To the Ends of the Earth

by Elizabeth Lowell

  She enjoyed watching him control the car with ease and precision. When he downshifted, sunlight ran like gold water over the tawny hair on his arm. As he transferred his grip from gearshift to steering wheel, the tendons on the back of his hand moved beneath tanned skin. His fingers closed firmly over the leather-sheathed wheel.

  Cat remembered the intense pleasure Travis could give to her with a simple caress. Sudden, stark need coursed through her, leaving her shaken. She wanted to touch him, taste him, take him so deeply into her body that she could feel every wild pulse of his release.

  “If you keep looking at me like that,” Travis said, “I’m going to pull over to the side of the road and do things to you that will get us arrested.”

  His husky drawl did nothing to cool Cat’s blood. She looked away from his knowing hands to his lips smiling beneath his tawny mustache. She remembered the feel of his beard sliding down her skin, the exciting silky roughness against her neck, her breasts, her stomach. She wondered what it would be like to feel him . . . everywhere.

  With a small groan Cat closed her eyes. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “I’ll pull over so we can find out.”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “Chicken.”

  “Cluck cluck. I can’t afford bail.”

  “I can.”

  “They’ll put us in separate cells.”

  “Damn. I didn’t think of that. Then you better stop looking at me like a cat with cream on her mind. I don’t want to spend the night alone.”

  As Travis slowed to turn off the Pacific Coast Highway, the Mercedes made a well-bred, throaty sound. The sound deepened when the car accelerated along the winding road into Dana Point Harbor. To the right of the street, a deeply eroded bluff wore the skeleton of a failed hotel like a gap-toothed smile. To the left, yacht basins held row after row of pleasure craft, countless boats tied side by side, creating a forest of white masts with seagulls turning and crying overhead.

  “Close your eyes,” Travis said.

  Startled, Cat looked at him.

  “I promise not to get us arrested,” he added, smiling slowly.

  “Oh,” she said, disappointed.

  He slowed the car, caressed her mouth with the ball of his thumb, then gently closed her eyes. “Keep them closed until I tell you otherwise.”

  “Yes, Captain,” she said, saluting badly. “Whatever you say, Captain.”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  Cat licked her lips, tasted him, and kept her eyes shut.

  The car growled through a few more turns, then slowed. Travis pulled into a parking lot next to the bluff, which had been named after Richard Henry Dana.

  “Stay put,” Travis said. “And keep your eyes closed.”

  She made a sound like a grumpy cat but didn’t open her eyes.

  Smiling in anticipation, he got out of the car, came around to her side, and opened the door.

  “I can lead you or carry you, little Cat,” he said against her ear. “Your choice.”

  The feel of his lips brushing her earlobe made Cat’s breath catch.

  “Lead on,” she said. “But I should make you carry me and eat your words. At five feet seven inches, I’m hardly little.”

  Without warning, Travis lifted Cat out of the car and settled her across his chest, carrying her as he had when she’d hurt her foot.

  “I was just kidding,” she said, laughing. “Let me go.”

  “Not yet. Never threaten a pirate, sweetheart. It will get you . . . this.”

  He kissed her slowly, completely, then let her slide down his body until she was standing. He could feel her heartbeat. It was as fast and hungry as his own.

  “Remember,” Travis said. “Eyes closed.”

  “It’s hard to walk that way.”

  “I’ll help.” He took a firm grip on her upper arm, supporting and reassuring her at the same time. “First we walk across the parking lot, then the pier. Ready?”

  “A pier? Aren’t you tied up with the other boats?”

  “No questions.”

  “But I just—”

  Travis silenced Cat by tracing the line of her lips with his thumb. She sighed, kissed his thumb, and allowed herself to be led through the parking lot while he kept up a running commentary on whatever might get in the way.

  “Big car to your left, and one backing out on your—wait—okay. Left about three steps, then right. Good. There’s a curb, then a ramp going to the pier, a kid riding a skateboard and carrying a surfboard, and—ah, the hell with it.”

  Ignoring Cat’s muffled laughter, Travis picked her up and strode past the obstacles. There was no one out on the end of the pier. He set her on her feet, wrapped her hands over the railing to orient her, and put his hands on her shoulders.

  “All right, you can look now. Her name is Wind Warrior.”

  Cat opened her eyes, looked out over the yacht basin, and forgot to breathe. There, beyond the other boats, riding alone at anchor, was the great black bird she had seen flying across the face of the dying sun.

  Even with its dark maroon sails furled, the ship was superb. The bold masts and rigging made elegant patterns against the empty sky. The ship’s graceful ebony hull rippled with the reflected dance of light on water. Although wholly at rest, the ship was alive, potent, a tangible consummation of wind and wave and one man’s extraordinary vision.

  Cat turned and looked at Travis as though she had never seen him before. And in one vital way, it was true. She had never before seen T. H. Danvers, designer and builder of the most beautiful ship ever to fly the seas of Earth.

  “I’m dreaming,” she said. “First you, then that ship.” Her words ended in an odd sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Don’t wake me up, Travis, not yet.”

  She looked over the water again at the ship lying sleek and quiet at anchor. Very quickly she glanced back at Travis, then at the harbor, as though expecting both the ship and the man to vanish before her eyes, leaving her as empty as the sky.

  Wind Warrior.

  “No wonder you wanted to wait and see my work before you agreed to let me do your book,” Cat said.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  She touched his mouth with her fingers, cutting off his words.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “The ability to shape beauty out of nothing is one of the few things I truly respect. I won’t belittle your creation with cute, safe pictures. And,” she added softly, honestly, “it is a rare, rare pleasure to meet an artist like you, T. H. Danvers.”

  For a long moment Travis stared down at Cat, drinking in her appreciation and wonder until she thought she would drown in the depths of his sea-colored eyes. Then he gathered her in his arms, holding her as though she was sunrise after a lifetime of night.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “For not insisting you hire me?”

  “No. For seeing the Wind Warrior as I do.” He smiled wryly. “The first time people see my ship, most of them say, ‘Oh, what an unusual boat,’ and then they turn away, not really liking what they see.”

  “You make them see too much,” Cat said simply. “You make them see that beauty is fierce, not soft, that it has the power to turn your soul inside out, forcing you to think again about the world and your place in it. Your Wind Warrior makes people afraid.”

  “But not you,” Travis said. “You’re like me, a wild creature caught in a civilized world.” His hands framed her face. “Come away with me,” he said, low-voiced, intense. “Avalon. Ensenada. Or farther. Hawaii. Papeete. The Seychelles or Tasmania or the China Sea. Anywhere in the world the wind blows, and it blows everywhere, Cat. Come with me.”

  Wanderlust was a strike of lightning that shook her to her soul, bringing memories like thunder in its wake. The scent and feel and sound of the sea, the long reaches where only a ship moved beneath the silent dance of stars. No one to worry about, no obligations to meet. Free.

  Free to photograph the fierce images that haunted he
r without being concerned about their commercial appeal.

  Free from worries about the Big Check and all the little ones.

  Free to be a woman with her man.

  Free as a great black bird skimming a sunset sea.

  Free.

  Yet nothing was free, not really. Cat had known that since she dove over the railing of her husband’s ship. She couldn’t run out on the twins, who depended on her for their education. Nor could she abandon her mother, a woman never made for the hardships of independence.

  “I can’t,” Cat said, her voice raw with longing and regret.

  Anger drew Travis’s mouth into a harsh line. His hands tightened around her face. Abruptly he released her and turned away.

  “Travis?” she said, putting her hand on his arm.

  He spun back toward her. For an instant Cat saw again the leashed violence that had made Ashcroft turn as white as his hair.

  Travis saw her expression and stopped as though she had struck him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, holding out his hand to her. “I didn’t realize how much I wanted to sail away with you until you said no.” He tried to smile. “Don’t say no to me, Cat.” Then, quickly, “If you can’t say yes, don’t say anything. Not yet.”

  She took the hand he held out to her.

  “January,” she said huskily. “By January I’ll have paid all my debts that matter. Then I’ll sail to the ends of the earth with you.”

  His expression changed again. Cat couldn’t read his emotions, but she could sense . . . something.

  And then she knew.

  “You’ll be gone by then, won’t you?” she whispered.

  “Cat,” Travis said softly.

  He moved to hold her, but she let go of his hand and stepped away from his arms with a sad, understanding smile that was worse than tears or anger would have been.

  Then Cat looked away to the ship he had built. She couldn’t bear to look at Travis. Not yet. Not until she stopped feeling as though the earth had been cut away beneath her feet.

  “I’d like to go aboard the Wind Warrior,” she said carefully. “It’s hard to judge camera angles from here. Would it be possible to row around the ship?”

  There was a long silence behind Cat. She felt the pressure of Travis’s will reaching out to her, demanding that she turn back to his arms. He was a wealthy, ruthless brigand who wasn’t used to hearing the word no.

  And she was an independent cat accustomed to going her own way.

  “Is that really how you want it?” Travis asked finally.

  Cat turned to face him with a determination that equaled his.

  “It’s the way it has to be.” Her voice had no emotions, certainly not sadness or regret. “I can’t leave until January and you’ll be long gone by then. Wanting doesn’t have a damned thing to do with it.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t expect you to understand,” she interrupted.

  “Why?”

  “You’re rich,” Cat said simply. “You’ve done whatever you wanted whenever you wanted to. You’ve forgotten that for most people, wanting and getting are rarely the same thing.”

  “You judge me very easily,” Travis said. His voice was remote, his eyes narrowed.

  “I know what it’s like to be rich.”

  Surprise widened his eyes, revealing their unique color.

  Cat smiled thinly. “I was born rich, and I married richer. Along the way I learned that there really are some things money can’t buy.”

  “Such as?”

  “Self-respect. That shouldn’t surprise you. If money automatically bought self-respect, you never would have designed your ship.”

  He looked beyond Cat to the Wind Warrior riding at anchor in the tranquil water. A man was walking along the deck toward the bow to check the anchor cable.

  Without warning Travis covered Cat’s ears with his palms and whistled through his teeth. The shrill, ascending sound carried like a siren over the water.

  The man on the Wind Warrior’s stern straightened and shielded his eyes against the glare of the sun. When he saw two people standing on the pier, he returned the questing whistle.

  Travis waved, covered Cat’s ears again, and whistled, two short and one long. The man whistled once, waved, and vanished behind a mast.

  Cat looked at Travis, her clear gray eyes silently asking what was going on.

  “In a few minutes Diego will bring the Zodiac around to the pier,” Travis explained after he took his hands off her ears.

  Then, as though there had been no interruption, he picked up the conversation where he had left it.

  “You’re right about me and ship designing and self-respect,” he said. “I was born rich, like you, and like you, I turned my back on it.”

  “You did?”

  He smiled ruefully at the surprise in her voice. “When I was sixteen I left home to work on international freighters. It was very different from what I’d known before. The men, the women, the fights.”

  “Fights?” Cat asked, startled.

  “Yeah. I grew up fast. One of the things I learned was how much I missed true sailing, wind and sails and the sea. I didn’t have to be without sailing—I knew I could go back to the life my father had made for me, the kind of life that had sailboats as toys.”

  “Are you the oldest son?”

  “The only child, boy or girl. Dad was waiting for me to grow up, to accept the responsibilities of my family name. Once I’d done that, I could afford a sailing ship again. Hell, I could afford a hundred of them. A thousand.”

  Travis looked beyond Cat for a moment, his blue-green eyes absorbing the beauty of the Wind Warrior.

  “But the thought of sitting on the boards of sixteen corporations and being listed on thirty select committees left me cold,” he said. “I didn’t want to juggle money and people. The only power I hungered for was the pull of a clean sailing ship in a good wind.”

  Cat followed Travis’s glance out to the Wind Warrior. She recognized the hunger in him for the untouchable, the unknowable, a world without boundaries. It was the same hunger, the same need, that she answered with her photography.

  “Since I couldn’t afford to buy a sailing ship,” Travis said, “and was damned if I’d give up my freedom just to own one, I decided to build a ship of my own.”

  “Just like that? Build a ship?”

  “Not quite. I apprenticed myself to an English shipbuilder. He was a big, hard old man who knew more about ships and the sea than he did about anything else. Especially people. His granddaughter became my wife, but that was later.”

  Cat looked at Travis’s distant, hooded eyes and didn’t say a word. She was afraid that any interruption would stop him from speaking at all. It was clear that he hated talking about his ex-wife as much as she hated talking about Billy.

  “The day I finished my first ship, my father died,” Travis said neutrally. “I couldn’t believe how much it hurt. I’d had some childish dream about sailing my ship alone across the Atlantic, tying up at his dock, and saying, ‘See, you aren’t the only one in the world who can do something special. There’s more to me than my family name and money.’ But Dad was dead and couldn’t hear me, and in any case I was no longer a child.”

  Cat’s eyelids flickered. She reached toward Travis, but he didn’t see the small gesture.

  “I sold my ship and flew home because I’d grown up enough to know that I couldn’t turn my back on my family when they needed me,” Travis said. “Tina—the old man’s granddaughter—followed me. Later I figured out that it was my money she wanted. Just after I left England, she found out that I was the son and heir of the Thomas Danvers. She was determined to marry me.” He shrugged. “She did, for a time.”

  Cat bit her lip against the need to comfort Travis. She knew he wouldn’t want it. All he wanted was to get the bitter story told.

  “I was determined to fill my father’s boots,” Travis said. “In time, I did. The family fortune doubled und
er my management, then doubled again. Yet I dreamed of the sea and a great black ship. If all my money couldn’t buy me that, what the hell good was it? So I found men and women I trusted, and trained them to run the companies. Then I built my ship and stepped into the wind.”

  Cat looked from Travis to the great ship with its wings folded calmly, floating on quiet blue water. Before she could speak, he did.

  “What happened between you and money, Cat? Why do you look so frightened every time you realize I’m rich?”

  She closed her eyes. Travis was a warm presence from her shoulders to her heels. Her memories were ice chilling her all the way to her soul.

  She didn’t want to put the brutal past into words, yet she knew she should. She owed it to herself.

  And to Travis.

  TEN

  “YOU WANT to know what happened with me and money?” Cat smiled with bleak humor. “I can give it to you in one word. Billy.”

  Travis waited. Beneath her self-control he sensed the savage tides of old rage and bitterness.

  “When I left Billy he was one of the hundred richest men in the world. Rich.” Cat’s upper lip curled. “So rich he kept score with people instead of balance sheets.”

  “What did he do to you?” Though Travis’s voice was soft, there was the hardness of demand just beneath his drawl.

  “It wasn’t the love match of the century,” Cat said, not answering his question immediately. “I wanted the security of a husband, and Billy wanted enough sons to make him feel like a man.”

  “Are there that many sons in the world?” Travis asked sardonically.

  “No. But I didn’t know it then. Anyway, as long as I was Billy’s wife, the question was academic. When he found out I was the reason we weren’t having kids, he . . .” Cat took a broken breath. “He was furious. Since I couldn’t have babies, he demanded to know how I would earn my keep. I wasn’t educated, my mother had spent all the money, and I was sterile. What damn good was I to a man?”

  Travis’s eyelids flinched. He knew now why Cat was so touchy about being independent. And about being sterile.

  “He kept flicking that lab report across my face,” she said, her eyes unfocused. “Sterile. Can’t earn your keep. Sterile. No damn good.”