Part 27 (2/2)
Before his eyes, pink flooded her cheeks. She reached up a hand to touch one, as if to soothe the heat from it, then dropped her hand.
She still wouldn't look at him.
He turned away from her, and in silence they gazed out at the heaving sea, gilded in early morning sun. The slap and rush of the water against his s.h.i.+p, the wind whipped and cracked in the sails, a sound he had come to love.
”Has he kissed you?” he asked bluntly. His voice sounded thick in her own ears.
”You've no right to ask.”
He made an irritated sound. ”Dodging and rhetoric are boring, Olivia, and you know it. Has he kissed you? Yes or no.”
”Yes. Of course.”
Of course.
He looked at her.
And even now, jealousy began a slow, scalding spill through his veins.
Olivia was almost always right, of course.
He had no right to his jealousy.
But then, by that same reasoning, his lungs had no right to the air he breathed, and his heart had no right to beat.
And now she was watching him, and she knew, she knew just what the words had done to him, and there was a flicker of triumph in her eyes.
”Was it everything you dreamed?” he murmured. ”That kiss?”
The tone was dangerously silky.
She watched him, incredulously. In her eyes glittered the beginnings of temper.
”What did you discover when he kissed you, Olivia? Did you discover that one kiss is much like another? Did you discover that mine were mundane, very ordinary indeed? Did you s.h.i.+ver when he kissed you? Because as I recall . . . you s.h.i.+vered when I kissed you. As if a river rippled right through you. As if the pleasure was almost more than you could bear. I could feel it in your body when my hand was at the small of your back.”
”Stop it.” Her voice was low and taut and frantic.
”I remember that you made this little sound when I first kissed you. A sort of . . . It was an astonished, hungry, joyous sound. That night, I lay in bed and I thought about that sound over and over. I thought I would die just for the privilege of hearing it again. I thought I'd discovered the reason I was born. To kiss you, and to hear your pleasure in it, and to know that it would only lead to more pleasure for both of us.”
”Stop it.” She was breathing roughly now and the hectic color was back in her cheeks.
He continued in a relentless tone of casual reminiscence. ”Kissing you . . . well, I knew, suddenly, what a roman candle must feel like. One moment lightless, the next soaring, dazzling. The difference between living and not living.”
”Stop it.”
”Did Landsdowne make you feel that way, Olivia, when he kissed you?”
”Stop it!”
It echoed shrilly.
Stop it stop it stop it.
Frightened seabirds flapped away from their perches.
Suddenly Lyon was ashamed.
He blew out a breath and turned back to the water, peculiarly drained and thwarted.
This was going badly. Clumsy fits and starts, attacks and feints.
What was he doing? What did he hope to gain?
He hoped to gain a life, he reminded himself. He hoped to get his heart back, if it could be had.
Another futile silence tacked itself down around them, dark and resentful.
Seconds stretched into a minute, then two.
”I suppose you've been celibate.”
Her words had a certain studied casualness.
Which sparked a tiny flame of something like hope in him.
”Of course not.” He shrugged.
It was absolutely true, but the shrug was meant to hurt her.
He didn't expound and she didn't ask. Olivia was intelligent and her imagination would torture her better than any Catherine wheel, if indeed she found the notion distasteful.
She was absolutely still and silent. But her knuckles were white on the railing.
She was imagining it. And suffering.
And perversely, it both elated and destroyed him.
It simply wasn't in him to hurt her. The point of his life had always seemed to be to keep her from harm.
And for a moment, his nerve and resolve wavered. He could return her now, and say good-bye, and she might know hurt again, but he wouldn't be the one to hurt her.
”He loves me,” she said suddenly, quietly. Defiantly. ”Landsdowne does.”
”The poor fool.”
”He does love me, Lyon.”
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