Nathan had enjoyed the slow, teasing tempo of Lydia’s lovemaking until he glimpsed her siren’s smile and felt her savage little love bite. Growling deeply at the back of his throat, Nathan’s fingers pressed harder against her buttocks and he thrust hard, pushing deep inside her, and repeated the motion again, urging her to catch his rhythm now. She held him with her arms and legs, and more intimately with the feminine center of her. The roles of captor and captive were reversed and reversed again. Pleasure gathered force between them as they gave freely and took greedily.
Lydia was rising on a swelling tide of excitement. The water around her, the dense forest just beyond it, the air redolent with exotic fragrances as well the familiar one she associated only with Nathan, Lydia felt as if all her senses were fired for this moment. When he made her come, she would shatter into rainbow colors like the water prisms, only her colors would be more vibrant, she thought, magenta instead of pink, emerald instead of green, gold for yellow. Her colors would be hot and liquid, like the molten center of Nathan’s eyes where onyx ran to silver.
It happened in just that fashion. The colors were brilliant behind Lydia’s closed eyes as she shuddered in Nathan’s embrace. Her back arched, her head was thrown back, her nails made small white crescents in his upper arms. This time she bit her lower lip to keep from crying her pleasure aloud. She heard it in the rushing fall of water, in the rustle of ferns, and in the keening cry of alien birds in the treetops.
Pleasure coursed through Nathan then. Every spring of tension spun wildly out of control and he filled her with his seed, holding her so tightly that she was a mere extension of him. He held her for just that way for a long time after, his face pressed to the damp curve of her neck, tendrils of her wet hair flicking his cheek. His eyes were closed and what she couldn’t see were the tears that scalded his lids and swelled his throat almost shut. Words were superfluous now, and for that Nathan was thankful. He couldn’t have given sound to anything he was thinking.
He let Lydia down gently, watching her lovely breasts vanish beneath the water. Drawing a line with his forefinger from the hollow of her throat to her navel, Nathan’s knuckles brushed her breast and he felt a frisson of pleasure shake her slender frame. He raised his eyes to hers and realized she had been watching him, too, waiting, her expression expectant and somehow guarded at the same time. What did she want? he wondered. What had he done to make her wary of him?
Lydia blinked. When she opened her eyes again the smile that touched her moist lips touched her eyes, too. She stood on tiptoe, kissed Nathan lightly, then took his wrist and led him to the rocky outcropping where their colorfullava-lavashad been discarded. Nathan fastened his around his waist, the hem coming to midcalf. Lydia wrapped her mauve one around her middle, knotting it to the left of her breasts so that it split along the length of her thigh when she walked. Nathan placed a lei of island orchids around her neck and realized that he was staring at her only when she turned aside, embarrassed by his attention.
They sat down together where the rocks were flat and smooth. Lydia’s bare toes dipped in the water as it splashed against her perch. She pulled all of her hair over one shoulder and sifted through it with her fingers. When it was combed out she began to braid it in a thick plait that would fall in a single line down the center of her back.
Nathan sat beside her, his long legs stretched out across the warm rocks, his arms braced behind him. He studied her profile, the touch of the aristocrat in the shape of her nose, in the tilt of her head and chin, the fairness of her skin. What was he doing with her? he asked himself silently and not for the first time. He knew the answer, but the answer didn’t make sense anymore. She should have been completely out of his reach, someone he might desire but would never have. He was a bastard, the son of a whore, a sneaksman, convict, and murderer. On reflection he added abductor and liar.
In so many ways they were opposites. His soul was black. Sometimes the pure white light of Lydia’s blinded him. He wasn’t particularly kind. Lydia had a giving heart and a gentle soul; she felt things deeply when often he could feel nothing at all. It was more than his back that was scarred, more than his flesh that bore the wounds of his past.
Most mornings she was hard to wake; most mornings he woke hard. She cut her food in tiny pieces and ate slowly, savoring the taste of each morsel put in front of her. There were moments he forgot he wasn’t hungry anymore, forgot the food wasn’t going to be stolen from his plate if he didn’t shovel it in. There were times he was midway through his second helping before he realized Lydia had barely made a dent in her first. With so much of her past erased from her memory, Lydia lived almost exclusively in the present—desiring, discovering, loving, wanting. Nathan lived there as well, but for different reasons. He hated the past and dreaded the future. There was no other place for him.
Perhaps it was the reason they practically ignited when they touched, Nathan thought. He had no other explanation. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for Lydia or the things she was capable of doing to him. And here, on this verdant tropical island in the middle of the South Pacific, hours away from the date line and sailing into tomorrow, Lydia had come to him with incredible abandon and sensuality and shown him a depth of sensation and pleasure that he had never known. She was making love to him, he realized. Making love.
What the bloody hell, then, was he doing to her?
Lydia dropped her braid down her back and laid a hand on Nathan’s thigh. She stared out over the pool toward the crystalline curtain of the waterfall. A bird swooped low, cut behind the steady shower of water, then reappeared on the other side, crying gleefully, triumphantly, at this superb flight of daring. Lydia smiled widely and turned the full force of it on Nathan at the moment he was most vulnerable.
“There must be no more beautiful place than this on earth,” she said, a hint of reverence in her voice.
“No,” said Nathan. But he wasn’t thinking of where they were. He was only thinking of her. “You don’t want to leave, do you?”
“Doyou?”
Did he? “Not as soon as we must,” he said finally. “But eventually, yes, I’d want to leave. I’m just the sort of man God drove out of paradise, Liddy. I don’t belong here—not for long.”
It hurt her when he talked that way, as if he were still the man he had been with no hope of expecting better, as if the scars that lashed his back had made the same indelible impressions on his soul.
“But you,” he said quietly, turning away from her. “You don’t belong anywhere else.”
Lydia leaned against him and was immediately enfolded in the secure circle of his arms. She hugged her knees to her chest. “I belong with you,” she said. “Don’t you ever forget that.” She grinned then, shooting him a quick glance. “Just in case I do.”
They walkedfor several miles in the dense forest before they came to the place where they’d left theirpapalagiclothes. Sometimes Nathan carried Lydia along the path that had been beaten out and tramped down by the Samoans before them. Lydia’s tender feet weren’t always up to the task of traveling the rough terrain.
Lydia smiled ruefully of her own reluctance to shed thelava-lavaand trade it for the conventional and proper gown she had worn that morning. “What do you think Mrs. Wilson would say if we both arrived in the village wearing these?”
“She wouldn’t say anything,” said Nathan. “But only because she’d have fainted dead away. Mr. Wilson, however, would point out that while it is quite proper for the Samoans to adopt thepapalagiway, we must not adopt thefa’a Samoa—and that includes the wearing of a sheet.”
Lydia laughed at Nathan’s mocking piety. He had caught Mr. Wilson’s tone precisely. She dropped thelava-lavaand picked up her undergarments, including her stiff whalebone corset, and began to dress. When she turned her back to Nathan for help with lacing the corset, he simply removed it and flung it into the trees. Rounding on him, Lydia said his name in shocked accents.
Mimicking her inflated outrage, Nathan repeated his name. “Did you really want to wear it, Liddy?” he asked, taking his own voice back. “If you’re that bent on being tortured by your own clothing, I’ll get it for you.”
Lydia looked over her shoulder to where Nathan had pitched the corset. It was hanging rather precariously from the end of a palm frond, its strings caught neatly in the fringed leaves. Her eyes traveled the length of the long, slender tree trunk. She had seen village children shinny up the trees, retrieve a green coconut, and slither back down, all of it accomplished in a mere heartbeat, most of it while Lydia’s heart was in her mouth. She didn’t think she could ask Nathan to climb that palm. Even if he could do it, she couldn’t stand it.
“It can stay just where it is,” she said, slipping her chemise over her head. “No corset’s worth a broken neck.”
Nathan grinned at her reasoning. He didn’t point out that he could have shaken the tree or thrown a shoe at the palm frond to knock it down. She probably wouldn’t thank him for presenting those options.
When they finished dressing, Nathan slipped his arms around Lydia’s middle from behind. He drew her back against him while his palms smoothed the material of her plain gray gown from her waist to the high-collared bodice. “Much better,” he murmured against her ear. He placed a light kiss on her temple. “I can feel you under here, not whale skeleton.” To prove his point, his thumbs passed over the tips of her breasts and Lydia’s nipples hardened immediately.
Looking down at herself, Lydia could see the faint outline of her arousal. She pushed his hands out of the way and raised her arms to cover herself. “Everyone will know,” she practically wailed.
