‘Tamsyn.’ She stumbled into his arms, heedless of sense or of anything but the moment. His body, under the chill of the water, was hot and so was his mouth on hers. Oh, the taste of him. Cris. Under her palms his back was smooth, broad, infinitely masculine, and she clung to him, taking and giving in a kiss that was trying to make up for over a month’s separation.
When the necessity to breathe finally broke the kiss, they stayed locked together, not speaking, reading each other through their eyes. Finally Tamsyn could pretend no longer. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Because I love you.’ Cris sat down, pulled her with him, knee to knee, his hand still on her arm.
‘I told you that this is not possible.’
‘You told me that you did not love me. And at first, I believed you.’ He held her gaze, not hiding the pain in his eyes, not shielding his feelings as he always had before. ‘Then you wrote to me.’
‘But I explained why I cannot marry you. And it makes no difference to my feelings.’ Now she was the one veiling her gaze, trying to keep him from seeing the futile hope.
‘I know.’ He lifted his other hand and cupped the fingers around her averted face, turning her back to face him. ‘I asked myself why you would have written and told me something so painful to you, when, if you did not love me, it could make no difference. And the only answer I could find was that you did love me and that this tragedy in your past was why you were refusing to marry me.’
‘But it is not in my past. It will be my future, too. It cannot be yours.’
‘Tamsyn. Do not lie to me, because here, now, I will know, believe me. Do you love me?’
‘Yes,’ she burst out. ‘Yes, I love you. And what difference does knowing it make, except to worsen the pain for both of us of what we cannot have?’
The tender expression in his eyes became something else, something hot and intense and possessive. ‘I knew it, I could sense it. I knew you were lying to me before. Tamsyn, my love.’
She pushed back against his naked chest, even though it was like pushing against the Flatiron itself. ‘It makes no difference.’
‘You cannot have a child whether or not you marry me. I do not want one unless it is yours. It will be a grief for both of us, one we will share,’ he said fiercely. ‘I do not want children with any other woman because I want no other woman. Only you, Tamsyn. Only you.’
‘But your heir—’
‘He is a perfectly pleasant, intelligent young cousin who would have inherited if the woman I married bore only daughters, or if I had a son who died, or if I married someone else and we had no children anyway. I love you, you love me. We can be happy for the rest of our lives. We can build a good marriage and you will make a wonderful marchioness.’ When she stared at him, wordless, he pulled her to him, breast to breast, mouth to mouth.
‘I love you,’ he said against her lips. ‘I was washed up on this beach because I thought I had lost love and all the time I was on the verge of finding it. Don’t deny us this happiness, my darling.’
Something broke inside her as if a dam had been breached, a stone wall that had been holding back her love for him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I won’t. I love you too much.’
A bare rock, covered in limpets and seaweed and water, in the middle of a rising sea, was not the most comfortable place to make love, Tamsyn thought hazily. Cris lifted her on to his thighs, entered her with a gasp that held relief and joy and intensity, and then she forgot to think, or to feel the sun on her back or the friction against her knees or the slap of wet seaweed tossed up by the wind. All that was real was the power of Cris’s body and the need to use hers to show him how much she loved him.
They broke together, clinging as they had done when they had first found each other in the sea, locked together now by love and the promise of a future.
Finally Cris moved and they untangled their limbs, laughing a little at themselves, touching again and again, as though unable to believe this was real. He flopped back, full length on the rock. ‘Lord, but I do love you. What the blazes?’ He sat up again, rubbing his head and twisted to glare at the lump of bladderwrack that Tamsyn had been exploring with her foot earlier.
‘Is it a crab?’ She shifted to sit beside him, legs dangling, as he poked at the mass.
‘No, it’s hard.’ He pushed the weed aside. ‘Look—it’s a ring bolt and a chain.’
‘Pull it up.’ A certainty that she knew what this was began to creep over her.
Cris hauled, his muscles bunching as he took the weight of whatever was at the end of the chain. He stood, braced his feet apart and hauled and suddenly a small, square, metal box broke the surface. He dumped it on the rock and stared at it. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think we’d found a pirate’s treasure.’
‘No. A smuggler’s. This rock was Jory’s place, ours when we were young.’ Tamsyn ran her hands over the rusting iron bands that bound the box. ‘There is no padlock, only a staple through the hasp.’
‘You open it, you are his heir,’ Cris said. In the end it took both of them to force it open, lift the lid, creaking, to reveal a canvas bag no bigger than a lady’s reticule. ‘Hardly pieces of eight and golden doubloons.’
‘If it was full of money I suppose we’d have to give it to the Revenue,’ Tamsyn said, trying to cover her disappointment with a show of reasonableness.
Cris put the bag in her hands and helped her open it. Inside was a gold chain and a handful of crystals. ‘Cris, these aren’t—?’
‘Diamonds? Yes, I think they are. I think your first husband has left you jewels where no one else but you would ever find them.’ They sparkled in his palm like the foam on the sand in the moment the sunlight caught it. ‘You can have these made into a necklace you’ll always remember him by.’
‘You wouldn’t mind?’ she asked as he tipped them back into the bag, knotted it securely and hung it around his neck.