She scarcely noticed. Or cared. He was kissing her, that was all that mattered, and she flung her arms around his neck, kissing him back with a desire that bordered on desperation.
They broke apart, both gasping quick, shallow breaths, both staring at one another as if expecting some form of rejection. When none was forthcoming, they melted together again, open mouthed and open eyed, holding one another hostage until the tremors in their bodies threatened to rival the tremors coursing through the mast.
He tried to draw her closer and cursed at the impossibility. He tried to appease himself by devouring her with kisses, thinking it would do until he could get them down out of the rigging and he could devour her in other ways. His hand did not have as much faith and went beneath her doublet instead, unfastening the belt that held her hose snug around her waist. He gave the wool a fierce tug, tearing the seam open from waist to crotch, and, with his mouth slanting more determinedly over any effort to protest, he slid his fingers deftly through the gap.
She was sleek and slippery, and he stroked deep into the heated folds of her flesh, groaning when he felt how hot she was, how tight, how soft and wet and quick she was to respond to the intrusion. The first shivering volley of pleasure was starting to tighten all the grasping little muscles even as her hands clutched at his shoulders and her head shook side to side in denial. Spasms drenched her with more heat and it was not enough, suddenly, just to hear her crying out his name in disbelieving whispers. He withdrew his fingers and made a similarily accommodating gap in his own clothing, then, with her body still quivering with shock, with pleasure, he hooked her legs over his thighs and lifted her onto his lap.
“You’re mad,” she gasped. “We’ll both fall.”
“Not if you hold on,” he snarled savagely, “and trust me.”
Beau spared a glance for the deck, still thirty feet below, and then she spared nothing, for the solid shaft of his flesh was furrowing up inside her, so hard and thick and unyielding, she had no choice but to lock her arms around his shoulders and trust his madness. Both of his hands were braced on the mast now, his feet were stirruped through lines of rigging. Every muscle and sinew in his arms and across his back stiffened as he pushed up into her clinging heat and a primitive sound broke from his throat.
The ship took a frisky leap through a deep trough and one of his feet slipped, leaving him scrambling a moment to balance himself and his precious burden on a yardarm no wider around than a tree trunk.
“Wait,” he commanded desperately. “Wait. Hold yourself there, or I swear—”
Beau was panting lightly against his neck, her body paralyzed, not from fear but from the almost inconceivable depth of his penetration.
“You might be right,” he admitted raggedly. “This is mad. I can’t move. I can’t … do anything. And I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You are not hurting me,” she assured him on the outward escape of another breath. “And you don’t have to move. You don’t have to do anything at all.”
To prove it, she arched her back and let the ship’s motion press her hips forward, swallowing him to the hilt. They both groaned, then groaned again when the Egret rocked back and the pressure eased.
“Don’t … do that again,” he warned softly. “Or I will explode.”
“I … can’t help it,” she cried, half laughing, half sobbing, as the Egret plunged again. The rocking motion, less pronounced on deck, was magnified by the weight and pull of the sails, by the rush of the wind, and the vibrations that shook the stem of the mast. Each giddy swoop brought him deeper and deeper inside her until it seemed he might touch her heart.
Dante’s arms were shaking, his teeth were clenched tight enough to make his jaw ache, but there was nothing he could do. His body tensed and his flesh reared, and his pleasure did indeed explode with a stunning lack of finesse. Beau felt the throb of each scalding burst and bit down hard on his shoulder to keep from crying out, to keep from screaming as the waves of ecstasy began to sweep through her with an equally fierce and unrelenting mercilessness.
“It occurs to me,” he said some time later, his voice hoarse and muffled against her throat, “we might both need rescuing.”
Beau shuddered softly and burrowed closer to the massive bulk of his chest. The conflagrant waves of heat had passed but not the pleasure. If anything it remained steady and threatening, sending small spirals of warm thrills along her spine and through her limbs.
“We should try standing up,” he suggested gently.
She opened her eyes and debated the question from the point of if she wanted to stand up.
“I don’t think I can,” she whispered. “I don’t even think I can move.”
Dante risked unclamping a hand from the mast ring and found her chin, forcing her to look up at him. Her eyes were glazed and heavy-lidded. Her mouth was deliciously puffed and moist but he refrained from kissing her, suspecting if he did they might never find the strength to untangle themselves and climb safely down the rigging. Even now the motion of the Egret was working its mischief again, making him aware of the sleek, molten friction where their bodies were still joined.
“We’ll make a pretty sight when the watch changes.”
Beau frowned and leaned forward, silencing his common sense with her lips. His tongue was too gallant to refuse her invitation and she welcomed him into her mouth with a languid sigh, running all ten fingers up into his hair and refusing to let him go until he’d been properly rebuked.
He groaned but still he eased her reluctantly away. She resisted halfheartedly for another moment, then let him lift her off his thighs and settle her back on the yardarm. They were both embarrassingly wet, although he seemed to regard the evidence of their expended passions with somewhat less mortification than she.
“Mon petit corsaire féroce” he mused.
“What?”
“My fierce little corsair. Only you could have inspired me to such desperate measures.”
“So you admit it. You are mad.” She glanced at the belling sail below them. “On a yardarm, for pity’s sake. We could have both ended up in the sea.” She looked to her rumpled and torn clothing and sighed. “It would not hurt to learn a little restraint.”
“Me?” His dark brows shot up. “I have been showing remarkable restraint this past week. You cannot know the number of times I have been tempted to haul you out of your miserable hammock again and— By the way, you never thanked me.”
“For what?”
“For letting you enjoy a good night’s sleep … alone … in your own bed.”
Distracted momentarily by the shape of his mouth and the intriguing way he used it to fashion words, she gazed up into his eyes and wondered if she should feel cheated or guilty.
“So … why did you do it?”
“For one thing, you were dead tired. For another … I did not intend to force something on you that you didn’t really want. I foolishly thought—like the arrogant bastard you believe me to be—I would wait until you came to me.”
“I did not come to you tonight,” she pointed out quietly.
“Not by design, no. But neither did you push me away. Or refuse me my madness. And after tonight, whether I come to you or you come to me, it will make little difference in the end.”
A gust of wind caused Beau to turn her head and look out over the vastness of the sea. It defied all logic to be straddling a yardarm thirty feet above the gundeck of a moving ship, her thighs slick, her body runny and warm, her sex pouting, quivering for more. It defied every shred of common sense and judgment to even let there be an ‘after tonight’ … yet what could she do? Where could she go to hide from him? The Egret was a small ship and she was an even smaller fool.
“Surely you know … this cannot possibly last beyond the first step we take on English soil.”
There was a very noticeable hesitation before he said, “England is more than two weeks away. We could grow quite bored with each other in that time—gallery balconies a
nd swaying yards aside.”
She rested her head against the mast, feeling suddenly trapped in the narrow space between his outstretched arms. “And if we become bored with each other before then?”
He shrugged blithely. “Then it’s you to your solitary hammock and me to my solitary bed.”
“And on to a civil parting on the quayside in Plymouth?” she added dryly.
“It will be so civil, mam’selle, the angels will weep.” He laughed at her expression and pulled himself up so that he was standing on the yardarm. He adjusted his clothes, then reached a hand down to help her to her feet, and on an impulse drew her against his chest, holding her there long enough for her to feel the hardness rising in his body again.
“But for now, ma petite, and for the next two weeks, we’ll make them weep over other things, shall we?”
Chapter 18
Over the course of the next three days not a moment passed that Beau would have described as boring, occupied as she was with the normal, if somewhat nerve-wracking, routines of guiding an overburdened galleon through seasonable squalls and strong currents.
The evening meals continued to be a trial, more for Spence than anyone else, once it was deemed a certainty that Agnes Frosthip had set her sights on him; she even appeared at the dinner table with her moustache shaved off, a clear indication to everyone but Jonas that he was a doomed man. As the duenna’s attention turned more and more to Spence, it lapsed even further toward her royal charge. Had the duchess been willing, Pitt’s stolen moments could have become outright theft of virtue for all her chaperone seemed to notice. It was Doña Maria, however, who took care never to be caught alone again with the handsome master gunner, although it was obvious to anyone with half a wit—which excluded Pitt by this point—that he would not have had to resort to theft; she would gladly have given him anything he cared to take.
Beau continued to excuse herself early from the evening meals, wanting nothing either by word or gesture to put more of a suspicious gleam in her father’s eye than was already there. To her credit she managed not to blush whenever Dante glanced her way, which he did with reckless frequency and with more suggested intimacy than she would have preferred. Conversely, at other times, it was a struggle for her to keep from staring openly at his starkly sensual countenance, especially if the light caught his smile a certain way, or his hands moved in a manner that brought to mind the treacherous skill of those long, deft fingers.
She took to pacing out her frustrations on the gallery balcony during the politic quarter hour before Dante joined her. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they argued. Always it depended on the mood Beau had worked herself into, whether she had accepted what they did together as casual and finite and a pleasurable way to pass the nights … or if she was convinced it was foolish, reckless, callous, and predatory on his part, senseless and potentially destructive on hers.
Either way they ended up naked and breathless in a tangle of sweat-slicked arms and legs, with Beau telling herself it was the last time. It had to be the last time. He was becoming too powerful an intoxicant in her blood, drugging her with his passion, draining her with his prowess and potency. It simply wasn’t fair.
Once. Once only she had managed to escape the cabin before his eyes, his hands, his mouth, had lured her into the realm of sensual decadence. She managed to stay away too … long enough to wonder why he had not come after her. To wonder if he was, indeed, growing bored.
She had returned to the cabin on some lame excuse and found him bent over his infernal documents again, his handsome face awash in candlelight. His expression had been cool enough to suggest indifference, but his eyes had betrayed too much relief for either one of them to waste effort on words. She had gone to him and he had taken her as he had wanted to take her that first day, sprawled naked on a bed of scattered papers, her hair spread in a wild spill of auburn beneath them.
The morning of the fourth day, she woke when dawn was nothing more than a hint of pearl-gray seeping over the horizon. Dante was actually asleep beside her, a rarety she had come to appreciate in the short time she’d had a chance to study his habits. It was as if he begrudged wasting even that much time, letting life go by without being in absolute control, absolute command.
Not wanting to disturb him, she eased herself out from beneath his arm and padded barefoot to the chair, groping through the gloom for an identifiable garment in the pile that had been so hastily discarded. Her shirt, she was not suprised to discover, was ripped into two halves, drawing a muffled curse from her lips. Dante’s was beside it and she pulled it over her head, losing herself briefly in the voluminous folds. She went out onto the gallery and leaned on the rail, letting the wind comb through the tangles in her hair. From the sound of the wash and the height of the wake curling out behind them, she guessed their speed to be between eight and ten knots; the faint sound of a bell overhead tolled the fifth hour of the morning.
She sighed and cupped her chin in her hands. The soft, indistinct light that hung over the far edge of the sea was spreading in gauzy strips, lightening to pinks and golds and grays. Soon the sea would become a vast, shimmering puddle of bronze and the wash would glitter with the first pinpoints of sunlight.
There was a chill in the air and she closed her eyes to savor the crispness. Her skin rippled with a spray of goose-flesh but before she could hug her arms and chafe some heat through the cool linen of Dante’s shirt, a pair of large, warm hands slid around her waist and invited her to share the heat of his body.
“I thought you were asleep,” she murmured.
“Mmm.” He nuzzled aside a tousle of curls and pressed his lips to the nape of her neck. “Come back inside and wake me properly.”
Desire stirred along her spine, spreading outward like a slow, rolling wave. After three nights of avid explorations of each other’s body, she would have expected to have at least grown more immune to the timbre of his voice, but even that small measure of control had deserted her. The low, throaty vibrations were as tempting as sin itself and she found herself shifting slightly in his arms, inviting his hands to cup her full, swollen breasts.
“I am surprised you aren’t still asleep,” he murmured against the curve of her spine.
“I … wanted to watch the sunrise.”
“Really? I would rather watch you rise all flushed and pink beneath me.”
“I rose quite enough last night,” she said through the catch in her voice, “thank you very much.”
He laughed softly and his hands slid downward. They met over her belly, then continued lower, pressing into the juncture of her thighs, pulling her even closer to his chest. As cool as the air was, his big body was as hot as a brazier. His skin was heated velvet, the muscles smooth and hard, burnished as bronze as the sea in the growing light. He loomed extremely large behind her and she felt as she always did: too short, too small, too inadequate, to accommodate all that massive power and strength.
Yet she knew it wasn’t true. She fit him as a glove fit a hand, snug and sleek and tight.
“You’re thinking of something other than sunrises,” he mused, “I can tell.”
His fingers seduced her through the linen and another ribbon of heat unfurled within her, coiling between her thighs, slithering past flesh that had become far too knowledgeable in such a short time. It was shameless, that’s what it was. It was shameless and brazen and …
“There,” she whispered, “please.”
Dante smiled against her nape and snatched up the hem of the shirt she was wearing. A hard-muscled leg urged her thighs apart, wide enough for him to slide his partly aroused flesh into the warmth. Beau cursed softly at this new torment, this new wickedness to add to his repertoire. His fingers were still dancing and stroking, now his flesh was stretching and expanding, vying for equal attention.
Beau leaned forward at his murmured urging and he curled an arm around her waist, holding her firmly against him. He probed the lush, pearly folds, not quite deep enough to pene
trate, but teasingly enough to send her head bowing forward on a shiver.
“I have the morning watch,” she groaned.
“It’s hours away yet.”
She sucked in a quick breath and shuddered as his big body stretched and throbbed and taunted her with a brief, swiftly retracted thrust.
“You are taking shameful advantage of my position, Captain,” she whispered.
Dante’s hands encircled her breasts, finding the nipples peaked into hard beads. He kneaded them, caressed them, gently chafed them, until she was pushing back against him with wriggling impatience.
“If I am, you have only yourself to blame. Standing here, robed in my shirt, with those long, luscious legs bare beneath it”—his lips nuzzled her neck and he withheld more than he offered—“how could I resist?”
Her lips parted with a moan and she braced her hands on the rail.
“How indeed,” she accused breathlessly, “when you know I don’t have the strength to fight you off?”
He offered up a low, husky laugh. “You should never make an admission like that to a man, mon enfant But why do you still think it is necessary to fight me, even after all this time?”
“Why do you,” she gasped, “always think your attentions bring a woman pleasure? Is it so inconceivable to imagine a woman not wanting to share your lusty ways each time the urge comes upon you?”
“You mean if she, for instance, wanted to watch the sunrise instead?”
“Some people do, you know.”
His body stopped moving. He withdrew himself completely and stepped back a pace, offering a formal bow. “Then by all means, I would do the gentlemanly thing and let her watch it.”
Beau stood with her mouth open and her body trembling. The shock of watching him walk back inside the cabin, combined with the sudden absence of heat, eventually spurred her into following him, but by then he was standing over the washbowl, humming faintly to himself.
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