a harsh laugh. “I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you that it’s often the other way around? White men being used by dark-skinned women to slake their own lust?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m not.” He studied her through narrowed, intense eyes. “That’s what really scares you, isn’t it? The terrifying idea that primitive, dark-skinned women are somehow more sensual, more sexual than white women. You just can’t stand the thought that a
white man might actually prefer a dusky, responsive woman to some rarified white lady who just lays there like a dead fish and waits for it to be over.”

  He let her go so suddenly she stumbled back, her hand coming up unconsciously to touch her arm, where he had held her. “I did not lay there like a dead fish!” she shouted after him as he swung away from her and continued on down the path.

  “Didn’t you?” he said, without looking back at her. “Hell, you were so unexcited and uninvolved, you didn’t even take off your clothes.”

  She stomped after him. “Exactly what is it you men expect a woman to get excited about, anyway? What is so sensual about being crushed and salivated over and pawed at? Maybe your dusky women are just better actresses than you give them credit for being.”

  His head tipped back, the softly filtered jungle light dappling warm and golden over his arched, tanned throat as he laughed out loud. “Oh, no,” he said, smiling still as he glanced back at her. “That’s a white woman’s trick. If an island woman doesn’t like your performance, she’ll tell you.”

  “Indeed? And have any of your island women ever told you that your performance wasn’t quite up to her expectations?”

  His smile widened. “Nope.”

  India felt a rush of impotent fury, mingling, disastrously, with the insistent promptings of a growing curiosity. “You really think you’re good, don’t you?”

  “I know I am.”

  She stopped in the middle of the overgrown trail, her hands on her hips as she watched him saunter ahead of her. “All right. Prove it.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  THAT STOPPED HIM.

  He swung about, no longer smiling. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me.” Her heart was pounding so hard and fast she was shaking, but she had no intention of backing down. “Show me how good you are.” She lifted her chin tauntingly. “Kiss me.”

  Sheathing his machete, he brought up both hands, palms forward, as if warding her off—or surrendering. “Oh, no.” His head swiveled slowly back and forth. “You’re not going to make me part of one of your bloody experiments.”

  She gave him the tightest, most supercilious smile she could summon up. “Now who’s afraid?”

  His eyes narrowing down into dangerous slits, he walked right up to her, until his thighs pressed hard against her tartan skirt and his bare, sweat-slicked chest was so close it seemed to fill her vision. Somehow, she managed to hold her ground, but she felt her smile slip as, hot and unexpectedly predatory and fiercely blue, his gaze captured hers, and held it. She watched his thin nostrils flare when he breathed, watched his lean, tanned cheek crease with a crooked smile that stirred a strange, hungry yearning deep within her.

  “All right,” he said, one hand closing behind her head to draw her toward him. She felt her breasts flatten full and aching against his solid, nearly naked chest, felt the hard proof of his arousal—shocking, thrilling, frightening—as he settled her into the cradle of his spread thighs. “Just remember you asked for it.” She knew one piercing moment of raging, blood-thundering panic. Then he dipped his head, and kissed her.

  His lips were hard and yet soft, so soft, and took hers in a magical caress of heat and tenderness and raw, savage wanting. Stunned, she opened her mouth in a helpless whimper, and he filled her, with his tongue and his fire and the intoxicating, tangy taste of him. She was drowning in his kiss, drowning in him, in the smell of him and the feel of him and the piercing, erotic intimacy of that kiss.

  Her hands clenched, once, at her sides, then came up to touch his chest, his shoulders, hesitantly at first, then tightening, her fingers digging into the hard flesh beneath the rough, damp cotton of his shirt. She felt his fist tighten in the hair at the nape of her neck, pulling her head back as he deepened the kiss, his mouth slanting roughly over hers, devouring her, stealing her breath and her sense and her consciousness of anything but the exquisite mating of his mouth with hers.

  She felt his hands come up to cradle her face, holding her as if she were something precious as he kissed her eyelids, her nose, her cheeks. “Jesus,” he whispered into her open, trembling mouth. He brushed her swollen, aching lips with his once, twice more, then let her go and took a step back.

  His eyes were dark and a little desperate, the color high on the sharp, flaring bones of his cheeks, the pulse beating hard and fast in his neck.

  She knew she should feel chagrined, that he had proven her more wrong than she could ever have imagined she might be. Yet she saw no sense of triumph on his face, only a stunned wariness that mirrored her own.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice sounding rusty, as if she hadn’t spoken for decades. “I shouldn’t have provoked you into doing that.”

  He sucked in a hitching breath that jerked his chest oddly, as if he were having a hard time getting enough air. “I don’t think either of us expected this.”

  She shook her head. She was suddenly, exquisitely embarrassed, and feeling awkward around him in a way she never had before. “We should keep moving,” she said, “if we’re to reach the coast before nightfall.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  They turned by mutual consent. It had been only a kiss, she reminded herself. Only a kiss. And yet it had changed everything, and they both knew it.

  The sun was hanging low in a clear tropical blue sky when they came to a freshwater lake that separated them from a band of palms and pandanus and parau trees, beyond which they could hear the gentle swish of the lagoon and, beyond that, the thundering of the surf against the offshore barrier reef.

  Hunkering down near the shore, India bent to scoop up handfuls of cool water and splash her face. The lake was a crystalline blue, its banks fringed with white lilies and yellow hibiscus that nodded gently in the evening breeze. Yellow and green noisy pitas and small brown swallows called sweetly from the branches of overhanging paperbarks draped with vivid green mosses and tree ferns, and India settled back on her heels, overcome by the calm, pristine beauty of the moment.

  “Well, shit,” said the man behind her.

  For the first time since that disastrous episode on the trail, India looked directly at him. He had his hands on his hips, his head tilted back as he squinted into the dazzling golden light of the westering sun. His dark, shaggy hair was tangled and worn far too long, the hard line of cheek and jaw shadowed by two days’ growth of beard, his bare, tawny torso sweat-slicked and streaked with dirt. And still she felt it, that tightening in her chest, that clenching, inner heat that caught her breath and made her want to do all sorts of wayward, forbidden things.

  Jerking her gaze away from him, India rose quickly to her feet. “We’re almost there. What could be wrong?”

  He swung his arm in a sweep that took in the sun-spangled water and gently drooping lilies and hibiscus, and the thick growth of trees beyond. “In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a lake in front of us.”

  India laughed. The lake might be wide, but they should have enough time to skirt its shores before night was upon them. “So we go around it. What’s the problem in that?”

  His strong, warm hands fell on her shoulders, twisting her around toward the south. “See those Alexandra palms and paperbark trees there, growing over those sedges and fan palms?” He pivoted her around to face the northern end of the lake. “See them there? Hear the ten billion frogs that live there croaking so happily? That’s palm swamp. You try to go through that and you’re liable to be sucked clear through to South America. It’s going to take us a good two hours to work our way around this.” He nodded toward the glowing west, his hands slipping from her shoulders so slowly that the movement was almost a caress. “And we don’t have two hours.”

  A mosquito whined in India’s ear and she swatted at it with a tired, shaky hand. “I don’t think I want to spend the night in a swamp.”

  He gave her a smile that crinkled the skin at the edges of his deep blue eyes. “Can you swim?”

  India turned to stare out
over the sparkling clean water. She thought of what it would be like, to strip off her hot, sweat-soaked clothes and slip her tired naked body beneath those cool, gentle waves. A near-desperate yearning rose up within her, a yearning she ruthlessly squashed. “When I was trekking cross-country in Malay, we came to a very large lake in the foothills. It was essentially impossible to go around it, due to the verticality of the slopes rising up on the other side, so my guide built a kind of a raft out of banana stems.”

  He fixed her with a hard, steady stare. “Banana stems.”

  “Yes. Trussed together with vines. I sat on top while my guide swam and pushed the vessel from behind.” She paused as a thought occurred to her. “You can swim, can’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, I think it should be fairly easily accomplished. I did get wet in the crossing, but when we reached the other side, my guide lit a fire by rubbing one end of a stick with great rapidity into a hole made in a flat piece of driftwood. As soon as the sawdust began to smoke, he added dried leaves, then swung the wood around his head until it burst into flame.”

  “I think I’ll stick to matches,” he said dryly, and slipped his machete from its sheath.

  While Ryder cut down the banana stalks, India gathered vines that she stripped of leaves for the lashings. She was helping him tie the last stalk in place when something made her look up to find him watching her with an odd, intense expression sharpening his features.

  “What?” she asked, a shy smile trembling on her lips. “What is it?”

  He shook his head, and grinned. “I think we’re ready.” Stretching to his feet, he hauled off his shirt.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, her voice ending in a squeak.

  Spreading the shirt out on the grass, he pulled off first one boot, then the other. “Ever try to swim in clothes?”

  “No. Why? Is it difficult?”

  Dumping the boots in the middle of his shirt, he pulled off his socks, and glanced up at her. “Did this Malay guide of yours keep his clothes on?”