The Windflower by Curtis Tom & Sharon

Author:Curtis, Tom & Sharon [Curtis, Tom & Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-05-09T06:02:29+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It happened that Devon was the one who found her. He saw her first from the far end of a sun-dappled meadow where fading day filtered in hazy spikes through the forest canopy. She lay innocently curled in clean elfin nudity under the drooping fronds of an orchid clump. Her back was toward him, the sweet misty flesh strewn with the curling ribbons of her damp hair. The curving line of her cheek and brow were barely visible under the drying gilded fluff that edged her lace.

He said her name once, and then, acutely conscious of the wealth of emotion he had invested in the single word, he disciplined himself into less revealing silence as he ran lightly, rapidly toward her.

Merry had bathed. That finished, she had been about to put her ragged clothing to another cleaning when a headache had struck with sudden savagery. She had lain down for what was meant to be only a moment and had lapsed into the stupor that for her was replacing sleep. Then, though she had begun to believe that she might never hear it again, someone had spoken her name. Her startled senses knew suddenly that she was no longer alone. She turned and saw him.

Finding her alive and evidently unharmed tapped every feeling within him that he had spent the past days trying to contain. His relief was white-hot, searing, a blaze that was too bright to look into.

"There must be some kind of archive where we can have you registered. Two escapes from a pirate ship on the high seas is likely to be a record."

His presence penetrated slowly to her consciousness, and she heard not his words but his voice, the tone fresh and light, charmingly low, alive with intelligence, and not so shorn of feeling as he might have wished.

Her inhalation was a jarring series of broken gasps. Standing would have taken more strength than she possessed at the moment, so she stretched out her arms to embrace the part of him she could reach, which happened to be his leg.

"Devon!" she whispered softly. Her voice was unquavering, a tribute to her hard-won self-possession. The problem was that she couldn't stop saying it. And when she had said it many times, she changed it to, "Is it really you?" Over and over she murmured the words in a broken whisper.

Of all her possible reactions this was one he hadn't anticipated.

He looked down at her small oval head, adjusting to her closeness. Against his leg he could feel the warm touch of her very soft breasts, the quick rise and fall of her shallow breathing, the fast beating of her heart. Her hair swirled around his calf and washed like a golden net over his boots as she pressed her lips into the side of his knee. Within the warm hive of her curls the shallow slope of her nose rubbed sniffing against his knee, and he could barely discern that the tip wasn't exactly dry.

This, after

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