When Beauty Tamed the Beast

Page 38

She was shivering so violently that she didn’t think she could move . . . but she did. A moment later she was moving through the water: slowly, but she was moving, not sinking. Piers stayed beside her, shouting instructions, most of which she couldn’t hear. But finally she got the idea, the way the arms moved separately, up and around, the way her head turned to the side, the way her legs—
He grabbed her legs with those clever hands, surgeon’s hands, and held them straight to show her how to kick.
Being a weak fool, she instantly stopped thinking about swimming and thought, slide your hands up, up.
He didn’t.
Five minutes later she had made it all the way across the pool. Her heart was racing, and she couldn’t stop grinning.
“Are you all right to go back the same way?” he shouted.
Without answering, she pushed off from the side and began to fight her way back through the water. Halfway across, her eyes stung, her mouth was full of saltwater, and her arms were exhausted.
A wave slopped over her head, and she hesitated, just long enough so she began to sink.
Piers’s arm curled around her waist. “Good enough,” he said into her ear. “Come on.” He pulled her to the side and then against his body. She curled against him naturally now, like a baby clinging to its mother. Except the way his hard body felt against hers had nothing maternal about it.
“Your heart is racing,” he said. “Too much exertion for someone who does little more than dance.”
She wasn’t going to explain why her heart was racing, so she let him hoist her out of the pool, and didn’t even watch as he thrashed away, back through the water, beating the waves to the side as if they were no more than ripples in the bathtub.
Linnet’s legs felt like soggy bread pudding. Perhaps he was right. She found the stack of towels that Prufrock had sent down and took all of them again.
Really, she should tell Prufrock that they needed an extra towel, one just for Piers. But lying back on the rock, she had to admit that she liked taking one off her body to give to him. Or two off her body.
It made him look. It made her feel fiercely alive, as if the blood sang in her veins.
Of course, that was why her mother set out so cheerfully on her assignations. They made her feel alive, one had to suppose. Poor Mama.
Linnet turned on one side in her nest of towels, remembering her mother’s laughter. She must have been addicted to the kind of pleasure Linnet felt around Piers. As easy to explain as Piers’s father’s being addicted to opium.
As simple as that.
And Piers was right: she hadn’t ever really forgiven her mother for wanting to be with strange men more than she wanted to be with her daughter. Enough so that she set out one rainy night to meet a man—they never knew who—and died when her carriage crashed into a piling.
I would never do it, Linnet thought. I would never . . . but that doesn’t mean I can’t understand it. Not when Piers’s very touch set fire raging through her blood.
Somewhere around her heart, some sort of emptiness, as icy as the water, eased and fell away. “Love you,” Linnet whispered, telling the wind, the warm rock beneath her shoulders, the smell of fish and the sea, the memory of her mother.
Piers came up, dripping, and flicked cold water over her face. “Are you planning to share one of those towels? Never mind the fact that my body is so much larger than yours.”
She pulled the towel off her head and gave it to him.
“I need another,” he said, rubbing his hair.
She gave him the one wrapped around her feet.
“Do you know how many people have diseases that cause their toes to drop off? I’d like a different towel.”
Linnet blinked. “My toes are firmly attached.”
There was something wicked in his eyes, something primitive that made her whole body respond. Instantly. She felt like a slave girl lying at the feet of a raja, boneless and without will.
“Another towel,” he demanded.
She took her time, pulling the edge of the towel from under her shoulders, rolling a little to the side, unwrapping herself as if she were a present. She didn’t have to glance down to know that her nipples stood out under the wet chemise. She didn’t have to glance up to know that he was devouring the sight.
She tossed the towel in his direction and settled back, her arms above her head.
He rubbed his body, looking down at her the whole time, without a shred of remorse or propriety. “You,” he said finally, wrapping the towel around his waist, “are—”
His head jerked up. “Bloody hell!”
Chapter Seventeen
Linnet sat up and followed Piers’s fixed gaze toward the horizon. Coming toward them was a kind of dark mass, as if the night sky had appeared out of nowhere, come down to the sea and was—
Piers yanked her to her feet, reaching with his other hand for his cane. Then he dropped her hand. “Run! Run as fast as you can back to the castle.”
She looked back over her shoulder. The dark, roiling cloud was coming, so close that she could see it moving. But the uncanny thing was that the sky opposite was still blue, the sun still shining.
He had started up the path. “Linnet!” he bellowed, not looking back. “Run, you blithering idiot!”
She dashed after him. He was going quite quickly in a sort of three-pronged run, watching the ground intently to manage where his cane landed on the rocks. Once she caught up, she turned around again.
The cloud wasn’t black. It was a kind of dark green-blue, and it bulged as if it were alive. Fear replaced fascination. She ran after Piers again. “What is it?” she asked. “What is that?”
“Weather,” he said tersely. “Bloody Welsh weather, that’s what it is. Would you please start running?”
“I’m not going without you,” she said. A wind running ahead of the cloud reached them, and the words were ripped from her mouth.
One glance over her shoulder and Linnet knew they wouldn’t make it to the castle. Whatever was in that cloud was eating up the blue part of the ocean, racing toward the coast like a ferocious animal. And yet, oddly, the sun still shone in the sky directly above them.
Piers was going even faster now, the power of his left leg clear as he thrust himself forward. “The guardhouse,” he shouted, his words barely intelligible in the howl of the wind. They were almost at the curve of the path, and just beyond that stood the little building.
The wind was shoving them from behind, and all of a sudden Linnet felt needle points of icy rain strike her shoulders and back. Piers, impossibly, put on such a burst of speed that he drew ahead. Then he was at the door, yanking it open, reaching back for her as she came up panting, grabbing her hand and pulling her so strongly that her feet left the ground.
Slamming the door behind them.
One second, in which they looked at each other in the dim twilight of the house. Then as if gunfire had erupted, the wooden door shook from blows so strong that the frame visibly trembled.
“Oh, my God,” Linnet whispered. “What is that?”
“Hail,” Piers said, turning and limping into the room. “That’s why we leave the shutters closed on this house at all times.” He paused and cocked his head. “The size of tennis balls, from the sound of them.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” Linnet exclaimed. She stared, transfixed, at the door. It was shaking as if hundreds of fists were pounding from the outside, as if a wild mob were trying to gain entrance.