The longing makes her feel feverish, and she thinks if Jack were to touch her now, she’d shiver. She looks up at the twilight, pinpricked with stars, then turns back to the hull when Jack comes to stand behind her. “A pretty sight,” he says. “There aren’t stars like there are at sea.”
She doesn’t care about the stars; not now. “I should like to…” she says. Her throat is dry, her tongue sticks. She can’t say it. It’s their last night away from the world, away from its prying eyes and whispering tongues. It’s her last chance. She shouldn’t think it, let alone say it. She tries again: “Jack, I want…”
His fingers brush the skin of her neck, sweeping away the loose hairs escaping their pins, then his lips touch her skin, just above her fichu, so lightly she could almost have imagined it. Her breath catches. Softly, against her skin, he says, “This?”
“Yes.” A breath, not a word.
He runs his hands along the length of her arms, down to her hands, lifting her left one. His chest is flush against her back the way it was when they rode the horse together, and then his mouth is on the back of her hand, touching the soft space between the knuckles as he did the morning after the dinner party at Weatherston and he’s saying, “And this?”
“Yes.” She turns in his arms, and before she can think, she’s kissing his chest through the cloth of his shirt and then his shoulder, his neck, his jaw, saying, “And this, and this, and this,” until she reaches his mouth. But she pulls back before she can kiss this, too, because it’s madness to be doing this, only it’s not—it’s the one thing in her life that suddenly does not seem mad. And when he kisses her, it is the only thing that makes sense.
She thought she had come home when she swam in Frenchman’s Creek and again when theRapideset sail. Now she knows otherwise.
“We shouldn’t…” she murmurs against his lips. He smells of the sea—wind and salt—and he tastes of something warm and a little sweet, port, maybe, or honeyed butter.
“Why, Isabel?” He breaks their kiss just long enough to say the words. “Why shouldn’t we?”
She feels his touch everywhere, as if all her nerves are connected by an invisible thread, as if by touching one small spot with his lips or hands, he caresses all of her.
He loosens her fichu, letting it fall to the floor before making a trail of kisses on her cheek and along the line of her jaw until he’s back where he started, his lips brushing her neck.
“Because…” Her mind has turned sluggish. She casts about for reasons—there were several and they were good ones—but she cannot now find them. All she knows is that she is lifting his shirt, the way she never got to lift George’s, for he would remove it himself. There’s the line of dark hair, disappearing into the top of Jack’s trousers, and she wants to see where it goes, she wants to touch it, and there’s the red, welted new scar. Her hands move along his skin like butterflies, searching and finding. His skin tastes of salt, but then he steps back, making her gasp.
“Turn around,” he says, and when she does it, he lifts the shirt she’s been wearing and begins to undo the laces on her stays and he’s kissing her again. Every bit of skin he exposes, he kisses, and he’s saying, “I’ve wanted you since I first saw you.”
“You were bleeding,” she says, and he laughs softly. The shirt falls to the deck, followed by the stays. His fingers work the knot in the neckerchief with which she has tied the breeches. Soon she will be naked. Standing upright before him, she will be naked. Even with George, she was never fully unclothed except under the sheets, with the candle put out and their hands taking the role of their eyes, fumblingly seeing.
Jack says, “Even when I was bleeding, I wanted you,” and thismakes her laugh. But then he has freed the neckerchief and it drops to the deck, the breeches pooling around her ankles. She almost stumbles as she turns to face him, expecting—what? Shame? Embarrassment? It doesn’t come.What’s wrong with me,she thinks vaguely,that I can stand before a man so unashamedly naked?
She blushes, yes, but she blushes easily, always, and the look in his eyes makes her feel unlike she ever has before. Like a siren, calling from the rocks. Beautiful like a merman’s daughter. All the things he said to her, teasingly, she sees in his eyes are true. She believes him now when he said he wanted her even when he was wounded. She feels the same wild abandon she felt when she climbed to the upper deck on her first morning on the ship and saw the wide, sky-laden sea. But then he kisses her again and his hands find their way down the soft curve of her belly and they take all her thoughts with them, until she can only sigh.
When they tumble into it, the hammock swings so that despite the high sides, they nearly fall out again. There’s a bit of a shuffle and then Jack moves on top of her, the full length of him pressing her into the canvas, causing a low, heavy throbbing. She aches to be touched. His breath hot on her ear, he says, “We’ll have to take it slow or we’ll end up on the deck.”
And they do, each touch intent and agonizingly unhurried. Whenever she grows impatient for him, Jack slows her down, saying they have all night, he wants to savor this—savorher. She remembers things from before and finds her hands and mouth know other things instinctively. Jack, she discovers, knows her better than she herself. The cabin fades in the heat of his touch; the burning in her deepens until she pulls him to her with a groan. This makes him laugh softly against her mouth, and then he gives in. Time sweeps away from her; she’s in his arms a moment and always as the stars, previously glimpsed through the skylight, explode inside her.
—
Later, much later, the hammock is full of arms and legs, sweat and skin pressed together. She has her cheek against his chest, his arm rests in the nook of her waist. Tears are jostling in her throat, making it difficult to speak. Jack is tracing patterns in the sweat on her belly. “You’re very quiet,” he says.
“I didn’t know it could be like that,” she whispers. It pains her to think how little she and George really knew each other. Not just physically—the way she talks with Jack is different, too. The way Jack talks with her.
“But you enjoyed it?” he asks, which makes the tightness in her throat worse.
She nods against his chest. “If I cry, don’t think it’s because I’m unhappy.” She wants to warn him; she wants nothing to spoil this moment, not a misunderstanding about her threatening tears or anything else. “I’m not. I’m very happy. It’s only…”
He brushes the wetness from her cheeks. “I know. It’s your husband. You miss him.”
“Not enough,” she says. “Since I met you, I’ve not missed him as much as I should.”
Jack says, “He was a good husband, was he not?”
“He was. Very good.”
Kissing her hair, he says, “Then he would want you to be happy, I should think.”
“Yes. I think so.”
“And he wouldn’t want you to always be on your own,” Jack says, running his fingers along the slick skin of her arm.
