“I’m serious, Cloud.”
“And I have never been more serious about anything,” he replied, his eyes caressing her slender form in one continuous motion. It was always like that, he thought. There was no place for his eyes to stop. His glance was forced to take in all of her. Her oval face, the tangent line that formed her neck and branched out at her shoulder, curving over her breast, curving in at her waist, down her thigh, her calf, and extending past her feet into infinity. “There are a few things you have to learn about me, Alex.” He stopped. Her eyes had narrowed and she held his glance in the only way it was possible, shooting amber flecks of fire into his face. He sighed. “I suppose that lesson will have to wait. What do you want to know?”
Alexis smiled. “Everything,” she said, sitting up. “Currents, places where storms are especially fierce, how to maneuver a ship in tight places. I already know trade routes. George taught me that. And I know where Lafitte and his men are likely to strike. We had to know because we sometimes carried cargo from Spain and that made us his target. I am familiar with the Caribbean. I know the dangerous reefs, like Horse Shoe, but I’m ignorant of the Atlantic. I want to know about conditions around France and England, and islands that are available for fresh water and supplies. And fighting. Don’t forget to tell me about strategy.”
“In short, everything.”
“That’s what I said.”
Cloud persuaded her to move the maps from the deck back to the table. She sat in the chair and he sat on the arm, one foot propped on the part of the seat she would allow him while the other stretched out beside him. She grilled him with questions. He answered them concisely and clearly, aware of her reason for asking, her resolve not far from either of their minds. When she had no more questions, he asked some of her. Alexis answered instantly, and when she did not know something she would struggle with the problem at length until she could find a solution by studying the charts. He was pleased that more often than not she arrived at the correct answers. When she did not, he explained her errors in detail so she might learn from them.
Finally, Alexis held up her hands in surrender. They had been working for almost three hours before she had heard all she thought she could assimilate.
“No more, Cloud. Not tonight,” she said, leaning against her chair and rubbing her back on the hard wood.
He watched her curiously. She had made the same movement earlier while he was explaining the currents off the coast of France and later when she was stuck on a particularly hard problem. It was distracting and he told her so.
Alexis leaned forward, resting her head in her arms on the table. “I’m sorry if it bothers you but my back is itchy. Those cuts are beginning to heal and I want to scratch them.”
He rubbed her back lightly with his palm. “Is that better?”
“Infinitely,” she sighed, closing her eyes.
“Where is the lotion John left with you? Have you been using it?”
“How could—right there…up a little higher…How could I apply it to myself? I haven’t used it since he last put it on me.”
“Then I’ll get it. Where is it?”
Alexis told him and when he returned she was already lying face down on his bunk, her shirt and shoes on the deck beside it. She moved toward the middle to give him room to sit at her side. She felt his weight on the bunk and when he did not do anything for a long time she said, misunderstanding his hesitation, “If the sight of my back is repulsive to you I can have John do it.”
Repulsive? he thought. Hardly. He did not know if he had ever seen anything as beautiful as the harsh, thin lines across her otherwise flawless skin. It was a symbol of her strength and a reminder to him of how much she had loved one man. He gripped her braid tightly and twisted her head so she could see his face and know the truth. He placed his mouth over hers and kissed her hungrily, almost brutally. He whispered the words she hated against her breasts as he turned her over and her arms folded around him.
Alexis knew the truth and thought that truth had never been at once so painful and so liberating. Their bodies clashed, sweat-slick, hunger demanding to be fed. Alexis pushed against him, wanting to feel all of him pressing close to her flesh. His strong hands that could easily strangle the life from her body she wanted to feel tight against her skin, squeezing breath into her lungs that she could emit in short gasps and brief moans. His powerful legs that walked the deck so surely she wanted to feel, hard on her own, strength against strength. His mouth that said cruel things to her ears she wanted to have on her mouth, at her breasts, on her stomach, and finally at the place between her legs where nothing he said mattered any longer, where only the pressure of his tongue against her inflamed flesh was of any importance.
When it was over Alexis lay beside him and listened to their ragged breathing grow calm in unison. Cloud took her braid and undid the golden strands, amusing himself by running his fingers through the wavy mass. He picked it up and arranged it over her glistening shoulders and breasts; then he brushed it away to reveal what he had hidden. He kissed her on the neck then, more an expulsion of air than actual pressure of soft skin on equally tender flesh.
“You have lovely hair,” he said, brushing a wisp of it from the corner of her eye.
“Thank you. I grew—” She stopped, realizing she was about to tell him she had grown it for Pauley, a promise in a previous existence it seemed now. She looked up into his emerald eyes. They were the exact color of the leaves on the trees around her home on the first day she saw them. Your eyes should not be that color, she thought. You should not remind me there was a time when I was free to make the promises of a little girl in love with someone who loved me back. I will hurt you for that, Cloud. “I grew it as a promise to Pauley. When I met him I had cropped hair and he told me if I ever cut it again he would take a switch to me. The threat was idle. He knew I grew it because I wanted to please him.”
Cloud’s features tightened. He kept his fingers wrapped around the curling strands for a moment. Abruptly he released her hair and fell back against the bunk, staring at the ceiling. “I’m glad he told you to do it,” he said after a long silence. “I thought there was something special about the way he looked at you that morning on the beach.”
“You saw Pauley and me?” she asked. “You were there then?”
Cloud nodded. “We were waiting for your father to come to the house so we could warn him about the British. It was too dangerous for us to wait there so we stationed ourselves at points around your home.”
“There were others, besides you and John?”
“Two. They were killed in the firing.”
“I didn’t know,” she said softly.
“No reason you should,” he said, unknowingly echoing her earlier sentiment to Landis.
“How long were you there, Cloud? Were you there before Pauley came?”
“You were swimming when I first saw you,” he replied, a slight catch in his breath as he remembered the girl battling the waves. “I thought you were a mermaid at the time. I expected you to have fins when you got to the beach.”
