Liam turned back to Perry, clutching the carriage wheel in his hand. The rim cut into his palm. “Get out of here before I lose my temper.”
“A terrifying prospect indeed.” Perry gathered up the reins. “Take my advice, old man, and consider the nature of your audience before you do something you’ll regret. You’re not hurting me.”
“Go.”
Perry went, though not without a certain leisurely insolence. He clicked to his team and sent them off down the lane, his unflappable demeanor completely intact.
Liam strode back to the surrey. The horses were in need of cooling off after their run, and Liam himself felt near the point of explosion. He drove to the hitching racks beside the long white building at the top of the road and paid a loitering young man to walk the horses.
His gut was churning with a snarl of emotions. He wasn’t thinking as he stepped through the doors of Cliff House. The place was all but empty. A few families, groups, and couples were scattered amongst the tables in the main dining room. Caroline and Mac were the only visitors standing before the large windows that framed an impressive view of Seal Rock and the ocean.
But it wasn’t the view Liam noticed. He stared at the two women, deeply conscious of the vivid contrast between them. Against the window they were only shapes, but he thought he could see something more: a glow, a burning that was like a candle’s flicker in Caroline and a roaring furnace in Mac.
Mac glanced over her shoulder, meeting his gaze. Meeting and holding, challenging, promising…
Liam broke free and strode across the distance between them. He grasped Caroline’s hand, pulling her away from the window and Mac.
Caroline didn’t resist. Her bootheels clicked on the floor in a rapid, uneven beat as she struggled to keep up with him.
He found a secluded hallway leading off the dining room. As good a place as any; this wouldn’t be any delicate wooing. He’d been putting off the inevitable far too long.
He released her hand. “We have something to discuss, Caroline.”
Her eyes were very blue and very wide, just as they’d been when she was a child. Only then they’d been filled with trust and admiration. “Discuss?” she said. “Like the way you… chastised me in front of Perry and Rose?”
“Caroline,” he said, more evenly. “You deliberately ignored my warnings. You could have been hurt.”
“Perry was with me. I was safe.”
“Safe?” He laughed. “What was the point of that little performance, Caroline? Did Perry put you up to it?”
Her hands twisted in the folds of her skirt. “I… it was my idea.”
She looked up at him, as pretty and exquisite as a china doll. Perfect. Beautiful. An ornament easily broken, to be unwrapped only with the greatest of care—never to be handled with strong emotion. Or passion.
There was no danger of that, no stirring within him, nothing to spark between a man and woman. The lack of that spark was an emptiness, a hollow yearning he could not remember feeling before he’d gone to the jungle.
Before Mac.
He clenched his jaw. “You’re nearly eighteen, Caroline,” he said.
Her attention was fixed on him. Her lips parted; the delicate lashes of an angel fluttered against her cheeks. “Yes.”
“Your father gave your care into my hands.”
“You are not my father.” She averted her face. “You don’t care about me.”
The words twisted deep into the emptiness inside him. “I do care,” he said hoarsely. He caught her chin and turned her face toward him again. “Caroline—”
He caught her shoulders and lowered his mouth to hers. The kiss was no more than a brush of lips, though Caroline shivered at his touch. Liam felt nothing. He had expected a sense of Tightness, of relief in doing what must be done. But the coldness in his belly only grew more chill, more fathomless, as if all his vows to Gresham and to himself meant nothing at all.
There was only one answer to that nothingness. He lifted Caroline against him, taking her lips more fully, seeking life itself.
The life he’d sensed when he’d held Mac in his arms, hot and bright and pulsing as the jungle sun. The wash of ocean waves and barking of seals became the beat of rain and shrieking of parrots, another place and another heart pounding close to his, a radiance that knew no limits.