“No!” she gasped, her head coming up. “I can’t possibly. I must stay in England. This is my home.”
“You want a home where you’re attacked every time you step out the door? You want a repeat of what happened to you today?”
“This isn’t the real England,” she pleaded. “There are beautiful people and places full of love and friendship and….”
“And what?” he asked, hard. “Money? Money is the difference between the filth just outside here and the gentility you seem to adore, the gentility that seems to have kicked out an innocent little thing like you. It looks to me like the lovely people you know are about even with the ones tearing your clothes off a while ago.”
Slowly, great tears began to form in Regan’s eyes, and as she looked up at Travis he saw her sadness. She needed her dreams, she thought, needed to believe in love and beauty, had to have something to make up for all the emptiness in her life.
Not exactly understanding the thoughts going through Regan’s mind, Travis did see her hurt, and her tears made him weak. Instantly, he was beside her on the bed, folding her into his arms, trying his best to shelter her from whatever painful memories haunted her.
“You’ll like America,” he said gently, stroking her hair. “The people are good and honest, and they’ll like you. I’ll introduce you to half of Virginia, and before you know it you’ll have more friends than you know what to do with.”
“Friends?” she whispered, clinging to him, only now beginning to realize how the experience on the waterfront had upset her. There still seemed to be clutching, greedy hands on her body.
“You can’t imagine all the wonderful people in America. I have a little brother, Wesley, who will love you, and of course there’s Clay and Nicole. Nicole is from France and can talk French as fast as lightning.”
“Is she pretty?” Regan sniffed.
“Almost as pretty as you,” he smiled, caressing her hair. “And when I left she was just about to have a baby. It’s probably months old by now. Of course, she’s already got the twins.”
“Twins?”
Travis laughed and held her away from him, wiping away her tears with his fingertips. “Don’t you understand yet that I’m taking you to America, not to punish you or because I like kidnapping little girls, but because I have no choice? There’s nothing else I can do with you.”
His words, meant to calm her and said in Travis’s own special blunt way of calling a problem by its true name, had the opposite effect on Regan. Her uncle and Farrell had said similar things about having to put up with her. She was tired of being a burden to everyone. “Let me up!” she demanded, pushing against him.
“Now what the hell’s the matter?”
Twisting her head, she tried to bite his hand on her shoulder.
Travis pushed her back into the mattress and rubbed his hand. “I don’t understand you at all. I save your life not more than an hour ago, and now I tell you, as kindly as you please, how I have your own best interests at heart, and you get madder’n hell at me. I don’t understand you at all.”
“Understand me!” she gasped, eyes spitting fire. “I wouldn’t have had to run away if you hadn’t been holding me prisoner, and I wouldn’t have needed rescuing if it hadn’t been for you in the first place. In a sense, you saved me from yourself for yourself.”
Bewildered, his mouth falling open, Travis could only gape at her. “Does your mind always work that way? Do you always go down ten different twisted paths before you get to where you want to go?”
“I assume that is an American colloquialism, meant to cover your lack of logic. The fact is that you are holding me prisoner, and I demand to be released,” she said smugly, arms folded, chin tilted away from him.
Travis’s anger faded quickly to laughter, which he tried very hard to suppress. Whatever her understanding of logic was, it was far away from the true meaning of the word. He considered explaining again what would happen if he released her, but since she’d been assaulted twice and it seemed to have made no impression on her, he had no desire to try to explain again. Nor would he try painting a glorious picture of America for her. All he could do was to let her see for herself. He also considered throwing open the door and giving her another chance to try to make it out of the docks, or he could pay for a cab to take her wherever she wanted to go.
At this last thought, something inside him tightened. If he sent her away, he might never see her again, this starry-eyed little vixen who seemed to look at the world through her own special pink haze. The thought of the long sea voyage without her to entertain and delight him made him feel very sad.
“You’re going to America with me,” he said firmly as he ran his hand along her bare shoulder. He’d felt so guilty about seducing her when she was so innocent that he’d forced himself to stay away from her for two nights, but now the near panic he’d felt all day when he couldn’t find her, combined with the seductive image she presented now with her bare shoulder and partially exposed breast, made him forget about logic.
“Do not touch me,” she said haughtily.
“We may disagree about…logic”—he smiled at the word—“but there’s one area where we seem to be in complete agreement.”
Regan really tried to keep herself aloof from Travis’s touch, but the feel of his hand—that wide, warm, sensual palm running along her neck—was impossible to ignore. She wanted to appear unaffected by what had happened to her, wanted him to think she was courageous and brave, but truthfully she wanted to climb into his lap and hide, perhaps crawl into his pocket. When he had stood over her this evening, pistols drawn, she’d never in her life been so glad to see anyone.
Turning her head to one side, his fingers stroked her neck, and she closed her eyes as his other hand went to the opposite side of her neck.
“You’re tired, aren’t you, love?” Travis whispered, the pressure of his hands increasing. “Muscles stiff?”
Her nod was barely perceptible as she felt her body relaxing. She had no idea what he was doing, only that by some magic he seemed to be making her body melt. She closed her eyes, giving herself over to Travis, hardly aware when he slipped off her dress and laid her naked body face down on the bed. The gentle, deep sound of his voice added to this new pleasure she was experiencing.
“When I was a boy,” he said, “I shipped out on a whaler for three years. Terrible experience, but at least there were some interesting stops, such as China, where I learned to do this.”