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.
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.