Chapter Ten

That night, the captain put out the news among the crew that Chou-Chou had died by choking. He brought in Drake. While Adriana sat in her alcove and sewed her lemur into his funeral cloth, she listened as the captain told the lieutenant the poisonous truth while her heart grew heavy as a stone.

The next day, after they stood on the deck and tipped Chou-Chou into the sea, the captain simply ordered everyone back to work.

Life went on as if nothing had happened at all.

She retreated to the crow’s nest and went hot with anger and then cold with fear and then she started shaking for reasons she didn’t know. She kept waiting for the captain to identify the sailor who’d delivered his dinner, then drag him on the deck to flay him bloody. She wanted whoever had done this to be keelhauled—hung from the yardarms in the blazing midday sun and then towed for hours from the stern, even if it meant his death.

She stumbled a lot, as if she’d forgotten how to walk without Chou-Chou’s weight on her shoulder. From her place in the crow’s nest, she watched everything. The stores of salted meat were dangerously low and the ale was gone. The sea grew violent and unpredictable at this latitude, and the sailors were constantly on guard for waterspouts and swells. Men grumbled in clusters. They looked thin and dirty. The captain kept them busy, but she could see he was careful not to work them to the point of exhaustion. Every night a different sailor was given the duty of delivering his supper. The captain casually asked them to taste it first as if he’d done that all along.

All this stealth, all this secrecy, all this careful maneuvering was futile—as was fury, mutiny, even vengeance. Nothing would change the fact that she was alone.

She didn’t feel like herself anymore.

Maybe that’s why, a few days after Chou-Chou’s death, she found herself studying the charts on the captain’s desk as the midday light filled the room. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Direction, maybe. A port that looked promising for a new berth, after she was off this wretched ship, away from everything and everyone. As she scanned the map, she noticed that the ship had made a sudden, northern change in direction days ago. That explained why the weather had turned, for they were north of the Tropic of Cancer.

In the back of her mind she knew she should wonder about this change, but she couldn’t muster any interest.

Then the door swung open and the captain walked in. He stopped short at the sight of her, standing where she didn’t belong.

His gaze was piercing as he approached. “When was the last time you slept?”

She shrugged. She’d spent years sleeping with Chou-Chou’s warmth against her chest. Without him, she was cold, and restless, and hollow. In the middle of the night she would startle out of fitful bursts of sleep.

“I could get you laudanum from the surgeon,” he said.

“Laudanum is like liquor, it makes people stupid.”

He didn’t respond to that, but his attention intensified. “You’ve washed the dirt off your face.”

She frowned as she touched her cheek. She vaguely remembered doing that. She’d taken a wet cloth and ran it over her skin, over and over until the water in the bowl went muddy. It felt as if someone else had done that, not herself.

He came around the desk to her side. He radiated strength and something else, something that teased an old memory of better, kinder times.

He murmured, “You try so hard to be brave.”

She didn’t know who moved first. But all of a sudden her cheek lay against his shirt. The scent of him—salt and sea and wind and man—engulfed her. His arms curled around her back and she closed her eyes because he was warm and she was as cold as the deep blue sea. His heart beat hard beneath her ear.

“I’m sorry, Adriana.”

Some sensible part of her knew she was reaching for his comfort to plug the lemur-sized hole in her heart, but she couldn’t pull away.

I am just another problem on this mutinous ship, a needy woman forced into his life. Roarke is holding me because Chou-Chou lost his life in his place, and he feels some sort of obligation.

And yet even as these thoughts skittered through her mind, she felt a surge of other needs that came not from the hollow in her heart but from another hungry place, from some feminine part of her that until these last few days she’d been able to suppress.

She squeezed her eyes shut, denying it.

Still, she felt the movement of his fingers as he spread open his hands against her back. She felt the brush of his palm up her spine as he swept his hand up to touch the bare skin at the nape of her neck. He combed his fingers through her short hair while, beneath the linen binding, her breasts throbbed with sudden sensitivity.

This feeling was real.

This feeling was good.

He tugged her head back with great gentleness. Below thick and lowered brows, streaks of green radiated through his gray irises. It was strange to see such beauty in him. In battle and in storms, he looked fearsome, but now she only saw a riveting sort of intensity.

“So here she is,” he murmured, “the woman you try so hard to hide.”

She supposed a wiser woman would look away, but she didn’t even know how to be a woman. She’d been raised to take the world as it came, to understand what she wanted, and to bargain hard for what she needed. So when the captain lowered his head to her throat, she tilted her jaw to make it easy for him.

The moment his lips touched her skin, she learned a new lesson of womanhood. All these years she had assumed that girls only surrendered their bodies for the sake of money. But here she was, feeling a weakening in her knees, a tightening knot in her lower abdomen, and a dampness between her legs. It was a primitive and undeniable ache, this thick, rising passion.

Then he drew away.

“No," she said. "Don’t stop.”

His arms tightened. “You don’t know what you are asking for.”

“I know how I feel.”

He lifted his head from her throat. She caught a glimpse of his tight, intense expression before he captured her lips.

His kiss was a spark shooting straight to her loins. She bowed back against the pressure of his mouth. She tried to mimic the movement of his lips against hers, but she was clumsy and he was quick, moving across her face as if he wanted to kiss all of her, all the time, all at once.

He pulled away, breathing hard.

She seized his head and kissed him again.

Every muscle in her body began to quiver. She became aware of odd things. Her clothing being tugged and yanked and jerked. A hot hand flat on the bare skin of her back. The scrape of his fingernails as he pulled her bindings down her ribs. A dizziness as she broke from his kiss to breathe.

The roughness of his palm as he cupped her bare breast.

“Your heart,” he said against her face, “beats like a bird’s.”

“Don’t stop.”

Her feet left the floor. The room spun. The ceiling came into view just as the linen covers of the bed brushed against her back. He sat up to grasp the collar of his shirt and yank the linen over his head. She touched his flexing upper arm the way she’d wanted to, perhaps from the first time she’d seen him naked. She’d thought he’d feel cold and hard, like marble, but his skin was taut and pliable in the way it moved over the muscles beneath. He tossed his shirt away and then leaned over her. The world went dark for agonizing seconds as he tugged her shirt off her body and with it, the bindings that had covered her breasts.

“The sailors must be blind.” He ran a rough hand from her breasts just beneath the gape of her breeches, to the valley by her hipbone. “I must have been blind.”

He lowered his head and sucked one nipple into his mouth.

Gasping, she lost her fingers in his silky hair. Sensation rushed through her. He abandoned one breast to taste the other, rolling the abandoned nipple between expert fingers. She tried to understand the rush of feelings, not just from the tugging of his lips, but from how his touch made her feel in places he had not yet touched. A pressure and urgency tightened in the cleft between her legs.

He paused to span her waist with one hand. “You’re too small.”

“You won’t hurt me.”

She heard her words in a voice she didn’t recognize as her own. A woman’s voice, she supposed, dry and dusty from lack of use.

He hesitated, hovering above her. She tried to read his face, that beautiful face, the scar just above his eye, the sharp angle of his cheekbones, the thick, dark hair, and the way his lips parted so he could breathe better. He was thinking. She could see galloping indecision in the ripples of his brow. She didn’t want him to think. She wanted him to kiss her again, press down upon her, touch her in ways that no man ever had.

She knew the moment he came to a decision because he plunged has hand lower beneath the waistband of her breeches. His fingers combed the tuft of hair that covered her mound before slipping between her legs to cup her sex.

She might have made a sound. She didn’t know. It was becoming difficult to think. Her knees dropped apart and she felt her sex peel open against the heat of his palm. She tilted her hips up, she wasn’t sure why. He accommodated her wordless demand and slid fingers into her sex.

She gasped.

He withdrew and slipped into her again.

Her inner muscles clenched.

He slipped his fingers deeper, and this time he used his thumb to roll around a place that ached.

Oh.

She stopped counting the strokes, stopped thinking of anything but his wet, quickening touch that made her ache even more but in a wonderful, intensifying way that had her writhing beneath him. When he lowered his head to suck her nipple into his hot mouth again, all her senses exploded.

Lights behind her eyelids. Music in her ears. Strange images flickered through her mind, of running in frilly dresses and the feel of long curls swishing against her back and the thrill of being swept up and twirled in the air. She struggled with a rising wave of emotion for the man coaxing out of her this woman’s gift she hadn’t even known she owned until this blinding, incandescent moment.

During the delirious throbbing that continued he still touched her. Her senses began to re-assemble and she realized that her back was arched off the bed, and her head was thrown into the pillow, and her mouth gaped open as if she couldn’t breathe deeply enough.

She blinked once, twice, and looked at him through eyes whose lids had become almost too heavy to keep open. His face was full of astonishment, as if he were gazing upon something new in the world.

Beautiful, she thought. This is what it was like for a woman to feel beautiful.

He gently withdrew his fingers. She reached for him, running a hand over the craggy muscles of his shoulders and arms. She felt languid, heavy in the loins, but she knew what happened during a proper coupling.

She wanted more than just his fingers inside her.

He must have read the look on her face, for his gaze flared and he rolled onto his back to tug at the opening of his breeches. A fresh new tingling spread through her body, as if, now awakened, the woman in her understood perfectly what better pleasures could be had.

With shaking hands she pulled down her own breeches and tossed them off the bed.

Then she heard a sound. A creaking sound, a familiar sound.

The captain bolted up to a sitting position.

In alarm, she followed his gaze.

In the open doorway stood Gwynn Sayer.