The Tiger's Lady (38 page)

Barrett opened the gossamer length of printed silk, feeling it float through her fingers, light as a second skin. And as she felt it ripple against her hands, the dim image of her dream returned.

Red silk and golden bells. Sweet heaven, this cloth was the very image of the garment in her dream!

She caught her breath, recalling the rest of that steamy fantasy.

Stop these fancies. It is purest coincidence and nothing else.

Grimly she walked behind a thick hedge and began unbuttoning her shirt. Next came the camisole Mita had left for her. The wounds seemed to be closed, for the cloth had not adhered to the long welts beneath.

After tugging off her breeches, she held up the gossamer length of silk, her eyes darkening in confusion. But this bit of cloth would cover next to nothing. It would look almost painted on!

And how in heaven was it meant to stay in place, with no buttons or lacing anywhere?

Down the beach she heard the muffled hiss of sand as Pagan moved toward the water.

Modesty warred with temptation, and temptation won.

Proudly, she raised her chin and wrapped the silk around her chest, anchoring an end beneath her arm. Then she turned to the water, her breath catching at the beauty before her.

A soft wind feathered through her hair, caressing her bare arms and shoulders. The sand was warm and lush against her bare feet. Just beyond, silver waters beckoned from a small, boulder-ringed beach.

For a moment Barrett almost managed to forget that she was an unwilling guest here. That even now a savage game between two relentless adversaries was being played out, and she was the pawn at its center.

Yes, that she must never forget
.

As she neared the water, Pagan turned, his broad shoulders rippling, hung with beads of water. With the sun behind him, his face was veiled in shadows, and she could not gauge his look.

But his jaw seemed to tense, his body going immobile.

“It suits you, Cinnamon.” His voice was a low caress. He turned away abruptly. “Just see that you go no deeper than waist-high this time.”

Barrett scowled. The man was impossible! As changeable as the weather in this garish, alien place. Would she ever be able to understand him? And why should she even care to?

Consigning Pagan to the devil, where he surely belonged, she strode to the water and inched out slowly until silver waves surged about her ankles. Cool and velvety, the currents rushed out and then retreated, driving away the prickling heat.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Pagan make an abrupt gesture to the scouts at the jungle’s edge. Then he turned and jackknifed into the water.

Although she tried not to watch, Barrett found her eyes drawn inexorably to his powerful body. He moved with a fluid grace and an economy of motion that spoke an intimate experience of the ocean. As the last rays of the sun danced golden around him, Barrett found herself thinking that he might have been a creature of that watery realm.

She turned away, picking her way along the beach, concentrating on thinking of nothing at all beyond the sweet lulling coolness of wind and water.

Out at sea Pagan forged a silvery path through the churning currents straight on toward the horizon.

Barrett found a small outcropping of rocks jutting from the water at the far side of the cove. Carefully she slid down, granite cool at her back, her legs dangling pleasantly in the narrow pool formed by the rocks.

It was the cooling of the air that first warned her the sun had set. She must have dozed off, for when she opened her eyes the sky was indigo, and only a faint streak of crimson lingered at the horizon.

She turned to the water, but Pagan was nowhere to be seen.

The two bearers, at least, were about their work, their white sarongs a faint blur at the edge of the beach.

Barrett bent forward and splashed water over her shoulders and chest, careful to keep the salt from her back. She had just stood up to leave when she heard a low, dim humming that seemed to rise from everywhere around her at once—and from nowhere in particular.

“You must be lucky,
Angrezi.
” Pagan’s voice came close at her ear. “The fish are singing for you tonight.”

She clenched her lips, trying to fight down a start at his sudden appearance. “What—what are you talking about?”

“The natives call them singing fish, though no one knows how the sound is made. Perhaps hidden coral reefs or perhaps some sort of shelled creatures gathered on the bottom. The sound is most pronounced when the moon is high and the tides full.”

Even as Pagan spoke, the strange humming grew, wrapping around them like an ancient, restless paean or mermaid’s wordless song. The sound seemed entirely divorced from this earth, separate in both place and time.

“Come on,” he said suddenly, gripping her wrist and pulling her to her feet.

“W-where are you taking me?”

“Just do as I say.”

“Very well, but if I drown I’m going to
murder
you!”

Pagan’s answer was a low rumble of laughter. “If you drown, Cinnamon, I’ll
let
you murder me.”

They moved past the stone outcropping to a sheltered pool on the far side of the cove. Barrett watched, uncomprehending, as Pagan searched for something in the sand. A moment later he stood up, brandishing a piece of driftwood in triumph.

“Come closer.”

She followed with patent reluctance, wondering if Pagan had lost his mind.

Every second the humming grew louder, an eerie, shimmering wall of sound.

Pagan strode into the black, glassy currents without a word, plunged the bough to the bottom, then pressed his ear to the woody stem. A moment later he motioned her closer.

What madness was the man about now? she wondered, approaching warily.

He lifted her above the currents, so that her back remained dry, while he held her next to the upright length of wood.

His long fingers locked at her waist as she rocked up and down in the tide. “Pagan! What are you—”

“Hush, Cinnamon. Just listen for a change.”

Reluctantly, she lowered her ear to the bough as he had done. Then she understood.

The humming, which had been dim before, was amplified a hundredfold by the wood. Now it resonated wildly, pouring through her body in whorls and volutes of sound like a wild, otherworldly chorus.

“It’s—it’s beautiful!” Her eyes fixed wide and dreamy on Pagan’s shadowed face.

His fingers clenched imperceptibly and his arm slid around her as the current surged, nearly pulling her free.

In raw tension the beauty rose, wrapping them in haunting splendor. Captives of its piercing clarity, they stood, bound together in the perfection of this moment they shared.

Pagan’s face slanted closer, a stark line of shadows against the softer shadows of the night.

Barrett’s breath caught. Wood gripped between her fingers, she faced him, dizzy and immobile while the lulling chorus wove through her senses.

She might have turned away at that moment. Later she realized she
should
have. But somehow she could not struggle or protest or do any of the things she should have.

For dimly Barrett sensed that her life had changed, that this moment had rendered her different, and all because of the beauty she shared with this man.

Never again would she be the same person, she realized, whether her memory returned or not.

And at that moment, with the wonder raw and fresh and aching upon her, she could not bring herself to move away, to deny any of this night’s strange splendor, even if part of it was the man himself.

She only waited, immobile against Pagan’s chest. For suddenly Barrett had to know how he felt, how he tasted, with the salt water clinging to his hard, clenched jaw, to his full, powerful lips.

She saw the muscles at his shoulders shift and bunch.

She swallowed, her eyes huge on his shadowed face, wondering if he had felt it too.

She had her answer in the next second.

“Beautiful,” Pagan whispered, and his gaze was on her face, not on the ocean as he spoke.

Barrett blinked as his fingers rose, lifting a honey-gold strand from her damp cheek.

Her breath caught at the gentleness of that gesture, from a man whom she had thought of as granite-hard. Only inches away, his dark eyes harrowed her flushed face.

“Who are you,
Angrezi
?” he murmured hoarsely.
“What
are you? Spirit creature come to haunt my sleepless nights? Or simply a woman, a beautiful pagan Eve who has wandered into my wild garden?”

Barrett did not move, unable to speak, mesmerized by the raw hunger that flared in Pagan’s face. Around them the night sea rose and fell, whispering of coral halls and pearl towers. Of seaweed realms never glimpsed by man.

Magic lay heavy upon her, in sound and smell and touch, and suddenly the raw terror of the last days, the harrowing uncertainty of not remembering was swept away, and all that was important was that Barrett was alive, and a woman.

And that the dark figure beside her was every inch a man.

A shiver worked through her. She felt his hard fingers splay apart over her hip, stroking her through the wet silk sarong as clearly if she were naked.

“I?” she repeated, her mouth strangely dry. “I—I am only a woman. A woman who feels—strange. Very strange.”

“Not as bloody strange as I do, Cinnamon.”

“What’s—what’s happening to us?”

His fingers cupped her waist. “Why don’t we find out,
Angrezi?”

His touch was as light as the wind, as dark as the night sky, as fierce and restless as the surging tide. And after the first stunned second Barrett leaned into the kiss, reckless, desperate to find out how he would taste.

The answer was good. Right. Entirely male.

His lips were flickering points of flame, now teasing, now possessing. Just when she thought she’d caught the taste of him, he moved, fire turned to smoke, steel turned to restless liquid lava.

Dimly Barrett realized she would never plumb this man’s depths. Nor would she ever have enough of him.

She opened her mouth to tell him so, but he trapped her lower lip between his teeth and tugged the soft skin into his mouth until her heart slammed against her ribs and every conscious thought fled.

He stroked the tender skin inside her lip. “Good. Too bloody good.”

Was it he who had spoken or she? A moment later Barrett forgot to care, for Pagan captured her ribs and lifted her, anchoring her against his naked chest, his rigid thighs.

His eyes gleamed, night seas flashing with strange phosphorescence. And she could feel the stormy thunder of his heart as he gazed down at her.

Her back arched, driving her breasts against him.

He groaned.

That was when Barrett first realized the power she held over this hard, unrelenting man.

She almost smiled at the realization, giddy when the living evidence of his arousal pressed against her thigh.

Some demon made her move closer into that burning steel, and instantly she felt him go rigid, a curse smothered on his lips. Reckless in the night’s beauty, Barrett wanted more, much more. Knowledge was here, and she was determined to seize it.

But her mouth was strange and dry and trembling.

Words blocked, she spoke with unsteady fingers, clenched upon his salt-slick shoulders.

Don’t stop,
she wanted to shout.

No more,
her sanity countered.

But her body listened to neither, speaking directly to his, as Eve must once have spoken to her Adam before paradise was closed to them.

Her fingers cupped his rippling, sea-sleek forearms. Each jerky breath drove her pebbled, pink-tipped breasts against his naked chest.

Pagan drowned.

In the space of one wild heartbeat all energy and life were torn from him. He fell deep and then he died—all in perfect, agonizing splendor.

“Dear heaven, I love the way you feel, the way you smell. Most of all I love the way you taste, Englishwoman. Kiss me, again,” he said hoarsely.

Barrett thought dimly of the forest stretching sere and brown all around them. Suddenly she realized
she
was that forest and he the spark that would ignite her.

His face slanted down, lips feather light on hers, more not there than there, yet that single touch provoked a churning turmoil of emotions in her.

But he gave no more, waiting, every inch of his body rigid with his effort at restraint.

Somewhere between the first wild heartbeat and the second, Barrett understood what he wanted. Her body answered his plea, her lips opening beneath his and molding his mouth to her softness.

Clinging. Claiming. Capturing.

Just as she had been claimed, in midnight tides and madness.

Forever,
though her conscious mind did not accept that fact yet.

His jaw locked harshly, one more stunning sign of the power Barrett was just beginning to realize she wielded.

Her eyes widened as she saw a muscle flash at his temple. “P-Pagan?”

“More, Angrezi.
Wrap your white legs around me and teach me the meaning of fire. I think I’ve been cold all my life until this moment.”