Chapter Sixteen

The Honorable Miss Payton Dixon did not fancy herself a theologian. In fact, there had been times when she’d been in serious doubt of God’s existence.

Now, however, was not one of those times. Because God—that same God who’d taken Payton’s mother from her at birth, and then cursed her further by letting her grow up to have hardly any bosom to speak of—had answered her prayers:

She was in Connor Drake’s arms, and Connor Drake was kissing her.

She wasn’t quite sure how it happened. One minute his hands had been gripping her shoulders, and he’d been shaking her—shaking her hard, too—and the next, he was kissing her, as passionately and as emphatically as, a few seconds before, he’d been shouting at her.

Payton couldn’t help thinking, even as she kissed him back, that this moment, this very moment, made it all worthwhile … all of it, everything she’d had to suffer since she’d boarded this miserable vessel. His whiskers, which had turned into a full-blown mustache and beard in the weeks he’d been incarcerated, rasped the sensitive skin around her mouth, and when, a second later, he dragged his lips from her mouth, to press them against her neck, his hot breath burned her throat, making her shudder pleasurably, and her nipples go hard beneath the soft linen of her shirt, and the heavier material of her borrowed vest.

That sensation alone, of his lips on her neck, convinced her: it had all been worth it—the pots she’d been forced to scrub; the buckets of water she’d had to haul back and forth from the after house; the fact that she hadn’t been able to take a proper bath in a month; the fact that she had to wait until midnight every night before she could find a quiet corner in which to conduct her personal business, if she wanted to lower her trousers without fear of getting caught not having that particular appendage which the rest of the crew waved so proudly over the back of the ship whenever the urge took them.

It was all worth it. Even the reception she had received when she’d first entered the prisoner’s cell—even that was forgiven, now. Oh, it had been sweet enough, at first … until he’d started shaking her. That hadn’t been at all the kind of welcome she’d been expecting. She hadn’t exactly thought Drake would be overjoyed to see her, true—he’d surely have been happier, she supposed, to see his precious Miss Whitby—but then, she hadn’t expected him to be so angry, either. What ailed the man? Here she was, risking life and limb for him, and he hadn’t seemed the least bit grateful.

When she’d first seen the murderous rage in Drake’s eyes, Payton almost turned around and ran. Except she’d gone to so much trouble—pouring that gunpowder into the dunderfunk mix, timing its explosion just so that she could have a little while alone with him—she couldn’t bring herself to go.

Weathering his initial wrath seemed worth it now. His lips on hers made it all worthwhile; the hunger in his kiss, the desperation—like that kiss he’d given her the night before his wedding—was such that she knew, then and there, she’d done the right thing. This man needed her. She was vital to him, she realized. It was right there, in the greedy way he was kissing her, the urgency with which his tongue was prying her lips apart. She’d been a fool not to see it before.

Or maybe she had, and that was why, in spite of everything, she’d never let him push her completely away, no matter how hard he’d tried. She was as vital to him as food and air. He didn’t want to admit that—that was obvious. But it was also obvious in the way he was kissing her that he couldn’t do without her.

The realization filled her with giddy joy, and she clung to him. He tasted exactly the way he smelled, of fresh clean ocean, salty, bracing. It felt wonderful, more wonderful than she ever would have dreamed, to be in his arms again. The man had been weeks in an airless cell, and yet he still smelled the same, of salt air and clean, healthy male. It was an odor as familiar to her as home. It was Drake. There was no sweeter fragrance in the world than him.

Her fingers fisted in his hair, that baby-fine blond hair that felt so wrong on such a large, hard man. Payton could feel that hardness swelling against her, as certainly as she could feel the softness of his hair, the bristles of his beard scraping against her face. She knew what it was this time, that thick stiffness prodding against the front of her trousers, and this time, she sure as hell wasn’t going to touch it; not after what happened last time.

But it sort of seemed to her as if this time he wanted her to. Because as he’d been kissing her, Drake had been slowly backing up—taking her with him—until he came up against the wall to which he was chained. Then, slowly, he slid down that wall, still taking her with him, until he was seated on the floor of his cell …

And she was seated in his lap.

Only she wasn’t even sitting, really. Straddling his lap was more like it, facing toward him, her trousered legs on either side of his, a position of which Georgiana would most heartily disapprove, but which Payton couldn’t help feeling was absolutely right. She tended to think Drake agreed—especially when he breathed her name against her hair. Payton heard it, but more than that, she felt it, the deep reverberation of his voice in his chest. He was straining her so tightly to him that it seemed as if when he spoke, the sound went straight through her. His voice, saying her name, made something happen to her spine, loosened it, changed it from rigid bone to a substance more akin to butter. She brought her face away from where she’d buried it against his neck, and looked up at him, wondering how he’d done it, this magic with his voice.

But he soon gave her other things to wonder about. His hands, which had been wrapped around her, moved to grip her shoulders. Then one went to her arm, and the other to her waist. Then she realized the one at her waist had actually dipped down beneath her vest, and then disappeared inside it. She could feel the heat of his hand against her ribs, his fingers separated from her bare flesh by only the thin linen of her borrowed shirt.

And something else was happening. At first she’d thought it an accident, when that hard shaft, pressing so deliberately against the soft twill of his breeches, had suddenly brushed against the seams that kept her trouser legs together. She knew he didn’t like to be touched there, and so she’d tried to move away, but the hand on her arm pressed her back down—quite firmly, in fact. So firmly that the swollen head of that shaft stabbed her in the most intimate of places. Intimate and, to Payton, quite unexpected. She let out a little bark of surprise and broke the kiss, rearing back to get a look at this man who was assaulting her so suddenly, and on so many fronts.

“What—” she started to inquire, through lips reddened from his kiss, but then her voice caught in her throat as Drake, his gaze very much below her neck, and unabashedly so, soundlessly and deliberately untied the string that held her shirt collar closed at the throat. Payton, confused, followed his gaze, but saw only her chest, the skin of which Georgiana had declared disgracefully tanned. What interest Drake could have in the skin of her chest, Payton hadn’t the slightest idea … until the hand that had untied her shirtfront dipped inside it to cup one of her small, tip-tilted breasts.

She sucked in her breath. Never had she felt heat like that, not there. As his fingers tightened, his palm grazed the tender bud of her nipple, which had gone rigid—both of them—the minute he’d first started kissing her. It was torture—exquisite torture—feeling that skin so close, yet not quite touching that part of her that was stretching, yearning for his touch …

And then she realized why he’d reacted the way he had that night in the garden, when she’d reached for the front of his breeches. He hadn’t been angry with her. He’d wanted her to touch him there, the same way she was yearning for him to flatten his hand against her breast. He’d probably just been surprised she was so forward.

Well, then he didn’t really know her, did he?

Tightening her arms around his neck, she pulled his head down so that she could kiss him again—and artfully thrust the whole of her breast against his hand as she did so. She shuddered pleasantly as his fingers caressed the soft flesh, kneading, exploring it. She might not have had enough bosom to adequately fill the fashionably low-cut bodices of the day, but it was clear that to this man, anyway, what she did have was more than sufficient.

And then it happened again, that prodding of her privates. This time, she wasn’t surprised—nor did she try to move away. Just the opposite, in fact. She pressed her pelvis down against that thick hardness, and felt a pleasurable tightening where her legs joined together. Just to make sure she hadn’t been imagining things, she pressed again, and got the same reaction—a sweet little throb. Well, not really a throb. More like a tug.

Only this time, in addition to the tug, she also elicited a reaction from Drake—a sort of groan, deep in the back of his throat. She pulled away from him at once, worried she’d hurt him. Maybe, as firm as it felt beneath her, that iron rod wasn’t meant to be bounced on quite so energetically—

But again, Drake pushed her right back down on top of him. This time when he did so, he was looking her straight in the eye. For once, Payton was able to meet his gaze without feeling that those blue eyes of his were filled with ice. In fact, he even wore a slight, crooked grin on his face. Well, if he’s grinning, Payton thought, he can’t be in too much pain.

Far from it, apparently. Because a second later, he’d unbuttoned her vest and completely parted her shirtfront, then lowered his head to stare at her bare chest. Payton, looking down, couldn’t see what was holding his interest so closely. All she saw were her breasts, which were so small and firm that they hardly ever moved on their own, not bouncing much even when she was running. Her nipples, too, she thought on the puny side, the areoles very narrow as well as a rather alarming shade of pink. Naked to the brisk sea air, they were both erect, pointing rather saucily toward the ceiling. Payton felt she ought to apologize for both their lack of size and appalling color. She had in fact opened her lips to do so when Drake did something perfectly extraordinary, and surely not at all proper: he lifted a hand, the chain descending from it clanking against the floor, until his fingers cupped her right breast, and then, bending his head, seized the hardened nipple in his mouth.

For Payton, the resulting rush of sensations was overwhelming. The heat from his mouth—the hot brush of his tongue—singed her, causing her back to arch, and a flood of moisture to dampen the gusset of her drawers. What was happening to her? The tug she’d felt between her legs had turned into a pull, and suddenly, she was pressing herself against his erection not because it felt pleasurable, but because it seemed necessary to her very sanity. He was a solid rock to which she could cling in what had become a maelstrom of desire …

Her breath caught as his month-old growth of beard razed against the tender skin of her chest as he slid his mouth from one nipple to the other. Both his hands had risen now to imprison her breasts. She clung to his shoulders, feeling him move beneath her, feeling herself begin to move with him, along the length of his enormous erection and back up again, pressing as close as she could without actually taking him inside of her.

And then one of his hands left her breasts, and moved down, to fumble with the buckle of her belt. Payton hardly noticed. Her breath was coming in short, sharp gasps. She held twin fistfuls of his shirt, still moving against him, oblivious to everything except the pull between her legs, which seemed to have taken over her entire body, and had turned into an ache, an ache only he could fill. She was using him, she knew, using him for her own selfish pleasure, and she felt guilty about that, especially because in some distant part of her mind she seemed to remember that at one time he hadn’t wanted her to touch him there …

Well, she wasn’t touching him there. Not with her hands, anyway.

And then she was exploding, like one of her brothers’ cannons. It was as if someone had lit a fuse beneath her and she had been shot up toward the night sky, where she was racing faster and faster toward the stars, until suddenly, she’d collided, in a shower of sparks and twinkling lights, into one of those stars. Her back arched, her fingernails dug into Drake’s shoulders, her thighs tightening around him like a vise. She was dimly aware that Drake’s hands had left her breasts, and were now holding onto her hips as she writhed against him.

And then she let out a cry, and collapsed against his bare chest.