"A tree house!" Beau said blankly, his gaze taking in the upper branches of the rain tree they were standing beneath. "You've got to be kidding."

Kate shook her head. "It's really a very practical idea," she said, her eyes wide and earnest. "The branches and foliage offer a certain amount of shelter from the sun and the rain and it's very private." She was dragging a ladder from behind a cluster of nearby bushes and he moved automatically to help her set it against the tree. "Julio and I built it. It took us about four months, but it was worth all that time."

"I can tell," he said gently. Even in the twilight dimness of the rain forest he could see the glowing eagerness in her face and it filled him with a poignant tenderness. Child-woman, vulnerability and strength. "I can't wait to look inside."

"It's not very fancy." Kate was climbing the ladder swiftly and her voice drifted down to him as he started after her. "It wasn't all that easy to furnish it. We had to use a pulley except for the little pieces we could carry." She reached the wooden platform and opened the rough wooden door with a little flourish. "Mi casa, sucasa."

"Thank you," Beau said gravely as he preceded her into the little house.

She followed him quickly. "Perhaps you'd better let me go first. It's pretty dark in here and I know my way around." She was fumbling at the natural rattan nightstand. Suddenly a match flickered and he could see that she was lighting an old-fashioned oil lamp. She turned to face him and her eyes widened in surprise. In the cutoff jeans, bare-chested and barefooted, he was a strange wild figure in her familiar little room. Wild and virile and overpoweringly male. "It's a little close in here," she said breathlessly. "I'd better open the shutters."

"I'll do it." He was at the large square window beside the door unfastening the tan woven hemp shutters and throwing them wide. "The whole place smells of flowers." He turned and suddenly grinned. "No wonder, you have enough flora in here to fill a florist shop."

"I love flowers," she said simply. "And they grow wild in the rain forest, so I can gather fresh ones every day." She gazed around in blissful satisfaction. "They make everything look so lovely."

The simple furnishings of the room definitely needed that embellishment, she thought. There was no bed, merely a single mattress covered with blue denim on the rough-hewn floor. Other than that, there were two rattan captain's chests against two walls and the small rattan nightstand. But there were blossoms everywhere. Gorgeous coral orchids with creamy centers tumbling out of rattan holders fixed to the unfinished walls. Delicate maiden fern surrounded deep purple violets in a polished black bowl on one of the chests. A tall vase in one corner was filled to overflowing with greenery and strange white blossoms with golden markings. But his eyes were on her, not the furnishings and she was suddenly conscious of that queer breathlessness again. "I guess it must seem primitive to you," she said uncertainly.

He shook his head slowly. "No, it's very beautiful and very, very special," he said quietly. "I can see how you'd be proud of it." His eyes met hers across the room and it was as if she were being wrapped in a velvet intimacy so complete it filled the whole world, "In a way it's like you. Different and lovely and totally special." He looked away and his eyes fell on a colorful object on the rattan chest across the room. "What's that?"

She was glad he'd been distracted. She didn't know if she could have broken the intimate moment herself. She followed his gaze with her own and then smiled eagerly. "That's my music box." She ran across the room and knelt by the chest. Her hands lifted the scarlet-and-ivory carousel with loving care and wound the key at the bottom. "I discovered it in a pawn shop in Port of Spain. Isn't it lovely? A carousel with not only horses but unicorns and centaurs. It was in pretty bad shape when I bought it, but I repainted it and Julio found a man to fix the mechanism." She set the music box back on the chest and stayed there, her eyes misty with dreams as she watched the carousel turn slowly on its pedestal. "I've always loved the tune it plays. I tried to find out what it was, but the man in the shop didn't know and neither did Julio and Jeffrey."

"It's 'Lara's Theme' from Dr. Zhivago," Beau said, his voice husky.

"Dr. Zhivago?"

"A beautiful movie taken from a book by Pasternak. I have a copy of the book in my cabin on the Searcher. I'll give it to you once we're back on board."

"Thank you. I'd like that." Her gaze was still fixed dreamily on the carousel. "You know, I've always wanted to ride a carousel. I was at a carnival in a little village in Nicaragua once, but it didn't have a merry-go-round "I'll buy you one."

"What?" She turned to look at him in bewilderment.

"I'll buy you the best damn carousel in the whole world," he said thickly. "Hell, I'll buy you an entire amusement park." He wanted to give her everything she'd never had. The experience, the beauty, the knowledge. He needed to give them to her.

She laughed uncertainly. "You're joking," She rose to her feet. "For a moment I thought you were serious."

He opened his lips to speak but quickly closed them again. "We'll talk about it later," he said. "Now where can I get rid of this combination of salt and sweat that's coating me? You promised me a bath." He looked around with a whimsical smile. "Somehow I don't think your very special house has a bathroom."

"There's a spring-fed pool several yards north of here," she said with a grin. She picked up the carousel and set it carefully on the floor before opening the chest. "It's a little cold, but very clear." "That's where you sunbathe?" There was something in the smoky darkness of his eyes that caused a frisson of heat to tingle through her. "Yes, that's the place," she said, quickly reaching into the chest to pull out soap, a large folded terry towel, and shampoo. "It won't be very warm there now. It's almost dark." "You only have one towel."

Her eyes flew to meet his and what she saw there made the heat in her loins turn molten.

"Well need at least two," he said with slow deliberation. "You're all salty too." His voice dropped to velvet softness. "But don't worry, I'll wash every grain of it off you personally." He smiled intimately. "Very personally."

She drew a deep breath. "You want me to go with you?"

"I insist upon it," he murmured. "I always did have a lousy sense of direction. I might get lost in the forest and never be heard from again."

"Then I guess I'd better come along," she said, reaching for a few more towels and a white cotton caftan. "I may need to redeem that promise you made to help me storm the bastille." Her voice was as light as his, and didn't reflect the fact that her heart was pounding so hard she felt as if she'd been running.

She didn't dare keep up the badinage as they made their way down the ladder and along the path to the pool. She wasn't experienced enough to maintain that casual sophistication and was sure that at any moment she'd betray how nervous and uncertain she felt. Nervous and something else. Something exciting and moving and as beautifully primitive as the rain forest surrounding them.

It was almost pitch-dark as they reached the bank of the pool and the water was only discernible from the bank by the occasional glitter of moonlight on its mirror surface.

Kate dropped her towels and the caftan on the bank. "It's shallow enough to stand upright around the edges. It only deepens as you go toward the middle."

"Right." Beau had already striped off his meager clothes and was jumping into the water. "Damn!" he exploded. "Where does that spring originate, the South Pole?"

She burst out laughing. "I told you it was cold."

"Cold, not frigid. Throw me the soap, will you?"

She tossed it to him and then pulled the T-shirt over her head. There was no use being shy. Beau had seen everything there was to see last night on the Searcher. Besides, it was so dark here Beau was hardly more than a bronze blur though only a few feet away. It was reasonable to assume she'd be equally indiscernible.

She inhaled sharply as she jumped into the water and she heard Beau's chuckle. "Definitely the South Pole, eh?"

"Definitely," she gasped. She poured a little shampoo in her hand and began rubbing it into her hair. The curls were coarse and wiry with salt and she sudsed and rinsed it twice before she was satisfied it was clean. "I've finished with the shampoo. Would you like to use it?"

"I made do with the soap," he said carelessly. His voice was suddenly much closer and she looked up to see him only a few feet away. "I didn't want to wait. I wanted to get through in a hurry so I could have my treat."

"Your treat?" She moistened her lips nervously.

"Bathing Kate, bonny Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom."

"Shakespeare," she identified, a trifle breathlessly.

"Right," he drawled, "but we're not going to discuss literature tonight. That I promise you, sweet Kate. I only display that degree of restraint every century or so."

"I think most of the salt is washed off now," she offered faintly.

"But we have to be sure, don't we? I promised you every grain of salt." He was very close now and she could see the white flash of his teeth in his darkly shadowed face. "And I'll think we'll start here."

The cold wet bar was against her throat and she gave an involuntary shiver. "Cold?" he murmured.

"Let's see if we can fix that." He rubbed the soap briskly between his hands. "I'm going to like this much better anyway. And you will too, Kate. I guarantee that you'll like it a hell of a lot better."