Authors: Iris Johansen
Julio grinned, his dark face shrewd. “And you were another, I’d bet. How many lovers did you have to your credit at the same age?”
“I was too much of a gentleman to count,” Beau drawled. “And so should you be.”
Julio shrugged. “Consuello is lonely. I merely fill a need.” His eyes were suddenly twinkling. “Actually a variety of needs.” He stood up. “The more I think about it, the more I believe it’s my
solemn duty to look up Consuello and persuade her to take me to Mariba,” he said expansively. “Don’t worry, Kate. I’ll get on it right away.”
“Or on her?” Beau suggested, his lips twitching.
Julio winked. “At any rate I’ll be back by tomorrow evening at the latest with news of the captain.”
“That would probably be the safest move.” Kate bit her lip. “Despard’s men don’t know you and Consuello would be a good cover. Just be careful, Julio.”
“Yes, by all means,” Beau said. “Or Kate will probably be storming the local bastille to get you out.”
“I’ll be careful,” Julio promised, touching her cheek with a gentle finger. “You, too,
pequeña
.” He turned to Beau with gruff sternness. “Watch over her.” Then he was walking swiftly toward the headland using the trees as a cover.
Kate’s throat felt suddenly tight and aching as she watched him swagger jauntily out of sight. “He’s so young,” she murmured. “What if something happens to him?”
“You told me yourself that he was older than
his years,” Beau said gently. “He’ll be fine, Kate.” He took her hand in his, the firm vital clasp giving comfort and strength and infinite reassurance. “And if not, I’ll help you storm that bastille myself.”
Her smile was a little watery. “Promise?”
He nodded. “Promise. Now what will it take to get you to lead me to this house of yours?” He made a face. “I hope it has bathing facilities. I need to wash this salt water off me. I feel as if I’m going to dry up and blow away any minute.”
“Oh yes, it has bathing facilities,” Kate said happily, her hand unconsciously tightening on his. Such a warm strong hand, it felt so wonderfully protective and affectionate. She started off through the palm grove into the half-light of the rain forest beyond. “I’ll take you there right away.”
“A tree house!” Beau said blankly, his gaze taking in the upper branches of the rain tree they were standing beneath. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Kate shook her head. “It’s really a very practical
idea,” she said, her eyes wide and earnest. “The branches and foliage offer a certain amount of shelter from the sun and the rain and it’s very private.” She was dragging a ladder from behind a cluster of nearby bushes and he moved automatically to help her set it against the tree. “Julio and I built it. It took us about four months, but it was worth all that time.”
“I can tell,” he said gently. Even in the twilight dimness of the rain forest he could see the glowing eagerness in her face and it filled him with a poignant tenderness. Child-woman, vulnerability and strength. “I can’t wait to look inside.”
“It’s not very fancy.” Kate was climbing the ladder swiftly and her voice drifted down to him as he started after her. “It wasn’t all that easy to furnish it. We had to use a pulley except for the little pieces we could carry.” She reached the wooden platform and opened the rough wooden door with a little flourish.
“Mi casa, su casa.”
“Thank you,” Beau said gravely as he preceded her into the little house.
She followed him quickly. “Perhaps you’d better let me go first. It’s pretty dark in here and I know my way around.” She was fumbling at the
natural rattan nightstand. Suddenly a match flickered and he could see that she was lighting an old-fashioned oil lamp. She turned to face him and her eyes widened in surprise. In the cutoff jeans, bare-chested and barefooted, he was a strange wild figure in her familiar little room. Wild and virile and overpoweringly male. “It’s a little close in here,” she said breathlessly. “I’d better open the shutters.”
“I’ll do it.” He was at the large square window beside the door unfastening the tan woven hemp shutters and throwing them wide. “The whole place smells of flowers.” He turned and suddenly grinned. “No wonder, you have enough flora in here to fill a florist shop.”
“I love flowers,” she said simply. “And they grow wild in the rain forest, so I can gather fresh ones every day.” She gazed around in blissful satisfaction. “They make everything look so lovely.”
The simple furnishings of the room definitely needed that embellishment, she thought. There was no bed, merely a single mattress covered with blue denim on the rough-hewn floor. Other than that, there were two rattan captain’s chests
against two walls and the small rattan nightstand. But there were blossoms everywhere. Gorgeous coral orchids with creamy centers tumbling out of rattan holders fixed to the unfinished walls. Delicate maidenfern surrounded deep purple violets in a polished black bowl on one of the chests. A tall vase in one corner was filled to overflowing with greenery and strange white blossoms with golden markings. But his eyes were on her, not the furnishings and she was suddenly conscious of that queer breathlessness again. “I guess it must seem primitive to you,” she said uncertainly.
He shook his head slowly. “No, it’s very beautiful and very, very special,” he said quietly. “I can see how you’d be proud of it.” His eyes met hers across the room and it was as if she were being wrapped in a velvet intimacy so complete it filled the whole world. “In a way it’s like you. Different and lovely and totally special.” He looked away and his eyes fell on a colorful object on the rattan chest across the room. “What’s that?”
She was glad he’d been distracted. She didn’t know if she could have broken the intimate
moment herself. She followed his gaze with her own and then smiled eagerly. “That’s my music box.” She ran across the room and knelt by the chest. Her hands lifted the scarlet-and-ivory carousel with loving care and wound the key at the bottom. “I discovered it in a pawn shop in Port of Spain. Isn’t it lovely? A carousel with not only horses but unicorns and centaurs. It was in pretty bad shape when I bought it, but I repainted it and Julio found a man to fix the mechanism.” She set the music box back on the chest and stayed there, her eyes misty with dreams as she watched the carousel turn slowly on its pedestal. “I’ve always loved the tune it plays. I tried to find out what it was, but the man in the shop didn’t know and neither did Julio and Jeffrey.”
“It’s ‘Lara’s Theme’ from
Dr. Zhivago
,” Beau said, his voice husky.
“
Dr. Zhivago
?”
“A beautiful movie taken from a book by Pasternak. I have a copy of the book in my cabin on the
Searcher
. I’ll give it to you once we’re back on board.”
“Thank you. I’d like that.” Her gaze was still
fixed dreamily on the carousel. “You know, I’ve always wanted to ride a carousel. I was at a carnival in a little village in Nicaragua once, but it didn’t have a merry-go-round.”
“I’ll buy you one.”
“What?” She turned to look at him in bewilderment.
“I’ll buy you the best damn carousel in the whole world,” he said thickly. “Hell, I’ll buy you an entire amusement park.” He wanted to give her everything she’d never had. The experience, the beauty, the knowledge. He
needed
to give them to her.
She laughed uncertainly. “You’re joking.” She rose to her feet. “For a moment I thought you were serious.”
He opened his lips to speak but quickly closed them again. “We’ll talk about it later,” he said. “Now where can I get rid of this combination of salt and sweat that’s coating me? You promised me a bath.” He looked around with a whimsical smile. “Somehow I don’t think your very special house has a bathroom.”
“There’s a spring-fed pool several yards north of here,” she said with a grin. She picked up the
carousel and set it carefully on the floor before opening the chest. “It’s a little cold, but very clear.”
“That’s where you sunbathe?”
There was something in the smoky darkness of his eyes that caused a frisson of heat to tingle through her. “Yes, that’s the place,” she said, quickly reaching into the chest to pull out soap, a large folded terry towel, and shampoo. “It won’t be very warm there now. It’s almost dark.”
“You only have one towel.”
Her eyes flew to meet his and what she saw there made the heat in her loins turn molten.
“We’ll need at least two,” he said with slow deliberation. “You’re all salty too.” His voice dropped to velvet softness. “But don’t worry, I’ll wash every grain of it off you personally.” He smiled intimately. “Very personally.”
She drew a deep breath. “You want me to go with you?”
“I insist upon it,” he murmured. “I always did have a lousy sense of direction. I might get lost in the forest and never be heard from again.”
“Then I guess I’d better come along,” she said,
reaching for a few more towels and a white cotton caftan. “I may need to redeem that promise you made to help me storm the bastille.” Her voice was as light as his, and didn’t reflect the fact that her heart was pounding so hard she felt as if she’d been running.
She didn’t dare keep up the badinage as they made their way down the ladder and along the path to the pool. She wasn’t experienced enough to maintain that casual sophistication and was sure that at any moment she’d betray how nervous and uncertain she felt. Nervous and something else. Something exciting and moving and as beautifully primitive as the rain forest surrounding them.
It was almost pitch-dark as they reached the bank of the pool, and the water was only discernible from the bank by the occasional glitter of moonlight on its mirror surface.
Kate dropped her towels and the caftan on the bank. “It’s shallow enough to stand upright around the edges. It only deepens as you go toward the middle.”
“Right.” Beau had already stripped off his meager clothes and was jumping into the water.
“Damn!” he exploded. “Where does that spring originate, the South Pole?”
She burst out laughing. “I told you it was cold.”
“
Cold
, not frigid. Throw me the soap, will you?”
She tossed it to him and then pulled the T-shirt over her head. There was no use being shy. Beau had seen everything there was to see last night on the
Searcher
. Besides, it was so dark here Beau was hardly more than a bronze blur though only a few feet away. It was reasonable to assume she’d be equally indiscernible.
She inhaled sharply as she jumped into the water and she heard Beau’s chuckle. “Definitely the South Pole, eh?”
“Definitely,” she gasped. She poured a little shampoo in her hand and began rubbing it into her hair. The curls were coarse and wiry with salt and she sudsed and rinsed it twice before she was satisfied it was clean. “I’ve finished with the shampoo. Would you like to use it?”
“I made do with the soap,” he said carelessly. His voice was suddenly much closer and she looked up to see him only a few feet away. “I
didn’t want to wait. I wanted to get through in a hurry so I could have my treat.”
“Your treat?” She moistened her lips nervously.
“Bathing Kate, bonny Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom.”
“Shakespeare,” she identified, a trifle breathlessly.
“Right,” he drawled, “but we’re not going to discuss literature tonight. That I promise you, sweet Kate. I only display that degree of restraint every century or so.”
“I think most of the salt is washed off now,” she offered faintly.
“But we have to be sure, don’t we? I promised you
every
grain of salt.” He was very close now and she could see the white flash of his teeth in his darkly shadowed face. “And I’ll think we’ll start here.”
The cold wet bar was against her throat and she gave an involuntary shiver. “Cold?” he murmured. “Let’s see if we can fix that.” He rubbed the soap briskly between his hands. “I’m going to like this much better anyway. And you will
too, Kate. I guarantee that you’ll like it a hell of a lot better.”
He took the bottle of shampoo from her and tossed it and the soap on the bank. Then his hands were on her throat rubbing the lather from his hands into her skin with slow teasing skill. She stood perfectly still, almost forgetting to breathe as his hands moved to her bare shoulders rising out of the water. His hands were cold from the water and hard with calluses. Playboys shouldn’t have calluses, she thought inconsequentially, but then Beau wasn’t a stereotype. He was a law unto himself. His hands weren’t really cold either. She could feel the vital heat beneath the surface coolness and it was arousing an answering heat everywhere he touched.
“Give me your left arm.”
She raised her arm from the water and his hands moved over it from shoulder to wrist with slow easy strokes that should have been soothing. They weren’t. By the time he’d finished the other arm, her heart was beating wildly and her flesh was so exquisitely sensitive that every brush of his hands was actually painful. It was like something from an erotic fantasy to be
standing here in this icy water in almost total darkness while a naked shadowy stranger ran his hands over her body in this intimately arousing fashion. Yet Beau wasn’t really a stranger. They’d been through so much together that in some ways she felt she knew him far better than she did Jeffrey or Julio.
“And now the pièce de résistance,” Beau drawled. His hands closed upon her breasts beneath the water. She cried out and involuntarily surged toward him.
“I’ve been wanting to do that since the minute I saw you in that bar,” he said thickly. He was squeezing her gently and his thumbs were exploring the pink rims that encircled the hard crests of her nipples. “And I think you’ve been wanting it, too, haven’t you, Kate?”
She hadn’t realized it, but she must have. The response was so immediate, the filling of an aching void so evident. “The water has washed all the soap off your hands,” she said vaguely through the haze of heat surrounding her. It seemed impossible now that she’d even noticed the coldness of the water.
“It doesn’t matter, we’ll never miss it,” Beau
assured her. “They say friction does just as good a job as soap.”