It wasn’t a miracle, her safe passage to France. The ship was a ruin, no longer lying at anchor, but slumped at the edge of what must once have been a deep pool, its hull half-buried in mud. No sails, no ropes. Those were long decayed.
Nonetheless, the blood roared in her ears.
“Ah.” Neal threw an arm around a nearby tree trunk, swung his body around to get a better look.
“I haven’t seen her in years.” He gave a low whistle. “She’s a beauty.”
“You knew of this?” She stared, rapt, at the ship’s tall, naked spars, at the enormous captain’s wheel with the broken spokes. How thrilling it must have been, to grip that wheel and to feel the ship responding, lifting and turning, surging through the waves.
“One of the wonders of these woods.” Neal pointed. “And there’s our old friend.”
Long and thin, the heron stood motionless on the poop deck, blending with the rails.
“Hello, Captain Heron,” she called out, and heard Neal’s low laughter.
“The ship is centuries old,” he said. “Or that’s what I recall. Mrs. Odgers took me to see it with my mother when I was a boy. She’s been rambling this river for sixty years and knows every legend.”
He was squinting down at the ship, unconscious that her attention had shifted suddenly to him.
Laura Odgers was his mother’s contemporary. Perhaps older than his mother.
Her face warmed. The sun shone stronger where they stood, but the warmth originated inside her.
Dear God, what hadn’t she pictured last night? She’d imagined—vividly—Neal passing those dark hours in every position, except sitting upright, sharing reminiscences with an elderly friend of the family.
Could he read her thoughts? Just in case, she shaded her eyes with her hand. The sun provided all the excuse she needed.
“It was a pirate ship, wasn’t it?” she asked throatily. “In the story I’m writing—a novel, really—the heroine flees her husband and becomes a pirate and harries the Cornish coast.”
“That’s what you’re writing in your notebook?”
She stiffened at the amusement in his voice. Yes, he’d overestimated her on that front as well. Would he mock her?
A novel, he’d say. I thought you were writing something of more consequence.
He intercepted her look and grinned the grin that made her breath catch.
“A novel,” he said, and shook his head. “I should have known that a novelist was naming my ointment, not a botanist.”
A dreamer. A novelist. How smoothly those words had rolled off his tongue. What possibilities he saw in her. For her.
If only she’d met Neal Traymayne years ago. But no, years ago, she didn’t have the eyes to see him.
“It wasn’t a pirate ship, not in the story I was told.” He leaned a shoulder into the willow. “Legend has it that ship was hidden there when the tide of the civil war turned and the west fell to the Parliamentarians. Members of the Prince’s Council were to be spirited to the Scillies. But something went wrong, obviously. The ship is still there.”
“A traitor,” she suggested. “He revealed the plan to the enemy. Instead of Cavaliers, Roundheads burst through these trees and slaughtered the crew.”
“Are all novelists so bloodthirsty?” Again, he flashed that grin. “I read too many horticulture journals.”
“How dull. I couldn’t tolerate reading any.” She responded automatically, tensed, and then, just like that, the tension dissipated. She could say what she pleased without worrying if it matched up with Neal’s image of Muriel Pendrake. Hiding her smile, she turned to the river.
“Still, it might have been a pirate ship.” She sighed as a breeze rustled the willow fronds, looked up at the tiny green leaves fluttering down around them. A leaf settled on a dark wave of Neal’s hair.
She knew how his hair would feel between her fingers if she plucked at that leaf.
She closed her eyes, blocking him out. She imagined the ship in its prime, bows and decks painted red and gold, white sails bellying in the wind. She could see it rigged for speed and racing downriver, past the headlands to the open sea.
“I’ll claim it for you.”
Her eyes flew open. “What are you talking about?” Even as she laughed, she was frowning. His voice held that same cocksure note she remembered from when they stood soaked to the skin in the Kyncastle harbor.
He was already unwinding the lightweight green scarf from around his collar.
“Red or black would be more piratical. But this ensign is at least distinctive.” He shrugged out of his coat. Without the scarf holding his collar together, his shirt gaped at the neck, exposing a triangle of bronzed skin.
Why did this man’s neck overwhelm her? She shouldn’t stare at it, but staring was better than the alternative. She wanted to taste it, to put her lips and teeth to that muscular curve.
“By your leave.”
Mortified, she jerked her head up. His expression was all politeness, but his eyes were glinting.
Has my lady looked her fill?
She made an unintelligible noise and he was off, vaulting logs and rocks, then skidding down to the mud. He circled around the ship’s hull and vanished from sight, and the next thing she knew he was up on the deck, weaving around ancient blocks, springing over weather-rotted boards.
“You’ll break your fool neck!” she shouted as he shimmied up the mast, which was nearly certain to splinter, to send him crashing through the deck, and Lord, if he wasn’t laughing, legs wrapping the ancient timber as he knotted his scarf to the pinnacle.
“What shall we call her?” he shouted down. “Lavinia’s Revenge?”
She put her hands on her hips. “Is Neal’s Inglorious and Untimely and Entirely Unnecessary Demise too much of a mouthful?”
“You’re the wordsmith.” He shrugged—shrugged!—as though maintaining his hold on the mast required no special concessions. “I’m thinking The Bluebell has a nicer ring.”
“Thinking! That’s a laugh.” She ended with a mutter. She wasn’t going to shout herself hoarse while he monkeyed around twenty feet in the air. What kind of natural scientist didn’t understand gravity?
She couldn’t help it. She shouted again. “I hope you and Captain Heron there enjoy yourselves!”
She’d leave them to it, the birdbrains.
She moved swiftly behind the willow and sat, setting her back to it. She tried not to interpret the sounds floating from the river. A particularly loud thud made her wince. But Neal’s arrival was only delayed by a few moments more, and she heard him coming, whistling as he climbed the bank. She stood hastily, feet protesting, and met him as he crested the rise. Instinctively she fisted her hands on her hips, but her remonstrances caught in her throat.
He looked, if possible, even more disheveled than before. Even more raffishly attractive. A light sheen of sweat made his cheekbones gleam. She could smell him, clean sweat and aromatic smoke.
“You look proud of yourself,” she managed.
“There wasn’t any danger,” he said, then checked himself. “Or—just enough. And now, behold!”
The wind had kicked up and the green scarf streamed out from the ship’s mast like a pennant.
Glancing between his wide white smile and the green scarf, she felt an answering ripple within her. Hot and red.
“Your ship,” he said. “The Bluebell.”
She couldn’t resist his good humor, not when she’d lately feared he’d shuttered himself to her forever.
“The Bluebell,” she repeated, more breathlessly than she’d intended, then nodded. “I’ll put it in the novel. My pirate is French, though. So his ship will be La Jacinthe de Bois.”
“Not very fearsome, for a pirate.” He tipped his head. “I liked it as a name when I imagined you the ship’s mistress, with your eyes like bluebells.”
She flushed. A high compliment, coming from a botanist. “He’s not a fearsome pirate.”
“No?” He laid a finger across his lips, regarding her. “He doesn’t pillage and murder? Why is he a pirate?”
“Freedom.” She shrugged. “Danger.”
“In that case, I understand.” He lowered his hand, rubbed his thumb absently along a red weal on his palm.
Another man might have torn his palms open on that mast, but Neal had calluses. She remembered their roughness.
“I wish . . .” she began, ignoring the wary light that came into his eyes. “I wish we were in my novel. I wish that ship were the brigantine La Jacinthe de Bois, and I was the heroine and you were the pirate she’d met in the woods, the one who offered to share with her the freedom of the high seas.”
“I don’t speak French,” he said, his tone light.
“I’ll rewrite it,” she said. “He’s a Cornish pirate and his ship is The Bluebell. He sacks estates for the fun of it, and he always tempts fate by taking the time to dig up flowers, which he keeps alive in glass cases in his cabin.”
“The deck,” he murmured. “He should put the cases on the deck. Not much light in the cabin, I’d wager. Never mind. Go on.”
“The deck, then.” She exhaled. “The deck of his ship is bursting with plants and flowers, bow covered with bluebells. And his parrot speaks in slogans on behalf of the Society for the Protection of Plumage. Now do you approve?”
He laughed, and she felt a sudden surge of power. She had the ability to elicit that grin. They got on well together, despite everything. She couldn’t define exactly what they shared, but their connection was real.
“ ‘Outlaw the market hunting of birds,’ ” he quoted. “That’s their slogan, if I remember correctly. You’ll come up with something catchier.”
“Certainly,” she retorted, pleased at the implication. He believed she might improve upon something thought up by one of his brilliant sisters!
“And when we’re pursued by aggrieved landowners, or the authorities,” she continued, “we’ll retreat to our hideaway on the French coast. Maybe we’ll like the life there so much we give up piracy altogether.”
Other men indulged her when she spoke. Neal listened. He was listening now, too intently. She sensed it coming, some negation. Some rejection. One of his rolled-up sleeves had slipped down and he pushed it back as he folded his arms.
She reached out then, watched her hand close on his forearm as if her hand belonged to someone else. It was so much paler than his forearm and looked flimsy against its bulk. He could break her grip just by flexing.
She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, he was staring at her.
“It didn’t come true.” She formed her lips into a smile. “We’re not in my novel. We’re not sailing for the French coast.”
Slowly, he shook his head. The humor went from his face. He, too, seemed to understand that their ill-defined rapprochement had come to an end.
“If France is still your destination . . .” As he slanted his gaze toward the river, she noticed the shadows on his eyelids, smudges of fatigue.
Into the lengthening pause, without looking back at her, he said, “I’ll take you to Plymouth. You can get on one of the steamers to Roscoff.”
She loosed a shuddering breath. It was more than she deserved from him.
It wasn’t enough.
Come with me. She couldn’t say the words. Neal had Varnham, his family, the Cornish flora . . . Muriel Pendrake. He had everything to lose.
He would refuse. And she would crumple.
She said simply: “Thank you.”
“What will you do in France?” His brows knitted together. He worried for her.
How decent he was.
If only he were slightly less decent. If he had knocked on her door last night, she would have opened it. And now he wouldn’t be looking worried at the prospect of abandoning her at the port. He would be looking implicated, entangled, trapped, bewitched—knowing he couldn’t let her go.
He was waiting for her answer.
“I’ll take a post at a school in Paris.” She said it calmly, a sharp pain in her chest. “A friend of a friend knows the headmistress.”
That woman with diamonds in her hair had described Le Manoir down to the stone angels flanking the entrance, the grotto built of Fontainebleau rock in the park. Surely, all that description had some basis in reality.
She’d lied to her parents about attending Le Manoir. Now, years later, she would walk between those stone angels, impoverished and humbled, begging to be taken on as a member of the staff.
Pity Justice if she were truly blind, unable to enjoy her ringside seat to all this comeuppance.
She laughed and Neal’s darkening expression told her that the laughter sounded hollow. She tightened her grip on his forearm. It befitted a pirate, so wide and so tan.
Come with me.
Her feet screamed, but she rose onto her toes and pressed her mouth to his. His lips were warm but unyielding.
She felt his fingers close on her wrist and he lifted her hand, pressing a kiss into her palm before pushing her arm into her chest until she stepped back.
“This goes nowhere,” he said gently, and she saw the color leaching out of the sky, the leaves, the river, the waving green flag. The heat in her core turned ashy.
But she tilted her head at a defiant angle. “So? We’re here, now.” She licked her lips. “Together.”
His fingers still encircled her wrist, his thumb tight to her leaping pulse.
“You said I planned to seduce Muriel Pendrake.” His smile was crooked. “In fact, I planned to marry her. Hell, maybe I still plan to marry her, I don’t know. But . . .”
“But you want to marry. Someone. I see.” She worked hard to swallow. “Maybe Muriel Pendrake.” Her voice was fraying. “Maybe a different woman so long as she’s unattached, scientific, and amenable to your schedule.”
“Don’t,” he said, his thumb moving up her wrist, sliding into the hollow of her palm, still burning from his kiss.
Now her laughter sounded unraveled. “Your mother’s hair won’t turn back because you marry the right woman. She’s dying and so you want to rush to her with your bride and show her you’re all grown up, exactly the man she wants you to be, when there’s nothing more childish, more—”
He yanked her wrist, dragging her into him, and she gasped as her breasts crushed against his chest. But she wouldn’t be silenced. She raised her chin higher, glaring up at him.
“Maybe there’s nothing about this that goes anywhere, that gets you to Penzance in time for the wedding you think will make your mother so happy, and maybe I don’t compare to Muriel Pendrake, with her knowledge of plants and languages and birds and dinosaur bones and who knows what else, but you can’t deny there’s something—” She broke off as the breath he heaved caused his chest to expand, increasing the pressure, the heat. Sensation gathered in her nipples.
“Something,” she whispered. The ashes within her had gone molten. She couldn’t explain. He felt it too, or he didn’t.
She wormed her free arm up between them, touched his high, angled cheekbone, skated her fingers over the concavity of his cheek, settled them on his jaw.
She directed his head downward. His chin rasped the sensitive skin of her lower lip, and then their mouths hovered a breath apart.
“Don’t go, then.” His growl warmed her lips. “Stay. Sue for divorce.”
“Impossible.” She went to lick her lower lip and the tip of her tongue stroked the curve of his. He hissed. She didn’t even realize he’d moved them both forward until her shoulder blades bumped the trunk of the willow. The fronds fountained around them, cool and green, but she felt hot flickers traveling through her, wild as runaway flame.
He felt it too. The jut of his arousal pressed her lower belly. His eyes were hooded, but the irises were clear. They bored into her.
She couldn’t face Cranbrook. Sailing to France would be easier.
If Neal came with her.
Lies and wishes. They’d been the source of so much trouble in her life. Her next utterance would be both.
“I wish we had today, just today,” she whispered.
“For what?” He was so close now that his eyes twinned in her vision, and the beating of his lashes tickled her skin.
“Something.” She shifted her hips and he groaned into her mouth. “Everything.”
He moved his lips to speak, but her own lips were between them, and his answer became their kiss, sweet and then deep, deeper—shattering.