She whipped around and all but fled down the stairs, her footsteps echoing.
Mademoiselle Lilette, whom she’d only now remembered, was waiting on the stairs.
“Thank you, Digby,” he said shortly to her, as if she were a subaltern who’d completed an assignment.
Digby?
Olivia’s head whipped around.
Mademoiselle Lilette was staring straight ahead. For all the world as if she were a soldier and Lyon was the commander.
As for the innkeeper, he was nowhere to be seen.
Olivia gave a start when a phalanx of men silently appeared from the night and fell into step with them, and Mademoiselle Lilette joined them.
The gray dawn light glinted off the swords swinging at their hips.
She doubted they were armed only with swords. These were trained men, disciplined and deadly. That much was clear.
But they weren’t soldiers.
They looked like mercenaries.
She was politely, matter-of-factly helped into a boat by men who climbed in after her, and rowed out over an inky black sea that gently moved and heaved.
Lyon sat in the prow, ahead of her, like he had in church so many years ago.
He did not look back.
She’d never before been aboard a ship, and the strange, elegant, imposing bulk of it was fascinating. She craned her head and then gave a start as she met the downturned, shadowy gaze of a man in the crow’s nest.
“If you’ll come with me, Olivia,” Lyon said politely. “You can wait for me in this cabin while I attend to a brief bit of business.”
Only an insane woman would consent to follow him below deck.
But in for a penny, in for a pound.
She followed him down a steep flight of stairs, though a narrow passage, to what were clearly sleeping quarters.
He pushed open the door of a cabin, and waved her in.
“It’s safest if you wait for me here. Please don’t leave. I’ve some business to attend to on deck and I’ll return . . . apace.”
He’d chosen that word deliberately, she was certain.
It was very nearly a monk’s cell of a room. But it was carpeted, if not in Savonnerie, then something fine and Persian in origin, and the bed, nailed to the floor, looked clean and was crisply made with a blue woolen counterpane. A little desk with an unlit oil lamp sitting atop it was pushed against one wall, and a map of the Mediterranean was pinned above it.
Pinned across from that was a print from “The Legend of Lyon Redmond” collection.
The one of him in the cannibal pot, his mouth a little “O” of alarm.
She whipped her head toward him, astonished.
Humor briefly glimmered about his mouth. “I thought it was funny.”
He closed the door and left.
She leaped up and tested the cabin door. She wasn’t locked in.
And so she decided to stay where she was, as ordered, because she could think of no other options.
This wasn’t where Lyon slept. Somehow she thought she would have known it. There was nothing of him in here. No shaving soap or brushes, no books, no trunk of clothes. It was clearly a cabin for guests.
And apart from pacing restlessly, which was one of her options, the other was to sit and wait. Perhaps pray.
Perhaps remember.
She sat on the edge of the bed. She hadn’t a prayer of sleeping, but while her mind had never been more alive, her limbs were weary as the devil.
She leaned back and closed her eyes. Lyon. She thought of the last time she’d opened them to see him next to her. In that clearing, on the heels of new and shattering pleasure, beneath his hands, against his body.
Her eyes snapped open. She did not want to dwell on that now.
And then she frowned.
She was motionless. But she thought perhaps she was dreaming.
And then she saw the chair ever so slightly shift.
The ship was moving.
The bloody ship was moving!
She leaped to her feet and bolted out the door with a slam, raced through the passage, clambering, skirts hiked in her hands, up the stairs to the deck.
She whipped her head about frantically. The sails were full and the dock was already alarmingly farther behind them.
She found Lyon instantly, speaking to a member of his crew.
He saw her and went still, and said a single word to the man he was speaking with. It looked like “Go.”
The man did just that, and rather rapidly.
He strode over to her. “I thought I told you it was safest to remain where you were.”
“But . . . the ship is moving.” As if it was something they had accidentally overlooked, and could now rectify.
“Yes.”
“The ship is moving. Away from the harbor.” Her voice escalated in disbelief.
“Yes,” he said, sounding bored. He glanced skyward, the way one might look at a clock for time, then at the rigging, and he nodded to a man at the wheel, some secret signal, affirmation of some sort.
“You’re . . . leaving me with me aboard?”
“Yes.”
“I . . . you . . .”
He simply regarded her with a sort of insufferable patience and one eyebrow cocked, as if waiting for a slow child to finish a sentence.
“You can’t . . . My God . . . Lyon . . . you can’t . . .”
“Leave with you aboard?” He completed. “Well, clearly I can.”
She was speechless.
“Are you kidnapping me? Will I be held for ransom?”
He snorted derision at that.
Her words abandoned her yet again. It was so utterly astounding. The temerity was shocking and, yes, rather piratical.
She stared at him.
“Yes?” he prompted mildly.
“I’ll scream,” she tried. They were, after all, still within earshot, more or less, of the dock.
“I wouldn’t.”
He said this so simply and grimly that she decided against it immediately.
And all of these quite terrifying and efficient-looking men obviously considered him their commander.
And one woman. Digby. Formerly known as Mademoiselle Lilette, aka that bloody traitor.
“What sort of madman abducts someone?” She almost spluttered it.
Then again, perhaps she ought not say those sorts of things to a madman.
And he didn’t look at all mad. She’d in fact seldom seen anyone look quite so lucid.
“May I point out that you were invited, and then voluntarily boarded, this ship?”
“But I never thought you’d . . . You didn’t say you would . . .”
“You used to be infinitely quicker, Olivia. Perhaps you’re keeping slower company these days.”
“You never said the ship would be sailing.”
“Funny, isn’t it, that the things we don’t say can become more important than the things we do say.”
She fell abruptly silent.
He evenly held her gaze, as they were both hurtled back to a night in Pennyroyal Green.
“You will be returned to London in a week or so, unharmed. And no one will know where you were.” His voice was gentler now.
Olivia covered her face with her hands to her cheeks, then brought them down with some effort and shook her head with incredulity.
She began pacing the railing like a caged animal. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Lyon watched her. If she had any notion to fling herself over, he’d snatch her back easily enough. He could likely pick her up in one hand by her scruff.
It made him strangely restless and angry.
She was too thin. The fine bones of her lovely, lovely face were etched more sharply, so that she looked like something brittle and porcelain a maiden aunt might keep on the mantel.
She finally stopped pacing and whirled on him.
Still. And after all these years. The muscles of his stomach still tightened when he looked at her. Bracing
to withstand her beauty, or whatever elemental thing about her that made him feel that sweet panic of need.
She whirled on him. “You’ve lost your mind. You’re a . . . you . . . you . . .”
“Before you choose that next word, you might wish to have a care how you address me. After all, you don’t know who I am anymore. Or who I’ve become. If I’m a madman, I might do anything, after all. I’ve grown accustomed to simply taking what I want.”
“Try ‘taking’ anything from me, and you may lose an eye.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. All I want is a reckoning.”
She fell abruptly silent again.
They locked eyes.
And before his gaze, he watched acceptance and acquiescence set in, and something like peace.
And guilt, too.
She knew precisely what he meant.
Ah, that was Olivia. She had a quicksilver intelligence. And her sense of fairness was unshakable.
He’d never needed to explain anything to her. He’d all but forgotten what a luxury this was, and how it felt. The world had simply felt larger and safer and kinder with her. It had made infinitely more sense, and it had never been the same without her.
She was biting her lip thoughtfully.
He’d bitten that lip before, too. Softly, softly, as her hands had wound in his hair, as they’d discovered ways to give and take pleasure from each other.
A gull screamed into the silence.
The ship moved inexorably on.
“A week, Olivia,” he said, more quietly.
She gave her head a rough shake. “How did you . . . Where have you . . . What have you . . .”
He held up a hand. “Later.”
She literally growled.
“You planned all of this.”
“Yes,” he said simply. “Of course I did.”
She pulled her pelisse more tightly around her shoulders.
He contemplated shaking off his coat and draping it over her, and he once would have done it reflexively.
Now it seemed too intimate an act.
But even now he couldn’t bear for her to be uncomfortable.
He leaned against the rail, near her but at a safe distance, and together they watched England shrink. All the sounds of the Plymouth dock were now fading. Soon it would be the elements, only. Sun and wind and sea.
What a relief it had once been to move away from land to something bigger than him. The sea could have killed him more than once. It had certainly tried more than once. And it still might win in the end. But he’d harnessed it, and there had been immense satisfaction in that, given that the rest of his life had resisted his command.
“Olivia?” he ventured gruffly into the silence.
She turned swiftly to the sound in his voice.
“Yes?” she said tersely.
“Why are you marrying Landsdowne?”
She didn’t answer immediately. She wouldn’t look at him. She looked up instead. The sunrise was a truly flamboyant one, all streamers of scarlet and apricot. It was tinting her skin golden and left a sheen of red on her dark hair.
“Do you mean, why am I marrying him rather than choosing a life as a walking, breathing, yet ever-withering shrine to your memory?”
That was certainly bitterly said.
But Olivia was the only woman he’d ever met who would have said something like “ever-withering.”
Despite everything, even now, it perversely charmed him. The things she said, the things she noticed, the expressions that flitted across her achingly lovely face—she had never, ever been dull.
“Were you withering without me, then, Liv?” he said softly.
“I didn’t say that,” she said tautly.
She was still looking determinedly away from him.
“I inferred.”
There was a sort of tension at the corner of her mouth that might have become a smile. In other circumstances it would have.
“No, Lyon,” she said evenly, with a sort of muted infuriating patience that was nothing like the Olivia he knew. A schoolteacher sort of patience. “I was not withering. You are not the sun and the moon and the stars. Life can and did go on in your absence.”
“The nerve of life,” he said softly.
She stole a swift glance at him again, her eyes flaring, as if she, too, was remembering the things about him that had set him apart. Made him uniquely him.
Made him uniquely hers.
Then she looked determinedly away again.
“And you are, of course, madly in love with Landsdowne. Which is why you’re marrying him.”
It wasn’t as easy to say that aloud as it probably seemed to her.
“Love” was always a word he’d all but enshrined when he’d left Pennyroyal Green. There had been pleasure since then, some of it extraordinary, some of it memorable, all of it mindless, in the arms of other women.
But that word had belonged only to Olivia.
She said nothing.
“Ah. So lies still don’t quite trip effortlessly off your tongue. At least that much hasn’t changed about you.”
It was a thrown-down gauntlet. Because Olivia wouldn’t be able to resist discovering what precisely he thought was different about her.
She opened her mouth as if to retort. Then closed it.
“I’m too old to do anything ‘madly,’” she said finally.
And it wasn’t quite an answer.
“Is that so?” he said idly. “And yet you used to do everything madly.”
He rested his arms on the rail, still close to but not touching her, and they both looked out at the sea, the ever-widening blue gap between them and English shores.
“You felt everything madly. You believed in things madly. You argued madly. I had to stay on my toes with you.”
She swiftly turned her face up to him, delight glimmering tantalizingly, lighting her face, a haunting hint at the Olivia he’d known. At the way she used to look at him.
It was swiftly, deliberately shuttered.
She turned away again.
“And you kissed . . . Liv, oh God, but you kissed madly. Or you did, once upon a time. Perhaps you’ve forgotten how. Perhaps I was imagining all of that. Perhaps it was all a dream.”
Before his eyes, pink flooded her cheeks. She reached up a hand to touch one, as if to soothe the heat from it, then dropped her hand.
She still wouldn’t look at him.
He turned away from her, and in silence they gazed out at the heaving sea, gilded in early morning sun. The slap and rush of the water against his ship, the wind whipped and cracked in the sails, a sound he had come to love.
“Has he kissed you?” he asked bluntly. His voice sounded thick in her own ears.
“You’ve no right to ask.”
He made an irritated sound. “Dodging and rhetoric are boring, Olivia, and you know it. Has he kissed you? Yes or no.”
“Yes. Of course.”
Of course.
He looked at her.
And even now, jealousy began a slow, scalding spill through his veins.
Olivia was almost always right, of course.
He had no right to his jealousy.
But then, by that same reasoning, his lungs had no right to the air he breathed, and his heart had no right to beat.
And now she was watching him, and she knew, she knew just what the words had done to him, and there was a flicker of triumph in her eyes.
“Was it everything you dreamed?” he murmured. “That kiss?”
The tone was dangerously silky.
She watched him, incredulously. In her eyes glittered the beginnings of temper.
“What did you discover when he kissed you, Olivia? Did you discover that one kiss is much like another? Did you discover that mine were mundane, very ordinary indeed? Did you shiver when he kissed you? Because as I recall . . . you shivered when I kissed you. As if a river rippled right through you. As if the pleasure was almost more than you could bear. I could fee
l it in your body when my hand was at the small of your back.”
“Stop it.” Her voice was low and taut and frantic.
“I remember that you made this little sound when I first kissed you. A sort of . . . It was an astonished, hungry, joyous sound. That night, I lay in bed and I thought about that sound over and over. I thought I would die just for the privilege of hearing it again. I thought I’d discovered the reason I was born. To kiss you, and to hear your pleasure in it, and to know that it would only lead to more pleasure for both of us.”
“Stop it.” She was breathing roughly now and the hectic color was back in her cheeks.
He continued in a relentless tone of casual reminiscence. “Kissing you . . . well, I knew, suddenly, what a roman candle must feel like. One moment lightless, the next soaring, dazzling. The difference between living and not living.”
“Stop it.”
“Did Landsdowne make you feel that way, Olivia, when he kissed you?”
“Stop it!”
It echoed shrilly.
Stop it stop it stop it.
Frightened seabirds flapped away from their perches.
Suddenly Lyon was ashamed.
He blew out a breath and turned back to the water, peculiarly drained and thwarted.
This was going badly. Clumsy fits and starts, attacks and feints.
What was he doing? What did he hope to gain?
He hoped to gain a life, he reminded himself. He hoped to get his heart back, if it could be had.
Another futile silence tacked itself down around them, dark and resentful.
Seconds stretched into a minute, then two.
“I suppose you’ve been celibate.”
Her words had a certain studied casualness.
Which sparked a tiny flame of something like hope in him.
“Of course not.” He shrugged.
It was absolutely true, but the shrug was meant to hurt her.
He didn’t expound and she didn’t ask. Olivia was intelligent and her imagination would torture her better than any Catherine wheel, if indeed she found the notion distasteful.
She was absolutely still and silent. But her knuckles were white on the railing.
She was imagining it. And suffering.
And perversely, it both elated and destroyed him.
It simply wasn’t in him to hurt her. The point of his life had always seemed to be to keep her from harm.
The Legend of Lyon Redmond Page 18