by Laura London
His hands moved with her trapped fists, pressing her backward into a crisply yielding mound of scarlet blossoms behind her on the limestone wall. Ruby flowers nodded against her cheeks and trembled among her curls, and the flood of scented blooms fed over her arms. The grip of his hand faded on her wrist, and his candied touch spread slowly down her arm and became a feather stroke on her breast. The unhurried glide of his fingertips was a banquet to her senses, and yet the raking invasion of love fluids was excruciating to her delicate tissues, and there was pain in the erotic ache of her moan. His fingers abandoned her breast briefly and searched the flowers for her childish wrist, and after he had discovered her white hand, he carried it back to her breasts. Inserting his hand into the cup of her much smaller, squarer palm, he whispered, smiling, “Ah, love, you’re as dainty as a toy. Show me, Merry. Show me how you want me to touch your body.”
Her fingers pressed his hand urgently closer, and his fingers spread, fanning over her breasts in deepening strokes, his thumbs passing in scorching circles over her nipples. The breath quickened in her throat and in his, and her skin quivered under the sweetness of his hot respirations as his mouth wandered over the inner curve of her throat, his hair skimming her chin.
She felt his lashes touch her skin, and the sigh of a whispered endearment, and then his lips rolled softly back and forth over her nipple, and his tongue stroked her moistly, easing the heady action of his fingers until her heartbeat began to pound in the depths of her body, and all she knew was her need to give herself to the wonder of his mouth.
“How soft you are, Merry—soft as a catkin,” he murmured. “And made in the colors of a wild rose. Angel. Oh, angel, love…” He dragged her into his arms. She felt the thud of his pulse as her naked breasts moved against his warm flesh and the hard pressure of his hips on her inner thighs. Her hands caught in his hair, pulling his head down to hers, and she opened herself to the stroke of his hard, coaxing kisses. The gauzy warmth of her wet gown clung in gently moving folds to her thighs and belly, teasing the feverish flesh there and the ache of her lower body where she was throbbing with a bell-like timbre, like a sweet promise, and she whispered his name as a plea and a moan, her pulsebeats coming thick and stinging.
She felt him lay her back against the rock with gently trembling purpose, and then the wash of filtered sunlight and warm air as his body left hers. At the shock of it her eyes flew open, and she saw that he was leaning with one palm against the rock and that the other covered his face. The skin exposed between his fingers had an enchanting flush to it, and his hair had tumbled forward in lovely and wanton disorder. And—shakily—he was laughing. When he dropped his hand from his face, she could see in his eyes the daze of frustrated longing. He said, “Merry. My sweet Merry. Ask a little question, get a great big answer. If I were going to make love to you, that was what I would have done next.”
Chapter 21
At sunset Merry found Cat alone on the veranda. He was sitting on the balustrade, one leg extended, the other bent, under the curve of a Moorish arch. Beyond him she saw the forests turning dark green, and a magenta sky, which suffused the young pirate with transparent orange-colored light that washed through his unbound hair and over the orchid resting above his ear. From the mandolin his fingers teased the minor chords of an erotic love song, and he accompanied the rich notes in a voice that was well trained, charmingly modulated, and emotionless. Merry stood within the ovoid of thrown light, watching the death of the wounded sun and listening to Cat sing, and when the last vibrating note faded, she could not speak because his songs always affected her in their sadness and beauty. Nor did she tell him it had moved her, because she knew he despised compliments.
At length he swung down his legs, laid the instrument carefully against the porch, and plucked the orchid from his ear, settling it with some tenderness in her curls.
From this close Merry could breathe in the roselike odor that clung to his hair and see the faintly opiated softness in his eyes. Annie had been right. Cat, for once, was not perfectly sober. There had been, Merry gathered, some kind of falling out with Morgan; and no one was willing to tell her anything about it beyond warning her not to question Cat unless she wanted to get her head snapped off.
She found the orchid with her fingers and smiled. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“No?”
He said, “Orchids remind me too much that flowers are the sex organs of the plant. I like my flowers to be more”—he touched the bloom and then, softly, her chin—“discreet.”
“You’re as bad as Cook,” she said. This morning, when she had chanced to make a remark praising the sparkling seascape, Cook had said prosaically, “I can’t see what you find to admire in the ocean. Jeez, what is it besides diluted fish piss? When you think of all those fish in all those centuries…” And then encountering severely critical looks from Cat and Raven, he had added, “Oh. Sorry, Merry. Fish urine.”
“Mmm” was all the answer that Cat made to her. He climbed back on the balustrade, extending his hand to her. “Come here, sweeting,” he said and pulled her gently between his knees, so that she was leaning heavily into him but facing away, and his hands began a hard, slow massage of her shoulders. “How does that feel?”
“Wonderful,” she said, and in a minute he turned her over with her breasts against his thigh and her hair dripping in a dense spill down both sides of the balustrade. Baring her neck, he brought the flat of his palm down to knead her weary muscles.
“So Devon didn’t take your maidenhead this afternoon,” he said.
“How do you know? How would I know? He might have, for all I know about it. No one tells me anything.” Then, curiously, “How do you always know when I want my neck rubbed?”
“You slump.” His clever fingers were slowly pulling the tension from her muscles. “You may have noticed that I’m three sheets to the wind and the fourth shaking.”
“Yes.”
He felt the tightening of her cheek against his hip as she smiled.
“Didn’t the others warn you to stay away from me?”
“Yes,” she said again. “But I’ve never seen you intoxicated. I couldn’t resist.” For a joke she said, “Are you going to assault me?”
Fantastic coral lights shone like buried gems in the mass of her curls, and he pushed his fingers inside one of them and began to stroke her scalp. “It must have been quite an afternoon if you’ve come back wanting to be assaulted,” he observed.
“It was. Cat, have you ever seen a white oak cheese? The painted kind that unscrupulous peddlers will sell instead of real cheese? I bought one on the first occasion that I went by myself to market because the peddler who sold it to me seemed like such a kindly man. When I brought it home, Henry—that was our indentured servant—”
“The one who put the ants in your luggage?”
“Yes! What a good memory you have! Well, Henry said, ‘Missy, when you buy cheese from a man, you got to learn to look at the cheese, not the man.’ ”
“I’ll be interested to see how you intend to apply that to Devon,” he said.
“Nothing elaborate. I just thought I’d say, do you think Devon would sell me a white oak cheese?”
Six months ago Devon would have sold any woman not only white oak cheeses but wooden nutmegs and oak-leaf cigars as well. Now Cat was not so sure—but that didn’t mean the man was no longer dangerous. Cat picked Merry up with a firm grip on her shoulders. Looking straight into her bluebell eyes, he said, “I think that whatever his intentions are, by the time Devon is finished with you, you’re going to feel like someone’s put your body through a cider press.”
She blinked twice against the dying light that was dusting her lashes with pulverized gilt. Then she said simply, “I think so too.”
When he let go her shoulders, she tried to sit up beside him, jumping and arching her body backward, and after her second failure Cat grabbed her under the arms and hauled her onto the porch
rail by his side. She sat, kicking her legs into the blue ruffled folds of her skirt. “We could talk about your problems for a while,” she suggested baldly.
“I don’t have any problems. Morgan says I just skitter like a newt through everyone else’s.… I won’t be here later, so if we’re going to skitter, we had better do it now.”
Being ready to talk and being able to do it without crying are two separate things. Glancing sideways at his shadowed face, she wondered how she would be able to put her emotions into words without drenching him with a tear-burst. It was a subject that she could only approach indirectly.
“What… what would you think of a woman who fell in love with a man who made her his captive?” she said.
“I’d think she was trying to save her neck,” he replied. “If that woman’s a friend of yours, you ought to advise her that a love like that doesn’t have much of a future.”
“She knows that already,” Merry said, putting her hands on her knees. “But… she’s less and less able to do anything about her feelings. And now that it seems as though the man is going to let her go, she can’t bear the thought of leaving him.” From an orange tree beyond the shaddocks came mockingbird song that filled the pause like tuned bells. “Why do you think this man would be kind to my friend while she was ill and then avoid her afterward?”
The opium had irritated Cat’s eyes, and he closed them, wondering briefly how addicts could stand the attendant discomforts of frequent drug use. As the soothing eye fluids did their work he realized that this time he would have to answer her questions. Devon obviously had chosen not to talk about it with her, and Cat was grudgingly forced to concede the wisdom of that. Devon had evidently decided to free her, because unless he had given her reason to so believe, she would not have thought it possible. And he knew Devon would not change his decision unless some terrible act of Providence should intervene that—Cat stopped the thought. Rand Morgan specialized in terrible acts of Providence, and Rand, for some fathomless reason, did not want to see Devon and Merry separated. Protective fear for her rinsed like camphor through Cat’s veins, and as he opened his eyes he saw that her hands, clinging to her knees, were beginning to tremble. The boy had to think a moment to recall what her original question had been. Then he said, very carefully, “If the man has some attachment to your friend, it might be difficult for him to let her go. It would be best for both if that attachment wasn’t nourished.”
In an oddly unmetered voice she asked, “But what if she decided of her own will to stay with him?”
Within the warm envelope of evening air Cat’s fingers had become quite cold. That was one offer she must not make to Devon. “And spend the rest of her life as his unprotected dependent?” Pity had roughened his soft tones. “Running after him, nibbling his crumbs, to climb or plummet at every swing of his pitching fancy like all the others before her? She couldn’t wish that for herself—and if this man feels anything for her, he wouldn’t wish that either.” Suddenly addressing himself no longer to the hypothetical friend, he said, “God knows, you don’t have the temperament to be a whore of Devon’s.”
After an aching moment of silence she said, “Did he tell you that?”
“Not in those words.”
“But something like that?”
“Something like that,” he said.
“I suppose,” she said in a small halting voice, “that marriage is not in the question?”
Marriage. Cat’s mind absorbed the word with a shock. She wouldn’t have bothered to ask if she’d known Devon’s full name. Oh, Christ, what an innocent she was. The Windflower. If there weren’t a thousand other obstacles, Devon’s complicated sense of honor would never permit him to solicit her hand while she was his prisoner. Affection was only another trap. If he loved her enough to ask, that love would prevent him from doing it. But all Cat said to her was, “As things stand, marriage is not in the question.”
Sometime during the course of their talk she had covered her face with one hand, and spiraling copper-bright tendrils fell from her hairline to invade her fingers and her thumb where they rested on her brow. Brokenly she said, “If this is the way love feels… Is it always this painful? How do people survive? You can’t imagine what it was like this afternoon—to have him hold me and whisper love words and kiss me—and then to pull away, laughing and shivering.”
But Cat could imagine it. The picture of it had haunted him until he had fogged the images from his mind with opium: Merry, bitterly hurt and confused, and Devon, worried for her, caught with such brutality in the web of his own contradictions, and heartsick from it. What had Morgan expected them to discover in this emotional morass?
“Devon was shivering. How were you?” he asked.
“I wanted to retch. After, he was so kind and charming—which only made it worse. If this is love, I hate it.” She lifted her head, and the dimming light showed a blue tear on the edge of her nose. Blotting the tear with a freshly sunburned wrist, she said, “I promised myself I wasn’t going to cry, so I insist you discount that tear.” A second tear rolled down to replace its fellow. “That one too.” She curled her upper lip into a rueful grin. “This won’t happen to me every time I kiss a man, will it?”
“Are we planning to kiss a great many, then?”
“Go teach your granny to suck eggs,” she retorted, imitating Raven’s drawl, groping for any game that would help her escape the ready tears. She didn’t want to cry. Tears, by their very triteness, were a sane and human balm to sorrow, and the wintry emptiness inside her seemed to have little to do with normal mortal processes. She didn’t feel as though she’d lost someone dear, or had a severed limb; those things she could have grieved over. This was like having died unborn. The pain was outside and around her, pricking at her skin, her eyelashes, the membranes inside her nose—but within her was only the chilled reflection of a soul that will not acknowledge its own agony. Yet this dull, suspended agony was bad enough. She was in no hurry to feel its full brunt.
A small family of mastiff bats lived beneath the shingles of the roof, and Merry heard the scratch of their small claws on the eaves as one by one they launched themselves swiftly into the air. Oh, to be that free. Thank heaven for Cat, warm and trustworthy at her side, and ready to be teased. She said, “Maybe I will kiss a great many, if I can figure out a way to make them hold still for me.”
“Rain comes when the wind calls,” he said pleasantly. “You won’t have any trouble getting males to cooperate. Ask one. You’ll be on your back faster than a bee stinging chain lightning.”
“Will you kiss me, Cat?” she said and almost could have laughed aloud at his expression. “Just one little tiny kiss?”
“Christ.” His eyes had widened slightly, and light speared the glowing filaments of his irises. “I don’t give little tiny kisses.”
“All right, then. Beggars can’t afford to be particular. I’ll take what you have. If you argue anymore, you know, I shall be quite cast down. You did tell me that males would cooperate.”
“If you think I can kiss Devon off your mind…”
“I don’t, I don’t!” Her shy Madonna face warmed into a picture of openhearted, impish mischief. “I just want to compare.”
“Brat,” he said in soft amusement, lowering himself in an unhurried way from the balustrade. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll kiss your friend—in the interest of clearing up her confusion.”
Merry’s heart was hammering as she jumped down with him, though she had begun to grin, and when he turned toward her, she dissolved in an irresistible fit of giggles. Trying to stop them was like trying to push froth into a bottle, and laughter quivered through her voice as she said, “Where do you want her to stand?”
“It would be fine if she stood just where you are,” he said.
“And what do you want her to do?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I’ll do—what has to be done.”
“Should she close her eyes?”
“Yes, and her
mouth as well.” He stepped closer, letting his gaze play lightly over the velvet of her eyebrows and lashes and her lips, with their delicately female satins. Dusk whispered through the shadowy porch, but the last streams of orange sunlight nuzzled her brow, embowed her cheekbones, and drifted in a heart-shaped patch upon her chest that led the eye pleasantly to the soft valley separating her breasts.
She had thought only that he would press a single sportive kiss upon her, so the brush of his hand against her cheek startled open her half-closed eyelids. Cat’s head was slightly inclined, and she saw that his gaze had narrowed fractionally. The one upraised hand gently drew away her hair, and his eyes took on a drowsy look as he allowed his fingertip to trail suggestively over the most sensitive folds within her ear. With another man she would have been afraid, but this was Cat, and she knew that in some remote and cerebral way he loved her.
His fingers whispered over her face, seeking and slowly stroking nerve points, knowing where, how long, how much to caress. Her skin gained color under his touch; her eyes became enormous; her throat tightened. By her nose his little finger encountered a forgotten tear. Gathering the sparkling drop, he smeared it slowly over the curve of her lips and blew it gently dry. One hand came lightly to rest on her neck; the other supported her cheek as he sought her with his kiss.
“And now,” he breathed, “she has to open her mouth.” His thumb began a slow compelling rotation upon the frozen muscles of her jaw. “It’s only Cat, Merry. Open for me.” Soft kisses of languidly altering pressure wrung acquiescence from her lips, and they parted for his voluptuous pleasuring. Her mouth drank from his the scent of roses, the heady opium imaginings, the promise of sweet erotic riddles unveiled.
When he permitted her lips to leave their silken bondage, she gave him a round-eyed look that would live for months in his dreams. Then she turned to stare out across the fading landscape, and breathing unevenly, he laid careful hands on her waist and buried his face in the fragrant skin on the side of her neck, letting his hair pass in a sigh over her breast. He stood so for a moment, feeling the smooth caress of her pulse, and then he released her completely and went to lean against the porch with his heels crossed.
