The Duke Is Mine
Page 64

“No.” She’d never thought, never imagined, that someone like Quin could love her. Still, she understood instinctively that he had to—he absolutely had to—respect her. He had to trust her even when his instinct was to deny her. “His father is gone. I am the only person in the world who cares for him, Quin. The only one. I must go to him.” She held his eyes. “My personal safety is immaterial. This is a question of ethics.”
There was a moment of tense silence.
“You have a point,” Quin finally said, his voice reluctant.
She held her breath.
His arms tightened about her. “You are Olivia, after all.”
“What do you mean?” she whispered.
“You love your sister enough to give me up. You love Rupert, the poor scrambled egg. You love Lucy with her bitten eyelid. You even love your misguided parents.”
She cleared her throat. “You omitted one person in that list.”
“You are the most loyal person I know. You will never give up Rupert’s secrets; you will never steal a man whom your sister wants. Therefore, obviously you could not live with yourself if you did not make every effort to be with Rupert.”
Olivia opened her mouth to say something about love, something about how much she loved the complicated, harsh, and altogether fascinating man who stood before her, but there was a splash, followed by the sound of an anchor being lowered as quietly as possible.
“Very well,” Quin said tightly. “I don’t like it. But I understand.”
Olivia reached up on tiptoes and brushed a kiss across his lips again. “I love you.”
His hands tightened on her arms and he kissed her. He said nothing. But it didn’t matter. Olivia understood love as well as any other woman, and when a man looked at a woman with desire and possession and caring all mixed up . . . he loves her, whether he articulates it or no.
She smiled. “The rowboat is waiting for us. It’s time to go.”
Twenty-seven
“And Miles to Go Before I Sleep”
Up on the deck, the first thing Quin realized was that the rowboat was far too small, hardly bigger than his bathtub. It would barely take his weight, let alone his and Olivia’s. And it certainly couldn’t take a third person, dead or alive.
The captain of the Day Dream leaned close, his voice low. “It’s the only one I have with muffled oars. It slips through the water with no more sound than a man pissing in a pond. For those with a need to reach the shore quiet-like, this is the one.”
The man showed every sign of being a smuggler. Quin paused, then nodded, consciously releasing the tension in his jaw. If they survived the next few hours, he didn’t want to keel over like Rupert’s father; he had noted that tension had an extremely deleterious effect on the human body.
Two dead dukes, both betrothed to Olivia and neither with a surviving heir, would be absurd.
He cautiously lowered himself from the schooner into the little boat and reached up for Olivia, whom the captain helped down. They had to sit with their legs sharply bent, knees pressed against knees, Lucy clutched in Olivia’s arms. The pang of desire he always felt at her touch, ordinarily so thrilling, was now an irritant, a spur to his underlying sense of panic.
But he slipped the muffled oars into the water, and indeed, the boat made no more sound than a reed in the wind. Rocks reared on the port side, and in the near distance a blur of sand shone in the moonlight.
He mentally calculated the exact place where the inlet let into the sea, and was gratified to catch a patch of darkness just where he’d predicted it would be. Somewhere a curlew called a night anthem, notes tumbling with the gentle sound of the waves. Olivia’s eyes were shining. “I love the smell of the sea,” she whispered, her voice just a thread of sound in the night.
In truth, the water didn’t smell like the terrible, engulfing entity that had stolen his son. It smelled like brine and seaweed, and reminded him of his childhood, when every physical quality of the world was a mystery waiting to be solved.
Ahead of them was a bright spark in the darkness, slightly to the right of the inlet. He tapped Olivia on the knee, pointed.
“Rupert?”
“The garrison.” He pulled to the port side, heading straight for the dark shadow that signaled the mouth of the inlet.
Perhaps they truly would be lucky . . . in and out like a fox.
Then the little boat was slipping up the inlet, which was overhung with branches, just as Grooper had described. All the while, Quin was calculating how to bring the three of them back down the inlet, given the size of the rowboat. It was not possible.
He would have to take Olivia back to the Day Dream, get her safely aboard, then return for Rupert’s body.
The boat slid like a ghost through the water, and the stream bent slightly to the right again. A second later, they nosed onto the beach. Quin clambered to shore, made the boat fast, and turned to help Olivia and Lucy.
He held her for a moment. “I don’t want you here,” he whispered.
“Let’s go,” she said, her voice brushing his ear.
He took her hand. It was hell to care about someone. How could he have forgotten that? He used to worry about Alfie every time he was ill. Anxiety was tiresome.
They climbed up the bank and veered to the left. In his mind’s eye, he followed Grooper’s finger on the map, translating map distances into steps. If there were ever a situation in which his mathematical skill was useful, this was it.
They moved silently forward, feeling their way as much as seeing it; after a time the dark exterior wall of a hut loomed precisely where it should be. Quin put a hand on Olivia’s shoulder and tightened it in a silent message. She nodded, her eyes huge in the moonlight.
He followed the wall of the hut, turned the corner, and pushed gently on the door. Inside there was a faint brush of movement; instantly he whispered, “God save the King.”
The door swung inwards. Quin walked into total darkness, and waited until the door shut behind him. Then a dark lantern slid open. Its wavering flame illuminated the faces of two drawn and exhausted English soldiers.
“Thank God you’ve come,” one of them breathed.
“He lives?”
A jerky nod of the head. “Barely.”
“Your names?”
“Togs.” Another jerk of his head. “That’s Paisley.”
Quin nodded at the lantern. They shut it again and he slipped out, returning with Olivia, her hand warm in his.
When the lantern was opened once more, its light shone on the clear planes of her face, the glowing strands of hair escaping from under her hood, the generous line of her lower lip.
“Lucy!” Togs gasped. There was a wealth of meaning in his voice. They thought she was worth risking their lives for. Quin could see it in both men’s eyes. A silent growl rose in his throat, startling him.
Olivia shook her head, unloosed her cape, and put Rupert’s little dog on the floor. She smiled at the bewildered faces and pointed. “This is Lucy.”
“The marquess?” Quin asked. He had stopped thinking about corpses and was now desperately calculating how to get both Olivia and a grievously injured Rupert back in that tiny rowboat. His remaining behind was out of the question; Olivia couldn’t row far enough to reach the Day Dream. He would have to take one, then return for the other—which meant that he would have to leave one temporarily behind.