by Sharon Page
“And you complained to me about caring about my grandmother’s opinion.”
“I was speaking from experience. I let the quality hurt me. It took a long time to learn that the pirate Captain Hawk had more nobility in his little finger than a dozen men like Wesley possessed. I don’t want you to be the way I was once. I don’t want you to do what my mother did.”
“Have an affair with a noble.”
He’d never spoken of his mother with anyone. But he had to, to make Grace understand. “My mother took every blasted insult my father used to hurt her and swallowed it up. And do you want to know why she did it? Why she let him abuse her until she was paralyzed with pain?”
“W-why?”
“Because he was bloody quality. Sweetheart, noble blood runs in my veins, but if I’m a moral man, it’s because of my mother’s damned blood.”
With one arm he jerked her to him, and rolled onto his good shoulder. “Now let me eat your sweet pussy, my love.”
He tugged up her heavy and awkward skirts, and he breathed a sigh of relief when he bared her skin and saw she wore no drawers. He let her skirts fall, fashioning a tent around him and her quim. Her sweet mound, shielded by soft, golden curls—how it enticed him. He loved to breathe in her scent, loved knowing that she was wet, glistening, and juicy for him. Traveling to the south seas had taught him that a woman’s cunny was as delicious as succulent, ripe fruit and that a lucky man was the one who indulged himself in the pleasures of licking his lady’s quim often.
But his body ached as he pressed his mouth to her moist pussy and searched for her clit to suckle. He had to roll onto his back, pulling Grace with him.
Unbalanced, she swung out her leg and, to his relief, her knee hit the mattress instead of his chest. He clamped his hands to her naked arse and held her to his mouth while he suckled, savored, and took his fill of her earthy, salty taste.
“Devlin—oh! You must stop! I want to ask you a question.”
He must have been doing something wrong—it must have been the laudanum dulling his skills, for why else would Grace have asked him to stop eating her pussy?
She pulled back and he wasn’t strong enough, with the drug rushing through his veins, to keep her pinned to his mouth.
“Oh God, Grace,” he muttered. “I was enjoying that.”
“I have to know this, Devlin. Lady Prudence told me that you murdered the gentleman that she loved. Is this true? You’ve told me you are noble, and I believe it—I know that you are. But why, then, would you kill a man?”
“It was a duel—”
“Prudence claims it was murder.”
“Lady Prudence believes what she wishes to, because she was in love. For a start, her suitor was no gentleman—he was the youngest of four children born to the Duke of Kingsmere. He was a shiftless lout with a charming manner and a penchant for young women. Very young women. Girls, wide-eyed, innocent girls and, for all accounts, the more frightened they were, the better. This was in the summer of 1817, and Prudence was a mere seventeen. I had returned to England, and had been invited back to the house by my father since he had magnanimously decided to acknowledge the infamous pirate Captain Sharpe as his own son. I had played in that house as a child, while my mother was still his lover. He even paid for me to go to school…up until their affair soured. Lady Prudence and Lord Wesley were furious to have me return. They hated me, as could be expected, but I rather liked Prudence. She was quite a bit like me—”
Grace gaped with a mystified expression. “Prudence is like you?”
“Rebellious to the point of being stupid. She’d fallen for Kingsmere’s boy, and he was leading her on a merry dance, trying to get her into his bed so he could marry her. But then, one night, Prudence was hurrying home from an assignation and she ran into me on the path.”
The night flooded back to him: Prudence’s stark horror as she saw him, the desperate way she had turned her face.
He’d grasped her arm as she tried to run by him, knowing from experience what she wanted to hide. Bruises bloomed on her pretty face at her right eye and her cheek, sickening splotches of blue and purple and yellowish-green. Blood had dribbled from a cut in her lip and made dry streaks on her pale skin.
His gut had roiled. His mother. He had found her lying limply on the bed, her expensive lace-trimmed shift in tatters around her. He’d been fourteen, with stolen ale racing through his blood. She was dead; he had been certain she was dead.
He’d touched her arm and the chilled flesh made him jerk away and toss the ale-soaked contents of his gut onto the bedroom floor.
Bruises had covered his mother’s body. He’d never seen a person bear so many marks of violence. Some, at her slightly rounded stomach, were the shape of a boot.
“Someone killed your mother?” Horror laced Grace’s words.
He was slipping into the power of the laudanum now, too weakened by emotion to fight the blissful peace anymore. “Yes,” he croaked.
“Did you—did you know who?”
“I found him eventually. He was the first nob I robbed on the Great North Road. I intended to shoot him that night, playing the highwayman to give me the excuse to blow his head off—” He broke off. “Hell, sorry, sweeting,” he muttered.
“It is fine, Devlin. Did you shoot him? He deserved it. Was he like Lord Wesley then, well born, and thinking himself immune to justice?”
“I didn’t shoot him. In the end, I couldn’t take his life in cold blood.” After years of living with the pain and guilt over not being able to save his mother, he had not been able to pull the trigger. After all those days of believing he couldn’t stand to see another sunrise, he’d found he could not kill the man who had put him in hell.
“What happened?” Grace urged.
“He found me, bent on vengeance. It had consumed him for months, the need to destroy me for humiliating him. He ambushed me as I left a tavern, accompanied by a half-dozen hired men armed with bats. I saw then the beast who had killed my mother. She must have humiliated him in some way; perhaps she ended their affair because she feared him, and he killed her.”
“But how did you escape?”
“Simple, love. I offered his men more money to go into the tavern and drink. In his rage, he picked up one of the bats and rushed at me. To defend myself, I had no choice but to break his neck.”
Fog crept in around the edge of his vision and he could barely lift his lids. “Do you hate me, Grace? Do you think I’m a murderer?” His voice shook with vulnerability.
“You challenged Prudence’s suitor to a duel because you believe he would beat her, as this horrid man did to her mother. You did it to protect Prudence.”
“S-she wouldn’t listen. She thought, as my mother did with that damned viscount, that her lover’s rage and violence proved the depth of his love. She believed that if she devoted herself to him, if she pleased him, if she worked to make him happy every moment of his life, that he would love her and never hurt her. And I didn’t murder the young blackguard—he shot first, he cheated, and fortunately, his cowardly nerves sent his pistol ball into a tree trunk.”
Hell, he was fading and there was more he wanted to say, needed to say. “I told you I ended up on a ship because I was drunk, Grace, but I let myself get drunk because I thought I was in love with a titled woman, the Countess of Arran.”
Dimly, he saw Grace’s mouth flatten into a pained line.
“I wasn’t in love with her, angel. But I thought I was.” Haltingly, fighting exhaustion, he told her all of it. Of wanting to be worthy to be seen in public with the countess. Of her dismissive note ending their affair.
Grace let her hand rest against his face and he savored the feel of her skin, the support he took from her touch.
“I thought I loved her with all my heart, and it drove me mad that she made me feel like I was unworthy, that I was less of a man because of who I was. She turned my world on edge, twisted my heart in knots until I never knew a moment’s peace, until my he
art and soul tormented me every waking moment.”
“And that was how you defined love?” Grace’s voice floated to him from somewhere above.
“Don’t look so shocked. You do that to me.” He licked his lips, tasting her creaminess on them, wishing he had the strength to bury himself between her thighs again. Then he turned his face and kissed her hand. “I know I never loved the countess and I know I love you, Grace. She made me believe I was less of a man. You make me hunger to strive to be more.”
“Miss, we’ve come to help you undress. Could we please come in?”
Grace paused. She had been fighting hopelessly to reach the ties of her corset and had sorely contemplated sneaking into Devlin’s bathing room and taking a straight razor to them. His snores floated in from the adjoining bedroom. He was completely knocked out by the laudanum.
He had also told her not to allow anyone into her room.
And, of course, she hadn’t even thought of having him undo her annoying foundation garments. He’d been far too tired and, just when she had thought of it, he’d said that remarkable thing.
You make me hunger to strive to be more.
Was it true? How could it be when he had told her that he couldn’t give up being a highwayman?
The edge of her corset, twisted by her struggles, jabbed into her breasts. Ouch! She couldn’t stay in this garment for the night.
What if the women at the door were naked, as so many of them ran about the house?
And how she wished she could be too.
Well, not be nude, but be without her corset.
Devlin’s world was a world without corsets, she saw. Whereas, the one she had longed to belong to, the world of her cold and condemning grandmother, was so tightly laced that no woman dare crack a smile or draw a breath.
“Miss?” The voice at the door repeated.
No pretense that she was anything other than unmarried.
Surely Devlin had been mainly concerned about her allowing men into her room.
She walked to the door, aware of the stays—they did not hurt yet, but they weren’t comfortable—and she opened it.
Two pretty women stood on the other side; once she would have thought of them as girls, the girls of Devlin’s harem, but she now was determined to consider them women. Each wore a silk wrapper tied snugly at the waist to contain generous curves. One wore a bronze robe, which went well with her freckled cheeks and auburn hair. This had been the woman who had been shocked—scandalized and furious—to see her arrive with Devlin.
Yet, now she was smiling as she breezed into Grace’s bedroom. “Is Devlin resting?” she asked softly. “I thought Kennedy gave him a good dose of laudanum.”
Grace nodded and the other woman came in and closed the door behind her. She carried a small green velvet sack and she let it drop by the door. Grace recognized her as one of the women who had fought over Rogan St. Clair. This woman was named Bess and she had loose black curls that hung to her waist, along with the drama of long black lashes, black brows, and dark red lips.
“I’m Lucy. You must be tired, Miss,” the auburn-haired girl said in a matter-of-fact voice that was soft and pretty. “What with being attacked on the road and worrying over Devlin.”
Lucy’s slim hands pushed into her back from behind, surprising her. “Come by the mirror, and I’ll help you with your gown.”
Sighing, Grace went. She was tired, it was true. By why should Lucy want to help her?
“What’s your name, Miss?” Lucy asked.
“H—” She stopped. She was tired. Everyone had seen her in this house, but they had no idea what her name was. “Heatley,” she lied.
“Miss Heatley,” said Lucy, “let me get this corset off you.”
Her fingers worked quickly, and soon Grace could draw a long, deep breath. Lucy glanced up into the mirror, from behind the sweep of her gleaming auburn hair, and their gazes met. “He’ll be fine, you know. Devlin. He can survive anything.”
The woman’s casual possessiveness sent a sharp pain to Grace’s heart, one that she tried to will away.
“You have been with Devlin a long time?” Grace tried to make the question sound as though she could hardly care less, but she wondered why she wanted to torture herself.
Lucy paused, her fingers hooked around the laces. A thoughtful smile transformed her—to a woman in love. “Most of my life that has mattered. He rescued me, of course. He’s done that to all of us.”
And he had rescued her, too, Grace thought. She’d fallen in love with him because of that, but she was not the only one. Had he rescued all the women here? She had thought he simply paid them, or they were like the camp followers of the army—women drawn inexorably to gatherings of men. But it appeared there was much more to the connection between Devlin and these women. He rescued women—he had done so with Prudence. He had not been able to rescue his mother, so instead he’d avenged her.
Grace winced at the ice-cold sensation gripping her heart.
And now, Devlin was trying to rescue her again and take her home to her family, where he felt she belonged. Perhaps all she was to him was a woman in need of rescue.
“Has he ever told you that you make him strive to be more?” she asked Lucy.
“What? What more could Devlin do? He’s famous! He’s like Robin Hood.” Lucy helped her step out of the corset. Oh, it felt so good to be free of it.
Grace glanced at Bess. “How did Devlin rescue you?” She should be impressed with his kindness, but her heart felt tight, as though her corset was still in place and squeezing it.
“I was working on the docks—I didn’t even have a room, unless I could coerce a gent to pay for one so I could have a bed. But most wanted me up against the door or the wall before they walked to the next tavern.”
“You’re not really Miss Heatley, are you?” Lucy asked the question. She winked at Bess, who sashayed to the door, her hips a sensual sway beneath her robe. From the sack, Bess drew out two bottles of wine.
“Of course I am.”
Bess deftly pulled out the cork and handed Lucy the bottle, who then turned and, with a generous smile, held it out to Grace. “Here, have a sip.”
Grace slipped her hand around it. She’d never drunk from the bottle, but it seemed fitting in a pirate’s world—it seemed base and primitive and sensual—so she tipped up the bottle.
His wine was certainly superb. Lucy motioned frantically, so Grace let the bottle drop. She resisted the urge to wipe her lips, which would hardly be proper. Just the sips she’d taken left her intoxicated and giggly.
She really should go to bed.
She longed to curl up with Devlin, but he was wounded and she feared hurting him.
Bess gave her the untouched bottle and she took more sips. It tasted so lovely, a testament to Devlin’s exquisite taste in sensual things.
In vino veritas. She was as hopelessly in love with Devlin as Lucy was, and that made her irritable enough to drink more.
Then she handed the bottle back to Bess, just as Lucy finished the first.
“I’m a bit foxed,” she admitted. “I think I should go to bed.”
Lucy grasped her by the wrists, led her to the bed, and helped her flop down upon it. The four posts began a circling dance as she landed on the mattress. His wine was certainly potent.
“Devlin is quite infatuated with you. If you want to be a part of his world, you will have to learn what he likes best.”
The entire room had begun to revolve and Grace could barely keep her lids open.
Learn what he likes best?
That had her struggling to sit up.
Lucy undid the belt of her robe and let it drop. Her voluptuous body came into view beneath a gossamer-thin shift that tugged across her large breasts. She sinuously twined her curvy form around the ornately carved gilded bedposts. “It is so much fun. Devlin and the other men take care of our every need—we have lovely clothes, delicious food, freedom. And pleasure. So much pleasure. They want us
to be sexual all the time. Watch—” She smiled wickedly. “And you will see.”
Bess brought the velvet sack to the edge of the bed. It looked lumpy and heavy, so it clearly held more than just wine. “They have brought us the most intriguing toys from around the world.”
She lifted an object that Grace thought at first was an elephant’s tusk. Then she saw the carved shapes and blushed. It looked like two male phalluses attached at the hilt.
Lucy had fished out a vial of oil and Grace swallowed hard. Her head was spinning and she knew she should send the women away but, as she tried, Lucy shook her head. “It will be fun,” she assured with a sparkling laugh.
Lucy was already spreading one end of the phallus with oil, while Bess dripped oil onto her graceful fingers. As Bess lifted Lucy’s shift and began to massage her privates with oil-slicked fingers, Grace stared in shock. For a start, Lucy was shaved completely.
But she couldn’t help but watch Bess’s fingers sliding around Lucy’s glistening pink lips.
“Ooh, you’re already soaked,” dark-haired Bess cooed.
Laughing, Lucy gripped one end of the ivory phallus and pressed it to her quim. Abruptly she slid it inside, gasping, her face turning red. “Oh, I do love one shoved in quick.”
Bess threw off her wrapper, revealing her naked curves. “But first…” She winked at Grace and took something else out of the sack. She applied some metal type of clamps to her nipples, wincing and moaning as they snapped closed over the erect, brownish lengths.
“The men do love us to play,” Bess laughed as she held up two carved toys, both shaped like teardrops, but each with a base at the bottom. She turned, revealing her generous bottom. And without further ado, she worked one of the enormous toys between her cheeks.
Grace was sure she must be in pain, as she panted and worked the toy in and out—of her rump.
Grace was so astonished, so embarrassed…so aroused, her head was swimming. Her skin felt too tight for her body and almost unbearably sensitive. Left unfulfilled because she’d stopped Devlin’s licking, she was now in erotic agony.