As Penfeld rose to light the lanterns, Emily leaned against the wall, content to watch the emotions dance across Justin's face and hands. She'd found most Englishmen to be stilted in both speech and manner,

but Justin's fingers were eloquent extensions of his voice. He spoke briefly to Trini in Maori, the foreign words rolling like song from his tongue. Trini rose and disappeared out the window again.


"His comings and goings are enough to make a kiwi dizzy," Penfeld said, splashing a healthy dose of

rum into his tea as Trini bounced back into the hut.


The native knelt in front of Emily and offered her a calico-wrapped package.


"For me?"


Trini nodded. "For that most elegant of womankind, the veritable apex of feminine pulchritude-"


"Did he just insult me?" she asked Justin.


His shoulders shook with suppressed laughter. "No. He said you were lovely." The warm glow in his

eyes made Emily wonder if he shared that opinion.


She tugged open the package. Nestled within the worn folds were a skirt of woven flax and a thin scarf

of flowered calico.


She held the skirt up to the light, admiring the exquisite workmanship. "It's stunning, Trini, but I mustn't accept it. Look what I've done to poor Penfeld's coat."


Penfeld offered a toast to that, sloshing rum on his immaculate trousers.


Trini spoke rapidly to Justin in Maori. He grunted a reply. The native took the skirt and laid it across

her hands once again, saying simply, "Not for Trini. For Em."


For Em. Not borrowed from a befuddled valet. Not outgrown by some snobbish teacher. For Em.

Virgin flax woven to hug the curves of her body. She looked around at their expectant faces, wondering how she could have allowed them to become so familiar and so dear in such a short time. Her gaze stopped at Justin. A wistful hunger touched his smile.


She offered Trini her hand, hiding a flinch when he brought it toward his teeth. "My most marvelous gratitude, Trini Te Wana," she said.


He kissed her palm with the suave charm of any London swell. Emily gathered her gift and withdrew

to the other side of the hut, terrified Justin might hear the tiny cracks shooting through her frozen heart.


* * *

Justin reclined on one elbow and tipped the rum bottle to his lips. The liquor spread its warm haze through his veins. Behind him Penfeld was snoring. The valet had forgotten to put any tea at all in his

last conch shell. Trini had confiscated Justin's watch and was twirling it over the lantern, watching darts

of light dance across the hut in drunken fascination. Conversation had long ago declined, as it tended to do when stomachs were full and bottles empty.


Sighing, Justin allowed his gaze to lead him to the same hopeless place it had all night. To Emily.


She sat, hugging one leg, her chin pillowed against tbe satiny curve of her knee. A jagged tear in

Penfeld's coat exposed a creamy shoulder burnished with freckles. The lantern light tipped her chestnut curls with flame, haloing a profile as fragile and inscrutable as porcelain. Her eyes followed the spin of

his watch as if hypnotized.


He closed his own eyes for a weary moment, wondering if they'd somehow wounded her with their kindness.


When he opened them, Emily was staring at him, her pensive expression hardened to something more feral. For a chilling instant he would have sworn she hated him.


Then the lantern flickered, Trini began to hum softly, and the moment was gone.


Too much rum, Justin assured himself uneasily as he tipped his hat over his eyes and eased into stupor.


* * *


Justin awoke to darkness. His head throbbed and his mouth tasted as if Fluffy had been tramping through it. No nightmares though. The thought gave him little comfort. He had learned long ago the seductive danger of drowning his dreams in rum.


Penfeld's rumbling snores assured him it was still night. He stumbled to his feet, hoping a trip into the moonlight would relieve more than his aching bladder. His eyes adjusted poorly, and he stubbed his toe on Trini's prone form. A sliver of moonlight beckoned him into the night. He was already fumbling at

his dungarees when he hit the door.


He stumbled a few feet away, then stopped, his back to the hut. His shoulders slowly relaxed in relief.


"Feel better?"


A rich note of humor tinged the feminine voice. An icy heat knifed between Justin's shoulder blades

and crawled all the way to his hairline. Dear God, don't let her see me blush, he prayed.


"Quite," he said gruffly, making crucial adjustments with frantic hands. He hitched his thumbs in his waistband and swaggered back to the hut as if he had known she was there all the time.


Emily sat in the sand, staring glumly at the fragments of china gathered in the circle of her legs. An elfin frown crinkled her brow.


She swept a floppy curl out of her eyes, leaving a pale smudge of flour on her cheek, and held up a teacup with no handle. "I made some paste for Penfeld's tea set."


Justin wondered how long she had been sitting out there alone. Shadows stained the fragile skin beneath her eyes. Her efforts seemed to have yielded little more than sticky fingers and sandy china. As they watched, a gaping fissure split the cup she was holding.


Her bereft sigh was more than Justin could bear. He ducked into the hut and returned with a small jar. "Kauri gum. Hand me that teapot and we'll give it a try."


Emily's grin swept away the last of the rum's stale fog. Their fingers brushed and lingered as he knelt

and took the spoutless teapot from her hand.


* * *


Penfeld threw open the door, inviting the brisk morning air into his lungs. He had awakened to an empty hut and was mortified to have outslept Justin. It wasn't that his master required any assistance wiggling into his dungarees, but a proper valet should always rise first.


He balled his hands and stretched, shading his tender eyes against the sunlight. He lifted his foot but mercifully glanced down before lowering it, realizing he was about to tread directly on someone's fingers. He hopped backward. His eyes widened as he took in the spectacle before him.


Justin and Emily lay in a heap, entwined like a pile of sleeping kittens, her arm looped across his stomach, his head pillowed on her thigh. Emily's cheeks were flushed. Justin's dark hair stirred in the morning wind. Beside them in the sand lay one of the sweetest sights Penfeld had ever seen.


The sun gleamed across the silver tray, kissing the sleek curves of the porcelain. They had rescued a handful of cups, the teapot, and the sugar bowl. What did it mar-ter that the china was webbed with thick brown gum and crusted with sand? Or that the spout of the teapot now hung upside down like the trunk of some morose elephant? Penfeld thought it all unbearably lovely.


He drew out his starched handkerchief and dabbed at his cheeks. "Silly sand," he muttered. "Always blowing in my eyes."


* * *


Later that same morning Emily danced around the hut, delighting in the musical sway of the flaxen

skirt. It hugged her hips, then flared around her legs in a graceful bell, granting her giddy freedom of movement. After nearly lynching herself, she had even managed to tie the calico scarf around her

breasts in a makeshift bandeau. She wished Miss Winters could see her now. The flowered material

bared enough skin to send the poky old headmistress past death into rigor mortis.


She folded Penfeld's ragged coat with tender hands. She was worse at sewing than she was at pasting together teapots and wouldn't have inflicted her seamstress skills on her worst enemy.


Not even on Justin.


Her hands paused in their motion. Her worst enemy, she thought. The man who had sat with her until dawn, using his exquisite patience to piece together shards of broken porcelain to cheer his friend. The man she had vowed to somehow destroy.


She tossed the coat on Penfeld's pallet. Today was to be her first taste of real freedom, and she refused

to dwell on such dark thoughts. The slant of the sun warned her she had slept past noon. Such decadence made her shiver with delight. She started for the door, but could not resist one last peek at Penfeld's tea tray. She had awoken alone on her pallet to find it displayed proudly beneath the window.


The sun illumined bulbous cracks patched with amber gum, but Emily had to admit it was a valiant effort. She leaned forward, lured by a hint of her reflection in an unbroken stretch of silver. She tugged at one

of her curls. It popped back like a coiled spring. She sighed. Why couldn't she have been born with a straight fall of ice-blond hair like Cecille du Pardieu?


The door swung open, and she thrust her hands behind her back, embarrassed to be caught primping. Miss Winters would never have tolerated such vanity.


Justin ducked beneath the lintel. "Thought I'd come back and see if Sleeping Beauty had decided to rise.