“Look, Payton,” he said, climbing to his feet. Unlike her, he’d pulled on his trousers. He wasn’t quite as comfortable with his own nudity as she was. Well, he had more that needed covering. “I’m going to go and try to find some dry wood, so we can build a fire. You stay here, and if that great gray fellow swims over here again, jab him. All right?”
She took the spear from him obediently enough, but then she rolled over onto her back, away from the rocks, and onto the more comfortable sand, and stared at the sky. “Oh, look,” she said, not sounding the least bit troubled by anything. “A pink sunset. It ought to be nice weather tomorrow.”
Her shirt, he couldn’t help noticing, did not reach much below her waist. Beneath it, she was completely naked. He wasn’t too surprised to find that the triangular patch of curls between her legs, which had so attracted him a few hours ago, still held every bit as much fascination for him. It was shameful, his insatiable lust for her body. He had to drag his gaze away, fastening it instead on some less evocative part of her body.
“Here,” he said, nodding at her ankle. “What’s that?”
She was still blinking up at the evening sky. “What’s what?” she asked.
“That ribbon, round your ankle.”
That got her up, and fast. In a single, fluid motion, she’d snatched the ribbon away—breaking it, not untying it—and tossed it over her shoulder, into the spring.
“It’s nothing,” she said quickly. “Just a reminder. I don’t need it anymore.”
He went to the side of the pool and peered down into it. The ribbon was floating on the water’s surface, the gray fish eyeing it from below, mistaking it for something edible. “What was it?”
“It’s a very long,” Payton said, “very boring story.”
He glanced at her sharply, uncertain as to whether or not she was teasing him, since that was the same answer he’d made to her question about the Frenchman. But she only grinned up at him, and asked, “Do you remember that night on the Virago—it must have been two or three years ago, at least—when I said I wanted to lie on the deck and watch for falling stars, and you brought me your pillow and blanket?”
He blinked at her. She was trying to change the subject again. “Yes.”
“Do you?” She looked mightily surprised. “Ross told me you were too drunk at the time to remember it, or even to know what you were doing.”
He felt a sudden and unreasonable dislike for all of her brothers, particularly Ross. “Of course I knew what I was doing,” he snapped. “I didn’t want you to catch cold. God forbid any one of them should have paid so much as a moment’s attention to you. They let you grow up half-wild, you know, Payton. When I think of some of the things you were subjected to, and on a daily basis—things no woman should know anything about—it makes my blood run cold. They deserve a thorough thrashing, each and every one of them, but Ross most of all, for letting it go on.”
She looked up at him, not at all perturbed. “But I turned out all right, in the end,” she reminded him, with a shrug.
“No thanks to your brothers! You turned out all right because—well, I don’t know. I suppose because you’ve got sense—more sense, I might add, than the three of your brothers put together.”
The smile she gave him was every bit as dazzling as the sunset. “Thank you,” was all she said, and she said that simply enough.
But the words caused something inside of him to break, something he’d been struggling to keep in check. And the next thing he knew, he was down on his knees before her, one of his big brown hands on either of her smooth thighs, pushing them apart.
Looking at him down the length of her body, Payton, who hadn’t moved, said curiously, “Drake?”
He lifted his head, his jaw clenched. “Could you, for God’s sake, call me Connor?”
“Connor, then. What are you doing?”
He showed her, instead of telling her. He showed her by lowering his head until his lips were on that soft patch of down between her thighs. He startled her—he knew he startled her, because she tried to buck away from him. Her fingers flew to his head, and grasped handfuls of his overlong hair.
“Drake,” she said, the word nothing more than a gasp.
But he wrapped his arms around her hips, not letting her pull away. He tasted her with his tongue, and found without much surprise that she tasted of the sea, salty and brisk. Well, of course. That was how Payton Dixon would taste.
“Drake,” she said again, with a little more urgency.
She wasn’t wet. When he’d slid into her every other time, it had been startlingly easy, impossibly tight fit aside. If he hadn’t known for certain that she was a virgin that night on board the Rebecca, he might never have guessed he was the first man she’d ever known, because she’d always been so wet, so ready for him, each time. But now she was dry, spent, her brown curls springing back every time he swept them away in his effort to trace each exquisite curve of her with his tongue. He laid a long and ardent kiss upon that velvet mound. He felt her fingers in his hair curl into helpless fists in response. She bucked again, but she had to know by now he would never let her go. He kept his lips where they were, delving, exploring with his tongue.
And then he was flooded, literally drenched with her essence. He lifted his face to look down at her, and saw that she was lying so that her hardened nipples, straining for the sky, had formed tents of the material of her shirt. Through the thin linen he could see the sweet rose-colored curves of her areoles. With her fingers still in his hair, and her head thrown back, her dark curls spread out like a fan against the sand, she looked the epitome of all that was feminine, more so, strangely enough, than when she’d been fully naked.
Wanting to watch her, wanting to burn the image of her just then into his mind’s eye, he put a hand where his mouth had been, and felt her buck again. Now she pressed her pelvic bone against his palm, a helpless murmur, a prayer of longing—or supplication—coming from between her moistly parted lips. Not taking his gaze off her, he moved his callused fingers over her hot, wet mound until they were centered over her very core. She rubbed herself against him as instinctively as a cat, mindless in her pleasure.
And then he could stand it no longer. Jerking his head free from her hands, he reared back and, reaching with trembling fingers for the front of his breeches, tore at the buttons until his erection sprang free. Not bothering to lower his pants any further than that, he centered himself over her, hanging there for just a second, wanting to make sure that this time, he’d be able to control himself, that this time, he’d see to her pleasure first—watch her take it—and then take his own.
But then, just like last time, she moved against him, lifting her hips so that just the tip of his hard staff entered her soft warmth—just the smallest fraction of an inch she moved, taking just the tiniest piece of him into her. But that was enough. Next thing he knew, he’d let out a sort of shuddering groan, and he’d thrust himself deeply into her, so deeply that he was afraid he might have lanced her to the ground. And maybe he’d meant to. Because if he could spend the rest of his life right there, exactly where he was, embedded between her legs, her long, smooth legs, wrapped so tightly around his thighs, he’d die a happy man, indeed.
And then, just as he was marveling at the feel of her, the immense heat that radiated from her core, the incredibly tight grip in which she held him, all without even being aware—he was certain she couldn’t be aware of it—of the power she had over him, he felt her arms tighten around his neck, and her back arch. The hot skin that held his erection so firmly prisoner began to spasm, and he realized that, incredibly, she was climaxing, without his ever having moved. Muscles he doubted she even knew she had caressed him, teased him, tried to pull him more deeply into her. He groaned, and dropped his head down so that he could press his mouth, still drenched in her dew, on hers.
This time, when he climaxed, he was no more controlled than before. Only now she had soft sand beneath her, instead of hard
rock, so as he pounded her body with his own, he knew he wasn’t hurting her. And when he’d finished, and was able to lift himself up to look at her, to make sure she was still whole, she smiled up at him with an expression that could only be called smug.
“I thought,” she said huskily, “that you were going to go look for firewood.”
He lifted a strand of her hair and brought it to his lips. “I changed my mind,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” she said, “to change it any time you like.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Payton could not remember ever having been quite so happy. Oh, she supposed that back when she’d been younger, roaming the decks of her father’s boats in her bare feet and pigtails, she’d been happy enough. And in the days before Miss Whitby, when it had been enough for her simply to sit next to Connor Drake, now and again, at mealtimes, she’d been happy, too.
But not since she’d become a woman—and she considered that this momentous occasion occurred sometime after her seventeenth birthday, when Mei-Ling had announced that she was returning to her own family, her job being done—had she ever felt this content, this calm, this … well, happy.
She probably hadn’t any right to feel so self-satisfied. After all, they were still in mortal danger. The Rebecca or the Nassau Queen could come into view on the horizon any minute. They still had to hide their evening campfires, and stay off the beach as much as possible. But what did that matter? She was marooned on an island with the man she’d been in love with since she was fourteen years old. What was more, he loved her. She was solidly convinced of his love. Besides the fact that he freely admitted it—and at the oddest moments, too, like when she’d just washed her face and was stumbling around, looking for something to dry it with—he proved it a thousand different ways, every single day. She had only to utter the slightest wish—a fancy for lobster for supper, for instance—and he granted it. She was the luckiest girl alive, and she knew it. She had even made a truce with God, and forgiven Him, at long last, for robbing her of her mother. She felt that, in making Drake love her, God had more than made up for any injuries done to her in the past.
And yet, happy as she was, she had to admit to a certain wariness, where Drake was concerned. Not that she felt she had anything to fear—for instance, that should they ever be rescued, he’d leave her for someone else, someone who wouldn’t so easily be mistaken for a boy, or who actually knew what in the hell had happened to her maidenhead—but because of something Georgiana had said once, when Payton had asked her why she’d married Ross. She had naively supposed that Georgiana was marrying her brother because she loved him, and now, of course, she knew that her sister-in-law really did love Ross … at least, in her own way, which wasn’t in the least the way Payton loved Drake.
Anyway, Georgiana, who was several years older than Payton, had taken the opportunity to offer her husband’s sister a little advice: “It’s always better,” she’d said, “for a woman to marry a man who loves her just a little more than she loves him. That way, she can always be certain of having the upper hand.”
Payton had never forgotten this piece of advice. She had no idea whether or not it was accurate, though she did rather suspect that in Ross and Georgiana’s case, it might be. And she had to admit it was causing her some worry, since she knew good and well that she loved Drake with every fiber of her being, with all the fervor and fierceness of a first love. She was not at all convinced that he loved her more than she did. In fact, she couldn’t see how he could: he was, after all, a man of the world. He’d surely met dozens of women who were far more worldly and exotic than Payton. If, after they were rescued—and she was quite certain they would be, some day—he stayed with her, how was Payton to know whether he was staying with her because he really loved her, or staying with her because, after everything they’d done together, her brothers would kill him if he didn’t?
It was a dilemma. Not one that bothered her hourly, or even daily, but one that occurred to her sometimes late at night, when she lay in his arms, looking up at the stars. Drake was hardly one of those poetic types of lovers—he rarely told her that he loved her without employing an expletive in the sentence (he loved her like hell, or like the devil) and he had certainly never sung the praises of her beauty (except to observe, once, that her feet were shockingly small, compared to his own). But still, she felt that he really was attached to her, in his way. She gathered this not so much through the way he made love to her—which was often, and generally quite emphatic—but from the subtle clues he dropped here and there, most likely not even realizing he’d revealed them.
Take, for instance, the fact that they were trapped together on this island. They could hardly get away from one another. In fact, when she wanted to be alone, she had to wait until he was asleep, or was fully occupied stalking some small beast for supper. The rest of the time, he was talking to her, or making love to her, or simply staring at her, something he did with irritating regularity, to the point that now, when she caught him at it, she heaved a coconut in his direction, if one was handy.
But despite the fact that they were hardly ever out of one another’s sight, it seemed as if Drake could not stand to be without her company. Even when she was sleeping, he did his level best to wake her. Head-over-heels in love with him as she was, Payton was still firmly aware of the fact that Drake had faults, and one of the most irritating was his tendency to wake very early in the morning. Since there wasn’t a great deal to do on San Rafael, Drake occupied these early morning hours devising ways to wake her. He didn’t dare, after their first few mornings together, simply shake her awake. He’d tried that, and nearly had his head bitten off for his trouble. Nor could he try more erotic methods of rousing her—she had wakened, plenty of mornings, to find his face buried between her thighs, and had generally responded by placing a foot on his shoulder and shoving him away.
So Drake had taken to “accidentally” waking her. Some of these “accidents” had included the very loud blaring of a conch shell (he’d had to blow on it, he claimed, to make sure there wasn’t a conch inside; she liked conch for breakfast, didn’t she?); a shower of spring water from an overturned gourd (he claimed to have tripped); and, Payton’s favorite, a butterfly that just happened to perch on her nose as she slept (he stridently denied having sprinkled pollen anywhere near her face, though when she’d rubbed it, telltale yellow had come off on her hand).
What was most infuriating of all was that every morning, after waking her with these preposterous excuses, Drake took no more time explaining them away than it took him to unlace her shirt. And then, next thing she knew, he was kissing her, and she forgot all about how furiously angry she was at being roused with the dawn, and actually proceeded to kiss him back! It was extremely hard to stay angry at someone who was capable, with the merest kiss, of rendering you senseless. Payton feared Georgiana wouldn’t think very much of her, had she been aware of how she was conducting herself in this, her very first love affair.
And if Georgiana had happened to witness her behavior one particular evening, after a delicious supper of roast parrot—she’ d quickly gotten over her soft-heartedness—and mangoes, she’d have probably disowned her. Having tied off the final knot in a hammock she’d spent, quite literally, days creating out of vines, Payton urged Drake to hang it between two palm trees, down on the beach. Since it was evening, and there was no chance of them being spotted from beyond the shoals, he agreed, and they set off, Drake observing dryly that, considering the amount of time she’d put into the creation, she might have woven something more useful than a hammock. A fishnet, he said, was what they wanted, so he wouldn’t have to spend all his time trying to will the fish to come to him: he could just spread out his net and wham! Dinner.
Payton, skipping along behind him, ignored him. It was a beautiful evening—like all the evenings they’d experienced on San Rafael—and she was looking forward to enjoying it from the cradle of the hammock she’d made—if it proved strong e
nough to support her weight. She wasn’t at all certain it would. Which was where Drake came in. She fully intended to make him try it first. If it did not break under his superior weight, she knew it would be safe enough for her.
How Drake might have liked it, had he known she’d required his presence merely as a test subject, she never knew, since she wisely kept it from him. But once he’d strung the hammock up, he didn’t even ask her if she wanted to try it first. Instead, he lowered himself onto it, gingerly at first, then with growing confidence.
“I say, Payton,” he declared, giving the crude netting beneath him an experimental bounce. “This thing’s perfect.”
Then, lifting his feet from the sand, he stretched out in the hammock, which groaned only a little bit beneath his weight. “This,” he said, to the moonless sky. “This is the way to live. What have we been thinking, sleeping on the ground? We must have been mad. Come here, Payton, and try this.”
But Payton, who’d been standing to one side, watching him, had another idea. She never could say how it occurred to her, or what made her think of it. Maybe it was the way Drake had lifted his arms above his head, revealing the pale skin and silken hair of his underarms. In any case, instead of joining him, Payton reached out and, using a bit of vine she’d had left over, she tied Drake’s wrists to the sides of the hammock.
“Payton,” he said, sounding only mildly curious. “What are you doing?”
Making sure he was well and truly secured—she pulled on each of his arms to be certain of it—Payton started to remove her trousers. “Remember,” she said, “when you were chained to the wall in the hold of the Rebecca?”
“I’m not likely to forget it.”
An Improper Proposal Page 28