She could not say she meant to settle in North Carolina, for it was patently untrue; she had no friends, no place to stay, and would be forced to make the return voyage. A message to relatives of Mrs. Morgan concerning that lady’s illness, and the delay because of it, could much more easily have been written and given to Ramon himself to be put in the mail rider’s pouch; there would have been no need to employ her to carry it. Her fears over the threat posed by Nate Bacon, he had already put to rest. What did that leave? A desire to see Wilmington? One did not travel for pleasure in wartime. Boredom with Nassau? Far too silly, since she had barely arrived.
The thud of the beam and slow beat of the paddle wheel impinged upon her furious concentration. The ship was moving. At least if her being on board did not suit Ramon, it would now be troublesome for him to put her off. After a time, an hour or two, it would be better for him to allow her to remain than lose the time in putting back. The three-day run had to be carefully calculated, so that the federal fleet could be penetrated at night, and the mouth of the Cape Fear River, below Wilmington, reached before the light of dawn exposed them as a sitting target.
Moving to the small cabin porthole, she watched as the lights of Nassau drew away, gradually growing dimmer, winking out one by one. The dark coastline stretched, marked by the line of the surf that was a gray streak in the starlight. When even that sight faded into the night, she began to relax, to think that she might be undisturbed until morning, to consider undressing and getting into bed.
A knock came on the door. She whirled, then lifting her chin, moved to open the panel. It was Cupid who stood outside. He stared at her, his mouth open in surprise, before, blinking, he closed it.
“Yes?”
“Mam’zelle Lorna! I came, me, to ask if the lady needs anything, as the capitaine says. I did not know the lady was you.”
She summoned a smile. “No, it was a … sudden change of plans. But, I need nothing, thank you.”
“You are sure? The capitaine, he said the lady in the cabin has been sick, very sick, and I must take special care. You do not look sick to me, but it would give me much pleasure to serve you.”
“It’s very kind of you, and Ra — Captain Cazenave — to be concerned, but I am fine.”
“I think it, me, and I will tell him so. He will be most relieved.”
“No — that is, you need not trouble him. I’m sure he has no interest in my health, one way or another.”
“You do not know, Mamzelle; everything is of interest to him, every small thing. But, I am happy, very happy, to have you with us. He will be better now, I think”
“Better?” she inquired before she could prevent the curious question.
“Of sweeter temper. He has been like the raccoon with a sore paw since you left us. Perhaps you will sweeten him again, hein?”
With a wink and a nod, he left her. She stood irresolute in the middle of the floor, conscious of a feeling of impending crisis. If there had been a place to go, she might have run, but there was not. Her mind was blank, her knees stiff. She clasped her hands in front of her, the fingers entwined so tightly that her knuckles were white. She stared straight in front of her, but failed to see the small picture of a child and a dog that hung on the wall, swinging steadily with the movement of the vessel.
When a knock fell on the door again, she started, then moved slowly to answer it. It was Cupid once more. His smile was gone, and his dark eyes were shrewd, watchful, as he spoke.
“The capitaine would like to see you in his cabin.”
The Acadian cook led her along to the door of Ramon’s cabin, tapped on it, then retreated. Lorna took a deep breath, then turned the handle and stepped into the room. It was the same, except for the guitar that lay on top of the trunk, replacing the one he had lost at Beau Repose; everything was neat, severe, and achingly familiar. Surveying it gave her something to do in those first unnerving seconds, but at last she was forced to turn and face Ramon.
He got to his feet, pushing back his chair from where he had been seated at the table with a chart spread in the pool of pale gold light cast by the lamp in its gimbals. He sent her a hard glance, then threw down his pen. Indicating the chair across from him, he said, “Sit down.”
If she did not, he would be forced to remain standing, and she preferred not to have him towering over her. Summoning a cool smile, she moved to the chair and, adjusting her crinoline, sank onto it. Moistening her lips, she said, “You did not expect to see me again so soon, I think.”
“No, it was the last thing I expected.” His tone was dry, noncommittal, of no help to her at all as a gauge of his reaction. He returned to his seat.
“I … trust you do not mind?”
“That depends.”
“Oh?” She tilted her head inquiringly. “On what?”
His answer was soft, threaded with steel and inevitability. “Your reasons for being here.”
“Mrs. Morgan was taken ill, and so could not come,” she said, lowering her lashes, taking up the pen he had discarded and turning it in her fingers. “I knew her place would be vacant, so — I decided to take it.”
“Just like that.”
She nodded, swallowing hard. “More or less.”
“Charming,” he drawled, “but it isn’t a reason.”
She glanced up to find him staring at her, his dark gaze resting on the soft swelling curves of her breasts most tantalizingly revealed by the draping of the tulle at the neckline of her gown. She felt a slow heat move along her veins. She threw down the pen. With a catch in her voice she asked, “Must there be one?”
He came to his feet so quickly that his chair skidded backward. “Don’t play me for a fool, Lorna. Two weeks ago you turned me out of your room. Since then, you have been keeping Peter on a string. Not two hours ago, I left you in his arms in the dark. What happened? Did you mistake the Lorelei for the Bonny Girl?”
“Of course not!” she cried, springing up with color flooding into her face. “How can you suggest such a thing?”
“Easily! It springs to mind full-blown, with visions I would as soon not describe, when I think of the two of you together.”
“It was nothing like that. I … I’m not sure why I came. It was an impulse, that’s all! I sailed with you once; why not again?”
“If you don’t know the answer to that one…” he began, then stopped. He took a step toward her, skirting the table. “But, maybe you do? Maybe that is, in fact, what you came for?”
He reached out to close his fingers around her forearm, drawing her to him. She wanted to protest, but could not find the words, could gather no strength with which to resist him. With parted lips and wide eyes, she watched as he lowered his head, blotting out the light.
His mouth touched hers, teasing the sensitive contours. She felt the warm flick of his tongue along the moist inner surfaces before he pulled her closer, increasing the pressure, probing deeper. Languor welled within her, and she closed her hands on the material of his uniform jacket, feeling its roughness beneath her palms. Her lips softened, burning, and she tasted the honeyed warmth of his desire. Swaying, she clung to him, intoxicated with the promise of surcease long denied, knowing that she was lost, unable to care.
A sigh shuddered through him, and he lifted his head, pressing a kiss between her brows, brushing her eyelids. He lifted his hand to cup her cheek, smoothing the tender shape of her mouth with his thumb, easing her lips apart and swooping to try that vulnerable sweetness.
His hand strayed to her hair, where he pushed his fingers into the massed curls, searching for and finding the pins that held the coronet with its tiny golden moon, discarding it as he sought those that also supported the weight of her hair. He scattered them so that they fell to the floor with small, musical sounds, and her hair slipped, cascading over his hand and arm, failing down her back in a pale gold shimmer. He brushed his hand down the silken length, closing his fingers in it, wrapping it around his fist, before he released it, letting it tum
ble to her waist once more.
Drawing her with him, he returned to the chair on which he had been sitting, guiding her onto his lap. With a delicate touch, he ran his fingers over her shoulders and along the exposed curves of her breasts. He traced their contours through the tulle of her gown, finding the top edge of her corset that pressed them upward, gently cupping them, flicking the sensitive nipples with intimate, knowing care. Moving to the valley between them, he slipped his fingers inside her décolletage, stroking, fondling.
His mouth seared a trail along the plane of her cheek and down the delicate angle of her jaw. He pressed his face into the curve of her neck, breathing deep of the lily fragrance concentrated there, rising from her hair. He shifted his free hand to her waist, and let his lips slide with warm kisses to the enticing hollow he had quitted. Behind her back, under the fall of her hair, he began to loosen, one by one, the hooks that held her gown. With the easing of the strain across her chest, the bodice slipped lower. He took full advantage of that relaxation, drawing aside the narrow sleeve of her camisole to bare the thrust of a breast, teasing the peak to tautness with the moist surface of his tongue.
So exquisite were the sensations he aroused in her, so compelling was his spell, that Lorna hardly knew when he released the last hook, when he slipped free the bow that held the tapes of her crinoline and petticoats. She only became aware as he drew the sleeves of her gown down her arms and pushed her heavy skirts over her hips, lifting her from them as he stripped them down and kicked them away. For the first time, too, she felt the brass buttons of his uniform digging into her. She shifted, and with lowered lashes, reached to undo the first of them. With only the fine linen of her pantaloons cushioning her body from his, she was forced to recognize for the first time, too, the vibrant rigidity of his manhood beneath her.
He paid no attention to what she was doing, still less to the urgency of his need. Like a man entranced, he explored, through the thin linen, the warm curves and hollows he had unsheathed, closing his hand on the roundness of her hip, stretching the fingers of one hand to span more than half of the narrow turn of her waist in its confining corset. The sleeves of her camisole trailed down her arms, and he peeled the fine cloth from the swelling thrusts of her breasts, baring them in the lamplight. They gleamed with the soft luster of fine satin, the veins a fine tracery of blue under the skin, the rose-pink of the aureoles and raspberry contractions of the nipples an enticement he made no effort to resist.
Her hands trembled slightly as she pushed them inside his jacket, removing the utilitarian buttons of his uniform shirt from their holes with more haste than care. She spread the edges of the open front wide, pressing her palms to his chest. The roughness of the curling hair that grew there tickled between her fingers, and a smile, tentative with dreams, curved her mouth. She brushed his paps with the pad of her thumbs, and felt the tensing of the hard muscles of his thighs under her. Felt also the slide of his hand between her legs, and the insinuating twist of his fingers as he found the open crotch of her pantaloons.
The flat expanse of her abdomen rippled at his first caress, then tightened to board hardness. She caught her breath as her senses expanded. Her heartbeat increased, and heat suffused her. With spread fingers she held to him, her grip slowly compressing. Her loins ached with fullness, yet deep inside she was empty, so very empty.
A fantasy in shadow images crossed her mind of the guitarist from the garden, wearing Ramon’s face, climbing up to the veranda outside her bedroom as she slept, entering, coming to her as she lay unprotected. It was brief, that drift into unreality, yet the surge of wantonness was so great that she made a soft sound in the back of her throat, turning her face into the strong curve of his neck.
He reached to unbuckle his belt, releasing the buttons of his trousers. He stripped them down, prising off his boots, pushing both trousers and boots from him. At the same time, he put his thumb under the garter that held her rolled silk stockings, loosening them at the knee one at a time, removing them as he swept her slippers from her feet. She smoothed his jacket and shirt from the broad expanse of his shoulders, freeing his arms as he straightened. Blindly, she drew him to her, pressing her bare breasts against him, so that they were flattened upon the unyielding hardness of his chest. As he leaned forward to wrap his arms about her, she eased the jacket and shirt from behind him and dropped them to the floor.
“Lorna, ma chérie,” he whispered. “Mon Dieu, how I have missed you.”
“And I you, oh, and I you.”
The need she felt to have him inside of her, a part of her being, grew. She pushed her fingers through the soft, curling hair that grew low on the nape of his neck, clenching her hand upon it. Parting her lips, she brushed them over the lobe of his ear, touching it with the tip of her tongue and breathing with quick pants as he slid his hand once more inside the slit opening of her pantaloons. Her heart thudded against her ribs. She could hear the singing race of her blood in her head, feel its pulsing where his fingers touched with warm and relentless persistence. Her skin glowed with moist heat. The depth of her longing was amazing; she had not known herself to be so sensual a creature. So alive was she that her every nerve ending felt exquisitely sensitive. At the same time, she was aware of being boundlessly vulnerable, as if she had abandoned her defenses and would be unable to regain them.
She trailed her fingers down his chest to the flat tautness of his belly with its narrow line of dark hair, following it to where it widened to a triangular mat. His body, with its hard planes and resilient, jutting firmness satisfied some deep, questing expectation. His chest swelled at her touch, and he turned his head, finding her lips, his mouth hard with the force of his ardor.
He slid his hand under her thigh, drawing her higher, spreading her legs, so that she straddled him. Gently, he parted her heated flesh and, positioning himself, eased into her. He brought her closer with both hands on her hips, pushing deeper. She caught his shoulders, and with a twist of her body, took him farther inside, bearing down upon him.
He held her then, smoothing the tumbling waves of her hair down her back, whispering her name against her lips as the movement of the ship, rising and failing, pressing and receding brought them slowly to feverish arousal. Their mouths clung, devouring, bruising. The pressure of his arms tightened until she could hardly breathe. She raked his shoulders with her nails, lightly scraping with the tips only, so that he shuddered in the grip of desire held tenuously at bay. The movement set up a vibration deep inside her, and she felt the hot concentration of her very being, the dark, engulfing moment of pleasure bordering on pain, the jolting contractions of release.
She moaned, pressing herself to him, entwining her tongue with his. He held her in that moment of paralyzed need, then gathering his feet under him, he surged upward. Stepping to the bunk, he put a knee on the sheeted surface, sinking to one elbow with controlled strength, carrying her with him without withdrawal. He turned with her, raising himself above her, plunging into her warm moistness with hard, powerful strokes.
She felt the leaping return of desire, more vivid, more overwhelming than before. She raised herself against him, swept by dark frenzy. Her hands clutched at his arms, feeling their trembling as he sought to stretch the boundaries of their passion, sliding on the dew of perspiration that enveloped them both. She spread her fingers wide, running the sensitive palms over the corded muscles and sinews of his forearms. She was soaring, sinking, flying, failing, towering, tumbling, rising, dropping. She was drowning in ecstasy beyond bearing, but neither could she bear for it to end.
It exploded with piercing, heart-stopping grandeur, a violent crescendo that burst upon them, spreading outward in waves of molten joy. Pure, magnificently carnal, it was an ancient upheaval, wondrous. It ended their striving, stilling movement at the last, deep thrust. They reveled in its magic power, bewitched, voluptuous, clinging, their chests heaving with effort: their eyes, black and gray, locked, glances mingling, close; as near to the touching of s
ouls as they were allowed to be.
She was in love with Ramon. She had known it for some time, but would not allow herself to accept it. It could be denied no longer. Not that it was a piece of knowledge she intended to share. Ramon’s attraction toward her, while undeniable, was physical. He had no use for a more vital emotion. He would see it as an attempt to fetter him, and pride would not allow her to give even the appearance of such a tactic.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked, watching the play of expressions across her face.
“Nothing,” she said at once, but he was already tugging at the wild silk strands of her hair that were caught under them both, easing the tension on her scalp that she had scarcely noticed. His searching hands brushed the corset constricting her waist, and he cursed softly.
“I should have known better,” he said with remorse. Heaving himself up, he began to unfasten the steel hooks that held the front of the undergarment, the backs of his fingers brushing the curves of her breasts. “I can’t begin to see how you breathe in this thing in normal times, much less—”
“It’s all right,” she protested, but he paid no attention.
“Why do women wear gear like this. It distorts your natural shape, cuts off your air, and compresses your organs, as any doctor will tell you, besides being damnably inconvenient.”
“I can see your concern is entirely for my health.” She sent him a glance from under lowered lashes, doing her best to prevent him from seeing the relief it was to be released from that whalebone prison.
“Entirely,” he said, whipping off her corset and flinging it to one side, then in the same movement, dragging her camisole off over her head. Gently, he began to massage the long red marks where her stays had compressed the skin.
His touch was soothing, and she did not think she had reason to be wary of his motives, not so soon. Despite the length of time it had been since she had lain nude before him, she had no consciousness of it at that moment. She relaxed, inhaling deeply as she had needed to do for some time. He snorted in what might have been sardonic amusement for her pretenses, or satisfaction that she had abandoned them.
Love and Adventure Collection - Part 2 Page 25
