Chapter 22

Callie's stomach grumbled.

The sun shone directly overhead, and still Nylander hadn't returned. She couldn't wait a minute longer. She would lunch without him.

The first saddlebag she opened contained oats for Arrow. Once she'd settled him with his feed bag, she found the saddlebag that Mrs. Bailey had packed. From its depths emerged a near endless bounty of sweetmeats, pies, cheeses, fruit, and breads. At last, she reached the bottom. There, she found a red woolen blanket. Mrs. Bailey had outdone herself today.

Callie snapped the blanket open, the thin cloth flapping in the persistent moor wind, and negotiated it flat onto the craggy ground. It wouldn't be exactly comfortable, but it would do. Once the various food items were arranged, she settled herself atop, snugging her knees to her chest, hands clasped around her shins.

The feast spread before her looked scrumptious and decadent, yet she was finding it difficult to partake of it. Her stomach seemed to be tied up in knots, even as it hungered.

Brigands, who emitted foul odors, spoke in foreign tongues, stole sheep, and had no qualms about gravely injuring a local man, had taken to skulking about the moor. Pirates. That was the truth of the matter. She knew it. Will and Cam knew it. The entire estate and town would know it soon enough.

Nylander strode into her line of sight. He knew it, too. The man missed nothing. Tension radiated off him as he explored the area, eyes scanning the ground.

Oh, the way that man maneuvered across the jagged terrain, sure-footed and confident, the steady strength of him apparent in his supreme control of his person. Perhaps it was an ability gained during his years at sea. Perhaps, but she felt it was something more, a power and grace unique to him. He was unbearably beautiful and skilled.

Her eyes darted away. She could suffer the torture of him no more.

As for what he sought, she felt no need to join him. There was no mystery in the who of who had perpetrated this act. The mystery lay in the why.

She wove frustrated fingers through her tightly plaited hair and loosened it. She had a feeling it wouldn't stave off the headache coming on. Perhaps the pirates hadn't known whose land, shepherd, and sheep they'd been abusing. Perhaps. Except she couldn't see how such a detail would get past Jack Le Grand.

Her gut told her that the pirates had known exactly what they were doing and to whom. What on earth could their motive be?

Further, what had she done? She'd miscalculated and done a very, very wrong thing by striking a deal with a devil she didn't know. She'd endangered people, the estate itself, and the very future she'd claimed she sought to protect.

"Mind if I join you in a light repast?"

Her head jerked up. Nylander gestured toward the various delicacies strewn about the blanket. Against her will, the irony drew a smile from her. She nodded and inched toward the edge of the blanket to allow for his hulking mass. The heat of him reached out and enveloped her in a warmth not unpleasant on this blustery day.

She jutted her chin toward an object in his hand. "What is that?"

He spread a rough, worn cloth on the blanket between them and smoothed it flat. "Something I found."

She leaned in to get a better look. Its colors were washed out and the pattern faded. "Surely, all manner of items find themselves blown onto the moor by tempestuous winds."

"Without doubt, but not this." He tapped his forefinger dead center on the ragged cloth. "This belonged to a pirate."

All at once, her body drew into a bundle of tense muscle. "How can you know that?"

"Red, yellow, black"—his finger traced the cloth as he spoke—"these are the colors of the Free Reaver. And, if you look closely, you can just make out the outline of a skull and crossbones." His head angled to the side, and his piercing blue gaze met hers. "It appears the pirate rumors are true."

Callie gasped. She couldn't help herself. A testing note wove through his deep baritone, a keenness in his eye. She recovered her good sense enough to say, "I can't imagine what pirates would be doing on the moor."

"Can't you?"

She wouldn't answer. Instead, she continued in a rush. "Look around you. This place is so desolate and rough. There can't possibly be any buried treasure here."

"No?" His intense, blue gaze surely stripped her layers down to her soul.

She swallowed and shook her head.

"Well, you'll find out soon enough, I suspect." He spoke the words on a low, hard note and released her gaze.

Breath that had been frozen in her chest also released. How long had she been holding it? She'd gone light-headed. But then this man's very presence made her go giddy with alarming frequency.

Apparently content to let the matter drop, he stretched forward and grabbed the nearest food item, which happened to be a mutton pasty. He tucked into the pie with a verve that would've made Mrs. Bailey proud. He was a big man. Of course he had big appetites.

A lightning hot blush flashed through her. She knew exactly how big his appetites were. Other parts of him, too.

She needed to occupy her mind on other subjects. Otherwise, she might burst into flame right here on the moor. She stared out at the vast wilderness spread before her and spoke the first words that found her tongue. "I can't imagine how Tom felt out here all those days, alone."

Nylander, very carefully to Callie's eye, set down the remainder of his mutton pasty, swiped a linen napkin across his mouth, and leaned back onto his elbows, a leisurely pose to the unobservant eye. But the air between them had changed.

His attention fixed on the distant moor, he said, "He thought he'd been abandoned by his God and his fellow man."

His words made her feel worse about Tom's ordeal, for she doubted them not. But it was the way Nylander spoke, so matter-of-fact and flat, that struck a wrong chord inside her. It revealed something fundamental about him. What wasn't he saying?

She leaned onto her elbows, mirroring his pose as they stared in parallel across the dramatic landscape of the moor. She'd never really given the moor much thought, focused as she was on the daily running of the Grange. But here it lay before her wild, free, and spectacularly untamed. She would like to know more of it.

Much like the man beside her.

"You make it sound like you've experienced such a thing." She needed to test this idea, to draw him out.

"That I have."

Three simple syllables. That… I… have. The meaning within them, anything but simple.

Instinctively, she recoiled from the complexity, the implicit darkness. This was Nylander, her most capable rival. "I'm sure you rescued yourself."

They were awful words, callous, unfeeling, but necessary. Separated from him by no more than twelve inches, she needed to achieve another sort of distance. And the uncomfortable silence that stretched between them told her that she was achieving her objective.

Oh, wretched victory.

"I was in the middle of the sea," he said, faraway, his attention fixed on a distant past.

"Swam to shore, then," she said. Why was she being so horrid? Distance. She must keep it.

"I was a lad of eight years."

Shock streaked through her. Was this a test to find out how horrible she could be? Well, she wasn't equal to it. "Eight?"

Nylander nodded, refusing to meet her eye.

"Where were your family? They couldn't have been too far away."

A laugh, dark and humorless, escaped him. "My pa wasn't too far off, but then the ship he was trying and failing to capture hadn't been either."

"Your father was a?—"

Nylander nodded. "He was."

A pirate. She would've thought herself beyond the reach of shock, but there it was in the catch of her breath. "How did you come to be in the sea?" she found the wherewithal to ask. She needed the full telling of this story, and she wouldn't rest until she had it. "Wouldn't a child have been kept below deck somewhere?" She didn't know the first thing about ships, but that sounded approximately correct.

The wind blew an apple across the blanket, its green skin a bright contrast as it rolled along red wool. Nylander grabbed it and began absently circling it beneath his palm. "Not that day. My pa wanted me to see the family business up close."

Her eyebrows drew together. "Your mother had nothing to say about that?"

"My ma died of the pox around the time I reached my fifth year."

A knot of grief formed inside Callie's chest at the subtle note of love in his voice. She knew what it meant to lose a mother as a child. Nothing in the world could reconcile one to the grief, even if one's mother was a whore, for surely that was yet another truth that lay unspoken between the cracks of Nylander's words.

His father had been a marauder, his mother a whore. Both had deserted him, one by choice, one not. But he'd known safety and love with his mother, no matter her profession. Then it had been stripped from him. Callie knew that feeling, too.

"A gangway had been dropped between the two ships, and my pa's men were readying themselves to board and begin the fight for the trade ship. I was completely absorbed in the action. That's why I didn't see it coming."

"What?"

"The well-placed shove at the base of my spine."

Callie's hand flew to her mouth.

"Overboard I went, instantly plunged into the drink."

"Could you swim?"

"Aye, my pa had made sure of it."

"But how… why?" she sputtered, unable to find rhyme or reason to the words proceeding from Nylander's mouth.

"I spotted a raft ten feet away and swam to it," he continued. "Once I'd draped myself across it, I began shouting. No one paid attention. Then—" He stopped. Bitterness flattened his lips and twisted at his mouth. "Above my head, the gangway was pulled back, and the barque began moving away."

Dread twisted her gut into knots. "Away? Without you?"

"I shouted like a banshee until I lost my voice." Nylander's eyes closed for a fraction of a second, but long enough to see the past clearly, she suspected. "Finally, I found him."

Relief soared through her. "Your rescuer?"

"My pa standing at the railing, watching me, growing smaller and smaller until he eventually disappeared into the horizon."

She might be sick. "How did you survive?"

"I'd just given up on that possibility when a hand grabbed the scruff of my shirt from behind and yanked me up into a dinghy."

"The trading ship."

"Aye. It belonged to the powerful Van Rijn family."

"They took you in."

"As their own." For the first time since he'd begun his tale, his head angled her way, and he met her gaze. "I was raised alongside the man you know as Lord St. Alban. He was a few years older than me and the best at everything he did. I had no choice but to worship him. I know him as Jake."

"Jake?" Callie's mouth twisted in reflexive distaste. Her feelings about Jake couldn't be more opposite of Nylander's. "He doesn't seem like a Jake to me."

"I doubt you really know."

"Fair point," she conceded, feeling the closeness between them begin to evaporate beneath the loathing she bore the Right Honorable Viscount St. Alban, Jake. "I met him only once, and that meeting did nothing to endear the man to me. I must ask, though, how did you come to be raised alongside him?"

"His uncle, from his mother's Dutch family, took me in. Raised me as his son, in fact, and taught me about the value of family."

"How lovely," she said before she could think better of it. It wouldn't do to allow emotion to get carried away around this man. But… it was lovely. The adoption of an unrelated child was such an unusual step. Most men wouldn't consider it. Take Georgie, for example.

Memory surged forward, deep and long-suppressed, of a night. She'd pleaded, begged, him to allow her to take in a child. Not even a boy, but a girl who wouldn't inherit, whose presence he would never experience if he chose not to. Outraged, he'd refused to consider the possibility. Oh, how she'd mourned that little girl, one who had never existed and never would.

"Jake and I grew up like brothers," Nylander continued.

Callie snapped to. His tone had grown harder, somehow more grounded in the present.

"Which is why I can't fathom something."

"What is that?" she asked, wary.

Nylander shifted forward and threw his arms wide as if inviting the entire western horizon into his embrace. "Why would Jake release this wild and glorious land from his grasp?"

Dismay at the sudden curve in the conversation struggled to the surface in the form of a grimace. "I believe we've already covered this. Lord St. Alban"—she wouldn't be calling him Jake any time soon—"doesn't care for the land."

"I don't think I've explained myself clearly." Nylander shifted and angled his body toward her, subtly encroaching into her space. Her heart banged out a hard thud. "Why would Jake allow Wyldcombe Grange to leave his family?"

No longer was Nylander looking backward into his vulnerable past, a past still raw and unresolved. He'd returned to the present and was asking her a very straightforward question, a hard glint in his eye.

She shrugged a shoulder in false indifference and reached for a sticky bun she had no intention of eating. She tore off a small piece and rolled it between forefinger and thumb. "I know nothing of the man's mind, to be sure."

"But you see, I do, and I can't fathom it. He was taught, the same as me, that land is what binds a family together, gives it stability."

"You'll have to ask him."

"I intend to, the first chance I get."

Callie tore off another piece of roll, and her heart thundered in her chest. No matter how she wanted to, she couldn't look away from Nylander now. His head canted slightly to the side, he was watching her too closely. Not in an intimate way, not in the way her body craved, rather from a distance. He was looking at her like a Viking, and she'd be damned if a flicker of desire didn't flutter through her.

But that was of no consequence right now.

Right now, she needed to pursue the unnerving direction of this conversation and ask him a question, one whose answer she wouldn't like. She was certain of it. "Are you upset St. Alban didn't offer you the estate since you're"—she gulped in the face of his vibrant blue stare, the inches between them at once a great distance and terribly, terribly close—"you're family?"

She'd had to ask. She couldn't go on not knowing.

Nylander leaned in, further invading her space, no more than a few inches separating them now, his eyes twin blue seekers of truth. "What if I said yes?" The question rumbled velvet in his chest. It might've made her heart skip a beat or two.

"I, um," she began, each syllable a granular rasp in her throat.

Although her mind knew he was referencing her question, her body possessed a different sort of knowledge and heard, or ached to hear, an altogether different yes.

If only he would move a little closer…

In boxing terms,Nylander would say he had Callie "on the ropes." He could continue working her over with this line of questioning, but…

In the full light of a yellow sun, he could see how the flare of her pupil pushed her iris, only a few shades lighter, into a thin, sable ring. It was the flare of want, and it swept all rational thought from his mind, leaving only irrational desire in its stead.

He could seduce her, here and now. It could be a cold and calculated thing. Except his body's response to her was neither cold nor calculated. It wanted her, deeply, with a longing he'd never felt for another woman.

She tugged at the collar of her high-necked blouse, revealing a stain of red creeping up the ivory column of her throat. His mouth went dry. "Why do you hide yourself so?"

"How do you mean?"

He reached out and covered her fingers with his. A tremor shuddered through her, and she snatched her hand away, leaving only his fingers on her throat, the beat of her pulse a fluttery throb beneath his fingertips. He took a button between forefinger and thumb. "Why do you choose blouses that button up to your chin?"

She swallowed, the subtle undulation of her throat moving against his fingertips. "I'm not covering up anything anyone wants to see."

That he didn't see the vulnerability that lay within her eyes. That he could ignore it.

With a quick flick of his fingers, he slipped the button through its loop. "Who wouldn't want to see this place right"—he splayed the fabric wide—"here."

Before he could think better of it, he angled forward, allowing not only the momentum of gravity to carry him, but the impulse of the moment, and pressed his lips to the hollow cup at the base of her throat. Her skin, warm and cream dappled with red rose, moved beneath his mouth as shallow exhalations of breath whispered into his ear. Gooseflesh raced across his skin.

He shifted back, not two inches, slanted his face up and took in the elegant curve of her jaw, her determined chin, her parted lips, the upturned tip of her nose. The scarlet had stolen higher, pinking her cheeks in a hot blush, her eyes bright as if with fever, assent in their depths.

He freed the next button, and the next, the only sound in his universe the sharp intakes of breath into her lungs.

"Or this place?"

His lips touched the space between her breasts, their delicate curves just visible.

He should stop right here.

She should stop him.

But she didn't, so he wouldn't.

He flicked open another button and pushed the coarse linen of her blouse wide, exposing a thin camisole and her small, well-formed breasts beneath, the pink of her nipples peeking up at him.

"May I?"

She took her plump lower lip between her teeth and gave a slow nod. Through gossamer linen he sucked one sweet bud into his mouth, and she gasped. He rolled it gently between his teeth and flicked his tongue across its hard tip, and she groaned, a low, animal sound that shot straight to his cock.

"Callie," he spoke against her small, perfect breast.

"Oh," she gasped, "say my name again."

"Callie," he murmured and shifted to take her other breast in his mouth.

Her fingers threaded through his hair, freeing it from its leather queue, and clenched into tight fists, pulling him closer. Her head arched back in abandon when his tongue swirled around the hard bud. One hand released its grip from his hair and reached between them. It found his swollen cock, a feather touch through fabric.

Another animal groan sounded, this one from him. Then she squeezed.

"Callie," scraped against the back of his throat.

A smile, sure, triumphant, tipped up the side of her mouth. In an instant, release was upon him. He'd thought to drive her wild, but it was he who teetered on the edge.

He wanted her.

He needed her.

What pulsed between them was based on mutual desire. And while there was so much that felt right about it, down to his very soul, he knew it was wrong, wrong, utterly and completely wrong. He wouldn't be able to easily walk away from this woman if he had her again. And based on her own words—"Can't you see that you and I don't suit at all?"—he knew he would have to.

She was a lady. He was a nothing. The past had taught him that lesson. Why would the future be any different?

He gathered whatever last shred of willpower he possessed and broke away.

"Why?" she cried out, cheeks flushed, eyes flashing, thwarted desire radiating off her in waves.

He repositioned himself so he once again sat parallel to her. Gaze fixed on the horizon, he watched from the corner of his eye as her shaky hands buttoned blouse and tidied hair. A feeling of exposure permeated the air. Sexual exposure—desire, ache, want, need, lust—but more: emotional exposure. The sort of exposure he'd thought to avoid. What the bloody hell had he gotten himself into?

"About the Grange," she began, her composure regained. The only remnant of the last five minutes was the red fading into pink at her throat. Her eye, hard and flinty, met his. "Were you saying yes? Would you like Lord St. Alban to offer it to you?"

"Yes."

It was only the truth.

Without another word, she shot to a stand and began gathering up the remains of their picnic, stacking breads, cheeses, and pies haphazardly in her arms and stuffing them into her saddlebag. His eye never truly off her, he stood and folded the blanket, but not before snatching up the pirate cloth and shoving it into his pocket.

She was definitely upset, possibly appalled at herself, which was partly her doing and partly his.

She wanted the Grange.

He wanted the Grange.

She wanted him.

He wanted her.

Somehow these wants had swirled together and, for him, become increasingly inextricable. Bloody hell.

Without another glance, she swung up onto her horse and began picking her way carefully across the moor. Alarmed, Nylander gave a short, sharp whistle, the same he'd heard Callie use, and to his utter surprise, Buttercup ambled into view. Unable to wait for the unruly horse to make it to him, he rushed over and mounted the beast in fewer than five tries, which gave him no small amount of satisfaction. He urged the beast on and kept Callie in his sights the entire ride back to the Grange.

Matters had escalated, on all sides. Between him and her, which was obvious, but also with Jack Le Grand. The assault of Tom hadn't really been about sheep thieving. It had been a message. To whom? And why?

Callie thought she'd made an honest bargain with Jack Le Grand. Nylander held no such illusion. Not just because of these "accidents" and assaults, but based on the man's own words.

And who she makes her enemy, too.

Jack could be a formidable enemy when he put his mind to it, and Callie would need an ally very soon.

She would remain in his sights until they reached the Grange.

Until he understood what was between her and Jack.

Until she was safe.