Olivia winced. “No, none of those things.”
“Isn’t that somewhat illogical?”
“What we have together has never been logical,” she answered with desperate truth.
“But believing that I was a wrecker destroyed what you felt for me… what we had together?”
“No.” She shook her head. “But it made it impossible for me to lose myself in the dream anymore.”
Anthony bent and threw more sticks on the fire. The flames threw his shadow huge against the wall of the cave. “Trust,” he said with the same bitter irony. “You said you loved me, Olivia, out there on the beach. There can be no love without trust. Lust, certainly. But not love. It seems to me, Olivia, that you are confusing love with lust.”
“I do trust you,” she said in a low voice.
He straightened. “You haven’t trusted me, Olivia, since the day we met. How long did it take you to tell me about Brian Morse? Would you ever have told me if you’d continued to believe him dead?”
“I c-couldn’t tell anyone that,” she said painfully, searching for the words that would convince him, would banish the cold angry hurt from his eyes and voice. “I felt it was my fault, you see. When I was little I thought that perhaps, perhaps I had made him do it.”
Anthony looked at her in dawning horror. He saw reflected in her dark eyes the child she had been, violated, terrified, guilt-ridden, driven into a silence as deep as the grave. “Oh, no!” he exclaimed softly. He reached for her, holding her tightly, stroking her wet hair, his bitterness falling from him. In the face of what Olivia had suffered, her mistake, hurtful though it was, became irrelevant.
“I know now it was stupid of me to believe such a thing of you. But I started to feel that men were never what they seemed and I had allowed myself to be blinded by… by passion, by desire… And I had brought this whole wretchedness upon myself. If I could have asked you… but I couldn’t bring myself to talk of it. Just as I couldn’t talk about Brian.”
She looked up at him, her cheek resting on his chest. “I am so sorry. Can you ever forgive me?”
He gazed down at her, a rueful expression in his eyes. “It’s true that I am not always what I seem,” he said. “And it’s true that you know very little about me.”
“But I should have known what you couldn’t do, couldn’t be,” she said insistently, perversely feeling that by accepting her excuse so readily, Anthony had failed to realize the magnitude of her error.
“I would like to think that you should have known,” he agreed with a faint smile. “But perhaps I didn’t make it easy for you.”
“You can’t blame yourself!” Olivia exclaimed. “Of course I should have known.”
“Well, let us agree that of course you should have known. That you did me a grave injustice, but there were extenuating circumstances,” he said solemnly. “Now, must you expiate your crime further or can we put it to rest now?”
“You really do forgive me?” She searched his face.
“Yes,” he said. He was remembering her radiance as she’d run to him across the beach. Her bubbling declaration of love. “Do you love me, Olivia?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “And I think you love me.”
“Yes,” he agreed, rubbing his knuckles along the line of her jaw. “And I don’t know what the devil we’re going to do about it, my flower.”
“There’s nothing much we can do really. Things being as they are. You being who you are, me being who I am.”
He cupped the curve of her cheek in the way he had and said only, “Get dressed now. We must go.”
Olivia wanted to cling to this moment. Once they left the cave, went out into the cold night, it would be finished. The dream finally broken. “Couldn’t we stay here by the fire just a little longer?”
Regretfully, Anthony shook his head. “It will soon be dawn and we have work to do.”
“Yes.” Olivia relinquished the dream. She scrambled into her clothes. They were still very damp and felt wretched against her warmed skin. Her chilled fingers had difficulty with the buttons of her chemise, and Anthony moved her fingers aside to button it himself. His palm lightly cupped each breast.
Fleetingly she put her hands over his. “I meant to tell you. After you’d left last night, Giles was talking to my father about some people called the Yarrows. He said they were being taken to Yarmouth Castle.”
His face in the faint light of the dying fire paled beneath the sun’s bronzing. “Bastards!” he said softly, his hands falling from her breasts.
“Giles said he thought the goodman would tell everything he knew without much persuasion,” she said, her eyes anxious. There was no softness in the cave now. Only harsh reality.
“Aye, I’m sure he has that much sense,” Anthony said grimly. “Not that he knows very much.”
She said hesitantly, “My father told Giles not to hurt them.”
Anthony regarded her with a frown in his eyes. “Am I supposed to believe that?”
“Why would I lie?” she asked quietly. “I love you, remember.”
“You might wish to put your father in a good light,” he suggested, watching her closely.
“I don’t need to do that,” she stated. “I don’t need to defend him to anyone.” She added softly, “Any more than I need to defend you.”
Some of the grimness left his expression, and a tiny smile warmed his gaze. “I’m probably a little harder to defend. Poor Olivia, divided loyalties are the very devil.”
Olivia said nothing.
He reached out and tipped her chin. He kissed the corner of her mouth, repeating softly, “Poor Olivia.”
“I’m not ‘poor Olivia,’ ” she said with a touch of indignation. “What are you going to do about the Yarrows?”
“Get them out of there,” he responded. Suddenly he laughed; his teeth flashed in a crooked grin and the reckless gleam was once more in his eyes. “I foresee a very busy day.”
Olivia regarded him warily. She knew of old that this exuberant amusement accompanied his most dangerous exploits.
He turned and stamped out the embers of the fire, then blew out the lantern. The darkness was complete. Olivia stood still as stone.
“Give me your hand.” His own closed firmly over hers. “Follow me.”
She stuck closer than his shadow, if he could have had one in the darkness, back down the narrow passage and into the outer cave. The sound of the wind and the waves was much diminished now as they stepped out onto the narrow path. The rain had stopped and there was only the melancholy steady dripping from the bushes and scrawny trees clinging to the cliffside.
Olivia shivered in her damp clothes. “God, it’s cold.”
“Run, it’ll warm you up.” Holding her hand, he began to run with her along the undercliff away from St. Catherine’s Point.
“Where are we going?”
“To Ventnor. We have a rendezvous at dawn, if you recall. We’ll borrow a horse at Gowan’s farm, just around the next corner.”
“Brian,” Olivia said, her voice curiously flat.
“Exactly so.” His fingers tightened over hers as he turned to climb up another path to the top of the cliff. “Ah, good. Gowan’s left his ponies in the field. Now, which one do you think would be strong enough for the two of us?” Whistling between his teeth, he surveyed the three horses standing sheltering under a giant oak in the middle of the field. “The chestnut, I think. He has a nice broad back.”
He sounded as carefree as if they were embarking on a midsummer picnic instead of standing in wet clothes in a sodden field at daybreak after a sleepless night.
“Why do you need me?” Olivia asked suddenly.
“Because, my flower, I need to do this as expeditiously and as quietly as possible. I need bait for the trap, and you are going to be that bait.” Still whistling, Anthony set off towards the horses.
“I don’t want to see him,” Olivia said when he came back leading the chestnut.
Anthony looked at her for a minute, and his expression was no longer carefree or amused. “I want you to know once and for all that it’s over. That he’s gone and won’t ever trouble you again. If you see him go, you’ll know for sure.”