by Lara Temple
‘I apologise for forcing myself on board, but it is done, Edge. Can we not start over?’
She searched his face for some sign of softening. His eyes fell from hers and suddenly he looked more sulky than furious and her heart eased a little. Before she could press her advantage his gaze flickered to the cot, away, and then back.
‘Where is your mattress?’
‘My mattress? Over there—I roll it up after I use it, it takes up too much space if I leave it on the floor.’
‘On the...you are sleeping on the floor?’
‘That way if I fall off there isn’t far to go.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were having trouble sleeping?’ he demanded and she smiled at his outrage. This was the Edge she could cope with.
‘Because I hate when people say I told you so. I have heard that enough times from you to last me several lifetimes. Besides, it is not so very uncomfortable.’
‘Yes, but what if there are...?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. If you cannot sleep on the cot, I will bring a hammock. It attaches to these.’ He indicated the steel hooks embedded in the walls, but her mind fixated on his avoidance, her eyes skittering around the room. They were on a ship, for God’s sake. Why had it never occurred to she might be sharing the floor with the ubiquitous naval rat? She brushed at her dress, her hair, but the image rose as sharply as if she’d actually awoken to it—the scuffling, snuffling, scratching...the sudden pressure as the small forms skittered over her legs... Her arms crossed over her chest, her hands at her throat in an instinctive defence.
‘Sam, you are perfectly fine, this room is well sealed, I’m sorry I said anything.’
He placed his hands on hers, his fingers moving soothingly on them, against the soft skin beneath her jaw, stroking the tense sinew along the side of her neck.
‘I am not afraid of rats,’ she denied, but her voice wasn’t as firm as she wanted. ‘It is only... I imagined...’
‘Yes, your imagination was always too fertile for your own good. And a sensible person should be afraid of rats—they carry disea—’ He stopped again at her glare and his face shifted into an all-out grin. Out of nowhere she remembered something Khalidi’s daughter Fatima had said about Edge more than a dozen years ago.
‘He has the smile of a god. He does not bestow it often, but when he does it is as if the sun and the moon and all the stars all join hands to bless you.’
At the time Sam remembered being thoroughly disgusted with Fatima’s infatuated adoration of Edge. She’d had no patience for such nonsense at fourteen and even less when Fatima’s foolishness landed Edge in gaol. To be fair it was as much Sam’s fault, since Edge had only been protecting her when she tried to stop Khalidi’s deputy from taking Fatima out of Bab el-Nur. Another of her well-meaning crusades gone wrong, as Edge had pointed out. He’d been even less impressed with her failed attempt to rescue him from gaol and had studiously ignored her for weeks afterwards.
His beautiful smile dimmed as she remained silent.
‘Sam, there really is nothing to worry about. Don’t look like that.’
‘I’m not.’
His hands traced the juncture between her neck and shoulder and it wasn’t soothing any longer. Her body heated, the hair at her nape rising as nerves tingled down her spine. His eyes rested on her lips and his jaw flexed, deepening the lines beside his mouth. She was desperate to lick her lips, her tongue was pressing against her teeth, begging. She couldn’t stop herself from sucking her lower lip in a little, testing it. Yes, she was ready, so ready for...
‘A hammock. I will fetch you a hammock,’ Edge said and left the cabin.
* * *
She was still staring at the door when he returned with a cloth hammock.
‘You expect me to sleep on that?’ she demanded. He smiled over his shoulder and heat fuzzed through her, her body tensing even as her mind relaxed at this sign that they were at least halfway to a truce. When he was done she came to inspect his work.
‘Edge, I shall fall out!’
‘You won’t. It is harder to fall than it looks. Try it.’
She eyed the dun-coloured fabric and he touched the tip of her nose.
‘You look like I’ve soaked it in bilge water. Come now, don’t be a coward.’
It was a blatant provocation, but it hit its mark. She placed her hands on the hammock.
‘Glaring at it won’t help, Sam. You need to turn around and...well, sit on it.’
She indulged in another futile glare, but did as she was told. For a moment when it took her weight she flailed back, her feet shooting upwards. She squeaked and grabbed at the cloth, sure the next thing she would see would be the ceiling as she hit the floor, but Edge steadied it.
‘Very gracefully done,’ he said, his face suspiciously blank. ‘Now swing your feet up, but this time try to get them inside.’
She was tempted to tell him to rip the blasted thing down, but she also wanted to conquer this absurd contraption. After all every fool on board knew how to sleep in one; she refused to admit defeat.
She swung one leg up and then the other, absurdly aware of her skirts riding up. This time instead of rocking side to side, it wobbled back and forth like a horse trying to buck.
‘You can’t sit upright in it once your legs are up. Lie back,’ Edge said. He sounded underwater.
‘If you laugh at me, Edge...’
‘Not much you can do to me from there, Princess. Just lie back.’
She lay back, her dress bunched under her bottom and her arms pinned to her sides by the fabric. She wriggled them free and clasped the sides.
‘I feel like a mummy,’ she grumbled.
‘You look marginally better than most mummies. Less comfortable, though.’
‘This is punishment for forcing myself on to the Lark, correct?’
He gave up trying not to smile.
‘If you could only try to relax for a moment, Sam, you will see it is not so bad. Close your eyes.’
‘I’d rather eat nails dipped in boot blacking.’
He took her shawl from a peg on the wall and tossed it over her face.
‘Now be quiet and stop fidgeting.’
She swiped the shawl from her face and folded it between her arms, but closed her eyes. Edge was so stubborn he probably wouldn’t allow her out of this blasted cocoon until she did as she was bid. Then she would return the mattress to the cot and resign herself to sleeping motionless.
His finger traced a line down the middle of her forehead.
‘You always had that line—a natural-born glowerer.’
‘That is not a word. And you are a fine one to talk about glowering.’
‘Keep your eyes closed, I said.’ He was nudging the hammock very gently, and she thought of the apple tree in Burford where they’d lived just before her father died. Lucas and Chase built a swing and she would curl her body into a ball and watch the sky. She had very few memories from that time, but she remembered the gentle creak and swish of the rope and the clouds tangling in the branches over her head as the world’s breath carried her back and forth, back and forth.
She had the oddest sensation that the hammock was suspended over nothingness. She was just a darkness floating in another shade of darkness. The pressure on her eyes changed and she opened them and realised he’d extinguished the lamp, its acrid scent fading around her as she swung gently. She could not see him, but she felt his warmth, like a chimney after the fire fades. She wanted to reach out and anchor herself to him, but she was too pleasantly sleepy. She yawned, her head falling to rest against the fabric.
‘I’m floating... Did you put something in my wine?’ she murmured, her voice swallowed by the darkness.
‘I will if you don’t keep quiet; you are the least restful female I know, Princess.’
&
nbsp; She smiled. Princess. He’d called her Princess. Twice. It wasn’t an endearment, but there was affection there, reluctant thought it was and for the first time she accepted that, however difficult matters were between them, Edge liked her. She knew she wasn’t a princess and he was certainly no prince. But he did like her when he wasn’t as annoyed as the devil with her. It was a beginning. And he had made this lovely swing for her.
‘This is quite nice. A pity you can’t join me.’
The rhythm stuttered a bit, but then fell back into a soothing ebb and flow. She was dozing when he stopped and she mumbled an objection, but it was lost to the brush of his mouth on hers. He’d probably only meant to give her a quick salute, but one shouldn’t give a sip of wine to a sot and expect them to tamely hand back the bottle. She threaded her hands into his hair, parted her lips beneath his and kissed him.
* * *
Never kiss a siren in the dark—that should be inscribed on his tombstone.
Every time he kissed her in the dark he stepped further down the plank—under the desert sky, in the tent, in this floating torture chamber...
Whatever defences he’d constructed to cope with this hellish voyage went overboard like a drunken sailor the moment her fingers slipped against his nape, her lips parting against his with a small sigh of pleasure, that plump lower lip she’d been sucking on warm and damp between his.
He hadn’t meant to kiss her. He’d meant to show her how to use the blasted hammock and then go find his for another tortured, sleepless night. For two weeks he’d lain in his hammock surrounded by snoring sailors and tried not to think of Sam curled up in that little cubby-like cot, her hair in a dark plait over her shoulder and her cotton nightshift covering her like a dusting of fine snow over hills and valleys waiting to be melted. Just at that point when sleep overcame discomfort and frustration he’d finally allow himself to imagine precisely that—the fabric fading like a film of dew on the desert planes, shimmering away and leaving just...Sam.
That night in Cairo had been a mistake. He would have been wiser to wait until they reached England to consummate their marriage. Because one night of volcanic lovemaking after a year of abstinence, only to be followed by weeks of a hammock while his wife flirted with two rosy-cheeked naval innocents while ignoring him...
It didn’t help that she looked as lovely every day as if she’d slept ten hours in a cloud. It didn’t help that that body-searing night kept playing through his mind like a popular tune that refused to be chased away. Playing through his body and with his body until he ached.
He’d forgotten about aching. It had nothing to do with abstinence, apparently. Trying to sleep in a hammock with a persistent erection and a bubbling temper was not a combination he was accustomed to and he didn’t wish to become accustomed to it.
But there was nothing he could do to stop fantasising about their marriage night. About the feather-soft skin of her inner thighs under his fingers or how she rubbed herself against him...those soft, half-embarrassed moans as she began giving away to pleasure. And her scent...orange blossom and...and butter biscuits.
Hell and damnation. He was frustrated and tired, and still a little in shock that they were married.
And now she’d spiked every one of his guns with her admission she’d been sleeping on the floor this whole time and said nothing... God, he wanted to climb into the hammock with her and do something about this ache.
‘Sam...’ He tried to pull back, but her hands tightened in his hair, sending fire down his back.
‘Your hair is so silky and warm. I love touching it,’ she murmured against his mouth. It should have meant nothing, but a groan exploded in his head like cymbals. He managed to keep hold of the hammock and not fall on top of her, but his arms shook with the effort as her teeth grazed his lip before licking it.
‘And you taste of Aziza’s honey cake,’ she whispered and another cymbal crash rang through his body. That didn’t even make sense, he wanted to say and gave up. He dug his arm under her and hauled her out of the hammock and into his arms. Her breath left her in a surprised whoosh and then she laughed, pushing back at the deflated hammock that was swinging wildly and batting them in the dark.
‘All your good work undone. I’ll never manage to get in again.’
He moved forward until he bumped into the table and set her down there, securing his hands in her hair and finally, finally kissed her the way he had in all those aggravating dreams that had plagued him the past two weeks.
In the dark her muffled whimpers and moans were a thousand times more intoxicating and he couldn’t stop touching, tasting, his fingertips singing with awareness of the shifting textures of her skin, this silk, that satin, the roughness of her elbow—he lingered over that, remembering her bent over her drawings, her sleeves hitched up, that line between her brows as sharp as a spear. And then the mother-of-pearl sweep of the inside of her elbow...he turned it over and breathed it in, open-mouthed, brushing it with his lips to the rhythm of her pulse and heard the soft thunk as her head fell back against the wooden wall, the rasp of her breath, the way her legs clamped about his hips. He hadn’t even realised he’d come to stand between her legs.
His hands slipped gently over her body, just softly on the outer swell of her breasts, he would make his way there later, he promised her silently as his hands slipped over her thighs. They twitched under his touch and she grabbed his shirt, pulling him closer.
‘I’ll help you back in when we’re done,’ he murmured against her throat as he undid her gown, shifting her so that it slid to the ground, grateful having no maid meant she’d dispensed with stays.
‘When we’re done,’ she confirmed, tugging his shirt from his trousers. ‘I just don’t quite know how we will be done. I can barely fit in that cot on my own...’
‘How limber are you, little mountain goat?’ He nuzzled Sam’s scent just below and behind her ear—silky soft and warm and it flowed through him like melting honey. Yes, orange blossom and biscuits. God, he was hungry for her.
‘Limber...?’ He felt the word through the skin of her throat. Her hands were pushing into his hair, sifting it like she would the soft sand of the delta as he tasted her, licking her earlobe and catching it with his teeth as a silvery shudder quivered through her. He smiled and kissed the soft skin there, aware that it was absurd to be pleased he was already beginning to find her weak spots, like the one right there, just beside her hip bone where the skin stretched towards her navel. He let his fingers linger and tease that indentation through the soft lawn chemise, loving the answering shivers that tightened her long legs around him.
‘Yes, limber. That bed presents a problem. We shall have to be creative.’
‘Oh. Tell me what to do and I shall try.’
He brushed his mouth over hers, a little surprised to feel his own mouth curved in a smile. She sounded both dreamy and determined. Typical Sam.
‘All you must do for the moment is close your eyes and relax, Night Star. I shall do the rest.’
Chapter Seven
The camel’s hoof pressed Gabriel deeper into the sand, its grizzled chin and twisted teeth less than an inch from Gabriel’s face.
‘If you had asked for help, boy, we wouldn’t be here. And they call my kind stubborn!’
—Captives of the Hidden City,
Desert Boy Book Four
Sam knew she had to move, but she didn’t want to. Edge yawned, his body stretching against hers, his arms pulling her more securely on to his lap as he leaned back against the wall of the narrow cot. It felt so good to be held. To surface from a fuzzy cloud of pleasure into comfort.
To think that just a few hours ago she’d been miserably convinced Edge was regretting his completely uncharacteristic impulsiveness in marrying her. He certainly hadn’t been complaining a few moments ago. He’d been...
She shivered in appreciation and growing anticip
ation and gave herself a silent reprimand. The man was exhausted, the setting was as uncomfortable as could be imagined, besides—twice in one night? It was probably not done. She rather suspected most of what she’d just done with Edge was not done. She very much doubted Dora had ever agreed to be seduced on a narrow wooden table and certainly would never have whimpered so loudly he’d had to muffle her cries with his mouth.
He yawned again, burrowing his face into her hair, his arms slackening for a moment before gripping again as if he was fighting sleep.
‘Go to sleep, Edge. You looked utterly exhausted at dinner. You are not a good advertisement for the restful qualities of hammocks, you know.’
‘It wasn’t the hammock that kept me awake, Sam,’ he mumbled against her hair and then untangled himself from her, groping around for his clothes. He made it out the door without bumping into anything or strangling himself in the hammock. The man must have eyes like a cat.
When he was gone she snuggled deep under the blanket, tucking it under her bare feet and wishing she was tucked around his warm body. She stared at the vague shifting in the dark that marked the still-swinging hammock.
Tomorrow she would brave that contraption again.
* * *
Where was he?
It wasn’t that she’d expected Edge to be beating down her door at dawn, but it was already midday and she was sorely tempted to hunt him down and tell him it was foolish to return to sulking after last night.
Well, she refused to beg. Instead she began a new drawing and finally became so engrossed she didn’t hear the tapping. It was the dull thud against the door that caught her attention and she hurried to open it.
‘Edge!’
He winced at her cry, but didn’t move. He was leaning on the doorjamb with both hands and he looked horrible.
She took his hand and pulled him inside. He flinched, turning away from the lamp.
‘The light...’ Edge’s voice was always deep, but now it was subterranean, a clenched rumble. He moved without any of his usual grace, as if his body was solidifying into stone as he walked. She forced him on to the cot, shuttered the oil lamp so it left only a glowing rim of gold.
