Summer Is for Lovers (6 page)

Chapter 7

I
T WASN’T ENOUGH
for Caroline to retreat, stumbling through Brighton’s dark streets, dragging Penelope behind her. She needed space. She needed escape.

She needed the swim that had been denied her some hours before.

Mama was already asleep, taken to bed by her headache some hours earlier. Bess had waited up, but Caroline sent the yawning servant off with apologies for keeping her so many hours past her usual bedtime. She ensured Pen had at least stepped out of her dress and found her mattress before her sister fell asleep.

And then Caroline let herself out the front door.

A full moon lay over the ocean, guiding her feet faster than she would have thought possible. She had never done such a foolhardy thing before. Surely it was a poor idea to trot in slippered feet along the treacherous footpath, guided by nothing more than a midnight moon. Surely she flirted with calamity to swim at a time of night when the more frightening varieties of sea life patrolled shallow waters.

But her memory of the night’s humiliation suffocated her good sense and honed her internal compass. This was not a night for sane arguments, or careful considerations.

David Cameron, the man she had dreamed of for eleven long years, had kissed her.

Her cheeks heated, and refused to be placated by the evening breeze. Yes, he had kissed her. Expertly, with the skill of a man who knew what he was about. And then he had laughed at her. Well, he wasn’t the first man to kiss her and display such a reaction.

But God help her, he was going to be the last.

She stuffed her self-doubts into the same dark corner where she kept her other secrets. They sat below the surface of her skin, clamoring for attention. By the time Caroline reached her swimming cove, those secrets were starting to chafe. She had never fit in among the popular crowd, not even when she tried very, very hard to hide her oddities. The only person who had ever come close to accepting—indeed, encouraging—her had been her father.

Her mother was convinced of the need to reform her, and they remained locked in frequent combat over things like her wardrobe. Her regrettable height. Her too-brown skin, and her insistence on traipsing about Brighton without a chaperone. Her mother only meant to help, she knew.

But Mama couldn’t help Caroline with this. The die had been cast, opinions formed. The parlor game tonight showed Caroline where she stood among Brighton’s seasonal crowd. Any opportunity she might have once had at finding a respectable match with a gentleman from the summer set was gone.

The only surprise of the evening was that she had survived most of the dinner party in relative obscurity before cresting the peak of mortification.

The moon shadows stretched out all around her as Caroline peeled off her dress and underskirts. Her corset came next. She pulled the pins from her hair with frantic fingers and welcomed the mantle of security as her heavy tresses fell across her shoulders.

The humid air settled over her bare skin like a sigh of relief, dampening her shift and easing her mood. The scents of marine life and moisture combined in an aromatic symphony, and it was a song she knew well. No other section of beach smelled as this one did. The indented cove and the steep cliff walls caught the scents off the ocean and held them fast.

She lifted her face to the chalk cliffs, the usual chatter of the swallows silenced by night. By daylight, she knew every crevice, every occupied nest above her. She had spent hours lying on a nearby rock, waiting for her hair to dry, staring up at the cliff face. But at night the contours of the place seemed different. The stark white geologic formations, peculiar to this part of Britain’s coast, were almost iridescent in the moonlight. She felt as if she were standing in a magnificent spotlight, and the ocean was her stage. The evening’s comedic failure receded as she took a step forward. The surf churned about her ankles, a parody of polite applause.

She had long since stopped trying to analyze why she was so drawn to the water, even to her own ruin. Perhaps it was her father’s legacy, an inheritance as indelible as the color of his hair. Or perhaps, through his own example, he had imprinted her with the things he loved. She could remember his obsession with the ocean as surely as she could still recall the smell of his pipe tobacco. Swimming was her most significant connection to her father, the last personal thing he had shared with her before he died. She cherished the memory, even though too often she felt plagued by the unwanted eccentricity.

Tonight she was grateful for his gift.

She pushed farther into the surf, until her hands skimmed the roiling water. The tide was nearly at its lowest point. Following the turmoil of the afternoon’s high spring tide, the water was calm tonight, and the pebbles along the ocean floor shifted to accommodate her progress. She gave a gasp of surprise as she stepped on something that wriggled away beneath her feet, but it wasn’t nearly enough to dissuade her. She was used to the risks of the ocean, be they dangerous eddies, stinging jellyfish, or sharp rocks. And so she drew a breath, filled her lungs, and let her body pitch forward into the waves.

She welcomed the rush of cool water over her head, filling her ears. The sound of the ocean was like a soothing balm, muffling the din of the night’s humiliation and the shriek of her internal voices. She glided effortlessly, knowing that the world below the surface was far calmer than the one that awaited her atop.

But as always, her body eventually demanded air.

She surfaced to noise of a different sort. An angry shout in a familiar voice.

“You stupid girl!” Tension snapped at her from the shoreline. The calm she had been seeking deserted her, chased by the anger in the voice.

She had come here to reflect on the indignity of the night.
Alone
. But David Cameron, the man who had caused that indignity, stood two dozen yards away on the shoreline, bristling in the moonlight. She didn’t know much about men, but if she had to hazard a guess from the sound of his voice, this one was very, very angry.

And she was all but naked.

Caroline sank down in water that regrettably came up no higher than her hips. The full moon was unbearably bright, and there was no doubt that David would be able to see every lack of curve beneath the soaked fabric, should he come close enough and be inclined to look.

The overhead moon illuminated his progress along the shore. It was too dark to see every detail, but the whispered shadows of night only made her look harder. He paced, the rigid slant of his shoulders speaking louder than words.

“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” he demanded, raising his voice to reach her over the sound of the ocean.

Anger began to edge out her initial panic. This was
her
hidden cove.
Her
chance to swim. He didn’t belong here, no matter how the sight of him, touched with moonlight and rage, sent her stomach tumbling. He had no business coming here, chastising her.

Tempting her.

He took a step toward her. She took a complementary lurch back.

“Any idiot knows you shouldn’t swim alone,” he shouted. “I recall you even telling me that once, although you clearly don’t heed your own advice.” He ran his hands through his hair in a tension-filled swipe. “Christ, Caroline, do you know how frightened I was when I saw you go under and not immediately come up?”

That gave her pause. He might have laughed at her after the kiss on the terrace, but he wasn’t laughing now.

“How did you know where to find me?” she demanded. “Did you follow me?”

His anger was palpable, thickening the air between them. “I took a guess.” His moonlit silhouette shrugged out of his evening coat. “An accurate one, it seems. I suspected as much after the kiss.”

Her gasp was indignant this time. How dare he bring the kiss into this . . . this . . . well, whatever
this
was. “I don’t recall inviting you to take that liberty,” she shouted back at him, striving to reach him over the sound of the water. “In fact, I recall warning you against it. So if you didn’t enjoy it . . .”

“I could tell from the way you tasted.” He retreated several steps to toss the coat onto a large rock that rose up, dark and menacing, behind him.
Her
rock, she thought, a bit uncharitably. “You tasted of salt, but not of perspiration. I couldn’t figure it out at first. But now it all makes sense.” He headed back toward her, and then she saw him strip off his waistcoat and toss it onto the shore. “Perfect. Bloody. Sense.”

She took a quick step backward through the water, shocked to hear in such indelicate terms how she had tasted. Somewhere nearby, the ocean floor dropped away and plunged to several feet or more over her head. She was paying far more attention to the man on the shore than to the water, and that was a sure guarantee for disaster.

And yet, she couldn’t look away. Her eyes followed the arc of his shirt as it joined his waistcoat’s insouciance on the shingle beach. “What are you doing?” Her voice sounded faint to her own ears.

His shoes were kicked off without ceremony, and then his trousers followed suit.

Surely he wouldn’t. Surely he
couldn’t.

He entered the water and began to close the distance between them in great, gasping strides. As he advanced on her, his shape became clearer, more distinct. Caroline’s earlier restrained panic began to jerk on its rope at the sight of so much of David Cameron’s exposed skin. And yet it was impossible to keep her eyes averted from the sight.

Her thoughts were flying, fast and furious, scattering to the wind and then coming back to coalesce on him. This was no childish dream, to be stored away and cherished in girlish naïveté as the years passed by. David Cameron was no longer a young man in a soaked military uniform. He was a hard, angry male, and he was clothed in so little it might as well have been nothing. Far from providing adequate cover, the night’s strong moon made his skin glow like polished granite. The ribbed slant of his abdomen drew her eye in a southerly direction before the ridge of muscle dipped into smallclothes she feared might soon turn as translucent as her own shift.

Though it was shallow where she stood, he dove into the last stretch of waves and finished the meager distance between them with an enviably constructed breaststroke. She stared at him, her mouth agape, as moonlight and water sluiced off his powerful arms. How could this be the same man who had once almost drowned on this stretch of beach?

“This isn’t proper,” she gasped as he came within arm’s reach. “I . . . I am not clothed, David.”

“We have already established you aren’t the sort of woman who cares overmuch about propriety. You wouldn’t be here risking your foolish neck, forcing me to take a midnight swim, otherwise.”

“I thought you
couldn’t
swim,” she protested.

He seized her around the waist and jerked her close. “I never said I couldn’t swim. I just can’t swim as well as you, mermaid.”

She could feel his pulse thumping in the grip of his fingers, there against her waist. “Then again,” he went on, his mouth lowering to her ear. “I don’t believe I’ve ever met another soul who could.” The last words were growled onto her neck, fanning out in tendrils of unwelcome warmth.

Dimly she realized he was pulling her closer to shore. The feel of his hot hands through her woefully insufficient shift broke the fragile hold she had on her panic. She dug her protesting feet into the ocean floor, rocks and sand scattering beneath her desperate toes. “It is none of your concern,” she panted.

He reacted by flexing his fingers into her protesting skin, as if to prevent her from bolting into the waves. “
You
are my concern, though I wish to God you weren’t. So tell me, Miss Tolbertson. Why do you come here, alone, risking your life on a lark? And just as important, why in the deuces are you pretending to be someone you aren’t?”

Chapter 8

D
AVID WAS SO
angry he could have shaken her till her teeth rattled.

It wasn’t only the hour-long walk he had just endured for the second time today, or the fact that she had left him thinking far too much about a kiss that should not have meant anything. He was angry that his suspicions about her had been correct. How could she be so reckless? He had danced with the intelligence sparking behind those kaleidoscope eyes. It boggled the mind, then, that she had thrown herself into this dangerous current.

Although, now that he was here, he had to acknowledge the water lapping around them seemed less intense than his memory predicted. In fact, compared to the churning surf he had glimpsed here just this afternoon, the ocean seemed about as dangerous at this moment as a half-filled hip bath.

As if in agreement with his unspoken thoughts, she struggled against him, her shoulders pummeling his chest. He was struck by her lissome strength and, by contrast, the softness of her water-slick skin.

How could he have missed it?

She had a swimmer’s build, all broad shoulders and narrow waist. He had thought her lanky when he had first seen her this morning, as if during some crucial years she had grown too fast and eaten too little. But now he readjusted that thinking.

She hadn’t grown into her body, her body had grown into
her
. She kept her form hidden behind the most god-awful frocks, but it you looked closely enough—or wrapped your arms around her—it was impossible to miss. What Dermott had intimated at the dinner party, that she was a girl with masculine leanings, was nothing close to the truth. She had her secrets, but Mr. Dermott had not hit upon them.

And David was a fool to have not seen it before.

“Let me go!” she gasped, rewarding his conjecture with a sharp elbow to the ribs. “I promise I am perfectly safe.”

His spleen protested the onslaught, but his grip remained firm. “You’ll forgive me if I lack a certain trust, given that not eight hours ago you assured me that ladies don’t swim.”

“Ladies don’t!” She spat the words with vehemence, her lean body writhing against the prison of his arms. “And I didn’t claim to be a lady. But a proper gentleman would not handle me in such a fashion, lady or no.”

He lowered his head and brought his lips flush against her ear. “If you recall, lass, I once told you I wasn’t a gentleman either.”

He felt her shocked intake of air, and his grip loosened. Nothing like reminding himself of his shortcomings to bring the matter home. If memory served, he had also once told her she should avoid men like him. And yet, where were they?

Stripped to their underclothes, drenched in seawater, grappling under a midnight moon.

He had spent the last eleven years avoiding the sort of entanglements that might lead him to become involved in an innocent young woman’s life. And he had just leaped into a raging ocean to save Caroline Tolbertson.

Even if it wasn’t actually raging tonight. And even if she appeared in no need of his proffered aid.

She took advantage of his slackening arms to twist herself ’round to face him, bringing her hands up to push against his chest. “I am in no danger, David.”

“I saw the surf this afternoon. You cannot convince me this is a safe place to swim.”

She drew a deep breath. “At high tide, there is some danger here, I will readily admit. The inlet and the cliff walls make the current very strong at times. But not now. It is heading toward low tide, and there is a full moon at that.”

One of his arms fell away, but the other proved stubborn. It was enjoying being wrapped around Caroline, ensuring the ability to jerk her to safety in the event of a rogue wave.

Or strangle her should the situation call for it.

“You clearly swim here at other times as well,” he said, unwilling to relinquish his anger or his hold on her. “Do not deny it, you were planning on swimming this afternoon, and the tide was up higher then.” He dared her to contradict him. This was a girl who took unnecessary risks, of that he had no doubt.

She wrenched from his weakened grasp and gathered herself warily, a few feet away. “Yes,” she admitted, still breathing hard. “I come here to swim. It is not as dangerous as you think, if you know and respect the current and the changing tides. I cannot swim at Brighton’s beaches, and so I come here. Where no one can see me.”

His anger refused to loosen its teeth. “That is ridiculous. Women swim in Brighton all the time. They construct bathing machines for the express purpose of swimming. In gentle surf. With people nearby to save you if you find yourself in trouble.”

“That is not swimming, David. That is torture. Think, for one moment, what it would be like to be denied the one thing you love.” Her words slashed at his heart in places that were supposed to be dead, places he was quite sure he had burned and buried eleven years ago. “This is the only place I can swim in open ocean,” she added, her voice cracking with emotion. “As fast as I dare, for as long as I want. With no one to judge me.”

David let his gaze snag on her damnable, ever-changing eyes and full, quivering lips, even though it was folly to be looking at her in this way, in this moment. He could understand something of what she was saying, but it did not deflect the worry that simmered in his gut at the thought of her swimming here, alone, risking her life. He, of all people, knew what it felt like to be out in this stretch of ocean when it had its claws in you.

Under his intense scrutiny, her arms crept up out of the water to cover her chest. The motion drew his eye, and for the first time his gaze settled on her shift, instead of her face.

Her very wet shift.

Much as he had when he had kissed her on the terrace, David felt the stirrings of an ill-timed interest, uncertain and hard and regrettable. She awakened something in him other than lust, although if he stopped to consider it, there was a bit of that surging to the surface too.

Damn it.
He had thrown himself into the ocean to rescue her, not gawk at her.

Irrespective of his better sense, his gaze fell lower, to where her shift was plastered against her skin. Between the waves, when the water receded, he could see the outline of her thighs. It was dark, but not so dark he couldn’t see . . . well . . . everything. She looked far too lovely, with the water lapping about her hips and the moonlight reflecting off the rivulets of water that coursed along her bare skin. Her legs were covered by water, and her arms were busy protecting the upper half of her body that seemed to worry her so much. She didn’t even realize that left her middle parts free for scrutiny.

And that was when he realized that while she might be willowy, there was nothing at all boyish in the gentle swell of her hips, or the womanly shadow that hovered at the seam of her legs.

“Please, don’t look at me like that.” Her words clipped his expanding thoughts as efficiently as a pair of sharp shears.

David swallowed, aiming his eyes back toward the safer direction of shore. He knew he should apologize, but he could not find the words to beg her pardon when all he wanted to do was look again. “You should have told me this afternoon.” His voice came out hoarse. He tried to focus on the nearby shoreline, on the waves that pushed against his body, instead of the direction his mind and his eyes wanted to wander. “I would not have judged you.”

He heard a gentle sloshing that indicated she moved closer to him, apparently deciding he was trustworthy after all. “You judged me just now, presuming I couldn’t take care of myself, or know my own limits.” Her words were accusing, but her tone had gentled.

Guilt nudged at him. “I am sorry,” he said. “Clearly, I was wrong.”

And deranged. Otherwise, he would be taking his leave from the water, and tossing her the gown he had spied on shore, and demanding she button it up and not take it off in his presence ever gain.

He kept his line of vision anchored beyond her, to the gray cliff shadows that rose along the shore. Through sheer force of will, his stirrings started to settle. After all, she was not the sort of woman he was usually attracted to. And his gaze was no longer directed at that lust-provoking shadow at the junction of her legs.

And the water was damnably cold.

After a moment’s silence, he heard the soft, welcome sound of her laughter. “Not that I don’t appreciate the effort, and not that you don’t appear to have a capable—if overtutored—swimming style, but did you really think you could have saved me had I needed it?”

He risked a look at her then. His eyes settled on her lips, which were curving upward. The gesture remolded her features into something passably pretty. The last residue of anger drained away at the evidence of her amusement, and his own lips pursed around a smile. “Overtutored? I reached you, didn’t I?”

“That was hardly a challenge, given we are standing in no more than waist-deep water.” Her eyes narrowed, though her lips never faltered from their delicious upward curve. And then she dove into the waves.

She swam away so fast David didn’t even have time to blink. Beyond the heart-wrenching plunge he had seen her take a few minutes ago, he hadn’t seen her swim since that day eleven years ago, and then he had been something like two dozen sheets to the wind. He watched her a moment, analyzing her movements. She didn’t have the serious, perfect form she had just teased him about. Truth be told, she splashed a great deal as her hands cut into the water.

But Christ almighty, she moved like lightning.

Caroline’s unusual swimming stroke, with alternating hands and feet working like shears, gave her an efficiency of motion the likes of which he had never seen. He was no slothful swimmer himself. In addition to ensuring his sons could fire a revolver with enviable accuracy, and pass, if not excel, during their required four years at Cambridge, David’s father had impressed upon him and his older brother the necessity of a powerful, well-formed breaststroke.

But David was used to swimming in the fresh water of Loch Moraig, not open ocean. Even though the low tide was not particularly difficult to navigate, he floundered as he followed her. His arms’ synchronized motion kept getting tangled in the choppy, irregular waves that bounced off nearby rocks.

But she did not slow down in the slightest.

And David could do nothing but chase her.

C
AROLINE TOOK PITY
on him just as she reached the rocky foothold of the sandbar.

She waited there, trying to settle her stomach. This was the ocean, the one place in the world where she felt comfortable. But tonight she felt as if fleas were jumping under her skin.

If only he didn’t look so masculine. His shoulders showed evidence of his years in the army, sinew and muscle, flexing in purpose. She had seen more than her fair share of men in shirtsleeves while growing up along Brighton’s beaches, but David Cameron looked nothing like Mr. Dermott and the other dandies who came down from London each summer and shed their coats as the temperature rose. In fact, she suspected that, if stripped down and compared to the nearly naked man swimming toward her, Dermott would look very much like the boy he had accused
her
of being.

She greeted David with a spontaneous splash of water, right to his face. “Not a laudable effort,” she teased.

He grinned, white teeth flashing in moonlight. “You’ll never get saved properly if you keep outswimming your rescuer,” he told her, shaking the water from his eyes.

And then he was ducking beneath the black water and grabbing her ankle and jerking her under. She came up sputtering and spewing and choked with laugher. The enjoyment of that moment threatened to submerge her as thoroughly as David had just done.

She was swimming, for the first time since her father’s death, with someone else. Someone who wasn’t judging her. Someone who made her laugh.

Someone who made her
want
.

Before she could give voice to those emotions, before she could even sort out the delicious skitter of her stomach, he looped an arm around her shoulders and began to haul her back to shore.

She couldn’t breathe. Not because his arm was too constricting, but because her lungs went rigid with surprise and repressed longing. She could have stayed that way forever, caught in his grip, even if it was purely for demonstration purposes. But all too soon the ocean floor met her feet, and then her posterior as he tossed her into the shallows.

He flung himself down next to her, loose-limbed and comfortable in the surf lapping along the shore. In contrast, Caroline felt as if she was waging a silent battle to pretend she was far less affected than she actually was.

“Did I answer the challenge well enough, mermaid?” He chuckled.

“I’ll admit that wasn’t a poor showing, for someone who only recently learned how to swim.” She peeked at him from beneath her lashes.

“That was a commendable showing, my friend.” He looked terribly pleased with himself, as if he rescued not-drowning girls every day. “And I’ll have you know I’ve been swimming since I was a child.”

His admission was unexpected. So was his easy reference to her as a “friend.” Her heart withered, just a little. She understood what David felt for her. He considered her a friend, nothing more.

But for heaven’s sake. Did he have to point it out quite so often?

Rather than dwell on the irritation his declaration brought, she sorted through her memories of that day when he had almost drowned. She had always presumed he had floundered because he hadn’t known how to swim, and that his folly had been magnified by the false bravado that often came at the bottom of a bottle. But with this new bit of information, she was unable to reorder the pieces into something approaching logic.

He shoved his way through her thoughts, nudging her with one bare shoulder. “You once told me your father taught you to swim. Where did he learn such an unusual style?”

Caroline pulled her mind from the physical and emotional conundrum David Cameron presented. “I believe he learned from an American who spent several years in Brighton. Apparently, the man had learned from the Natives in his own country. I realize it doesn’t look quite the thing, but . . .”