THERE WAS nothing but ocean in all directions. No ships, no shore, nothing to swim toward even if Cat had the strength to flee.
After the initial overwhelming realization of Travis’s presence, her first thought was that Harrington had lied to her. Though she said nothing, though she refused to speak to Travis at all, the accusation was written across the taut lines of her face.
Travis saw it, as he had always seen so much of her. So much, and still not enough. He had understood too late that he had been so busy looking over his shoulder at the mistakes of the past that he had missed the most important truth of all. Cat, his future.
“Rod didn’t lie to you,” Travis said. “The captain is part of the crew.”
Cat closed her eyes. Of course. And Travis is captain of this ship. I should have phrased my demand more carefully.
But she said not one word aloud. Speaking would make it all too real. Make Travis too real.
When she made no move to speak, he did. “I knew I couldn’t lure you out of your . . . silence. But I thought your cameras would. I thought you would succumb to the beauty of photographing the Wind Warrior as she sailed a long reach at dawn.”
Cat looked past Travis. Through him.
Though he wasn’t surprised at her reaction, he was surprised at how much it still hurt. Like having his guts pulled through the eye of a needle. Like watching her slide further and further away with each dawn.
“But you didn’t respond to the cameras,” Travis said, his voice hard. “In six days you haven’t so much as unwrapped a roll of film. You’re not sleeping and you’re not eating. Since neither your cameras nor I can seduce you back to life, it’s time for the direct approach.” He shoved a wet suit into Cat’s hands. “Put this on.”
Her eyes flew open. She looked in disbelief at the wet suit, and then at Travis. She saw nothing in his face but the hard planes and angles of his determination. And the shadow of another emotion that she flinched from seeing at all.
“If you don’t put it on,” he said flatly, “I’ll do it for you.”
Once she would have flung his suit and his pity in his face. Now it simply didn’t matter. Nothing did.
As soon as Cat went below, Diego appeared at Travis’s elbow. “Now, at least, we won’t have to hide you with the cook.”
“Is everything ready?”
“As you ordered, Captain.”
Travis grunted and stalked to the stern of the Wind Warrior.
When Cat emerged on the deck again, she was wearing the wet suit. It, like the other clothes Travis had bought her, fit perfectly.
The ship was hove to, resting quietly on the roller-coaster back of the sea. At the stern, Travis was waiting for her, a tall black figure looming against the dawn.
“I’ll go first,” he said. “The ladder can be slippery.”
Cat waited with absolute indifference until Travis called to her from the diving platform below. She climbed down and went into the water without looking at him. He dove cleanly, surfaced beside her, and swam alongside her, watching her.
Diego watched too, ready to launch the Zodiac if it was needed.
At first Cat swam erratically, more of a flight from the Wind Warrior than a coordinated effort to stay afloat. Gradually the ingrained rhythms of swimming settled her body. Then she swam mindlessly, arms and legs churning, ignoring everything.
She didn’t know how long she swam. She knew only that when it came time to climb back onto the diving platform, she hadn’t the strength.
With a smooth motion Travis levered himself onto the platform. He pulled Cat out of the sea, stood her on her feet, and pushed her up the ladder.
“Captain,” Diego asked anxiously, “is she sick?”
“She’s fine. Just tired from the exercise. I’ll bring breakfast to her.”
Travis picked Cat up and carried her back to her assigned cabin. He peeled off her wet suit, toweled her dry as impersonally as a nurse, dressed her in warm clothes, and left her staring at the door in a combination of shock and disbelief.
He returned in a few minutes, carrying breakfast.
The first thing she saw was the medicine Dr. Stone had prescribed to help get her menstrual cycle back to normal.
“Take it with this,” Travis said, holding out a glass of juice.
Cat didn’t move.
“You aren’t strong enough to fight me,” he said bluntly. “If I have to, I’ll shove this pill down your throat and pour juice in after it.”
She took the pill.
When she made no move toward the food, Travis picked up the fork and loaded it with scrambled eggs.
“Open up.”
His words and actions reminded Cat of the night at the restaurant, when they had fed each other dessert and Travis licked up his mistakes. A single look at his smoldering blue-green eyes told her that he was remembering too.
Pain moved beneath Cat’s indifference. She took the fork away from Travis.
She would eat, but not from his hand.
“I’m not leaving until the tray is clean,” he said. “Take as long as you like.”
Cat ignored him completely, but the plate was empty when Travis took it away. Moments later he was back in her doorway. She hadn’t moved. Her eyes were as empty as her hands.
“Up,” Travis said curtly. “Get your cameras.”
Slowly she focused on him. She said nothing, simply looked at him, her pale eyes dazed with exhaustion and disbelief.
He can’t do this to me.
Travis leaned over Cat. She could see nothing but him, a tawny-haired giant filling her world until there wasn’t room for anything else, even breath.
“No mercy,” he said softly. “I’m going to push you until you fight me. Somewhere under all that ice a fire still burns. I’m going to find it. Get up.”
Cat stood up, knowing that if she refused, Travis would simply carry her up to the deck. She didn’t want that. When he touched her, she remembered things better left buried under layers of ice and silence.
For the rest of that day and all the days that followed, Cat didn’t look directly at Travis, didn’t argue with his orders, didn’t speak to him at all. He gave up trying to break through her silence and settled for being her nurse and her nemesis, driving her physically in the hope that she would be tired enough to sleep through the night.
But she wasn’t.
No matter how far she swam, no matter how many meals she ate, no matter how many exercises she did or how many pictures she took under his critical eye, the hole in the universe was still there beneath her feet.
And each time she slept, she fell through, awakening to terror.
When night came and the sea anchor was put out and the crew went below, Cat dreaded going back to her cabin to face the freezing core of darkness. Yet she did just that. Every night. Night after night after night.
Halfway through the third week at sea, she woke as she had every night, sick, cold, fighting not to scream. When she looked out the porthole to begin the ritual of counting stars, something gave way deep inside her.
I can’t take this anymore.
With a choked sound she stumbled out of her bed and fled silently up to the deck. She found a place out of the wind and huddled there, staring blindly into the night.
Though she had made no noise, Travis appeared. When he picked her up and began carrying her toward the stairs, she went rigid in his arms.
“No,” Cat said, her voice soft, shattered. “I won’t go back to that cabin. Do you hear me? I won’t.”
It was the first time she had spoken to Travis in all the long days since he had appeared on the Wind Warrior.
His arms tightened around Cat as he looked at her drawn face. In the moonlight she looked otherworldly, as fragile and beautiful as frost.
“It’s all right,” he said very gently. “I won’t take you to your cabin. I promise.”
Slowly Cat’s body relaxed. Travis carried her to the cabin at the bow of the boat.
His cabin.
She didn’t protest. She would do anything, endure anything, rather than count the stars beyond her porthole again.
“Easy now, sweetheart,” Travis said softly. “We’re almost there. You’re safe.”
Gently he put Cat on his bed and covered her with a blanket. When he lifted a hand to smooth her hair back from her face, she flinched as though he meant to strike her. His mouth flattened into a bleak line. He sat near the bed, close to Cat but not touching her.
And not touching her was like feeling his skin peeled from his living body.
Eventually Cat slept, only to awaken shaking and cold and nauseated. Her low sounds of distress woke Travis.
“Cat,” he whispered. “You’re safe. It’s all right, darling.”
She shuddered.
“Easy, sweetheart,” Travis said in a low voice. “I won’t hurt you. I just want you to know that you aren’t alone.”
He lay down next to Cat and gently, very gently, gathered her into his arms.
Cat wanted to fight his touch, but couldn’t. At that instant she could no more have turned from his warmth than the sea could have turned from the pull of the moon.
For a long time Travis held her, rubbing out the knots of tension in her neck and shoulders, soothing her, stroking her without sensual demand. Yet still she shuddered on some breaths, her body and mind wound too tightly to go on much longer without breaking. Travis wasn’t even certain she knew that she was being held.
“Cat . . . Cat, don’t fight against showing your feelings. Scream or cry or smash things, do whatever you have to. Let go, Cat. Let go. You can’t go on living like this.”
Her only answer was a shudder that wracked her body.
Travis held her, warming her cold flesh until finally she slept again.
This time Cat didn’t wake up until long after sunrise. It was the most sleep she had had since telling Travis she was pregnant. She was still trying to understand why she was able to sleep next to him but not alone when he appeared in her cabin. He was wearing a wet suit and carrying hers.
The daily routine began. Neither one of them said anything about how the night had been spent. When Travis did speak, he didn’t require an answer from Cat. He had learned that she wouldn’t give one. Except for that one stark demand not to be taken back to her cabin, she hadn’t spoken to Travis at all.
It was as though he no longer existed for her.
At some point during the day, Cat began to do more than go through the motions with her cameras. The beauty of Wind Warrior’s magnificent maroon sails swelling against the cloud-layered sky finally had seeped through her numbness. She said nothing to Travis about it. It wasn’t something she wanted to put into words, to face. It was easier just to let reflexes take over.
When the time came to sleep again, Cat went to her own cabin. She woke up shaking and cold, making muffled sounds, trying not to scream. When she was able, she dragged herself off the bunk and started for the deck.
Travis was waiting outside her door. Wordlessly he carried her back to his cabin. He tucked her between the sheets, climbed in beside her, and pulled her against his body. Saying nothing, she accepted his embrace and his warmth.
In time the shuddering finally stilled. Travis settled Cat more closely against him. She didn’t resist. Nor did she move closer on her own. He closed his eyes and fought to conceal the rage and despair and anguish that were tearing him apart.
“Cat,” he said softly, raggedly, “don’t be too strong. Let me help you. Bend before you break. Before we both break.”
She didn’t answer.
His lips brushed her forehead again and again, the caresses like tiny breaths whispering over her. He tried not to think about what might have been, love and time and the future, all the things that money can’t buy. Instead, he watched moonlight and shadows move over her face, staring at her as though if he looked closely enough, he would be able to see through darkness to the end of her pain.
It was the same on the nights that followed. They slept until Cat awakened, and then Travis held her until she slept again. But he didn’t sleep again. He couldn’t.
Her nightmare had become his.
Each night after Travis soothed Cat back to sleep, he slipped out of the bed and went out on the deck alone. There he stood with the moonlight and sea, the ship steady beneath his feet and the night haunted by voices, voices turning and crying around him like black gulls, voices telling him how little he could do, how much he had lost.
Cat’s voice, alive with wonder. I’m dreaming. First you, then that ship. Don’t wake me up, Travis, not yet.
Cat’s voice caught in pain. Why? Why couldn’t I have met you in January, when we might have had a chance to love?
Ask me to go away with you again in January. By then I’ll have paid all my debts that matter.
I don’t want your money. Can’t you understand that?
If you stopped buying women, you might just find out that there are women who can’t be bought.
But Travis had been afraid to believe.
And then he had believed, only to be betrayed.
Do you believe in miracles? I’m pregnant, my love. I’m pregnant! A baby! Travis, my man, my lover, my love. Our baby!
The joy in Cat’s voice could wound him even in memory. Especially in memory. He should have shared that joy, should have gone down on his knees and thanked God for a miracle. Instead, he had been locked within his own fear of making the same mistake all over again, costing another baby its chance to live.
You’re going to have that baby and then it will be mine. My attorney will have the papers to you in a few days.
He had let the past and Tina’s lies blind him to the present and Cat’s truth.
Travis looked at midnight without seeing it. His hands were locked around the railing, his whole body taut with pain and the voices cutting him until he bled silently, invisibly, hearing his own words with a kind of numb horror.
If you’re holding out for marriage, you can forget it. Marrying a whore is the kind of mistake I don’t make twice.
Yet it was Cat’s voice that stripped Travis to his soul.
I wouldn’t give up this child to be raised by a man who can’t see love when it stands in front of him. Like me, now. I love you, Travis. But that’s my mistake. I should have known better. Rich men just don’t know how to love.
Thank you for my child, even though it was an unwilling gift. I’ll take the baby. And you, T. H. Danvers, you can take your money and go to hell.
Dr. Stone’s voice, each word another drop of agony eating at Travis’s naked soul as she outlined the many ways he had failed Cat.
She was simply too physically depleted to sustain a pregnancy. Everything we did was too little, too late.
For a time she was connected in the most intimate possible way with another life. Now that is gone.
She described her feelings to me very well—a hole at the center of everything. She stumbles in and then she falls and keeps on falling.
Money is too small a bandage to put on a wound like Cathy’s.
And money was all Travis had.
The despair that lay beneath anger and pain lapped at his will. He had been so certain that Cat would respond to her cameras, to the sea . . . to him.
She wouldn’t speak to him.
She wouldn’t even look at him.
He didn’t blame her. If he could have, he would have shed himself like an ugly skin and walked away, but that wasn’t possible. He wanted to cry her name and his love to the night, but his throat was blocked by grief. Like Cat, he could only endure each moment in a silence haunted by all the mistakes of the past.
Head bowed, Travis endured because it was the only thing he could do for Cat, the only way he could be close to her, joined by grief as he had refused to be joined by love.
I know you hate me. I came back to you too late. If you don’t want my baby, then another man’s.
Anything, Cat, anything. Scream and call me names. I deserve all of them. At least cry. Tears will heal you faster than anything else.
It seemed to Cat that no sooner had she been soothed out of nightmare and back into sleep by Travis than she awakened again. She didn’t know what had disturbed her. There was no nightmare clawing her out of sleep. Nor was she cold.
Slowly Cat realized that she had awakened because she was alone in the bed. She was used to being within reach of Travis in the terrible darkness, within touch, breath and warmth mingling.
Making no noise, Cat went up onto the deck. Though she wore only the soft T-shirt she had found forgotten in a drawer, she wasn’t chilly. The night was like velvet. Wind Warrior had taken them south to summer.
All around the ship, a school of dolphins leaped in silver calligraphy against the seamless midnight sea. Balanced on the horizon, a full moon poured radiance over the night.
It was a moment before Cat saw Travis at the bow, outlined against moonlight. His arms were braced against the rail, his head was bent, his body rigid. Despite being half turned toward her, he didn’t see her. He seemed to be looking at the ebony sea and the dolphins’ quicksilver grace.
Cat stood without moving, without breathing. The crystal beauty of the moment sliced through her. She heard a harsh sound and thought that she had cried out. Then she realized the sound had come from Travis. He buried his face in his hands, but not before she saw the silver sheen on his cheeks.
He can’t be. Crying. Rich men don’t care enough about anything to cry.
Confused, shaken, Cat stumbled back to Travis’s cabin, his bed. She lay awake, sorting through certainties that had been shattered by moonlight and a man’s tears. No matter how many times her thoughts scattered, they reformed around one impossible truth.
Travis had cried for her when she was unable to cry for herself.
Guilt might make him replace her cameras. Pity might make him bully her into health. But neither guilt nor pity could force tears out of his strength.
Trembling, almost afraid, Cat wondered how many nights Travis had comforted her and then gone out on deck alone with no one to comfort him.
As quietly as moonlight, tears came to her, burning her, searing through ice to the agony beneath.
Cat didn’t know how long it was before she heard Travis walk softly into the cabin and ease himself onto the bed. Silently she turned toward him, fitting herself against him, holding him as he had held her so many times. She tried to speak, but her breath came out in a ragged sob that was his name.
It was all she could say, over and over. She wept even harder when his arms closed around her, crying because he had cared enough to cry for her when she couldn’t cry for herself.
Travis buried his face in Cat’s unexpected warmth, holding her as tightly as she held him, sharing the terrible wrench of emotions returning to her.
When there were no more tears, they still held one another, warmth in the cold center of night.
Cat awoke with the taste of Travis on her lips, bittersweet residue of tears. He was watching her as though he was afraid she would turn away.
And he was. When she moved closer to him, his arms tightened to hold her. He breathed raggedly, no longer fighting against the pain that ate at his soul.
“I should have been with you,” Travis said. “I should have cooked your meals, bathed you, carried you into the sun, held you.” His voice tightened into silence as he fought for control. “I didn’t believe you loved me. I kept telling myself that you would call, you would come to me, that all you wanted was to marry my money. Then you told me you sold your cameras.”
Travis was holding Cat so hard that she couldn’t breathe, but she didn’t notice. She knew nothing but his face, his eyes, his words, his warmth.
“You sold your cameras to keep my baby and never called me, never spoke to me, never asked one thing of me.”
When Travis closed his eyes, Cat almost made a sound of protest. His face was so bleak without their unique light, so despairing.
“I thought,” he said slowly, “that nothing could be worse than seeing that wave break over you and Jason, seeing your blood pooling on the deck, hearing you scream.”
Cat tried to speak, to protest, but the pain she saw in Travis was too great for words to ease.
“I was wrong,” Travis said. “The last few weeks have been like watching you die by inches, knowing I’d killed you but not cleanly, not quickly. Nothing I did helped you. The nights, Cat. My God, the nights.”
She tried to speak, but couldn’t for all the emotions twisting through her, telling her she was alive.
His eyes opened, but there was no comfort in them, no beauty, no life. His face was turned away from her.
“And the nightmare will go on forever because I can’t change the past,” Travis said in a raw whisper. “I can’t take back the moment when you saw blood on the deck and fell into nightmare, screaming.”
“Travis,” Cat said, her voice husky from lack of use.
“I can still hear you screaming beneath your silence. I can’t stop it. I can’t help you. I can’t change the past. I can only relive it one savage memory at a time. And hate myself.”
“You didn’t do any—”
“The hell I didn’t,” Travis interrupted. “I’ve seen you locked in nightmare because of the miscarriage. I can’t change the nightmare. I can’t help you live with it. There is no end to it.”
“The nightmare,” Cat said painfully. “The nightmare began before I miscarried, not after.”
At first Travis wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. Slowly he turned his head, facing her, revealing himself.
What Cat saw shocked her, turning her world and her heart inside out. She touched his cheek tenderly, wanting to take the certainty of despair from his eyes. She saw his breath hesitate at her caress, then still completely, as though he was afraid to believe. To hope. To trust.
She took a shaky breath. “I knew from the beginning that I would almost certainly miscarry. And I knew that it wasn’t my last chance, that I could have other babies. But I didn’t want another man’s child. I wanted yours. I wanted you, but I’d lost you. That’s when the nightmares started. When I lost you.”
A shudder ripped through Travis. He started to speak, but she covered his lips with her fingers.
“Please,” Cat said. “Let me finish. Let me be like you, strong enough to bend.”
His lips moved against her fingers, and he said nothing.
“For seven years I prided myself on standing alone, and then I fell alone,” she said. “I’m still falling. Don’t leave me, Travis. Not yet. I know I’m not rich enough for you to trust, to love. I don’t care about that anymore. All I care about is here, now, you. Let me run before this storm with you. And when it’s over you won’t have to say anything, do anything. I’ll know, and I’ll leave.”
Travis’s breath came out in a rush as his lips moved from her fingers to her palm to the pulse beating in her wrist.
“You’re richer than I ever was or ever will be,” he said. “You’re fire and life and love. If I thought I could buy you, I’d sell even the Wind Warrior, my soul. But you can’t be bought, can’t be begged, and borrowing isn’t good enough.”
Without warning, his arms moved swiftly, fitting her body against his.
“But you can be stolen, sweet Cat. And that’s what I’ve done. The Wind Warrior owns three quarters of the world. No one can find you and take you away from me.”
He held her so tightly that she couldn’t move or speak. It didn’t matter. She didn’t know what to say and she didn’t want to go anywhere except even closer to him.
“But I promised Harrington I wouldn’t keep you against your will,” Travis said.
“What?”
“You didn’t really believe that your green angel would force you back to work just to meet a deadline, did you?”
She just blinked and looked at Travis like a puzzled cat.
“The publisher told me your photos were so good that he’d cheerfully wait until hell froze over to get the rest of them,” he said. “The rest was just a lie to get you on board.”
“Some angel,” Cat whispered, but the line of her mouth was soft.
“He’s no angel at all. He wouldn’t help me until I promised to let you go when you were well, to let you find a man you could love. And he’s right. You deserve that love, Cat. I’ll let you go, I promise it.”
Yet even as Travis spoke the words, he sensed the hole at the center of the universe opening beneath his feet. Waiting for him. Waiting to swallow the man who learned to love too late.
“But don’t leave me yet,” he whispered raggedly. “Don’t make me let you go right away. I . . . can’t.”
Cat traced his mouth with fingers that trembled. “I’ve already found the only man I could love. Nothing has changed that. Nothing ever could. I love you.”
“Then marry me,” he said urgently, his beard caressing her cheek, her neck, his lips warm and firm on her skin. “Please marry me, Cat. I need you so much that I can’t—don’t know how to say—don’t know what to say.”
She pulled away and stared at Travis.
“I know it isn’t fair to ask you now,” he said in a low voice. “You should have time to recover, but I’m afraid that once you’re well you won’t need anyone, and I need you . . . I need you. Marry me.”
“Don’t,” Cat whispered. She closed her eyes, afraid that if she looked at him, she would accept without asking whether guilt or passion made Travis offer marriage. “The miscarriage wasn’t anyone’s fault. Not yours. Not mine. Not Jason’s. Don’t marry me out of pity. I can take anything but that.”
Travis made a harsh sound. “Pity? I’d as soon pity a storm. You’re so strong.”
“Strong?” Cat’s voice was frayed. Her eyes opened, luminous with tears. “Yeah. Right. That’s why I wake up in a cold sweat every night.”
“You spent a month going through the nights alone. I’ve spent only a week and it’s tearing me apart.”
“You helped me just by being here, holding me. It’s much better now. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t feel you have to marry me.”
“I love you, Cat.”
Travis felt the tremor that went through her, saw shadows of pain and doubt in her haunted gray eyes. His lips brushed hers as his tongue licked at the corners of her mouth.
With a small sound she opened her lips, let him fill her mouth with his breath, his taste, his tongue meeting hers until she forgot to breathe. She felt the sweet heat of his skin beneath her hands, felt his body change, felt his need break over her.
His lean, scarred hands moved beneath the T-shirt she wore, his shirt, a shirt he had envied for too many nights. He stroked her hungrily while she trembled and sighed, telling him how much she liked his touch. His hands moved from her hips to her shoulders, and then over her head, leaving her naked.
Cat lay in the dawn pouring through the porthole, watching Travis, asking nothing of him but his presence here, now. He bent until his lips could brush her face, his warmth touching her temples, her eyes, her mouth. His tongue lingered over hers for a time, moving slowly, deeply, sending desire quivering through her.
When he ended the kiss she made a sound of protest. He called her name and buried his hands in the silky fire of her hair. She arched against him, asking him to touch all of her.
His fingers curled around her breasts, caressing her as his tongue rasped softly over her skin. With slow, unhurried movements he cherished her, moving over her like the sun, warming every shadowed hollow.
She changed beneath his touch, his tongue setting fire to her until she moaned. Her hands clenched rhythmically in his hair as she cried out in the wordless language of ecstasy. With a deep male sound of pleasure he held her straining hips until the storm passed. Then slowly, reluctantly, his mouth released her sultry flesh. He tasted his way back up her body, savoring the salt-sweetness that misted her skin.
“I didn’t steal you out of pity or guilt,” Travis said against Cat’s mouth, catching her lower lip in his teeth, moving his hips hungrily against her and drinking her ragged moan of pleasure. “I stole you because I had to. I want to sink into your soul the way you sank into mine. You taught me how to love. And then I drove you away before I could discover how much I loved you. Now I know. I’ll give you whatever you want, even a life without me. If that’s what you want. Is that what you want?”
She looked at the tourmaline depths of his eyes, felt his arms hard and strong around her, the heat of his aroused body burning against her. He had given her everything, asked nothing, not her love, not even the easing of his own need.
“You,” Cat whispered, pushing Travis over onto his back, her hands sliding down his body. “I want you.”
“Are you sure? The money hasn’t changed.” His lips twisted in a sad, ironic smile. “I’m rich and getting richer every minute.”
“Fuck your money.”
Travis looked startled. Then he laughed until Cat’s hands slid knowingly between his legs. He made a hoarse sound and rolled her onto her back.
“I have a better idea,” he said. “Marry me. Then the money will be yours and you can do what you like with it. Even that.”
Before Cat could answer, his hips moved against her sensually, opening her. But he stopped just short of the union she wanted.
“Travis . . .”
The word was both name and plea.
“Do you want me?” he asked, moving just a bit, touching her, teasing her.
“Not fair,” she said. Lightning raced through her again, seething currents that promised to consume and renew her in the same burning ecstasy. “Not fair.”
“Whoever told you pirates fought fair?” he drawled.
His eyes were blue-green fire, fierce and loving. He laughed and moved again, touching her, but not enough, not nearly enough.
Cat melted in liquid waves of pleasure. “I want you.”
“How do you want me?” he asked, his voice husky, deep. “Husband or lover? Friend or partner? Companion or father of your children?”
“Yes,” she said, closing her legs around him, trying to draw him into her liquid warmth.
“Yes, what?” Travis asked, fighting the desire that shook his strength, showing what it cost him to wait for her answer.
“Yes. Everything you can be. Everything we can be.”
Travis whispered Cat’s name and his love as he took her and gave himself. For a time he simply held her, murmuring his love over and over, hearing the words return redoubled from her lips. Only then did he begin to move with the timeless, potent rhythms of the sea and love, melting her, melting into her, stealing her away.
Above them the Wind Warrior spread its wings and soared through the incandescent dawn, a radiant pirate ship sailing to the ends of the earth and beyond.
If you enjoyed To the Ends of the Earth,
then sample the following brief selection from
JADE ISLAND,
Elizabeth Lowell’s latest captivating romance,
an Avon Books hardcover,
coming in October 1998.
“LET ME get this straight,” Kyle Donovan said, staring in disbelief at his older brother. “You want me to seduce the illegitimate American daughter of a probably corrupt Hong Kong trading family in order to discover whether said family is involved in the sale of cultural treasures stolen from a Han emperor’s grave?”
Archer tilted his head as though thinking it over and studied the cold salt water beyond Kyle’s Pacific Northwest cabin, and finally nodded. “Yeah, that’s about it. Except for the seduction part. That’s optional.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Fine. So seduce her.”
“This is a joke.”
“I wish.”
Kyle waited but his brother wasn’t feeling talkative. Kyle was afraid he knew why. Archer hated involving family in any of the gray areas of his past. Uncle Sam was definitely one of those areas. But the U.S. government, like the past, never really went away.
“What’s going on?” Kyle asked finally, shifting in his chair. “And don’t give me any fairy dust about hands across the water and international cooperation.”
Archer looked at his brother. Sunlight glinted in Kyle’s tarnished blonde hair and made his hazel eyes look more gold than green, but even sunlight couldn’t brighten the dark rims around the irises. Nor could light take away the lines and shadows of experience—experience Archer would rather have spared his younger brother.
“Would you believe business?” Archer asked neutrally.
“Monkey business, yeah.”
Archer’s smile was fast but real, like the anger narrowing his gray-green eyes.
Kyle simply waited. This time he wasn’t going to be the one to break the silence.
Archer got out of his chair. He was tall, rangy, quick, a darker echo of his younger brother. Silently Archer prowled the cabin’s homey main room, touching things at random: a computer that bristled with Kyle’s personal additions, books on everything from international banking to five thousand years of Chinese jade, a small vase with a branch of rosemary in it, a letter opener that could slice to the bone, and a fishing lure that looked like a tiny hula skirt. Beneath the slithery, glittery skirt was a hook so sharp it could stick to rock. It certainly wanted to stick to flesh.
“You’ve changed,” Archer said, smiling as he carefully set aside the lure. “Before that amber fiasco last year, you couldn’t out-wait me if your life depended on it.”
“Does it?”
Archer’s smile vanished. “Not as far as I know.”
“Which brings up an interesting question,” Kyle said. “What do you know?”
“Enough to worry. Not enough to do anything useful about it.”
“Welcome to the human race.”
For a moment longer Archer studied the windswept fir forest outside the cabin and the water beyond, where currents more powerful than rivers coiled beneath the peaceful surface of Rosario Strait.
“I don’t know any more facts than I already told you,” Archer said.
“Can you get more?”
“Soon? I doubt it. My contact was unofficial.”
“Unofficial. Uh-huh. Do you really believe that?”
“Most of the real work is done that way. Off the record.”
Subtly, Kyle flexed his left shoulder, trying to work out the ache. The wound had long since healed, but the shock wave from an off-the-record bullet had done unhappy things to nearby cartilage. When it came to predicting rain, he had a much better average than the expensive weather guessers on TV.
“So this guy calls you,” Kyle said, “and says that there are rumors of the kind of cultural theft that will make diplomats reach for tranquilizers while governments beat the drum of nationalism and everyone with any sense heads for cover.”
“Yes.”
“Why did he come to you?”
“He didn’t say, beyond the obvious.”
“Which is?”
“Donovan International is in the right position and I know how the game is played.”
“With real bullets,” Kyle muttered.
“No. With real permits, passports, and paper. If we tell Uncle to bugger off, life becomes a lot trickier for Donovan International. It’s hard to run an import/export business without the cooperation of the U.S. bureaucracy.”
“And we owe them one, don’t we?” Kyle asked quietly. “For cleaning up my mess on Jade Island.”
Archer shrugged, but the tight line of his mouth said a lot.
“Mother,” Kyle said, disgusted. He had been afraid of that. “I tried to keep the family out of it.”
“So did I.”
Kyle flexed both hands, trying to work off the tension that came to him every time he realized how close he had come to dying—and taking his sister Honor with him. “Let’s go over it again, just to make sure I don’t fuck this one up, too.”
Turning, Archer looked straight at the big blonde man who had once been his little brother and would always be his younger brother. “What happened on Jade Island wasn’t your fault.”
“Yeah, right,” Kyle said, disgusted. “I’m surprised you trust me with this.”
“That’s bullshit. The only one lacking trust around here is you, in yourself.”
“Did your contact ask for me by name?” Kyle asked, changing the subject.
“No. But you’re the one Lianne Blakely has been watching for the past two weeks.”
Kyle’s odd gold-green eyes widened. “What are you talking about?”
“The illegitimate daughter of—”
“Not that,” Kyle interrupted. “The rest of it.”
“Simple. She was looking at you and you were so busy looking at cold jade that you never noticed a warm woman trying to catch your eye.”
“Jade isn’t cold and I’ve never met a woman of any temperature who wouldn’t crawl over my bleeding body to get to you.”
Archer bit off the kind of comment that would devolve into a family argument. He had never understood why everyone considered him a lady killer. As far as he was concerned, Kyle was the best-looking of the Donovans, with Justin and Lawe very close behind.
“Not this lady,” Archer said. “Lianne was looking at you. That’s one of the reasons I agreed to ask for your help in penetrating the Tang Consortium.”
“Penetrating, huh? First the woman, then the whole damn clan. You’ve got an overblown idea of my libido, not to mention my stamina.”
Archer made a choked sound that was a combination of exasperation and humor.
“In any case,” Kyle said, “if the lady was looking at me rather than you, we can be sure of one thing.”
“What?”
“It’s a setup.”
Archer blinked. “I’m having trouble following you.”
“Take it one word at a time. In the last two weeks you and I have gone to three jade previews together.”
“Five.”
“Two were so lousy they don’t count. If Lianne saw past you to me, then it’s because the Tang Consortium figures that I’m an easier nut to crack than you.”
“You don’t think it’s possible that Lianne prefers blondes?”
Kyle shrugged. “Anything is possible, but the last time a woman passed up a tall, dark, and handsome type for me, I nearly got killed before I figured out exactly what kind of screwing was on her mind. That kind of lesson sticks with a man.”
For a moment Archer didn’t know what to say. Kyle was certain that the only thing women wanted was to use him and lose him. It hadn’t been like that before last year.
At times Archer missed the old Kyle, the one who laughed easily, the golden boy touched by the sun. But Archer never would have asked that golden boy to do anything more serious than match wines with meals.
“Maybe it’s a setup,” Archer agreed. “And maybe there’s a different game. That’s up to you to find out. If you want to.”
“And if I don’t?”
Archer shrugged. “I’ll put off my trip to Japan and take a run at the Tangs myself.”
“What about Justin? He’s blonde. Kind of.”
“Justin and Lawe are ass deep in their own alligators, trying to get a line on a new emerald strike in Brazil. Besides, they’re too young.”
“They’re older than I am,” Kyle pointed out.
“Not since Marju.”
Kyle smiled. It wasn’t an open, sunny kind of smile. It was like Archer’s, more teeth than comfort.
“I’m in,” Kyle said. “When and where does the game begin?”
“Tonight. Seattle. Wear a tux.”
“I don’t have one.”
“You will.”
Lianne Blakely sat in her mother’s elegant Kirkland condominium and watched Lake Washington’s gray surface being teased by cat’s-paws of wind. Never quite still, never predictable in its changes, the lake licked slyly at the neat lawns and sidewalks that crowded its urban shores. In balcony planters and along streets, tree branches were just beginning to shimmer with the kind of green that was more hope than actual announcement of spring’s return. The bravest of the daffodils were already in bloom, lifting their cheerful faces to the cloud-buried sun.
“Do you want green, jasmine, or oolong?” Anna Blakely called from the open kitchen.
“Oolong, please, Mom. It’s going to be a marathon tonight. I’ll need all the help I can get.”
And all the courage, Lianne acknowledged silently, wryly. She had promised herself that if Kyle Donovan was at the ball tonight, she would pick him up. Or try to.
Putting off the encounter hadn’t made it any easier, so she had decided to just get it over with. If she failed, she failed, and her father would just have to chalk up one more disappointment from his bastard daughter. In truth, she knew she didn’t have the kind of recklessness or innate female confidence to approach a good-looking stranger with the idea of getting acquainted for business purposes, much less for sexual ones.
But Lianne was definitely the kind to repay a favor or keep a promise. Engineering a meeting with Kyle Donovan was both.
Her stomach hitched at the thought. She tried to calm herself by saying that Kyle wouldn’t be at the ball tonight. He had no patience for that kind of arts-and-culture crush and no need to siphon money from society’s cream.
Lucky him.
“Nervous?” her mother asked from the kitchen.
Lianne barely prevented herself from jumping up and pacing the room. “Of course I’m nervous. I chose every single piece of the Jade Trader’s display myself. Wen Zhi Tang never gave me that much responsibility before.”
“Wen’s eyes are going. Besides, the crafty old bastard wanted goods that would appeal to the Americans as well as to overseas Chinese.”
“And his bastard granddaughter is as close as he can come to American taste, is that it?” Lianne retorted.
The sound of a teaspoon hitting the granite countertop made her wince, but she didn’t apologize for her bluntness. She had spent thirty years pretending that she was the legitimate daughter of a widow, while knowing full well that Johnny Tang was her father and Wen was her grandfather.
Lianne was tired of the charade, just as she was tired of watching her mother treated like an unwelcome stranger by the Tang family. As far as Lianne was concerned, bastards were made, not born.
And the Tang family had made more than its share of them.
Anna Blakely walked into the room carrying a lacquered tea tray that held a pale bone china teapot and two elegant, handleless cups. She wore a scarlet brocaded silk jacket, slim black silk pants, and low sandals. Pearls gleamed at her neck and wrists, along with a Rolex. On her right hand she wore a diamond and ruby ring that was worth more than half a million dollars. Except for her height and glorious blonde hair, she was the picture of a prosperous Hong Kong wife.
But Lianne’s mother was neither prosperous nor Chinese nor a wife. She had built her life around being mistress to a married man for whom family, legitimate family, was the most important thing in life; a man whose Chinese family referred to Anna only as Johnny’s round-eye concubine, a woman who didn’t even know who her parents were, much less her ancestors. Yet no matter how often Anna came in at the bottom of her lover’s list of family obligations, she didn’t complain.
Watching her mother’s quiet elegance as she poured tea, Lianne loved her but didn’t understand the choices the older woman had made. And still made.
Bitterness stirred, a bitterness that was as old as Lianne’s realization that she would never be forgiven for not being one hundred percent Chinese. She was too much an American to understand why any circumstance of birth, blood, or sex should make her inferior.
It had taken Lianne years to accept that she would never be accepted, much less loved, by her father’s family. But she had vowed she would be respected by them. Someday Wen Zhi would look past her wide whiskey eyes and thin nose and see a granddaughter rather than the unfortunate result of his son’s lust for an Anglo concubine.
“Is Johnny coming by later tonight?” Lianne asked.
She never called her mother’s lover by anything other than his given name. Certainly not Father or Dad or Daddy or Pop. Not even Uncle.
“Probably not,” Anna said, sitting down. “Apparently there’s a family get-together after the charity ball.”
Lianne went still. A family get-together.
And she, who had spent three months of her free time preparing the Tang Consortium’s display, wasn’t even invited.
It shouldn’t have hurt. She should be used to it by now.
Yet it did hurt and she would never be used to it. She longed to be part of a family: brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents, family memories and celebrations stretching back through the years. Except for her mother, the Tangs were Lianne’s family, her only family.
But she wasn’t theirs.
Without realizing what she was doing, Lianne ran her fingers over the jade bangle she wore on her left wrist. Emerald green, translucent, of the finest Burmese jade, the bracelet was worth three hundred thousand dollars. The long, single strand necklace of fine Burmese beads she wore was worth twice that.
She owned neither piece of jewelry. Tonight she was merely an animated display case for the Tang family’s Jade Trader goods. As a sales tactic it was effective. Resting against the white silk of her simple dress and the pale gold of her skin, the jewelry glowed with a mysterious inner light that would act like a beacon to jade lovers, connoisseurs, and collectors.
Lianne’s own jewelry was less costly, though no less fine to someone knowledgeable about jade. She chose her personal pieces with an eye toward her own desires rather than worth at auction. The trio of hairpicks that kept her dark hair in a swirl on top of her head were modern shafts of Burmese jade carved in a style four thousand years old. When she wore them, she felt connected to the Chinese half of her heritage, the half she had spent her whole life trying to be part of.
Distantly, Lianne wondered if she would have been invited to the party if Kyle Donovan was her date. Johnny, Number Three Son in the Tang dynasty, was hell-bent on getting entree into Donovan International. He had pressured Lianne to get acquainted with Kyle: Come on. Don’t go all modest and fake Chinese on me. You’re as American as your mother. Just do what the other girls do. Go up and introduce yourself. That’s how I met Anna.
The memory of her father’s words went down Lianne’s spine like cold water. She couldn’t help wondering if Johnny figured that what was good for the mother was good enough for the daughter: a life of guaranteed second-best in a man’s affections.
A mistress.
As Lianne drank tea from ancient, unimaginably fine china, she told herself that Johnny only wanted her to meet Kyle, not to bed him for the sake of Tang family business.
“Lianne?”
She swallowed the bracing tea and realized that her mother had asked a question. Quickly, Lianne replayed the last few minutes in her mind.
“No,” Lianne said. “I won’t be staying for the ball. Why would I?”
“You might meet some nice young man and—”
“I have work piled up,” Lianne interrupted. “I’ve spent too much time on Tang business already.”
“Johnny appreciates it. He’s so proud of you.”
Lianne drank tea and said nothing at all. Disturbing her mother’s comfortable fantasy would only lead to the kind of argument that everybody lost.
“Thanks for the tea, Mom. I’d better get going. Parking will be a bitch.”
“Didn’t Johnny give you one of the Jade Trader passes?”
“No.”
“He must have forgotten,” Anna said, frowning. “He has been worried about something a lot lately, but he won’t tell me what.”
Lianne made a sound that could have been sympathy. Careful not to jerk the handle, she closed the door of her mother’s condo behind her and headed out into the gusty night.
The benefit ball for Pacific Rim Asian Charities was one of the big social events of the season in Seattle. Invitations were reserved for the rich, the powerful, the famous, and the fabulously beautiful. Normally, Kyle and Archer wouldn’t have bothered attending this kind of show-and-tell in the name of charity and social climbing.
“At least the tux fits,” Kyle muttered.
“I told you we were the same size, runt.”
Kyle didn’t say anything. He was still surprised that he fit into Archer’s long-legged, wide-shouldered clothes. No matter how old Kyle got, part of him was still the youngest of the four Donovan brothers, the butt of too many brotherly jokes, the runt of the litter always fighting to prove that he was as good as his bigger brothers in everything from fishing to karate to exploring the face of the earth for gems.
“You see her?” Kyle asked, looking past the herd of limousines to the glittery crowd filing toward Seattle’s newest hotel.
“Not yet.”
“Not ever. I didn’t know this many people owned tuxes. Not to mention stones.” He whistled softly as a matron walked past wearing a diamond necklace whose central feature was a pendant the size and color of a canary. “Did you see that rock? It should be in a museum.”
Archer flicked a glance at the woman and then looked away. “You want to talk museum pieces, try the companions of the Taiwanese industrialists who just walked in. Especially the woman in red.”
Kyle glanced past his brother. The red silk sheath—and the body beneath it—was an eye-popper, yet it was the woman’s headdress that sent murmurs of appreciation and greed through the crowd: a lacework cap of pearls encased her gleaming black hair. Teardrop pearls as big as a man’s thumb shimmered and swayed around her face. A triple strand of matched teardrop pearls the size of grapes fell from the back of the cap down to the cleft in the woman’s rhythmically swinging ass.
“Companion, huh? As in mistress for the moment?” Kyle said.
“It’s common enough. Most of the Asian men leave their wives at home with the in-laws when they come to the States.”
“Afraid their little women will bolt to greener pastures if they get the chance?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“I wouldn’t be fenced like that in the first place. Let’s try the atrium. That’s where the Jade Trader has its display. SunCo’s stuff will be there, too. Ever since China took over Hong Kong, the Sun clan has been whittling away at the Tangs.”
Archer smiled slightly. “Been doing some research?”
“If I had to research in order to name the competition, I wouldn’t be much good to Donovan International, would I?”
“You’re really serious about dragging Donovan Inc. into the jade trade, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been serious about it ever since I held my first five-thousand-year-old jade pi,” Kyle said simply. “I’ll never know why the piece was carved, but someone back then was like me. He loved the smooth weight of jade. Otherwise he never would have tackled a stone that hard with little more than rawhide, sticks, and grit.”
When Kyle turned and started toward the atrium, Archer put a hand on his arm, stopping him.
“There’s only a limited market for Neolithic jade artifacts,” Archer said neutrally.
“The market is expanding every day. Even New York has caught on. Besides, there’s a lot more to jade than Neolithic artifacts.”
“Do you feel expert enough to advise us on the full spectrum of jade, to go one-on-one with the Pacific Rim’s best?”
“Not yet. But Lianne Blakely is. Or didn’t your contact mention that?”
“He didn’t make a point of it. He just said she was a kind of back door into the closed world of the Tang Consortium.”
“So let’s go see if I can learn more from sweet Lianne than she can learn from me before she’s finished using me for whatever old man Wen Zhi Tang has in mind.”
Archer blinked. “That’s scary.”
“What?”
“I understood you.”
Kyle forged a way through the crowd with Archer at his side. Once inside the atrium, the crush of people broke into clots centered around various exhibits of corporations that were donating pieces to the midnight auction.
“Forget it,” Kyle said, pulling Archer away from a Mikimoto pearl exhibit. “Lianne Blakely is into jade, remember?”
“Any harm in looking at something else?”
“You’re as bad as Faith when it comes to pearls.”
“As bad as you and jade?”
“Worse,” Kyle said, looking around.
Against the towering greenery-and-glass backdrop of the atrium, people from three continents and several island nations revolved around the central fountain, creating a kaleidoscope of languages and fashion. The fountain itself was striking: a clear, cantilevered glass sculpture of rectangles and rhomboids where light and water danced with a grace that people could only envy. The sweet music of the water blended with the languages of Hong Kong, Japan, and several regions of China, as well as English accented by countries as distant as Australia and Britain and as close as Canada.
“The jade must be on the other side of the atrium,” Kyle said.
“Why?”
“Most of the Anglos are right here, crowded around the rubies and sapphires from Burma or the Colombian emeralds or African diamonds. Jade is a more subtle, civilized taste.”
“Crap,” Archer said mildly. “Civilization has nothing to do with it. Jade was available in ancient China. Diamonds weren’t. Same goes for Europeans. Clear gemstones were more available than jade. Tradition is created from the materials at hand.”
Kyle and Archer continued arguing about culture, civilization, and gems while they circled around the fountain. On the way they passed museum-quality pre-Columbian jade artifacts from Mexico, Central, and South America that were displayed on slabs of hand-hewn stone. Fright masks of gold and turquoise grinned or snarled, scaring off demons whose names were known only by people thousands of years dead. Mixed in among the artifacts were modern examples of gold and jade art.
Everything—ancient and modern—had a card in front of it naming the corporation that owned the object. Corporate displays of support for the arts were as much the purpose of the evening as the charity auction that would precede the ball.
By the time the two brothers came to the section reserved for offshore Chinese exhibits, Kyle was wishing he was aboard the Tomorrow, sharpening hooks and tying leaders for a dawn fishing raid. He snagged a glass of wine from a passing waiter, sipped, and grimaced. At a function like this he had expected higher quality.
“Bingo,” Archer said softly.
Kyle forgot the mediocre wine. “Where?”
“To the left of SunCo’s jade dragon screens, near the Sikh in the jeweled turban.”
Though they were less than ten feet away, Kyle at first didn’t see any woman. Then the Indian Sikh stepped aside.
Kyle stared. “You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“Damn.”
Kyle didn’t know what he had been expecting, but he knew Lianne Blakely wasn’t it. With a combination of skepticism, disgust, and grudging male interest, he watched the sleek, petite young woman who supposedly was so smitten with him that she had been watching him from afar for two weeks.
Yeah. Right. He was standing close enough to see that she had on real silk stockings and her patrician little nose was buried in an exhibit of Warring States jade ornaments as though he didn’t exist.
Then Lianne turned and for an instant looked right at Kyle. Her wide tilted eyes were the color of cognac. She hesitated as though recognizing him. But if she had, she wasn’t going to do anything about it. She went back to studying jade as though no one else in the room existed, certainly not a man she was interested in meeting.
“You’re sure that’s her?” Kyle asked quietly, praying it wasn’t.
“I just said so, didn’t I?”
“She doesn’t look like an international art thief.”
“Really?” Archer asked softly. “How many have you known?”
“Not as many as you. So tell me, is she?”
“A thief?”
“Yeah.”
“They don’t wear labels.”
Kyle didn’t say anything more. He simply watched Lianne Blakely.
Archer looked from his brother to Lianne, wondering why Kyle had come to a point like a bird dog scenting warm pheasant. Lianne was attractive, even beautiful in an exotic way, but she wasn’t in the fabulously beautiful companion category. The simple white dress she wore fit well enough, but wasn’t slit from hem to crotch or throat to pubic bone in order to draw and hold a man’s eye. The jade bracelets she wore were doubtless Burmese and of the highest quality, as was her necklace, yet Kyle didn’t seem to have noticed them. He was looking at the woman and ignoring the jade.
Not good.
“Maybe we should forget the whole thing,” Archer said abruptly. “I’ll put off the trip to Japan.”
“My shoulder is good as new,” Kyle said without looking away from Lianne.
“Nothing is good as new after a bullet.”
Kyle shrugged, then winced. Though he wouldn’t admit it aloud, his shoulder still ached when the weather was setting up for rain. In the Pacific Northwest, that was pretty often.
“I know much more about jade than you do,” Kyle said.
“Considering how little I know, that’s not much of an argument for your participation in this little waltz.”
Kyle smiled crookedly. The non sequitur hadn’t even made Archer pause before he answered. That was the good thing about family: you knew them well enough to follow their thoughts.
It was also the bad thing about family. That kind of knowing could be claustrophobic when there were six kids. But Kyle had learned the hard way that running off to the other side of the world didn’t prove anything except what he already knew.
He was four years and one century younger than his brother Archer.
“What’s really bothering you?” Kyle asked, looking at his brother. “Afraid another woman will grab me by my dumb handle and lead me into trouble?”
“If you get hurt because of me, Susa will have my ass for a wall hanging.”
“Our own mother? Ha! You’re her favorite son.”
Archer gave him a look that would have backed off anyone else.
Kyle wasn’t feeling like backing anywhere. He felt like he had just taken a sucker punch to his gut.
Lianne Blakely was everything that appealed to him in a woman, and he hadn’t even known until he saw her. He had thought he liked big women; she was small. He had thought he liked blondes; she was dark. He had thought he liked outgoing, laughing women; she was quiet, poised around an inner stillness.
One thing Kyle did know for certain was that he never wanted to be at the mercy of his cock again. Yet he wanted Lianne in a way that had nothing to do with old knowledge, old learning, old promises.
Kyle’s sudden, primitive arousal made him furious. He must be a slow learner on the subject of being used by a woman.
Maybe he could be a fast learner on how to use one.
“Don’t wait up for me,” Kyle told his brother, starting forward. “I’ve got some monkey business to conduct.”