The Windflower (42 page)

He turned her to him, and she leaned back against the soft fall of flowers, lifting her chin, letting the sun touch the most delicate and unreachable softness of her throat, her back arching gracefully, bending under the warmth of his hands on her sides. Their bodies touched, his hard and muscle-knit, hers soft and yielding, holding each other in a soul-spinning embrace, his desire and her response as innocent and as rich and as floral as the bud plumes lying splendidly against her cheek. Her lips parted slightly as she breathed the perfumed, nectarlike air.

He studied the young face, remembering the dark hours when death had laid its coldly beckoning hands on her, and his kiss, when it came to her, was chaste and urgent. But the free-flowing fire between them began to soften and shape their mouths, and the pressure of his lips increased. ... He pulled back then, pleasuring in the sight of her, learning the full curve of her cheek with the caress of his finger.

She tilted her head under his touch, inadvertently brushing her own lips against his; and drew back, startled by the heat rising within her. Suspended in tenderness, she held the impression of his willing male flesh upon her mouth, the form of the alien lips, which were firm and winning. Her lashes danced open, and her eyes met his subtly tempting gaze.

He murmured, "Kiss me again." And then, softly, "Please."

Initiating their contact was awkward for her, perhaps partly because he was infinitely more skilled than she. "Please," he had said, and stood courteously silent. He touched her lower lip, gently rubbing back and forth there as it distended under his thumb. The water touched warmly at her thighs with innocent provocation; the sun was constant upon them, a halo. Finally she put up her chin, gazing into his eyes for a moment before she closed hers, and pressed her mouth to his in a full, open kiss. When she broke from him, she was trembling so that he had to support her with his hands, and her cheeks were hotly flushed.

As though she believed she were making a confession that would surprise him, she said, "I'm never sure if I'm doing it the right way."

Laughing huskily, he collected her body and dragged her close. "Then you'll be reassured when you see I'm too overcome to paddle us home."

"That wasn't really an answer," she said.

Stroking back her hair with his palm, he said, "Oh, my dear, I'm sorry." He smoothed his lips into her rosy curls. "I didn't know you wanted a real answer." His fingertips thrilled in light strokes over the quivering skin on her neckline. "There aren't ways that are right or wrong. Please yourself. That's all you need to do with me, Merry. Watching as you touch clouds takes me there with you."

With a graceful movement he plucked her from the water, nurturing her in his arms, and carried her with her legs dripping to the flat ocher shelf of a boulder. He set her on the rock, standing in front of her as she stretched back on her hands, losing herself in the sudden penetrating sensation of hot, hard stone beneath her thighs. But her gown was heavy with spring water and clung like gauze to her hips, and driplets melted from the fabric and explored the inside of her thighs in an oddly dulcet manner. She plucked at her wet skirts and began to wring them out, trying without success to avoid baring her legs.

"I should take you home," he said. "You're"—his gaze traveled the length of her, taking in her slim, shapely body, and below, the pale skin of her legs, the dainty swelling muscles of her calves, the way her legs were slightly parted on the rock—"wet."

She dropped the tangled hem, lifting her shadowed, delicately veined lids to stare at him wide-eyed, and tried to say something intelligent about being taken home, but her voice faltered, and the words that came out were, "Yes—take me . . ." And suddenly she was inside his embrace, with his kiss dissolving her living will into his. Her mouth was a full pink bud, widespread to him, open to the heavy stroke of his tongue. An ancient, primitive force controlled her hands as she encircled him, one palm flat on his back, the other seeking his neck, twisting into his silken hair, fighting to heighten their contact. She swallowed his kisses like honeyed broth, each one both sating her and increasing her thirst until she was as helpless as a drifting poppy.

She lost pace with her breath. Her body became a foreign thing to her, her blood spinning through veins that seemed delighted to swell and pump; her nerves were shocked and burning under her hard-running desire. Scattering hot, open kisses, his lips coursed over hers, into her ear, into the softness of her throat beneath the sensitive curve of her jaw; and she pressed herself against him in an agony of erotic tenderness. His hands were a murmur against her body as he cupped a palm beneath her, catching her closer, spreading her legs with his other hand, sweeping her aching warmth into the narcotic hardness of his hips. She gasped at the bright flare of sensation, and he caught her head as it fell weakly back, cradling her, nibbling at the whiteness of her exposed throat, feeling her swallow beneath his lips, stroking the light tattoo of blood so close to her skin, feeling the vibration of the soft moan that escaped through her parted lips.

As their mouths searched for and found each other she gave herself deeply to him, twining closer, and his breath became quietly arhythmic.

"Merry—sweet Merry ... I didn't bring you here for this."

"Th-this?"

"To love you. I didn't bring you here to make love to you."

"No? Devon?" she said in a husky little voice. "If you were going to make love to me, what would you do next?"

He kissed her, lovingly and long, with a caressing intensity that left her limp everywhere, and said, "If I was going to make love to you"—his hands moved in a slow pattern at the back of her gown—"I would want to be closer to you ..." Laying his forehead softly against hers, he brought one of his hands to her cheek and massaged it with the back of his fingers. Then he separated himself from her slightly and with his fingertip tugged at the line of fabric that hid her collarbone, and the muslin fell an inch, revealing the milky fairness of flesh never gilded by sunlight. He kissed its creamy softness, and his heart caught at the beauty of her shyly blooming sensuality as she closed her dusky eyelids and leaned into the curve of his arm.

It was time to stop, and he knew it, but before will and common sense could coalesce, his palm slipped along her collar and curled over her shoulder, and that gentle act freed her gown so that it drifted by gravity into a sighing pillow around her hips. A startled exclamation sprang from her lips, and against the heady sylvan hues of the tropical pool her smooth skin and pink colors seemed sharply human in nakedness. Unaffected embarrassment made her move instinctively to cover her breasts, but he caught her wrists, one in each of his hands, and murmured, "No, love. Don't."

His hands moved with her trapped fists, pressing her backward into a crisply yielding mound of scarlet blossoms behind her on the limestone wall. Ruby flowers nodded against her cheeks and trembled among her curls, and the flood of scented blooms fed over her arms. The grip of his hand faded on her wrist, and his candied touch spread slowly down her arm and became a feather stroke on her breast. The unhurried glide of his fingertips was a banquet to her senses, and yet the raking invasion of love fluids was excruciating to her delicate tissues, and there was pain in the erotic ache of her moan. His fingers abandoned her breast briefly and searched the flowers for her childish wrist, and after he had discovered her white hand, he carried it back to her breasts. Inserting his hand into the cup of her much smaller, squarer palm, he whispered, smiling, "Ah, love, you're as dainty as a toy. Show me, Merry. Show me how you want me to touch your body."

Her fingers pressed his hand urgently closer, and his fingers spread, fanning over her breasts in deepening strokes, his thumbs passing in scorching circles over her nipples. The breath quickened in her throat and in his, and her skin quivered under the sweetness of his hot respirations as his mouth wandered over the inner curve of her throat, his hair skimming her chin.

She felt his lashes touch her skin, and the sigh of a whispered endearment, and then his lips rolled softly back and forth over her nipple, and his tongue stroked her moistly, easing the heady action of his fingers until her heartbeat began to pound in the depths of her body, and all she knew was her need to give herself to the wonder of his mouth.

"How soft you are, Merry—soft as a catkin," he murmured. "And made in the colors of a wild rose. Angel. Oh, angel, love ..." He dragged her into his arms. She felt the thud of his pulse as her naked breasts moved against his warm flesh and the hard pressure of his hips on her inner thighs. Her hands caught in his hair, pulling his head down to hers, and she opened herself to the stroke of his hard, coaxing kisses. The gauzy warmth of her wet gown clung in gently moving folds to her thighs and belly, teasing the feverish flesh there and the ache of her lower body where she was throbbing with a bell-like timbre, like a sweet promise, and she whispered his name as a plea and a moan, her pulsebeats coming thick and stinging.

She felt him lay her back against the rock with gently trembling purpose, and then the wash of filtered sunlight and warm air as his body left hers. At the shock of it her eyes flew open, and she saw that he was leaning with one palm against the rock and that the other covered his face. The skin exposed between his fingers had an enchanting flush to it, and his hair had tumbled forward in lovely and wanton disorder. And—shakily—he was laughing. When he dropped his hand from his face, she could see in his eyes the daze of frustrated longing. He said, "Merry. My sweet Merry. Ask a little question, get a great big answer.
If
I were going to make love to you, that was what I would have done next."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

At sunset Merry found Cat alone on the veranda. He was sitting on the balustrade, one leg extended, the other bent, under the curve of a Moorish arch. Beyond him she saw the forests turning dark green, and a magenta sky, which suffused the young pirate with transparent orange-colored light that washed through his unbound hair and over the orchid resting above his ear. From the mandolin his fingers teased the minor chords of an erotic love song, and he accompanied the rich notes in a voice that was well trained, charmingly modulated, and emotionless. Merry stood within the ovoid of thrown light, watching the death of the wounded sun and listening to Cat sing, and when the last vibrating note faded, she could not speak because his songs always affected her in their sadness and beauty. Nor did she tell him it had moved her, because she knew he despised compliments.

At length he swung down his legs, laid the instrument carefully against the porch, and plucked the orchid from his ear, settling it with some tenderness in her curls.

From this close Merry could breathe in the roselike odor that clung to his hair and see the faintly opiated softness in his eyes. Annie had been right. Cat, for once, was not perfectly sober. There had been, Merry gathered, some kind of falling out with Morgan; and no one was willing to tell her anything about it beyond warning her not to question Cat unless she wanted to get her head snapped off.

She found the orchid with her fingers and smiled. "It's beautiful, isn't it?"

"No."

"No?"

He said, "Orchids remind me too much that flowers are the sex organs of the plant. I like my flowers to be more"—he touched the bloom and then, softly, her chin—"discreet."

"You're as bad as Cook," she said. This morning, when she had chanced to make a remark praising the sparkling seascape, Cook had said prosaically, "I can't see what you find to admire in the ocean. Jeez, what is it besides diluted fish piss? When you think of all those fish in all those centuries ..." And then encountering severely critical looks from Cat and Raven, he had added, "Oh. Sorry, Merry. Fish
urine."

"Mmm" was all the answer that Cat made to her. He climbed back on the balustrade, extending his hand to her. "Come here, sweeting," he said and pulled her gently between his knees, so that she was leaning heavily into him but facing away, and his hands began a hard, slow massage of her shoulders. "How does that feel?"

"Wonderful," she said, and in a minute he turned her over with her breasts against his thigh and her hair dripping in a dense spill down both sides of the balustrade. Baring her neck, he brought the flat of his palm down to knead her weary muscles.

"So Devon didn't take your maidenhead this afternoon," he said.

"How do you know? How would I know? He might have, for all I know about it. No one tells me anything." Then, curiously, "How do you always know when I want my neck rubbed?"

"You slump." His clever fingers were slowly pulling the tension from her muscles. "You may have noticed that I'm three sheets to the wind and the fourth shaking."

"Yes."

He felt the tightening of her cheek against his hip as she smiled.

"Didn't the others warn you to stay away from me?"

"Yes," she said again. "But I've never seen you intoxicated. I couldn't resist." For a joke she said, "Are you going to assault me?"

Fantastic coral lights shone like buried gems in the mass of her curls, and he pushed his fingers inside one of them and began to stroke her scalp. "It must have been quite an afternoon if you've come back wanting to be assaulted," he observed.

"It was. Cat, have you ever seen a white oak cheese? The painted kind that unscrupulous peddlers will sell instead of real cheese? I bought one on the first occasion that I went by myself to market because the peddler who sold it to me seemed like such a kindly man. When I brought it home, Henry—that was our indentured servant—''