“How may we serve you, lord?” they chorused.
He viewed them through cruelly narrowed eyes. “Let us begin with the same exercise you performed earlier on your merchant client,” he said. “We will progress slowly and inventively from there.”
And across the city, Skye lay awake hugging her happy secret to herself. There was no doubt now. She was with child, and oh! howhappy Khalid would be when she told him! They had entertained earlier, and then he had gone off on his customary nighttime rounds of his houses. When he came back she would surprise him with the news. Smiling, she imagined the look on his face. She folded her hands protectively across her belly. It was much too early to feel any life, but she tried to imagine what the son of Khalid el Bey would look like.
Hearing his step, she rose and ran to greet him. His strong arms wrapped about her, and he kissed her very thoroughly. His mouth inflamed her, and when his hands slipped beneath her gauze gown to caress her trembling body she almost forgot what she had waited to tell him.
“Khalid! Stop! I have news.”
“Yes, my love,” he murmured, pulling her robe open to nuzzle at her pretty breasts. His mouth closed over a pointed nipple; he sucked hard on it, and she almost fainted. It was no use. She wanted him as much as he wanted her. Her news would wait. She swayed against him and he picked her up and carried her to the bed. Somewhere along the way their garments were shed.
He put her down on the middle of the mattress, positioning her body carefully. Then he straddled her just as deliberately, his hairy, well-muscled legs lying outside her smooth ones. Sitting back on his haunches, his heels against his tight buttocks, he reached out his hands to play with her. One moved forward to pinch gently at her sensitive little nipples, the other moved behind him to tickle the soft throbbing flesh of her sweet cleft.
Skye’s eyes narrowed like a cat’s and she murmured her pleasure. “So, my lord husband, you would tease me. Two can play at the same game.” And she cupped the sac of his manhood in her right hand, rolling his balls with a provocative rhythm while her left hand stroked his rod with equal expertise. She elicited a groan of delight from him.
For several minutes they continued to caress each other until both had reached a peak of excitement that offered only one satisfaction. Skye enjoyed pleasuring Khalid as much as he enjoyed pleasuring her. As always, she felt a thrill of excitement as she watched him grow big and hard for her.
The bey watched his wife’s growing passion with delight. She was so beautifully natural, so unlike all the skilled whores he owned. To have such a wife was a blessing for which he was deeply grateful. He swung off her body now and said, “Let me play thegreat desert stallion tonight, my Skye. Roll over, and be my little wild mare.”
She knelt, her head resting on her arms, her white bottom facing him, ready. Kneeling, he gently inserted himself into her. Then one hand moved to squeeze and fondle her hanging breasts while, with the other, he did something he’d never done with her before. As she approached her climax, he pushed a finger into her anal orifice and sent her into such a frenzied climax that for one brief and terrifying moment he thought he’d done her some awful damage. Then, realizing that she had only fainted, he took his own release. It was a greater climax than usual because of his relief.
Afterward she lay relaxed in his arms and sighed with pleasure. “I was worrying,” she said, “that our lovemaking would not be as much fun now, but I see that it can continue to be just as delicious.”
“Why should anything be different, my love?”
“Because, my lord and husband, you are to be a father next spring. Is that not wonderful?”
The bedchamber was plunged into deep silence. Slowly then, awareness began to grow, and his face took on a brilliant glow. He caught her to him.
“You’re sure?” he cried, tearfully, hugging her to him fiercely.
“Yes! Yes!” she gasped, laughing and crying at the same time.
“Oh my Skye! No one has ever given me a greater gift than you have given me in yourself. And now you will give me a child, too. It is too much, my love. Far too much. Thank you, thank you!” And he wept, still holding tightly to her.
Skye cradled Khalid to her breasts crooning to him. This wonderful man who had rescued her from God only knew what horrors, who loved her, had made her his wife and given her a wonderful life was thankingher!She wept with him and her heart swelled with joy.
“I love you! Khalid! Whoever I might have been I cannot remember, but I rejoice in the woman I am now for I am your woman. It is I who should thank you.”
Silence again descended upon the room as the two lovers joined once more, tenderly, and Khalid bent to kiss Skye’s faintly rounded belly. Then they slept, entwined together on the bed, until long after dawn.
It was Skye who rose first to greet the new day. Looking down upon the sleeping Khalid, she let the great love she felt for him sweep over her, leaving her teary. She noted every inch of him. Thelight sprinkling of silver gray that had begun to touch his dark, wavy hair. The faint scar on his left shoulder left by a wild Bedouin girl’s dagger. The almost boyish look he had when he was asleep. Her blue-green eyes traveled the length of him. Then, shivering, she began to feel as if she were committing his face and body to memory. Shrugging the feeling away, she went to her bath.
Skye would always remember that the day progressed with an easy familiarity that offered no hint of the things to come. She worked with Master Jean on the books of the trading vessels, amazed that Captain Small had done so well. He was due again in Algiers any day now. They had recently received word of his arrival in London, where he had disposed of the last of the Spanish gold. She was looking forward to seeing Captain Small again, knowing how delighted he would be at her happy news.
After the midafternoon prayers, Jean’s Marie brought them a light repast and the news that the bey had gone on his daily inspection rounds early as he wished to spend the entire evening with his wife. Skye blushed happily, then said, “My good Jean, you and your Marie have been true friends to my lord Khalid and me. I shall therefore share with you a secret known only to my husband. I am to have a child in the spring.”
Marie cried, “Oh, madam! So am I! Is it not wonderful!?”
Delighted, the two women sat together and chatted happily while Jean chuckled with amusement. Following his ex-master’s lead, he had, soon after acquiring Marie, legally freed her and then married her. He had learned that she came from a seacoast village located in Southern Brittany near Poitou. It was only rarely that Barbary pirates attacked the region, but on one of those infrequent raids, the fourteen-year-old Marie, a postulant at a local convent, was carried off. The pirate captain had stripped her habit off himself, but when he saw how attractive and how young she was, he locked her in a small cabin with several straw pallets, a bucket, and a tiny barred porthole. Two other pretty young girls quickly joined her, one her own cousin, Celestine.
The three naked girls clung to each other, terrified, through a long night. On the deck above their little prison, the anguished screams, pleadings, and sobbings continued throughout the night as the village women who were unfortunate enough to be married and older, or virgin but not pretty enough, were repeatedly raped and sodomized. At least two girls committed suicide by leaping overboard. Several died of abuse including a ten-year-old girl whose mother was strangled when she tried to knife one of themen attacking her daughter. Finally, toward dawn, the weeping survivors were all herded into an open pen on deck where they stayed for the remainder of the voyage—burned by the sun during the day, cold and wet in the night, and easily accessible to any sailor seeking sport.
In their tiny cabin Marie and her two companions were little better off. The heat during the day made the room an unbearable oven and the damp night air chilled them to the bone. This, coupled with the stink of the one bucket they had for relieving themselves, left them weak and listless. The bucket was emptied every other day. Food was shoved through the grate in the door twice daily. They often had a steaming bowl of a surprisingly tasty concoction of peppercorn- and herb-flavored gravy with tomatoes, onions, eggplant, and a tough, stringy meat that Marie suspected was goat. They had no utensils, but ate with their fingers and the small piece of bread allotted each. A pitcher of water went with the meal, and they quickly learned to conserve it.
When their ship reached Algiers the girls crowded together by the tiny porthole watching as their female relatives and friends were taken off the ship. Then from the bowels of the ship, the village men were brought up, filthy, their newly grown beards matted and lice-ridden. They too were quickly driven off the ship. As the three wondered what was to become of them the cabin door opened and the captain entered carrying something over his arm. Carelessly he flung them each a garment.
“Put ’em on,” he commanded in rough-accented French, and when they obeyed he handed them each a heavy veil. “Pin it to your hoods and follow me,” he said. “Open your yaps once, and I’ll turn the lot of you over to my crew. They’d like that.”
