Moriah's Mutiny. Elizabeth Bevarly

like Professor Mallory to pick up a man in a bar and follow him all over town. Never in her life had she reacted so wildly and impulsively to a man the way she had to Austen. Not with professional and academic men she had known for months and years, and certainly not with some beach bum she had just picked up in a bar.

      Virtually all of her life she’d been building up sturdy walls and barriers to keep away the pain that came with continuous rejection, to protect herself from ever being thoughtlessly hurt again. But somehow, and in a very short span of time, Austen had managed to tear down those walls, break through those barriers and had experienced very little difficulty in doing so. Moriah had to admit with a good deal of surprise that she had been perfectly happy to let him do it. And standing here now on the beach of a tropical island, digging her toes into the sand, breathing in the fragrance of the summer night and the handsome, exciting man beside her, savoring the kiss of the breeze on her skin and watching the shimmery light of the wide silver moon dance across the tranquil water…it suddenly occurred to Moriah that this was exactly where she belonged. The scent of her stale, stark campus office was exactly where it belonged right now, too—a million miles away.

      Moriah told herself that it was precisely because she did feel like another woman that she made her next suggestion. Because she was free of the restrictive leashes that her job and her relatives choked around her, free of the academic and familial mores that dictated she be stark and stale, too. With Austen, she was no longer Mo Mallory, underachieving younger sibling of the spectacular Mallory sisters, nor did she have to perform to the high standards and intellectual level of Professor Moriah Mallory, Ph.D., cultural anthropologist. Here, with him, she could be anyone she wanted to be, and for tonight, she just wanted to be Moriah, a woman with wants and needs like any other, a woman whose feelings were fierce and whose desires ran deep. A woman who wanted and needed the man who held her close in his strong arms.

      “Austen,” she whispered quickly, breathlessly, fearful that the wind would whisk her words before he heard them, “I want you to spend the night with me. I want to make love with you.”

      She heard him catch his breath, felt his heart begin to fire rapidly in his chest. For long moments neither of them moved, and she began to worry that Austen wasn’t going to answer her. Finally his softly uttered words splintered open the dark, quiet night.

      “Moriah, you don’t know what you’re saying,” he told her softly.

      “Yes, I do,” she insisted.

      He pulled his head from above hers and looked affectionately down into her eyes, then shook his head slowly back and forth. “No, you don’t,” he repeated simply.

      “Austen—”

      “Moriah, you’re here temporarily on vacation,” he interrupted her. “And the Caribbean is a far cry from Philadelphia, believe me. It’s very, very easy to get things mixed up down here, very, very easy to confuse your priorities and values.”

      “But—”

      “I went a little crazy myself the first time I came down here, and when I went home, I had to do some pretty serious thinking before I decided to change the way I was living. It took me months to make the decision. You’ve only been here for one day.” He bunched a fistful of curls at her temple into his palm and gazed into her eyes with an expression Moriah didn’t understand. “You have no idea what you’re saying right now. Trust me. It’s your heart talking, not your head.”

      She lifted her chin a little defiantly. “And what’s so wrong with that?” she demanded. “Maybe if everyone thought with his heart instead of his head the world would be a better place.”

      He smiled at her, a smile that was sweet, serene and sad. “That’s never going to happen. Everyone would grow up to become a fireman or a ballerina, and we’d all do nothing but lie on the beach and eat out.”

      “But, Austen,” she protested, “I’ve never met a man like you before. You’re…” She paused for a moment, uncertain what it was exactly she wanted to say. Finally she just told him, “I don’t want anything to happen. I don’t want you to disappear and then never know what it’s like to…”

      When her voice trailed off, leaving her statement unfinished, he smiled at her again, but this time his smile was gentle, happy and warm. “You’re not going to lose me, Moriah,” he assured her.

      Her eyes searched his frantically. “You promise?”

      He nodded slowly and pushed back her hair with his hand. “I promise,” he vowed, leaning down to seal the bargain by placing a soft kiss on her forehead.

      “Well, could we stay out walking a little longer anyway?” she asked him hopefully.

      “What about your family tomorrow? Didn’t you want to get up early to meet them?”

      Moriah pushed the annoying thought of her sisters to the back of her brain. “Oh, who cares?” she muttered irritably. “Let them get a taxi to the hotel, they’re not helpless.” She circled her arms around Austen’s neck and arched her body closely toward him. “I don’t want this night ever to end,” she said quietly.

      Oh, God, he groaned inwardly, loving the way her body felt pressed so intimately against his, neither did he. He began to reconsider the wisdom of his previous statements to Moriah. Maybe he’d been a little rash in suggesting that she didn’t know what she was saying when she told him she wanted to make love. Hell, she was a grown woman; she knew what she was doing. What would be so wrong about the two of them spending the night together? When had he become so damned noble, for God’s sake? And when had he developed a conscience?

      “All right,” he ceded to her request. “Just a little farther up the beach. But then I have to leave. I’ve got to work in the morning.”

      Moriah was about to ask him what exactly it was that he did for a living, surprised that the question hadn’t come up before now, but at that moment, the steel-drum music started up again, a catchy mambo number that made her want to dance. “Let’s go find out where the music is coming from,” she said with an excited smile.

      “Moriah, I just told you, I have to work in the morning.”

      “But tonight you introduced Dorian as your business partner, so I assumed you have your own business. Don’t you?”

      “Yes, but—”

      “So if you’re the boss, can’t you go in late for once?”

      “No, it’s not like that. I can’t—”

      “Please, Austen?”

      She looked at him with such pure and childlike hopefulness that Austen had to smile at her and give in. What was wrong with him, thinking about work when he only had a few more short hours to spend with Moriah? “All right,” he surrendered, laughing at the look of naked relief and joy that spread across her beautiful features. “We’ll go and find out where the music is coming from.”

      Moriah had never stayed out all night long before, but tonight had been full of firsts, she decided, so why not add one more? They wandered up the beach until they came to an open-air pavilion surrounded by dancing, laughing people. As they pushed their way through the crowd, they too became infected with the high spirits of the others. When they finally broke into the front of the group, they saw a tiny stage encircled by blue-tipped flaming torches, where four islanders wearing bright red shirts and white pants danced and shouted as they pounded out on their green-and-yellow steel drums the most wonderful music Moriah had ever heard. She laughed out loud at the feeling of fun and life that went rippling through her body while she watched them, and she scarcely paid attention when her feet and hands took up the rhythm of the drums. Someone pressed a tall tropical drink into her hands, and she consumed it thirstily, only to discover it replaced by another, then another when she was through.

      For what seemed like hours she and Austen danced and sang and laughed, so caught up in their revels that they barely noted the passing time. When the musician reluctantly announced that their set was over, Moriah and Austen voiced their playful disappointment