Part 27 (1/2)

He'd bitten that lip before, too. Softly, softly, as her hands had wound in his hair, as they'd discovered ways to give and take pleasure from each other.

A gull screamed into the silence.

The s.h.i.+p moved inexorably on.

”A week, Olivia,” he said, more quietly.

She gave her head a rough shake. ”How did you . . . Where have you . . . What have you . . .”

He held up a hand. ”Later.”

She literally growled.

”You planned all of this.”

”Yes,” he said simply. ”Of course I did.”

She pulled her pelisse more tightly around her shoulders.

He contemplated shaking off his coat and draping it over her, and he once would have done it reflexively.

Now it seemed too intimate an act.

But even now he couldn't bear for her to be uncomfortable.

He leaned against the rail, near her but at a safe distance, and together they watched England shrink. All the sounds of the Plymouth dock were now fading. Soon it would be the elements, only. Sun and wind and sea.

What a relief it had once been to move away from land to something bigger than him. The sea could have killed him more than once. It had certainly tried more than once. And it still might win in the end. But he'd harnessed it, and there had been immense satisfaction in that, given that the rest of his life had resisted his command.

”Olivia?” he ventured gruffly into the silence.

She turned swiftly to the sound in his voice.

”Yes?” she said tersely.

”Why are you marrying Landsdowne?”

She didn't answer immediately. She wouldn't look at him. She looked up instead. The sunrise was a truly flamboyant one, all streamers of scarlet and apricot. It was tinting her skin golden and left a sheen of red on her dark hair.

”Do you mean, why am I marrying him rather than choosing a life as a walking, breathing, yet ever-withering shrine to your memory?”

That was certainly bitterly said.

But Olivia was the only woman he'd ever met who would have said something like ”ever-withering.”

Despite everything, even now, it perversely charmed him. The things she said, the things she noticed, the expressions that flitted across her achingly lovely face-she had never, ever been dull.

”Were you withering without me, then, Liv?” he said softly.

”I didn't say that,” she said tautly.

She was still looking determinedly away from him.

”I inferred.”

There was a sort of tension at the corner of her mouth that might have become a smile. In other circ.u.mstances it would have.

”No, Lyon,” she said evenly, with a sort of muted infuriating patience that was nothing like the Olivia he knew. A schoolteacher sort of patience. ”I was not withering. You are not the sun and the moon and the stars. Life can and did go on in your absence.”

”The nerve of life,” he said softly.

She stole a swift glance at him again, her eyes flaring, as if she, too, was remembering the things about him that had set him apart. Made him uniquely him.

Made him uniquely hers.

Then she looked determinedly away again.

”And you are, of course, madly in love with Landsdowne. Which is why you're marrying him.”

It wasn't as easy to say that aloud as it probably seemed to her.

”Love” was always a word he'd all but enshrined when he'd left Pennyroyal Green. There had been pleasure since then, some of it extraordinary, some of it memorable, all of it mindless, in the arms of other women.

But that word had belonged only to Olivia.

She said nothing.

”Ah. So lies still don't quite trip effortlessly off your tongue. At least that much hasn't changed about you.”

It was a thrown-down gauntlet. Because Olivia wouldn't be able to resist discovering what precisely he thought was different about her.

She opened her mouth as if to retort. Then closed it.

”I'm too old to do anything 'madly,'” she said finally.

And it wasn't quite an answer.

”Is that so?” he said idly. ”And yet you used to do everything madly.”

He rested his arms on the rail, still close to but not touching her, and they both looked out at the sea, the ever-widening blue gap between them and English sh.o.r.es.

”You felt everything madly. You believed in things madly. You argued madly. I had to stay on my toes with you.”

She swiftly turned her face up to him, delight glimmering tantalizingly, lighting her face, a haunting hint at the Olivia he'd known. At the way she used to look at him.

It was swiftly, deliberately shuttered.

She turned away again.

”And you kissed . . . Liv, oh G.o.d, but you kissed madly. Or you did, once upon a time. Perhaps you've forgotten how. Perhaps I was imagining all of that. Perhaps it was all a dream.”