Devon’s fingers, searching within the soft filaments of her hair, were able to find and capture her chin, dragging her face to him until he could cover her lips in a moist kiss that sent flame ripping through her body. His soft motions grew longer, deeper, more lavishly beguiling, until she was damp and helpless, no longer struggling against the demands of his lower body, but needing to dissolve into him.
Her love-desire for him carried to the moment when he shifted his weight and began to smooth her skirt up. Shame grew in the void of his withdrawn kindness; the floral scented night air felt like lye on her exposed thighs. Covering her blood-suffused cheeks with trembling and suddenly rigid fingers, she whispered, “Devon, the candles… please, can you put them out first.…”
There was a shocking quiet in the room as he stoppedmoving. He seemed almost to have stopped breathing. With her hips pinned to the bed between his knees, he took her wrists in his hands and dragged them away from her face. One of his hands was large enough to hold both her wrists; with the other he began to stir back the dewed hair tangles that clung to her lips and eyelashes and cheeks.
“Open your eyes, Merry.”
Her sluggishly functioning brain was slow to obey him.
“Look at me!Now,angel. I can reconcile myself to the queasy certainty of having spent three months coaching a whore in the more trifling preliminaries of lovemaking, but I warn you, don’t continue these piteous displays of virtuous hand wringing.”
He dropped her hands, limp and half-bloodless from the violence of his grip, her palms creamy white as they nested in the ruby tones of her swirling curls. Slowly, beginning at the inner curve of her elbow, he trailed his finger along the buried blue path of her vein. Reaching her wrist, he curved his fingers around it and carried the small freckled hand to his mouth, pressing a lightly sensual kiss to each swelling surface of her palm, and then, spreading her thumb and forefinger, on the tender, unveiled flesh. As he loosed her hand he said, “Merry… What a foolish mistake for you. All I needed was your honesty.” His hands curved into her palms, separating and linking their fingers, pushing her hands deeply into the billowing mattress. “Transform for me, Windflower. Show me what you really are.” He lifted their mated hands, brushing her cheekbones with the side of his finger. Softly he said, “What’s this? I hope these aren’t tears, sapphire eyes?”
“No. I’ve given that up.” Her voice quivered like a guttering lamp. Then, rather limply, “Would it interrupt your agenda of torture if I were to blow my nose?”
“Not at all. I can adjust to anything.” He released her hands and tossed her a corner of the sheet. “Think of the bedclothes as one big hankie.” Hostile shell-gold eyes watched asshe snuffled dolefully into the bed linen. “You haven’t done much talking up to now,” he observed.
The urge was overwhelming to throw herself against his chest, to weep, to tell him everything, to beg him to believe her. But to do so in his present mood would be to invite a death sentence for Carl and Jason. Perhaps. Always perhaps. Only one thing was obvious. His clemency was less to be hoped for at this moment than at any time in the past.
“I’m sorry,” she said gruffly, sensing within herself the crumbling ruin of her unnatural passivity. Her voice was disappointingly the same as it was always; not the richly beatific voice of a martyr, but young and rather soggy and typically ineloquent. She couldn’t keep herself from chattering out, “But being ravished and called bad names doesn’t bring out my talkative side. All I have to say is that I’m innocent but since denials are only likely to incite you to greater violence, I hardly think it would behoove me to—”
“My, my,” he said in a satiny voice. “We did have something to say, didn’t we? So you didn’t draw those pictures, then?”
A pause. Then she said, “Oh, why don’t you toss me off a cliff and have done with it?”
“In this part of the world,” he said, “we only sacrifice virgins. Tell me about the drawings. Who paid you for them?”
A longer pause.
“There are men on theJokewho’d garrote you if they knew about this little indiscretion of yours, my pet. Tell me about the pictures.”
“There’s nothing to tell. I did them after I saw you in the tavern. Morgan was cutting off fingers. Cat said he wanted to slit my throat. And you—you—”
“Yes?”
“You unnerved me. You still unnerve me. I can’t tell you more than that. You wouldn’t listen if I did. No matter what I do, you’ll think it’s a defense: if I talk, if I don’t talk. If I cry,if I don’t cry. Whatever I say will be a lie to you.” Her voice had degenerated to a tear-choked whisper and then finally to damp gasps as she said, “I don’t think I deserve to be raped.”
He stared at her, all emotion concealed behind his wide-set, opaque eyes. Abruptly he released her. She watched him face toward the wall, his hands braced against the freshly painted plaster. He was standing quite still, with one knee slightly flexed, and there was a barely visible tension across his shoulders, as though there were some powerful thing inside him that he was trying to bring under control.
From that position he said, “I’ll never let you go back to him. Never.”
Tears of angry frustration dribbled into the front of her dress as she sat up. “I don’t want to go back to Michael Granville. So what,” she said desperately, “areyou going to do with me?”
He turned slowly toward her, his eyes as severely bright as fire embers. “Why, what else can I do, Merry flower? I’m going to take you to England as a prisoner of war.”
Chapter 23
Falmouth, Cornwall, September 1814
To Merry, standing beside Cat on a Falmouth jetty, England was a rain-drenched waterfront. Tall row houses shimmered in a haze upon a terraced hillside; whitewash and dunstone among the choppy shag of shrubs and grasses. From a victualer’s shop abutting the dock area came the smoky tang of frying sprat and the laughter of young apprentices as they teased each other over breakfast. Early as it was, the town was wide awake. Wet flagstones rang under the stout wheels of lumbering carrier’s wagons and the lighter carts that drew produce to the market gardeners, the butchers, the hotels. Undaunted by the drizzle, women were outside sweeping the slick sand from their doorsteps and taking a shovel to the offal that had gathered from yesterday’s traffic on the shining cobbles before their houses.
More than three hundred great ships bobbed like floating gulls in the vast bay, while sturdy punts streamed busily between them and the wharf on a hundred separate errands. An oyster-catcher caught Merry’s attention, a black-and-white dart in a silver heaven. She followed its flight until it passed over a mail packet making a slow departure under sticky sails, passing within hailing distance of where theBlack Jokerode at anchor.
From where Merry stood, theJokeappeared to be one more innocuous vessel, nodding under the stern gaze of Pendennis Castle. Passing in a skiff under theJoke’sbowsprit not half an hour ago, she had seen the bright flare of the colors of Great Britain flapping proudly over the ship, and the fresh painted name on the prow. TheEagle,it had said. There was no clue to the casual onlooker that this was a pirate ship turned privateer with a rich load of spoils lashed in her hold awaiting division with the crown, and a dark-eyed boy wearing chains in the fo’c’sle.
It had not been a particularly pleasant voyage. Raven had been incarcerated about a week ago, following an incident with Devon that no one would talk to her about beyond admitting that yes, it had been something to do with her, but she’d better keep her oar out of it anyway. Late that night she had heard Morgan’s quiet voice in the passageway outside her door.
“Yes, Tom, I’m aware of that, but this way at least he can’tget into trouble. Much as he’s made a nuisance of himself lately, I don’t want to whip the child a second time. I know Raven is frightened for the girl, but I doubt Devon’s temper could support another one of Raven’s fits of weeping.”
