‘I don’t underst—’ she began and he kissed her. It was not gentle or considerate or teasing. It was uncompromising, and so was the hard thrust of his body against her and the way he pulled her shirt clean out of her trousers and ran his hand up, over her bare skin, to take her breast and mould it with strong, calloused fingers.
Her flesh seemed to swell as though eager to fill his hand and she moaned into the heat of his mouth, wanting and aching, and both his hands were on her body now and she understood, finally, what her clamouring senses were telling her to do and dragged his shirt out, too, frustrated because his coat stopped her pulling it over his head.
Luc’s skin was hot and smooth and she could feel those lovely muscles she had watched with such scandalised fascination. Her hands slipped lower, under the waistband of his trousers and his hands that had been doing indecently wonderful things to her breasts stilled.
‘Luc?’ His whole body was rigid, then she felt him relax as he stepped back.
‘That very nearly got out of control,’ he said, passing his hand across his mouth while his eyes held hers. ‘I am sorry. It is a good thing you will be sleeping alone tonight, I think.’
Averil found she could, after all, articulate. ‘It was my fault, too.’
‘No. You are an innocent—you don’t understand.’
‘I am beginning to get the hang of it, a little,’ she ventured, shocking herself.
‘Lucky Bradon,’ Luc said with a flash of the grin that made her smile back, a trifle uncertainly. ‘I’ll see you at supper.’
When he had gone she sat quite still for a while on the edge of the bed and tried to think. Luc said she was not wanton, only sensual. Was that true? He took the blame for that kiss becoming so much more, and yet she wasn’t ignorant, or unobservant. She should have stopped him the moment his fingers slid under her shirt. But she had not; she had wanted to undress him and to touch him intimately and—and then what?
Averil got up and let herself out, walked over the rise behind the hut and, once she was out of sight of the ships at anchor, began to climb towards the island’s little summit until she was at the top and looking out westward over open ocean. There was nothing between her and America, she realised, thinking of the endless ocean the Bengal Queen had ploughed across to bring her here, to this tiny speck on the edge of the Atlantic.
The breeze was brisk and cool, and the sea spread out like crumpled silk with tiny white wavelets all over it and sudden, sinister, patches of foam and disturbed water to mark submerged rocks. She had thought perhaps she would see the wreck of the Bengal Queen from this height, but she could not. Was it out of sight behind that big island—Tresco, she thought they had called it—or had it sunk to the bottom?
How could anyone navigate at night through this maze of islands and islets and reefs? She pulled her braid over her shoulder and began to play with the end while she watched the sea. Only a few days since the wreck and so much had happened. She was a different woman. I have suffered a sea change, she thought. I thought I knew who I was and what I wanted. Who I wanted.
‘But it doesn’t matter what I want,’ she said out loud, as though arguing with someone else. Or, perhaps, just with her conscience. ‘There is a contract, an agreement. Papa has said that I will marry Lord Bradon.’
There really was no option, after all. Whatever it was that was happening between her and the man she had met only days before, the man who had saved her life, it was not about the prospect of marriage. And marriage was her purpose in life: to marry well to help her family, then to be a good wife and support her husband and to raise happy, healthy children to carry on his line.
I have had a shock, Averil thought, sitting down, then lying back so she was watching the sky and not the troubling, shifting, sea. I am not quite steady in my mind. Almost killed, mourning for her friends … Of course she felt more for Luc d’Aunay than she would have under any other circumstances, she reasoned.
The bright sky hurt her eyes. Averil rolled over and lay on her stomach, propped herself up on her elbows and frowned at the short grass between them. It was starred with tiny flowers she did not know the names of and a minute black beetle was making its way through what must seem a jungle to it.
And what were those feelings when she came right down to it? Luc made her cross a lot of the time. He most certainly aroused wickedly sensual sensations that she was doing her best not to think about. He was attractive, although not handsome—she would not allow him that accolade. He was brave and strong and commanding and ruthless and even if he rescued women from admirals bent on rape he seemed to have no scruples over almost seducing her.
The world was full of strong, confident men like that, she told herself: Alistair Lyndon, the Chatterton twins, to name but three. She bit her lip—they were all right, they had to be. If she could reach land alive, then those men could.
Yes, there were thousands of attractive, courageous, dashing men and she was probably about to marry one. But in the meantime this one, the one she owed her life to, was going into danger. And behind his strength there was a darkness. His family tragedy and his isolation because of his birth would account for some of it. The injustice of the situation he now found himself in would be enough to make any man cynical and angry. She wondered if he would be in this position if he had been fully English or whether prejudice had told against him. Did he really know what he wanted? Did he secretly yearn for acceptance as an Englishman as well as for his French identity and title back again?
Averil sat up and looked down the slope to where the men were gathered r
ound Luc as he stood in the pilot gig on the beach and realised what she had been meaning to do ever since he had pulled her into his arms in the hut.
She was going with them.
Chapter Nine
‘Ferris.’
‘Yes, miss?’ As Averil reached the bottom of the slope the skinny little man looked up from the knife he was sharpening with loving care on a whetstone. She sat down beside him with a momentary thought about how convenient trousers were and how restricting skirts would seem when—if—she ever got back to them.
‘With Dawkins injured you are one man down for tonight.’
‘Aye, we are that.’ He spat on the stone and drew the knife down it again with a sinister hiss. ‘Clumsy lummock.’
‘Is it all boarding and fighting or does someone have to stay in the pilot gig?’ She had been trying to work out the tactics for boarding a brig from a much smaller boat and it seemed to her that they could not just all swarm on board and leave the gig to float away.
‘Someone has to stay, miss. If Dawkins wasn’t such a big lump, perhaps the cap’n would have taken ‘im anyway, but he can’t row with that bad foot—you can’t get the strength behind the stroke, see—and we can’t haul ‘im on board, not and fight at the same time, and he’s a great hulk of a man.’ He tried the edge of his knife with the ball of his thumb and grunted with satisfaction. ‘In the gig Dawkins is just that much more weight if he can’t fight or row. We’ve got the extra weapons and the charts and stuff as well—you can’t climb up the side carrying that lot and fight, so the man in the gig ‘as to look after those.’