Chapter 13
Nicholas readjusted the gourds slung over his shoulder. “We are on a fool’s errand, governed by the ravings of a man gone mad in his isolation.”
Alexandra leaned on a gumbo limbo to catch her breath. “I think you are frustrated. Let’s go to the summit again. Maybe we can glean an idea standing on the escarpment.”
“No. It is a stupid idea. I’m not going to try one more insane notion doomed from the start.” He reached in his sack, pulled out a piece of smoked pork and ripped it with his teeth.
“Clearly, I have overstepped my bounds,” she said, unapologetic and undaunted by his anger.
“For days, we have traversed the island looking for treasure, coming up with nothing. Clearly, you have been wrong about a treasure.”
She brought up her chin. “Being right all the time must be a burden.”
“You have dragged me to the north, south, west and east on this island with no results.” He turned her toward the cottage. “I want rum.”
She stopped dead in her tracks. “I refuse to listen to your cantankerous outbursts. We will keep looking.”
He propelled her onto the path again.
“And I refuse to be bullied, Lord Rutland.”
How he hated her sarcastic inflection when she resorted to calling him, Lord Rutland.
As the smoked pork took the edge off his appetite, he felt himself afflicted with hunger of another sort. The curves of her lovely derriere rendered nicely by the fall of her shift, presented a delectable picture. Ever since he kissed her, he had been unable to deal with the sweetness of her lips and the tightening in his loins. He was ready to upend trees and toss them into the ocean.
A cold edge cracked in his voice. “Alexandra, I’m sick to death of your common platitudes. You lived with coarse, unrefined commoners all your life and you have become one.”
Her eyes flashed, dipping to the pork he chewed. “I’m sorry, I’m not a refined, polished, sophisticated aristocrat. Hail the pitiful, Lord Rutland, caught in his superiority and trapped in his arrogance.” She stabbed a finger in his chest. “What an ungrateful creature you are. I am the one that saved your miserable life. I’m the one who has taught you how to survive.”
He towered over her. She was the most beautiful, enraged angel of retribution, her chest rising and falling with fury as she confronted him. Suddenly, she pivoted and ran.
Nicholas raked his fingers through his hair. What an ass he’d been. He had deliberately picked a fight, taking his anger out on her for being stuck on this God-forsaken patch of earth. He called for her. No answer.
He threw a few punches into a tree, and then laughed aloud. That wasn’t the entire reason. Every night he resisted the urge to pull back her quilt and gaze at her slender white body. Every night he’d suppressed the almost overpowering desire to take her in his arms and let go inside of her.
He pushed through the undergrowth.
At times, Nicholas could feel her watching him and he’d look up. She’d cast him a modest sidelong glance, a morsel to tempt him, to leave him panting like a hound of summer on the scent of deer.
Blast it, where had she gone? She was a thorn in his side. He crisscrossed the lagoon, river and cottage. Nowhere. Another part nagged him. Every time he got close, she skittered away, made-up excuses. She was hiding something. He slapped several palmetto branches away. With all the time they spent together, why didn’t she trust him?
For the same reason, he hadn’t told her about Lady Susannah Tomkins. Alexandra deserved the truth.
He made his way down to the shoreline. When she didn’t answer his shouts, his apprehension gave way to alarm. Had she fallen? Was she hurt? Unable to answer? A nauseating wave hit his stomach.
Hopping over fallen trees, he pushed through palmettoes and thick undergrowth to get to the beach. Sweat poured down his back. He stopped to catch his breath, wiped the moisture from his head and blinked. Footprints. Her footprints. He followed her trail up to a rocky cliff. Of course, her favorite place to watch the sea.
Soberly, Nicholas looked at Alexandra, sitting beneath a bright green sea grape tree. Sea lavender rippling around her knees, the land sloped upward behind her. The thong holding her braid had been torn, and her hair hung wild about her shoulders and down her back. The sun, shining through the leaves, caught the gold in bits and pieces, exposing her as the siren she really was.
“Will you come down?” he asked in a more pleasant tone.
“What for?”
He couldn’t think of a thing. A moment later he blurted, “I want you to go for a walk with me.”
“You will have to do better than that,” she sniffed.
“I want you to go for a walk with me, and…I’m sorry.”
“What’s the second part?”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s more than that. I’m not common. I’m tremendously exceptional.”
“You are exceptional. Now come down from there and go for a walk with me.”
She stared at his proffered hand and dammed if she didn’t look down her nose at him like a queen, acknowledging an undesirable serf. “I’m a brute, Alexandra. I blamed you for my misfortunes.”
“I know.”
The woman had uncanny discernment, always divining his moods.
“I find myself with no purpose here. So it’s hard to shake off the intentions of my life at home where my day’s brim with helping tenants, buying horses. The island makes my time filled with not-doing. And then, there is the looming threat the island will become my sepulcher.”
Alexandra dropped his hand and faced him. “Not doing? Since we have been incredibly busy with the purpose of trying to survive a kidnapping, potential slavery, farming, hunting, fishing, hauling water, curing our food, and surviving the elements. Our lives have been chaotic. But sometimes chaos is the very thing that deliberately shakes up our neatly ordered world to get us out of our neatly ordered ruts that keep us stuck.”
Nicholas blew out a breath. She had the ability to lash him with common wisdom.
“Is it also the helplessness of not getting off the island and the vengeance you seek?”
She cut him a sharp look that dared him to argue with her. He gritted his teeth. “Yes. Now do you forgive me?”
“I have similar emotions since I would do anything to avenge the wrongs done to me by my stepmother, and seek justice for Molly’s death.” Alexandra picked up stones and pitched them into the sea. “You know I forgive you.”
His melancholy started to evaporate as he watched a half-dozen sandpipers skitter up the beach, his foul mood of the morning fading like the darkness before the dawn. “Alexandra, what do you want?”
She gave a half-hearted shrug, intent on pitching stones in the surf. “You’d think I was silly.”
“Nothing about you is silly,” he challenged.
Silence as thick as wet sand oozed between them. Alexandra pitched stones into the sea with greater rapidity.
“When I was a girl, I saw a lady get married in a neighboring village. She had a beautiful bridal gown, so regal and fine, and roses and lilies in her bouquet. There was a pretty coach pulled by two dancing white horses. To have a fairy tale wedding.” A wistful expression of longing covered her lovely face.
“Why?” He had always loathed such affairs as nothing but pomp and circumstance. Yet he hated the despair etched in her voice when all he wanted to do was pull her into his arms and soothe her. Hands at his sides, he stood, patiently listening while watching her eyes gloss over with moisture. To speak could break the fragile hold she had on her emotions.
She shrugged. “I suppose it is every girl’s dream but mine is more important.”
“Why is that?”
She stopped throwing stones, dropping them one by one to the ground. “Remember the Cornett sisters? My name is smeared. Just for once, I’d like to be someone special.”
His hands fisted with anger at what had happened to her in her village. To be an outcast. He’d do anything to eradicate the cruel ghosts of her past.
“There is something I want more than anything else in the world.”
She continued to surprise him. Just when he thought he knew all there was to know, she revealed another layer yet to be peeled away. What else had happened beyond the guilt she suffered from the loss of her surrogate mother, Molly?
“So many words get lost. They stay in my throat and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept away like dead seaweed on an outgoing tide. I wish to ignore it, but how can I hide from something that will never go away?” She gave him a tremulous smile. “As a child, I loved to climb trees.”
Trees? What did climbing trees have to do with anything?
“I was nine summers, it was such a fine day. The sun was glorious. I climbed higher and higher, immune to danger as children so frequently are, just to get a bird’s eye view. The view at the top was like a heady aphrodisiac, the tree so alive I could feel it breath, the winds scented with coming rain swished and swayed the branches. I was so mesmerized, I barely heard the branches crack….and then…falling. And darkness.”
Alexandra scrubbed her hands over her face. “I drifted in and out of consciousness, as if in a dream. Molly crying. Samuel wringing his hat. The doctor shaking his head. Molly had labored for three days, despairing if I’d survive, her expert nursing skills, bringing me back. I survived, but I learned I’d never be able to have children.”
She turned her gaze on him, would know instantly he’d see differently. He’d see her not as a fertile woman who could bear children, but as a…spinster. When he didn’t speak for full minute, tears pricked at the corner of her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice a little hoarse.
I’m sorry. Numbness overcame her. Her knees buckled and she sank into the sand. She covered her face with her hands, unable to see the look in his eyes. She was sorry, too, but that didn’t change the facts. “I-I know what it means, so don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t need anyone’s pity.
He pulled her up and into his arms and she tilted her chin upward, unable to discern the darkness in his eyes. More than anything she wanted to melt into the warm comfort of him, wanted to be all the things she knew she would never be. She could never be the woman he needed.
“Do you pity me?”
She pulled back. “Of course not.”
Good. Because your injury was the result of an accident and out of your control…as was my punch that killed my adversary.”
Her heart melted with his words. Just looking at him made her tremble, making her yearn for things only a husband had the right to offer. His large hand held her face and gently, his calloused fingers brushed the wetness away, his touch almost unbearable in its tenderness. His hands slipped into her hair and brought her closer.
“I have wanted to confide in someone, but the stigma—”
“Never could I think less of you, Alexandra.”
Nicholas’s mouth descended on hers and her body started at the first brush of his warm lips.
“I was so ashamed.”
“You are very brave to have shared with me.”
Her body came alive as his lips pressed against hers. The heat. It was not just her cheeks that burned. She was sipping liquid fire. It flowed over her tongue and down her throat and spread through her entire body. She leaned into him.
“For so long, I have carried that burd—
He groaned into her mouth. “Your gravest error was to despair. You should have told me sooner.”
She leaned into him, her hands slid up his arms and linked around his neck. “You do not judge me?” she asked, some part of her still unable to believe what was happening.
Nicholas took a ragged breath. “No more than you have judged me. It is your faith in me I find admirable. I wish I was as strong as you.”
“But you are strong. The strongest man I’ve ever known.”
Breathing hard, he stopped. And suddenly, he took her arms from his neck. He broke away, leaned against a palm across from her. Casual but not casual.
She straightened. “Forgive me, Nicholas. I have forgotten myself.” She turned to leave, wanted to be alone, anywhere away from the mortification she was drowning in.
“Don’t leave.” He rasped, stooped on his heels, picked up a piece of driftwood and drew circles in the sand. “Can I ask you something?”
“Ask away.”
“How do you know we will be rescued? What makes you so sure?”
Mystified, she wiped the tears from her face, stared at him. Had saying he was strong have something to do with his mercurial change? “I’m not sure.”
“My life before…I was so sure of the world. And now it feels so remote. What is it you’re looking for?”
Instead of the warmth she felt in his arms a moment ago, she saw his detachment. She turned her gaze on the palms lining the beach, and then to where pelicans were dive-bombing the stretched surface of the sea far out from the shore. I want you, Nicholas. She returned her gaze to him. Silent.
“Did you ever ask yourself why we survived out of a whole ship of sailors? We could have drowned, yet we’re here.”
He gave her a lop-sided smile.
“One thing I had when I was back in England was structure. I knew my place. And then I had my family provided me a circle of strength. I’m away from England, from them. I just want to wake up and be whole again. To realize my life.”
With certainty, he was stalling. There’s something else. Something he can’t seem to get out.
The horizon was edged with a silver tint and a cormorant flew into the place where the sun and the water converged. His wings were a blur of motion and he soon faded from sight. She knelt in the sand. “I wish my heredity were proven, I wish to have Molly back, I wish to have children, but it is impossible. All I want is to not look forward or back. I just want to be in the moment I’m in.”
He concentrated on digging in the sand, and then looked at her. Agony lined his handsome face.
“Alexandra, there’s a woman back home. Lady Susannah Tomkins.”
“A woman?”
He took a deep breath. “If I get home, Lady Susannah and I are getting married.”
A dry sob burned her throat. She drew back, felt the blood drain from her face. Of course, he’d have—a wife. He was to be a Duke. Duke’s had to produce heirs.
Her head spun. Of course. How stupid she’d been. So why did she feel so betrayed…as if he’d delivered a knife to her heart. “Oh…well.”
“I shouldn’t have kissed you, Alexandra. I can’t make commitments. I have a duty. I have a life waiting for me. I’m sorry.”
Her stomach rolled. Suddenly nauseous, she stood, her legs wobbly. “Of course.”
“She is waiting for me. We had announced our betrothal a month before I was kidnapped. I’ve made promises.”
Anger and grief bled from his voice.
“She’s a perfect match and she pleases my father.”
Stupid. God, she’d been so stupid, believing her own fantasies. Bile rose in her throat. She turned…and ran…before she vomited, before she made a further fool of herself.
Alexandra ran and ran, tears flowing, arms thrashing at the air and the invisible visions of a life that would always be just out of her reach. It was her fault for having dared to dream. If she’d known, she’d never have revealed her darkest secret. To be that susceptible, that vulnerable to a man who never cared.
“Alexandra.”
He followed. Why? Why couldn’t he just let her alone to deal with her pain and misery?
“Alexandra.”
She stopped in her tracks, feet digging into the soft sand. She turned. Faced him. Opened her mouth to tell him to go away, but the words clogged in her throat.
Why are you here, Nicholas?
He stepped closer. “Please listen, Alexandra.”
She pressed her lips together to keep the tears and a sudden rush of anger at bay. “Why? So you can unburden yourself again and not feel guilty?”
“No. Because I have something to say to you. Only to you.”
She crossed her arms. Waited.
“I’ve been doing everything my whole life to please my father, to be the best duke he wanted me to be. Pretending my whole life…”
He took another step toward her. She held up her hand. You’ve made it clear, you don’t want me. Fine. Now leave me alone.
“I am to marry the perfect woman, a well-connected woman who will add value to the Rutland’s prestige in assets and power,” he said, each word slashing like a knotted whip. “My life is built on it and it’s a good life and it’s always been the life I wanted.”
And she was a nobody who could not give him an heir.
She blinked back another rush of tears. She would not shed another. She would not let Nicholas have the satisfaction he so needed. Ridding himself of guilt at her expense wasn’t a road she wanted to travel. Not again. She’d fooled herself when she knew full-well what could never be.
“Then I arrived here and I got a glimpse of a freedom on this island. I don’t have to pretend a life in which I can be truly alive.” He took a step closer. “How can I go back to pretending when I know what this feels like?”
Nicholas bridged the gap between them, grasped her face in his hands. “I want you, Alexandra. Only you.”
Tears coursed down her cheeks. She couldn’t be certain of anything other than the searing pain in her heart and her raw fear of the immense power in this man, a potency he tried hard to keep leashed.
“We were meant to be together. We can no more stop it than the sunrise.”
She shook her head, the tears she’d so valiantly held in suddenly erupting like a geyser. Giant sobs came from somewhere deep inside.
He closed the space between them, gently wiping away her tears as they fell. “Alexandra, love,” he whispered tenderly. “The longest journey is taken a step at a time. My love can wait, but it will neither yield nor change.”
“I do not want to love you, Nicholas. I cannot love you. I cannot bear your children.”
“You think that matters to me? My courageous, wonderful Alexandra. You fill my whole world. And then he hauled her into his arms. He drew her up to him, holding her tight in his embrace, as if shielding her with his body against all the torments, the fears and loneliness.
Cocooned within Nicholas’s arms, Alexandra closed her eyes and drank it all in—the man, the millions of ways he moved her. He lifted her ever so gently and carried her beneath the shade of palms, reverently laying her on the sand. She buried her face against his throat, so conscious of where his warm flesh touched hers.
He brushed her hair with his calloused fingertips. “Your hair ripples and shines like a cascade of golden waters.”
The air lay thick with the heat of day. She dared to glide her hands down his shoulders, chest, and midsection.
He grabbed her hands. “Slowly,” he warned her, watching her with hunger.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” He locked his eyes with hers, commanding her complete attention. He was giving her a way out. A choice to stop. But how did she tell him to stop?
Alexandra swallowed. Who knew how long they would be on this island. Perhaps an eternity. But what if they were rescued…she didn’t want to think…to go back to southern England, to an endless void of lonely days. The reaffirmation of all she knew to be true and cruel about life, about her own existence, destined for precious little happiness. “I want you, Nicholas.”
She sensed his vulnerability and reached up to stroke his cheek, awed by the splendor of the moment, yearning for so much more.
Alexandra remained silent as he lay beside her. She thought she could speak, that there would be many more words to share. But there were no more words. Nicholas reached out to her, the heat and passion forged in his body, so great she trembled, for she really did not know what to do.
He pressed his lips to her mouth, more than kissing it. She quivered at the sweet tenderness of his kiss. Then he pulled apart for a moment and probed her eyes. She dropped her hands. Had she done something wrong?
“Do you trust me?”
“She nodded. “I’m scared. I have never—”
Nicholas smiled his boyish smile, obviously trying to relax her, an expression of satisfaction glowing in his eyes. “We are man and woman and made to fit.”
She lay with her arms at her sides as Nicholas’s long thick fingers clutched her shoulders, finding an incredible consolation in the gentleness of his grasp and undeniable look in his eyes. The stroking of his fingers sent pleasant jolts through hers. His hands slipped to the hem of her shift, pressing down on the soft material, from her thighs, searing a path over hips, up her abdomen and over her head. Naked.
“Alexandra.” He caressed and teased her flesh until her breasts budded full and heavy against his warm hand.
Like quicksilver his palm moved, the gentle massage sending currents, spreading like embers on a newly turned fire, spiraling down her stomach and lower, eliciting a trembling between her thighs. Her body craved his hand, his mouth upon her lips, and distinct warmth flooded the area between her legs.
“Nicholas.”
His tongue traced the soft fullness of her lips, his hands glided over her shoulders then down, exploring the hollows of her back, pressing her length into the solid contours of his muscled body and hard thighs. Dragging her mouth from his, she followed his lead, imitating what he had done to her and with shaking hands, ran her fingers over his chest, tracing his nipples. His jaw clenched involuntarily as she moved her hands up and over his shoulders. They stared in mute silence, sharing an intense physical awareness of each other while latticed sunlight poured hotly on them through the palm fronds above.
Alexandra licked her lips as Nicholas shrugged out of his breeches, fully exposed, her eyes widened, riveted on his manhood, impressive and frightening.
“I will be tender with you,” he promised, taking her into his arms, pillowing his head in the veil of her hair.
His gentleness was her undoing. “What we are doing is a promise, a time for loving and once given will never disappear.”
His mouth grazed her neck, her earlobe, and then swooped to capture her lips. Coaxing them open, his tongue explored the recesses of her mouth, firm, demanding. She groaned.
He smelled wonderful, strong, healthy male, of sea and sweat. His arms encircled her, his hand splayed at the bottom of her spine holding her in intimate contact. She gasped as her bare breasts crushed against the firmness of his chest and the hard, intimate contact of his arousal against her stomach. Suddenly his hands were everywhere, her body aching for more.
Outlining the tips of her breasts with his fingers, Nicholas brought their tips to crested peaks. Slowly, languorously, his hands moved downward, skimming either side of her body to her thighs. He explored her thighs then plunged down again searching the warmth that lay hidden intimately between.
“Let me ready you, Alexandra.” His deep voice slid along her veins like warm honey.
His mouth came down on hers, sapping all her strength, making her boneless while he plied her intimately with his finger, withdrawing and sinking, pushing her over some unnamed edge. She writhed beneath, her body arching toward the power of his ever-present fingers. She could not get enough of him; her impatience grew to explosive proportions, his expert touch driving her to higher levels of ecstasy. She cried out in release, exploding in a downpour of fiery sensations.
Dazed, she opened her eyes to meet his blue gaze, dark as lapis…and poised above her… the Duke of Rutland. A man who had the lethal power to kill a man with his hands, who had fought off Damiano. Yet all he had yielded to her was an aching tenderness and fierce desire.
“Oh, Nicholas.” She lay there in a gasping heap, her arm still trapped beneath his weight.
He laughed. “That is just a measure to prepare you.” The vow he’d made not to touch her had disintegrated like a sandcastle in the wind. She lay there soft…yielding, all for the taking, a fulfillment of every waking dream that had tormented him since the first time he clapped eyes on her on the beach. To think that aboard the Santanas, he had thought her an old crone who robbed people. She’d been so dirty he hadn’t realized her beauty until she had cleaned up on the island.
Her full ripe breasts thrust impudently like dark rose buds. Her trim waist melded down over rounded hips, revealing the dark triangle of her womanhood where his hand explored. He swallowed, imagining a hundred wicked things from her. He wanted to kiss her there, to taste the sweet saltiness of her skin, to tease his tongue down the soft curvature of her spine.
Her fingers touched his bare chest, circling his breast. Nicholas closed his eyes, torturous thoughts of long, slow love making aroused him to a fevered pitch.
He nudged her legs apart and with incredible constraint, entered her. He paused when he felt the barrier of her virginity. She was tight and so damp. Barely hanging on to his control, Nicholas bowed his head, his breathing ragged next to her ear.
“It will only hurt a little bit.”
She clenched his shoulders, expectant.
He shifted his hold on her, continued his probing, perspiration beading his brow. To bury himself in her hot, moist warmth. The last remnants of his control failed.
Grabbing her hips, he plunged hard with one solid, powerful thrust.
She pushed at him, scrambling in the sand to get away. He had hurt her. He stopped, his mouth came down on hers, and he whispered into her mouth, reassuring her.
“No more.” She pounded his shoulders, but he held her in place.
Nicholas stayed rock still inside her, waiting for her to adjust before he started moving again. “My love, the worst is over.” He hated hurting her. But she felt so damned good.
In reply, her arms entwined his neck in an aching tenderness that tore at his heart.
He began to move, slowly at first, a whisper of a caress, his manhood deep inside her. He groaned as the dormant sexuality of her lush body burst into full bloom. His control shattered like a million shards of glass, nights of restraint he had harnessed, now unleashed, his ardor mounted as she rose to meet his scorching need.
Nicholas matched her movements, thrusting his fingers into the silkiness of her hair and lifting her hips to meet his rhythmic thrusts. Her fingers dug into his shoulders and he buried his face on the side of her neck, the pressure building inside of him unlike anything he had ever experienced. Exquisite. She abandoned herself to him, and with every forceful thrust, he claimed her in a raw act of total possession, mindless of everything except the indulgence of granting them both complete satisfaction.
She arched, and her body vibrated with liquid fire. Nicholas taut above her, emptied his seed into her. Breathing hard, he rolled to the side, keeping her intimately joined to him, and reveling in the sensation of her wet warmth, and the brush of her lips against his neck. He cradled her in his arms, his hand drifting up and down her spine as she leaned her soft cheek against his chest. His chin nestled upon her head and his fingers buried in the golden waves of her hair. For a moment, he abandoned all the fears of the past and future, basking upon the wonder of the intimacy they had just shared.
She ran a fingernail across his abdomen. “Nicholas…did I?” She was too shy to ask if she pleased him.
He exhaled a long sigh of contentment, basking in male arrogance that she was shaken as much as he. He kissed her head, the scent of jasmine mixed with the musky scent of their lovemaking permeated the air.
“Perfect,” he said.
“I can’t imagine such fulfillment. Is it like that for everyone their first time?”
She was whirling through a haze of new feelings and desire, and she wanted him to explain what she was experiencing. “Seldom.”
“Will it always be like this?” She squirmed closer to him. Her innocent movements and conversation put provocative thoughts into his head. No woman he’d known had ever kindled this overwhelming surge of lust. Despite his wild desire for her again, he seemed to revel in her struggle with future anticipations of which he had no doubt.
“Better.”
She drew his hand to her lips and kissed the hard, lean knuckles. “Then I wager a game of chess and the winner demands the prize.”
Nicholas chuckled. “I shall not let you distract me. You will find a worthy foe in the future.”
“Is that a threat?” Her eyes were wide and dared to taunt him.
“No, Alexandra my love,” he whispered. “Only a vow.”
In the last months, he’d been kidnapped, imprisoned, set to be sold into slavery, endured a hurricane and survived on an island, and met an enchantress. Yet England, a distant, cloying shadow, called him to return. They would get off this island. She gave him confidence in that notion. And she was his. He would face his father and damn the consequences. For now, he was rooted. He rolled her over onto her back and made swift violent love to her, more hopeful, more demanding than before.