“You'll be swimming against the current, and it's strong around here,” Julian pointed out.
“So am I,” Gabriel said, still grinning. “You going to help me strip them, Colonel?”
“With pleasure.”
Tamsyn watched as the twins were rendered white and naked on the sand. They both stirred and groaned as Gabriel tugged off their boots.
“Funny thing!” Gabriel frowned. “Seem to have hurt their feet in exactly the same spot.”
“Yes,” Tamsyn said. “I owed them a favor.” Julian's eyes darted toward her as she sat on the sand.
He fought the persistent and exasperating amnesia that had swept over him first when he'd seen her lying in the bottom of the boat, and she'd gazed up at him in silent, anxious plea, and his heart had turned over with joy that she was alive, and he'd forgotten his hurt and anger in his joyous relief and the need to hold her in his arms.
Coldly, he turned away from her to help Gabriel heft the inert figures into the rowboat.
Tamsyn shivered, but the night was warm and the chill was within her. She'd seen his eyes, and she could read his thoughts as if they were an open book.
Gabriel stripped to his long woolen drawers and helped the colonel push the boat into the lapping surf, then sprang over the side and fitted the oars into the rowlocks. David stirred, groaned, and his eyelids fluttered. “Go back to sleep, laddie.” Gabriel tapped him gently on the jaw with his heel. It had looked to Julian like the lightest of touches, but David fell back again, inert.
The power of this unpredictable giant was not to be minimized. “You're not intending to kill them, are you?”
Gabriel shook his head, saying cheerfully, “A day in the broiling sun on the open sea will do nicely, Colonel. I'll even leave them an oar, if you like.”
Julian looked at the naked bodies and thought of them bobbing on the open sea under the midmorning sun, waiting to be found by a fishing boat. It was a pleasing prospect. “Leave them one,” he said.
Gabriel nodded. “And you'll take the little girl back home.”
“I'll not deny her the shelter of my roof for another night,” Julian stated flatly. “After that, since your business is done here, I imagine you'll have no further need of my hospitality.”
Gabriel frowned in the moonlight; then he said neutrally, “Leave my horse where he is. I'll collect him and my clothes when I get back.”
Julian stepped back to the sand, watching, hands on his hips, as Gabriel pulled strongly toward the opening of the cove. Then he turned around. Tamsyn was sitting on a rock, her hands clasped lightly in her lap, her head bent as if she were looking for something in the sand.
She raised her head, and her eyes were large and strained in her pale face. “So you know everything now.”
Julian raised an eyebrow. “I can't believe that,” he drawled. “There are no more secrets, no more illicit little plots percolating in your devious mind? You'll have to forgive me if I find that hard to credit, Violette.”
“Oh, there's one secret,” she said dully. “But only one, and you might as well know it. I love you. I love you so much it hurts. And I'll never love anyone else in the same way.”
Her hands fell to her sides. “There, now,” she said. “That's all of it. I've tricked you, and I've used you. I've lied to you, and I've rearranged your life to suit my own purposes. I forced you to leave Spain, and I'm the illegitimate daughter of a Penhallan and a robber baron. But I love you with my heart and soul, and I'd give my last drop of blood if you ever needed it.”
She stood up. “But of course you won't ever need it, so I'll go now. And you need never fear that our paths will cross again.” Turning from him, she began to walk back across the sand.
“You omitted to mention puking all over my boots in that catalog of wrongs,” Julian said.
Tamsyn stopped. She turned slowly. “I suppose you're entitled to that,” she said. “Entitled to mock. Why should you believe in my love? Anyway, it's a poor thing. I know it can't excuse or make up for what I've done to you.”
“Dear God,” he said. “I'm assuming this extraordinary show of humility was brought on by that drug Penhallan gave you. I trust its effect isn't permanent.”
It was too much! All Tamsyn's sorrow and weakness went up in a puff of smoke. She was not going to walk out of his life a broken reed. Colonel, Lord Julian St. Simon was going to have something else to remember her by. “Oh, you despicable bastard! You are an unmitigated cur!” She swooped down, grabbed a handful of sand, and threw it at him. Darting sideways, she picked up the empty cognac bottle. It flew through the air and caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder, before rolling onto the sand.
“Diablillo! Virago! Termagant!” Julian taunted, grinning as he ducked one of Gabriel's boots.
“Espadachin! Brute! Bully! Unchivalrous pig!” she hurled back, searching for another missile. “You can't even accept an apology gracefully!”
Julian dived for her, bringing her down onto the sand. He felt extraordinary, struck by a blinding epiphany. He'd been reborn in some fashion, his hurt and anger vanished in the mists of incomprehension. It no longer mattered how or why this had all started. What mattered was the now. She loved him. He did believe her, every word of her declaration. He believed it because he knew it was how he felt himself He'd fought the knowledge… he'd been fighting it for weeks… and now he'd lost the battle. She was a lawless, unethical, manipulative, illegitimate half-breed, no possible wife for a St. Simon, and he didn't give a damn.
Scissoring her legs with his own, he pinned her arms above her head, subduing her with his weight. “When did you decide you loved me?”
“Weeks ago,” she said, lying quiet now beneath him, reading the light in his eye, a trickle of incredulous hope beginning to seep into her veins. “But I knew you didn't think you could love me in the same way, although I knew that you did… and I was hoping that when we were together in Spain, maybe you could learn to look into your heart. But I still had to deal with Cedric… it was something I felt I had to do… for Cecile, and for my father. But I gave up my big plan to ruin him publicly, because then you'd have known the whole story, and I thought you'd be unhappy to discover how I'd been deceiving you.”
“Unhappy, eh? You're a mistress of euphemism,” he declared with a wry quirk of his lips. “But maybe you can find a euphemistic explanation for blackmail? Just to enable me to live with it, you understand.”
“It wasn't blackmail, it was restitution.”
“A little better. Keep trying.”
“The diamonds were my mother's,” she said quietly, and finally told him the full story. “It was only justice,” she finished.
“Only justice,” Julian mused, his body still pinning her to the sand. “I suppose I can live with that. A woman with a fine sense of justice, not a blackmailer at all.” He nodded judiciously. “Yes, I think I can live with that.”
“You're very heavy,” Tamsyn said. “I don't want to puke all over you again.”
Julian with a muttered exclamation promptly rolled off her.
“I have to go back to Lanjerrick.” Tamsyn sat up.
“My sense of justice hasn't been appeased… and Cesar is still there.”
Julian got to his feet and pulled her up. “Then let's pay your uncle a visit.”
“You don't have to come with me.”
“Oh, but I do,” he said. “I too have a very fine sense of justice.”
“You don't mind too much that I have Penhallan blood?” she asked hesitantly as they climbed the path to the cliff top.
“Oh, I hardly think so,” he responded with a dry smile. “Your kinship with a murderous viscount is probably the most respectable thing about you.”
Cedric was in the library, cradling a brandy goblet, morosely awaiting the return of his nephews, when there came a violent hammering on the front door. He sat up abruptly, listening to the servant's footsteps on the marble tiles, the sound of the bolts being drawn back on the front door.