The Windflower (7 page)

"Please. Oh, please," she gasped, her mouth moving against his.

"Yes?" he answered in a slow voice. "What would you like?"

It had been too much, all of it, for her previously unawakened body. Lifting trembling fingers to her swelling, burning lips, Merry forced herself to speak. "I'm not what you think. I don't know what you think I know."

The starlight lent sharp outline to the otherworldly beauty of his face, and yet, as clearly as she saw him, it was difficult to tell what he made of her words. After a minute he reached up a careful hand to stroke a drift of hair from her forehead, cupped her shaking fingers in his own, and tried to still them.

"You really are afraid, aren't you? Come here." He folded her tenderly in his arms and brought her head down to his shoulder.

Had she wished to push herself away from him, there would not have been the strength in her spent limbs. Her cheek lay against the heated, porous leather of his jacket, and through the calico gown that covered her breast, she felt his chest, moving only slightly as he breathed. Dear Lord, what if he should start to question her again? What if he guessed her lies?

From behind the wagon came the light sound of running footsteps, and then Sally called out, muted but urgent, "Merry? Merry! Are you here?"

Relief hit Merry like a blow because her need was desperate, but shame followed swiftly and hit more painfully. She should have felt nothing,
nothing
except distress to find Sally near her danger.

Sally, not seeing her immediately, began to cast about in a panic, and then to race for the tavern, as if to go back in. She had nearly reached the light when
Devon
vaulted lightly over the side of the wagon and stopped her, clamping his hand over her mouth and saying, "Hush! She's safe. But she won't be and neither will you if you run yelling into the tavern."

She fought his grasp and muttered something Merry couldn't distinguish through his muffling hand.

"After you promise not to scream," he said, "I'll let you go. Do you understand?"

Under his hand she jerked her head in a hard nod, and as soon as he had freed her mouth, Sally cried, "Where is she? Where is she? What have you done with her?"

Calling her cousin's name, Merry struggled to scale over the wagon's side, her legs twisting clumsily in her skirts. She might have fallen if
Devon
hadn't stepped to catch her around the waist and eased her way to the sand. For a moment Merry's legs shivered under her and nearly buckled, and then with a cry she ran into Sally's wide-flung arms. As from a distance she heard her own voice begging, "Help me, Sally."

Merry put back her head to look into her cousin's face and saw that Sally was glaring fiercely at the blond pirate.

"Don't!" Sally said to him in a savagely angry voice that sounded as if it was strangling in her throat. "You've got to let her go! She's so young. If anything happened—she'd never recover from it. In the name of pity ..."

Devon
had settled back against the wagon, long legs crossed, arms casually folded at his chest, and his shining golden hair caressed by a black breeze. He was watching Sally in an intent way without seeming to be listening to what she said.

He took his time before speaking, and when he did, his tone was dangerously mild. "I wonder if it would be worth my time to discover what two young women of obvious breeding are doing in a low-life tavern."

"The puppets," said Sally, too quickly.

"Ah. Itinerant puppeteers. The common folk." His beautiful mouth curved into a smile that quit before reaching his eyes. "And yet little Venus here has hands softer than an infant. She's never been within a furlong of a scrub bucket. As for yourself, Miss Sally, no matter what silly disguises you adopt, your speech and manners belong to a lady."

His tone robbed the words of any shade of a compliment, and there was a calm conviction in the indifferent voice that showed that it would be futile to argue. A threat rolled in the sea air, as thick and sizzling as hot oil over coal.

In a cool voice that made Merry pink with admiration, Sally said, "It's unwise to put too much stock in these superficial judgments, sir.
Your
speech, for example, marks you as a gentleman, while your manners suit ..."

"The gutter?" he supplied, his smile widening a fraction. "And they get much worse than this. It's a good thing for you to think about."

It was too much, even tor Sally. "The devil take you, sir. we don't know anything that would interest you!"

"How do you know what would interest me?" he asked her smoothly, inclining his head. "I'm willing to believe you haven't been foolish enough to tell Venus much. But you, Sally—it's what's in
your
mind that intrigues me."

Sally lifted her chin in brave defiance and snapped, "It'll take longer than you've got to beat it out of me."

"Without a doubt. I wouldn't waste my time beating you, dear, because you have already shown me a quicker course." Almost gently he said, "How much would you let me do to Venus before you started answering my questions?"

The shaft hit home with lethal accuracy. Over her head Merry heard Sally's horrified cry, and Merry felt her legs grow cold and seem to recede from her body.

More than a minute passed before he said, "You're a clever girl, Sally, but you're an amateur." He uncoiled from the wagon and slowly crossed to them. "Give me your hand."

As Merry watched, Sally obeyed him warily. From his own right hand
Devon
slid a heavy diamond signet and dropped the ring into Sally's palm, curling her fingers around it with his own.

"Give this to the man you'll find at the stables, watching the horses. Tell him to hitch your team."

In stunned thanksgiving Merry's eyelids drooped closed, and she heard Sally's awed whisper.

"You're letting us go?"

Devon
's hand fell on the back of Merry's head, slid caressingly under her curls, and stroked slowly over the line of skin behind her ear.

"One has a certain reluctance to maim anything so lovely," he said. "I've a feeling, my brave Sally, that you wouldn't recover any better than she would. I wouldn't be so nice a second time. You know that, don't you? And if it had been another man ..."

"Yes," said Sally quietly. "I know."

"If you value her so much, you won't risk her again next time." His fingers traced the satiny skin on Merry's neck.

"Go to the stables," he said, turning. "I'll send out your men."

Like
Lot
's wife Merry watched in rigid silence as he moved toward the tavern, the faint light touching the smooth, sensual roll of his hips, the graceful shoulders, the moon-kissed hair. He entered the tavern and pulled the door closed behind him, leaving them safe among the sand and the surf and the stars.

Sally's legs slowly buckled, and she sank to sit on the wet grit, ducking her head down to her knees, and with bent wrists laid her palms on the back of her head. She laughed for a long time, half-hysterically, and when finally she stopped laughing, she said, "Dear God, what a man." She looked at Merry, her cheeks wet with the tears of her laughter, and said, in a calmer voice, "We're lucky to be alive, the way we botched that one. He kissed you, didn't he? I guessed it. You look that upset, no more."

In a voice that shook, Merry said, "If you had heard me, Sally ... I was a whimpering ninny. I should have fought him."

Sally chuckled tensely. "Fought? Him? What would you want to do a thing like that for? Merry, when a man like that kisses you . . . Never mind, don't blame yourself."

Merry lowered herself to the sand and put an arm around her cousin's back. "Why do you think he let us go? Doesn't he suspect who we are?"

"I have no idea what he suspects, honey. But I think that he was afraid he would have to kill us if he found out. Who in the world could that man be?"

"I heard one of the pirates call him . . .
Devon
."

"
Devon
?
Devon
. . . Are you sure that's what it was?
Devon
! Heavenly days! You don't suppose—"

"What?"

Sally smiled. "Oh, never mind. It's impossible. A ridiculous thought. Come with me, and let's hurry before he changes his mind."

CHAPTER FOUR

August passed like a dancer, graceful and sweating. Frog song thrilled from the reed grass, raccoons hunted among the ripened cornstalks, and turtles slumbered away the afternoons on gray rocks comforted by the sun.

At Merry's home the cook boiled the rutabagas Merry had drawn, and served them in a lamb pie on the fourth Tuesday of the month. An owl with long downy ears took up residence in an old squirrel's nest inside the walnut tree that overlooked the garden, and Aunt April was pleased because it would keep the mole population down. Henry Cork went to the Quaker meeting house and preached violently and at length about the Holy Virgin and the Catholic saints until the Quakers were driven from their own building.

And the unicorn came often. Merry could feel it
when she came to her room at night, waiting in the twilight behind the dark folds of the curtains.

The pictures from the tavern were to be the last that she would draw for Carl, who had said not so jokingly that it would be better to let a few British spies wreak havoc with the war effort than expose Merry to that much danger again. Merry was ashamed of the new secret woman inside her who questioned whether he cared for her so deeply or whether he was worried about how he'd explain things to their father if anything happened to her. Even under the blight of that cynical thought she missed him, and she wasn't likely to see him again, or Sally and Jason either, until Sally's wedding, which would be next June, war permitting.

Merry had worked and reworked the sketches Carl wanted, and the results had pleased him. She had been able to draw not only the traitor but the man he had been with—the pirate John Farley, whom Rand Morgan had come to the Musket and Muskrat "only to frighten," which, Carl had told her later, had included cutting off the little finger on each of his hands. She had drawn Morgan as well, and the boy called Cat, although not without a lingering, superstitious fear that the act might make them materialize before her. Carl had sent the sketches to the Secretary of the Navy, William Jones, for use at his discretion.

The only face she could not draw well was that of the blond man who had hidden her from the other pirates. Each sketch she made was wrong in one way or another. No matter how hard she tried to capture them, his tantalizing features remained memorable in their effect on her, elusive in their reproduction. It was difficult to draw such a beautiful face; her hand seemed to rebel against that unnatural perfection. Or perhaps some secret avenue of her mind had closed him off and shut away the sweet pain of remembered passion. It had all become less real to her with the waning of the month; the spying, the seacoast tavern, the pirates, and
Devon
. Hot and sticky September filtered in, bringing moments when she even asked herself if his kiss had been another fantasy like those her imagination had made for her in the past.

And as the days of September began to lessen and the night at the seacoast grew further away
it
became less real as well, gathering to itself the arabesque curlicues of legend. She would play the evening through in her mind like a playwright working on a script, and give it different endings and plot twists: She salvaged her pride with fierce resistance; she resourcefully captured the pirates single-handedly. Then there was the one ending she couldn't acknowledge. It had come to her in a dream of scruples abandoned and fear tossed away, a dream of submission and resultant joy, her senses reeling with the warm, sweet scent of his skin, his golden hair like silk under her fingertips. There was something in the power, the energy, the intelligence of this man that made him different, the way gold is from copper, and diamonds from glass chips. Anything he chose to do, he could have done well; why had he chosen to do it with Rand Morgan? Quick riches had been Carl's guess, for
Devon
wasn't a man who seemed likely to be content with little. But there, how quickly one could fill with speculation the vacuum of the pirate's background and identity. He was a man who would remain a mystery, and the secret would likely die with him on the blood-slicked deck of a burning ship.

Life had waxed more complex. Merry would sit by the duck pond in a clump of ferns watching the water beetles scud between the lily pads and think about the secret people she had discovered hiding inside her, the whimpering child who had appeared at her first taste of real terror, and the woman learning desire in the arms of a pirate. Surely she must exorcise them both.

Her home was safe and as rich in pretty domesticity as it was sterile in challenges to the soul; it was as though she were living in the clean, pink interior of a moon shell. The months passed in fluid order, filled with precious detail and suppressed longing. And Merry tried to let the pleasing minutiae of her days blot the gloss from her newly awakened senses.

Autumn was warm, wet, and golden; the mosquitoes were intolerable. To repel them, each night until the first frost Merry slept with brown sugar burning on coals in a chafing dish near her bed and woke daily to the sharp tang of charred sugar.