Thief of Hearts

by Teresa Medeiros

  His fingers bit into the worn cambric sheathing her back. “Is that who you want, Lucy? Your darling phantom? Captain Doom?”

  She shook her head helplessly, reaching to touch his bearded jaw, but he caught her hand, blocking her caress with even more desperation than he had blocked her blow. “Who’s going to make love to you tonight, Lucy? Me? Or Doom?”

  Her voice trembled. “You.”

  “Who am I?” he whispered fiercely, as if her answer would determine the absolute truth.

  She searched his face, knowing it capable of reflecting both cruelty and tenderness, cynicism and hope, the basest of hatreds and the purest of loves. He could call himself whatever name he chose, but she would never again see him as two separate entities. He was simply the man she adored, with all of the complicated strengths and flaws inherent to his character.

  Her fingers curled gently around his own, softening his grip. She brought their linked hands to his cheek, rubbing the back of her hand against the beguiling prickle of his beard.

  “Gerard,” she confirmed. Then more softly, as if the incantation could somehow banish all the harm they’d unwittingly done each other. “Oh, Gerard.”

  Gerard was paralyzed by the tenderness in Lucy’s eyes. The loving acceptance of all he had been, all he was, all he would ever be. He felt as if she’d given him back something he had lost in those dark, dank years in that French prison by the sea. Something more elusive than just his name or his pride or even his freedom. She had told him at their first meeting that the soul was eternal, but he’d never really believed her. Until now.

  He turned her hand, bringing it to his mouth to kiss each delicate knuckle in turn. Her eyes misted with emotion as he slowly lowered his lips to hers. He’d come to her seeking damnation only to taste salvation in the intoxicating nectar of her kiss. He drank of it deeply, its flavor made all the more potent by the risk she’d taken in offering it to him.

  As soon as Gerard’s lips touched hers, Lucy knew what had been absent from Kevin’s stolen kiss. Tenderness. Longing. A passion so strong it made Gerard’s powerful masculine body quake with want. Lucy remembered the exquisite care he had taken with her in the gatehouse, the selfless restraint that had given everything, but asked nothing in return.

  She wrapped her arms around his lean waist and buried her face against his shirtfront, needing privacy for what she would say. “You don’t have to take the time to … to seduce me. I know you’ve waited six years for this.”

  He cupped her jaw and gently tilted her face to his. His solemn gaze searched her features. “I’ve waited thirty-one years for this. For you.”

  For you, Lucy silently echoed. Not for some deft, buxom beauty who could ease his grudging celibacy with the elusive skills taught only by experience. But for her. Shy, awkward, inexperienced Lucy. His revelation endowed her with confidence, making her heart sing to the remembered melody of a Viennese waltz.

  “Are you certain?”

  His crooked grin laid her heart bare. “I’ve waited six years. I’ll be damned if I’m going to rush you now.”

  As if to prove his words, he moved away from her to light the lantern. The sight of him enveloped in its tawny haze made Lucy’s throat tighten with yearning.

  For once, Gerard wasn’t afraid of the dark, but entranced by the promise of the light. He wanted to bathe every curve and hollow of Lucy’s luscious body in its revealing flame. He no longer wanted to come to her as a faceless phantom in the darkness, but to watch each nuance of pleasure flicker across her delicate features as she cried out his name in a plea for sweet release.

  As Gerard began to disrobe Lucy, she stood utterly still, afraid to even breathe for fear of shattering the magic of his hands on her. His warm lips soothed her temple as he raked his fingers through her hair, scattering the taut braids. He slid each button of Tarn’s shirt through its mooring as if it were a ribbon of lace gliding through a silk chemise.

  His hands drifted downward to the waistband of her breeches. His throaty words vibrated against her ear. “I liked you better in my breeches. I loved the thought of the fabric caressing you everywhere I couldn’t.” He reached around to cup one of her buttocks in his palm, giving it a provocative squeeze. “Here.” He nuzzled two fingers of his other hand into the hollow between her legs. “And here.” The coarse fabric abraded her, making her even more sensitive to his touch. She clung to him, gasping with raw pleasure.

  Gerard’s hands drifted over her once more, his skills so refined that her clothing melted into nothingness. The cool air struck her fevered flesh, pebbling her nipples into throbbing buds that ached to be soothed by his tongue.

  As the sham of Lucy’s masculine garments fell away, Gerard had cause to regret his rash promise to woo her. He might have endured the pouting beauty of her pink-tipped breasts. Might have withstood the temptation of her narrow waist and gently flared hips. But when Tarn’s breeches slid down her slender legs to pool at her feet, his flesh surged against the constraints of his own breeches with a violence that made him groan.

  Lucy Snow was blond.

  Everywhere.

  Not even in the vibrant fantasies that had sustained him through his sleepless nights at Ionia had he imagined such pale, flaxen perfection. He wanted to bury himself to the hilt in those ethereal curls. He dropped to his knees, burying his burning face instead against her beautiful breasts.

  Lucy was alarmed by the ferocity of Gerard’s grasp, his heartfelt groan. She sifted the unruly hair at his nape through her fingers, intrigued by its unfamiliar texture. “Are you all right? Have I hurt you?”

  He strangled out a laugh. “Mortally, I fear.” She shivered at the provocative scrape of his beard against the sensitive skin of her belly, the underside of her breast. “But I don’t mind as long as I can die in your arms.”

  Her arms welcomed him as his heated lips drifted over the swell of her breasts. Had she honestly been fool enough to believe his tongue would soothe her? He wielded it with diabolical skill against her throbbing flesh, flicking and teasing until her nipples tingled and ached beneath his sweet torment. When they were both rigid and glistening with the balm of his ministrations, he claimed first one, then the other, suckling her fiercely until her thighs clenched in an ineffectual effort to douse the answering tongues of fire licking between them.

  He stroked the backs of her knees and she collapsed against him, straddling his lap. Gerard wrapped his arms around her, unable to suppress a rumble of pure joy. “A naked, blushing, oh-so-proper Miss Lucinda Snow dumped in my unworthy lap. Have you checked the calendar? It must be Christmas.”

  “You don’t deserve any gifts. You’ve been a very bad boy this year,” Lucy mumbled into his throat, pressing against him to hide as much of her nudity as she could. Her shyness worked to her disadvantage. The contrasting textures of his clothing tantalized her bare flesh, making her writhe in frustration.

  “Ah, but you’ve been a very good girl, haven’t you? So there’s no point in both of us suffering on my account.”

  With that devilish observation, he swept her into his arms and carried her to the bed. Without him, its opulent splendor had seemed lonely and forbidding. With him, its sensual promise of luxury was fulfilled. As they sank as one into its feathered depths, Lucy tugged Gerard’s shirt from his shoulders, hungry for a taste of his golden skin.

  Her open mouth glided down his throat to his collarbone, coming to rest against the circular ridge of scar tissue carved by her own hand. She pressed her lips to it with a soft sound of dismay.

  “Don’t,” Gerard whispered, drawing her head up. “I deserved far worse. Let’s just be thankful you have such dreadful aim.”

  “Oh, I’ve excellent aim,” she confessed. “I just couldn’t bear to stab you in the heart.”

  He pressed her palm to the beguiling warmth of his chest. She could feel his heart thudding against it. “You would have come up empty for you’d already stolen it.”

  As his lips leisurely caressed
hers, Lucy’s nimble fingers danced down the remaining buttons of his shirt, freeing him from its restraints. He rubbed his chest against the inviting softness of her breasts, his crisp whorls of hair both tickling and torturing her sensitive nipples. His husky groan mirrored her own breathless delight.

  He sucked in a bracing breath as her adoring hands drifted lower as if to sculpt the flat, muscular planes of his abdomen, his lean flanks, hesitating only when they reached the waistband of his breeches. She might have let her curiosity overrule her bashfulness had he not captured both of her wrists in his panicked grip.

  “Not yet, angel, or all my noble intentions will be for nothing. Let’s not test my restraint, shall we?”

  Gerard had no such similar qualms about testing her restraint. If she had thought the scrape of his beard against her belly beguiling, the prickle of it skating down the silk of her inner thighs maddened her to distraction.

  She tugged helplessly at his hair, torn between delicious anticipation and mortification. “Please don’t. You mustn’t do such a wicked thing.”

  His warm hands splayed against her thighs, coaxing them apart. “Oh, but I must. Wasn’t it you who so boldly invited me to ‘do my worst’?”

  His worst proved to be her sensual undoing. All of her inhibitions melted beneath the scorching heat of his mouth. His clever tongue taunted her, whipping her into a frenzy of indescribable pleasure. Her deep-throated moans seemed to be coming from the mouth of a wanton stranger. She arched off the bed in mute plea, and as reward, his blunt, graceful fingers joined the dance, stroking hard and deep the moist, throbbing places his tongue couldn’t reach.

  Lucy’s entire body shuddered, caught in a delirium of ecstasy. When she finally collapsed from its throes, Gerard was there to catch her, to cradle her breathless, trembling body in his arms and kiss tears she could not remember crying from her flushed cheeks.

  His eyes gleamed with fierce hunger as he laid her beneath him and eased his breeches from his hips. When she would have indulged her curiosity with a nervous peek, he cupped her face and kissed her deeply, giving her a tantalizing taste of her own fulfillment.

  Gerard was afraid it would take little more than the caress of Lucy’s eyes to finish him. It had taken every ounce of his control to come this far, and he was too near the edge to make any more reckless promises. He hadn’t lied to her. For him, this wasn’t like the first time in six years. This was like the first time ever, with all of its callow eagerness, its clumsy, self-seeking hunger.

  Her eyes misted with blind need as he reached down to test her readiness for him. He’d hurt her enough in their brief acquaintance. He had no desire to compound his crimes with another, even more unpardonable, betrayal of her trust. His fears were unfounded. He’d never touched a woman as ready for him as she was. She fairly dripped with want. He groaned, rubbing his throbbing length in her luscious bounty as a precursor to his possession.

  Her eyes widened with mingled shock and delight as he let her feel in remarkable detail what he had refused to let her see.

  Biting back a smile at the charm of her innocence, he braced his palms against the bed and rose above her. He tried, but simply could not resist a glance downward to watch himself breach those damp, flaxen curls one exquisite inch at a time.

  Lucy gasped with unexpected pain as her untried body strained to accommodate Gerard’s persistence. She felt him hesitate, poised on the brink of paradise.

  “It’s all right,” she assured him shakily. “Really it is. It’s quite pleasant. I … 1-like it.”

  He glowered down at her, his frown mocked by the pleasure-glazed sparkle of his eyes. “You’re lying, you deceitful mouse. You don’t like it at all. But you will,” he vowed.

  For the first time in their acquaintance, Gerard was as good as his word.

  He withdrew slightly, surprising Lucy. She had expected to feel relief in his wake, but instead felt only a hollow emptiness that ached to be filled. She wrapped her legs around his hips, urging him deeper. He obliged her, then drew back again, making her whimper with disappointment.

  “Oh, please,” she whispered.

  She could not find it in her heart to begrudge him his triumphant grin. “As you wish, Miss Snow. I live to serve you.”

  Serve her he did, using the copious nectar of her body to bury himself deep inside of her.

  “Better?” he whispered, his own voice cracking under the strain.

  Lucy’s dreamy smile was all the encouragement Gerard needed. From the beginning he had sensed the passion boiling beneath her icy veneer and she did not disappoint him. As he rocked against her, she arched off the bed to meet him, the provocative motion of her hips enticing him to abandon his exalted plan to treat her virgin body with the tender care it deserved.

  He threw back his head, clenching his teeth against a premature wave of ecstasy. “God, Lucy, do you know what you’re doing to me?”

  Lucy could feel something else seething beneath Gerard’s patience—a violence born not of brutality, but of deprivation. Its intensity frightened her, but she was determined to give him a gift even greater than that of her innocence. Her permission to lose control, to slake all of his selfish desires on her willing body.

  She had learned more of his character than he had wished her to in the past few weeks. He took care of his crew. He took care of his brother. And even if he would not admit it, he had taken care of her more often than not. The time had come for someone to take care of him.

  She caught his face in her hands and said fiercely, “Don’t hold back. Not with me. Never with me. I want everything you can give me.”

  To Gerard, it was as if Lucy’s tender invitation opened up a sluice of tangled emotions. Lust seized him, so dark and primitive it was almost bestial. He ceased to think, becoming a creature driven by its basest instincts, instincts denied for so long that it took only Lucy’s generous coaxing to send them raging beyond his control. He gazed at her as Adam must have first looked upon Eve, as if she had been created solely to indulge his desires.

  And indulge himself he intended to do. But with his last shred of rational thought, he angled his hips so that each of his deep, hungry strokes would rub against the pleasure-sensitive nub sheltered by those entrancing curls.

  Lucy pressed her eyes shut, giving herself over to his pounding rhythm as Gerard gave her everything he had. And more. He drove her back against the headboard, then kept coming, giving no quarter, taking no prisoners. When she thought her body had reached its endurance of pleasure, he cupped her backside and lifted her, embedding himself so deeply within her that she could feel his heart beat as if it were her own. A soft, broken wail escaped her, a herald of the exquisite outpouring of ecstasy to come.

  Lucy’s release was Gerard’s downfall. He had no time to ponder the irony before his own body surged with long-denied rapture. As he’d feared, the end had come too quickly, but it seemed to roar on for a sweet eternity, their joined bodies shuddering in magnificent accord, Lucy’s bewitching spasms milking him of every precious drop of pent-up pleasure.

  His boneless body collapsed against hers. “Did I hurt you?” he murmured into her silky hair, awareness of their awkward position slowly dawning.

  Her arms tightened around him, her gentle hands stroking and soothing his cramped muscles. “Mortally, I fear. But I don’t mind as long as I can die in your arms.”

  Lucy tried to wiggle herself to a more tenable position; Gerard held her fast. “Oh, no, you don’t. I’m not through with you yet.” For once, his boyish grin was untainted by cynicism. “Hell, I haven’t even started.”

  His lips lowered to hers for a kiss rife with all the tenderness she had forced him to forgo in their love-making. Lucy moaned at the fresh miracle of his body stirring deep within hers.

  His heated lips strayed to her earlobe. She frowned. “Did you hear that, Gerard? It’s thundering.”

  “Nonsense,” he murmured, nipping the sensitive appendage. “It’s just the pounding of my heart
.”

  Lucy gasped with pleasure as his tongue plundered the inner shell of her ear. She closed her eyes only to be startled by a starburst of light behind her lids. “I do believe it’s lightning as well.”

  “You flatter me, darling. Why don’t we see if I can evoke a fanfare of celestial trumpets?”

  His foray across the tender skin of her throat might have done just that had not the entire hold shuddered as if pounded by a mighty fist. The ship lurched, tossing them, blankets and all, to the floor of the cabin.

  “Son of a bitch!” Gerard jumped to his feet, jerked his breeches up over his hips, and ran to the porthole.

  Another clap came, sharper and more sinister than thunder. The mouths of the Argonaut’s cannons erupted in gouts of orange fire. The Retribution pitched to starboard, forcing Gerard to catch hold of the wall or fall.

  “That son of a bitch,” he breathed, the oath taking on a far more personal nature. “What sort of monster would fire on his own daughter? What manner of father is he?”

  A sound even more unlikely than the rumble of cannons captured Gerard’s attention. He turned slowly, disbelievingly. Lucy had cupped a hand over her mouth, but her high-pitched giggle escaped through her fingers. She looked so enchanting with her hair tumbled around her face, her skin still rosy from his robust loving, that it was inconceivable to him that her teasing offer to die in his arms might prove prophetic.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she said, struggling to catch her breath. “I can’t imagine what’s come over me. I’m not usually so emotional.”

  Gerard’s fear of losing her deprived him of any patience he might have summoned. He dropped to his knees and caught her by the shoulders. “Don’t you understand what’s happening? That miserable son of a—” He grappled for control, clenching his teeth against a wave of raw panic. “Your father is firing on us.”

  To his shock, she tossed back her head with a fresh burst of laughter, her beautiful eyes luminous with tears. “Ah, but there’s the rub, you see, for that ‘miserable son of a bitch’ is not my father!”