She rocked from side to side, a pudgy little huddle of misery. He watched her, meditating on what a naive, foolish, high-minded piece of humbug she was, just the sort of crusading missionary he could well do without. It was her kind that started wars, with their preaching and prodding and stupid philosophizing, until his kind ended up stating down the sights of a loaded cannon.
Clearly, it wasn't going to work. Traveling with her was about as safe as chaperoning a powder keg through a house fire. Really, he thought bitterly, he ought to slip her overboard when nobody was looking; it would be doing Oriens and the rest of the world a favor.
For a long minute he gazed at her. Then, for no reason he could identify, he reached out and touched her hair. She flinched, turning those wide, wretched eyes on him. Sheridan looked into the swimming forest depths: the shadow-green intensified by tears, the lashes spiky and clinging together.
He heaved a sigh and pulled her down against him, letting her bury her face in his neck and weep for lost and silly dreams. He supposed he must have had some dreams himself once—even if he couldn't remember now what the devil they ever were.
Seven
* * *
Their first evening on Madeira, Olympia could not sleep. She'd tried, but her natural inclinations hardly fitted the role of invalid sister who went to bed before dark. She pulled the filmy lace of her dressing gown around her and stepped onto the terrace outside her island bedroom.
Red reflections of late afternoon dyed the sea and the whitewashed houses, set the town of Funchal glowing against the steep plunge of the island. The air felt like silk on her skin. Below her, the leafy tips of orange trees and banana plants rustled, and from very near came the soft ripple of notes on a Spanish guitar.
The English wine merchant had insisted on offering them his home as soon as he learned Sir Sheridan and his sister were pausing in Madeira. Traveling incognito—at least for the Hero of Navarino—was over. As soon as the mail packet docked, it seemed the whole town knew that Captain Sir Sheridan Drake was among them. Olympia's cheeks ached from smiling and accepting well-wishes.
Mr. Stothard's hospitality was enthusiastic. Dinner had turned into a party in Sir Sheridan's honor, as everyone of any stature in the English community on the island came to be introduced to one of their country's gallant champions. She could still hear the murmur of lingering guests in the garden below, though no one was visible from her lofty point of view.
Along the terrace, other doors stood open to admit the breeze. She realized as she listened that the sound of the guitar emanated from one of them instead of from the garden. A single door down from her own…the room where Sir Sheridan's baggage had been placed.
She slipped closer on silent feet, crossed her arms to hold her dressing gown tighter and peered suspiciously around the doorframe.
It wasn't the dawdling servant she'd expected. It was Sir Sheridan himself—sitting propped up on the bed, his feet and chest bare, his dark head bent over the instrument as he picked out a cascade of notes.
Olympia pulled back hastily. She'd thought he was still down in the garden with the others. Her heart thumped with a wildness out of all proportion to the mild surprise. For a moment she leaned against the whitewashed wall, cooling her skin against the stone. Then she moistened her lips and peeked again, watching him through the crack between the frame and the open door.
Sunset radiance flooded the room. It caught his face in strong profile, shadow and ruddy light, his eyes a clear gray beneath black lashes. He left off playing and shifted his shoulders into a more comfortable position. Before Olympia could pull back, he looked up and saw her.
He smiled—a sideways smile, a glance like a secret shared between them, brief and heartrending. It sparked a pleasure so swift and fierce that she felt bruised inside instead of glad.
Instantly, those moments with him in her cabin rose up to make her cheeks flame.
She'd tried not to dwell on the extraordinary memory. If she allowed herself to think of it, she could still hear him whisper she was beautiful, still feel his open palm sliding up her leg, still experience the ragged breath and mortifying surge of pleasure when he touched her naked skin.
The thought of it made her want to sink through the pavement. What if he'd guessed? What if he'd realized that her reaction had been a flood of dark hunger so intense that it still haunted her every time she looked at him? She hung back, wondering if she could just slip out of sight without saying anything.
"Polishing up on your skulking?" he asked. "I daresay that'll come in handy for the next political intrigue, but I wonder if I ought to tell you that you're about as invisible as a camel in a chicken coop?"
She held the dressing gown around her as closely as possible and stepped into full view. "Excuse me. I heard the music, and I thought perhaps someone was in your room. Someone who shouldn't be here."
"Musical thieves." Making no move to rise, he lifted the instrument and stood it against the wall. "Dastardly fellows," he added dryly. "I'd advise you to avoid violoncellists in particular; they'd as soon rob you as play a fugue." He sat up on the edge of the bed and regarded her with leisurely intensity—a faint insolent smile on his lips as he took in her dressing gown and loosened hair.
Olympia hugged herself. "Well," she said, "I shall bid you good night, then."
But she didn't move. Somehow her feet seemed rooted to the floor.
He stood up. "Good night," he said evenly.
She kept staring at his chest, at the way the sunset drew a line down the center, outlining muscle and easy strength.
"Princess," he murmured, with a strange note of emphasis in his voice. "Good night."
She drew her gaze up, to his shoulders, his jaw, his smoky eyes.
"Do you really think I'm beautiful?" she blurted, and then put her hand over her mouth in horror.
"I think," he said softly, "that if you don't take your transparent gown and your green eyes and your suggestively loose hair and get out of here, we'll both regret it."
She curled her fingers and pressed them against her mouth. "Perhaps—would you mind—" She dropped her hand and hugged herself. "I can't sleep. Might I stay a while?"
He closed his eyes with a sigh. "Lord deliver me. We wouldn't want anything to be easy, would we?" His hands opened and closed, as if they needed to crush something. "Olympia, assume that I am giving you this advice in a friendly, avuncular tone. Get yourself the hell away from me."
He stood for a long moment with his eyes closed and his jaw set.
"Are you gone yet?" he asked.
"No."
"Naturally." He exhaled with resignation. "However, I am going to ignore the fact. I am going to lie facedown on my bed. I am going to go to sleep, because I happen to like living, and I'm afraid there are a few influential people who would be interested in my painful demise if I gave you what you're so prettily asking for."
Without looking at her, he turned his back and threw himself full-length on the bed, drawing the pillow over his head.
Olympia took a step toward him and stopped. He was right, of course. She shouldn't be here. It was insane. She had no idea what she was doing or what she expected of him. But the tight trembling inside her would not relax, the memory of his hands on her skin would not recede. She looked at the long line of his body, from his bare feet and strong ankles to the shape of his legs, his hips and his broad back.
Her gaze paused. She frowned. The angled light caught something she had not seen in the gloom of Hatherleigh Hall—a very faint tracery of pale scars across his shoulders and back.
She moved closer. With one finger, she touched him. His skin was warm and smooth. She followed the line of a vertical slash across his shoulder blade and down the taut muscle over his ribs.
He shuddered. "God," he said into the crook of his arm. "Must you do this?"
"You've been flogged," she whispered. "Someone's whipped you."
His torso moved beneath her palm as he heaved a sharp sigh. "M
y memory is perfectly clear. You needn't think you must provide me with a concise history of my life."
"Who flogged you?" she demanded furiously. "Why?"
He knocked the pillow aside, rolled over onto one elbow and scowled at her. "Why? Because I was a dumb bastard once upon a time. World's full of fools. I'm looking at one now."
She pressed her lips together and stayed where she was. But her cheeks burned.
His gaze lingered on her face and traveled downward. He dropped his head back on the pillow, his hand over his eyes. "Let me put it this way." He looked at her under his palm. "I had a moment of madness the other night, but you're poison, my dear. Purest poison. Go away."
She stepped back as if he'd struck her. "I'm sorry. Of course. How stupid of me!"
Of course. Of course she was poison. She'd never thought she was beautiful.
"Good night," she said quickly, walking out onto the terrace, blinking hard against the sunlight. She paused at her own door, leaning against the smooth blue-painted wood, tugging the gown around her. She could feel the plump shape of her body beneath the lace. How Mrs. Plumb's exquisite lips would have curved in that pitying smile if she'd witnessed the humiliation of this moment! How she would have shaken her head, and said Olympia had brought it on herself, always dreaming of things that could not be.
She sank down on the cool tile at the foot of her bed. She bowed her head and clasped her fingers, said her daily prayer in a mumbled rush and then knelt there, her face hidden in her arms, wishing she could grow fainter and fainter until she disappeared entirely into the soft evening air.
If only it had not been Sir Sheridan. If only, when she'd chosen to mortify herself, she'd done it before anyone but him.
Poison.
And to think he'd cared for the cause of freedom so much that he'd even offered to marry her, had gallantly pretended that he had some admiration for her so as not to wound her feelings.
But she'd forfeited even chivalrous politeness now. She'd made a disaster of things. He was angry at her, and spoke the truth. She was a miserable failure, a pathetic parody of what she'd hoped to be, unable to accomplish even the first step toward a worthy goal without making a complete bungle of it. Poison, poison, purest poison.
She lifted her head miserably. Outlined in a rosy glow, her shadow lay in a long ripple across the simple bed and up the whitewashed wall.
Another—taller, broader—lay superimposed upon it.
She looked over her shoulder, bit her lip and scrambled to her feet.
"Don't mind me," Sir Sheridan said. He leaned against the doorframe. "And as long as you're praying, put in a word on my behalf, will you? Sheridan Drake—Knight of the Bath, thirty-first on the captains' list, disobliging bastard and general all-around heartless dog. You may have to jostle the Old Man's memory pretty hard." She stood staring at him through a blur. "Don't cry," he said.
She bent her head, ashamed of the weakness, unable to stop.
He came forward, silent on bare feet. "Damn it." He pulled her into his arms, against his chest, his fingers closing with casual cruelty in her hair. "Must you turn me into a mindless clown?"
Her scalp burned under the grip that tilted her face up to his. His kiss hurt; she could taste the anger in it, but the hot need welled up the instant he touched her. He drew one hand down through her hair, pausing in the small of her back, spreading his palm until his fingertips curved around her waist. He held her that way, the peaks of her breasts pressed into his bare chest through silk and crushed lace, their shape swollen and spread against him. It made no difference what she was, or who, or why he came—it all whirled away and left only awareness: his body a bruising pressure against hers, his hand locked in her hair and the taste of him consuming her.
Sheridan explored her, softness everywhere, her breasts and velvet skin surrendering and shaping to his mouth and fingers. It was that lush promise, that sweet unconscious yielding, that drove him past the last scrap of sanity and lit the short fuse to annihilation. He was past fighting himself or her. It was all madness, all weakness and stupidity—it would get him killed, and he didn't care.
Olympia spread her hands across his bare skin. His back was taut; hard and smooth, no physical trace of the faint scars across the broad muscled expanse beneath her fingers. But she remembered. The heat and desperate longing to cherish and hold him spread to her body—she burned where she touched him; she burned all through, a hot ache that coursed from the fierce possession of her mouth down to her breasts and belly and legs—a pleasure that bloomed between her thighs and made her move and press and mold to him as if she could make him part of herself.
"Enough…" he mumbled, a harsh breath against her lips. "That's enough. God, this is suicide; it's got to stop."
But he held her still; he didn't stop. He kissed her throat, pushing back her hair, coiling it around his fist. She opened her mouth and allowed her own tongue to taste the hot, bare skin at the curve of his shoulder.
She felt him groan. His powerful muscles moved, salty skin sliding past her tongue as he pushed her back on the bed. He hung above her on braced arms, cursing softly even as he grasped her shoulders and bent to kiss the base of her throat, to nurse and nuzzle while his body forced hers down into the unyielding bed.
She felt his hands at her waist, pulling the dressing gown upward, tugging the fabric with rough and frantic moves. Soft air caressed her bared calves, her thighs and then her hips. He spread his palm across the round curve of her belly and made a sound of excitement, a rough note deep in his chest. His forearm drove her shoulder back against the coarse weave of the sheets as he bowed to reach her breast.
He kissed it through the silk, his tongue finding the tip, drawing it against his teeth until she arched and whimpered with the searing swell of pleasure.
Sheridan lost himself in her body, tasting the delicious heat, sliding his hand into the silky crevice between her legs. He wanted her passionate, he wanted her arching that voluptuous figure upward, begging for what he burned to give. He caressed the plump downy mound at the apex of her thigh and slipped two fingers into her alluring feminine recess, his tongue and lips closing on the peak of her breast.
She was moist and hot, insanely inviting. He drowned in her, in the virginal tightness of her, in the way she closed her legs convulsively on his invading hand. His fingers slid, pushing, exploring deeper and deeper until she began to gasp and tremble beneath him.
He tugged at her nipple, curling his fist in the satin cascade of her hair to hold her head down as she tried to lift it with a moan. His fingers met the unbroken barrier inside her. Heat flashed through him, the fierce desire to ram and force, to crush her, spread her, take her delicious softness in absolute possession.
He started to withdraw, to reach for his breeches and free the aching pressure there, but her body followed the move. Her hips curved upward. She tossed her head, pushing into his hand while her fingers raked his back. With the awkward desperation of inexperience she clutched at him, holding his head to her breast. She arched with a strangled moan—that long, lovely strain of female ecstasy—and then her body was shuddering against him in a way that made him want to explode with response.
But he didn't. From somewhere amid her collapse into panting oblivion he found a vestige of reality. He shoved her away from him, sitting up supported on a shaking arm. He looked around·
The door to the terrace was wide open, the last of sunset still poured through, the sound of polite conversation still drifted up from the garden below.
"God Almighty," he said, and thrust himself off the bed. His body throbbed with frustrated violence; he didn't dare look at her—he knew what he would see revealed in naked and tempting disarray. Fatal—fatal to see her, fatal to stay here—he had to get hold of himself. He put a shaky hand over his eyes and muttered, "You bloody born fool, you braying ass—got your dashed brains between your legs…Lord—what am I doing?"
"Sir Sheridan?" Her voice was a breathless whispe
r behind him.
He braced against the door without turning. "Go to bed," he snapped. "Don't follow me, or I'll kill you."
Striding out onto the empty terrace, he swung into his own room, pulled the door closed and shot the bolt. He grabbed the bellpull, yanked it twice, and then again for good measure. Then he paced, prowling the sparsely furnished room, picking up an empty vase, putting it down again, dousing his face in lukewarm water from the basin, kicking the Portuguese rug back into place—moving, and moving again.
He could not do it. There was no conceivable way he could continue. Damn her and her bloody tears, her face; curse her bloody charming plump buttocks that made him get up from a safe bed and go trailing after her like some puling adolescent half-wit. He rested his elbows against the wall and locked his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling while his body raged.
Mustafa answered his ring, sleepy and grumbling.
"I want the maid," Sheridan said shortly. "Lily. Lavinia. What the devil's her name?"
"Mary." Mustafa yawned and bowed. "It is done, my pasha." He shuffled away.
Sheridan sat down on the bed. He shifted, tugging at his breeches, a futile effort to ease the stiff discomfort inside them. He thought of Olympia, wondered if she'd gotten into bed, had a flashing picture of her lying there with her legs spread invitingly and her gown around her waist. He dropped his forehead into his hands and groaned.
There was a quiet knock at the door from the inside corridor. The maid he'd hired for Olympia slipped into his room. Sheridan looked up hopefully. She was skinny, but he was desperate. He stood up and gripped her arm.
She came willingly, no blasted tears, no naively trembling lips, no figure whatsoever—all bones, and a strong sample of Madeira's famous wine on her breath. Sheridan turned his face and put his hands on her shoulders, feeling the sharp jut of her collarbone beneath his fingers.
He couldn't help it; he thought of Olympia's smooth white bosom, her beautiful round breasts. As the maid melted against him, he took a step back, glancing down at her face. Her eyes were closed and her mouth slack, and he had a terrible vision of a crow: black hair and thin gaping beak.