Seize the Fire (29 page)

Olympia sat up away from him. "Steal her jewels, perhaps," she said acidly.

To her astonishment and rage, he had the gall to catch her back. Olympia struggled, pushing at his hands, but in spite of her fight he held her up close to him, his arm around her chest. "You'll have your damned jewels returned," he said into her hair.

"Release me!" She went stiff and utterly still. "I hate you."

"I said you'll have them back! That'll have to be good enough, curse you."

"Good enough!" With a mighty effort she tore away and scrambled to her feet, turning on him savagely. "You don't understand anything, do you? You don't have the first notion of right or wrong or loyalty or honor! Nothing would be good enough! I thought you were a hero, oh, yes. A
real
hero, worth respect, and admiration, and—and
love
." She gave the end of a burning log a hard kick, sending sparks spiraling off into the night. "I loved you! Can you comprehend that? I
loved
you, and you did that to me—betrayed me and robbed me and left me alone. Alone, when I'd given you all the trust and devotion I was capable of giving! When I'd read about you since I was fifteen, and pasted every report from the Naval Chronicle into my scrapbook; when I'd treasured every clipping about your medals and your ships and the things you've done—when I dreamed about meeting you every night of my life!" She squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her hands, feeling the wild tears coming. "I
loved
you." Her voice trembled into a squeak. "I loved you…and you…betrayed me."

The tears leaked from beneath her eyelids, hot tracks on her icy cheeks. In the windy silence, the fire popped. Her lip trembled. She put her fist to her mouth and turned away, unable to bear looking at him.

"You loved me, did you?" His voice was quiet and cutting. "You never knew me."

"Obviously," she said.

After a moment, he said on a queer, soft note, "You might have. I would have let you."

She whirled around. "Good God, why should I wish to? Who are
you?
A thief. A blackguard."

He looked up at her, one arm braced around his knee. All the humor had left his face, leaving the bleak, battle-scarred remnants of perfection. "I gave up on ethics before I was fourteen. I settled for plain survival. One day at a time, Princess—I told you, that's all I know how to do."

She pulled the cloak around her. "How can you live like that?" Her voice was scathing. "What's the point of it?"

He stared into the fire. His breath seemed uneven for a moment. Then he lifted his face to look at her with a faint, wry wistfulness. "That maybe tomorrow will be an improvement?" he suggested. "That I might be around to see what color the sunrise will be? That I might have a midshipman called home before he's blown apart in battle, or hear a princess laugh? I don't know. What's the point?"

He looked down and began covering the rest of the goose in seaweed, carefully collecting every bit of flesh and bone and adding it to the bucket.

"It seems to me," she said shakily, "that the point is to try to make the world a better place."

"How?" His voice was flat.

"You know how. You've done it—in spite of yourself, I suppose! By fighting injustice and tyranny."

"Yes, that's what the papers call it, don't they?" He bent over the fire, pushing sand onto the coals to preserve them. "Glorious stuff. For instance, take the time I attempted to recite a poem on the topic to an Algerian corsair. They took out my cabin and the whole of the second gun deck in one volley." He sat back on his heels, staring out into the night. "Not a bad shot for Berbers, actually. Odd how the enemy seems to cherish the backward notion that we're the tyrants. Makes 'em downright violent." He paused. His face grew very taut and strange. "Stupid of me to underestimate that. I lost a lot of men." He turned back and stared at her, his eyes like silver smoke. "I'm already pretty well damned to burn, you see. I've got more than stolen jewels on my soul."

She held his gaze for a long moment. The cold breeze lifted her hair and touched her neck the same way a queer, shuddery finger of emotion touched her heart. "You're trying to make me feel sorry for you," she snapped.

He laughed softly and stood up. "Maybe so." Firelight cast moving light on his hands and face, blending his dark hair and clothes into the night behind. "Why not?" he asked quietly. "It's lonely out here with the dragons."

She was in her bedroom, snuggled down to her nose in her own bed against the freezing air. Mr. Stubbins bent over her with his golden hair and his lesson frown. "You must drink," he said. "History teaches us that the will of the people overcomes tyranny. Drink."

She tried to move and couldn't. Her head felt like a leaden weight.

He wore a uniform, braids and epaulettes that gleamed against the dark. "I am willing to fight," he exclaimed. "I am willing to die. Don't be afraid."

With a steel flourish, he drew his sword. A sensation of horror gripped her. She turned in the dark and something was there—she heard its breath; she felt its hot touch; she tried to scramble up and run and found herself mired on the ground. It hunkered over her, pinning her down with warm weight, the soft underbelly pressing on her body.

Terrified, she arched her head back and saw the glittering blackness, the huge frame and graceful tail—a nightmare hiss and slash.

A dragon,
she thought. And then, with strange wonder:
How beautiful it is.

"For the People!" Mr. Stubbins shouted, lifting his sword.

No,
she tried to cry
, no, it's a dragon!

She could not form the words. The sword swung in a bright arc against the night and the dragon moved like a cat, a sudden shimmer of black and silver that flashed and struck in silence.

The uniformed figure lay still on the ground, leaking blood that dulled the polished braids and ruined the golden epaulettes.

"He's dead," the dragon said, holding her trapped when she would have run to the fallen form.

She stared at the limp and broken body while the blood spread and stained the deck. "You killed him!" she cried. "I loved you, and you killed him!"

The dragon's hold dug into her shoulders. "I'm not a dragon. I'm a man."

"I hate you. I hate you. I loathe you!"

His belly slid against hers; he buried his head in her naked shoulder—and suddenly he was kissing her skin, forcing weight on her, his body pressing warmth and lust into hers.

"I want to touch you," he whispered, his hand on her thigh.

"Oh, God. "She trembled and arched. "You can't. You can't do this."

His palm slid upward, caressing her thighs, her inner skin. She moaned with the feel of it, the intimate heat moving toward a center of fire. They were both naked, his male shape pressed down on her, into her.

"No," she whimpered. But her hands molded the length of his back, the breadth of his shoulders—passed along the flame-touched curve of muscle and bone. "I hate you. I can't. Why are you doing this?"

He did not answer. His kiss scored the arch of her throat; his hand sought the heart of her tumult: a pressing, violent, sweet sensation.

"I hate you." She twisted and clutched and moaned in desperation. "Oh, I hate you!"

His body enveloped her, covered her in hot darkness and passion. She felt his touch on her lips and throat. She tried to see him and saw dragon eyes in the night, glittering silver.

"I'm a man, "he whispered. "I'm a man."

"I won't," she cried. "I can't!" And yet she reached for him, tried to pull his body close in shame and urgency.

"Oh, please," she said, "oh, please…"

He covered her, drowned her in black fire and glittering darkness. And she let him, weeping with humiliation; moving and pulsing with pleasure.

Olympia opened her eyes with a faint start. The ache of excitement still throbbed between her legs. She shifted underneath the sealskin and blinked past the dream to consciousness.

A foot away, Sheridan was still asleep. Cold sunlight filtered through the tussock roof of the stone hut, lighting an uneven streak on the sandy floor. From outside the door came the sound of rooks, arguing and fluttering, and beneath that the ever-present murmur of the surf.

She stared at Sheridan for a long time.

He was stretched out beneath her cloak, which he'd been using as a blanket since they'd found only enough fur skins to make a single bed in the ruined sealers' hut. He lay on his side, one arm curled up under his head and the other extended, as if he'd been reaching for her.

The streak of sunlight crossed his hand and bare forearm. His palm lay upturned and half open, the fingers curled gently in relaxation. She could see his pulse beating beneath the smooth skin of his inner wrist, and the almost healed blister he'd got from rowing the pinnace with wet oars.

Stripped of his halo of heroism, he was infamous. He was vile and tantalizing, with his soft mockery and his unfamiliar maleness. She squeezed her eyes shut and threw herself onto her stomach, burying her mortification in the soft fur.

For a week she'd dreamed it—or something close enough. She despised him, and he haunted her. He was a coward and a thief, yet she found nothing so fascinating as to watch him as he slept. It was bewildering and distressing and shameful. It was unbearable.

Slowly, so slowly, she slid her fingers across the sealskin. They came within a fraction of his. She stopped. She had only to open her hand to touch him. In the dream he had touched her, slid his palm across her skin, made the ache into sweet fire…

She opened her fingers and brushed his hand.

He didn't stir. Glancing up, she watched his breathing, deep and oblivious. He was tired; he'd spent yesterday rebuilding the last portion of the hut, hauling rocks from the hill behind the beach while Olympia cut tussock grass to thatch the roof. She'd missed her attempt at a goose. The flock was growing wary. By the time she'd given up, the tide was too high to reach the mussel beds, so all Sheridan had had to eat was the contents of two handfuls of tiny, spiraled periwinkle shells in a thin broth of seaweed and goose bones. There had been a half breast of the last goose left, but he'd stubbornly refused it.

She needed it more, he said.

She slipped her fingertips along the pads of his. His hand was so much larger than hers—brown and firm, where hers was pale and plump and chapped. She'd tried to help with the rocks, but he didn't like it. She was too slow, he said; she was in the way, and she'd only get hungrier and look at him with her big eyes and he'd end up giving her his portion again. Go stalk a goose. Or keep a lookout.

Sometimes it was hard to hate him.

She'd been content with stalking the geese, as long as she could catch them. But she hadn't taken one for two days now. And no ships came, not
Phaedra
or any other.

She smoothed her fingers over his sun-warmed palm. There was an ache in her, a restlessness, on the edge of something she wanted and could not have.

The hut was not as cold as it might have been before they'd learned to dig the peaty turf from beneath the tussocks to bum. Last night's fire was banked against the stone hearth. Her dress and chemise, dry at last, hung from a bleached whalebone rafter. Beneath the sealskin she was naked.

The cloak had fallen back from his shoulder, revealing the velvet swell of bare skin and muscle. A flash of the dream came back: a weight on her, a masculine shape between her hands. Her fingers curved, pressing into his. She imagined smoothing her palm across his shoulder. Her heart beat faster. She could see the outline of his body beneath the cloak, the fluent shape of his torso and hip, powerful relaxed perfection, his leg drawn up a little in a sleeper's balance.

She wished she could slip the cloak back. The dream lingered, a remembrance of sensation. She stared at his hand, her fingers drifting, tracing the curve at the base of his thumb and moving up the open flex of his forefinger, feeling the smooth skin and roughened places. It seemed amazing to touch him, to be so close to a man—to
this
man, who set her insides in turmoil and harried her dreams in dragon-shape.

She raised her lashes and found him watching her.

She almost snatched her hand back—then didn't, on the hope that it might seem an accident of sleep—then nearly did, on the logic that she would if she'd just woken up and found it there—and then didn't, for no reason at all except that she was paralyzed.

He smiled at her: a strange, sleepy, heated smile, his eyes a tangled brush of dark lashes and pale smoke. Gently, his hand closed over her fingers. He caressed her palm with his thumb.

Olympia wet her lips. If he'd held her by force, if he'd spoken, she would have pulled away. But the silence made it seem unreal. She could see the tendon in his wrist flex as he stroked her.

He opened his hand and slid his fingers backward between hers, curling them over and down into his palm. So slowly that she never found the concentration to resist, he drew their locked hands toward him. He bent his head to the back of her palm and pressed a soft, caressing kiss to her skin.

"I'd like to," he murmured, his fingers tightening. "God, I'd like to." His lashes lowered as if he were tasting honey. "But better not, Princess. Not here."

Olympia jerked away, coming to her senses in a fluster.

He rolled onto his elbow at her side. His gray eyes were marked with laugh lines as he leaned on his hand and looked down at her. "As your chief minister of affairs, it's my unfortunate duty to report that I'm exerting myself manfully, but should I be awakened tomorrow with a back rub, I'm afraid it may go hard with you."

"What are you talking about?"

His face lost its humor. He watched her for a long moment, his gaze moving to her mouth and shoulders with raking leisure and then up again. "I think you know what I'm talking about," he said softly.

Olympia felt blood rush to her cheeks. She turned sharply away and stared at the tussock roof. "If you will kindly leave for a moment, I can get dressed."

His mouth curved up at one corner. He threw off the cloak and turned over, hiking himself up. Olympia pretended to stare at the roof, but she watched him from the comer of her eye. Though he was wearing pale trousers, he slept with them open. In the moment before he reached for his shirt on the hearth, Olympia bit her lip with a small sound of dismay. He tied the double trouser flap, containing the startling sight behind a bulge of fabric, and glanced questioningly at her.