by Amy Andrews
He looked utterly masculine with nothing but a white sheet riding low on his hips.
‘Good morning,’ she murmured, blushing as she remembered just what lay beneath that sheet and the things he’d done with it.
She’d done with it.
Rick smiled at the pinkness in her cheeks, surprised that someone who knew him so carnally was capable of such modesty. ‘Good morning to you too,’ he replied, dropping a kiss on a bare shoulder.
His smile slackened as a feeling he wasn’t familiar with washed over him and took up residence in his gut like a lead sinker. Nothing like how he usually felt the morning after—loose and light with all his kinks ironed out. Stella wasn’t some bar hook-up or one of his many port calls. He wasn’t sure what came next.
Stella noted his pensive look. ‘I hope that’s not buyer’s remorse,’ she murmured.
Rick shook his head. If she slapped him in the face and swam back home to England right this moment and refused to see him again he would never regret last night. ‘Never.’
He lowered his head again and kissed her on the mouth, a long, slow, lingering kiss that tasted of them and left him hard beneath the sheet and aching for more.
Stella sighed as he pulled back, brushing her fingers along the soft bristles of his perpetual three day growth. ‘So what’s up?’ she murmured.
He turned his face, kissing the tips of her fingers. ‘I guess,’ he said, looking down into her sleepy olive gaze, ‘I’m not sure what comes next...’
Stella smiled. ‘Breakfast, I think. Unless you want to—’ she dropped her hand to his chest, traced her index finger down his belly to the interesting bulge in the sheet ‘—fool around a bit more?’
Rick captured her hand before it hit her target and thinking wouldn’t be possible. ‘Stel,’ he said. ‘I’m serious. Normally I’d kiss you and tell you I had to be somewhere in a couple of hours but...this is you and...I don’t have a well-rehearsed morning-after plan for this. Frankly I’m torn between freaking out and ringing Andy Willis to tell him I’ve seen your boobs.’
Stella laughed, letting her hand fall to the mattress. Andy Willis had been Rick’s best friend when he’d been eleven and had spent a couple of weeks one summer on the Persephone with them. He’d also had a massive crush on Stella.
Rick frowned down at her. ‘It’s not funny, Stella.’
Stella sobered, finding his pout irresistible. She lifted her head to kiss it away. He resisted until she tugged on his bottom lip with her teeth and soothed it with her tongue. She smiled when he groaned and kissed her back.
She pulled away when they were both breathing hard, smoothing his brow with her thumb.
‘You’re not eleven any more, Rick. What’s happened with us has taken us both by surprise so I don’t have a plan for this either. But do we really need one?’
She remembered what Diana had said—you’re going to be on that boat with him for long periods of time where there’ll be nothing to do. She’d rejected it then as an impossibility but, after last night, maybe Diana had a point.
‘You and I both know that we live two very different lives and also know through the bitter experience of two broken families that they’re practically mutually exclusive. But for the next little while we’re on this boat together—alone—and we’re both single and of age and if last night is any yardstick, we’re pretty damn good together. Can’t that be our plan?’
Rick thought it sounded like possibly the best ever plan he’d heard. But could things really be that simple between the two of them? If he shut his eyes he could hear Nathan telling him how special Stella was, what she deserved out of life. And what she didn’t.
‘I don’t know, Stel, maybe your father was right—’
Stella shook her head vigorously, interrupting him, annoyed that her father had meddled to the extent he had. She’d always wondered why none of her father’s crew had ever spent much time with her once she’d grown breasts and now she knew.
‘No, he was wrong. About a lot of things but especially this. I understand, Rick. You’re like him. I get it. The ocean runs in your veins and the sea is your mistress blah blah.’
She rolled her eyes.
‘And I want marriage and one day babies and for the father of those babies to be around full time. I know all that. But that’s not what this is. We’re not talking marriage and happily-ever-afters here, Rick. We’re talking a couple of weeks of hot, sweaty, sandy, frolicking-in-tropical-lagoons sex.’
Rick shut his eyes against the images she evoked as his hard-on voted yes. But...he looked down at her, her blonde hair spread out on the pillow around her, her lovely face so, so familiar...could a woman who immersed herself in happily-ever-afters ever settle for less?
‘And then what? We just go back to being friends?’
Stella shrugged. ‘Sure. It’s not like we see each other much these days, Rick. What...two or three times a year? Probably even less now that Dad’s not around. Hell, it’ll probably be another year or so before I next see you.’
Rick had to admit she made a good point. ‘That’s true,’ he murmured.
Stella smiled, her hand making its way back to where the sheet still bulged interestingly. ‘The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’
Rick dropped his head to nuzzle along her collarbone. ‘It certainly makes sense.’
Her hand dipped under the sheet and she hit pay dirt. Rick swore in Spanish, and she smiled, recognising the word he had taught her when she’d been twelve years old. She wrapped her palm around his girth and revelled in the silky hard length of him and the way he shuddered against her.
She stretched languorously, her free hand slipping under the pillow, grabbing a fistful of sheet as Rick claimed a nipple, sucking it into the heat of his mouth, lashing it with hot wet swipes of his tongue.
Her hand nudged something and it took her lust-drunk brain a moment to ascertain it was a book. Without thinking she pulled it out and looked at it.
The cover of Pleasure Hunt stared back at her.
She said a choice swear word of her own, snagging Rick’s attention.
‘Ah...’ he said warily.
‘You’ve read this?’
She frowned as he collapsed back on the mattress and nodded, her worst fears confirmed. She’d wondered when they’d first had that conversation about her writing process if he’d read it, but his comments had set her mind at ease.
His obviously misleading comments.
‘This is Diana’s copy,’ she said as she thumbed through it. She’d have known it without the benefit of her autograph on the title page. She’d know this dog-eared copy anywhere—she’d seen Diana reading it often enough.
‘Yes. She gave it to me just before we left your house that day.’
‘Oh, did she, now?’ Stella murmured, her ire rising as she formulated a rather stinging email rant in her head. But then another thought hit and she sat bolt upright. ‘Oh, God,’ she said as the most important thing of all occurred to her. She turned her head and looked down at him. ‘So you know...’
She couldn’t even finish the statement, it was so embarrassing.
Rick grinned at her mortified look as he crossed his ankles and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘That I’m Vasco Ramirez?’
The pink she’d gone earlier was nothing to the deep red that currently suffused her cheeks. She opened her mouth to deny it but she couldn’t. If he’d read it, he’d know. There was too much of him in it. Not just that tantalising birthmark but the essence of him. His mannerisms, his way with words, his sense of humour.
His sense of honour.
She looked away, her fingers absently stroking the raised lettering on the cover. ‘Well, there’s no need to get too big-headed about it,’ she huffed. ‘I needed a pirate of Spanish descent. It made sen
se to...model him on someone I knew.’
Whatever happened she couldn’t let him know that she’d been fantasising about him for a long time before Vasco had come on the scene. That Vasco had walked into her head fully formed because of him. He was already freaked out enough about the development in their relationship.
‘But any resemblance to person or persons alive or dead...’
Rick vaulted upright, fitting himself in behind her, his front to her back, covering her mouth with his hand, cutting off the lawyer speak as he kissed her shoulder. ‘Shh, Stella,’ he murmured. ‘I love it that you modelled him on me.’
He brushed a string of kisses up higher as he dropped his hand to her shoulder. ‘I’m not going to sue you, I’m...flattered. And impressed how...accurate...’ he smiled against her skin ‘...your descriptions are. That bath scene...’ He nuzzled her ear; his hands moved to cup her breasts, his thumbs brushing over the already erect nipples. ‘It was like you’d painted a portrait of me.’
Stella arched her back and felt her eyes roll back in her head as his mouth and fingers turned her insides to mush.
Rick kissed up her jaw and when she turned her head towards him he feathered kisses along her lips. ‘Like you’d actually seen me naked,’ he whispered against her mouth as one hand left her breast bearing south.
His words triggered a thought and Stella opened her eyes. ‘You knew,’ she murmured. ‘You’d already read the book when you spied me watching you have that shower.’
He chuckled unashamedly in her ear as both hands stroked her thighs. ‘Guilty,’ he whispered.
Her brow wrinkled as she remembered how cannily familiar some things on this trip had been. The shower incident. When he’d tended her wounds as Vasco had done. When he’d squeezed mango juice all over her body.
But he’d turned her whole body into an erogenous zone and when he urged her thighs apart she didn’t object.
‘Have you been deliberately enacting scenes from the book?’ she murmured, raising both arms and linking them around his neck, arching her back as his finger slid between her legs.
‘What did you expect me to do for fun when you took away all my recreational flirting? Anyway, do you care?’ he whispered, his erection pressing into the cleft of her soft round buttocks.
‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘I’m mad as he...ll.’ And she would have sounded much more convincing had he not driven a finger deep inside her.
He chuckled at her breathy whimper. ‘Are you telling me you haven’t been taking advantage too? That you didn’t think about the book when you were spying on me in the shower? Or when I was tending to your wounds? That bringing those scenes to life didn’t excite you?’
Stella knew he was right. Knew that it would be hard to take the moral high ground when she’d been using him to indulge a few of her own fantasies.
But she was damned if she was going to let him have it all his way. ‘It’s just a story,’ she panted as he stroked between her legs. ‘They’re what excited Lady Mary.’
Rick remembered what she’d said about Lady Mary not being her in anything other than a generic female way. Her slickness coated his fingers and he picked up the pace. ‘And you’re not her, right?’ he whispered.
Stella was so close to falling over the edge. So far gone she didn’t know which way was up, but even she knew to answer that question truthfully would be madness.
‘Right,’ she gasped as she squirmed against him and he stroked harder.
She clutched convulsively at the back of his neck as a tiny pulse fluttered deep and low, fanning out in ever-increasing waves. Mary was forgotten, Vasco was forgotten as it pulsed and grew until nothing else mattered but the magic Rick could do with his hands.
‘Oh, God,’ she groaned, arching her back, tilting her pelvis. ‘Don’t stop,’ she begged. ‘Please don’t stop.’
Rick felt the tension in his groin tighten to almost unbearable tautness. ‘Yes, Stel, yes,’ he panted, working her slickness, feeling her ripple around him. ‘Come for me. Come.’
Stella bucked as the wave broke over her, undulating with a ferocity that tore the breath from her lungs and, for a moment or two, the beat from her heart.
It gripped her and shook her in endless waves and she knew there was no possible way she could be put back together right, once it ended.
CHAPTER TEN
Mary chafed against the four silken bonds that imprisoned her, legs akimbo, upon Vasco’s bed. For no matter how many times she shared it with him she would never regard it as hers. She eyed the big brooding pirate as he prowled back and forth. He was wearing breeches and boots and nothing else save the sunlight slanting through the portholes.
He stopped and turned to face her from the foot of the bed, shoving his hands on his hips. ‘I’m waiting, Mary.’
His low rumble set her heart aflutter and her nipples to attention. She watched as his glittering blue eyes took in their state of indecency. How could they not when she was barely covered? When he had stripped her to her undergarments not ten minutes ago this had not been the expected outcome.
Damned stubborn man.
‘I insist that you untie me immediately, Captain Ramirez.’
Vasco chuckled, his gaze fanning over the hard peaks tenting her chemise. ‘Methinks you like to be tied up, Lady Mary,’ he murmured, planting a knee on the bed.
She glared at him both scandalised and titillated at the thought. ‘Captain Ramirez.’
He ignored the warning in her voice, slowly advancing onto the bed. ‘I do so prefer it when you call me Vasco. Like you did that day on the deck when I washed your hair.’ He prowled closer on his hands and knees until he was sitting on his haunches between her spreadeagled legs. ‘And when I first touched you here,’ he murmured, stroking his finger down the open central seam of her linen drawers.
She sucked in a breath and he smiled triumphantly. ‘Like you did last night and the night before that and the five nights before that.’ He stroked again.
Mary squirmed against his hand. ‘Vasco, please,’ she moaned. ‘It’s the middle of the day. The crew...’
He shook his head and chuckled that she could still keep a sense of propriety while tied to his bed. ‘Say it,’ he insisted. ‘If you want it, Mary, you’re going to have to ask for it.’
Lady Mary Bingham had been a willing and eager bed partner but there was part of her he hadn’t been able to reach, a part she kept aloof from him even when she was in the throes of her release. It made him feel like a common street urchin and she the lady who was condescending to allow him to use her body while she had nothing better to do.
He needed to know that this fever was burning in her blood too.
Mary shook her head. Gently bred ladies did not talk so.
She’d already taken a pirate as a lover. How much more did he want? ‘I will not.’
Vasco smiled at her, watching as she bit down on her bottom lip and fought against closing her eyes. ‘You know you want to, Mary, I can feel it right here...’ He slipped a finger inside her where it was hot and slick and she gasped. ‘I know you, Mary.’
Mary hated how he could addle her senses so quickly. ‘You know nothing about me, sir,’ she said vehemently as her hips moved against him restlessly.
Vasco grinned. ‘I know you like this,’ he said, pushing up her chemise with his other hand, exposing a creamy breast and rosy nipple that puckered quickly beneath the stroke of his fingers.
‘I know you have this tiny strawberry birthmark just here,’ he said, satisfied to hear her whimper as he withdrew his finger, shifting it slightly to the left to the crease where her inner thigh met the very centre of her. ‘I know you like it when I lick you there,’ he murmured, lowering his head and putting his tongue to where his finger had been, to the mark that had fascinated him right from the beginning.
‘Vasco...’ Mary cried, arching her back as his finger re-entered her and his tongue swiped in long, lazy, knowing strokes.
He smiled as he pulled away, sitting back on his haunches, his finger still stroking deep inside her. ‘I know me tying you up excites you even though I know you’re hearing your uncle’s voice telling you you’re going to hell.’
Mary also hated how he seemed to be able to read her mind. ‘Well, I’ll be seeing you there first, Captain Ramirez,’ she said haughtily.
Vasco threw back his head and laughed. When he stopped his eyes glittered down at her and he started to stroke her in earnest. ‘Ah, but what a way to go, Lady Mary,’ he taunted as he relentlessly increased the pressure.
Mary especially hated how he could bring her to her peak so effortlessly. ‘Vasco,’ she whimpered and moved against him, desperate for the rush.
He quirked an eyebrow, easing back a little, refusing to give her what she craved. If she wanted to use him then she could damn well say the words. ‘Yes, Mary, what do you want?’
Mary rocked her pelvis against his hand as the maddening friction plateaued, divinity frustratingly out of reach. ‘Please, Vasco,’ she gasped.
Vasco was harder than he’d ever been in his life, watching her lying before him half exposed, fully abandoned, head tossing from side to side, her body begging for that which she would not put into words.
He shook his head. ‘Please what, Mary?’ he demanded, quickening the pace for a few tantalising seconds, then backing off.
Mary bit into her lip hard, lifting her hips off the bed. ‘Vasco!’
‘Say it,’ he growled.
She opened her eyes and glared at him. ‘Damn it, Vasco.’ But she knew in that second she’d have given him the world if he’d asked for it. ‘I like it when you do this to me,’ she said. ‘I want you to do it to me. I just plain want you. Now please...please...’ her wrists yanked at the bonds ‘...I beg of you...’
Vasco grinned. ‘Of course, Lady Mary, why didn’t you just say so?’
But the rebuke that came to Mary’s lips was lost as Vasco drove her over the edge in ten seconds. When she was capable of opening her eyes a little while later it was to his smug triumphant smile.
