India had never considered herself an impulsive person. But she could not have said what it was that caused her to stand and walk toward him. It was not a conscious decision. It was a need. A need to understand this man, whose life had become so unexpectedly, so fundamentally entwined with her own.
Chapter Nineteen
SHE COULD SEE him standing at the water’s edge, his body taut as he watched her walk out to him. The air was soft and warm and sweetly scented with brine, the sea a dark, star-glittered presence that stretched beyond tomorrow.
“Why don’t you ever sleep?” India asked, pausing only a short distance from him.
A flicker of a smile lightened his eyes. “I do sometimes.”
“It’s because of what happened on Rakaia. Isn’t it?”
He didn’t answer her, but she knew from the tightening of his jaw, the cording of the muscles in his throat as he swallowed, that it was true.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me how your wife died.”
He turned, his gaze sweeping the distant line of breaker-shattering reefs. “You don’t want to hear it.”
“Tell me.”
He swung his head to look at her over his shoulder, his gaze narrow and piercing. “You want to hear? You want to hear how three sailors from the Lady Juliana raped an island woman so viciously that she died?”
India felt a sick, hollow dread settle heavily within her. “Not . . . not your wife?”
“No. Another village girl. But the Rakaians handled the situation badly. They thought the island was theirs, you see. They thought they had the right to exact their own justice on these visitors who had broken the island’s laws.”
“They killed them?”
“Yes.”
It would have been the penalty for such a crime in England, of course. But the captain of the Lady Juliana wouldn’t have seen it that way, India knew. He’d have seen three British sailors murdered by hostile natives. “The captain . . .” Her voice was a scratchy, broken whisper. She thought, too late, that he’d been right: she didn’t want to hear this. “What did the captain do?”
Something flared in Jack’s eyes, something that blazed up, deadly, then grew cold and hard. “He lined up thirty of his men and ordered them to open fire on the village. Men. Women. Children. It didn’t matter. Those who could ran for the edge of the forest. Only, Titana couldn’t run very fast. She was a month away from delivering our second child.” He drew in a long, ragged breath, then let it out in a rush. “She was eight months heavy with child, and they shot her down like a rabid dog. Like she was nothing. Because to them, she was nothing.”
“I don’t believe it,” India said, although even as the words left her lips, she knew what he’d told her was true. She simply didn’t want to believe it.
He shifted to face her, his hard gaze locking with hers. “Why can’t you believe it, India? For the same reason you can’t believe that thirty years ago in the Subcontinent, a British squadron strapped the Sepoy rebels they’d captured to the mouths of cannons and literally blew them to hell? For the same reason you can’t believe the good, God-fearing Puritan colonists of New England had a nasty habit of surrounding native villages and burning their inhabitants alive?” He took a step toward her, his eyes blazing. “What do you believe? That the world is divided—simplistically, dangerously—into good and evil? That the white men represent the force of civilization and good, which means the darker races of this world must be barbaric and evil?”
She stood her ground, although her heart was beating so hard and fast, her chest ached. “You are wrong about me. I have seen the ruins of the once-great cities of Central and South America that were laid waste by the brutality of conquerors from Europe. I have walked the mosaic floors of Arab homes that were old when Englishmen still wore uncured animal skins and roasted people in primitive trials by ordeal.” She brought her hands up together, as if in prayer. “Don’t you see? One of the reasons I am driven to write is because I want to try to dispel all the comfortable delusions people like to live with, to challenge their preconceptions and prejudices, to help those who are unable to travel understand the other peoples with whom we share this world. You can accuse me of many things, but don’t you dare accuse me of cultural elitism.”
The air seemed to echo with the thrum of her emotion, mingling with the distant crash of the breakers and the slosh of the surf at their feet. She watched as a strange, unexpected smile curled the edges of his lips. “Except, of course, when it comes to cannibals.”
She was surprised into a shaky laugh. “Yes. Although perhaps by the time I sit down to write this book, I will have come to a more philosophical, less personal perspective of anthropophagy.”
He reached for her, his hands closing over both of hers to draw her closer. At some time, he had put his trousers and shirt back on, although he wore the shirt unbuttoned and loose, so that it flapped in the warm breeze. She was intensely aware of a haunted, almost desperate glow in his eyes, and the way the moonlight glazed the dark sinews of his throat, his collarbone rising and falling with each breath. “I think it would have been better,” he said, his voice a husky whisper, “if I had continued to think of you as an arrogant, self-righteous Scotswoman, convinced of the superiority of her race and scornful of any unfamiliar culture.”
“Better why?” she asked, her hands trembling within his, although she made no attempt to remove them. “So that you could continue to keep me at a distance?”
He gathered her hair in his hands and lifted it from her neck before letting it fall down her back again in a soft, sensuous tumble. A dimple slashed one lean cheek. “And here I thought I was trying to seduce you.”
“That’s just biology.” She touched his beard-roughened cheek, gently, with her fingertips. It was something she’d been wanting to do for what seemed like forever, although she’d resisted the impulse. Now it seemed the most natural thing in the world. “You blame yourself, don’t you?” she said quietly. “You blame yourself for your wife’s death. Hers, and all those who died with her.”
His hands stilled in her hair, his eyes narrowing, his nostrils flaring as he drew in a quick breath. “Wouldn’t you?”
It would have been easy to say, No, of course not, to tell him that the blame was not his, that responsibility for that dark day lay with the captain of the Lady Juliana and the men who had followed his order. But India knew something of what it was like to bear a burden of guilt, and so she said, instead, “I don’t know.”
“I think you do.” A ghost of a smile softened the fierceness of his features. “I might blame myself for Titana’s death, but you blame yourself for your mother’s life.” He shifted his hands to her shoulders, holding her close when she would have stepped back in surprise. “You think that if she hadn’t had you, your mother would have left your father. That without you tying her to that cold, narrow house in Edinburgh, she could have had the life of adventuring she’d always dreamt of.”
“How?” India whispered hoarsely, her gaze wide and frightened as she searched his face. “How could you know?”
“Because we’re alike, you and I,” he said softly, his hands moving over her shoulders in a gentle, caring caress. “We’ve simply found different ways of punishing ourselves.”
She watched, breathless, as the warm tropical breeze ruffled the dark hair at his forehead. She watched his head dip, his features taut with a hunger she understood. His eyes looked as black and wild as the sea, and for one, dangerous moment, she almost fell into them. Then he brushed her parted lips with the pad of his thumb, and said, “You need to go back now. Before biology gets the better of us both.”
She could have stayed. A part of her wanted to stay, to taste again the wickedness of his kiss, to know the magic of his hands and the secrets that his body could show hers. But everything she’d told him before was still true, and so were the other things, the things she hadn’t told him and that he hadn’t guessed. And so she turned and walked away, and left him there, wi
th the wind, and the sea, and his past.
The passage through the barrier reef off La Rochelle was wide and easy, the lagoon opening out into an arcing, white-sand-rimmed bay that formed a natural harbor. The air blew off the sea cool and salty-sweet, the high feathery fronds of the palms overhead shifting lazily with the trades. Backed as it was by a thickly overgrown series of low foothills that rose lush and green above the clear, vivid turquoise waters of the bay, the village could have been beautiful.
It wasn’t.
Pausing upwind of the settlement, Jack let his gaze drift over the rotting lumber hovels roofed with rusting sheets of imported iron that straggled away from the beach. Lacking both the shabby elegance of an English colony and the neat prosperity that characterized the German settlements in the Pacific, the French trading post of La Rochelle was simply squalid and sad, and half-obscured by indiscriminate piles of rotting garbage that included what looked like the bloated corpse of a man, floating facedown just offshore.
Jack saw India’s eyes widen as she stared at the corpse gently rising and falling with the placid surf, but she didn’t mention it. All she said was, “Patu isn’t here.”
Jack squinted out over the sun-sparkled harbor. A battered old sloop rode at anchor on the far side of the bay, and some half a dozen native outrigger canoes lay propped up on forked branches stuck in the white coral sand. But other than that, the bay was deserted. “He will be,” Jack said.
It was close to midday by now, and blazingly hot. Anyone with any sense had long ago disappeared into the lavender-colored shadows of the mangoes or one of the ugly plank buildings strung out along the bush track that passed for the settlement’s main street. He knew that. And yet . . .
“What is it?” she asked, her brows drawing together as she studied his face. “You think something’s wrong, don’t you?”
He shook his head, his gaze lifting to the walled French compound that had been sited, with deliberate intimidation, at the top of a low rise. “I’m not sure. It just seems . . . different.”
“Why? Weren’t there dead men floating in the bay the last time you were here?”
He glanced over at her, and smiled. “You’re going to put that in your book, aren’t you?”
“Of course,” she said, her sensible boots kicking up loose sand as she set off down the beach again. Her voice drifted back to him. “Right after the part about the cannibals.”
His smile fading slowly, Jack watched her walk away from him, her back straight and tall, her head held high, her knapsack with its precious notebook gripped securely to her side. He watched the sun warm the curve of her face, glint in the chestnut highlights of her hair, and he knew a surge of regret, an unexpected and baffling desire to reach out and hold this moment before it could slip away. Hold her in his life.
It was a strange, useless thought. He was a renegade, a hunted fugitive doomed to a short, violent life spent alone and on the run. While she . . . she roamed the world freely, deliberately. And while Jack yearned, secretly, desperately, for a home and a family, he knew that India was determined never to tie herself down to any place, anyone . . . any man.
The call of a seabird drew his attention, briefly, to the sun-dazzled bay, where a tern sailed low and graceful on an updraft. Jack watched it come in, its wings spread wide as it glided to water level. Then he started down the beach, toward the acacia-shaded path that led to the French compound.
Chapter Twenty
BUILT CRUDELY OF saplings bound together with vines, the gates to the French commissioner’s compound hung open and untended in the thick, sun-baked air. Once, the high, spiked walls had provided a refuge for European traders and missionaries in times of unrest. Now the gates were used mainly at night, their purpose less to protect the lives of the compound’s inhabitants than to guard their property. The island’s Melanesian peoples, who judged a man’s worth not by the number of possessions he accumulated but by the generosity with which he gave his bounty away, had never quite been able to bend their minds around to understanding the white men’s possessive attitude toward things.
With India at his side, Jack paused in the compound’s open, muddy courtyard, his gaze flicking from the tangled, rioting ruin of Georges Lefevre’s once well-tended garden, to the empty, fly-buzzed blue shadows of the main bungalow’s bougainvillea-draped veranda. For a moment, he turned, his eyes narrowing as he stared, again, at the nearly deserted lagoon below the settlement, where a scrawny native dog could be seen foraging for scraps on the refuge-strewn beach.
“What is it?” India asked, touching his arm.
He shook his head. “I don’t know.” Crossing the court and the untidy, overgrown garden beyond it, he climbed the wooden steps to the bungalow’s veranda two at a time. “Georges?” he called. In the hot, heavy silence, his footsteps echoed hollowly. “Georges? Ou est tu?”
A whisper of white muslin lightened the dark, open doorway before him as an unexpected but wholly familiar scent came to him, the scent of lilies of the valley and talcum powder; a European woman’s fragrance, mingling oddly with the tropical scents of frangipani and gardenia, honeysuckle and stephanotis wafting up from the rioting garden below.
“Hello, Françine.” Jack paused at the edge of the veranda, one hand still resting on the weathered wood of the rail. He was intensely conscious of the presence of India in the garden below, her gaze riveted on the petite, exquisitely fair Frenchwoman who came to trail one hand down Jack’s arm in a familiar, almost intimate caress.
“Jacques,” said Françine Poirot. “You look as if you’ve spent the last month in the jungles.” Her small, turned-up nose crinkled. “And you smell like it, as well, mon ami.”
Jack caught her hand in his, then let it go. “What are you doing here, Françine?”
“You did not know?” She pursed her full lips into a pouty moue that had once heated Jack’s blood, but now made him feel only wary and uncomfortable. “Pierre is Takaku’s new commissioner.”
Jack let his gaze drift, again, around the compound that was not, he now realized, as deserted as he had thought. Two gendarmes had appeared near the gates; another waited, silent and hard-jawed, at the end of the veranda.
“I suppose I should congratulate Pierre, but commiserate with you. Pepeete might be a backwater, but it’s better than this.” In the courtyard below, India McKnight had not moved, but he knew from her tense, still posture that she was as aware as he of the gendarmes, and all the implications of their presence.
Françine shook her head, as if overcome by sadness. “You should not have come here, mon ami.”
“I could leave,” Jack said amicably.
“Actually, I don’t think you could.”
Another gendarme appeared from around the side of the bungalow, then another. “Five men,” said Jack. “Pierre must think I’m dangerous.”
“He knows you are.”
“I have no quarrel with the French.”
“Non. But there were some Englishmen here this morning, a Captain Simon Granger and his lieutenant, a fiercely passionate young man who takes himself far too seriously. They say you are a wanted man.”
“Wanted by the English. That’s nothing new.” Jack brought his gaze back to the Frenchwoman’s delicate features. “Since when have the French turned themselves into Her Britannic Majesty’s policemen?”
“There’s a diplomatic revolution under way in this world,” said a heavily accented, masculine voice. “Had you not heard?”
Shifting slowly, Jack met the gaze of the man who had appeared in the bungalow’s open doorway. He was a slim, darkly handsome man, Captain Pierre Poirot, with fierce eyes and an aristocratic nose and a perfectly proportioned physique. It wasn’t until he limped across the veranda floor to pause behind Françine that it became apparent he stood only a few inches taller than his incredibly dainty wife.
Jack gave Takaku’s new commissioner a tight smile. “Cheeky of the Germans, isn’t it, to decide at this late date in history to unite
, and upset the Franco-Anglican domination of the world?”
A muscle bunched along the other man’s clenched jaw. “Where you made your mistake, Monsieur Ryder, was in leaving Neu Brenen. No German gunboat here.”
Jack swung to gaze out over the palm-fringed, sun-spangled turquoise waters of the lagoon. “No Royal Navy corvette, either.”
“The Barracuda will be back.” The Frenchman smiled. “After I’ve arrested you.”
Jack raised one eyebrow in mild inquiry. “On what charge?”
“The forced and violent abduction of a British travel writer.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said India in her crisp, Scots-accented voice. “Obviously, there’s been some sort of misunderstanding. Do I look as if I have been kidnapped?”
Turning, Jack watched her climb the stairs, her sensible, lace-up boots treading firmly on the plank steps. Her hair might be bound in a simple plait secured at the end by a twisted vine, her Expedition Outfit might be ripped and muddied and reduced in volume and propriety by well-intentioned theft, but it would take more than cannibals and jungles and Aussie renegades, Jack thought with a private smile, to diminish the powerful, no-nonsense presence of Miss India McKnight. She had her head held high, her piercing gaze fixed on the Frenchman. As she reached the veranda, it was Pierre Poirot who swallowed hard, and took a step back.
“As a matter of fact, mademoiselle,” said the commissioner, his eyes widening as he assimilated the wonder of that tattered, jungle-stained tartan skirt and belted shirt, “you do.”
“Nonsense.” She planted herself directly in front of the French commissioner; the top of his head came up just shy of her shoulder. “I did have a spot of trouble with the cannibals on the southern end of the island, but Mr. Ryder acted the part of the rescuer, not the abductor.”
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