“The lesser of two evils, hmm? I wonder. You don’t know very much about men or marriage, do you, Amanda?”
“No.”
He shook his head. “I must tell you about it sometime. You should at least know what you’re getting into before you make up your mind. Amanda . . .”
She looked at him inquiringly.
“Could you pass me that blanket? I’m getting cold.”
She saw that he was beginning to shiver again. All the time she had been talking, he had been lying in the cool, damp air with no cover. Contrite, she fetched the blanket she had brought, then shook it out and smoothed that and the other one over him. He was shivering in earnest by the time she had finished. She sat beside him until the spasm passed, not speaking. Although talking about her situation had not changed it one iota, she felt much better, lighter almost, as though some of the burden had passed from her shoulders to his broad ones.
“Thank you, Matt,” she said softly when he was still again. His eyes opened, the expression curiously brooding.
“There’s something you haven’t asked me, you know,” he said abruptly. Those silvery eyes beneath the thick black brows were almost accusing. “Something that I would have thought you would have wanted to know before anything else.”
Amanda looked down at him blankly. “What?”
“Don’t you want to know if I did it?”
“Did what?” Amanda, befuddled by the unexpected change of topic, wondered momentarily if his mind was wandering again. She stared down at him, concern plain in her face. He made an angry sound that was almost a hiss.
“The murders, Amanda. Don’t you want to know if I committed the murders?”
Amanda flinched. For the last hour or so she had forgotten what he was, and she hated being reminded of it. He had been so kind, so gentle with her. It was hard to reconcile this facet of him with the ruthless, cold-blooded killer who she knew must lurk somewhere within.
“Please . . . don’t tell me about it, Matt. I don’t want to know. I don’t even want to think about it. You’ve been very kind to me, and that’s all that matters.”
He stared at her in silence for a moment. Amanda was surprised to see his eyes start to snap.
“Good God, you think I did it, don’t you?” he demanded furiously, sitting up so that he was scant inches away from her. “You actually think I murdered six people—slit the throats of a woman and four children—and you’re sitting here alone with me? You’re not safe to be let out.”
He sounded so angry that Amanda flinched away from him. The movement was involuntary, but his expression turned ugly as he observed it.
“A little late to be frightened of me, isn’t it, Amanda? What could you do if I decided to kill you, too? We’re all alone—I could throttle you in an instant.” He reached out to lay ungentle hands against the base of her throat. Amanda, eyes staring, looked at him with disbelief that rapidly turned to fear. He was so close, and so big . . . But his hands weren’t hurting her, and as she realized that, everything he’d said took on a clear meaning.
“Do you mean—are you telling me—you didn’t kill those people?”
“No, I didn’t,” he growled, removing his hands from her neck but looking angrier than ever. “It so happens that I’m as innocent of that particular crime as you are. But you had no way of knowing that. I thought you were helping me because you had decided that I was innocent. But you hadn’t, had you, Amanda? You thought I was guilty as hell—and yet here you are, totally at my mercy. Do you think you could stop me from doing anything I chose to you? Which might include murder but certainly not at first. Have you ever heard of rape, Amanda?” Her eyes widened at that, and her cheeks flushed a deep pink as he continued relentlessly. “Believe me, my girl, it’s not an experience you’d enjoy, and unless you want to experience it firsthand, I’d advise you to take more care in choosing your lame ducks. A soft heart is one thing, but a soft head is something else entirely.”
He flung himself back against the mattress as he finished, but his eyes continued to glare at her. Amanda returned his gaze with the first stirrings of indignation.
“You got over being grateful for my help pretty quickly, didn’t you?” she demanded. “Would you rather that I’d left you on the beach—or screamed when Mr. Llewellyn told us to come out? I imagine they’d have hanged you by now—which might have been a damned good thing but I was too softheaded to realize it at the time.”
Matt stared at her, his angry expression turning to one of surprise, then dawning amusement, as though a silky kitten had turned and bitten him.
“Don’t swear, Amanda,” he rebuked, his eyes beginning to dance as he took in the full extent of her loss of temper. “It’s not ladylike.”
“I’ll swear if I want to,” she shot back, jumping to her feet before he could put out a hand to stay her. “And since you’re not a murderer, there’s not a damned thing you can do to stop me.”
And with that Parthian shot and a final, killing glare, she flounced toward the passage.
“Tut, tut, milady, where are your manners? Aren’t you going to say good night?” he called after her retreating figure, and it was obvious from his tone that her anger had restored his own good humor. Stalking toward the trapdoor, Amanda quivered with fury at the laughter in his voice. After his insults and rank ingratitude, being the butt of his amusement was simply too much to be borne.
chapter seven
The next day, like the one before it, was excruciatingly long for Matt. Alone in the echoing quiet of the cave, both too weak and too wary to venture out on the beach, he occupied himself with getting his strength back—and with thoughts of the girl who had literally saved his life. The first was fairly straightforward, though painful and arduous. He forced himself to walk the length of the cave, over and over, until he was exhausted, but his muscles were becoming more reliable. Finally he collapsed on the feather tick, taking a hearty swig from the bottle of water that Amanda had left him. He was hungry—he always seemed to be hungry lately—but that didn’t bother him particularly. Hunger had been an almost constant companion for months; he was getting used to it. The thoughts of Amanda that he could no longer seem to keep at bay were far more troublesome than the gnawing in his empty belly.
She was beautiful. He had known—in every sense of the word—many women over the years, but Amanda had somehow managed to catch his fancy to a degree he previously would have said was impossible. His imagination dwelled pleasurably on the madonnalike loveliness of her features: the great, black-fringed eyes set aslant like a pair of sparkling amethysts against the magnolia-blossom texture of her skin, the still-childish line of her cheeks, her small, straight nose and rosy lips—sweet Jesus, yes, her lips. Lips clearly made for kissing . . . Their tender fullness fascinated him almost more than the glorious color of her hair. Before he had set eyes on Amanda’s rubyhued mane, he would have said that he preferred females whose locks were as pale as his own were dark. But Amanda’s tumbling masses of fire-shot-with-gold silk lured him like a moth to the flame it resembled. Even the prim coronet of braids she had worn when she had come to him the night before had not lessened the almost irresistible compulsion he felt to bury his face in it, to see if it could possibly be as soft as his fingers remembered . . .
His thoughts wandered to the enticingly curved shape of her. She was slender as a young girl is slender, but there was a hint of fullness about her breasts that held out tantalizing promise of the woman she would one day become. Her breasts would be soft to the touch, like her hair . . . He felt his loins begin to heat. Thoroughly annoyed at himself, he wrenched his mind away from the further delights of her body. She was very young and very vulnerable, although she didn’t seem to realize it, and he would not repay her for her care of him by rutting after her like a stag after a doe. He felt a curious urge to protect her, had done since he had opened his eyes on the beach to look into hers, huge with fright. Protectiveness was not something he usually felt toward women; desi
re, yes, liking, sometimes, but not this overwhelming urge to stand between her and anything that might threaten her, including the base stirrings of his own passion. He supposed he could ascribe it to a very natural gratitude—not many others would have put themselves at risk for a dangerous stranger, as she had done—or even to his instinctive recognition of an innate goodness in her that transcended mere physical beauty and transformed her into something quite outside his ken.
He wanted her, of course. He would have to be a eunuch not to. Her budding womanhood enticed him while the lusher charms of more experienced members of her sex had begun to pall. It would be enjoyable to teach her what it meant to be a woman . . . But the shining innocence that was so plain in her eyes stopped him cold. No matter what else he might have become, he was not that big a cad.
The trouble was, he told himself, that he hadn’t had a woman in almost half a year. Not since two nights before they had arrested him . . . For him, who hadn’t been celibate since a friend of his mother’s had initiated him at the tender age of fourteen, that was almost unbelievable. Certainly it must be that which intensified his very natural interest in an indisputably lovely girl into this hot, raging desire that gnawed at his vitals like a starving rat.
To take his mind off the increasing tumescence between his legs, Matt stood up and began to pace restlessly back and forth. He winced as every movement of his right leg sent a knifelike pain plunging through his body, but he persevered. By the time exhaustion once again compelled him to sink down on the feather tick, his thoughts weren’t on the girl but on the pain . . .
After he had rested for a while, the pain receded and Amanda’s face and form returned to torment him despite his best intentions. In pure self-defense, Matt finally decided to shave. Scraping nearly four months’ worth of whiskers from his face with nothing more than a knife and cold water should be a sobering enough experience to keep his thoughts where they belonged, he told himself. Picking up the knife, he grimaced at its dullness and proceeded to sharpen it as best he could on a stone. When the blade was honed to as near razor sharpness as he could get it, he found the small, chipped mirror Amanda had brought and propped it on a rocky protrusion that jutted shelflike from the wall. Then he positioned the candle strategically, poured a little water into the bowl, stripped to the waist, and set to work. As he turned the blade this way and that, he grimaced at the marks Amanda’s nails had left on his skin. They were fading, but he still looked as though he’d been tangling with a wildcat, which he supposed was as good an analogy as any . . . Just as he scraped the last trace of stubble from his throat, wincing at the abrasiveness of the dulling blade, he heard the soft swish of skirts coming down the passage. Amanda. He would recognize that sound in a dark hole in China.
Clad in another of the severe gray dresses that were, oddly enough, a perfect foil for her bright coloring, Amanda was juggling several items, including a tureen of hot soup. All her attention was concentrated on not dropping anything as she entered the cavern. In consequence, she did not look up immediately, not until after she had safely deposited the tureen on the floor. The other items followed, and she heaved a sigh of relief as she looked around for Matt.
“I’ve brought you something hot,” she began, smiling at him. He had been kneeling when she came in; now he stood up, coming toward her, and Amanda felt her cursed cheeks grow hot as she saw that he was naked to the waist. Hastily she averted her gaze, retaining only a fleeting impression of black-furred planes and broad shoulders. Her eyes moved up to his face—and her mouth dropped open.
He was handsome, she discovered with a shock, more than handsome, in fact. Without the bristly black beard that had obscured the firmness of his lean jaw and the cut of his beautifully shaped mouth, he was marvelous-looking. His black hair was still overlong and untidy, but its waving thickness framed a rampantly male face that God must have designed expressly to appeal to the female of the species. The silver-gray eyes beneath the thick black brows, the straight, almost aquiline nose, the high, flat cheekbones, were brought into exquisite symmetry by the newly revealed lines of cheek and jaw and chin. A chin that was square, and looked as though it could be obstinate. A chin that was not softened in the slightest by the faint cleft in its center. As her dazed eyes moved back over his face, seeking to reconcile the man who stood looking down at her rather quizzically with the fearsome murderer she thought she had come to know, another fact became crystal clear to her: he was young; much younger than she had supposed.
“You’ll catch flies,” he said, gently teasing as his thumb came up under her chin to close her mouth. Amanda continued to stare at him, not even blushing, so intense was her surprise.
“How old are you?” She gasped out the first coherent words that popped into her brain. He grinned, and one of his eyebrows lifted at her inquiringly. She had seen that expression on his face before—his mockery was something she was rapidly becoming thoroughly familiar with—but now the crooked grin had a charm that almost made her mouth drop open again. Just in time she got a grip on the remnants of her self-possession and managed to keep her mouth closed.
“Thirty-three,” he answered equably, watching her with a glint of unholy amusement in his eyes. “Why, how old did you think I was?”
“I-I didn’t know.” Amanda stumbled over her tongue. Try as she might, she could not seem to tear her eyes away from the mind-boggling splendor of his face. The proximity of his naked chest paled into insignificance in comparison. “I thought about forty, or a little more,” she added feebly.
“Not quite, although thirty-three must seem nearly as old to you,” he answered, and to her relief took his eyes from her face to look with interest at the steaming tureen near her feet. “That looks good. What is it?”
“Potato soup,” she replied automatically, still unable to look anywhere but at his face. Even half averted from her, as it was at the moment, it was devastating. “I volunteered to take what was left from dinner to the Morells. Mrs. Morell just gave birth to her eighth child, and Sister Patrick thought she would appreciate the soup. Which she did, even though there wasn’t a lot left after I kept back half for you . . .” Amanda’s voice trailed off as she realized that she was rambling. Sudden annoyance with herself set in. So he was handsome, and not horribly old, she told herself fiercely, so what? He was still the same man she had rescued and begun to regard almost as a friend. To her relief he didn’t seem at all interested in her continued reactions to his changed appearance. Instead, all his attention was focused on the soup. Thank goodness his primary concern was his stomach! With luck, he hadn’t even noticed what a fool she was making of herself.
“You’d better eat it while it’s hot,” she said, grasping for composure. To her relief her voice sounded almost normal. “There’s fresh-baked bread, too, and butter.”
“It sounds wonderful.” He bent, picking up the tureen by its handle and gathering up the bread and butter in his other hand, then straightened, carrying his booty over to the flat-topped rock that served as his table. Retrieving a spoon and knife from the utensils she had brought him the night before, he sat cross-legged on the floor and began to eat with gusto. It was some few minutes before he stopped, looking a little self-conscious, and gestured to the food. “Will you have some?”
“What?” Amanda was still assimilating the shock to her system. “Oh . . . no, thank you. I’ve had dinner.”
“All the more for me, then.” He grinned with unabashed greed. Amanda was still coming to grips with the dazzling attraction of that grin, unobscured now by bristling whiskers, when he returned his attention to his meal. It was some little time before he spoke again.
“Still angry at me?” he asked casually, barely glancing up at her as he spread butter on a chunk of bread with absorbed pleasure.
Amanda blinked. It took her a moment to remember that she had been furious with him when she had stormed out the night before.
“No.” She shook her head, smiling faintly. “I get over being angry
almost as fast as I get angry.”
He looked reflective, or as reflective as it was possible to look while crunching on a piece of bread. He must have finished the soup, because he was looking into the tureen with a faintly regretful expression and laying aside his spoon.
“You’re not still afraid of me, are you?” He looked up at her again, swallowing the last of the bread, his eyes suddenly keen.
“Of course not,” Amanda answered, then wondered if it was true. Oh, she was no longer afraid of him physically—that he would harm her, that is—but without his beard he was suddenly a stranger. An impossibly handsome stranger.
“Then why are you standing way over there? I don’t bite—at least, not if you feed me.” He grinned a little. Amanda realized with a burn of embarrassment that she had been rooted to the same spot since she had come in. She moved jerkily, turning her back to him and crossing to the place she had left the basilicum powder and bandages. At the memory of her fingers brushing against the hard wall of his abdomen—the abdomen of a young and unquestionably virile man—her blush deepened.
“Do I embarrass you?” he pursued softly. “Would you like me to put my shirt back on?”
Amanda turned to look at him. He was still sitting cross-legged on the floor, his eyes narrow as he regarded her thoughtfully. To tell the truth, she had almost forgotten about the bareness of his chest. So much male flesh was overwhelming, it was true, but in her shock she had hardly registered it. Now she did, her eyes automatically absorbing the wide shoulders and deep chest, the sinewy arms and flat, hard-looking muscles blurred by a soft covering of black hair. Foreign to her, certainly, but not the reason for her odd behavior . . .
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