Beyond Sunrise (24 page)

Chapter Thirty

They climbed the hillside above the village, following a hibiscus- and fern-shadowed path worn smooth by countless centuries of bare feet.

India kept teasing him, trying to worm out of him what it was he was taking her to see, but he only ducked his head in that Aussie way he had of smiling up at her with his eyes, and saying nothing.

The path led to a low, moon-bathed headland that curved out into the darkness of the ocean and protected the bay below from the worst of the surf that crashed itself into a white froth on the rocks of the windward cliffs. On its gentler, leeward side, the promontory was mostly of grass, with only scattered tamanos, and here and there, the vermilion blossoms of the delicate, fernlike poinciana trees, just coming into flower.

"It's beautiful," she said, going to stand on the far side, where the land fell away in a dizzying precipice to the sea-bashed rocks below, and the trades blew wild and free, and she could see
nothing
but the black undulations of the sea and a universe of brilliant stars that seemed to stretch on forever.

"Yes, it is." He came up behind her, his hands warm on her shoulders as he urged her around to face the end of the cape. "But that's not what I brought you to see."

She saw it now. Bold and proud and unabashedly masculine, it jutted up from the very tip of the cape. As she drew closer, she could see that it had been carved— deliberately, skillfully carved—from a hard red granite, its head swollen and round and cloven like a devil's hoof, its shaft long and straight, thrusting some eight to ten feet up into the air.

"Good heavens," said India, pausing at its base. "It's a giant phallus."

She walked all around it, careful not to get too
close
to the cliff's edge, then twisted to look back at him. "However did you find this?"

He came to stand beside her, his head tipping back as he stared up at the statue's huge, red head. "Patu told me about it this afternoon. He figures the Reverend Watson must not know about it, or he'd have had the islanders toss it into the sea by now."

India sighed, her head, like his, tipping back as she stared up at the monstrous erection. "It's one of the things making my investigation into the origins of the Polynesians so difficult. Most of the ancient stone statues have been smashed, or at least thrown down. And it's even worse on those islands where the carving tradition was in wood. There, they simply burned everything."

She wanted to reach out and touch the stone, but found she couldn't quite bring herself to do it. Instead she said, "Does Patu know what it was used for?"

Jack shook his head. "No. Navigation, maybe?"

India nodded. "The ancient Greeks had signposts they called Hermae, after the god of travelers. At first, actual statues of the god were used, but eventually they were simply stylized into straight pillars." A naughty smile curved her lips. "Only the peculiarly male portion of the god's anatomy continued to be rendered realistically."

"Don't tell me," said Jack, his gaze no longer on the statue, but on her. "It pointed the way?"

India laughed. "Yes, it did. Unfortunately, the early Christians went around and defaced every Hermes they could find."

"I think the word you want is
castrated."

India looked at him. He stood with his back to the wind, so that it molded the worn cloth of his shirt about the hard, strong length of his torso and fluttered the ends of his dark hair against the tanned skin of his throat. He was smiling at her, the kind of smile that barely curved his lips, but warmed his eyes with an inner glow that spoke of a man's admiration, and a man's desire.

Feeling suddenly shy and a little anxious, she glanced again at the huge red phallus. "It's very big," she said, her throat so tight, the words quivered slightly on their way out.

"Does it scare you?"

She met his gaze. She heard the surf break against the rocks far below, an endless crash and boom that mingled with the primeval beat of the drums drifting up from the luau on the beach. The wind gusted around them, its caress a warm, sweet whisper of all things wild and exotic and unknown. And still their gazes held, and it came to her that never had she felt closer to anyone than she did to this man, in this moment; that no one had ever known her—really known her—the way he knew her, the way he had always known her.

Reaching out, she took his hand, and put it on her breast. Her gaze never left his. "I'm not afraid," she said, and smiled.

He undressed her slowly, standing there at the cape's end, where land met sea and sky in a tumult of crashing breakers and gusting wind. He unbuttoned the tucked front of her man's shirt, his fingers trembling slightly when he eased the fine linen from her shoulders and arms.

"You're shaking," she said.

He laughed, his breath warm against her ear as he reached for the waistband of her split skirt. "I'm trembling with impatience. What I'd like to do—" He shoved the tartan down over her hips. "—is tear every last stitch right off you."

"You can't." She kicked away her boots and stockings. "I don't have any other clothes. If I lose these, I'll be reduced to wearing one of the islander's grass skirts."

His lips curved into that rascal's smile she loved, the one that lit up his face and made her feel all warm and tingly and naughty inside. "Don't tempt me."

Wearing only her chemise and drawers, India took a step back. She was trembling now, as well, every fiber of her being aware of his hard, hot gaze upon her as she tugged open the ties at the front of her chemise and pulled it over her head. The warm trade winds gusted around her, caressed the bare, moonlit flesh of her arms and breasts. She hesitated only a moment, then loosed the waistband of her drawers and let them fall in a soft white flutter to her feet.

"You're beautiful," he whispered, his chest lifting as he sucked in a deep, half-hitching breath. And in that moment, she did feel beautiful. Beautiful and desirable and very much a woman. His woman.

"Now it's your turn," she said, her voice husky, hushed.

He went to work on the buttons of his shirt, his cheek creasing with a crooked smile as he glanced up at her. "You've seen me before."

"I know. But in the past, I always tried not to look."

"Huh." He stripped off his shirt, the muscles of his arms and chest bunching beguilingly as he went to work on his trousers. "That's not the way I remember it."

She laughed, because while it was true that she had tried not to look, it was also true that she hadn't succeeded as well as she ought. She watched him shove his trousers down over his lean, naked hips, watched the muscles in his bare brown back flex as he straightened again, and the laughter died on her parted lips.

He reached for her, his palm cupping the base of her head to draw her into him. She went to him, her naked body pressing close up against his, her face buried into the curve of his neck as he hugged her close and held her for a moment. Just held her.

He smelled of the night, and the sea, and himself. Her hands gripped his shoulders, then opened, her splayed fingers and palms gliding over smooth, tanned skin, hard muscle. She touched him with reverence, awe even. She was greedy for the feel of him, wondrous with the delight of touching, and being touched.

For as she touched him, he touched her. He touched her everywhere, with his hands, and his lips. And then, laying her down on the pile of their clothes, he touched her with his tongue, touched her where she'd never even touched herself. He sucked her breasts into his mouth, and smiled up at her with his eyes when she gasped, and gasped again. Then his dark hair slid across her belly, and she lost herself in the magic of his tongue and his lips and the gentle, probing knowledge of his fingers.

When he finally lifted his head and stared up at her, she found the sharp, hungry look of arousal on his face frightening, and yet exciting at the same time. A deep and powerful longing filled her, the need to join her body to his, to join herself to him, to hold him in her arms. To hold him in her life, forever.

She reached for him, drew him up to her, her knees bending and falling apart wide as he covered her with his hard man's body. Much of his weight he took on his forearms, his elbows bracketing the sides of her head as he brushed her hair from her sweat-dampened forehead, and kissed her cheek, and whispered sweet endearments in her ear.
God, I love you. Love you, love you...

He shifted his weight, and she could feel his hardness pressing smooth and hot against her. She saw his jaw tighten, saw his lips curl back from his clenched teeth. Then he pushed himself inside her.

She gasped, then let out a soft whimpering noise when he drew himself partially out and thrust in again, harder, deeper, stretching her, filling her. "Easy, sweetheart," he whispered, his body stilling as he held himself poised above her. He kissed her eyelids, the tip of her nose, her lips. She could feel his rapid heartbeat, thundering in his chest, hear the jagged catch of his rough breathing. "Does it hurt?"

"No," she whispered, although she was, in truth, in a breathless torment. Yet this was not the dry, tearing pain she'd known in the past, but a burning, clenching ache that was more like an unfulfilled need, a wanting that was curling up tighter and tighter, deep within her. She slid her hands around his bare sides, held his body close to hers. "Don't stop. Please... Don't stop."

His gaze locked with hers, he began to move, a slow thrust and drag that stole her breath and made her heart swell with a love so tender, it brought tears to her eyes. Then he dipped his head, and his lips took hers in a sweet and gentle kiss that caught fire as the tempo of their bodies increased. Above them, the night sky reeled in a breathless swirl of sparkling stars. She heard the distant, savage beat of the drums, and the violence of the rock-dashed surf, far below.

With a groan, he tore his mouth from hers, his hands twisting in her hair, his thumbs tipping her head back so that he could kiss her neck, and she had to bite her lower lip to keep from screaming with pleasure and need. Somehow, her fingers interlaced with his, her arms stretching high over her head as she reached, reached for something she didn't even understand, something that kept eluding her, enticing her.

Squirming, she wrapped her legs around his waist, drawing him deeper, deeper within her. She felt his breath blowing against the sweat-dampened flesh of her throat in quick, harsh gasps. Felt his hand reach down between them, his palm pressing against her woman's mound, pressing her between the hardness of his hand and the pounding hardness of his man's body. And the pleasure was so exquisite then that she did scream, her hands clutching his sweat-slicked shoulders as he whirled her away to a place where pleasure and pain exploded together in a pounding, pulsing, endless rush of ecstasy.

The morning sunlight, spilling across the ocean from the east, awakened her.

India opened her eyes, a smile touching her lips as she found herself staring at Jack's hard, tanned chest, lifting gently with his slow, even breaths. She lay with her head nestled in the curve of his shoulder, his arm holding her close, her body pressed against the warm length of him. They had fallen asleep here, at the very tip of the cape, with the moonlight soft on their naked bodies and the trade winds warm about them. She knew that he had slept, slept soundly in her arms, because once, during the night, she had come awake and propped herself up on her elbow so that she could look at him.

She had stayed like that for the longest time, letting her gaze rove over the sharp, beautiful bones of his face, the curve of his lips. She had looked at him, and felt a sweet ache swell within her, an ache that was part wanting, and part the sadness that comes when the soul glimpses something it secretly yearns for, yet knows can never be.

She'd been so lost in her own thoughts that it had been a moment before she'd realized that his eyes had opened, and he was looking at her. "What are you doing?" he said, his voice a soft caress.

"Watching you sleep."

He smiled, and reached for her. "I'm not sleeping anymore."

And so she had gone, again, into his arms. And he had shown her that there was still much she had to learn about the joys shared between a man and a woman. She'd learned that she could give pleasure as well as receive it, and what a heartwarming delight that could be. She'd learned that lovemaking can be hot and hungry, as well as sweet and tender. And she'd learned that she could hold this man in her arms for the rest of eternity, and it wouldn't be long enough.

Now, with the sun shining down warm and bright upon them, she twisted around so that she could look over the bulge of his strong arm, toward the bay where the
Sea Hawk
lay at anchor far below.

India straightened her elbow and pushed herself up on her splayed hand, her gaze caught by the way the yacht rode low in the water and listed oddly to one side. "Jack," she said softly. "Jack, wake up."

Something in her voice must have warned him. He sat up suddenly, his eyes narrowing as he twisted around to stare down at the purple-blue waters of the bay below. "What the hell?" he said, pushing to his feet.

India shoved her bare arms into her shirt and reached for her tartan skirt, but Jack had already taken off at a run, his bare feet pounding the hard dirt of the path as he sprinted, naked, down the hill. Far below, as if pushed by an unseen hand, the
Sea Hawk
swung about slowly on its anchor chain, the gentle surf breaking over the unnaturally low deck.

"Oh, shitfire!" Jack screamed. "No." He lifted his arms up, wide, his hands clenching into fists that he let fall, helplessly, to his sides as the
Sea Hawk
gave one last gurgle, and sank beneath the waves.

Chapter Thirty-one

They sat side by side at the edge of the black sandy beach, their gazes fixed on the empty waters of the bay before them. Even without squinting, India could still make out the shadow that was the
Sea Hawk,
plainly visible through the clear, clean water.

"Is it possible to raise it?" she asked, her arms wrapped around her bent knees.

"Maybe. Patu says the men of the village are willing to help try."

She swung her head to look at him. "How long would that take?"

Jack let out his breath in a long sigh. "I don't know. It's not going to be easy. And God knows what we'll need to get her seaworthy again, even if we can raise her. The monsoon season isn't that far away anymore."

India nodded.
The shifting wind brought to them a fine spray that felt cool against her cheeks and smelled sweetly of the open sea. "If I had never come to you, or if I'd listened when you said you couldn't take me to Takaku, none of this would have—"

His fingertips touched her lips, stopping her. "No. Don't say it. Don't even think it. It would have happened. The
Barracuda
came out here under orders to see me brought to justice. The Prime Minister himself is after my blood." His fingers rubbed across her lower lip, then drifted over her cheek and down her neck in a soft caress that was there, then gone. "Ten years is too long to run. I should have faced it all long ago."

She took his hand in hers. It was a big hand, strong and tanned and scarred from his years at sea, his years on the run. "And if the
Lady Juliana's
charts and log have been lost? If you can't prove your innocence?"

He squinted out over the tropical blue sea. "I don't know. I'm tired of running. Tired of hiding." His hand shifted in hers. "India..." He paused. His thumb was making circular patterns on the back of her hand, and he watched it intently, as if it were the most important thing in the world at that moment. Then he lifted his head to look straight at her and said, "Marry me."

India felt herself go so cold and still inside, it seemed for a moment as if her heart had stopped.

I love you,
he had whispered to her last night.
Love you, love you.
She'd heard him, but she hadn't really believed him. Somehow, she had convinced herself that the caring was all on her side, that everything was still for him the way it had begun for her—a heat, a wanting. An appetite easily and casually appeased. Nothing more.

"I mean, if I can clear my name," he was saying, his dark eyebrows drawing together as he studied her face. "I wouldn't ask it of you otherwise. I hadn't intended to say anything until I knew what kind of future I had to offer you. But after last night, I thought you ought to know where my heart is."

His words humbled her. She would never have had the courage to say something that had the power to make her that vulnerable. She found her chest ached, and she drew in a deep breath, trying to ease it. When that didn't work, she took another.

Ever since she'd been old enough to consider such things, she'd told herself she would never marry. Not even the dawning awareness of the profound depth of her feelings for Jack had provoked her into changing her mind. Even if she had believed in marriage, she wasn't sure she'd have been able to bring herself to become this man's wife. He was too wild and irreverent, too much a rebel, too... dangerous.

The skin beside his eyes crinkled, as if he were thinking about smiling, but couldn't quite manage it. "I don't think I've ever seen you speechless before."

"You know how I feel about marriage," she said finally, grasping wildly for something to say, something that wouldn't require her to be as honest as he was being. "My opinion of what marriage means for a woman."

"Then marry me in an island ceremony. Just you and me, promising our love to each other. No government certification, no one-person-before-the-law-and-the-husband-is-that-person."

"It wouldn't work."

He was no longer smiling, not even with his eyes. "Why not?"

In the blue sky above the bay, a gull soared, riding a warm updraft. India watched the bird wheel, its call so sweet and sad it seemed to tear her heart. "Because..." She had to stop and swallow before she could go on. "Because I love to travel, whereas you want nothing more than to settle down and make a home."

"So, we settle down and make a home, and then we travel."

"Settle where?" She let her gaze drift around the bay, struck, as she always was, by the vibrancy of color here. The cobalt blue of the water, the vividness of the sky, the saturated gold of the sunlight pouring down on a tangle of intertwined greens of every imaginable hue splashed with blooms of crimson and cadmium yellow and brilliant, pure white. "In Edinburgh? The sea is gray there. Did you know? The sea, and the sky, and the houses... everything is gray."

"I'll go to Scotland, if that's what you want." He paused, then added, his voice tight, "If I can."

India shook her head. She couldn't imagine him in Scotland. He belonged here, in this southern land of waving palm trees and sun-warmed sand, where the trade winds blew wild and free across the ocean, and the sky was so full of stars at night that it made a body feel lonesome and sad, just looking at them. "You might think you could live there, but it would kill you. One day at a time."

"And what do you think it'll do to me, living here without you?"

Her gaze met his, and it came to her that his eyes were the exact shade of blue as a deep, tropical sea, and that she could look at them forever and never get tired of it. She swallowed, trying to answer him, but her throat had become so swollen and tight she couldn't push the words out.

"You're just making excuses," he said suddenly, those vivid blue eyes of his narrowing, darkening. "You know that, don't you?"

She scrambled to her feet, the constriction about her throat instantly gone.
"Excuses!"

He rose more slowly, his hands settling on his lean hips in that quintessentially masculine stance of his. "That's right."

She brought up one clenched fist and thumped it against her chest for emphasis. "I'm being practical."

"Uh-un." He leaned into her, his nostrils flaring with a quick, angry breath. "The truth is, you're afraid. And you're too bloody dishonest with yourself even to admit it."

She scooped up her knapsack from where she'd left it lying in the sand, and practically shook it under his nose. "I'm not afraid of anything."

He knocked her hand away from his face. "That's bullshit, and you know it. Oh, you might not be afraid of traveling around the world by yourself, or exploring a cave filled with moldy old skeletons. But there's a hell of a lot you
are
afraid of, and I don't mean just reasonable things, like swinging bridges and sharks. You're terrified of being late, or looking foolish, or just simply admitting to anyone, least of all yourself, that you get lonely sometimes. Or that deep, deep down, you really would like to have children, and a man to love you, except that you're too afraid of making a bad choice, the way your mother did."

She let out a bitter, false laugh. "You dare? You dare to lecture me about courage, when you're the one who's been too afraid to go back to Rakaia and face up to what happened there!"

It was a cruel, cutting thing to say, and she would have taken it back instantly if she could, except that it was already too late. A line of dark color appeared to ride high on his sharp cheekbones, and his head snapped back as if she had slapped him.

"At least I know what I'm running from," he said, his voice low and even and carefully, flawlessly modulated. "But you... you don't even know you're running."

He turned around then and left her there, at the edge of that strange black beach, with her knapsack clutched to her chest and a sick weight of despair riding low in her belly. And she realized, as she watched him walk away from her, that never had she felt more afraid, or more alone than she did in that moment.

India hesitated at the base of the bungalow's steps, one hand on the railing, her head turning toward the sound of Cynthia Watson's merry laugh. The woman was standing beside a clothesline strung between two erythrina trees, one of the reverend's wet shirts held, momentarily forgotten, in her hands, her back arching as she looked up at a couple of yellow and green noisy pittas.

Turning, India walked toward her.

India might be critical of many of the results of the missionaries' work, but she still had to admire them. This was no easy life to which the Watsons had dedicated themselves. The islands of the South Pacific were scattered with the graves of missionaries' wives, and their children.

"Miss McKnight," said Cynthia Watson, looking around as India walked up to her. "Good morning! What did you think of last night's luau?"

"It was good material for the book I'm writing," India said warily.

The reverend's wife ducked her head to hide a smile. "William was furious, of course, when he heard they were having it. But I thought you would enjoy it."

"Is there a steamer that comes by here?" India asked, reaching into the basket at her feet and bringing up a wet apron she pegged on the line.

"Going which direction?"

India almost said,
Any direction.
But then she remembered her trunk, sitting in the Limerick in Neu Brenenberg, and said, "West."

"The
Fijian
is due tomorrow or the next day. But it'll probably be the last one until April."

India nodded. They called it the Tunnel, that long, tense period running from December to April, when the rains fell incessantly, and the danger of encountering a fierce storm kept most ships and boats in harbor. It made the isolation faced by those manning these far-flung outposts so severe that white traders and missionaries and their wives had been known to go mad, or simply give up and die, waiting for the Tunnel to end. India had been hoping to make it to Pepeete before the rains came. As it was, she'd be lucky not to be stranded on Neu Brenen.

Mrs. Watson shook out a wet petticoat and hung it on the line. "It's a good thing you weren't still at sea when that boat took it into her head to sink. But William had a look at her this morning, and he says he thinks they should be able to raise her."

"I might not be waiting for that."

Cynthia Watson looked around. "But I thought—" She broke off and bit her lip, then laughed. "Silly me. I don't know where I got the notion you and Mr. Ryder were, well, you know."

India felt her cheeks heat with discomfort. "We only just met. I hired his boat."

"Mr. Watson and I knew each other less than three weeks before we were wed. He was due to set sail for Waigeu when we met, so there was no time for a prolonged courtship."

India stared at the other woman's full-cheeked, merry face. "You weren't afraid?"

"Of coming here? What was there to fear, with God leading our way?"

"I meant, marrying someone you
didn't
know."

India expected the woman to say she'd had God leading her in that, as well. Instead, a strange, secret smile lit up Cynthia Watson's pale gray eyes, and she said simply, "I knew him."

It was Patu who took India to see the ancient burial complex, the marae, that Jack had told her about.

Built at the edge of the tidal plain below the village, the marae was one of the largest such places she'd ever seen. Thousands upon thousands of dark gray stones had been hauled down from the mountains and piled up to form walls some two hundred feet long and perhaps fifteen feet high. At first, she simply walked around the outside of it, stumbling occasionally over stones half buried in the rioting vegetation of the encroaching jungle, her head falling back as she looked up into the spreading limbs of giant old maape trees thrusting up from inside the enclosure. The whole place looked deserted and forlorn and sad.

"Does no one ever come here?" she asked.

Patu shook his head. "It's taboo." Forbidden.

India glanced over at him. "I thought the islanders were all Christians now."

A smile flashed wide and quick across his face. "So they say. But they still don't come here."

India paused between the two giant slabs of basalt that formed the marae's portal. It was like entering some ancient cathedral, she thought; a cathedral torn open to the sky, a place of peace that seemed, contradictorily, to hum with an energy she found almost frightening.

"You can go inside," Patu said, when she continued to hesitate. "It's all right."

She took a step forward, reluctant to disturb the strange aura of this place, yet oddly drawn by it, as well. Her boots made soft swishing noises in the high grass as she passed through a small antechamber and into the interior courtyard, a vast empty rectangle filled with only maape trees, and a tangle of creeping fig and shrubs, and grasses bending softly in the wind coming off the sea. Here and there, a few fragments of bone showed dull white in the fierce tropical sunlight, splintered shafts of long bones and small, weathered vertebrae and the thin, serrated pieces of a crushed skull. But that was all.

"Where are all the people who were once here?" she asked, her voice echoing oddly in the empty stone chamber.

"Father Paul had the bones gathered up when I was a boy, and given a Christian burial." Patu was prowling about the enclosure, parting bushes and pulling back mats of creepers to study the various tall, upright slabs of stone that had been set about seemingly at random. Suddenly he called out, "Here it is. Come see."

She joined him on the far side of the marae, and found herself staring at an upright stone deeply carved with a relief of a squatting, almost fetuslike creature with enormous round eyes and a wide mouth. His stunted legs were bent beneath him, his hands on his fat belly. He looked both faintly ridiculous and utterly evil. India fumbled in her knapsack for her notebook and pencil. "What god is this?"

Patu shrugged. "I don't know. We used to have many gods. The people thought that a god, if properly worshiped, should serve them and bring luck. If he didn't, then...
pffff"
He made an outward sweeping motion with his hands, and grinned. "The god would be abandoned, and a new one chosen."