Part 36 (1/2)

It was a mercy to surrender his thoughts and tension to the cool buoyancy of the water. He floated on his back, watching a gull ride the breeze above him just because it could.

Then again, the gull had its own hunger to contend with, and it lived for its next meal.

Freedom-from anything, really, whether it was the past, one's family, from a seemingly hopeless love-was really rather an illusion, he'd learned.

Something bright and white caught the corner of his eye, and he blinked.

A bar of soap was drifting merrily by.

He shot out an arm and seized it, then stood upright.

He knew in a flash what he had in his hands: Leverage.

The thing with which to bargain.

Also: potentially a terrible mistake.

He could let it go sailing out to the ocean.

He could tuck it into his knapsack and pretend he'd never seen it.

He could have done a dozen or more things more advisable than what he did next. He raised his voice.

”Did you . . . perhaps lose something, Olivia?”

A silence. A telling and almost palpable hesitation, during which he could practically hear the gears of her mind clicking away over the sound of the waterfall.

Let your body have the say, Olivia.

”Did it . . . find its way to you?” The acoustics were such she scarcely needed to raise her voice. It was pitched a little higher. She was tense, too.

”It drifted on by en route to Le Havre, and I seized it.”

In the silence that followed it felt as though the world itself held its breath.

”Do you want it?” he asked.

The words were gruff. He didn't bother to disguise the tension in his voice.

So much hinged on her next word, and he didn't know which answer he wanted most.

It turned out to be: ”Yes.”

Chapter 20.

HE WENT TO HER immediately and without another word.

He never second-guessed decisions. It was a quality he'd inherited from his father, born of arrogance and privilege, tempered through one test after another over the last few years.

He swam into the larger pool and stopped abruptly.

His breath whooshed out when saw the suggestion of her body, veiled by the pouring water. Her head was tipped back to allow it to run the length of her, as if she were a fountain carved of marble.

And he'd held her body close to his before, through layers of muslin. He'd often thought over the years that it wouldn't matter what Olivia looked like beneath her clothes. She could be sporting the head of a girl and the body of a rhinoceros and he'd still feel that frisson.

She was most definitely sporting the body of a woman.

Through the water he saw her in profile: a suggestion of a small, up-curving, rose-tipped breast, a waist that flared eloquently into a round white a.r.s.e, long slim white limbs.

The impact was as total and instant as a lightning strike. It sizzled along his spine and he thought his head might pop off away from his body and join the circling gulls.

And he was on sh.o.r.e and out of the water swiftly, soap in hand, before she even saw him.

SHE TURNED WITH a start when he appeared.

They stared at each other, like Adam stumbling across Eve for the first time.

Or very like that first time in the ballroom, when time had stopped and they had stared.

”No scales,” was all he said, finally.

She couldn't speak. When she saw him, the blood stampeded to her head and her ability to form words had clearly been trampled in the process.

A new sort of logic a.s.serted itself. This sudden weakness in the face of extraordinary male beauty was perhaps an evolutionary thing. The point of which was to stun the female into helpless, willing submission.

Nude we ought to look vulnerable, a little absurd, she thought. But Lyon looked as right out of clothes as an actual lion did in its own skin, and he looked as comfortable standing there as he would be in a ballroom or the deck of a s.h.i.+p.

Then again, she didn't know why anyone would bother with modesty if they looked like him. His lean body was everywhere gradations of sun-touched gold, darker on his arms and legs and face, his hips and lower on his belly paler. He seemed etched from muscle, s.h.i.+ning hard quadrants on his chest, downright lyrical slopes of his shoulders, vast enough to turn his torso into a veritable ”V,” to the lean bulge of thighs, to the concave scoops on each side of his b.u.t.tocks, each just about the size of the palm of her hand if she had to guess.

There were a few worrisome scars on him, one that was most definitely from a musket ball.

But there was his p.e.n.i.s, of course, already beginning to curve toward his belly out of a nest of black curls from merely the thought and sight of her.

Olivia had an epiphany born of l.u.s.t: He was only overwhelming when I resisted.

If I surrender to what we both want, everything is simple.

She knew he thought her beautiful, because it was reflected in his face. But more thrilling was the intent she saw there. It was primal and absolutely implacable.

He intended to take her.

She wanted very, very badly to be taken.

There was no thinking or right and wrong. There was only now. But suddenly fear and exhilaration seemed of a piece.

”Perhaps you need help with was.h.i.+ng the back of your neck, Olivia? I imagine it feels sticky.”