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“It’s not too small. Go.”

“You’re coming too?”

“Go,” he said. His voice already sounded far away. “I’m right behind you.”

She went. Fangs of rock jabbed her from all directions. Crawling was like getting chewed. She might have been in a monstrous throat. She squirmed and twisted. Her fingers and toes had stiffened, numb with cold, but sweat streamed down her face. Once she collided with a slab and thought she’d reached another dead end, that the water would chase her down and find her here, in this crack in the stone, a worse fate even than drowning in that awful chamber, where, at least, she and James could cling together and sip the last of the air from each other’s lungs.

But there was another fissure, and she inched onwards. When that passage widened, and began to slope up, she turned. She turned and screamed for James, screamed herself hoarse.

The rock walls were gray and glistened here and there with moisture, or with pale, mineral veins. The darkness had thinned, because light penetrated. Light.

She crawled faster toward its source, and the inky black striped with beams of sun. The rays merged, and she could see her own hands, could see the tunnel’s end. The rock rose steeply. No more crawling. She had to climb, to drag herself up the vertical rise. She couldn’t trust her arms, her legs—she hovered, too long, a hairsbreadth from collapse, but then she was free, gasping on her stomach. She’d reached the shrubby top of the islet. The wind was sweeping over her, all that rock replaced by churning air.

She flopped onto her back. Clouds raced across the sky. Her body felt like broken puppetry, a disjointed pile.

James.

Damn him for a liar. He hadn’t fit. He hadn’t followed. He was still locked far below, closed in with the relentless sea. Not for long, though. She’d storm back to him. She’d cut a wider channel through the rock with the force of her will, with the wild power she’d summon like lightning from the sky. She’d become Merlin for his sake. Or else she’d chew off his arms, like a fox in a trap. She’d do whatever it took to wedge him through.

She sat up, motes swimming at the edges of her vision. She blinked and fixed her eyes on the tunnel, a blacker hole in the dark rock.

A hand with bloodied knuckles shot out of that darkness. Another hand. A thick, bare forearm. And then James was levering himself up over the edge, scrambling to his knees. The rock had grated the buttons off his shirt. It hung open, revealing a muscled wedge of heaving chest. One shirt sleeve hung in tatters, the other bunched above his elbow.

After the fire, he’d resembled a Viking in his soot-streaked nudity. Now he resembled a Greek castaway from Cowper’s Odyssey, Odysseus himself, shipwrecked on Calypso’s island.

Sweet heaven, it was good to look upon his beautiful, disagreeable, insufferably arrogant face. His eyes seemed to concentrate all the day’s light. His gaze was the lightning.

It shocked her into motion. She skidded forward on her hands and knees. His arms closed around her, his grip making no concession to her bruises. She didn’t care. She didn’t want caution or finesse. She wanted to feel him, every contour of his body. She wanted their hearts to smash together. They were both kneeling, like supplicants, like worshippers overwhelmed by grace.

Their embrace, though, was ruthless, carnal. She fisted her hand in his hair and drove his mouth onto hers.

The Elizabethan curses that had been rattling in James’s head rearranged themselves into Elizabeth sonnets. His mind became a quatrain on love, and his cock a very emphatic couplet on . . . something related. A moment later all words fled.

He gasped into Tib’s mouth, need clawing him, too fierce to contain. He could feel against his chest, not only the tantalizing swell of her breasts but the peaks of her nipples, taut, taunting him, Lord have mercy. He gripped the curve of her backside. He wanted to sink into her, to possess and be possessed, to battle with her deliciously atop this blasted rock until the sun sank in the sky, and rose again, and sank, until the sun was a cinder and all of time had come to an end, and even then, he wanted more.

He hefted her, slid her up his thighs, and she ground a circle with her pelvis, rubbed against his erection. Her arms wound around his neck. She was licking inside his bottom lip, and when he met her tongue with his, she moaned, and he nearly spilled in his breeches.

He bracketed her shoulders and thrust her away, held her at arms-length so as not to disgrace himself. He could blame the brush with death for this too. Unbridled lust as affirmation of life.

Oh, how he longed to affirm every part of her. The obvious parts. The tucked away parts. The pink, impertinent parts. The downy brown parts. The plump parts. The angular parts. The slippery parts. The . . .

He shook his head frantically, tried to make a different mental catalogue, less arousing. He could list soil components. Essential crop nutrients.

But the images persisted.

The situation in his breeches kept begging for immediate redress.

“Shirt’s ruined,” he said inanely, as a gust of wind flapped the shredded fabric. “Breeches too. Holes everywhere. I had to shed a bit of skin as well, to crawl out. I owe Alexander Stevenson a new suit of clothes.”

“You owe me too.” Her clear eyes dazzled between wet black lashes. She had a red scratch on her forehead, a bruise ripening on the rise of her left cheekbone.

Pleasure. He owed her so much pleasure, to atone for every scratch and bruise. He realized his thumbs were massaging down her biceps, an inch from her breasts.

“The preservation of the Fairy Dale,” he said. “I will never allow a kiln, or indeed any structure of any kind, to limit the moss available for amorous pursuits.”

Her flush was glorious. He wanted to trace its path with his tongue, tart as wine.

He grinned. “And a new cottage, of course, with windows and unicorn tapestries, and bookcases filled with all the good Reverend’s books, down to the very last volume of Smollett.”