Whispers of Heaven (18 page)

He watched, mildly puzzled, as she buckled a leather satchel to the back of her saddle. "Where are we going, anyway?" he asked, fitting the bridle over the gray's head.

She glanced over her shoulder at him, her lips curling up into a saucy smile that took his breath and left him aching. "That's not exactly the sort of question a humble groom is supposed to ask, Mr. Gallagher."

"Yeah?" he said slowly, his gaze on her mouth. "Well, I've always had a hard time with humility."

She turned away abruptly to gather her mare's reins. "There's a series of limestone caves to the east of here, at a place called Fern Gully. I want to explore them."

"Caves?" he repeated.

"You don't like caves, Mr. Gallagher?"

"Well now," he said as they led their horses, together, out into the yard. "That depends. They're all right, I suppose, as long as you don't have to live in one." He had lived in one once, in the Comeragh Mountains, when there was a price on his head and he was on the run from the British army, but he wasn't about to tell her that.

She laughed softly. "I don't intend to live at Fern Gully." She adjusted her reins and prepared to mount. "Unless, of course, we get lost."

He gave her a leg up. "Shouldn't you tell someone where we're going? Just in case we
do
get lost."-

"I've told Old Tom," she said, arranging her skirts about her, her face half averted.

"Old Tom?"

"That's right."

He took a step back, his head tilted as he watched her. "None of them know you very well, do they?" he said quietly. "Your family, I mean."

Her head snapped up, her lips parting on a quickly indrawn breath as she sent the little white-socked mare dancing sideways in a caper that was both deliberate and damnably attractive. "You, sir, are impertinent."

He held himself quite still, his hard gaze never leaving her face. "Yeah, I suppose I am. But at least I'm honest."

He watched, calmly, as her fist tightened around her riding crop. He thought she might bring it down across his face, but he made no effort to move out of her way, simply stared up at her. And he realized, with an odd sense of detachment, that he wanted her to strike him. He wanted her to make him hate her.

Without a word, she turned the mare's head and touched her heel to the horse's side, sending Cimmeria cantering out of the yard so that he had to vault into the saddle and hurry to catch up with her.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Warrick lifted his broad-brimmed hat and swore softly as he swiped one well-tailored arm across his damp forehead. The day had turned warm. Too bloody warm to be out beating the bush for some bloody bolter who was obviously bloody good at not getting caught. He turned his horse off the main road on to a half-hidden track that snaked down a hillside covered with blackwood and stringybark thickly undergrown with dogwood and sassafras, and swore again.

After a day and a half of thundering about the district in a show of force that was as useless as it was supposed to be impressive, they'd finally agreed to split up, the constable and his men taking the Aboriginal tracker up into the mountains, while Harrison and his hounds crisscrossed the north end of the valley with the kind of systematic thoroughness for which Harrison was known. Warrick himself had offered to check out the hills that sheltered the valley from the storm-battered coast. Not that he was expecting to find anything. He was beginning to think it'd just be sheer, dumb luck if any of them stumbled upon the man they were after.

He'd heard about this particular absconder before, this Parker Jones, for big black men with American drawls weren't that common in Tasmania. They said he was a runaway slave, that he'd escaped from some Georgia plantation by stowing away on a ship going to England. Only, he hadn't enjoyed his freedom for very long. He'd made the mistake of killing a sailor in a brawl on a Portsmouth dock, which landed him free passage on another ship, a convict ship, this one bound for penal servitude in Australia. They weren't called slaves, of course, the men who labored in chains and under the lash on the government roads, or down in the mines, or on the private estates with their big, fancy houses and vast fields. It wasn't exactly slavery, but Warrick wondered if a man like Parker saw much of a difference.

Warrick thought about the senselessness of the man's life, the bloody, soul-destroying irony of it, as he let his horse pick its way across an open slope of daisy-sprinkled grass waving lazily beneath a gloriously clear sky. Then he crested a small rise and there, unexpectedly, stretched the ocean, swelling blue and breathtaking into the distance. He reined in hard, his chest aching with bittersweet joy the way it did each time he caught sight of the sea.

It had always been his passion, the sea, since before he could even remember. His father had laughed at him for it, and teased him and wondered aloud how the grandson of a Lancashire miller and a Hampshire half-pay army officer could have come up with such a notion, of going to sea and captaining his own ship. But Anselm hadn't discouraged him. Not until that dreadful summer when the grinding waves and jagged, deadly rocks of Shipwreck Cove took Cecil. After that, the mere mention of the sea was enough to make Beatrice go white and tight-lipped. Warrick had hoped, in time, she'd get over it. But then, just a few years later, his second brother, Reid, had died, too, beneath the Aboriginals' spears. And then there had been no question of Warrick going to sea, for of Beatrice and Anselm Corbett's three sons, Warrick was the only one left alive, which meant that the castle and its vast estates would be his some day. Whether he wanted them or not.

He sucked in a deep breath, filling his head with the scent of warm grass and sweet dogwood and the faint briny tang of the sea. Then he turned his back on that shining vista and nudged his horse forward.

A pair of Cape Barren geese took flight, beating the air clumsily with their great wings. He let his reins go slack, his hat brim tipping up as he watched them gain altitude and grace as they rose to the sky. And then he became aware of a strange stillness, an indefinable tingling of awareness, and he knew he was being watched himself.

He swung about sharply, his gaze sweeping the nearby line of mountain lilac, his hand going to the pistol he'd stuck in the waistband of his doeskin riding breeches. The breeze blew through the treetops, shifting the leaves and swaying the branches. There was no one in sight. But the feeling of being watched remained. He slipped his gun from his belt.

A girl's laughter rang out, soft and gurgling like the rush of a clear mountain stream. "Are you going to shoot me then? Should I be afraid?"

His head fell back. She sat perched in the lower branches of the tree right above him, a slim sprite of a girl with long, dangling brown legs and hair the color of a fiery sunrise that tumbled in wild, sinful disorder about her shoulders and down her back.

"What are you doing out here all alone?" he asked, easing his gun back beneath his waistband.

She pushed off the branch to land with a lithe, feline grace, close enough to startle his horse into a head-tossing snort. "I live here."

She was built long and thin, with a small head and exquisitely fine bones, like some kind of exotic, well-bred cat. She had eyes like a cat, too: big and golden and gleaming with some inner knowledge that beckoned him and intrigued him and scared him, all at once. "No one lives here," he said.

She laughed again.

She wore nothing but an old-fashioned gown of blue cotton with a pointed bodice and a ragged skirt that was too short, so that he could see the long length of her bare calves and her feet. He didn't think she could be wearing anything beneath it. The material stretched tightly across her firm young breasts, showing the clear outline of her dark nipples. As she walked up to him, the skirt shifted sensuously against her lean flanks and hugged the long stretch of her thighs. She was all legs and hair and eyes, and he thought he had never seen anyone so captivating. Reaching up, she put her hand on his booted calf. "We do."

He saw it then, beyond her. A crude cottage of freestone, with a thatched roof and plank door built so that it faced the sea. It looked like something out of the wilds of the Scottish highlands, or the poorest dell in Ireland. Yet this exquisite creature lived there.

"You look hot," she said, smiling up at him.

She had a wide mouth for such a dainty face, the teeth even and white, her lips full and beckoning. Warrick felt his breath catch in his throat, so that he could barely force the words out. "I am."

She turned, her hand brushing across his knee, brushing him with raw fire. "Follow me."

She didn't say where she was going, but he followed her. She led him not toward the hut but down the slope, into a ravine that plunged toward the sea. The ravine was deeper than he'd expected it to be, the vegetation lush and dense, with great reaching branches of myrtle beech and celery-top pine that met overhead to create a leafy green canopy of deep shade and sweet coolness. A strange hush closed around him, and it was as if he moved through an enchanted world, the only sound the dull thump of his horse's hooves in the thickness of the path. And still he followed her, descending into a shadowy realm of ferns and lichens and moisture-laden air. He heard the rush of nearby water and knew that she had led him to a stream.

He could see it now: a swiftly flowing brook of clear water and tumbled moss-covered boulders shaded by tree ferns and native laurels. Where the path ended, the stream widened out into a small pool backed up behind a crude stone cairn. He reined in, nodding toward the dam. "Did you make that?"

"No. It was here when we came. I think the black men made it." She waded out ahead of him into the pool until the water lapped almost to her knees, then swung around to face him. "Come in," she said and began to unfasten her dress.

The cloth of her dress slid up, slowly revealing naked hips and waist and breasts. Her body was slim and lithe and achingly desirable, and Warrick wanted to laugh—not at her but at himself, because he was so bloody shocked he almost fell off his horse. He'd always thought of himself as wild and reckless and daring, as a man who flouted the rules and did exactly as he pleased. But he realized, now, he wasn't really that way. Not compared to this girl.

She pulled the dress off over her head and draped it across a nearby overhanging branch. He'd been right, of course. She wore nothing beneath it—nothing except a sheathed knife strapped to her naked thigh. He watched as she untied the thong that held it in place and set the knife on top of her dress. She tilted her head, smiling up at him. "Aren't you going to get off that horse and come in?"

He stretched back in the saddle, straightening out his legs in the stirrups and ducking his head so that his hat brim hid his face. "I don't think so."

"You're shy."

He gave her a slow smile. "I think I've just discovered that I am."

She had a beautiful body, long and lean, with high small breasts and an unbelievably tiny waist. Her woman's hair was the same fiery hue as the curls that tumbled about her shoulders, the flesh of her breasts and hips the same golden color as her arms and legs. She obviously spent a fair amount of time out in the sun without her clothes. It was a thought that both excited and worried him.

"Aren't you afraid?" he asked.

She took a step back, to where the water was deep enough to come up to her waist. "Of what?"

He rested the palms of his hands on the pommel of his saddle and leaned into it. "Of me."

She took another step. The water must have been over her head now, for she was forced to make wide sweeping motions with her hands to keep afloat. "You wouldn't hurt me."

He watched the graceful movements of her long arms, watched the way her breasts shown firm and luminous through the clear water. The urge was strong in him, the urge to get down off his horse and wade into the water and pull her up against his hard body. He wanted to take her with swift savage lust, to bear her down into a bed of ferns and wrap her long naked legs around his waist and bury himself inside her, here, beneath the wide blue sky. Not since he'd lost his dreams of the sea had he wanted anything the way he wanted this woman. This woman with the wild hair and wild ways. This woman who was everything he'd always wanted to be, and more.

"You can't know I wouldn't hurt you," he said his voice rough. "You have no idea who I am."

"Yes, I do. You're Mr. Warrick Corbett of Castle Corbett." She arched her neck, shaking her hair back from her face. Dark and wet and clinging, it slid over her shoulders, floated dreamily about her naked breasts. "I've seen you before." Her smile broadened. "Seen you, and wanted you."

She was utterly guileless and direct, a bewitching contradiction of simplicity and wisdom, innocence and experience. "Do you always do what you want?" he asked.

"Yes." She studied him, her brows drawing together, her cat's eyes glimmering. "But you don't."

He started to argue, to say he always did as he damned well pleased. Then he remembered he was still sitting on his horse.

She rolled forward, giving him a glimpse of small, tight buttocks beckoning pale and gently rounded beneath the shimmering water. "Why are you out here, anyway, Mr. Corbett of Castle Corbett?"

He lifted his gaze to the sea, just visible as a vivid band of blue up ahead, and realized that he had utterly forgotten the reason he was here. "I'm looking for a bushranger. A big, black man with a bad reputation. An American black, not an Aboriginal. You might want to be a bit more careful until he's caught."

"I've seen your bushranger."

He swung his head to look at her again. She waded into the shallows, her naked body glistening wet and beckoning in the shadowy light. Looking at her, he felt the breath leave his chest in a painful rush, felt his entire body tightening up with desire, tighter and tighter, so that he was barely aware of the sense of her words, and had to swallow, hard, before he could even speak. "When?"

"This morning." She stepped from the pool, her head tilted at a pensive angle as she looked up at him. "He's dead."