Chapter Thirteen

After Drake left, Adriana walked across the cabin and shot the bolt. Then she turned to the man determined to abandon her on a savage shore.

Roarke stood very still behind the desk, his gray-green gaze as bright as the sun hitting the water through the window behind him. Her heart did a strange looping drop. Something akin to fear made her limbs go numb, but she started toward him anyway.

He said, as she approached, “I will not change my mind, Adriana.”

“I know.”

He seized her jaw to stop her in place. “You’ll hate me for this.”

“I may hate you for marooning me,” she said, raising her face despite his resistance, “but I won’t hate you for this.”

She met his lips with her own. She knew what she was doing this time, so she anticipated the parting of his lips, and the way his tongue brushed against hers. She ran her hands up his shoulders and stroked his chest, feeling his own nipples beneath the linen. He thrust his fingers through her hair and held her so tightly that she began to worry that he would do nothing more but kiss.

Then a sound came from his throat—low and long and rumbling—and she understood that he would not stop now.

He lifted her off the ground. She wished his hands were not dug into her sides, full of the linen of her shirt or the wool of her breeches, but rather full with her breasts or the curve of her backside. Her skin prickled in anticipation of his touch. Already her mind skipped ahead to nakedness though she was still fully dressed and the bed was just a shape on the edge of her sight growing larger as he hauled her toward it.

She jarred as her feet hit the floor. They separated for a dizzy breath. She stared up at him, that tight jaw, that muscle moving in his cheek, the sun-kissed skin with the flare of white crinkles on the edge of his eyes, that strange crescent-shaped scar, memorizing already the moment that she would dream about in the days, months, maybe even the years to come.

The tails of his shirt brushed her face as he yanked it off his chest.

She seized her own shirt.

Off.

She threw it aside and tugged at the bindings around her breasts. Roarke dipped to yank off his boots. She struggled with the bindings as he straightened to undo his breeches.

Off.

Everything—shirt, bindings, breeches, small clothes, modesty, hesitancy, fear—all tossed in abandon. With a racing heart she saw Roarke’s body unveiled—the wide, muscled shoulders, the strange undulating ripples of his abdomen, the ridges on either side of his hips that her fingers itched to trace, ridges that tapered down to his sex—now hard and straining up.

A sensation like a shock shot through her body as he brushed a finger across the tip of her nipple. She’d always been grateful that her breasts were small, for it made it easier for her to pretend to be a boy, but when Roarke cupped one of her breasts in his hand she suddenly felt as if she had the bosom of a farmer’s wife, spilling out full, swollen, and heavy.

Her curiosity overtook her. She wrapped her fingers around his sex and was rewarded with the feel of a jolt going through his body. He felt silky-smooth, like the well-polished railings of the quarterdeck, but warm and ridged and pulsing with life.

Her inner muscles throbbed with an unsatisfied ache.

He pressed his forehead against hers, and she knew behind that hard skull doubts were growing.

“Don’t,” she whispered.

“Adriana—”

“You’re the Sea Wolf, a brutal pirate without honor, remember?”

“But you spoke my name.” His mouth pressed against her hair. “You know my name.”

His sex slipped out of her grip as he hauled her onto the bed. She bounced on the mattress only to come up against his solid chest. He braced himself on one elbow as his other hand roamed over her—a swift pass across her breast, her waist, the curve of her hip, down over her thigh only to rise up inside it. His fingers scraped against the tender skin of her inner thighs as they traveled closer to where she wanted them to be. He found her cleft and stretched his fingers deep.

She grasped his muscled arm to brace herself for the sensations flooding through her. His tongue found the hollow of her throat and he mimicked there what his fingers were doing between her legs until both places were slick with moisture.

Though she loved this feeling, it wasn’t enough.

She reached down and removed his hand. She nudged one knee against his legs as invitation. Groaning, he rolled atop her, then used his thighs to push her legs open even wider, so that her cleft was exposed to his perusal.

How wonderfully arousing it was, to look between them and see their naked bodies, so clearly made for this joining.

“Look at me.”

He was breathing heavily above her, bracing himself on his elbows.

“It will hurt for a moment, chérie.”

No, she thought.

It will hurt forever.

It would hurt whenever she smelled the scent of pine wood or pitch, whenever she saw sails billowing in a harbor, whenever she smelled the sea wind on linen, or heard the rush of waves against a hull. If she lived through the next months, she would treasure this singular moment though she might resent him, for the rest of her life, for what he planned to do.

Then all thought flew out of her mind as the head of his sex probed where his fingers had once been. He moved with great tenderness, and her heart swelled with painful pressure at his kindness. She watched his jaw tighten as he eased himself a fraction deeper. The air in the room grew thin. An ache had grown to agonizing proportions in the core of her body. She felt full, but not full enough, so she surged her hips up, a silent assent for more.

With one smooth, insistent stroke, he slipped inside her, pausing briefly against a resistance that she felt as a stretching, increasingly sharp pain that ended almost as quickly as it started, leaving behind a twinging sensation overwhelmed by the fullness of his sex lodged deep inside her body.

He went still and watched her face. She trembled though not from cold or fear or anything bad. The sensations rushing through her were just too many to parse. She had not expected such a perfect fit of their bodies. Not just his sex throbbing within her loins, but the way his hips fit between her thighs, his abdomen against her own, his chest just brushing her nipples which seemed to rise to meet his skin.

The way his hand cupped her face. The way his gaze held her own.

Skin to skin. Heart to heart.

A slow smile stretched across his face, and she felt a smile blossom on hers to mirror his own. How kind he looked when he smiled. She saw the boy still within him, the laughing, excited older brother setting off for adventures, coaxing his younger brother into the fun. She saw the commanding man he’d grown into, the confidence and the quiet assurance and the steady sense of right that had led him to command.

And she saw the hurt, too, rippling under all that. A pain that came from a sense of failure. He couldn’t prevent that failure with his brother, just as he felt he couldn’t stop what he was about to do to her. She traced the line of his jaw and wished she could wipe all that pain away—and sensed that maybe, in this wrapped embrace, she could.

Coupling was not always like this. She may be just new into womanhood, but she’d witnessed many a sailor having his way with many a woman in many a strange way. She’d never once conceived that giving herself bodily to a man would make her feel so completely whole. Yet she knew that there was still more to this coupling. That ache that she’d thought was only for the feel of his hardness inside her was growing.

She wanted all of him.

The sunlight had turned golden through the stern windows. They still had time. She wanted to live in this ringing joy for as long as fate allowed them.

Then he moved inside her.

She grasped his sides to brace herself.

He lowered his head to suck her upper lip into his mouth, and then he moved again.

Oh.

He took her lower lip this time, and moved again.

Beneath her gripped hands his muscles rippled. His stroking took on a slow but increasing rhythm. She tilted her hips to try to match his movements. Everything inside her grew taut and tense—too taut, too tense—she wasn’t sure she could bear it. Her breathing started to match his thrusts as her senses went dizzy.

She gave herself over to an urge that was pure and fierce and undeniable and a hundred thousand times stronger than she’d ever imagined. It tangled up with all the other things she craved—warmth and compassion and love, yes, even love, she could admit that now—for it was one of the wonders she’d been denied when she dedicated herself to living a life that wasn’t honest and wasn’t true.

She knew he wanted her, too—even if it were only for her body. He spoke by the way he gripped her hair, by the tenderness of his movements, by the way his breath came harsh through his throat, and the way he dug his hand in the flesh of her hip to still her though she sensed he hadn’t yet thrust as deep as he wanted.

His voice came, hoarse and full of desire.

“Come with me, Adriana.”

She wasn’t sure what he meant, but she knew she would follow this man to the very ends of the earth.

“Come with me,” he whispered, “as you did before.”

And then she understood.

So she threw her head back against the covers and followed the captain’s orders.