The Least Likely Bride (3 page)

She wondered whether to speak, but it seemed impolite to disturb his concentration, so she lay watching him through half-closed eyes, deep in the languid warmth of her peculiar bed. Her body was still sore, and the back of her head felt bruised. Other disparate aches and pains lingered with the slight muzziness in her head. She felt remote, contented, the terrors of the nightmare world vanquished. And she was aware of the strangest connection between herself and the man at the table. It was puzzling but only vaguely so. Mostly it made her feel happy.

And then he spoke. He didn’t raise his head or look up from his work, but he said in the harmonious voice she remembered from the dreams, “So, Sleeping Beauty returns to the world.”

The question didn’t so much break the silence as slide into it. “Who are you?” she asked. Of all the questions that came to mind, it seemed the only one of any importance.

He looked up then. His hand fell idly to the papers on
the table as he regarded her, with a half smile on his lips. “I was expecting you to brush your brow and say, ‘Where am I?’ Or words to that effect.”

When she didn’t immediately reply, he came around the table and perched on the edge facing her, stretching his legs, crossing them at the ankle. The sun was behind him and his golden head was ablaze. He laughed, a light, merry sound. His teeth flashed white against the deep bronze of his complexion, and laugh lines crinkled at the corners of his deep-set gray eyes. “Don’t you wonder where you are, Lady Olivia?”

She wondered if he was mocking her. She sat up, clutching the sheet to her chin. Only as she did so did she realize anew that she was naked. The sheet, crisp and fresh and clean, was all that lay between her bare skin and this man, who sat there so insouciant, laughing at her.

“How do you know my name?”

He shook his head. “No prescience, I’m afraid. ‘Olivia’ was sewn into all your undergarments. A common enough practice, I believe, in large households with busy laundresses. I had to undress you to tend to you, you understand.” There was a glimmer of secret amusement in his eyes that made Olivia’s skin prickle. Then he leaned sideways to a small table and picked up a book. It was the book she had been reading when she had stepped into thin air.

He flipped it open to the title page. “Olivia Granville.” He held it for her so she could see where she herself had inscribed her name. “Aeschylus … not what I would call light reading.” He raised an interrogative eyebrow, the smile still playing about his mouth. “So, Lord Granville’s daughter is a Greek scholar?”

“You know my father?” Olivia rested her head on her drawn-up knees. She had the feeling that there should be
some sense of urgency about this conversation, but somehow she could find none. She still felt remote, detached.

“I know of him. Who on the island doesn’t know of the marquis of Granville? Such a conscientious jailer of His Sovereign Majesty.” An ironic note entered his voice, and the smile was less pleasant.

Olivia flushed. It seemed she was in the company of a Royalist sympathizer. “My father negotiates with the king for Parliament,” she said stiffly. “He is no jailer.”

“No?” Both eyebrows lifted, then he laughed again. “On politics, we shall agree to differ, Olivia…. Oh, by the bye, this was in the pocket of your gown. I put it in the book for safekeeping.” He reached over and handed her a small ring of braided hair. “I would have put it on your finger, but I was afraid it might become unraveled and I assumed it had some special value.”

Olivia took the ring. “Yes, it does.” She held it tightly in her hand and it seemed to impart some greater sense of reality. The ring belonged to another world, to people who still seemed remote, but it helped her to feel grounded again. She waited for him to ask for an explanation, but he didn’t, merely continued to perch on the table, lightly drumming his fingers on the highly polished surface.

“And what of your name?” she demanded, still stung by his tone when he’d spoken of her father, and yet still inexorably drawn to him as if with reins of silk.

“I am the master of
Wind Dancer
. You may call me Anthony, if it pleases you.”

He made it sound as if he’d plucked the name from the air and didn’t mind whether it was his or not. “Wind Dancer?” Olivia queried, seizing on this as one question that might bring enlightenment.

“My ship. You are aboard her and I’m afraid you’ll have to remain so for a few more days.” He picked up a
piece of paper and a quill from the table beside him, rising in leisurely fashion from the edge of the table. “It was not what I had intended, but we were obliged to set sail this morning, so I can’t return you home until we return to safe haven.”

As he moved away from the table, Olivia saw how tall he was, his head almost brushing the ceiling of the cabin. He was very lean, the ruffled sleeves of his white shirt rolled up to his elbows revealing strong brown forearms. His manner was relaxed, casual almost to the point of carelessness, but Olivia felt the power contained in the long, spare frame. A sense that he did nothing without purpose for all his air of easy indifference.

It had been his hands on her body. His were the cool, competent hands that had touched her so intimately, had lifted her, anointed her, held her head for the bitter draft that had brought her sleep. Her skin prickled again and a soft flush crept up her neck at memories she would rather not have.

He continued to talk casually from somewhere behind her, and she was glad not to have to look at him as the memories of his attentions rose with stark clarity.

“The cliffs on this side of the island can be hazardous. There are deep clefts and gullies that are concealed beneath the undergrowth. One false step and you can slip to the undercliff and beyond. I imagine you were so deep in your Greek that you didn’t notice where the cliff gave way. But you were fortunate. You slid into a cleft and it delivered you neatly at the feet of one of my watchmen on the undercliff.”

Olivia pushed her hair away from her face. “When?”

“Three days ago.” He began to whistle softly between his teeth as he stood behind her.

Three days!
She had lain here for three days! “But …
but Phoebe … everyone … they will be frantic!” Olivia exclaimed. “Did you send word?”

“No. There are certain difficulties,” he said, sounding quite unconcerned about them. “But we will find a way to return you as soon as possible.”

Her father was not at home. He had gone again to war. The Scots were threatening to cross the Border in defense of the imprisoned King Charles, and there were renewed Royalist uprisings across the land. Sporadic and ill-thought-out as they were, they nevertheless posed a serious threat to Parliament’s ultimate victory. But if Lord Granville away at the wars was unaware of his daughter’s disappearance, Phoebe would be beside herself with worry.

“I must go home,” Olivia said, her desperation wildly at odds with her companion’s apparent calm indifference to her situation. “You must put me ashore at once.”

“Believe me, if I could, I would,” the master of
Wind Dancer
said, and continued to whistle softly from somewhere behind her.

“Where are my c-clothes?” Olivia demanded with a rush of anger. “I want my c-clothes!” she insisted, swivel-ing around to glare at him, too angry now to care that the stammer that had plagued her since childhood had escaped the rein she had finally and so painstakingly managed to put upon it.

He frowned down at the paper in his hand almost as if he hadn’t heard her, then said coolly, “Adam is doing what he can with them. You fell a long way and they’re much the worse for wear. But I have hopes of a miracle. Adam works wonders with the needle.”

He looked up, the frown still between his fair brows, then he nodded and smiled, tossing the paper and quill onto a stool beside the bed.

Olivia stared at the paper. “That’s … that’s … that’s my
back
!” she exclaimed. It was an ink sketch of her bare back, curved as she’d rested her head against her knees. It was her nape, the dark hair falling forward over her shoulders; her shoulder blades sharply delineated; the line of her spine; the indentation of her waist and the flare of her hips; the beginning of the cleft at the base of her spine.

It was all there in just a few deft strokes of the quill.

Outraged, she stared up at him, at a loss for words.

“Yes, I’m rather pleased with it,” he replied. “The lines are particularly graceful, I think.”

“How … how c-could you? You c-can’t go around drawing people’s backs … their bare backs … without asking!” She found her voice finally in a stumbling cascade of anger as she belatedly fell back against the pillows.

“It was irresistible,” he said. “You have a beautiful back.” He smiled at her with all the indolent benignity of a tabby cat.

Olivia stared at him, clutching the sheet to her chin. “Go away.” She flapped her hands at him like a desperate child shooing away an importunate duckling.

He did not do so, however, but perched again on the edge of the table, long legs stretched out before him, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his britches. His thick gold hair was caught at his nape with a black velvet ribbon, and his throat rose strong and brown from the open collar of his shirt. There was a glimmer of amusement in the gray eyes, a flicker of the fine mouth that showed her crooked white teeth.

“I don’t think this maidenly outrage really suits you,” he said. “It was only your back and you forget perhaps that I have been tending you for three days.”

Olivia felt the color mount again to her cheeks. “It is ungentlemanly to remind me.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “I have been called many things in my time, Olivia, but not even my most partisan friend would call me a gentleman.”

Olivia sank deeper into the feather bed that enclosed her. “Then what are you?”

“Apart from a reasonably skilled physician, a man who lives off the sea,” he responded, folding his arms as he regarded her with that same secret amusement. But there was a hint of speculation now in his regard.

“A fisherman?” Even as she asked, she knew it couldn’t be so. Nothing so mundane as fishing could capture the interest of this man.

“I go after a more challenging catch than fish,” he told her. He touched his fingertips to his mouth in a reflective gesture, before saying slowly, “I believe there are things about such a life that would speak to you too, Olivia. Will Lord Granville’s Greek scholar of a daughter allow herself to be entranced for a few days?”

Olivia heard the challenge beneath the musical cadence of his voice. And she knew it was not lightly spoken for all the smile and the little ripple of amusement. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“Oh, but I think you do, Olivia.” He looked at her keenly. “Maybe you don’t feel it as yet, or perhaps you don’t yet understand it. It may seem strange to you at first, but I promise that if you will allow yourself, you’ll come to see and understand many things that Lord Granville’s daughter would never see and understand in the ordinary course of events. Things that will show you much that you do not yet know about yourself.”

He came over to the bed and bent over her. His fingers brushed her cheek in a fleeting caress, and there was a light in his eyes like the glow of a fire. “I know these things about you, because I know them about myself,” he said.

Olivia looked back into his eyes and that strange sense of connection returned. She knew nothing of this man and yet she felt as if she had been waiting to know him for a long time … as if this moment in the sun-filled cabin was always going to happen. Her scalp lifted with premonition and her palms were suddenly clammy. And yet despite the tingle of danger, she felt elation. As heady as it was confusing.

“Yes, you do see it,” he said quietly. “You feel it too …” His tone changed suddenly, became brisk at a sharp knock on the door.
“Enter.”

A grizzled man, short and squat, with powerful shoulders and corded arms, came into the cabin. He glanced incuriously at Olivia and gave her a nod. “The
Doña Elena
is in sight, sir. And the wind’s backing to the southwest.”

“I’ll be up directly. Oh, and, Adam, our guest was wondering about her clothes,” the master of
Wind Dancer
said, stretching in the sunlight.

“I’ll be done soon enough,” the older man said. “But there’s other things to fuss with at present.”

“True enough.” Adam departed, and his master strolled to the door, saying cheerfully over his shoulder, “I must go to work, Olivia. Don’t be alarmed by what you may hear in the next hour or so. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” With that he left, closing the door behind him.

Olivia sat up slowly in the now empty cabin. She looked around more carefully this time, noticing the richness of the furnishings. There was nothing ostentatious in the large space, but everything looked to be of the best. The sun glinted off the bright windowpanes and accentuated the glow of beeswax on the furniture, the floor, and the paneled bulwarks. There were shelves lined with books set into the bulwarks, silver handles to the cupboards below them.

The man had given her a first name, but it seemed he
had plucked it from the air as a matter of convenience. Simply so that she would have some way of addressing him. He was no gentleman, or so he said, yet everything about him bespoke privilege and authority. He was master of a ship. His voice was pleasant and harmonious, no rough edges, and his hands, so long and fine, were not those of a laborer or a man who had come up from the ranks of plain seamen.

So what was he? Who was he?
A man quite out of her ken, that much she understood.

Olivia pushed aside the covers and sat up, pulling the quilted coverlet around her. She stood up, and nearly fell down again as the motion of the floor beneath her took her by surprise. Her knees were alarmingly like butter and her head spun a little as she took a tentative step towards the table. Three days on her sickbed, sedated with that bitter medicine, was bound to have an effect.

She kneeled upon a cushioned seat below the window and looked out. Sun-dappled sea to all sides. And far away, almost on the horizon, was another ship; a garishly painted craft of crimson and purple and gold, with great white sails bellying in the wind. She could hear feet and voices on the deck above and the master’s voice rising above the chatter, calling orders.