Stormfire (43 page)

"But he would for political gain, wouldn't he?" Seeing her eyes flicker, he pressed. John Enderly was the last real barrier between him and Catherine and he was determined to smash it. He had to have her. The sight of her half-naked, her black hair falling across high, taunting breasts turned his guts to a volcano. "Don't tell me Papa doesn't crave the favor of a man who might someday rule France. You know damned well he does. And he's no longer rich, Kit. He's near ruin. I did it to him. He had to race Numidian because he needed money; otherwise he wouldn't have required a cosigner to cover his losses when Mephisto won. All his accounts connected with his smuggling dealings have been in escrow for months."

"Smuggling?" The Irishman's words came like a hail of arrows. Her eyes faltered in bewilderment and Culhane would have pitied her if he had wanted her less.

"He's a thief, Kit. An urbane one. A good one. I know, because I'm a thief too. But I'm not a traitor, and he is. He's been selling arms to the French—"

"Stop it! You're lying! You'd say anything . . . anything!" She was deathly pale under the tan.

"Yes, I'd say anything. Do anything to beat you down. Down on your back and open to me. With nothing between us. No clothes, no country, no father! But I'm not lying and you know it. Only you've been cheating. You want me now as much as I want you." Culhane jerked away his covering and rose slowly from his bunk. "Do you think I haven't seen desire in a woman's eyes before? Yours are full of it. You know what I am. And you want me. You want me inside you, like the beat of your heart. Kit. . ."

"Stop it!" she sobbed. "Don't touch me! I cannot . . . don't you see? It would be like dying." Her resistance foundered in a gold-flecked green ocean and she wildly seized at anything. "It's useless, Sean. I know! I know about your guns!" He hesitated, still crouched over her. "I've seen them. You care nothing for your own life or anyone else's! You'll push your people into a hopeless rebellion to serve your own ambition and they'll die! And you'll die more horribly than any of them if you're caught!"

"For a woman who finds a killer's touch so distasteful, you sat around long enough hoping for a pat on the head from Papa! Adder-eyed Papa, up to his armpits in blood!"

Catherine clawed at him viciously and he caught her wrist, twisting until she gasped, then pushed her roughly down on the bunk. Lying atop her, he deliberately slid his body over hers as she sobbed and twisted. Holding her wrists, he bit her nipples with soft savagery until they were hard, begging peaks of desire and she whimpered. "Get used to it, Kit," he muttered hoarsely. "Tomorrow, the truce is over. It's time you saw some of your father's handiwork." Abruptly he released her. Sobbing into her pillow, she heard him pull on his clothes and go on deck. A half hour later, the
Megan
was under way.

The next day was overcast, with threatening clouds on the western horizon. Jacket buttoned high, Catherine huddled near the bowsprit, as far away from the Irishman as she could get. Her last refuge was crumbling, Had he planned it all, even to this? The elements themselves had been his allies. The lazy, sunlit days; the soft, starlit nights. Like a fool, she had followed him, and now he'd burned the bridges home.

Dully, she noticed the
Megan
was coming close to shore; too close unless Culhane planned to land. On the windswept heath above the roiky beach, a village lay scattered, its few buildings ruined and open to the sky. Their whitewash had worn away to patches of pale gray against blackened stones. She saw the place had been burned until only the rock remained. Kenlo. Inevitably the
Megan
had come home.

Although she was cold, she turned her back to Culhane and without hesitation pulled off her boots and jacket. Intent on bringing the
Megan
in, he did not notice her movements until he saw her slim body arch outward in a clean dive toward the rocks. Hearing him call out as her head cleared the turbulent surface, she struck out strongly for shore nearly a hundred yards away. The wind whistled about her ears. The water, Gulf Stream current or not, was cold, with treacherous rocks that bristled under the offshore surf. She had gone overboard without thinking, only knowing she had to get away, hide. With nothing left to lose except the last shreds of respect for her father and herself. And her life.

Sean anchored on the spot, not caring that
Megan
jerked and heeled about in the water like a broken-winged bird. He hauled the sails down as fast as he could, tensely keeping a shoreward eye on the small black head increasingly obscured by the waves. By the time he pushed the dinghy away from the
Megan'
s side, Catherine was fighting rollers among the rocks and his belly was knotted. The waves were breaking over her head and she was weakening, the cold seeping into her limbs, slowing her reactions. Then mercifully, she emerged from the breakers, stumbling and falling as they beat her down, but stubbornly making for shore. She collapsed on the rocky beach; he willed her to stay there, but when he looked again over his heaving shoulder as he rowed, she was gone. The white shirt flashed once among the rocks, then disappeared.

Kenlo's single, irregular street was overgrown with heather, and scabrous lichens crawled up ruined walls that distorted the sea wind into moaning, keening sighs. Doorways and windows stood dark and empty, framing bloated, sullen thunderheads in a gunmetal sky. Catherine sensed rather than smelled a stink of death; a faint, sweet, clinging perfume. Fiona's warning echoed in the rising wind. Megan is powerful among her own shadows. She'll destroy you. Catherine straightened. She had been coming to Kenlo ever since leaving England.

Knowing Culhane must be already searching the beach, she moved quickly from house to house, but no cranny proved safe from discovery, and too late, she realized she should have stayed in the ro9ks, away from the cold wind that turned wet garments to clinging ice and sent her hair whipping in sodden tangles. Away from Culhane.

A ruined chapel stood apart from the huts, its terraced steps broken and weed-bound. Shivering, she crept in, her fingers pressed along walls rough with seashells imbedded in native rock. The altar was open to the sky and streaked with droppings of seabirds, its relics vandalized or stolen. Long slits in the building's seaward side were blocks of angry surf gruigbling against wet rocks. Crudely carved limestone faces of saints in niches about the room had been worn away by the salt wind to noseless, blank-eyed effigies. They resembled less Christian saints than the Old Ones who were even older than the Druids. These were saints returned to pagan primal beginnings. Were they now her allies? Or Megan's?

A small cell adjoined the nave. Roof still partly intact, it was barren except for a rotting chest with hieratic carvings. A small alcove, unnoticed until she advanced several feet into the room, dented the near corner wall.

A stone scratched outside and she whirled. Wind whipping about his frame, Culhane was picking his way along the deserted street, examining the interior of each house. Shivering, Catherine pressed into the alcove, trying not to let her teeth chatter. He might not look too closely if he had not seen her come up from the beach. The ruins had drawn her like a magnet. Megan's lure? No, Fiona's suggestion. Megan's dead. Her thoughts swirled. Stay, Kit. Stay where you are. Not breathing, not moving. Kit. His name for her. His will, still commanding her. Don't. Don't think. He'll go away. Please God, make him go away. Tears streamed in icy rivulets down her face and she shook. I'll never be warm again. Never. She closed her eyes. Never again enfolded in arms that held tightly, fiercely defying her, anyone, to break his grip.

"I thought I might find you here. I used to study in this cell."

Eyes flaring, she tried to bolt past him but a steel grip closed on her arm and spun her around; his other hand locked in her wet hair. He jerked her to him. "So you'd rather freeze than burn. Stubborn Kit. Almost as stubborn as me." His voice was soft, but taut.

"Rape me and be damned to you! You'll never have me any other way!"

"Words, Kit. Just words now. The spitting of a cornered cat. Surrender. You're all out of ammunition. I'm taking you back to the boat. I'm going to make love to you and it won't be rape. Never again." He held her head immobile as his mouth came down on hers, searching softly, then urgently, igniting a slow flame in her belly. Ice and fire. She melted against him, then stiffened and savagely bit his lip. He swore and shook her. "You little bitch! I ought to break your neck, but I've a better way of breaking you."

He dragged her stumbling to the nave with its distorted saints. With a hand locked in her hair, he jerked her to the front of the altar and clamped her in front of him with an arm under her breasts, her head dragged back against his shoulder. "You know where you are, don't you? That's why you ran. What do you see, Kit? Papa's face above the altar? Damned right you don't!" He shoved her to sprawl on the altar steps. "Those stains under your hands are blood. A priest's blood to be exact. He was murdered on this spot by your father's order. But first he was buggered with his own crucifix by your Papist-hating countrymen. You do know what bugger means, don't you,
 
chérie?"

Before she had time to react, he dragged her up and after him out into the street. Every foot of its length, she fought him, kicking and scratching, deliberately falling down to tangle his feet. Anything to silence the hard, relentless voice that made Kenlo alive again with slashing cavalry and bayonets. Hacked bodies and flaming, gutted infernos. Mass murder. Finally he half shoved, half threw her into a building apart from the others.

Instantly she scrambled to her feet, turning at bay, her eyes black and wild, fingers raised like talons to come at him again. He caught her slashing hands easily and pushed her back against a blackened, burned table. "My home, girl—what's left of it!" he snarled. "This is where my mother was raped by one of those bastard's sergeants. I watched while she submitted to give me time to run for my life."

Catherine bucked against him and he bent her further back as he told her the rest, forgetting that her eyes were hardly lucid, forgetting he was hurting her—everything except the agony of reliving that night. "I heard him and a lieutenant name the author of their orders: a certain aide to the viceroy who figured slaughtering some villages might incite a rebellion so he could confiscate the rebels' property.
Your
father, you damned bitch!" Sean's face and chest were beaded with sweat, and at that moment, he hated the girl helpless under him more than on the night he had destroyed her innocence.

With deadly swiftness he drew the boot knife and pressed it against her belly. Catherine's eyes glazed back with terror as the knife dug into her skin. "The sergeant gutted Megan with a bayonet. After the soldiers were gone, I doused the body with oil and set fire to it so nobody would see her mutilated. Then I put what was left into a bag and threw it into the sea.

"When I was seventeen, I found that sergeant in a tavern. He almost killed me, but I left him gutted, like my mother!"

Catherine saw murder flare in the green eyes slanting hellishly down at her.

Later, Sean could not remember what had stopped him in time. He remembered Catherine's screaming; the walls seemed to ricochet the sound of her helpless terror. He put a hand over her mouth, and above it her eyes, utterly lost, tore into his soul. Then they fixed on nothing and she went limp. At first he thought he had driven the knife home. As swift fear flooded away the killing daze, he slowly took his hand away from her mouth. "Kit?" Mind barely functioning, he started to lift her and her head dropped back against his arm. "Kit?" His fingers sought the pulse of her throat; it fluttered weakly. She was unconscious, lashes jagged against a bloodless face. He touched her everywhere and found no blood. With a cry, he flung the knife away. Almost, he had killed her. As he looked around distractedly for something to cover her, his stomach rebelled and he retched, falling on hands and knees in the rubble. His body heaved until nothing more was in his belly, and yet he convulsed.