A Scandal to Remember (35 page)

She took his hand again, and led him on from the point at the north end of the little island, and down the lee side of the beach to where a small fire set within a circle of rocks crackled under a slightly rusty cast-iron pot.

And behind that, just off the sand at the tree line, a tarpaulin had been set up to form a tent.

Dance stared at it for a long moment, trying to get his brain to catch up with his eyes. It was a tent. A canvas tent. “Where did that come from?”

She beamed as if she had conjured it out of magic. “I tried to rig it the same way you did making the shade over the well of the boat. I had to give it several tries, but eventually I got it right.”

She had done all this. She had emptied the boat, and taken the main sheet. She had set up the hearth, and lighted the fire. She had found whatever it was that was in the steaming pot. Dance felt rather like someone from his childhood fairy tales who wakes from an enchanted sleep to find that the world has changed around him.

Jane was unfazed by her feats of near-magic. “I had several in the boat, you see? I had planned on setting up just such a camp for myself once we had arrived in the islands, and begun our various studies. But this is nicer, to have you with me.”

That was the second time she had said that. And he had never thought of what she would do when
Tenacious
arrived at its destination. He had thought only of his part, of the transportation and the navigation and the many and different pieces of work necessary for him to get the party of naturalists to their destination, not of what they might do once they got there.

But
there
appeared to be
here
.

“Dance, are you all to rights?”

He was not. He was staggered. By her. By this tiny, resolute, tenacious woman. “No. I’m stuck on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean with a beautiful woman, and she turns out to be as able as Alexander Selkirk and Robinson Crusoe combined. And I adore her.”

It took a very long moment for her to understand what he was saying. Her face stayed blank while Dance felt as if he were exposed and hung out on a yardarm, flapping in the breeze for all the world to see. His throat went dry, and he swallowed, and tried to think of some retort that would deflect her rejection, or her pity, or whatever was coming next.

What came next was that she kissed him. Simply and directly. She tipped up that resolute chin, and kissed him, and her mouth was there, just across the gap. If he angled his head, and leaned in, the soft suppleness of her lips would brush against his.

His hand was already stroking along the fine edge of her jaw, tugging her fractionally closer, testing to see if she wanted to be kissed anywhere near as much as he wanted to kiss her. And he wanted to kiss her with every breath of his body.

He wanted her surety. He wanted her joy. He wanted her to smile at him in the way that pushed all doubts from his mind, and made him forget for just a little while that he had sunk his first and only command, and that if they ever made it back across the oceans to their former lives, he would face a court-martial for the catastrophic loss of his ship.

But Jane broke the lifeline of her lips. “Come, you’ll feel much better when you’ve had something fresh to eat. You have your own knife, of course, but I have an extra fork—I have two of everything. I had packed for the two of us originally, before I ever thought to come alone.”

“The two of us?” His mind was still racing to catch up with hers.

“My father, the real J. E. Burke. No.” She shook her head—an emphatic denial. “The
other
J. E. Burke. I am the
real
one. I did the work. And I am here. This is real.”

She moved back to the fire and the iron pot at the boil. “And we have real, fresh food,” she said as she fished him out the ugliest, spiniest creature he had ever seen.

“What is that?”

“A lobster.” She waited a moment for the creature to cool, and then twisted off its tail, and presented it to him in an tin enameled bowl.

He had heard of them—particularly in the West Indies—but had never eaten one himself. And though he had never before turned down a meal in all his years in the navy—he had even eaten rats—this creature was … unsettling. “What kind of lobster?”

“The kind that comes from the sea. The kind that someone else was kind enough to catch and cook for you.”

“You caught this?”

She looked at him as if she feared he had taken a blow to the head in the landing of the boat. “There is no one else here, and I assure you it did not willingly leap out of the water, and conveniently throw itself into my pot.”

“No. Of course not.” He shifted his weight to his other foot. “It’s just that I don’t particularly like things that come from the sea, like fish.”

She fell into a sort of overtired laughter. “And you a sailor. There’s more than irony there. Well, Captain Dance, you’ll learn to like it, or you’ll go hungry this evening. Your choice.”

He felt his pride catch fire in his chest. “Are you mocking me?”

Her smile gentled, but her look was arch under her brows. “I do believe I am. At least until you start providing me with dinner.”

His pride welled stronger. But Dance knew it wasn’t just the damn creature that was unsettling, it was her—doing all these things, being so bloody competent. It made him feel devilishly stupid and incompetent. Entirely unnecessary.

He cast his gaze back at the forested hill across the lagoon. “Surely there’s some game I could shoot.”

“And how many bullets do you have to hand, Captain? I have several dozen cartridges for the fowling piece I packed—although it is dismantled and in its case—but I have no intention of hunting with it. What would become of us if we needed it for defense? And besides, I’ve seen no sign of indigenous mammals on the island. And the birds don’t look particularly appetizing.”

Devil take him. And his stomach was growling—in another minute it would be loud enough for her to hear.

There was nothing else to do—his pride would have to be the first course.

Dance swallowed it down, and sat himself in the sand next to her. “You have this all thought out, have you?”

“Yes. I should hope so.” Her look was frank but cautious. “I thought it all out for well over a year. And planned everything just—”

“So,” he finished, on a sharp sigh. He should not have expected anything less.

“Yes.” She drew back a little, unsure of his tone, as if it were her pride now that stung. “I had thought it out for a particularly long time. I have been planning this expedition ever since my father and I concluded our last one to Cornwall, some four years ago.”

“Devil take me, Jane. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” It was only that
his
considerable pride
had
been stung. More than stung—trussed up and made useless, while this glorious, tiny Amazon of a woman had rendered him redundant.

But if he did not thank his lucky stars for her competence, he was a fool. And though he was many things—hungry among them—he was no fool.

“You should have been in the army or the navy,” he groused companionably. “We could use quartermasters and pursers like you.” His ship could have used somebody who cared about her work as much as she. “You’d have done much better for
Tenacious
. You wouldn’t have run off with other people’s money, or let the ship go to rot, or let the captain drink himself into a stupor. You’d have figured it all out. You did figure it all out.” Dance ran his hand through his hair as if he could rub the idea more firmly into his brain. “You’re bloody incredible.”

Her smile came back, slow and beautiful. “Careful, Captain, I might take that as a compliment.”

For the first time in what felt like forever, Dance felt his chapped lips curve into a true smile. “Careful, Miss Burke. I might actually mean it as one.”

Chapter Twenty-one

And he knew without a shadow of a doubt that he was going to make love to her. Right here on this sand. Slowly and carefully. With attention to detail, just as she so richly deserved.

The only question was when?

His answer was as soon as possible.

And with that thought, his stomach let out a fearsome grumble. “And so I must eat lobster?”

“You really must,” she confirmed. “It is very nutritious. The Americans, I’m told, eat it all the time.”

“And there you have all of my objections put into one. I should hate to be taken for an American.”

She laughed as he had hoped she would. “Dance,” she began. “Or perhaps, given the circumstances, we had best be Jane and Charles now?”

“Absolutely not. You may be Jane all you like, but I refuse to be Charles. You may call me Dance, which is bad enough. But Charles—” He shuddered overdramatically, like a dog that needs to shed cold water, uncomfortable for the moment in its skin.

He was rewarded for his troubles by a glow that owed nothing to the strange sky, but seemed to light her from within. “Dance then.”

“Yes.” And he would eat this hot supper she had caught and cooked for him. “I thank you, Jane.”

They ate in companionable silence as the long daylight waned into purple night. “Rather remarkable, is it not?” She was looking at the strange western sky.

But he was looking at her. “Yes. You especially. I could never have hoped to be shipwrecked so comfortably.”

She laughed, a happy relaxed sound. The sort of sound he wanted to grow accustomed to hearing. Every day. For the rest of his life. “I’m glad you’re comfortable,” she said. “Poor Ransome. I am quite sure he can have no idea how much I am enjoying this.”

“No.” Everything that had been relaxed and easy in Dance drew into a low fist of loathing. He turned from her, lest she see the damning mark of hatred on his face. “I imagine he thinks us both at the bottom of the sea. I know Manning meant for you to be.”

The easy happiness that had lit her face dimmed. “Yes.”

But he could not hold it all in—all the vicious vengeful thoughts that had been on a slow boil at the back of his mind for days now. He flung himself up off the sand—if such a thing were possible. And it was, if only because that is exactly what he did—he threw himself into movement, to keep from spouting a filthy host of obscenities. She deserved better than to be sworn at. “There was no reason why we should not have been able to find them. There is no reason they should have put their lanterns out. No reason why we should not have seen them, except that they did not want to be seen.”

“Yes.” She stared across the darkening expanse of the lagoon. “They must have taken themselves away in an indecent hurry.”

“Indecent.” He nearly spat the word out. “Disobedient and mutinous more like.” But thinking of justice—for that was a more palatable way of thinking than revenge—clarified his way forward, and sheathed the sharp end of his temper. “Which is why I need to get a decent reading so I can fix our position, and then I need to repair the pinnace, and see what I can do to find a ship.”

Jane showed no signs of well-deserved temper herself, but concentrated on eating her lobster before she spoke. “It seems to me we’d have much better luck finding a boat from here—a place with fresh water.”

“A ship,” he corrected automatically. “We need to look for a ship.”

“A ship,” she acknowledged. “But the hill”—she pointed across the lagoon to the largest of the islands—“will afford a higher, and better, vantage point from which to search, than a boat upon the water, will it not? And only on land could you build that signal fire you mentioned. I should think the smoke from such a fire would be easier to spot from a ship than a small boat would. I’m sure you will have your own opinion, but I really do think we had best stay here.”

“Yes. But…” He had no rebuttal. Her suggestion made very good sense. But he was a man of the sea, a man for action—the idea of just standing on a hill, looking out to sea for what might be months, terrified him in a way that facing enemy cannon never had.

He wanted to do something. He wanted to find his men. Of the officers in the boats, only Mr. Whitely and perhaps Able Simmons might have been reliably counted upon to have taken their instruments for navigation, but Simmons was injured—

No. Simmons had been struck by someone of his crew. Which was a hanging offense.

He wanted to find them, not wait to be found.

“You really ought to eat, Dance,” she urged. “It’s very tasty. Granted, it would be more so swimming in a sauce of butter that Punch could have concocted, but I shall count us lucky to be able to eat, and keep ourselves alive with so little work as wading across some rocks.”

The image arose unbidden again, of her with her skirts hiked up to keep from the water, and her shapely white legs bare in the sea. It was erotic and enticing and so very not conducive to sitting down next to her in the sand and eating supper like any kind of gentleman.

But maybe he didn’t want to be a gentleman. He was shipwrecked and marooned on an island with a beautiful young woman who seemed to think it all the greatest of good fortune. Why should he not take advantage of that? Why should he not make it fully the paradise it could be?

But if he wanted to do that, he had best keep both his wits and his strength about him. And so he sat, and put the fresh food she had so cleverly provided for him into his mouth, and thought about how he might make his fantasy a reality.

By complimenting her. “Thank you. Both for the food, and for making a remarkable go of our extraordinary circumstance. I am sorry if I sounded ungrateful. I should be kissing your rather lovely bare feet in thanks.”

She extended one elegantly pointed foot in front of her. “Go ahead.”

He would have done so—he wanted to do so, to start kissing the delicate arch and ankles, and work his way up the pale slide of her legs until he was kissing all of her, until—

The blood that ought to have stayed in his brain flew south for the winter—he was almost instantly hard. So hard he could not move up from his place on the sand. He was poleaxed by lust, riveted by the mental image that sprang before his eyes of what those breasts might look like, pale and full and pink tipped and—