She slipped her hand from Peter’s. “If he wants to talk, I should hear him.”
Peter chuckled cynically. “You can’t be that naïve. He doesn’t want to talk, Emily.”
“I trust him.”
“You shouldn’t.” Peter sighed and shook his head. “He just wants to seduce you into his bed.”
Likely he did. Nevertheless, she would stay if Alex finally wanted to talk. “I am a big girl, Peter, I can look out for myself.”
Peter’s jaw tightened. “Emily, we should go now.”
She pulled away from him. “I am my own mistress. I shall likely always be.” She placed strong emphasis on each word.
Peter’s eyes widened. “I see,” he said.
The kittens mewed. She glanced down at the basket he held. “You’d best be getting them home. You know Betsy won’t sleep a wink until she sees them.”
“I think she’d rather you tucked them in with her.”
Emily smiled, a little sadly, and shook her head. “I can’t do that. It would be wrong for me to allow her to attach herself to me.”
His eyebrows lowered and his nostrils flared slightly. Then he released her hand. “I shall bid you goodnight, then.”
She nodded. He turned away. Moments later the door closed behind him as he left. She stared at it for a few moments. God, had she done the right thing or had she thrown away her best chance for family and happiness?
At a touch on her arm, she jumped. She looked up into Alex’s piercing eyes.
“Come, let’s go to my study,” he said.
****
Alex watched Emily settle herself on the settee, her ivory skin glowing against the colored satin. Her modish pale yellow gown with its dark green satin sash and puffed sleeves accentuated her slender figure. Her hair was tied back with a bright green ribbon and fell in curls to her shoulders, glinting like rubies in the firelight.
Christ, she looked so fragile, so vulnerable. So damned young. Telling her was going to be the single most selfish thing he’d ever done. She was really too innocent even yet to imagine the things he’d known in Turkey. What kind of gentleman subjected a gently raised young woman to such a tale?
But he had no choice. His heart gave him no choice. The whole week he’d thought of nothing but her censuring tone and expression on the night she’d first seen Aimee. She thought he’d put his own child aside out of a young man’s sense of not wanting to be tied. He’d given her no other information upon which to base her opinion. It had seemed the only way. But now he couldn’t bear for her to have such an opinion of him. It was funny, the things that could drive a man to do what he swore he’d never do.
Yet, in telling her, he would still lose her respect. Forever. However, he’d rather her think he’d failed out of weakness than believe that he’d turned his child away out of callousness. It had been a surprise to learn this about himself. He’d have been sure he would have preferred her image of him remain one of a callous man, not a failure of a man.
Her sherry-brown eyes focused on him intently, as if she were holding her breath to hear what he had to tell her. She’d long wanted to know, she’d made that plain. Well, now she would hear and then she’d understand why he’d never told her before. And her contempt for him would increase—or it would turn to pity.
Just as his mother had pitied his father.
Neither choice was one he could live with in a wife. But, hell, it was too late now to think about any of that.
If she would stay over there, on her own settee, then he could maybe get through this and get the whole story out. Maybe. He took a deep breath and plunged in. “Green and I met while serving on the Pollyanna, a privateer in the war. After the war, our vessel sailed and traded in the Caribbean.”
“Yes, I know. Nancy and Peter told me.”
“Ah, and did he tell you about the wreck?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we didn’t really wreck.” Her sharp intake of breath made him pause.
Her eyes had grown larger. “You didn’t?”
Concern for him marked her expression. Such sweet concern. But hadn’t it been hard for him to hear the details of her fight to survive yellow fever? Damn, it wasn’t going to be easy to tell her this. Even the lesser parts of it.
“Our ship was blown apart by what we thought was a British Navy frigate bent on pressing some Order of Council we hadn’t heard of. But they were flying false colors; they were not British. They weren’t even Barbary pirates.”
She frowned. “Not pirates? But who then?”
“These were pirates but they were renegades—the lowest of the low that no land would claim.”
Her eyes grew larger than ever. “You mean there are pirates worse than Barbary pirates?”
He nodded. “Even the Barbary pirates follow the laws of their rulers. But renegades follow only their own.”
She paled and put a hand up to her throat. “Oh God—”
His throat seemed to constrict. How was he going to continue with this tale? It was not fit for her ears.
“Oh, Alex.” This time her voice was a hoarse whisper.
“Do you want me to stop?” He held his breath with the hope that she would say yes. Then he wouldn’t have to continue.
She shook her head. “Go on.”
“I awoke on land. I don’t remember how I got there. I have dreams of it, vague snatches, but nothing solid to recall. It was just Green and I. There were no other survivors. We knew they’d come looking for us. We made a shelter to hide ourselves with underbrush and tree limbs and things like that. It was very crude.
He could taste again the bitter, metallic fear. “I was burning with fever and they were upon us. I collapsed with exhaustion and lost track of time. We could hear them, getting closer and closer. I could hardly think clearly and my body was weak, racked with shivers. Green reassured me that the voices I heard were simply a manifestation of the fever. Then I fell asleep and he left me. They found me and took me.”
Her loud gasp jerked him back into the moment. He stared at her, a little bemused. He had been so deeply immersed in the past.
Once again, she put her hand to her collarbone. “But he was a grown man and you were—why, you were just a boy!”
“Aye. I never forgave him. My refusal to forgive is what killed him.”
He could still hear the report of Green’s pistol. He could feel it in his chest.
“What he did was terrible! Abandoning you like that.”
“Yes, terrible and damned craven on his part. But now I wonder what he could have done for me. He could not have prevented what happened. Maybe I was too harsh on him.”
What if he could have reached Green sooner? What if he could have prevented Green from falling into despair and taking his own life? Christ, he had failed Green.
He met her eyes. “I could have reached him sooner. I could have chosen to forgive him.”
“Do you think he would have been able to accept your forgiveness? He couldn’t forgive himself.”
“I suppose.” He wasn’t convinced. Green’s death continued to feel like just another situation where he had failed. Just like Alice McConnell. Just like Catarina…
“What happened after that, Alex?”
It was hard to go on. He took a deep, ragged breath. “They took me and forced me to work on their ship. For months I planned to escape. However, they watched me like a hawk at every port, sometimes even placing me in chains. They made their way around, eventually docking in Constantinople, and I soon found out my true value to them. They intended to sell me in the slave market.”
Of course there were things about this voyage that he couldn’t possibly tell her. But he had told enough to give her a fairly good idea of his experience thus far.
“They forbid me, under pain of getting my throat slit, to speak to anyone. It was to be a secret, illegally enacted sale. No records, no chance of ransom.”
She kept staring at him with those large eyes. Eyes full of empathic pa
in. And fear.
He couldn’t bear seeing it.
“Alex, this story turns out very, very badly, doesn’t it?” Her voice quavered. “I mean, far worse than I ever imagined.”
Her voice rang with regret. A touch of shame. She would blame herself now, for not understanding before. But how could she have truly understood? He hadn’t given her enough information.
He really couldn’t bear this. He shook his head. “I should stop. I shouldn’t burden you with such a tale.”
“You lived through it, and yet you think I cannot bear simply hearing it?”
He nodded.
She bit her lip and the surface of her eyes went glossy.
It was ripping his heart out. He’d never be able to tell her now.
She jumped to her feet and all but leapt to stand before him. He shook his head. No, she had to stay on her side.
She had to.
But she dropped to her knees and put her head into his lap, pressing her cheek to his thigh. Her dark hair caught the firelight and shone fiery red against the gray of his breeches. He couldn’t help touching it, running his fingertips over her silken tresses.
“Tell me,” she said, her voice quavering. Her tears were wetting the velveteen fabric that covered his leg.
“I can’t.”
A few moments passed. She took a deep breath. “You tell me. Tell me everything.”
Her voice resounded with firmness. With determination.
He continued to stroke her hair and she kept her face pressed to his thigh. He didn’t think he could tell her.
“I mean it, Alex. I won’t leave this chamber until you’ve told me all.”
Her stubbornness put warmth into his belly, into his bones. That sense of the strength of her will loosened the tight feeling in his throat.
Then, somehow, the words began to tumble out of him.
“It doesn’t do much for a young man’s sense of masculinity to find he’s basically been sold for the beauty of his face with the expectation that he’ll soon be gelded like a horse and resold naked on the block. But there I was, just turned eighteen and for sale.
“When I met the Dutch merchant, I thought I’d been saved. He made it quite clear he wanted me intact. I had no idea what he wanted from me but I cannot deny I was giddy with relief that I would not be mutilated at least. He pretended to stumble upon me in the market. He wanted to present himself as a savior. I learned later that he had requested the pirates to search far and wide for a young man with my coloring. He paid a fortune for me.
“He already had a young male slave who had blond hair and light eyes but his eyes were too blue. The Dutch devil wanted blue-gray eyes to match his own.”
He had to pause. He could feel again the terrible intimacy of looking into the Dutch devil’s blue-gray eyes after a beating. The Dutch devil crooning to him, calling him “beautiful” and “gorgeous” as though Alex had been a girl. Shame burnt through him as though he were back in that time.
“The Dutch devil?” she said. “Who was he?”
“He was a madman who lived in a beautiful palace and he had dark needs. He’d been captured himself at a young age and castrated. He was intelligent and cunning. He had won his elderly master’s deepest gratitude and regard and had earned his freedom in the old man’s will. He became a merchant himself, dealing in slaves. But he couldn’t be totally happy for he wasn’t a whole man.”
“The other young man, that was Nicolo, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, my love, it was. But you can never tell anyone. You can’t even let Nicolo know that you know. He would be too deeply shamed.”
“Of course, I will tell no one. But why did this man want you? I don’t understand.”
He continued, “He needed surrogates for himself to perform with his slave women for his amusement. Alternately, or perhaps as a result of the frustrations of the first case, he also enjoyed inflicting punishment on young men who looked like himself at a younger age. I was purchased for both needs.”
“He beat you?” Her voice sounded quite teary.
“He tortured us both.” His voice sounded hoarse. “Emily, he had ways of torturing—it wasn’t just a standard whipping on the back. That would have left scars that would have spoiled his viewing pleasure. He knew how to make pain exquisite, how to stop just short of physical damage while maximizing the sensations.”
Again, he couldn’t tell her, explicitly, what that intimate, visceral torture had entailed. But he had to make her understand the effects of such horrors.
“Pain day-in and day-out. Over and over. It can be very hard, in times like that, to hold one’s sanity intact. I hated the devil so much, allowed my fear of him to control me so much I ceased to be a man.”
She tightened her grip on his leg. She was coaxing him, pulling the whole story out of him, giving him the will to continue his confession.
“I would beg, I would plead for mercy. I would do things that I should never have otherwise done.”
“But you were still just a boy.”
The sympathy in her voice hit him like a blow to the chest. He took a slow, hitching breath. He couldn’t let himself off so easily. She must know the full depth of how badly he’d been broken.
How completely he’d lost himself.
His very soul.
“You don’t understand how it was. To me, he represented pain, punishment, deliverance, a protective father, a sympathetic brother. All at once. Even though he was a devil, as I lay in the darkness, hearing his voice telling me I was not to be beaten that hour, that day, was the sweetest thing I’d ever known.” His heart was pounding. Nausea clenched at his guts, a deathly cold that leached deep into his bones. He wanted to hold this last bit back but he could not. “The Dutch devil wished for me to say ‘I love you, Papa. I forgive you the things you do. I know that I have brought them on myself.’”
Her slender frame shuddered against his leg.
His nausea increased and he swallowed, hard, against it. He must wait to be really physically ill. For now, he had to continue talking. He must tell it all, quickly, spill it out like vomit and then never speak of it ever again.
“It was true, in a perverse way. He was my captor, my tormentor, and yet, at times I loved him. I cannot explain it. How can anyone possibly understand that which I cannot understand myself?”
She gripped his leg tighter than ever.
He tensed.
She stroked her hand up and down his taut muscles. “I will accept whatever you tell me.”
“He broke me, Emily. He broke me.” Nausea rose in his throat, bitter bile that he had to swallow back.
“Oh Alex—”
“I allowed him to break me. I allowed it.”
“No, no Alex. You were just a boy.”
“I cannot forgive myself. I have tried, all this time, to run from myself. But I cannot. The knowing is always there, eating into me. It destroyed anything worthy or good within me. And I have destroyed others because of it.”
His stomach, thankfully empty, contracted so hard, it must be pressed against his spine. Gall rose in his throat and rendered him unable to go on speaking.
She pressed her cheek to his leg harder than ever. “Oh, my love.”
Her slight whisper settled over him, a soft, warmth. A balm that eased the cold, cold shuddering in his bones. He closed his eyes and let the sense of her love settle over him and he swallowed back the bitterness welling in his throat.
“I allowed it all, Emily. The blame is all mine. He seduced me with sensual pleasures and I fell to the temptation.”
“Then tell me about that.” Her voice was all soft inducement.
“Alternating with the punishments, he allowed me certain luxuries. They have something called hashish that they put in gelled candies. It’s better than being drunk. It takes away all pain. I loved it. Adored it. And in this state of inebriation I would be offered women… soft, willing, affectionate, lovely women with the caveat that he might remain and watch. But I
had my Christian beliefs. I had expected to know no other woman but a legal wife.
“And the things he wished me to do with these women seemed sinful and devilish. I refused and I was punished. It was a decision between pain and pleasure. He always wanted to watch. Eventually, I was so debauched I didn’t give a damn if he were there or not. I took comfort from their sympathetic arms… God, but many times I cried in their arms from the simple pleasure of holding close another human being who would not hurt me. But never did the same woman return more than two or three times.”
“It would be very hard for any young man to resist such temptations.”
“That’s no excuse, Emily.” She flinched and he realized he had spoken far too sharply. He softened his voice and added, “A man should stand strong against temptations. But I’ve said enough and I never want to mention this part again. I mean never.”
“Of course,” she replied, her voice very small.
“He wanted something else from me. Something even more sinful and devastating to my beliefs.”
“Nicolo…” she said breathily.
He had forgotten her imagination. Well, those parts had been necessary actions, done to satisfy the Dutch devil’s voracious, voyeuristic appetites. It had been nothing, just playacting between comrades, friends, and afterwards, quickly put out of mind by both himself and Nicolo.
It hadn’t been often and since he’d not taken true pleasure from them, those events had not touched him. Not like the women had.
“The Dutch devil had a wife, an exceptionally beautiful Venetian of twenty-five, the daughter of a minor merchant who had been captured on her way to her wedding in Greece. As I said, I looked very much as the Dutch devil did and he wanted me to impregnate this young woman. It went against everything I believed in, making a child like that. She was a pure, devout Catholic, a virgin. I refused to do it.
“He punished me. I was prepared to die before I would do what he wanted. Then he threatened to punish her. She was so frail, like she was spun from glass. She could never hold up to such torture and—and I gave in. I promised her I would find a way to get us out of there. I would bring her back to America and marry her and we would raise our child in respectability, and none of what we’d gone through would ever matter again. I gained her willingness. Within two months she was pregnant.
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