Merry spit it quickly into her hand.
“But it ain’t!” he finished and ducked, chuckling, as she threw the half-chewed piece of meat at him. She began to chuckle too and received into her open mouth the handful of sticky weeds that Meadows had tossed back at her in retaliation. Enough was enough. Tired she might be, but she was not going to take that sitting down. Merry snatched a long stick that was crooked at the end and flew at Meadows, advancing on him like a fencer.
“En garde!” cried Meadows, brandishing his meat spear.
Neither party had strength enough for a prolonged battle, so the match was short, zesty, and sparked with laughter. Excited sand fleas, kicked up in the dust, hopped around them, nipping. The exhausted combatants settled back under the chestnut tree, slapping insects off their arms and listening with weary pleasure to the night’s song. How varied was the symphony of an evening at peace. The buzzes, hums, whistles, and the high bird calls soothed the senses like sleep. The luminous moon hung above them, close and gigantic.…
Merry woke, dazed and stiff, to the dawn’s first breath.Meadows slept on, and on, and at last she came to her knees beside his dusty body and tried, rather playfully, to rouse him.
But Michael Meadows was dead. Prickly instinct warned her before she was able to roll him gently to his back, feeling the helpless droop of the muscle tone, the utter stillness of a body where function had ceased. His eyes were closed, the lids bloodless, his jaw hanging slightly open. This was not sleep. Sometime during the night the aging pirate’s heart had stopped.
She sat on her heels for a long time, gazing with hollow sadness into the irrevocability of death.
Then she realized that she was alone.
She was not to realize how totally alone until she struggled on her own to the beach, following the siren scent of the sea, to find that her boat had vanished in the prankish crawl of a high tide.
Now she found a flat stone and began to dig a resting place for her companion in the soft sand. But crocodiles came from the depths of the pool to claim him before she could finish, and she fled for her life into a citrus tree and remained there, trembling in a fever bath of misery, trying to close her ears to the horrible sounds below. She did not cry then, nor when she found the boat was lost, nor even as her accidental footstep discovered the one remnant of Meadows, his head. Instead she was mercilessly ill, and then she stood up to begin doing what her days on theJokehad schooled her to do—survive.
In the two weeks that followed, she learned the full meaning of being alone. As though she were the last soul on earth, she became her own companion in the grim desolation of long nights filled with milky starlight and heavy dew; of days thick with the rustling voice of the forest. Hours passed when she heard no sound but the palm fronds rattling in the scorching breeze like dry finger bones. The heat was deadly, a withering stench that left her clothing clammy with perspiration moments after she had washed and dried it on the speared fingers of a poinsettia bush. Minute insects, steelblue pinpoints with wings, swirled around her in a humming mist. Pink welts marked her body from their venom. She rose each morning shaking wood ants, brushing speckles of grit and leaf rot from her skin, and grieving for her family, who would never know what had become of her.
Unfamiliar vegetation was lush around her. She had no way to know which of it was edible and which was not, and her experiments did unspeakable things to her digestion. It became hard to recall just why running away from theJokehad seemed like such a good idea. As she tried one more piece of bitter exotic fruit and wondered whether it was cassava or manioc or the Lord knew what, she remembered the times on theJokewhen she had eaten on deck with Will Saunders making double entendres about her lips and what her fingers were doing that were so wicked Merry had never figured out even one, though everyone within hearing had collapsed in gales of laughter. At the time she had never guessed that a day would come when she would regard those moments with longing.
Chapter 17
It happened that Devon was the one who found her. He saw her first from the far end of a sun-dappled meadow where fading day filtered in hazy spikes through the forest canopy. She lay innocently curled in clean elfin nudity under the drooping fronds of an orchid clump. Her back was toward him, the sweet misty flesh strewn with the curling ribbons of her damphair. The curving line of her cheek and brow were barely visible under the drying gilded fluff that edged her face.
He said her name once, and then, acutely conscious of the wealth of emotion he had invested in the single word, he disciplined himself into less revealing silence as he ran lightly, rapidly toward her.
Merry had bathed. That finished, she had been about to put her ragged clothing to another cleaning when a headache had struck with sudden savagery. She had lain down for what was meant to be only a moment and had lapsed into the stupor that for her was replacing sleep. Then, though she had begun to believe that she might never hear it again, someone had spoken her name. Her startled senses knew suddenly that she was no longer alone. She turned and saw him.
Finding her alive and evidently unharmed tapped every feeling within him that he had spent the past days trying to contain. His relief was white-hot, searing, a blaze that was too bright to look into.
“There must be some kind of archive where we can have you registered. Two escapes from a pirate ship on the high seas is likely to be a record.”
His presence penetrated slowly to her consciousness, and she heard not his words but his voice, the tone fresh and light, charmingly low, alive with intelligence, and not so shorn of feeling as he might have wished.
Her inhalation was a jarring series of broken gasps. Standing would have taken more strength than she possessed at the moment, so she stretched out her arms to embrace the part of him she could reach, which happened to be his leg.
“Devon!” she whispered softly. Her voice was un-quavering, a tribute to her hard-won self-possession. The problem was that she couldn’t stop saying it. And when she had said it many times, she changed it to, “Is it really you?” Over and over she murmured the words in a broken whisper.
Of all her possible reactions this was one he hadn’t anticipated. He looked down at her small oval head, adjusting to her closeness. Against his leg he could feel the warm touch of her very soft breasts, the quick rise and fall of her shallow breathing, the fast beating of her heart. Her hair swirled around his calf and washed like a golden net over his boots as she pressed her lips into the side of his knee. Within the warm hive of her curls the shallow slope of her nose rubbed sniffing against his knee, and he could barely discern that the tip wasn’t exactly dry.
This, after days of raw anger, after days of searching for her, forcing himself to accept the state in which he might find her.… Hideous visions of what she might have endured, briefly banished on finding her alone, were returning in force. He knew too well the nightmare that life could become for an unprotected woman in these waters. After a long hesitation he lowered himself to her side, and laying his left hand on her head, he stroked lightly over her shimmering honey curls.
She was well-bred and shy about her body. Yet she seemed unconscious of her nudity, her utterly lovely, compelling nudity, and beneath his concern he could feel the thrilling drive of his own desire.
She said his name again, in a voice that sounded shaky, and as if she had tears and hair in her mouth. His fingers searched and pulled clinging hair strands from her barely moistened lips, and as his fingertips brushed her mouth he felt the contact burn in hot channels through his body. Stupid, to kneel here nourishing it. He felt light-headed, odd, unable to recognize himself in the welter of tender emotions that were a torrent inside him.
Merry, however, saw nothing new in the clean-lined composure of his face. She watched through a nerve-wrenching mixture of revived fear and thanksgiving as he discovered her clothing beneath a citrus tree and handed it curtly to her.
“Try to cover a majority of everything irresistible,” he said.
Lithe, dangerous, and familiar, he went to stand against a fallen cedar that supported a straggling growth of prickly pear in its dry roots. Then, hardly giving her time to react to his command, he snapped, “Dress, Merry. Quickly.”
The words had been spoken harshly, though in a soft tone. Still, he saw they had startled her. Her nerves were as volatile, as shocked as his, and he watched her unsteady attempt to stand, watched her dropping clothing through her numb fingers and realized with something like despair that she needed help. It showed in her eyes; in the unnatural stiffness of her muscles. Exhaustion; poor nourishment; exposure. She was in no state to receive his questions or the attentions of his body. Yet even as he was making the decision to moderate his immediate need he felt the denial within, realized he was crossing toward her, pulling her close.
It was an act of instinct, of aching hunger that drove his fingers deeper into her curls to bring her face close to his. His mouth hovered just above hers, heating her lips, caressing them with his breath before he brought them softly, softly together. He coaxed against her still lips until they parted in confusion, permitting him access to the wild honey taste of her mouth. His lips stroked over, against hers, drinking her desperation, feeding her his, dragging her tighter, breathing in the heat and wet orchid scent of her body.
