Whispers of Heaven (19 page)

Warrick's hands tightened on his reins. "Where?"

"I'll show you." She snagged her dress off the branch and put it on again as she moved downstream, the worn cloth clinging to her wet skin, revealing and enhancing rather than hiding the lean line of her flanks, the incredible length of her legs. There was a small path there that he hadn't noticed before, almost lost amid the leafy sassafras and dogwood and fern. He followed her toward the sea, his gaze fascinated by the swing of her skirt, the flash of her bare calves. He found himself forgetting, again, about bushrangers and runaway slaves for whole minutes at a time, until he saw a man's body lying faceup in the bracken some fifteen to twenty feet from the edge of the cliff. The thunder of the falls made by the stream shooting over the cliff face rumbled loud in the air.

"How did he die, anyway?" Warrick asked, sliding carefully out of the saddle, his gun in his hand.

She shrugged. "Dicken found him like this."

Warrick crouched down beside the body. "Dicken?"

"My brother."

Warrick slipped his gun back into his waistband. He didn't need to be a doctor to know that Parker Jones had been dead for hours, although he could see nothing on the man's kangaroo- skin-clad body to suggest how he might have died. Gingerly, Warrick turned the dead man over, and saw the knife wound high up and to one side in the man's back.

He glanced at the girl. "Do you have a horse I can put him on?"

"No. But there's a donkey."

He stood up. "I'll see it's returned to you."

"No." She shook her head, an enigmatic smile curling that impossibly wide mouth. "You've got to bring it back yourself."

He met her strange, golden-brown gaze. He knew what she was suggesting. Knew, too, that he was accepting when he said, "All right. I will."

It wasn't until he rode away that he realized he'd never even asked her name.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Trembling in reaction, Jessie reined in to let Gallagher catch up with her, her undignified, unladylike burst of fury as short-lived as it was inexplicable and troubling.

She waited until he was abreast of her before kneeing her horse forward again into a trot. They rode through the fields side by side, the atmosphere between them heavily charged and uncomfortable.

"I would like to beg your pardon," she said after a moment. "My actions were inexcusable." She waited through a tense, seemingly interminable silence, then prodded gently, "Now it's your turn to apologize for deliberately goading me."

He swung his head to look at her, his face dark and unreadable. "What I said wouldn't have touched you on the raw like that, if you hadn't been thinking the same thing yourself."

It was true, of course, although ungentlemanly of him to say it. But then, he didn't play by her society's rules of polite falsity. It was one of the things about him that both fascinated and attracted her.

She studied him from beneath her lashes, aware, in spite of herself, of the graceful way his lean, lithe body moved to the rhythm of the animal beneath him. He had his hat pushed negligently back on his head as he stared up at the rainforest- covered mountains rising misty and lushly green ahead of them. The day had turned surprisingly warm for this early in spring, the bright sunlight catching the highlights in his ragged dark hair and causing him to squint in a way that brought creases to the corners of his eyes and made it look as if he were smiling, although she knew he was not. As she watched, the warm breeze lifted one edge of his gray convict jacket and flattened the coarse linen of his convict shirt to his slim, muscled torso. He looked wild and rough and breath- takingly, dangerously attractive, and she knew she had been wrong to risk this ride with him, to risk
herself
with him.

The track was growing steeper, the beech and celery-top pine more dense, shutting out the light and the heat and the wide open spaces. She reined the mare in to a walk, her gaze on his darkly handsome face as he pulled the gray in beside her. "Why did you save my life the other day?" she asked abruptly.

He stared back at her in that proud, defiant way he had. "You think I should have let them have you, do you?"

She leaned forward to pat Cimmeria's hot, sweat-darkened withers. "It's what most men in your position would have done, isn't it? Why risk your life to save someone you despise?"

There was a pause filled with the gentle plodding of their horses' hooves and the almost audible hush of the moist, heavy air of the rainforest closing in around them. Then he said, "What makes you think I despise you?"

She swung her head away to fix her gaze on the thickly towering, moss-covered trunks ahead. "Because I am English and you are intensely, fiercely Irish. Because I try to play by society's rules even when I think they're wrong. Because I hide the things I do, the person I really am, from those closest to me. Because I visit my dearest friend in secret, as if I were ashamed of her, when I'm not. I'm not."

Even though she wasn't looking at him, she was aware of his gaze, hard upon her. She could
feel
him looking at her; it was that intense, whatever this thing was between them, this thing neither of them wanted. "What'd she do, then," he asked unexpectedly, "this Genevieve Strzlecki, that makes her such an unacceptable person for you to know?"

"She fell in love with a Polish count," Jessie said simply, for Genevieve's past was no secret on this small island.

"Augh, 'tis a terrible social solecism, sure enough," he said, his brogue thickly exaggerated. "Especially for an Englishwoman."

His words surprised her into a laugh that faded into a soft sigh. "Under the circumstances, I'm afraid it was. Her parents had already arranged a match for her with a gently bred and very wealthy merchant from Hobart."

"Was he poor then, this count?"

She shook her head, her gaze coming back, inevitably, to the hard profile of the man beside her. "Quite the reverse."

He slanted a glance at her from beneath the broad brim of his hat. "So why would her parents favor some Hobart merchant over a well-heeled count? Surely his title more than made up for the deficiencies in his nationality and religion?"

"It would have, no doubt, if he hadn't already had a wife."

"Ah," he said in a way that made her smile again.

"He was the victim of an arranged marriage himself, you see, and the resulting union wasn't a happy one. He and his wife lived completely apart."

"So this count, he fell in love with your Genevieve, did he?"

"Oh, yes," she said, a little shocked at herself for the frankness of the things she was saying. She tried to imagine herself discussing lovers and unhappy marriages with Harrison, and couldn't. It should have seemed strange, to be having this conversation with this rough Irishman, this servant, this
convict.
It should have seemed strange, but it didn't. And that was the strangest thing of all.

"Genevieve knew he would never be able to marry her," Jessie said quietly. "She knew it, but she loved him so desperately she couldn't conceive of life without him. So she ran away with him." It had always struck her as such an intolerable choice to be faced with having to make. She drew in a deep, soul-shaking sigh, just at the thought of it, her gaze falling to the reins woven loosely between her gloved fingers. "I can't imagine doing such a thing. Leaving my home, my family, my friends. Turning myself into a social outcast, cut off from everything I'd always held most dear. It must have been like a kind of death."

"She evidently thought it was worth it."

Jessie glanced up to find him staring at her through narrowed, unreadable eyes. "How can anything be worth that?"

An odd smile touched his lips, a smile so sad and sweet it tugged at her heart. "You've obviously never been in love."

Have you?
she wanted to ask, although of course she did not. However strange this conversation might be, she couldn't bring herself to be that bold.

The rainforest grew thicker around them, the leafy crowns of the spreading trees meeting overhead to throw the path into dense shadow. The air here was cooler and damp, the smooth brown of the tree trunks contrasting with the dark green of the ferns and mosses and splashed with color from the native laurels and the fragrant, star-shaped white flowers of the sassafras.

"So how long have you been visiting her?" he asked quietly.

"Since I was twelve." She tilted back her head to watch a honeyeater take flight from a nearby branch. "My friend Philippa Tate has always thought of my study of science as some sort of daring rebellion, but it's not. Not really. My mother might try to discourage me from my interests, but she has never actually
forbidden
me to do any of the things I do. Yet with Genevieve..."

"Your mother forbade you to have anything to do with her, I've no doubt."

Jessie huffed a soft laugh. "Quite specifically. As a child, of course, I had no idea what Genevieve had done. I didn't even know her real name. She was simply the Fallen Woman of Last Chance Point. I didn't know what a fallen woman was in those days, so I decided she must have suffered a fall from the cove's cliffs that had left her hideously deformed and shocking to look at. I thought that's why my mother warned me away from her."

"Is that why you went to see her? Because it was forbidden?"

"I'm not the type to do something simply because it's forbidden, remember? I leave that sort of blind rebellion to Warrick."

"So what happened?"

"I was hunting for fossils in the limestone beds near her cottage one day when we met quite by chance. We got to talking about rocks, and ..." Jessie shrugged. "She became my friend."

"And if you were to sit down one day and calmly announce to your mother and your betrothed that Genevieve Strzlecki is your dearest friend? What would happen?"

"They would be shocked. Mortified. Hysterical. They would forbid me to have anything to do with her ever again."

"And would you? Would you stop going to see her?"

"No." She let out a long, painful breath. "No, of course not. But my life would be .. . hideous."

"So you visit her in secret. You try hard to be the woman your family wants you to be, and when you decide you simply can't, you avoid flinging your choices in their faces. The way I see it, if anyone is at fault, it's them, for not accepting you the way you are. For forcing you to choose between the woman you were meant to be, and their love."

He paused, and she swung her head to find him watching her, his eyes shadowed by his hat brim.

"I don't despise you," he said softly. "Who am I to despise you, or even presume to judge you for the choices you've felt you had to make in your life? And as for the other ..." He gave her a crooked smile that deepened the dimple in his cheek in a way that clutched treacherously at her heart. "Well, it's not your fault you're English."

She laughed out loud, then knew a swift rush of sadness as the sounds of her laughter faded away into the hushed silence of the rainforest around them. She didn't want to see him in this way. Didn't want to see him as wise or admirable or any of the other things she now knew he was. She wanted to go on thinking of him as rough and uncivilized and savage. What could have possessed her, she wondered, to forget for so many minutes at a time both who and what he was? To speak so freely of love and risks and impossible choices to an Irish convict with a disreputable past and a blighted future and shackle scars on his wrists.

"I'm not sure this is such a good idea," said Lucas, raising his candle so that the flame leapt up, casting flickering light and darkly shifting shadows across the low ceiling and smooth, close gray walls of the cave entrance. The gurgling rush of the water flowing beside them filled the frigid air, echoing and re-echoing with a beckoning promise of mystery he found both seductive and dangerous.

They had left the horses tethered a short scramble down the hill, beside the stream that flowed swift and clean and unbelievably cold from the bowels of the mountain. Since the unexpected intimacy of that strangely frank conversation on the track, they had both withdrawn largely into silence. Yet the memory of the words they'd spoken seemed to hang between them. The words they'd spoken, and the ones they hadn't.

"Afraid, Mr. Gallagher?"

He met the challenging sparkle in her eyes, and grinned. "I prefer to think of it as being sensible."

"Huh. I've been here before, remember?" She tilted back her head to study the rock ceiling arching above them. "It's a maze of passageways and interlocking chambers, but as long as we follow the stream, we'll be in no danger of getting lost."

He watched, quietly, hopelessly mesmerized as the golden light of the candle she held played over the fine features of her face, emphasized the curve of her cheek, the sweep of her lashes, the delicate length of her slim white neck. She looked so utterly feminine, and yet so strong and brave and vibrantly, energetically alive, that he smiled. Then something caught within him, something jagged and wrenchingly painful, and he found he had to turn away.

"We've caves like this in the Comeragh Mountains," he said, walking ahead of her up the gentle slope of slippery smooth rock that edged the stream, his candle held before him. "In county Waterford, not far from where I was born. People go missing in them all the time."

"You mean the cattle thieves and highwaymen who hide in them?" she said, falling into step behind him.

He laughed softly. "Aye. A few of those, too. Although mainly your bespectacled pipe-smoking Englishman-types, who fancy themselves scientists." He heard her huff of expelled breath, and smiled into the candlelit gloom. "Are we just going for a stroll here, or is there actually something to see?"

"Be patient, Mr. Gallagher."

"For what?" he said, or started to say, when the low, darkly walled gallery they followed opened up, suddenly, spectacularly, into a great soaring chamber of glittering crystalline beauty, its walls draped in gleaming flows of delicately fluted and undulating calcite. Its ceilings dripped stone icicles that reached down toward their counterparts thrusting up from the cavern floor to meet in great thick pillars that sparkled wetlike in the candle's glow.