“In case something should happen to me.” He turned his head to look at her. Since she was lying so close to him that their hips touched, he didn’t have to turn his head far, and when he did, their noses nearly collided. He leaned back a little. It was important that he made her understand.
“They’re going to look for us, Payton. If I know the Frenchman, he’ll spend his every waking moment combing the area, until he finds us. That’s why it’s important for you to know how to take care of yourself.”
She turned those eyes upon him, those eyes that were sometimes green and sometimes gold, and sometimes, like now, the deepest, most impenetrable mahogany.
“I know how to take care of myself,” she informed him—mildly enough, for her. “Besides, you make it sound as if you think that if they found us, they’d only take you, and let me alone.”
“If we plan this out right, that’s exactly what will happen. I’ve hidden the longboat, so there’s no chance of them spotting it from the shoals. And if we stick to making fires at night, and deep enough inland, we’ve got a good chance. But just in case they stumble upon us anyway, I’ll distract them, and you hide.”
She laughed, a happy, burbling sound. It sounded familiar, and he realized that the spring, bubbling up from the earth, made much the same sort of sound. “Where?” Payton wanted to know. “Where am I going to hide, for heaven’s sake? We’re on an island, Drake, in case you didn’t notice.”
He pointed to the top of the rocks, where the water arced out, sounding like her laughter. “You could climb up there,” he said. “And lie down flat. They wouldn’t think to look there.”
Payton followed his gaze. “Well,” she said. “I could. But I won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not going to sit up there and watch them kill you.” She turned her attention back to the pool beneath them. “Oh, there’s one, Drake.”
She meant to distract him, he knew. She was good at that, at changing the subject when it happened to displease her. But then he looked, and saw that she hadn’t been lying. A great gray fish of some sort was peering up at them from the mossy depths. It looked plump and defenceless and eminently edible.
“Right,” he said, hefting the spear. “Now pay attention, Payton. The point is not to let the fish know you’re there. Then … wham! Straight through the eyes.” He demonstrated the technique, using the ivory-handled dagger, which he’d tied to the end of a long stick. “You see? You want to throw from the shoulder, not the elbow. Now you try. See if you can get him.”
“Drake,” Payton said, still looking at the fish, and not at him, “what was it that you did that got the Frenchman so angry at you?”
He lowered his spear. “You don’t know?”
She shrugged. “No. Every time I ask, Ross just says it’s a long story.”
He cleared his throat. “Well, he’s right. It’s a very long, very boring story.”
And he couldn’t believe his luck that none of her brothers had told it to her. It was a bit demoralizing, he was discovering, being with a woman who knew absolutely everything there was to know about him … or at least thought she did. He did not need her to know that he’d frequented brothels. That had been a long time ago. He was a changed man. She had seen to that.
“And you really think he’ll try to come after us?” she asked. “The Frenchman, I mean.”
“Probably. That’s why the next time you build a fire, it’d be best not to do it on the beach.”
She looked up at him sourly. “I only built a fire there because I thought you were cold, and you were too heavy for me to move, you bloody oaf.”
It occurred to Drake that most women who claimed to be in love did not refer to the object of their affections as a bloody oaf. But their relationship was still very new, so he thought he’d let it pass.
“I’m not criticizing you,” Drake said. “What you did was very brave.” He reached down and swept a curl of russet hair from her eyes. “And very foolish.”
“I know,” she said happily. “Look what it got me. I’m ruined.”
She could not have said it in more delighted tones, but still, it bothered him to hear her say it at all. Oh, there was no doubting she was contented as could be. Dressed in nothing more than her newly laundered shirt, her bare feet swinging loosely behind her, she was the very picture of a well-loved, well-fed woman. Still, he could not help feeling that he had failed her, and in more than one way. He could remember nothing of her daring rescue of him. She had told him that he’d been semiconscious for part of it. He could not recall even a single moment of it. That was unforgivable. He ought to have been at least lucid enough to urge her to leave him behind. He ought to have ordered her to make her break for freedom without being burdened by a large and only partially conscious beast who, to pay her back for her unselfishness, was only going to ravage her like some kind of animal every time she turned around.
How could he help it, though? He hadn’t wanted it to be like this—he’d wanted to do things properly, to court her, to woo her …
Instead, it seemed as if he couldn’t even look at her without having to control an overpowering urge to throw himself on top of her.
“Drake,” she said, dropping a hand down to the water to stir it a little, frightening away the fish he’d been hoping to spear for supper. For someone who’d been so bloodthirsty a few nights before, she seemed strangely pacifistic now. She wouldn’t let him kill any of the parrots, depriving them of the possibility of roasted poultry. She even protested when he offered to slit the throat of a turtle that had crawled by, declaring she hadn’t any taste at all for eggs. If she thought that after a month on mash and water, he was going to be content to live on bananas and love …
Well, maybe she was right.
“What?” he asked, beginning to feel as lazy as she did. It had been no small feat, moving that longboat into the undergrowth. The thing had to have weighed several hundred pounds, at least.
“Do you suppose Becky Whitby will go back to England and claim to be your widow anyway? Even though they don’t know for certain you’re dead?”
Becky Whitby? Who cared about Becky Whitby! There were so many more important things they needed to discuss! Like what they were going to name their children, for instance.
“I don’t know. She’s welcome to try. I imagine that by now, your family must have every ship in His Majesty’s navy out looking for you. If they get to the
Rebecca
before the
Rebecca
gets to England, all bets are off.”
She glanced at him. “Do you think they’d know to look for us here?” she asked, and there was just the tiniest trace of worry in her tone. “My brothers, I mean.”
Drake nodded. “If they have any reason at all to believe we’re still alive, they’ll find us, Payton. Don’t worry.”
She smiled at him reassuringly. “Oh, I’m not worried,” she said.
It was odd, but he had a feeling that she really wasn’t—not about being found, anyway. Could it be that she was as delighted as he was by the way the fates had thrown them together? Or was she simply so confident—so blindly, so childishly confident—in his abilities that she could not imagine anything but that they would be rescued? The thought staggered him a little. He was used to commanding, used to issuing orders and having them followed. But he had never, to his knowledge, inspired that kind of confidence in any of his men. It made even less sense that Payton would feel that way about him, when she had been the one who’d rescued them, she had been the one who’d brought them here, to safety.
He didn’t feel as if he could go on basking in the adoring light in her eyes much longer. It wasn’t her fault. He wasn’t blaming her. But he couldn’t help half-wishing that the Frenchman would find them, and that he could take out some of his frustrations on the pirate’s handsome face.
“Look, Payton,” he said, climbing to his feet. Unlike her, he’d pulled on his trousers. He wasn’t quite as comfortable with his own nudity as she was. Well, he had more that needed covering. “I’m going to go and try to find some dry wood, so we can build a fire. You stay here, and if that great gray fellow swims over here again, jab him. All right?”
She took the spear from him obediently enough, but then she rolled over onto her back, away from the rocks, and onto the more comfortable sand, and stared at the sky. “Oh, look,” she said, not sounding the least bit troubled by anything. “A pink sunset. It ought to be nice weather tomorrow.”
Her shirt, he couldn’t help noticing, did not reach much below her waist. Beneath it, she was completely naked. He wasn’t too surprised to find that the triangular patch of curls between her legs, which had so attracted him a few hours ago, still held every bit as much fascination for him. It was shameful, his insatiable lust for her body. He had to drag his gaze away, fastening it instead on some less evocative part of her body.
“Here,” he said, nodding at her ankle. “What’s that?”
She was still blinking up at the evening sky. “What’s what?” she asked.
“That ribbon, round your ankle.”
That got her up, and fast. In a single, fluid motion, she’d snatched the ribbon away—breaking it, not untying it—and tossed it over her shoulder, into the spring.
“It’s nothing,” she said quickly. “Just a reminder. I don’t need it anymore.”
He went to the side of the pool and peered down into it. The ribbon was floating on the water’s surface, the gray fish eyeing it from below, mistaking it for something edible. “What was it?”
“It’s a very long,” Payton said, “very boring story.”
He glanced at her sharply, uncertain as to whether or not she was teasing him, since that was the same answer he’d made to her question about the Frenchman. But she only grinned up at him, and asked, “Do you remember that night on the
Virago—
it must have been two or three years ago, at least—when I said I wanted to lie on the deck and watch for falling stars, and you brought me your pillow and blanket?”
He blinked at her. She was trying to change the subject again. “Yes.”
“Do you?” She looked mightily surprised. “Ross told me you were too drunk at the time to remember it, or even to know what you were doing.”
He felt a sudden and unreasonable dislike for all of her brothers, particularly Ross. “Of course I knew what I was doing,” he snapped. “I didn’t want you to catch cold. God forbid any one of them should have paid so much as a moment’s attention to you. They let you grow up half-wild, you know, Payton. When I think of some of the things you were subjected to, and on a daily basis—things no woman should know anything about—it makes my blood run cold. They deserve a thorough thrashing, each and every one of them, but Ross most of all, for letting it go on.”
She looked up at him, not at all perturbed. “But I turned out all right, in the end,” she reminded him, with a shrug.
“No thanks to your brothers! You turned out all right because—well, I don’t know. I suppose because you’ve got sense—more sense, I might add, than the three of your brothers put together.”
The smile she gave him was every bit as dazzling as the sunset. “Thank you,” was all she said, and she said that simply enough.
But the words caused something inside of him to break, something he’d been struggling to keep in check. And the next thing he knew, he was down on his knees before her, one of his big brown hands on either of her smooth thighs, pushing them apart.
Looking at him down the length of her body, Payton, who hadn’t moved, said curiously, “Drake?”
He lifted his bead, his jaw clenched. “Could you, for God’s sake, call me Connor?”
“Connor, then. What are you doing?”
He showed her, instead of telling her. He showed her by lowering his head until his lips were on that soft patch of down between her thighs. He startled her—he knew he startled her, because she tried to buck away from him. Her fingers flew to his head, and grasped handfuls of his overlong hair.
“Drake,” she said, the word nothing more than a gasp.
But he wrapped his arms around her hips, not letting her pull away. He tasted her with his tongue, and found without much surprise that she tasted of the sea, salty and brisk. Well, of course. That was how Payton Dixon would taste.
“Drake,” she said again, with a little more urgency.
She wasn’t wet. When he’d slid into her every other time, it had been startlingly easy, impossibly tight fit aside. If he hadn’t known for certain that she was a virgin that night on board the
Rebecca
, he might never have guessed he was the first man she’d ever known, because she’d always been so wet, so ready for him, each time. But now she was dry, spent, her brown curls springing back every time he swept them away in his effort to trace each exquisite curve of her with his tongue. He laid a long and ardent kiss upon that velvet mound. He felt her fingers in his hair curl into helpless fists in response. She bucked again, but she had to know by now he would never let her go. He kept his lips where they were, delving, exploring with his tongue.
And then he was flooded, literally drenched with her essence. He lifted his face to look down at her, and saw that she was lying so that her hardened nipples, straining for the sky, had formed tents of the material of her shirt. Through the thin linen he could see the sweet rose-colored curves of her areoles. With her fingers still in his hair, and her head thrown back, her dark curls spread out like a fan against the sand, she looked the epitome of all that was feminine, more so, strangely enough, than when she’d been fully naked.
Wanting to watch her, wanting to burn the image of her just then into his mind’s eye, he put a hand where his mouth had been, and felt her buck again. Now she pressed her pelvic bone against his palm, a helpless murmur, a prayer of longing—or supplication—coming from between her moistly parted lips. Not taking his gaze off her, he moved his callused fingers over her hot, wet mound until they were centered over her very core. She rubbed herself against him as instinctively as a cat, mindless in her pleasure.
And then he could stand it no longer. Jerking his head free from her hands, he reared back and, reaching with trembling fingers for the front of his breeches, tore at the buttons until his erection sprang free. Not bothering to lower his pants any further than that, he centered himself over her, hanging there for just a second, wanting to make sure that this time, he’d be able to control himself, that this time, he’d see to her pleasure first—watch her take it—and then take his own.