“What happened to her?” Once the words flew from my mouth, I pulled back and covered it, but it was too late. I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.
“Several years later, our now fully refitted pirate ship, what was the Majesty’s Venture, of course, made a stop in Port Royal for the first time. I was a bit of a wild one myself, but not the way ye might be thinking, so you can just let that assumption of my past go tonight and never think of it again. However, I did enjoy a good cup a’ Caribbean rum from time to time. The fellas and I took a stroll to the Golden Gull; ’twas my first time ever setting foot in that place. Seaman or no, I didn’t go in for those establishments, but in Port Royal, they were the only places to get a decent drink. A few cups later, the music started and the crowd was boisterous and lively, and I looked up at those girls doing their evening show on the railing. They were waving, and twisting their half-naked bodies, singing along with the band. I was entranced, yet at the same time, the old, high-born London gentleman in me cringed and thought only of their poor mothers and fathers and what they’d think seeing them like this. Can you imagine a man of twenty-seven, never having seen such a sight?” He shook his head and then turned back facing me.
“One girl, second from the right, caught my eye, though. I stood up from the table and started walking towards them. Everything seemed to move so slowly. It was as if life was a spinning wheel rolling down to a stop.”
“‘Gabriel!’ she shouted into the crowd at me as I stood there like a big, dumbfounded ape. She scrambled, pulling at her clothes to cover herself, and ran back up the stairs. I chased after her and caught her just as she pulled open a door to run inside a room to escape me. Oh, she was crying so and shaking when I pulled her into my arms and stroked her strawberry hair.”
“Gabriel. Your name is, or was, Gabriel,” I said, wiping tears away from my face.
“It was she; my bonny little lass. Once I calmed her down and paid for her time, she told me how that night I saw her in her pretty red cape she was snatched and carried away aboard a ship with several other girls. She told me she was ashamed to look at me, but I swore I’d get her out of there and back home where she belonged. She told me it was too late. She had a son who she’d placed with a family on a plantation, and she could never leave the child. I offered to take them both with me, but she wouldn’t go. All I could do was promise her that I’d do everything I could to not let this happen to another girl. Finally, I did manage to convince her that I could afford to place her and her son somewhere safe, and she’d never have to work another day in that slimy place for the rest of her life. To that, she agreed. To this day, she and her boy still live there, and yes, I have been to see them many times.”
I was sobbing. I had to cover my mouth to keep myself from dragging everyone from the house to look for the wailing ghost woman in the night. “Oh, Rasmus, I’ve believed you the most honorable and generous man I’ve known since Uncle William. I didn’t think it possible for me to love you more than I already do, but I was wrong. I simply don’t deserve you. Not even the smallest bit. I’m a horrid wench, and I wouldn’t blame you if you turned me over your knee and whipped me before tossing me out into the night for good.”
He glanced around and then reached out and pulled me against his chest. “My crazy, ridiculous girl, I’m the one should be tossed out in the night for keeping all of myself from ye for this long. I’ve wanted to tell ye, don’t ye see? But to me, there’s nothing I can go back and change. I don’t even know who Gabriel Wallace is anymore. Maybe he never really lived. He was to me as Ivan is to you now; just a shield over the true man that was living in my heart.”
I held so tightly to him, I thought if I let go he’d shatter into a million pieces. I wanted to warm him and be his shield now, instead of needing him as mine. “I’m twenty-eight years old, lass, and I’ve been a full grown man for many a year. There’s other women, a bounty on my head, and deeds I laid down on a trail that’s long behind me, but none of those things has anything to do with you and me. If any of it meant a God-damned thing to me, I wouldn’t be standing here right now.” He looked down at me and pulled my face up to his. “I promised ye my heart, soul, and body, and I’ll not break that promise unless the Devil himself tears me from your arms.”
He glanced around again and then said, “Damn the moonlight,” and pressed his delicious lips down hard on mine, pushing and pulling at them as I pushed my hands into his hair and held onto him. Tasting him again at last, all I thought about was having him right there. Rarely did his mouth and mine mingle so deeply and not invite our bodies and souls to join in.
After several minutes, and feeling as if I’d faint, we let go in the exact same moment, and he said, soft and deep over long heavy breaths, “I need you, Ivory. I need you now, and if I have to, I’ll lay you down right here, I will.” He pulled me tightly against him again and pressed his forehead down against my brow and closed his eyes.
“Lay me down then, but first…Valentina? Relay this to me, and I swear on my life I will never question you again. Once I understand, there’ll be nothing left between us but flesh and bone,” I whispered up at him.
Pulling my head to his chest, he answered, “I found her two years ago at eighteen, cooking for an inn here in Nassau. She’d somehow managed to escape being a whore by staying with her grandmother and older brother, Marco. Yes, we had a brief romance, but she was already promised to a young man named Phillippe, who’d she thought had died aboard a pirate ship six months before. The day Phillippe walked back through her door, she swept my big red-headed arse aside like day-old bread.” He chuckled, shaking my body in rhythm with his.
“Phillippe wasn’t jealous or angry?” I asked.
“Well, when he found out about us, he wasn’t in much of a mood for having words with me, and as you’d assume, there were a few blows exchanged. Valentina stepped in and reminded him of her warning about taking up with the pirates in the first place. In her way, explained to him had he not left her alone in the first place, she’d have never even looked at another man. We settled things once he saw what was in her heart. I was pretty disappointed, I won’t lie to ye, lass, but who was I to block true love’s path?”
“How did you all end up working together?”
“When I told them what I planned to do, they both wanted to help me, as she’d lost many friends to the pirates and the brothels. In exchange for her and Phillippe hiding the girls and helping me get them out of the Caribbean, I provided them with this home and a small restaurant in town that provides them with a decent income. The orchard is all theirs. I suppose my wedding gift healed ol’ Phillippe’s wounds pretty fast.” He chuckled again, brushing the last of my tears away.
“Wait…” I sniffled and wiped my face on my sleeve. “Phillippe is her husband?”
“And you, my darling, are no boy, because I know this big, red, hot-blooded beast of a man would not be pressing you against his body and wiping away your tears unless you are hiding your curves beneath those rags,” Valentina said, bursting into laughter as she emerged from the shadows of her roses. “Gran Rojo, take this woman to bed and make love to her. It is the least you can do for making her cry,” she said, standing on her toes to kiss his cheek and then kissing mine. “You see? I love everybody, chica. Now, ir a la cama y hacer el amor! No more tears tonight, unless they are for happiness.”
NINETEEN
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Once alone in our room, under Valentina’s orders, Rasmus was possessed with a renewed and unleashed longing. The lover I knew him to be and this new man, light as air and covering me with the joyous fever of his lust, were so different that I held my eyes open the entire time to reassure myself I was being loved by the same man. The release of all he’d hidden from me had stripped his spirit so clean that when he pressed against me, belly to belly, it was the freedom in his expressions of pleasure that took my breath away, and not the weight of his flesh.
He’d no sooner closed and locked t
he door and lit the lantern on the side table by the bed, than I felt his hands on me. He wasted no time with my clothes, pawing and pulling at them to relieve me of the cloth barriers barring him from my flesh, then tearing away his own. When his big body flew against mine, I hit the bedroom door with a thud and tried to shush him, but it was useless. My body was no longer my own, which he made obvious when he lifted me at the waist and tossed me headlong onto the bed. Before I could catch the wind he knocked from my lungs, he was inside of me. My heart pounded with a rhythm of both fear and excitement, and my body was already covered in a pungent mixture of our sweat.
At last, he was making love to me for him, not solely to satisfy me, and I loved it. With the exception of our brief, but intense, encounter in his cabin aboard the Jade, he’d always been so attentive to me and seemed only to concern himself with my pleasure. However, I accepted that rough romp of fucking as, again, what I wanted and needed. Thinking back on it now, his whole demeanor for those few minutes was by my design—even the words he spoke.
The peculiar and foreign way in which he positioned me was at first. uncomfortable, but after a few moments of the blissful sensation of him filling me so completely, I didn’t care anymore. His hands gripped me tightly at my ankles, and he pushed my legs up and back until I was pinned beneath him. My ass was at least six inches off the bed, and he was as far inside of me as he’d ever been, or ever could be without splitting me in half. His hair whipped about as he ground himself into me, wildly groping at my breasts, then mouthing them roughly until I bit down on my lip to keep from crying out. He was loud, and I was tempted to hush him again, but I knew he was submerged somewhere inside himself and wouldn’t have heard me anyway. The force of his thrust grew so intense the bed shook and banged hard into the wall, and his hands gripped tightly to my shoulders for leverage to keep from pushing me out from under him.
Without warning, he wrapped his big arm beneath me tightly, rolled me on top of him and sat back on his knees. His hands then clamped onto my hips and pulled me onto him, straddling his lap. Face to face with him, his hungry eyes stared into mine for a few moments, and I believed he was waiting for me to do something. When I began to move on him, he jerked his body and stiffened, holding me still. If I’d had the slightest doubt that the man had opened every door and window of his soul to me, I surely knew it when he grabbed a handful of what little hair I had and jerked back my head.
“Unh, unh,” he growled, mashing his lips onto mine and forcing his tongue into my mouth. When he released my hair, I threw my arms around his neck and my legs around his back and held on. With our ale-coated tongues still tied together, I gasped into his open mouth when his hands came down hard on my ass with a loud slap and clamped onto me, holding me at his will while he drove himself up and into me, until I at last cried out and fell limp against the soft fur of his dampened chest.
Without so much as a few seconds to regain my senses, he flipped me like a rag doll onto my stomach and mounted me from behind. I was spent and weak when he entered me, but the power and force with which he attacked me rekindled my energy. Within a few moments, I was fully reengaged and clawing at the rungs of the headboard for something to hang onto, so as not to give up one bit of slack against his thrusts. My body ached everywhere, but wishing this night would never end far outweighed my near exhaustion.
His breathing became more like the chuff of a lion than a man, overlain with loud sighs and moans as he slowed down until his drives became deliberate gentle slides. The moment I believed he’d reached his end was near. But I was wrong. He arched his broad back and held himself deep inside me and, with a deep breath, flipped me again. My eyes widened as he crept over me as that lion and began kissing me everywhere. These kisses weren’t as rough and hard, yet they were still accompanied by those huge, sandy palms groping and kneading me everywhere. I thought he was about to devour me, for when he looked up at me from between my breasts, his eyes were wild and a bit frightening.
“What are you doing?” I whispered down at his ferocious face.
“Do you trust me?” he asked. His expression was somewhere between the self-satisfaction of his strength and power and the fiery glee at what he was about to do.
“I trust you’ll empty that inferno in your belly afore I’m unable to walk straight tomorrow,” I said with a breathy giggle. I’d no sooner released my words than he began kissing me lower on my belly, until I finally shouted at him. “No! Stop! My God, Rasmus, I haven’t bathed today!” My hands flew to my face in complete shame when he gripped my thighs and unclenched them with little effort. I’d heard that men do this, and I’d longed for him to, but not now. Not tonight. Yes, tonight—for on no other night could this have happened.
“When I’m through with you, you’ll not need a bath, love.”
My mortified soul was hushed the moment his velvet mouth touched me there. I’d never burned so deeply nor believed such pleasure possible. My body writhed beneath the movements of his tongue as it whirled and probed me, igniting dark and mysterious delights beyond anything I’d ever known. I was completely under his touch and control. No longer did my mind or my muscles govern me. My back arched off the bed, and my legs trembled as I closed my eyes. I could hear myself crying out his name, and my hands flew into his tangled red mane when he clutched my thighs and pushed them up, resting them on his shoulders.
I thought I’d fainted, for when I opened my eyes I felt his weight atop me, filling me again. He pushed himself up from his elbows, and every muscle in his arms and chest bulged while bearing his weight. I ran my hands roughly up his arms, feeling every peak and valley of his form, and then slid my nails down his chest and around to his back. The sheer strength beneath his damp, taught skin left me weak, and I dug in my fingertips until my nails clawed at him to hold on. He winced and jerked, but I wasn’t going to stop until I reached the firm round pillows of his ass. When I dug into it, pulling him harder into me, I felt his skin turn to gooseflesh all over, and finally, that thick, ravenous body stiffened and stilled.
This night, I was what I’d longed to be for him, and I didn’t even know it until I felt my body transform into no more than a vessel for him to use and devour at his will. He did things to me he’d never done before. He explored every bit of me with his mouth and reveled in watching how he turned my body into a trembling mess when he drove me to ecstasy. He invited me into his long-shrouded hungers and those never-before-mentioned sexual acts with an unspoken insistence and a firm hand, and I wanted more. I wanted to explore him and please him in ways no woman had before. He made me feel like his queen and proved to me over and over that he was my king—demanding, unyielding, and exposing me to the delights of living under his reign.
He poured every bit of his long withheld lust over me, until every muscle and pound of flesh on my body ached with sweet memories of him. The sheer power of him pulling me, turning me, and tossing me at his will, seizing me like a wild beast taking down its prey, left me stricken with awe that such a man could exist, and that such a man was mine. Oddly, at one point during a brief rest for water and breath, I was bewildered by him for having withheld himself from me, and I believed it was the burden of his conscience that had restrained him. Then, I wanted to fall at his feet and weep for him, when I imagined the level of strength it must have taken to single-handedly hold the reins on that team of wild horses he’d at last unbridled and slapped hard on the ass this night.
Sometime just before dawn, my mighty lion laid down to rest. The breeze which had tossed the lace window drapes throughout the night was now evident as it cooled and dried our skin. I couldn’t sleep. Every inch of my body was alive, and I was more in love with this man than I’d imagined I could ever be—terrifyingly so. He slept with one hand up and tucked beneath his pillow and the other resting on his chest as it rose and fell. I marveled at the smooth skin of his cheek bones and the light brown freckles hidden behind his sun-kissed glow.
Leaning on my elbow, my eyes traveled ove
r the amber highlights of his long hair as it fanned out against the stark white pillowcase and over his forehead. His eyebrows looked like two red, wooly caterpillars, and his golden and tan eyelashes fluttered every few seconds, and I told myself he was dreaming of me. I continued my exploration over his coarse beard and down his thick neck, memorizing every stray whisker and tiny mole as if I’d never see it again. His chest was a beloved physical feature, second only to his big blue eyes. Whenever I saw his bare chest, I always recalled the first time I pressed my cheek against that silky fur and felt completely safe. Most of all, his heart lived there, and as such, so did I.
When the sun made its first appearance, the bands of light illuminated him. My angel, my king, my lion, and my love glowed, and I found my hand touching him ever so lightly, until I rested it above his heart.
“Ivory?” he called out as his eyes fluttered open.
“I’m right here, Razz,” I whispered.
I awoke to someone lightly tapping on our bedroom door. Rasmus was snoring so loudly I was sure it was someone calling to request a slow and painful death for him for waking the whole house. I had no idea what time it was, nor when I’d finally fallen asleep, but I wasn’t anywhere near rested, and my blurred vision and heavy head held me pasted to Rasmus’s naked right side.
“Yes?” I called out in a rasp.
“My darlings, it is almost noon. Shall I have someone bring you something to eat?” Valentina asked as I heard a key turn in the door. At the sound, I peeled myself from Rasmus and pulled our sheet and blanket over us. “Happy wife, no?” She giggled, poking her head around the door.
“Thank you, Valentina. We’d be so grateful for something to eat and perhaps some coffee or tea,” I said, holding the wadded-up sheet at my chest.
Jaded Tides (The Razor's Adventures Pirate Tales) Page 15
