"You mean, by turning yourself into Catherine and Jane."
"No. Yes. I don't know. That's the problem. I don't know who I am anymore. Who I even want to be."
"Don't you?"
She found she couldn't answer him, could no longer even bear the intensity of his gaze, and bowed her head. It had begun to rain. She could hear the splattering of big drops, hitting the leaves of the trees and pocketing the surface of the pond. She felt the wetness on her cheeks, and didn't even realize she was crying until Warrick's arms came around her, pulling her tight against him, so that she felt the rumble in his chest when he said, "I'm sorry, Jess. Oh, God, I'm sorry."
Early the next morning, Warrick and Harrison assembled in the yard with the dogs and an Aboriginal tracker and the constable and his men from Blackhaven Bay. From the upper veranda, Jessie watched them milling about, the dogs barking in the crisp morning air, the men arguing, the horses tossing their heads and feeling their bits. She watched them ride off toward the cloud-covered mountains; then she went inside.
She spent the morning in genteel pursuits, embroidering a spray of rosebuds on the yoke of one of her nightgowns, and then reading The Pickwick Papers to her mother, who was suffering from nervous prostration brought on by the previous day's incident. In the afternoon, Jessie walked over to spend some time with Philippa Tate at Beaulieu Hall. She cut through the park, the way she had done so often as a child, enjoying the freshness of the rain-cleansed air and the sting of the cool wind against her cheeks.
She did not go near the stables.
The men came back late that evening, hot and tired and frustrated with their lack of success, for the night's rain had washed away the escaped convict's scent and much of his sign. Jessie stood in the hall, listening to their grumbling, and felt her heart lighten with a relief that both surprised and disturbed her.
But of course they went out again, the very next day. The morning dawned sunny and dry, and the constable was confident that the dogs would run across the "bolter's" scent before noon.
This time, she didn't watch them ride out, but went instead to the top floor of the house. There were eight bedrooms in the house that Anselm Corbett had built, for his family had once been large. She walked first to Catherine's room, then to Jane's. Neither room had changed much; the heavy mahogany four-poster beds and dressers, the washstands and hip baths, were all still there. Only the personal touches, the straw hats and seashells, the posy holders and silver-handled hair brushes, were gone, swept ruthlessly away by Beatrice Corbett, who could talk endlessly about the virtues of her dead children but could not bear, it seemed, to look upon anything that had once been theirs.
Standing in the middle of Jane's shadowed room, Jessie turned a small circle and tried to remember what the room had looked like when her sister was alive, only she couldn't.
They'd all caught the scarlet fever that summer—Catherine and Jane and Jessie. Catherine had been twenty-one and preparing to wed a wealthy merchant from Launceston, while Jane had been seventeen. Jessie remembered them both as quiet, composed young women, gracious and demure and properly subdued. But lately she'd begun to wonder if she really remembered them as they were, or if she remembered Catherine and Jane only as her mother liked to remember them, as her mother's words had painted them over the years. Once, when Jessie had done something particularly disgraceful, her mother had flown into a cold rage and said she wished Jessie had died that summer instead of her sisters. Beatrice never said such a thing again, of course, for rages were bad form and Beatrice seldom succumbed to them. But
Jessie had never forgotten her mother's words. And she never would.
Her chest tight with suppressed emotion, Jessie walked to the window and folded back the long cedar shutters, letting in the light. But even the sun couldn't warm the room; it remained cold and empty and dead.
For a long time, Jessie stood with her hands on the shutters, her forehead pressed against the glass of the French doors. Then she quietly closed the shutters and went back to her own room. Quickly, before she could change her mind, she put on her riding dress and went down to the stables.
"Anxious for a run, are you, boy?" Lucas stroked the young gray's cheek and laughed softly when the gelding shoved its nose against his chest and snorted as if in agreement.
Something made him look up then, toward the young woman who worked beside him saddling her mare in the warm, diffuse light of the stables. She wore a different riding dress today, this one made of a dark cloth of hunter green with a frothy jabot of lace at her throat and a nipped-in waist that emphasized the sensual flare of her hips. He supposed the other one must have been ruined by the rough handling the bushrangers gave her up in that glen, and he tried not to remember what she'd looked like, with her hair coming down and her dress torn, and her mouth soft and trembling with fear.
She didn't look soft or trembly today. There was a kind of coiled defiance about her, an almost determined recklessness that worried him. But then, she tended to worry him a lot, because he didn't quite understand her, couldn't predict her. She didn't always behave the way he expected her to, didn't say the things he would have expected a woman such as her to say. For she was not, he was beginning to realize, the woman he'd thought her to be. And that worried him more than anything else.
He'd learned that she wasn't simply capable of saddling her own horse, she actually preferred it. Whereas most women of her kind exaggerated their weakness and incompetence as a way of underscoring their femininity and gentility, she seemed to like the idea of being strong and capable. Strong and capable and smart. It was one of the things he liked about her, one of the things he admired about her. And he did admire her, even though he didn't want to. He'd thought her haughty and spoiled at first, and he knew that in some ways, she was. But there was so much more to her than that, so much more he'd have liked to come to know and understand—if he weren't a convict, and she weren't... who she was.
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 ou
t 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 dr
ess 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.
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