Sea of Ruin

by Pam Godwin

  Because he hit like Priest.

  The more I thought about that, the deeper I sank into the terrible, wicked intensity of the pleasure-pain. Gradually, my ear-splitting protests melted into raspy whimpers and moans. But even those sounds spluttered with curses at the way I yielded to his imperious discipline.

  I was wet. Not from the pain. My body felt as though it were immersed in hellfire, and I wasn’t into that.

  What aroused me was his undivided attention. For a man of his stature and self-control to gaze upon me like I was his sun, moon, and sea, even if only for a fleeting moment, it made me feel alive. Hungry and hot and vigorously alive.

  That was motivation enough to hold my position beneath his strikes.

  Aching everywhere, I rocked against the edge of the table. As another open-handed smack collided with my sore bottom, I gasped, shudders seizing me anew. I felt the ridges of my swelling skin as profoundly as I felt the trembling in his palm as he slowed his swings.

  Then he stopped.

  My mouth opened and closed on an air-sucking gulp. The action pushed my cheek through a puddle of moisture that had leaked from my eyes. I hadn’t cried. Not consciously. But I wanted to. God almighty, the pain was all consuming.

  “Don’t move.” His voice shook with the pummel of his breaths.

  I couldn’t have moved if I tried. My arms felt like water stretched above me. My lower half hung off the side of the table, buckling my knees. I lay there, my eyes drifting shut, as his footsteps treaded aft toward his sleeping quarters.

  Then he was standing behind me again, staring at my naked backside. His breaths issued in broken clusters of air, coming hard and fast as an effect of whatever internal force he was fighting.

  If he were any other man, I would cover myself in fear of being rutted against my will. But Ashley Cutler hadn’t yet reached that level of desperation. Perhaps he was capable of it, of forcing himself on me in a moment of weakness. But I suspected it would take a great deal more than a spanking for him to snap.

  I licked my parched lips. “Are you hard?”

  Silence extended an eternity before he responded. “Yes. It’s an involuntary response to a perfectly red backside.” He cleared the scratch in his voice. “It helps that yours isn’t covered in hair.”

  “You see a lot of furry arses?”

  “With over four hundred men on this ship, I can say with confidence that yours is the smoothest. And the reddest.” He stepped closer and stooped low, crouching behind me. “You’re also the first prisoner I’ve punished who leaked something other than urine down the thighs.”

  “Don’t look for lust where none exists,” I said, echoing his words. “It’s an involuntary response to a perfectly delivered spanking.”

  He made a sound in his throat, something between a grunt and a snort.

  Setting a small jar he’d retrieved from the sleeping chamber beside my hip, he rose to his feet and rested a finger on my tailbone. I shivered as the touch glided downward, following the cleft of my bottom. He didn’t push into the crease, instead keeping the caress agonizing, slow and light as a feather.

  “As a liberated woman, I shall presume you’ve had all your territories occupied.” His finger paused directly over my arsehole without sinking between my clenched cheeks. “Tell me, Bennett. Has this domain been pillaged?”

  Only a man who was interested in the act would inquire about such a thing. Priest had demanded it dozens of times before he broke down my resolve and introduced me to the sin of Sodom.

  To this day, he was the only one who had taken me fore and aft, and he’d done so with a skill that made me crave it relentlessly, thereby damning me for all eternity.

  “Yes.” I craned my neck and locked onto hooded blue eyes. “I’ve been plundered forward and backward, with my consent, and only by a libertine who knew what he was doing.”

  “Does this libertine have a name?”

  “I don’t recall.” I fought the urge to swallow. “How about you?” At his silence, I clarified. “Do you know what you’re doing, Ashley?”

  “I should flog you every time you disrespectfully address me without my title. Except you love my punishments.”

  “And you love when I call you Ashley.” I squinted. “You’re evading my question.”

  His mouth curved up at the corners. It wasn’t a smile, for there were no traces of softness or humor in it. It was the mien of cruelty, and it hit my veins in splinters of ice.

  Eyes bolted to mine, he dipped long fingers into the jar and scooped out an oily substance.

  Lubrication? To grease a hole I gave him no license to penetrate?

  I choked on a spike of fear and pushed up from the table. Until a heavy hand clamped onto my hip, shoving me back down.

  “Do. Not. Move.” His lubricated palm went to my thigh, gliding upward, unhesitating along my abused flesh.

  Cool, refreshing balm penetrated my searing skin, instantly soothing the pain and perfuming the air with the fragrance of garden herbs.

  He was treating my wounds? Dear God, would he never stop deviating from the expectations I’d built up around him? I couldn’t read him, predict his actions, or figure out a way to circumvent him. He was an anomaly.

  Releasing his grip on my hip, he surrounded my backside with his hands, kneading my aching flesh, rubbing the salve into the burn, and coursing relief and sudden desolation through my limbs.

  How long had it been since I’d been cared for this way? Since I felt the attention of a lover’s caress upon my body?

  I tried not to think about Priest as Ashley worked me into a thrumming, molten puddle of bliss. Talented fingers roved along my hips, waist, and thighs, learning my shape before returning to my bottom.

  The friction of skin, even the barest touch, sizzled honeyed pleasure up my legs and into my core. When his thumb hovered over the hidden hole at my aft, rich shivers invaded the muscles there, clenching deep inside.

  It was his gentleness that seduced me, his teasing fingers, the tenderness in every diabolical touch as though he trickled thick, hot syrup along my spine and dribbled it down my crack and into the needy gap between my legs.

  It wasn’t nearly enough. I lifted my hips, urging him to keep stroking, blindsided by the madness of my need. I wanted more than the delirium of his expert petting. I ached to feel his lips mate with mine.

  My whimpers found voice as he caressed the arch of my back. His hand tangled in my hair and turned my head. Eyes, so commanding that Satan himself would do his bidding, sucked me in like dark whirlwinds, threatening to swallow me whole.

  “Siren.” The word came forth like gravel from his mouth, a beautifully shaped mouth befitting the devil, which I stared at quite fixedly.

  His features seemed too relaxed to be affected by lust. But I knew better than to trust that handsome face.

  I gasped as his weight came down atop my back. He was hard as stone in his breeches, the swollen heat of him intoxicating my blood as if I’d imbibed a cask of rum. I couldn’t breathe.

  With hair as black as night and eyes bluer than the sea, he smelled like a midnight storm, the kind that infused the air with woodsy loam and turned everything it touched inside out. My mouth watered. My heart shivered.

  He gripped the side of my face and tilted my chin up to meet his. Our lips hovered an inch away.

  Did he find me pretty? Desirable? Worthy enough to kiss?

  To be wanted by a man whose heart didn’t belong to another… I would never admit such a vulnerable desire aloud. The desperate, wild hope that fluttered from my thoughts equally mortified and excited me. Oh, how I hated this need to be wanted by him, but it was there, a hunger so deep it clamped down on my lungs.

  Kiss me, Ashley.

  He trailed a finger along my jaw and traced my quivering lower lip. His mouth parted, inviting mine to edge closer.

  I arched my neck, pressing into the hand on my cheek. My nerves buzzed with drunken anticipation as he dipped his head. Closer. Close
r. The nearness of his mouth teased mine, trembling, groaning, heating…

  Gone.

  A chill swept in. Then I saw it.

  The curved lips. The humorless non-smile. Eyes as mean as the devil’s own.

  “You’re a pirate whore, Bennett Sharp. Nothing more.” He shoved off my body, his tone cutting. “You will hang for the crimes you’ve committed against the crown.”

  Ashley’s sudden transformation sucked the wind from my sails. A scathing sob rose in my throat, and I trapped it there, humiliated, devastated, and overcome.

  The salve on my wounds, the pretty words about my beauty, the almost-kiss… It had all been a ruse to disarm and hurt me.

  “Don’t move.” He straightened the shirt, covering my bare bottom and igniting sore flesh.

  I showed no reaction and made no move to disobey. I needed to reassemble my thoughts and rein in the blubbering jumble of emotions unraveling inside me.

  He set a chair directly behind my bent position, selected a book from a nearby shelf, and grabbed a bowl of lobscouse from the table. Then he settled in to eat and read as if naught were out of order.

  The seething agony of his rejection and outright dismissal of my existence shook me to the core. If I were a cold-hearted woman, perhaps I wouldn’t feel so damned hurt. But I wasn’t, and I did. A vise of pain shredded my organs to a pulp. Prickling heat seared the backs of my eyes, and my head pounded beneath the pressure.

  He couldn’t see my face from his position, and that alone kept me in place.

  I couldn’t hide my true feelings behind a mask like his. Couldn’t stifle the spill of tears or the quiver in my chin. Until I fastened a tourniquet around my bleeding heart, I couldn’t look into his pitiless eyes.

  He’d beaten me with emotional warfare.

  Hadn’t I considered something as equally nefarious with Priest? I was going to fuck another man in front of him. Probably.

  Probably not.

  When it came down to it, I wasn’t as cruel as I wanted people to believe. But I wasn’t a saint, either. I didn’t even claim a god. Maybe I deserved this degradation.

  Every proud fiber of my being bristled in objection. I was a female prisoner, bent over a powerful man’s table for his amusement, after being assaulted to a level of agony that would prevent me from sitting. I hadn’t been convicted of a crime, and until then, it was my right to fight.

  But to survive this captivity, I needed to adjust, bend with the strikes, and set aside my pride.

  So I lay there, deprived of grace and dignity, listening to the clink of his spoon and the rustle of pages turning in his book.

  As a king’s commodore, he was expected to put country and crown before himself, behave as an officer and a nobleman, and exercise control and order at all times.

  But who was he beneath the rank and title? Was he actually reading the words in that book? Tasting the meat he scooped into his mouth? Or was he hiding bawdy thoughts about me and the erection he’d neglected in his breeches?

  “Bennett.” His English accent—terribly deep and more beautiful than it should have been—curled up my spine. “Stand and face me.”

  Damnation. If I disobeyed, he would wrench me up by my hair. He’d done that enough times that my scalp shuddered at the sound of his voice.

  I pushed myself off the table, discreetly wiping my eyes on my arm. I didn’t erase all the tears, but no matter. More fell, trailing itchy rivers down my cheeks. All I could do was remain vertical and hold my head high as I turned.

  He closed the book and set it and the empty bowl aside. “Tell me the lesson learned tonight.”

  “Humility.”

  He’d been right about me not being frightened enough. While it went against my nature to cower, my ostentatious boldness hadn’t helped me, either. His indifference to the suffering of a woman made him a man to be feared. Not that I deigned to be treated differently because of my sex. I just wasn’t accustomed to his degree of callousness.

  “Bring me the second bowl of stew.” He flicked a finger at the table.

  I followed his order, grimacing as the muscles in my backside protested the movement. When I returned to him holding the lobscouse, he tossed a cushion between his boots.

  “Kneel.” He took the bowl, his gaze giving mine an icy reception. “Or sit in a chair.”

  The ruthless bastard knew I couldn’t put weight on my throbbing arse. My hands fisted at my sides, my stomach in turmoil. Would his torture never end?

  I lowered to my knees in the V of his legs.

  Then he fed me.

  Spoon to lips, the action felt awkward, but he showed no sign of discomfort. Patient as ever, he scooped, lifted, and served, catching droplets on my chin, waiting for me to chew, and repeating the motions.

  I was too hungry and beat down to refuse the hand that fed me. The lukewarm meat melted in my mouth, the broth bursting with spicy flavors. My stomach rolled with pleasure.

  Halfway through the stew, he set the spoon in the bowl. “Address me properly, and you may ask your questions.”

  Let go of your pride, Bennett. It won’t save you.

  “Why are you so mean, my lord?”

  “It’s not like me to be so with a woman.” He lifted his free hand to my cheek and traced the drying track of tears. “You behave more like a man.” He tilted his head, studying me. “Or rather… An animal.”

  “There’s an animal in all of us. Including you.”

  “Quite so. But the difference, madam, is that I control mine.”

  “Have you always? What were you doing before you went a-hunting for pirates?”

  “I fought in the War of the Spanish Succession.” His eyes illuminated as he absently lifted the spoon and resumed feeding me. “The battles that followed kept me occupied in the Mediterranean for five years, where I climbed from the lowest naval rank to my current standing.”

  “Has the conflict ended there?”

  “For now. This ship and my crew celebrated victory in an undeclared war last year when Spain tried to retake Gibraltar and Menorca. After that, we were sent back to England.”

  “But you didn’t go.”

  “I command the heaviest warship in the Royal Navy. It would be a shame to moor it.” He slid the spoon into my mouth and let the tip linger on my bottom lip, his gaze stuck there. “I found another use for it.”

  Pirate hunting.

  My stomach twisted, and I leaned back, breaking the connection. “I’m no longer hungry.”

  He set the bowl at his foot and slanted forward, resting elbows on his knees. The position put his gorgeous face so close to mine I had to fight every instinct to remain where I was. I feared him, but I wouldn’t cower.

  Not even when his hand caught the open neckline of my shirt.

  “Do you still love him?” he murmured.

  My heart stopped and restarted. “Who?”

  “The man who wore this shirt.”

  All the warmth in my face drained to my knees, replaced by a coldness that numbed my lips. I was too raw, too exhausted to fight another battle, pass another test, learn another lesson—whatever he had in store for me.

  I closed my eyes, failing to slow my breaths. Until a curled finger caught me under the chin and lifted my head.

  “Yes.” My gaze shot to his, hardening with sudden anger. “I still love him, but I’m working on rectifying that. It’s a process.” I motioned between my chest and head. “In here.”

  “He betrayed you.” The hand beneath my jaw tensed, loosened, and fell away. “Was he involved in the mutiny on your ship that threw you overboard?”

  “No.” I stared into his eyes, letting him find the truth in mine.

  “He bedded another.”

  “Bedded and loved.” I wanted to share this. Perhaps not with Ashley, but it felt freeing to voice it to an impartial ear. “He still loves her, but she won’t have him. He’s alone, and I should be happy about that. I am happy about that.”

  Not really. I was lying
through my teeth.

  “He didn’t maliciously try to hurt you by seeking the arms of another,” Ashley said.

  “No.” My eyebrows crawled together. “I don’t see why that matters.”

  “Love isn’t a decision. It arrives unannounced, breeds madness, and leaves a sea of ruin in its wake. Hate him or love him. Either way, he’s in certain hell.”

  My jaw unhinged under the weight of piling questions, but my voice deserted me. As I stared at his detached expression, I couldn’t separate the truth from the rhetoric. Was he feeding me what he wanted me to hear? Or was he speaking from experience?

  “Close your mouth.” He reclined in the chair, regarding me.

  “You speak of love from experience?”

  “There’s a woman,” he said slowly. “A lady to whom I’m betrothed.”

  “Do you love her?” My knees teetered, struggling to hold me up.

  “I am here.” He spread his arms wide, indicating the ship and the sea. “And she is not.”

  What did that mean? Did he want her here? Who was she? To be betrothed to a high-ranking officer and son of a viscount, she would have her own titles, family wealth, and obligations.

  She would be someone important.

  “Does she love you?” I shook my head, changing the direction of my thoughts. “Of course, that has no consequence. She wants to marry you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “She’s well-bred, titled, educated, modest, kind, beautiful, virtuous—everything a nobleman could want from his betrothed.”

  There was positively no want in his voice or expression. But this was Ashley—buttoned, polished, and starched. Even so, why didn’t he race home after the war to see her? She must miss him horribly.

  He was an extraordinary catch. Gorgeous. Wealthy. Powerful. As a titled lord, he was required to behave like a gentleman in her presence, meanwhile keeping her in the dark about his unchristian proclivities. Such as restraining, spanking, and sharing a bed with his half-naked female prisoner.

  As Lady Ashley Cutler, she would turn the other cheek and focus all her energy on high society. In exchange for his status and affluence, she would only need to open her legs once or twice a year to give him his requisite heirs.