Morgan moved through the gaping crowd like visiting royalty, companioned by two men. The younger of the two was near to seventeen, an age that normally might have led him to be described as a “youth,” and yet there was nothing of youth in his coldly Scandinavian face, with hard, milk-blue eyes and lips that looked as though they had never known a smile. His hair was dead straight, almost white from the burn of salt and sun, and so long that it touched his hips; it was pulled across his right shoulder to lie in an ivory fall over one side of his chest. His exposed ear was pierced and held a loop of black thread. As he moved into the room Merry saw pale stripes on the chestnut-tanned skin of his naked back that she shudderingly realized had been inflicted with a whip.
The exotic boy ranged tigerlike between the tables, oblivious to the tension around him—the indrawn breaths, the nearly exploding lungs. Finally he stopped; everyone breathed again except the unlucky patrons whose table he chose, who scurried away like lizards from fire. He gazed disgustedly at the mass of bottles, empty and full, at the table, and the unplayed hands of piquet and scattered coins which were strewn by each chair. Reaching out, he tipped the table, sending its contents clattering to the floor, followed by a single card, the jack of hearts, which flipped in the air twice and landed gently like a leaf on the floor.
The violent little scenario caused the third man to laugh and murmur some remark which caused the spirit of a smile to pass over Morgan’s lips, so faint as to be only felt rather than seen; and the pirate’s features held fleetingly the telltale softening of affection.
Bound by the pounding urge of fascination to see the man that Rand Morgan could care for, Merry’s gaze left the long-haired boy and the pirate captain to center on their companion.
He was half-turned from her, his face toward Morgan, so her first impression was of a man of perhaps a little more than medium height, each inch of him hard, flowing muscles knit arousingly into a well-carried, sensuously slender frame.
A dark jacket of supple leather hung from his wide, relaxed shoulders; below were snug, faded denims and wine-colored boots cut high to the knee, which looked expensive, despite their scarred toes. It was hardly Merry’s habit to study the male anatomy, and certainly not to admire it, and yet there was something in the shapely play of line and curve and sweetly made muscle that captured the eye, however modest.
With a graceful movement he bent to upend a chair, and his hair, as bright and glowing as a harvest moon, swung in a lively arc. He dropped into the chair facing Merry; all at once she could see his face.
The stranger had one of those rare, wonderful faces that truly deserve to be called arresting. It was so much more than handsome; this man was beautiful, in a way uniquely masculine, as arrogant and tender as a Renaissance archangel sitting in liquid, unattainable splendor, the half deity made mortal, with eyes that held light like faceted gemstones. It was an urbane face, stamped with humor and humanity, in marked contrast with the delicately erotic mouth, and as she stared at him Merry felt the hot embers of that same confusing blend of yearning and fear that had brushed into her soul when she had dreamed of the unicorn.
But this man was a pirate, a member of one of the most vicious and carnal orders of men that had ever plundered the earth’s good few. Lucifer, it seemed, was too smart to appear always with his horns and tail.
Chapter 3
Devon Charles Crandall sat back in his chair, raising the heel of his boot to rest it lightly against the trestle table before him. He picked up his sand-scoured glass and with a gentle movement of his wrist sent the pale wine into a slow whirl. After watching it a moment he raised his gaze to where his half brother sat, the great emerald winking evilly on his chest.
“Do you know,” said Devon, turning an interested gaze back to the wine, “I think it’s beginning to separate.”
“The scum coming to the top,” said the pale-haired boy next to the pirate captain. “I told you. American wine tastes like it was fresh from a pig’s…”
A raucous burst of laughter from the next table covered the end of his sentence. Rand Morgan reached out to pluck the wineglass from the younger man’s fingers and casually tossed the contents onto the tavern’s dirt floor. Refilling the glass from his own bottle, he handed it back and said, “Try the rum instead.”
“Oh? Is it better?”
“It’s worse.” The pirate captain smiled. “But it’s quicker.”
Devon returned the grin and lifted the glass. “To my speedy intoxification.”
The rumwasworse, as it happened. Devon mentally tipped the hat he wasn’t wearing to his misspent youth, which had forged his iron palate.
The unease of the crowd had altered little since their arrival, save perhaps that the stares had become both more frequent and surreptitious. Devon was used to being staredat. His position in life had made it inevitable, and even in those remote places where he was unknown, his looks had made him far from inconspicuous. What he saw here was different. Here they were afraid. What a heady, corrupting power it was, to have men fear you, and his half brother had been years on this coast, flashing his emerald and nourishing his reputation for stone-hearted savagery. Morgan had come here to terrify, and before the night was over, he surely would. However different Devon’s purpose, their interests were hardly incompatible. He looked back into Morgan’s sleepy gaze.
“How do you like the natives?” asked the pirate captain, sending a slow survey around the room that made the other tavern patrons look as though they would have liked to crawl under their chairs.
Devon shrugged. “I’ve seen them before. In Cadiz, in Le Havre. The mongrel waterfront.”
The boy looked up from his ale and said in the purring, even voice that was the closest he came to good humor, “We can’t all of us be blue bloods. Listen, Dev, have you got the horn colic, or what?”
It was, all in all, the kind of remark one might expect from a boy who had lived his first twelve years in a Caribbean brothel. Devon took a pull of rum and smiled. “No more than usual, I don’t think. Why? What am I doing?”
“You’ve looked four or five times at the copper-headed wench by the puppet box.”
Amused, he said, “Four or five? Is that so many?”
“It is for you. Especially considering the size of her belly.”
“Poor Cat,” Morgan murmured. “Look at her again. She’s a beauty.”
The boy leaned his head back and shook his hair vigorously from his shoulders. “She is if you say she is. They all look alike to me.”
As Devon watched, the girl looked at him, met his gaze, and turned quickly, fearfully away, as though in shame. She was drinking nothing, and her clasped hands lay on the table before her, the fingers fervently knit. He was too far away to see whether they trembled. He supposed she had heard by now of Morgan’s identity and was wondering what it might mean to her. There was tension in the slightly averted profile, with its Venus-on-a-seashell oval frame, and soft rose-petal lips.
“If you want her, she’s yours,” said Morgan in a quiet, bored voice.
