Now the cart had stuck again. This was the third time they’d halted to push the cumbersome vehicle out of sucking mud. Celeste climbed out with a groan of frustration, lifting her skirts nearly to her knees without care for propriety. Padre Francisco took up the reins while Barto eased his way through the muck to put his strong shoulder to the back of the conveyance. “Hettie,” Celeste said, turning to her maid. “While the men push the cart out, I need to relieve myself. There in the forest. Nay, don’t climb down. You’ll soil your skirts. I won’t go far.”
Hettie nodded. “Be careful, love. And hurry. It shouldn’t take long to get the wheels on solid ground again.”
Celeste entered the gloom of the trees with trepidation. This island was so lush that she expected to find herself in a tangle of underbrush. Surprisingly, the trees grew tall and the forest floor was passable. She sought out a sheltered place to answer nature’s call, then looked around at the beauty, so different from the forests of England, even more vastly different from the dry plains that surrounded Seville. Curious, she eased farther into the wood, smiling at the coolness, enjoying the heady fragrance of vividly coloured tropical flowers. She breathed in deeply, comforted by the scent of vegetation, of rich, moist earth and…water?
She moved forward and soon heard the roar. Moments later she stood on an outcropping of rock, looking down at a froth of rapids below. She sighed with disappointment. She’d wanted to cool her skin, wash her face. But the water was too far down and much too rapid.
She held her place for a moment, mesmerized. As she turned away an exquisite blossom nearby caught her eye, vibrant pink with streaks of peachy orange. She thought of Jacob. He loved flowers. He’d often picked bouquets of daffodils for their mother.
Jacob needed beauty. The physicians had said so. He could have it if she pressed this unusual bloom for him. Maybe she could reach it. It grew on a vine only slightly above her head. She swiped at it without success.
She tucked her lower lip between her teeth and tried again. Her fingertips grazed the delicate blossom, but it remained stubbornly out of reach. She jumped, then jumped again, realizing just as she snared her prize that the earth beneath her feet had shifted, carrying her towards the edge of the cliff on a rolling wave of pebbles. The blossom was crushed, then lost in a nightmare of blurred motion. She sought anything to grasp—vines, roots…nothing! There was no solid earth beneath her feet, only the tumbling of slippery rock and the edge, the very thinnest edge, of the cliff overlooking the water.
She fell in slow motion, her arms winding like fragile windmills, her body tipping forward even as her mind screamed. No! Oh, dear God, no!
She saw water beneath her before she plunged into the soundless depths of it. For a moment she hung within it, then rose again into sound and air. Down, up again, constantly shoved between the deep green-blue of the river, the green forest, the blue sky.
The current caught in the heaviness of her skirts. She was hurled forward into white froth, then dragged below into dark silence.
She bobbed up, gasping. Stones slammed against her ankles and her elbows, and scraped roughly against the tender pads of her fingertips. She screamed as she was flung towards a huge boulder. Somehow she managed to avoid it. She was sucked backwards into the eerie silence of water, then just as quickly rushed forward towards turbulence again, helpless to stop herself from hurtling downriver.
I will die and no one will know. Oh, God, don’t let me die.
Then, as if God had truly heard the petition, someone was there, someone of flesh and blood with strong arms. Someone made of warm muscle and sinew. Those arms lifted her, pulling her through the noiseless depths and through the froth, pulling her up into air and light and sound. Masculine arms closed tightly about her.
They reached the bank, dripping. Celeste could only cling to him, burying her face into the throbbing pulse of his neck—shaken, trembling, aware now of a thousand chaotic sensations. The tendrils of her hair clinging to his skin. The prickling of scraped places. The heavy breathing that meant she lived. And the breath of her rescuer, hot and harsh against her neck.
He spoke to her in Spanish, in between gulps of air. “Está bien?” he asked.
She could not answer, not yet.
He shifted her slightly in his arms so he could see her face. “Está bien?” he repeated, the tone more worried, more forceful.
“I’m sorry,” she said, gasping. “I don’t speak much Spanish.”
“Are you all right?” he asked, in her English tongue, the enunciation clear but accented in a heavy, sensual way that made something burn within her. Or maybe it was the voice. So deep. So rich with concern.
“Aye, I’m fine,” she managed to say between gulps of air. She pushed her hair out of her eyes.
Celeste wasn’t sure what she noticed first, whether it was the rigid planes of his jaw or the clear blue-green of his eyes—eyes that could have been made of river and sky and trees. Eyes filled with a kindness that made her ache, that seemed somehow familiar, though she couldn’t recall when she’d ever seen eyes so warm before.
Or perhaps it was his hair, tawny gold and so long it touched his shoulders, or his warm breath against her wet lips. Maybe it was the strength of the arms that cradled her, the thudding of his heart, the firmness of his muscle against her body… She wasn’t sure which impression struck her first and most vividly—or if all of them were there simultaneously…as if, in the aftermath of surviving, she could only sense and feel and exult.
It made no sense, the emotion that flooded her. She wanted to reach up and twine her fingers into his long hair, to pull his lips to hers and taste him, to hear him moan inside her mouth and to feel his lean body press itself against hers. It made no sense, what she felt for this man who seemed familiar but wasn’t. No sense at all, but yet…it was there.
She made no move, said nothing.
She only let herself breathe and feel his breathing, too, until finally the strong rhythm of lifeblood ebbed and she could speak without gulping at air. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t swim well.”
“Certainly not in all these clothes.”
He’d not meant the words to be provocative, but, cradled as she was in his arms, his chest bare and warm against her cheek, she felt such strange stirrings. She couldn’t contain the heat which speared her, beginning a burn in the pit of her stomach and igniting a fire that flamed in her cheeks.
As soon as he’d said the words, lust bolted through Diego. He hadn’t meant to conjure the image of her as a forest nymph, sliding naked against his skin in sensuous water, but that image had somehow been there, full-blown. Dear God, what had he done?
He looked down at her—a girl, he’d thought her at first, for she was quite petite. But, no, she was a woman. An ethereal woodland fairy with rounded curves outlined by wet, clinging garments. A fantasy, with delicate features and long, long tendrils of coppery hair. With eyes large and dark and warm as earth. She was glorious, and he couldn’t halt the desire that savaged him. He hadn’t expected it, hadn’t needed it or wanted it, but it had come.
And—God help him—she must soon know of it, for he could not hold her cradled in his arms for ever. When he put her down, her dainty feet to the forest floor, she would see then that he wore nothing. And all his explanations about his interrupted bath, all his apologies that his linen towel waited on the rock behind them…none of that would explain the swollen heat of his loins, the arousal she could not avoid seeing. Lord, have mercy.
The woman looked up at him and their gazes locked.
For the moment, she couldn’t seem to find her voice. She could only lick at lips moist and inviting. She seemed to concentrate on words—such poor, poor substitutes for the nebulous something other they both truly wanted.
Words. Think. Words. He could