“Try it,” the captain repeated, more sternly.
Alex’s gaze faltered beneath the other man’s steady stare. “Yes, sir.” His insides skittering in anticipation, Alex took a tentative nibble and realized, for the first time, why they called this unattractive lump breadfruit. “It’s not bad,” he said around another mouthful, as he suddenly remembered just how hungry he was. “Rather like toast.” He took another bite. “Oddly crossed with new potatoes.”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
Alex looked up to find the other man smiling faintly. “Where did you learn to fix this?”
For one, brief moment, a sad, faraway light shone in the other man’s eyes, before he hid it with a careful lowering of his lids. “Jack Ryder taught me.”
The sharpened stick was a spear, India came to realize. Ryder used it to skewer a species of plump native fish as they came up to feed in a nearby moonlit mountain pool overhung with soft ferns and trailing vines of white flowering native jasmine and sweet laurel.
To her relief, he kept his trousers on, simply rolling them up to the knee before wading out bare-chested to a flat-topped rock, where he stood motionless yet utterly relaxed, eyes alert, spear poised high in a natural huntsman’s posture that India, watching him, decided must be as old as time.
With a quiet ripple and a flick of its tail, a silver fish broke the surface. The muscles and sinews of the man’s bare, sun-bronzed back flexed and lengthened. The crude spear shot through the air in a swift, clean strike. And India McKnight, watching fascinated and oddly humbled from the mossy bank, felt something quicken within her, a primitive and unwanted admiration of male beauty and grace and some other quality she could not quite identify but that had something to do with a strong, skilled male’s ability to protect and provide nourishment for a female. Once, she would have scoffed at the idea that she might find such a characteristic even faintly attractive. But the allure was there, powerful and subconscious and no less real for being innate.
“Where did you learn to do that?” she asked when he came to hunker down in the shallows and clean his catch.
“On Rakaia,” he said, his attention all for his task. “It’s an island near Tahiti.”
“Is that where you lived with the cannibals?”
He looked up, the mingling moonlight and star shine limning the sharp bones of his face as he stared at her through dark, narrowed eyes. “Who told you I lived with cannibals?”
“Captain Granger.” She held herself quite still, caught off guard by the intensity of his reaction. “He said you lived with cannibals for two years.”
Jack Ryder went back to cleaning his fish. “The people of Rakaia haven’t been cannibals for half a century or more.”
“But they were, once?”
He rolled one shoulder in a dismissive shrug, but she could feel the tension in him, the simmering anger, even if she couldn’t explain it. “All the natives of the South Pacific were cannibals once, Melanesians and Polynesians alike, from Rabaul to the Sandwich Islands.”
“Did you ever wonder why?”
He straightened, his lips quirking upward in a smile. “Maybe they got tired of pork,” he said, then laughed when India couldn’t quite keep herself from shuddering in response.
She was glad to get back to the fire, and stood holding her hands out to the flames while he set the fish to roast on a spit propped between rocks. The short walk down to the pool and back had been unexpectedly difficult, for the split petticoats India wore beneath her tartan skirt were soaked through and the wet cotton had chafed the tender flesh of her inner thighs with every step. Even her corset was wet, its baleen ribs rubbing her torso painfully raw. She was sore and cold and very, very tired of being wet, and if it hadn’t been for the presence of Jack Ryder, she would gladly have stripped off blouse, skirt—everything, so overwhelming was the urge to release her body from the wet, clinging embrace of wool and cotton and whalebone.
“What exactly are you wearing under that outfit of yours, anyway?” he asked, glancing up at her.
India stiffened. “I beg your pardon?”
“You hobbled up here from the pond like an old bow-legged stockman just off a four-week muster. All those wet female accruements of yours are starting to get a mite uncomfortable, are they?”
“My ‘female accruements’ are none of your business, sir.” She meant to say it loftily. Instead it came out sounding petty and more than a bit childish.
He gave her that nasty grin of his. “Uh-uh. Anything that slows us down is my business.”
India felt her heart give one, unsteady lurch. “Which means?”
He was smiling still, but his eyes were narrow and hard with a look she was learning all too well. “Which means you can put that damned wool skirt and your blouse back on if you insist. But you either take off those wet petticoats and all that other nonsense now and let them dry overnight, or you take them off in the morning and simply leave them behind. The choice is yours.”
Chapter Thirteen
INDIA OPENED HER mouth to say, And if I don’t? Then she read the determination in his eyes, and swallowed instead.
“That’s right,” he said, as if he knew the train of her thoughts exactly. “If you don’t take them off, I’ll take them off for you.”
He stood slowly, the firelight gleaming over his bare, well-muscled chest. She was suddenly aware of the breathless stillness of the moment, broken only by the crackle of the dancing flames and the creak-creak of some exotic creature lost in the vastness of the surrounding rain forest. The velvety darkness of the tropical night seemed to press in on them, making her excruciatingly conscious of their isolation and his power and her own vulnerability. And the thought of facing him, of facing the night to come, without the rigid, protective confines of her corset and all those layers of petticoats awakened once more that strange, unfamiliar coil of tension, low in her belly.
“Well?” he asked softly. “Which is it to be?”
She eyed him consideringly. “You’re not that much taller than I.”
“Nope. But I’m bigger. And I don’t fight by the Marquess of Queensbury Rules.”
The implications of his words seemed to hover in the moonlit night between them, along with the image they provoked, of him wrestling with her, his big, half-naked body rising over her, pinning her down, his lean, sure hands seeking out buttons and ties. And India felt it again, a strange inner heat that rippled not unpleasantly downward to meet and be passed by a surge of panic that spiraled contradictorily upward.
“Turn around,” she said, coming to an instant decision.
He eyed her with unconcealed suspicion. “Why? So you can skewer me with my spear? Or just run off into the night?”
“Exactly how far do you think I could run in these wet clothes?”
He grunted noncommittally. “And the spear?”
She raised her chin so that she could look down her nose at him in a haughty gesture of disdain. “You have my word as a gentlewoman that I will accompany you safely to La Rochelle.”
“Your word as a gentlewoman,” he repeated.
“That’s right.”
He hesitated a moment, then swung around to stare off at the distant shimmer of moonlit sea, his arms folded across his chest. She studied the broad expanse of his bare shoulders, aware for the first time of just how much he was trusting her by turning his back on her like this.
Then he said, “Remember: I have very quick reflexes, and my sense of hearing was honed by some two years of living with ex-cannibals.”
“You should write a book about your experiences, Mr. Ryder,” she said, unbuckling the wide belt she wore at her waist, and quickly going to work on the row of buttons down the front of her blouse.
“A book?”
“Yes.” She hesitated a moment, then peeled her blouse down over her shoulders, sighing softly with relief as the stiff, wet material came away from her arms. The night air felt warm and sweet and vaguely sinful against her bare flesh, so that her v
oice quavered slightly when she said, “There have been numerous accounts written by missionaries who worked among the various peoples of the South Pacific, but your experience of actually living with the natives as a renegade must be unique.”
“I wasn’t a renegade at the time.”
“You weren’t?” She twisted around to find him staring out over the dark valley, his hands resting lightly on his lean hips, his powerful body held almost painfully still.
He shook his head. “A seaman by the name of Toby Jenkins and I were washed overboard in a storm. It took the British navy the better part of two years to figure out we were still alive, and track us down.”
She wanted to ask him more, but something about the taut line of his back and the harsh, flat tone of his voice discouraged her. With one more quick, apprehensive glance at his motionless back, India took off her camisole and set to work loosening the hooks of her corset. This was easily accomplished, for she was far too practical a woman to ever indulge in that ridiculous affectation known as tight lacing. She wore her corset not to exaggerate the female curves of her body, but to present a rigidly proper silhouette to the world. It was like a shield, her corset, and as she stripped away the wet, heavily ribbed material, she felt exposed, vulnerable— oddly naked, despite the presence of the thin chemise she still wore.
“Why don’t you put on my shirt?”
India froze, the corset clutched to her chemise-covered breasts, her gaze lifting once again to the man who still stood staring off into space, his back to her. “I beg your pardon?”
“My shirt. Why don’t you put it on until yours dries?”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Would you rather I did it for you?”
She snatched up his shirt from where it lay draped over the top of a nearby boulder. “That will not be necessary.” Turning her back on him, she yanked the hem of her damp chemise from beneath the waistband of her skirt and quickly stripped it off, as well.
A warm breeze kicked up, caressing her naked breasts with an erotic, compelling touch. Shocked at the new and unfamiliar sensations the experience awakened within her, India thrust her arms into the sleeves of his shirt and hugged it close against the dangerous seductions of the night.
The shirt was warm and dry and smelled not unpleasantly of him. She buttoned it swiftly, then loosened the waistband of her split skirt. The heavy tartan smelled pungently of wet wool, but she was determined to put it back on once she rid herself of the petticoats, no matter what Jack Ryder threatened to do to her. Casting a quick glance at him over her shoulder, she wriggled the wet cloth down over her hips, quickly followed by her three petticoats. Then, after only a brief hesitation, she also rid herself of the damply clinging cloth of her drawers.
The exotically scented breeze stirred the thick canopy of the surrounding primeval forest, whispered softly over the bare flesh of her thighs to seek out the intimate, secret places of her woman’s body. She was peculiarly, unexpectedly aware of the dark presence of the man who stood behind her, of all the breathless, forbidden possibilities of this moment. Then a laconic male voice said, “If you don’t hurry up, the fish is going to burn.”
India thrust her legs back into her tartan skirt, dragged the wet, scratchy wool up over her bare flanks, and hastily cinched her belt around the voluminous fabric of his shirt. “I’ve finished,” she said, busying herself with the task of spreading her clothes out to dry. She could not look at him. He might have kept his back turned throughout the entire procedure, yet nothing could mitigate the fact that she’d just stripped essentially naked while this man stood scant feet from her. It was a dangerous thing, she decided, this relaxation of the normal standards of decent, proper behavior, this overly familiar knowledge of each other’s bodies brought about by the forced intimacy of their sojourn alone together in the jungle.
“Jesus,” he said with a soft whistle. “You were wearing all of that?”
“I’ll thank you not to ogle my undergarments, Mr. Ryder.”
He huffed a soft laugh and went to hunker down beside the fire. “You planning to fuss with those things all night, or are you going to come sit down and eat?”
“I do not fuss.” She came to sit opposite him, the wet wool of her tartan scratching her bare legs unmercifully with every step.
“You fuss.” He handed her a chunk of neatly filleted fish on a bamboo-leaf plate. “All old maids fuss.”
“I have always despised that expression,” she said loftily. “Old maid. It makes any woman who never marries sound like some pitiful, passed-over creature, her life lived solely in desperate expectation of a moment that never arrives.”
He looked up from filleting the second fish, his eyes gleaming softly in the light cast by the glowing embers of the fire. “I remember now, you—how did you put it?— made up your mind never to marry. Now, why was that, I wonder?”
“Do you indeed, Mr. Ryder? When a man and a woman marry, they are legally considered to have become one person, and the husband is that person. Is it any wonder that I should be reluctant to cease to exist as an individual? That I should object to my personal property immediately becoming some man’s, to do with as he pleases? That I should not wish to give some man the power to direct the course of my life, to beat me if he should so choose?”
“When you put it that way, no, I suppose it isn’t such a wonder.” He handed her another hunk of fish. “How’d your family feel about your decision?”
“According to the Reverend Hamish McKnight, a woman owes her husband the same obedience and submission due her Lord, and the idea of any female existing outside the control of some male is more than an aberration, it’s an abomination.”
“I take it the reverend isn’t too favorable.”
“Wasn’t. My father is dead now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We were never close.”
She’d meant it to come out sounding casual, even flippant. But she knew when she looked up to find Jack Ryder staring at her, his eyes narrowing as he studied her face, that she hadn’t succeeded.
“And your mother?” he asked quietly. “Did she agree with the reverend?”
India felt the hard line of her lips relax into a smile, and shook her head. “My mother is the one who named me India.”
“Ah.”
“She always dreamed of traveling the world,” India said, a deep ache in her heart. “I think it was one of the reasons why she married my father. He talked of devoting his life to missionary work in Africa or the Pacific.”
“But he never did?”
“No. My mother never traveled any farther than London.”
“She’s dead, as well?”
India nodded. “She died when I was fifteen.”
“I was thirteen when my mother died.” It was simply said, but the pain was still there, in the tightness of his voice, in the way his chest lifted.
A silence settled between them, a silence filled with the gentle crackle and pop of the fire, and a companionable recognition of shared pain and life-shattering loss. With an unsteady hand, India set aside her makeshift bamboo plate. She had not thought of this man in this way, as someone who had once known a mother’s love, someone who still mourned that mother’s passing, even after so many years. It made him seem both more vulnerable and more human, and she wasn’t sure she wanted that. It would have been much easier—and more comfortable— to continue thinking of him as a renegade, a man without any past that didn’t involve nefarious deeds and dark secrets.
“And your father?” she asked after a moment. “Is he dead, as well?”
“Nah. He says he plans to live to be a hundred, and he’s just ornery enough to do it.” He smiled when he said it, his voice rough with an affection he wasn’t quite able to hide. And India thought, What would it be like, to have that kind of bond with your father? To know the closeness that smile hinted at, rather than grow up hurting and angry and alone.
Aloud, she said, “He’s sti
ll in Australia?”
“He has a station, in Queensland.”
India stared at the man who sat across from her, firelight gleaming a hellish red over his naked shoulders. “You grew up on a sheep station?”
He grunted. “That surprises you, does it?”
“It’s an unusual background, surely, for a naval officer?”
He shrugged, and reached for one of the oranges they’d collected on their walk back up from the pond. “I have four older brothers. And I always liked the sea.”
“I never had any brothers or sisters,” she said, before she could stop herself.
He threw her an orange. “I figured as much.”
India caught the orange, its sweet, tangy scent filling the air as she set to work boring its thick peel. “How could you possibly know?”
“It shows.”
India resisted the urge to press him for more of an explanation. The combination of food and fire and dry clothes had warmed her, and she realized that he’d been right, that despite the elevation the night was still comfortably balmy. Quietly sucking on the orange, she stretched her bare toes out to the fire, finding it both decadent and oddly pleasant to be sitting here in the open night air, sensuously aware of the naked flesh of her thighs and hips, covered only by the thin folds of her tartan. With every breath, her bare breasts brushed the rough cloth of the man’s shirt she wore. Never before had she been so conscious of her own body. It was as if, along with her corset, petticoats, and drawers, she had divested herself of some of the restraints of the civilization of which they were a part. It was a thought that both frightened her and excited her.
She stole a glance at the dark man who sat, silent now, on the far side of the fire. He had one hand dangling idly from a bent knee, his head half turned away from her as he stared out over the distant moonlit seas, so that all she saw was his profile, nose straight and long, chin strong, cheekbones flaring wide and high. It was a striking face, made even more striking by the unusual, unexpected jolt of those vivid blue eyes. She wondered suddenly how old he was, and decided he probably wasn’t much above thirty, if that. He was such a mystery to her, his life an intriguing whisper of terrible crimes and dark secrets. She knew a swift, unwelcome yearning to understand those secrets, to know the reason for the anger and pain she sometimes glimpsed lurking behind the lazy, habitual smile in those blue, blue eyes.
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