Olivia looked around in amazement at the rudimentary furnishings of this inner cave.
Anthony pulled blankets off a straw palliasse. “Get your clothes off while I light the fire.” Urgency made his tone brusque. He tossed a blanket across to her, then busied himself at a round stone hearth in the center of the cave.
“Won’t we be smoked out?” Olivia shrugged out of her cloak and doublet and stood shivering.
“There’s a natural flue in the roof.” He looked up from the hearth. “Hurry up, Olivia! Get out of those clothes. Don’t just stand there!”
His gaze rested on her breasts, pink and round beneath the sodden white chemise. Her nipples were hard dark points against the pink.
“Dear God,” he said softly. “What is it that you do to me?”
“What you do to me,” she responded as softly.
The comforting crackle of catching wood filled the cave. He straightened. His gaze held hers and this time her shiver was not due to cold and wet. “Take your clothes off, Olivia!”
He watched her through narrowed eyes as she flung aside her wet clothes. Naked she drew close to the fire. On some distant plane she realized that she was warm again. She could feel the fire against her side. She looked up at him and saw her own face in the dark irises.
He put his hands on her shoulders, cupping the curve where they met her upper arms. He ran his hands down her arms and the fine hairs prickled. He took her hands, turned them palm up. They were filthy, encrusted with sand and dirt. He held each hand in turn and lightly smacked the grime from each palm.
There was an edge to his caresses. An edge that Olivia sensed had to do with the battle he’d fought with the wreckers. A lingering residue of the savage intensity that had defeated the enemy. Something in herself responded. She tugged her hands free and undid the buttons on his shirt with rough haste, heedless when one flew off into the far corner of the cave. She unfastened his belt buckle, slowly, making of each movement a deliberate act. She slithered the belt through its loops and unfastened the buttons of his britches.
Her nails raked his flanks as she pushed his britches over his hips. She heard his quick indrawn breath. Then he kicked his feet free of the britches and caught her face between his hands.
His mouth was hard, relentless, offering no quarter. And Olivia asked for none. She pushed her hands up inside his opened shirt, over his ribs, up to his shoulders. She thrust the garment from him until he stood as naked as she.
His hands went to her bottom, pulling her hard against him. She caught his lower lip between her teeth, drove her tongue within his mouth on her own exploration. She would not be dominated by his urgency; her own met and matched his in a competition that escalated with each breath. Her hands were everywhere, following their own instincts. She gripped his buttocks, sliding a finger into the deep, narrow cleft between them. She ran her flat palm over his belly, dipped a finger into his navel, slid down to clasp his penis, moved back between his thighs to cup the hot swelling globes. She was on tiptoe now, pressing herself against him, giving herself to his hungry hands, feeling the heat of her own arousal, the flowing juices, the absolute desperation of their shared need.
They slid to the floor beside the fire. Olivia was unaware of the hard sand-covered rock beneath her. Her hips rose to meet his penetration and he gathered her up, lifting her off the hard floor, holding her, his hands flattened on her back, protecting her, as they rose and fell together in a silence that sang with all the sweetness of a cathedral choir.
And when it was over, when he held her tightly against him, rocking her in the aftershocks of passion, she pressed her lips to the fast-beating pulse at the base of his throat and thought that if she never experienced such joy again, she would die content.
But when the world reasserted itself, she understood the stupidity and the futility of such a belief.
As the glow of lovemaking faded she moved from his embrace, and he let her go without protest, reaching for the blanket that lay discarded on the sandy floor. He put it around her shoulders, then rose to throw more wood on the fire.
Olivia drew the blanket tight around her as she stood up too. She was tense now as she watched him dress again. She couldn’t help the unworthy hope that their lovemaking had driven all questions about her presence on the beach from his mind… that she would be spared her confession.
“So you thought to stop a wreck single-handed, my flower?” He raised his eyebrows, his gray eyes suddenly uncomfortably penetrating.
She clutched the blanket at her throat with one hand and stepped closer to the fire, the sand soft as silk beneath her feet.
“I have to confess something,” she said, keeping her head lowered, her eyes on the fire.
Anthony was suddenly very still. She could feel his stillness, hear the soft in and out of his breath. “Go on,” he said.
“I think it was probably unforgivable,” she said. “I know you’re going to be very angry and you have every right. But I hope you’ll understand why it happened.”
“You’re alarming me.” He clasped the back of her bent neck, his hand warm and somehow reassuring. It gave her the courage to speak.
“I thought it was you,” she said.
“I don’t understand you.”
“The wreckers,” she said simply. “I thought… and then I think I thought that maybe I could persuade you to stop.”
Her words hung in the cave’s dank and stuffy air. For an eternity there was no sound but the crackle of the fire. Slowly Anthony’s hand dropped from her neck. It left a cold place where before it had been warm.
When at last he spoke it was in a tone of utter disbelief. “You thought I was one of those filthy vermin? You thought I could do such a thing?”
Olivia turned to face him. She forced herself to meet his eyes, where incredulity mingled with a deep anger. “You said… you said in Portsmouth when you gave me the c-clothes that they’d c-come from a wreck.” She tried to control the stammer but her agitation was out of hand.
“I didn’t say I had caused the wreck.” Anthony’s voice was now very cold and soft, and it was impossible to imagine the way they had loved a few short minutes ago.
“I thought you did. It’s what I heard you say. You sounded so c-casual, as if it was quite natural… You’re a smuggler, a pirate. Everyone knows that smugglers are often wreckers. You were on the island the night of the last wreck, and the goods from the wreck were in Wind Dancer’s hold.”
She extended one hand in a gesture of appeal. “What was I supposed to think? I didn’t know anything really about you. I still don’t,” she added. “I don’t know why you are as you are… why you do what you do.”
There was a challenge in her voice now, but Anthony didn’t answer it. He stood with his hands on his hips, feet braced on the sandy floor. His icy regard never left her countenance.
After a second, Olivia continued in the face of his silence, “We’d been living a dream, an idyll on the beach and on the ship. It wasn’t real. And then I saw everything with new eyes, as if the dream was shattered and I was seeing the real world again. And in the real world, piracy, smuggling, and wrecking go hand in hand. I’d seen you c-capture the Dona Elena. I saw you steal her c-cargo. I heard you tell me the c-clothes c-came from a wreck!”
And at last he spoke. “I don’t understand how, when we had loved together in the way that we did, that you could imagine I could do anything that vile,” he declared with soft savagery. “Was that why you threw dishonor in my face?”
She nodded dismally. “Only for that.”
“Not piracy, nor smuggling, nor the fact that I am an enemy of your most honorable father? Not the fact that I will do everything I can to outwit him, regardless of honor?” he asked with bitter irony.