Once in a Blue Moon

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 6

Jessalyn and her grandmother arrived at End Cottage the next afternoon to learn of a most shameful tale. It seemed that while the cat Peaches had been increasing all spring and summer, it had not been entirely with fat.

"She had babies!" Jessalyn exclaimed at the sight of the tiny kittens, hardly bigger than mice, suckling at Peaches's white belly. The cat had delivered her litter during the night, and she had chosen the worst possible place to do it —in the corner of a stall occupied by a cinnamon-colored mare called Prudence. Jessalyn had found them when she'd gone to perform her daily chore of mucking out.

"She was pregnant, Gram, and we didn't know it!"

"You watch your tongue, gel," Lady Letty said. "Such a word is never to be uttered in polite society. Use such language within my hearing again, young miss, and you'll be tasting soap for a week."

Jessalyn wanted to point out that they were in a stable, not polite society, but she knew from past experience that her grandmother's threat was not an idle one. "I wonder who the father is," she said instead.

"Father, ha!" Lady Letty shot a killing glance at the unfortunate Peaches. "Let that be a lesson to you, gel. It don't matter what species they are, 'tis always the females who are left to bear the fruit of the sin."

Even Peaches, who was not the most intelligent of cats, soon perceived that her kittens were in danger of being trampled by the mare's big hooves. She decided to move her household into the kitchen. But to do so, she had to negotiate the dangers of the courtyard where lurked her nemesis, the black-backed gull. She had good reason to fear for her babies. The enormous gulls had been known to steal little lambs off to their nests to feed on later.

Hissing all the while between her clenched teeth, Peaches carried her kittens one by one from the stables into the house. Armed with a stout stick, Jessalyn walked along beside her.

Sea-washed sunlight dappled creeper-covered walls and glinted off the diamond panes of the mullioned windows. With its red and yellow patterned brickwork and tall ornamental chimney stacks, End Cottage always looked cheerful, even beneath the gloomiest fog. Jessalyn loved the house. It didn't matter that the rooms were small and dark or that the black oak paneling was wormholed and the paper stained with damp. End Cottage had been her home for all of her life that she cared to remember. It was warmth and security and love.

For a moment her mind was filled with other memories, dark memories, of a house in London with narrow, shrouded windows and thick, tense silences. They had never shouted at each other, had her mother and father, but she had learned all about anger in that dark house. She had learned what love was and what it was not.

But today, here at End Cottage, sunlight shone through the thick windowpanes, painting watery patterns on the kitchen's flagstone floor. It had always been Jessalyn's favorite room, mostly because of the smells, which today came from the bacon and mutton and hams that hung curing from the rafters. Peaches had chosen the wooden seat of a beehive chair that sat before the hearth as a new nest for her babies, and she settled down before the fire to suckle. Jessalyn counted the kittens. Earlier there had been five, now there were only four.

Her heart pounding in her throat, she ran back to the stable. And that was how Lieutenant Trelawny found her— on her hands and knees in a horse stall, trying to rescue the last kitten. For some reason Peaches had abandoned the poor thing, burying it beneath a pile of straw.

When she heard a step on the packed earth floor, Jessalyn thought it was Becka come to help her. "What an unnatural mother that Peaches is, Becka. She's given up on one of her babies just because he's runty."

"A terrible thing to do, I grant you. Especially as we cannot all be such splendid examples of virile manliness."

Jessalyn straightened with a snap. She blinked, looking up at a splendid example of virile manliness through the dusty sun bars that streamed through the stable's open door.

"Hullo, Miss Letty. It is Miss Letty, isn't it? Or have I the honor of addressing her runty brother?"

She lurched to her feet, brushing the straw off her knees. Her hands fluttered over the front of her clothes, as if she could magically whisk away the boy's shabby blue fustian jerkin and whipcord trousers that she was wearing and replace them with the latest fashion in sprigged muslin. She settled for brushing back her hair, which had fallen out of the binds of a frayed pink ribbon.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded, her voice made sharp by nervousness and excitement.

Her hair fell into her face again. She reached up, but he pushed her hand aside. He tucked the wayward curl behind her ear, then trailed his fingers down the side of her neck, as his piercing gaze moved slowly over her face. She quelled an impulse to shiver. She had never known anyone, man or woman, to touch so often as he did. Somehow he even managed to touch with his eyes. She wondered if he did it with everyone and what he meant by it.

"I thought to see if you might wish to go riding," he said. "And to give you this."

"What is it?"

He pretended to contemplate the object in his hand with utmost seriousness. "It could be a hat. That is, it has the look and shape of a hat. Although it might be a pair of breeches in disguise."

Jessalyn seized the bonnet, flapping its brim in his face like a fan and laughing. "Don't be a silly goose. I mean, why have you brought me a hat?"

"It is to replace the one you so gallantly sacrificed on my behalf."

It was not the one that she had so admired at the fair, the one he had insisted did not suit her. It was an adorable little cottage bonnet made of chip straw and decorated with a posy of primroses the exact pale yellow shade, like whipped lemon custard, of the primroses that grew around the paddock fence.

She tied the wide satin ribbon beneath her chin. Tilting her head, she smiled at him. "How do I look?"

"Stay away from the goats. They might mistake you for lunch."

She knew he hadn't meant to hurt; it was his way to be flippant. Yet she had wanted him to tell her she looked pretty. Even if it wasn't true.

Her fingers trembled as she tugged at the bow, and her chest felt tight. "I shan't wear it riding, though. It will only get soiled."

"Miss Jessalyn!" Becka Poole burst through the stable door, wringing her apron. "That Peaches, she don't know what she be about, esquiring them poor kits onto that chair. One of them nearly tumbled right off and into the fire—" She skidded to a halt when she caught sight of the lieutenant. Quickly turning her head, she pulled her hair over her cheek to hide the scar.

But she still managed somehow to gawk at him out the corner of her eye. "You be the gennelman what nearly killed Miss Jessalyn with his iron horse. Tes a wonder I didn't fall away dead on the spot when I heard tell of it. I was prostitute all of last night, I was, with me scattered nerves."

"She means shattered nerves," Jessalyn said. Lieutenant Trelawny was getting that cross-eyed look most men got when they listened to Becka talk.

"Aye, me scattered nerves. Miss Jessalyn will tell ee, sur. The least little thing overturns me poor nerves."

"Becka suffers from indifferent health." Jessalyn's voice was muffled, for she had dropped down on her hands and knees again to crawl beneath a pile of hay. She emerged with straw sticking out all over her head like pins from a cushion and the kitten cradled in her hands.

"Poor hungry little spud," she crooned as she put the mewling piece of orange fluff into Becka's open palms. "We might have to feed him with a sugar tit. I don't trust that wretched Peaches to be a proper mother."

"No, nor me neither, miss. I tell ee, already one nearly fell into the fire. Nearly emasculated, it was."

Becka Poole sauntered from the stable with the kitten just as the Sarn't Major entered. He, too, came to an abrupt halt when he caught sight of the lieutenant. His thick lips pouched out, and his head sank into his shoulders like a toad's. Black eyes the color of old ink stared unblinking. Then he spit through his teeth, spun around on his heel, and left.

Jessalyn waved her hand at his disappearing back. "Don't mind the Sarn't Major; he's always sour enough to pickle cucumbers. He doesn't like people, only horses."

Lieutenant Trelawny was staring at the now-empty door, a bemused look on his face. "What an odd household you have," he said.

"It's Gram. She collects misfits and strays the way other people collect butterflies."

"She pins them to a board?"

Her head fell back, and her laughter filled the stable until the sound of it, rusty and grating like an old gate, echoed back at her. She caught the last of it by sucking hard on her lower lip. She could feel his eyes on her, on her mouth.

He had started to say something else when behind him Letty's Hope let out a sharp whinny. Turning, he leaned his forearms on the stall door to take a better look at the filly. Jessalyn stared at him openly. He wore a snuff-colored riding coat and fitted doeskin breeches tucked into spurred long boots. The sight of him this morning left her feeling slightly breathless.

"She's a fine-looking filly," he said. He was smiling at the horse, the creases deep at the corners of his mouth, his eyes a little sleepy-looking. He should do it more often, Jessalyn thought, smile more often.

She joined him by the stall. "Her dam, Prudence, was out of Flying Betty, who won the Newmarket Whip twelve years ago. The sire was out of Silver Blaze. He won over twenty thousand pounds in stakes and four hundred hogsheads of claret in his prime." The filly bumped her arm, seeking a pat. Jessalyn rubbed the blaze on her forehead. She told him about her grandmother's dream to race in one last Derby. "That is why we've named her Letty's Hope."

"And what of your parents?" he asked after a moment.

"My father died when I was six. My mother lives in London." She had not seen her mother since that day she had been left here at End Cottage. At first she had lain awake at night, her throat tight and aching with unshed tears, wondering if her mother would ever come back for her. But her mother hadn't come, and now Jessalyn no longer wanted her to. I rarely think of my mother anymore, she told herself, and most of the time it was true.

The lieutenant watched her saddle Prudence, not offering to help, as if he sensed that she was enough of a horsewoman to want to handle her own tack. She owned a sidesaddle, but she preferred to ride astride, and he made no comment on her choice. His own horse, a big bay with a black mane and tail, was tied up to the paddock rail. The courtyard was otherwise empty except for the gull, which had not yet given up on the idea of kittens for dinner.

"Where is your groom?" he asked as they prepared to mount.

Jessalyn glanced up uneasily at the shuttered windows of the room where her grandmother lay napping. Lady Letty would never countenance her riding unescorted with the lieutenant.

She put her foot in the stirrup, and he gave her a boost up, his hands gripping her hips. "We have no groom," she said, settling into the saddle. And feeling the lingering imprint of his man's hard hands on her body, which was disturbing and frightening, and in some mysterious way, wonderful. "There's only the Sarn't Major, and he's busy."

One of his hands still cupped her calf. She shouldn't have been able to feel the heat of it through the stiff leather of her boot, but she did.

"We can't go riding unchaperoned," he said. "People will talk."

Even if they only met brown rabbits and grouse chicks on their way, by tomorrow everyone breathing within twenty miles would know that Lieutenant Trelawny and Lady Letty's hoyden granddaughter had been seen riding alone together across the moors. "Let them talk," she said, waving an airy hand. "Why should we care a rap for a bunch of useless, clacking prattle-bags?"

"You'll care. Once they start crucifying you for it."

She didn't like the set of his mouth, so brooding and serious. She wondered what had been done to him to make him this way, so bitter against the world.

"I hardly know whether to believe my ears," she said. "All this talk about propriety coming straight from the mouth of a founding member of the Dishonorable Society to Alleviate Boredom and Complacency. You are letting the club down, Lieutenant."

His hand fell, and he stepped back. "Don't say later that I didn't warn you."

She watched him mount his horse. There was a look of infinite weariness on his face now, and the eyes that stared back at her held black secrets. They had seen too much, had those eyes. He was a Trelawny, and he had done things, wicked things, that would make her shudder if she knew of them. He had warned her, and she ought to take heed. But it wasn't gossiping tongues she had to fear. It was he.

They rode side by side through the back gate, toward the cliffs and the sea. A stiff silence came between them that was broken only by the click of hooves upon stone and the creak of saddle leather.

"That is a bang-up mount you have, Lieutenant," she finally said for lack of a better topic, though in truth she thought the bay too shallow through the chest, his tail too high-set. He was likely to become winded in the stretch.

He gave her a look with those piercing dark eyes that made her think he had divined her unspoken aspersions against his horse. "The nag serves my purposes, and he had the advantage of having been cheap off the block."

More lengthy silence followed this statement. She was beginning to wonder if the black-backed gull had stolen his tongue. "You never told me how long you will remain in Cornwall."

"I must take ship to rejoin my regiment in the West Indies in three weeks."

The sun was tin bright, and it cast harsh shadows over the barren moors, made cruel with granite boulders and broken stones. The wind had a salty taste to it, like tears, and though the sun was warm, Jessalyn shivered. Three weeks... The silence drew long between them again, tense like his face.

"Do you know where Claret Pond is?" she asked.

"Of course. A good soldier always scouts the countryside.

One never knows what man-traps might be lying in wait for the unwary."

Jessalyn suspected that there was more than one meaning in what he said. She wondered if he thought of her as a man-trap. The idea brought a swift-flushing color to her cheeks... as if he had read the words that she had written in the green leather journal.

She squeezed her mare into a trot, pulling ahead, then wheeled around to face him. "I'll race you from here to the pond."

He walked his horse up to hers. There was a tautness to his face, and his eyes were hard and glittering, like chips of onyx. "We must have a wager on the outcome," he said. "And no chicken stakes either."

"But I've only a few shillings left. Gram and I lost all the rest at the Tiltwell faro tables." He had brought his horse so close her knee rubbed against his thigh. He leaned into her, and her belly began to flutter with a strange anticipation as his gloved finger came up to touch her mouth.

"Then you must stake something that you have a lot of." He ran his finger along her lower lip. The leather felt as soft as butter. "Such as a kiss."

She could feel the beat of her heart in her lip. "And— and if I win? What will you give me?"

"What would you like?"

What she wanted she could not even formulate as a thought, let alone put into words. His finger had stopped its stroking, leaving her mouth feeling naked. "I can't think," she said.

"Allow me to think for you then. Should you lose, you must grant me a kiss. Should you win, you may name my forfeit after the fact."

"What if I demand more than you can pay?"

"Why concern yourself with impossibilities?" He took the riding crop from his boot. His mouth twisted, looking a little mean. "I've never lost a bet with a woman yet."

"There is always a first time, Lieutenant." She wanted to beat him. She would beat him hollow. She thrust herself forward in the saddle and loosened the reins. She cast a quick glance in his direction, then dug her heels into Prudence's sides. "Go!" she shouted.

Prudence, who had galloped neck or nothing on this path many times before, was surefooted among the scrub and loose stones. She was bred to race and would have made a fine runner in her prime, except that she had a weakness in her blood vessels, which had a tendency to break under rigorous training. She was as honest as they came, though, and she ran to win.

Jessalyn could tell that he, too, was riding all out to win. His bay had the advantage in height and stride. But her reservations about the gelding were proving true. He had no bottom.

They dipped down into a small, weed-choked gill. Brambles and briars clutched at her legs, but she barely felt them. On the upward slope she and Prudence nudged ahead. They had perhaps two hundred yards to go to reach the pond; she could already see the wind-tortured elms and mallow grass that encircled its banks. There was a crumbling stone hedge, about three feet high, that would have to be jumped first, but Prudence was a champion fencer. The hedge rose up before them. It had primroses blooming on the top of it, and their yellow petals fluttered in the wind like butterflies. She was going to win... and suddenly that was the last thing Jessalyn really wanted.

What she wanted was that kiss, and the only way she would get it would be if he had the right to claim it of her.

It wasn't that hard to throw a race; jockeys did so all the time. She did it just before the hedge, a subtle check on the reins so that Prudence felt a pull in her mouth and couldn't stretch out her head. Instead of taking the jump cleanly, the mare popped over, going up in the air and landing on all four feet with a hard and jerky jolt that rattled Jessalyn's teeth. The bay sailed over the hedge, gaining at least three strides. It was all he needed.

Lieutenant Trelawny had already dismounted and was waiting for her, standing beneath the biggest of the elms. Jessalyn pulled up Prudence at the edge of the pond. Knotting off her reins, she slid from the saddle.

He slapped his riding crop against his boot. The loud thwacking sound sent a jackdaw bursting out of the reeds with a frightened squawk, and Jessalyn jumped. The tree's broad, cone-shaped leaves cast harsh shadows on his face. She couldn't meet his eyes.

She started for the pond, but he snagged her arm as she went by. Throwing the crop aside, he spun her around, slamming against her and pinning her to the trunk of the tree. He brought his face within inches of hers. She could see the flaring of his thin nostrils as he breathed, the creases at the corners of his mouth, the sunbursts of gold within the dark night of his eyes. He smelled of horse and leather and hot anger.

"You little cheat," he said.

She made a movement to get away from him, but his hard weight held her fast. His chest flattened her breasts; his stomach pressed against hers. One of his thighs was braced between her legs.

She drew in a breath of pure fear. "What a nasty, spiteful thing to say. I cannot imagine what you mean by it."

"You know damn well what I mean by it. You threw the race, and we both know why. So now, Miss Letty..." He brought his face even closer, so close that if either of them so much as breathed, their lips would touch. "Now you are going to get precisely what you deserve, and you are not going to like it."

She thought: He is going to kiss me.

"I might like it," she started to say, but she never quite got the words out.

Because by then he was kissing her.

His mouth crushed down on hers, forcing her lips open, and panic slammed into her chest. She made a little gasping, mewling sound in the back of her throat and tried to twist her head away. His hand closed around her scalp, pulling her head back so that he could kiss her harder. His mouth plundered hers, and she gripped the front of his coat to keep from falling, for it felt as if all the bones had been sucked out of her legs. Her nostrils flared wide as she drew in a desperate breath, and her senses reeled from the hot, tangy smell of him. She heard nothing but the fierce rushing of her blood, knew nothing but that he was devouring her with his mouth.

He ended the kiss abruptly, tearing his lips from hers. His fist tightened in her hair, hurting her. His face was so close the moist heat of his harsh breaths was like steam against her skin. Her lips felt thick and hot. She touched them with her tongue and tasted him.

"Y-you are not a very nice person."

"I have never pretended to be a nice person." He let go of her hair, and his hand slid down around her neck to span her chin. His thumb rubbed her throbbing lips. "And you, Miss Letty, kiss like you have never done it before."

"I have so done it before."

He laughed. Jessalyn thought she probably hated him. "What you did with Clarence Tiltwell on Midsummer's Eve was not a kiss."

He was right; that brief brush of lips had not been a kiss. A kiss was a taking and a mating of mouths. A kiss tore through your belly and left your throat aching and your knees weak. A kiss sent your heart hovering somewhere between terror and bliss.

She jerked her head out of his grasp, and he stepped back, letting her go. She walked on shaky legs toward Prudence, barely aware of what she was doing. Her mouth hurt, and she felt strange inside, sort of hungry and empty.

She tried to make her voice sound nonchalant and thought she succeeded rather well. "If you are done with teaching me a lesson, we should cool down the horses. They're sweating."

They walked side by side along the tree-shaded bank, leading the horses. It was called Claret Pond because the streams that fed it had once run red from the waste water that came from washing tin ore. But the mines were all shut down now, and the pond lay gray and dull, like a tarnished pewter bowl. Clouds billowed like tossed sheets above their heads, but the wind was warm. It smelled of summer: of dust and dry grass and long, sunbaked days.

Jessalyn could feel the lingering heat of a blush on her cheeks, and she wished that he would say something. She thought that perhaps he had kissed her the way a man would kiss a woman he wanted—hard, rough, hungry. She thought of him kissing her in that way, and the memory of it was a burn on her lips.

"You know what I think?" she said, to end a quiet that had become too hot and heavy. "I think you are only angry because you know that I, a mere female, could have beaten you. Doubtless even the thought of such an odious possibility is a sore blow to your manly pride."

One corner of his mouth creased, a flash of a smile that was there and then gone. "So that is why my manly pride has been feeling tender of late. And here I was about to do it further damage by conceding that you sit ahorse rather well. For a mere female."

He was talking flummery again, but she also suspected that he was offering her a compliment in his own backhanded fashion. She did ride well; it was her singular talent. "And I concede that on a worthy mount you would be a most formidable opponent, Lieutenant"—she whirled, flashing a sudden and brilliant smile—"but I'll wager you can't do this."

"More wagers? I wonder that you dare."

She only laughed, for a devil had seized her. Leaning against a tree trunk, she pulled off her boots, then gave a tug on Prudence's reins. The mare came reluctantly, for she'd been enjoying a snack of reed grass. Jessalyn removed the saddle and bridle and, with a smart slap on the rump, sent the mare cantering away from the pond and into a field of greensward and scrub. She caught hold of her mane and ran alongside for a few strides. Springing forward and up on both stocking feet, she raised her right leg high over the horse's back, landing smoothly astride.

He applauded, but she shook her head and laughed again, for that was only the beginning of the trick. She cantered in a circle, legs hanging straight along the mare's sides, her seat sure and graceful. She took a deep breath now, centering herself, becoming part of the fluid, rocking motion of the horse. She tried to ignore the man who watched, for she would impress him only if she succeeded. Yet he was there, at the edge of her vision. Seeing him, dark and tall against the vivid green of the trees and the sward, reminded her of the Gypsy boy who had filled her days last summer.

It had been the Gypsy boy who had taught her a whole repertoire of circus equestrian feats. His band had camped in the shelter of a coppice of pines near the little fishing village of Mousehole, and she had met him almost every morning for lessons. One day, while showing her a trick called the Mill, he had accidentally touched her breast. Then he touched her there again, deliberately, and she had let him. She had spent that night praying on her knees, sure that her soul was going to burn in hell's all-consuming fire, and even more terrified that Gram would learn of her sin and give her mortal flesh a well-deserved birching. But the next morning she had hurried out to the pines, eager for more lessons in trick riding, and other things, only to find the Gypsy camp deserted.

One of the most spectacular tricks the Gypsy boy had taught her was the Standing Somersault. Jessalyn wondered if she dared do it now, because it had been weeks since she'd practiced. But then, as Lady Letty always said, it was better to die game than to die chicken.

Pushing on the horse's withers, she swung her legs forward and lifted her knees onto its back. She straightened into a kneeling position, stretching her arms out from her sides. Then, before she could lose her nerve, she thrust upward with her thighs and jumped to her feet. Consciously she relaxed her knees, to absorb the shock of the mare's pounding hooves. She was standing upright on the horse's back now, a mile in the air or so it seemed. The wind rushed in her ears and flattened her hair. The world whirled, images flickering before her eyes: gray water, green trees, blue sky and him... him... him....

Sucking in a deep breath and releasing it, she flexed her legs, leaped high, and turned a complete somersault in the air to land on the mare's broad back, standing and with her arms raised above her head in triumph.

Short-lived triumph.

As she tried to explain afterward, it was the wretched rabbit's fault for digging a hole in the precise spot where Prudence planted her left forefoot. Prudence stumbled, and Jessalyn lost her precarious balance, flipping cat in the pan over the mare's tail.

But that was not the worst of it. For Prudence had been running close to the pond, which was in a deep bowl scoured out of the earth. Jessalyn hit the lip of the steep bank and rolled over the edge of it. She slid down the sharp incline, her grasping hands pulling up reeds and mallow and ferns by the roots, and continued on her inevitable course into the placidly waiting water.

She didn't scream—but only because the water was so cold it snatched the breath from her lungs. Her head went under for a brief second, then bobbed back up. Her jerkin buoyed out around her like a fishing float, helping to counteract the dragging weight on her legs from her heavy whipcord trousers. Water swirled and bubbled up around her. It came from an underground spring, which kept the pond perishingly cold even in the middle of summer.

She pushed her streaming wet hair out of her face and spit the taste of the pond from her mouth, which was bitter and metallic, like biting down on a tin cup. She trod water and looked up. He sat on a rock, his forearms resting on his drawn-up knees, totally at his ease and not the least bit concerned that she could momentarily drown or die of frostbite. She thought that if he laughed, she would never forgive him.

He didn't laugh. But then he didn't have the sense to keep his mouth shut either. "You have won your wager handily, Miss Letty," he said. "I could not duplicate that feat should I live to be as old as Methuselah." He plucked a reed and stuck it between his teeth. "You look wet, Miss Letty. And cold."

"Oh, no, I assure you, Lieutenant, it is most invigorating." She floated on her back, making a lazy circle. The water was so blasted cold it burned. She forced herself to make one turn around the pool, although she had to set her jaws to keep her teeth from chattering.

She swam over to him. The pond was deep, even up to the very edge of the bank. It would be difficult for anyone to make it up the steep escarpment without help. He grinned down at her—one of those superior smirks that only men seemed able to manage. "Are you having a pleasant bath, Miss Letty?"

She produced a helpless little smile. "Give me a hand up, please."

He stood and bent over, stretching out his arm. She deliberately kept back so that he would have to lean way forward as he reached out to her. His hand closed around hers; she felt his strength in his grip. But she had a strength, too, in her arms and wrists made wiry by years of riding. He tensed to pull her out of the water, and she gave a hard tug.

He hit the pond with a grunt and a giant, fanlike splash that wet the topmost leaves of the elm trees.

She tried to scramble up the steep slope of the bank, but her heavy, soaked clothes dragged her back like an anchor. Behind her, she heard his head break the surface and his mouth swearing worse than any drunk tinner outside a kiddley on a Saturday night. At last she got a foothold, and then she was on her hands and knees on the slippery grass. She stayed that way a moment, hunched over and breathing hard.

Water splashed and lapped against the bank. His voice changed, became soft and rather nasty. "My dear, sweet, gentle Miss Letty... you are going to repent the day you were ever born."

She dared a glance over her shoulder—and screamed. He slammed into her, rolled her onto her back, covered her with his body. She went quiet beneath him, breathing quickly like a cornered animal that knows it has been caught.

The water ran in rivulets from his hair down over the sharp bones of his face. He lowered his head until they were nose to nose. His eyes were blacker than the devil's sea. His lids drifted closed; his mouth softened. He was going to kiss her....

Jessalyn's breath caught, and her heartbeat skittered. His lips lowered another inch, and her mouth parted on an expulsion of breath that was more of a sigh.

"How old are you?" he said against her open mouth.

She could barely push the word out her tight throat. "Eighteen."

"Not only a cheat but a liar as well." He wrapped his hands around her neck, pressing his thumbs into the hollows of her throat, pushing her head back. Her blood quickened, drumming against his fingers. "How old are you, Miss Letty? And don't you ever lie to me again."

Her pulse plunged and dipped. She swallowed, hard. "Sixteen."

"Good Christ!"

He shoved off her, sitting up. She lay on her back a moment, watching the procession of clouds across the sky. She turned her head; he sat next to her, his wrist resting on one bent knee. It was a relaxed pose, but she could feel the tenseness in him as if he were giving off heat. She sighed, at the mystery of him, of what she felt for him, that strange mixture of fear and longing. He was the handsomest man she had ever seen, even with his mouth set the way it was now—hard and just a little cruel. Being with him was like drinking wine that came from a cold cellar. Tangy, exhilarating. Intoxicating.

She pushed herself up to lean back on her elbows. "Sixteen is not so young," she said.

His mouth tightened even more. "Oh yes it is."

"Many girls are married at sixteen."

His head swung around, and he pinned her with his hot gaze. "Many girls are whores at sixteen. Just because you have an itch does not mean you have to scratch it." In a movement so quick she didn't see it until too late, he seized her wrist and hauled her up with such force her neck snapped. His voice, harsh with fury, lashed at her. "I have no reason to guard your virtue, little girl, and every reason to take it. So use the wit beneath all that red hair and stay the bloody hell away from me." His fingers tightened around her wrist, and he jerked her hand up to her face. "And the next time a man tries to kiss you, use your claws on his eyes."

She stared into dark eyes that were wild and dangerous. She felt helpless with fear and a strange sort of excitement. He acknowledged no rules, did McCady Trelawny. He was capable of doing anything at any time, and a part of her understood that it was his very unpredictability that made him so attractive.

A cloud smothered the sun, and the wind kicked up, flattening the sward and sending ripples scurrying across the pond. A shudder racked her.

He dropped her wrist and leaned back. Unconsciously she rubbed her arms. His gaze followed the movement of her hands, then came up, settling on her mouth. The dangerous glint in his eyes flared like a fire fanned by a draft.

"We—we had better go back," she said, suddenly frightened by what she saw in his face.

She kept up a stream of constant chatter on the way to End Cottage. He contributed little, but she no longer minded his silences. For when he did talk, it was to use words like hedges. Cornish-type hedges, made of rough, hard stone and covered with prickly bracken, that he threw up to force others to keep their distance. She suspected that if he ever felt deeply about something, he would not speak of it at all, not even to himself.

He left her at the gate to End Cottage without even telling her good-bye.

Jessalyn rubbed Prudence down and gave her some oats, but once this chore was done, she felt too restless to go inside. Instead she walked out to the cliffs. She looked around her as if she'd never seen it all before, never seen the sea lashing the black rocks or the white flash of a gull's wings riding the wind. Surely the surf boomed louder than it ever had before, and the air, thick with salty sea spume, had never felt so soft. She thought that after today nothing in her world would ever be the same again.

That night she took the journal out from beneath her mattress and wrote: Today he kissed me....