Sweet Fire

by Jo Goodman

  One of his hands moved from the curve of her waist, over the flat plane of her belly, and when his knee slipped between her legs, parting her thighs, Nathan’s fingers began an intimate caress, touching, stroking the budding center of her pleasure. He found her wet and hot, ready for him, unafraid in her eagerness and innocence.

  “Touch me, Liddy,” he said huskily. “Help me.”

  She did as he asked, hesitant at first, then at his urging, with more confidence. She held his heavy cock, stroking, making a caress of her exploration. They shifted. She raised her knees and the soles of her feet slid along his calves as he knelt between her thighs. Her buttocks were lifted; her hand reached out blindly, searching, finding, guiding.

  He came inside her slowly, watching her all the while, listening for some sound that warned him he was hurting her. She moved beneath him, trying to accommodate his entry and not let him know about the pain because she didn’t want him to stop. He felt her stiffen anyway and started to withdraw. Lydia’s legs curled around him and she held his forearms.

  “No,” she whispered. “Come into me. I was meant to fit more than your hand. I was meant to fit all of you.”

  “Oh, God, Lydia.” And even more quietly, “Forgive me.” He thrust inside her fully, covering her with his body. She was tight around him, and hot. He wanted to move in her right away and forced himself to hold back, waiting for her to adjust to the hard length of him. He kissed her long and deeply and sometime during the kiss they began to rock in unison, their limbs locked, their bodies sliding.

  Everything he had made her feel before he made her feel again, this time more powerfully. Knowing what was awaiting her, Lydia was an eager participant, moving against Nathan, tightening around him. Her fingers tripped along his forearms and then fell to the mattress and curled in the sheets. She wanted to see his face, know that he was sharing in the pleasure as he was sharing in the passion.

  Lydia cried out her need and his name as Nathan’s strokes quickened. The tension dissolved in her while it continued to build in Nathan, tightening the muscles across his back and in his thighs. Her hands were on him now, caressing him, clutching him, urging him toward finding his own release. And when he did, she held him in her arms and stroked his hair, her fingers a whisper against his neck, the tenderness that was so much a part of her nature inherent in her touch.

  Nathan had never wanted to cry after making love to a woman before. He did now and barely understood it. Lydia made him ache in ways that had nothing to do with wanting her and everything to do with needing her. He had never been frightened of a woman before. Lydia scared him to death. He came close to telling her the truth then, just so she would hate him and never let him near her again. It was almost a physical blow to realize that that scared him just as much.

  “Do you know what I regret?” Lydia asked quietly. Except for the gentle stroking of her hand, she was still. Nathan’s weight was comforting, somehow reassuring, and she didn’t wait for his response to her question. She knew he was awake because his thumb was making a pass across the inward curve of her waist. “I regret not remembering our wedding.”

  He raised his head, kissed her on the tip of her nose. “As long as you don’t regret the wedding.”

  “No. Not that.” She smiled to herself as Nathan’s head rested on her shoulder again and one of his legs trapped both of hers. “Actually, I do think I remember something of it. Father Patrick said the service, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so.”

  She sounded pleased with her capture of an elusive memory, Nathan thought. “Do you recall anything else?” he asked calmly, as if his future did not depend on her answer.

  “No,” she said. “Nothing. But I’m never going to forget our wedding night.” There was another wedding night, the first one, though, that she could not bring to consciousness no matter how hard she tried. Nathan told her that after the ceremony in the orphanage’s chapel, they had taken a room above a tavern outside the city. She had been tired, he said, worried about the manner in which she’d left her parents. Going against their wishes had been hard on her. Lydia appreciated his honesty. He could have led her to believe differently and not risked as much, but he didn’t. That evening, when her weariness had become a relentless and pounding ache in her head, Nathan, instead of pressing her with his attentions, had given her his own mix of powder to help her sleep. Her first real memory was of waking up and finding Nathan kneeling at her bedside, sleeping, his cheek lying against the mattress, and his hand curled around hers.

  “Do you know?” she asked, still thinking about the moment when her fingers had tightened in his and he came awake. “I sensed that I belonged with you as soon as I saw you.”

  A fancy on her part, Nathan thought. Their first meeting had been in an alley and she hadn’t had a good look at him until he’d coerced her into his hotel suite. Far from thinking she belonged with him, she had run the other way. Humoring her, Nathan asked, “How could you be so certain?”

  How could she? she wondered. It had seemed so clear to her at the time, knowledge that she had in her fingertips, a sense of knowing that could hardly be defined in plain words, more certain than intuition, more rational than instinct. “I can’t explain it,” she said finally, “but it’s real. I feel it now. I couldn’t belong to anyone else…ever.”

  “Liddy,” he said softly. He wanted to say that she shouldn’t think of being his forever, that things could change, and that he was not everything she imagined him to be. But he couldn’t tell her. However briefly, she believed he was kind and good, patient, generous, and loving, and Nathan was reluctant to let her see he was none of those things. “Liddy,” he said again, helplessly, inadequately, and kissed her full on the mouth.

  The taste of him lingered long after he withdrew. Lydia snuggled against him as he turned on his side and pulled her close. She fell asleep almost immediately, lulled by the ship’s constant rocking, peaceful in Avonlei’s cradle. Nathan finally slept because he was exhausted.

  He came awake hard, wanting her. He wasn’t sure what he would do if she didn’t let him have her. Take her anyway probably. He wanted her that much.

  It didn’t come to that. Coming awake by slow degrees, Lydia turned in his arms naturally and moved with sinuous grace against him, a sleek cat with her eye on the cream, circling her master’s leg. Lydia did everything but purr as she took him inside her. His thrust was powerful, deep. Her back arched, her nails pressed white crescents into the taut, warm flesh of his shoulders. Throwing back her head, Lydia felt the driving force of his body become hotter and harder. She wrapped her legs around his flanks and matched the rhythm of his desire.

  Nathan felt her all around him, her hands, her arms, her legs, and more intimately, the velvet center of her, and still it was not enough. He had her heart, her trust, her love, and he had none of it fairly. Suddenly he was angry, blindly, irrationally angry, and his only outlet had already been set in motion.

  He ignored her wimper, thrusting in her deeply, touching her womb. His mouth was hard on her skin. He drew hotly on her slick and salty flesh, bruising her with kisses. He said her name like a curse, spilling into her, the planes of his face rigid with tension as he gave Lydia his seed.

  In the aftermath he was silent except for his harsh breathing, motionless except for the hand that caressed her hip.

  Lydia lay on her back and turned only her head toward him. She stared, trying to fathom his expressionless, implacable eyes.

  “Did I hurt you?” he asked to fill the silent void.

  She wondered why he asked the question when he didn’t seem to care about her answer. He hadn’t hurt her, but it was almost as if he had wanted to. Finally she said, “No.”

  Nathan turned on his side and propped himself on one elbow. The hand at her hip moved to her hair. He drew strands of it across her shoulder. “Yes,” he said. “I did.”

  But he didn’t apologize, Lydia noticed, or explain his actions; y
et there was an expression that briefly entered his eyes and she thought it was regret. She would have to be satisfied with that for now. Beyond the certainty that she belonged with him, Lydia realized she knew little about Nathan Hunter. And before? she wondered. What had she known about him before she lost her memory? Nathan told her himself that their courtship had been brief, spanning only a few months. “Have I ever known you well?” she asked.

  Nathan’s fingertips smoothed her brows and traced the graceful arch of her cheekbone. His knuckle pressed lightly against her chin, brushed her bottom lip. He felt her beautiful dark blue eyes on him, curious and expectant. “As well as most,” he said. “Better than some.”

  His flippancy made her frown. Had she angered him in some way? “That’s no answer.”

  “No, it’s not.” He hesitated, and finally the question was pulled from him, as if against his will. “What is it you want to know?”

  Lydia evaded his exploring hand while she sat up. She drew part of the sheet with her and leaned against the wall. Brushing back a lock of hair that had fallen across her cheek, she asked, “You told me you were a convict,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me about the scars?”

  So she had felt them. Nathan followed Lydia’s lead and sat up, hitching a blanket around his waist. He started to reach for his shirt, which was hanging on the corner post of their bunk, then stopped. Shrugging, he withdrew his hand. What did it matter? She knew they were there. He had hoped in the dark she wouldn’t learn about them. He remembered trying to stop her from touching him there, but he hadn’t been quick enough. Her hands had felt so good on his back—tender, gentle. Lydia’s hands were healing, her touch a balm.

  “How should I have brought the matter up?” he asked. “I turned back the lamps so you wouldn’t be offended.”

  “Offended? Do you really think I’m as delicate as all that?” She pulled the sheet aside and pointed to her knee. “Here. I have a scar. An ugly one, too.” It was the shape of a half moon, almost two inches long, and raised above the smooth skin around it. “I wanted to be so beautiful for you, and I saw this, and—”

  Seeing it, Nathan smiled. He leaned toward her, bent his head, and brushed the scar with his lips. “You are beautiful for me,” he said.

  Lydia looked up at him as he raised his head, not quite believing what she heard.

  “Don’t cry,” he said as she blinked back tears. “Why are you crying? What did I—” But she had launched herself into his arms and he stopped questioning and simply held her.

  She hardly knew why she was crying herself. Lydia couldn’t have explained it to Nathan. He gave her one corner of the sheet to wipe her eyes as her muffled, hiccupping sobs gradually stopped. “I love you,” she said, her voice hushed. “I may not remember falling in love, but I know about this feeling I have for you.”

  Nathan’s arms tightened around her. His cheek rested against her hair. “There has never been anyone in my life like you, Lydia. No one so gentle or giving, honest and innocent. Sometimes…sometimes I think it’s all been a mistake, that you can’t possibly love me, and I...” He fell silent.

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing.” He didn’t tell her that he was frightened when he thought of her not loving him, not needing or wanting him. Nathan could not make himself that vulnerable, not for anyone, not even for Lydia. “You wondered about the scars,” he said.

  He would tell her about the ones on his back, of course, but Lydia knew now that there were other wounds that had never quite healed, and she knew he would not speak of those. She would have to be patient if she hoped to understand the man she loved. Laying her palm against his chest, Lydia waited.

  “I got these stripes while working Van Dieman’s Land,” Nathan told her. “Tasmania they call it now. As if changing the name could change the bloody stink of hell’s own island. I labored near Hobart, felling Huon pine for ship timber. Sixty and seventy feet tall some of it was, and so large around that three men could barely ring the trunk. All-day labor, sixteen hours in the summer, twelve in the winter, was the schedule we kept most times. I cut myrtle that the wheelwrights needed and celery-top pine for masts and spars for the shipbuilders. Van Dieman’s Land was rich in resources and, God knows, the labor was cheap.

  “The guards were ruthless. Oftimes they used convicts as guards and they were worse. No man’s life was valued beyond the work he could do. Death was an escape, looked forward to more often than not. On the mainland gold had been discovered and men scrambled for tickets-of-leave to take up a pickax and shovel for themselves rather than work the government land. I waited ten years for mine and by then I had these stripes.

  “Twenty-five for tampering with my leg irons. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t walk in them. Twenty-five for losing the shirt of my uniform, even though it was stolen from me. Fifty for fighting with a convict who tried to rape me.” He felt Lydia’s shudder, and knew her well enough to understand that it wasn’t revulsion that made her shiver, but pain. She felt it for him, shared it. There was nothing in her life remotely similar to anything he had suffered, yet her capacity for empathy and acceptance made Nathan feel as if he must protect her from herself. “By the time I left Van Dieman’s Land for Sydney I had spent over two hundred days in solitary confinement. Don’t dwell on that,” he cautioned. “I don’t. For ten years’ time it was not such a bad record.”

  She didn’t believe he didn’t think about it. It was part of him, part of the anger that seethed just below his consciousness. He couldn’t talk about the fear, the loneliness, or the deprivation. But he could be angry. It was so much easier. “Did you ever tell me why you were sentenced to the penal colony?”

  “Yes.”

  Lydia didn’t want to make him repeat it, but she had to know. “Ten years is a long time to be sentenced,” she said. His crime could not have been a trifling one.

  “I was sentenced for twenty.”

  “But you said you had a ticket…a ticket-of—”

  “A ticket-of-leave. But it’s not a pardon, and it doesn’t mean one’s sentence is over. It’s simply a method of allowing convicts to work for someone else, a system of providing laborers and servants to men who can pay them. It decreases the government’s burden of caring for the convicts. All that’s required is accounting for them. A ticket-of-leave does not permit unrestricted travel.”

  “Yet you came to San Francisco.”

  “An arrangement with my employer.” The bribing of a number of officials, he added silently. “I couldn’t have done it otherwise. I’m not a free man yet.”

  Lydia frowned. “Nathan, you must have been a child when you were sentenced. How can that be?”

  “I was fourteen. Not so young, Lydia.” He paused as her arms circled his back and she felt the uneven ridges of his scars, the thin white lines of his suffering. “I was convicted of murder,” he told her without inflection. “There are some who say I was fortunate not to get the gallows.” It was only recently that he had begun to believe that sentiment might have been true. Holding Lydia, he could accept Van Dieman’s Land as the only path that could have taken him to her.

  “Did you do it?” she asked.

  “Not many people ask me that question. You didn’t, you know. Not the first time I told you.”

  “Then I married you without knowing.” She shook her head. “No, I must have known the truth somehow.”

  Nathan caught her by the shoulders and held her away from him. His eyes were grave, his features set hard. “Don’t make me into something I’m not,” he warned her. “I didn’t kill at fourteen, but I’ve killed since. That’s the legacy of Van Dieman’s Land, the price of living there, sometimes the price of getting out alive. Get rid of your foolish, romantic notions, Lydia, because they can’t last where we’re going. I’d rather not crush them, but I will if it means you’ll survive.”

  His hands dropped away. He slid his legs over the side of the bed and stood. Crossing their cabin, he poured water into the blue-and-white spo
ngeware basin, rinsed his face, and began shaving. The small mirror above the stand reflected Lydia’s pale face, the stunned hurt in her cobalt blue eyes. He did not look at her long, but when he dressed he made certain his back was to her so that she could see his scars and know a little better the kind of man he was.

  Nathan could protect her from everyone but himself.

  When he was gone Lydia rose from the bed. There was an ache between her thighs that was not precisely unpleasant. She could still feel the shape of Nathan inside her, the heat and hardness of him, and in spite of how he had parted from her, she wanted him again. If he had walked in their cabin right now, Lydia would have opened her sheet and drawn him inside. She did not think she had much pride where Nathan Hunter was concerned.

  Kneeling beside the tub, Lydia washed quickly with the cool water, then rinsed the sheets clean of the stain of her virgin’s blood. There were six gowns in her wardrobe, including the one she had worn on board, and a riding habit. Lydia chose a hunter green dress with mother-of-pearl buttons trimming the bodice and a high collar that banded her slender throat like a choker. She found a green grosgrain ribbon that nearly matched her gown and used it to loosely pull her hair back.

  She was ravenously hungry, but was not free to roam the ship as Nathan was. To pass the time until someone remembered she needed to be fed, Lydia finished unpacking the trunk and valises. Like her own things, Nathan’s clothes were finely made. Nathan told her she came from a wealthy family, but looking at his clothes, Lydia realized she had not married a pauper. She remembered something about gold mining. Was that her family’s fortune or his? She frowned, a furrow between her eyebrows, trying to recall what he had said, and more importantly when.

  After struggling a few moments, Lydia went back to her task. She found embroidery hoops, silver-gray thread the exact shade of Nathan’s eyes, and white linen napkins stenciled lightly with an ornate H. Ah, she thought, smiling now, she was most definitely a woman in love if she had set herself this task. Embroidering was not her long suit and she didn’t question how she knew that. Nathan could think what he liked, but some things she just knew.