A Wedding Story

by Susan Kay Law

  “Of course I’m fine,” she said. “Oh. You were worried about me?”

  “The screaming’s usually a hint, yes.”

  She tried not to be flattered. Likely he’d have come running for anyone who shouted. But for the first time that day, she felt warm.

  “Look what I found,” she said, and handed him the book.

  “Well, well, look what we have here.” He turned it over and ran his finger down the binding. “Open it yet?”

  “Would I do that without you?”

  “Here. You do the honors. You found it.”

  “I need more light.” She moved into the lone wedge of light that remained in the cave, near the right front, and tilted the book toward the weak coppery glow. Jim followed her with a halting half step. “Are you limping?”

  “No,” he shot pack. She frowned at him. “Just a little. Twinged my ankle. I’m fine.”

  She gave him a skeptical look, then shrugged and turned her attention to the book.

  “How many did you find?” he asked her.

  “A whole pile of them.” She turned it over and over in her hand, as if reluctant to open it. The volume was thin, the dye of the reddish leather so uneven that in places it appeared pink. The cover barely hung on at a cock-eyed angle. Someone had made a very halfhearted effort to brush metallic paint on the edges of the paper. “If they were going to go to the trouble of binding it, you’d think they might have put a little more effort into it than that.”

  “We’re talking about a newspaper here. It doesn’t matter what it really looks like, only how they can write it.” He pitched his voice low and flat. “‘The competitors discovered a treasure trove of tomes’—don’t look at me like that, alliteration is a respected literary technique—‘secreted in the caves as if they’d been sheltered there a hundred years. Bound in rich red leather, edged in gold, they held for the intrepid adventurers the glittering promise of a brighter future.’”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” But a smile, pretty and warm, flirted with her mouth. “I wouldn’t give up your day job.”

  “I don’t intend to,” he said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Kate flipped it open. All the pages, so thin one could see right through them, were blank but for the very center sheet.

  An emperor is subject to no one but God, the sea, and justice.

  “Hmm.” Kate methodically ticked off possibilities. “It could be a geological structure called the emperor, I suppose. What countries still have an emperor on the throne?” She traced the quote with one forefinger. “For some reason that doesn’t sound quite right to me. ‘No one but God and justice’…Jim?”

  “Huh?” He’d come up behind her, leaning over her shoulder as she tilted the page toward what remained of the sun, so close his breath stirred fine hairs at the side of her neck.

  “That new ship, the Emperor. When does it sail?”

  “Damn.” He went still, like a leopard waiting to pounce. “Twentieth? Twenty-first? Something like that.”

  “That gives us…” She turned to face him, only the slim book wedged between them as a barrier. “Jim, I’ve lost track of the days. How long do we have?”

  “Enough,” he said flatly. “Barely. If we get moving.” He grasped her wrist and took a step toward the ledge. His ankle had stiffened while he stood, and it almost gave out beneath him. Grimacing, he shifted his weight to his right leg.

  “Jim!”

  “Forget it,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she told him. “I know it’s difficult, but give it a good try, all right?”

  “Kate, there’s no time—”

  “There’s no time for you to be hobbling along a narrow ledge, either, and even less for me to fish you out of the ocean when you fall in,” she snapped. “Sit down.”

  He sat down, stretching his injured leg before him. Kate knelt in front of him and lifted his foot to her lap.

  Hell, he thought. I’m in worse shape than I thought, much, much worse.

  Because the sight of his foot snuggled up right there, in the sweet curve formed between her belly and thighs, the look of the scarred and battered black leather of his favorite boots against the deep midnight blue of her skirt and the white of her shirtwaist with its narrow trace of pretty lace along the placket—just that simple sight damn near had him dizzy with want. He hadn’t been so simply aroused, quick and hard, at something so innocent since he’d been seventeen or so, when the barest hint of anything female would have him salivating.

  He was never going to survive the next few months. A man simply could not walk around with the blood perpetually draining from his brain and live.

  Her finger crept up his ankle, disappearing under the ragged hem of his trousers, and a moan eased from his throat.

  “Sorry,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “Hurt?” he managed. Barely. “It’s not that bad.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “You’re very pale, not to mention sweating. Are you sure you didn’t hurt more than your ankle?”

  She was probing his ankle now, gentle fingers gliding over swollen, tender flesh.

  “Yeah,” he said, once he collected enough air to form a word. “Just my ankle.”

  “Hmm.” She frowned a little, tracing along the edge of his boot. “It’s swelling up terribly.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Huh?” She took a firm grip on his calf, her hand stronger than he would have guessed, and slid her other hand down toward his heel. “We’re going to have to get this off.” She glanced up at him, face taut with concern and concentration. “It’d be easier, and far less painful, if you’d let me cut the leather off. Do you have a knife?”

  “No,” he said flatly.

  “I take it you’re not going to let me do this the easy way.”

  “Correct.”

  “It’s going to hurt,” she warned him.

  “You could distract me so that I’d never notice,” he suggested.

  “Oh?”

  “Sure. Just pop a few of those buttons—say, six or so—and I’m betting I won’t feel a thing.”

  She shook her head even as she smiled at him.

  “You’re no fun.”

  Her smile turned instantly seductive, mysterious and promising. “Oh, yes I am,” she purred, and yanked his boot off before his brain cleared.

  “There,” she said brightly. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  Pain pulsed through his newly freed ankle.

  “This really isn’t my sort of thing,” Kate murmured as she inspected it. “But I don’t think it’s broken.”

  “It’s not,” he put in.

  “Had a medical college out there in the jungle, did they?” Having apparently completed her examination, she sat back, and regrettably took her hands away. Having them wrapped around his ankle wouldn’t be his first choice, but hell, at this point he’d take what he could get. “But it’s certainly badly sprained. We’re going to need some support.”

  Jim shrugged. “I’ll manage.”

  “Hmm.”

  It really was too bad, he thought, that she was who she was and he was who he was. The line between harmless appreciation of someone who was, after all, a riotously attractive woman and “appreciating” all too well a woman who’d betrayed his friend was getting thinner and thinner all the time.

  “I’ve got an idea. I know, I know, it’s a shock,” she said, the words lighthearted, wry, but Jim thought he detected a bitter edge, “but let’s give it the benefit of the doubt, shall we?”

  He was terribly unhappy when she slid his foot out of her lap but cheered considerably when her fingers went to work at the top button of her blouse. “I suggested this already, remember? I liked the idea then, too,” he said, then cursed himself when his words stopped her with her top button halfway through its hole.

  “I don’t suppose I could trust you to close your eyes and keep them that way?”

  “Oh,
sure you could,” he said heartily. “Trust away.” To prove it, he slammed his eyelids shut.

  By his calculations, he waited a full thirty seconds, a noble feat if ever he’d performed one. He cracked one eye open the barest fraction only to discover she’d turned her back to him.

  She slid her shirt off her shoulders.

  Lord. Oh, Lord. The line of her shift ran horizontally a third of the way down her back, cotton so thin it was nearly gauze, edged with a flutter of pretty lace. He could see where her neck flowed into her upper back, the intimate angle of her shoulder blades until they disappeared beneath her shift, and how the fabric bunched and gathered where it tucked into the edge of her buff-colored corset. The straps were just narrow strips of lace, a rainbow curve over her lovely round shoulders.

  Her skin glowed in the dimness, a pearly sheen as if it held moonlight within. She bent her head and she folded her shirtwaist carefully and set it aside, exposing the nape of her neck, the fine line of hair that tapered there beneath the sophisticated twist of her hairstyle.

  Her hands came around behind her, working quickly at the tight lacing of her corset. He’d have offered to help, but his hands were shaking and his tongue was paralyzed, and she was finished before he could get the words out.

  She bent forward, her back curving, spreading the laces. She pulled off the corset and he would have died rather than move, waiting to see what she might do next. He longed to ask what she was planning, but he was afraid a single word might bring her to her senses. As long as there were pieces of clothing coming off her body he wasn’t risking anything that might stop it.

  But his luck didn’t hold. She’d no more than stripped off her corset than she shrugged back into her blouse. He was still trying to recover from his disappointment when she turned around again. Her shirtwaist was loose, one button still undone at the top, two at the bottom, deep creases in the once-crisp cotton where it had been tucked into the tight waistband of her skirt. Not her usual flawless neatness, but dressed. Definitely, most regrettably, dressed.

  She approached him with the corset in her hands, laces dangling nearly to the rock floor of the small cave as she sat down beside him.

  “I thought,” she said uncertainly, “that this might be better than merely binding it up with cloth. The stays are quite firm, the cloth sturdy, and it should supply excellent support.”

  If anyone at the Explorer’s Club saw him wandering around with a woman’s corset wrapped around his ankle, he’d be laughed out of the place. “Good idea,” he said.

  She beamed like a ten-year-old who’d just won the spelling bee.

  She scooted over and—bliss, bliss—lifted his foot back into her lap. His brain fixed irrevocably on the fact that she had one less garment on. Her breasts moved as she did, unbound, swaying softly, potently sexual.

  “There.” She gave the laces a firm tug, finishing off a loopy bow. The corset cradled his ankle snugly, wrapping him in warmth that he imagined was a ghost of her skin’s own heat. “How does it feel?”

  “Let’s find out.” He got to his feet and bounced gingerly, testing it out. “Not bad,” he admitted.

  Her smile was blinding. As if she’d never received praise in her life, when she must have been showered with compliments.

  He took a couple of limping steps. “Thanks for sacrificing your corset. It really does hold much better,” he said, and the smile grew brighter still. He blinked underneath its power. She could have leveled an army, brought down a monarchy, began a religion with that smile.

  It was far too much to waste on one battered and cynical man who couldn’t surrender to it. For if he’d felt guilty before, for having kissed—having wanted—the doctor’s wife, however unintentionally, he’d feel all the worse now if he allowed himself to get lost in her knowing exactly what she was: no longer the doctor’s wife but still his betrayer.

  She leaned toward him and whispered conspiratorially, “It was no sacrifice.”

  He cleared his throat. “We’d best get going.” He turned away from her because if he looked at her for one second longer they’d never get out of that cave. Night had fallen fully, with a faint wash of lighter indigo behind the pines on shore the only remnant of the day. Beneath him the ocean glimmered, black rippled glass.

  “Shit.”

  She hurried to his side. “Oh, dear, you’re hurting, aren’t you? I should have known it wouldn’t work, I—”

  “No,” he said, and inclined his head down the sheer front slope of the island. “The boat’s gone.”

  Chapter 14

  “What?” Kate lifted to her tiptoes, peering over Jim’s sturdy shoulder. Gleaming rocks, wet from the rising tide, rose from the dark water. “I thought it was right in that shallow curve.”

  “It was,” he said with flat assurance.

  “Maybe it just drifted down the shore a bit,” she suggested hopefully. “The knot came loose as it was bobbing around—”

  “The knot did not come loose.”

  “We were in a hurry. You must not have—” He slanted her a look that simmered with anger and conviction. “All right, you tied it perfectly. I don’t know what I was thinking. So what happened?”

  “Our ‘friend’ showed up again.” Tension vibrated in the set of his shoulders, the angry jut of his jaw. She could only hope that he was never that angry with her. If whoever was sabotaging them saw Jim right now, she had no doubt they would abandon the contest in an instant, fifty thousand dollars be damned, in favor of putting as much geography between themselves and Jim as possible.

  “We’re not going to find the boat conveniently around the corner, are we?”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh, well.” She attempted a light, philosophical tone but decided she’d failed miserably. So much for her sudden, inexplicable urge to at least attempt to be a good sport; she was clearly unsuited for it. “I’m cold. And hungry. And not terribly thrilled by the idea of sleeping on rock.”

  “Anything else?” he asked dryly.

  “Many,” she told him, “but I’ll spare you for now.”

  “I’m so grateful.”

  “Good. I rather like the idea of you grateful.” Clearly she’d been at this too long, she decided. For all her complaints, she really was not as upset as she should be. She wasn’t certain if she trusted Jim to get them safely off the island—trust Jim, what a bad idea that had to be—or if she was simply becoming inured to setbacks, they’d had so many already. “What next?”

  He’d yet to look away from the water, staring at the space between the island and shore as if he could will the distance to close. “A swim.”

  Her unconcern vanished abruptly. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You have a better idea?”

  Anything would be a better idea. “Why chance it? There’ll be someone along sooner or later. I doubt we’re the last ones here. There were plenty of books left.”

  “Kate.” He turned toward her. “It could take days. We’ve no food, no shelter, no water.”

  “How far could they be behind us? And I saw a few puddles in a depression in the rock. We’ll be fine. It’s better than drowning.” Her stomach lurched. “Besides, we’ll freeze.”

  “I’ll swim fast,” he said. “Why ‘we’? Thought you couldn’t swim?”

  “I…uh…”

  He merely shrugged. “Doesn’t matter if you can or can’t. I wasn’t planning on us both going.”

  “I thought you were supposed to have a swimming buddy.” It was all too easy to imagine herself helpless and too far away, on shore while he thrashed around in the water. “It’s not safe.”

  “Kate, be reasonable. I’m not going to sit around here and hope to be found. I’m a very good swimmer, I’m strong, and I’m careful.”

  “You are not that careful,” she said.

  “Oh? Can you think of one time that I’ve acted recklessly on this entire trip?”

  She tried. His seemingly casual attitude toward things that terrified her
and his breezy confidence gave every appearance of a casual attitude toward his personal safety. But he triple-checked every line, every knot before he depended upon them; he tamped out every fire until not a spark remained, he cleaned his gun every night, and he never assisted her into a boat without making certain a life ring was within reach.

  “That’s just because you have to watch out for me.”

  “No,” he said flatly. “It’s not.”

  Careful. It was a word she would never have thought to apply to him. It bothered her that she’d so easily bought into the legend. It made no difference that every article she’d ever read about him portrayed him as a man who embraced risk like a lover. She, of all people, knew that the surface was a very brittle foundation upon which to build a judgment.

  But there had been that death in the Arctic on his last expedition. Perhaps he’d learned something from that terrible experience.

  “I suppose you’ve had to learn to be,” she said.

  “No. I’ve always been careful. Somebody in my family had to be.”

  Curiosity burst like fireworks. She’d never before considered what kind of family he might have had, what sort of forces might have formed him. To her, he’d sprung full-blown, walking out of a floral-scented darkness on a soft summer night, a one-dimensional, perfect construct. But he was a real man, one shaped by a thousand influences both small and large, a completely unique conflux.

  “Your family?” she prodded, but that was all she was going to get. He shook his head, dismissing the subject as if it wasn’t worth another second.

  “I would never set one foot in that water,” he told her, “unless I was absolutely sure I was going to come out the other side.”

  She nodded. “You’ll wait until morning, at least.”

  “What? Can’t stand to miss a chance to spend the night on cold stone?”

  “You wouldn’t want to spoil a lady’s fun, would you? Why, I—”

  “No need to convince me,” he said. “I’ll wait for low tide.”

  “You’re ever reasonable, aren’t you?”