The Pirate Prince (39 page)

“I am so unworthy of you,” he whispered, looking up into her eyes, distraught. “Before I ever met you, I planned to kill you, Allegra. I was going to shoot you, take your beautiful life—”

“That is long past,” she told him gently.

“Allegra—”

“Lazar.” She silenced him with a soft kiss, gazing into his stormy eyes. “You asked me to love you. You had to know I would. Make me one with you.”

As he searched her gaze almost helplessly, she caressed him lovingly, wringing a moan from him as he closed his eyes. He gripped her shoulders, head back against the rim of the tub, as she pleasured him, aware only of him, his wishes, his needs.

He opened his eyes and pulled her close by the back of the neck to kiss her, plunging deeply, wildly into her mouth as he reached under the water and began stroking her in turn.

When they were both quivering with desire, he lifted her in his arms in one smooth motion, and they left the tub. Kissing her all the while, he set her down on his berth. Her warm, damp body made the sheets cool and wet around her. She laced her fingers through his, then slowly she lay back, drawing him down atop her.

Endlessly he kissed her. Willingly she gave him her soul in every breath. With smooth, bridled power, Lazar slid her farther back onto the bed and covered her with his hard, muscled body. She held him, kissing and yielding completely. He spread her thighs wider with the softest possible caress, pausing to stroke her wetness.

Guiding himself against her, he entered her.

He moved as a man on holy ground, conquered by her surrender. With the grace of a goddess, she gave herself to him, flawed, fallen man, without promises of any kind in exchange, simply because he had needed her more than he could bear.

Lazar vowed to himself he would take it slowly, though his arms, his whole body, shook with his desire for her. He nuzzled her mouth very tenderly, feeling intensely protective toward her all in a surge, his brave kitten, whose need to give to him had overthrown her own need for safety, freely giving him her gift beyond price.

“So innocent,” he whispered, taking her slowly, inching deeper and deeper into the hot bliss of her mysterious passage until he came up against her maidenhead.

Her breath was wild at his ear, her lithe body trembling like his own.

“It will hurt,” he told her.

Her arms were tight around him. “Yes, I know. Oh, yes, Lazar.”

He shut his eyes and claimed her, rending her maiden shield with a shock that went down to the center of his being as Allegra cried out. He tried to pull away, but she embraced him tightly, fighting back her tears. He remained inside her, perfectly still, as her body gradually accepted him.

While he waited, he sought and found her sweet, soft hand, kissing her palm and delicate fingers until her pain became her pleasure, and she sought it.

After several moments, he closed his eyes in ecstasy to feel her hips rise, inviting his rhythm.

It was relief, reprieve, redemption.

She was covered in an Edenic dew beneath him, petting his sides and his waist, bringing every inch of his skin to life. He had not known what sex was until now, he thought, his mind dreamlike with it. He was unbearably alive, new-fashioned from the hand of God. He was Adam discovering paradise.

“I love you,” he whispered, still amazed to form the words on his tongue.

When her gold-tipped lashes swept open, she gazed up at him with a stare of mixed passion and alarm. He traced the curve of her face, smiling softly.

“Don’t be afraid. Just let it happen.”

He smiled vaguely at her again when she nodded, thinking he could drown in her eyes so full of trust in him.

“Lazar?” she whispered.

“Yes,
chérie
?”

Her eyes misted. “It hurts, but it is so beautiful.”

“Sweetheart.” Too moved to say more, he lowered his head and kissed her deeply as he loved her with more tenderness than he knew he possessed. He bent to reverence her breast, and he caressed her creamy skin with its dusting of freckles, her arms and chest, her lovely hips.

After a few moments of these attentions, she gave a drowsy moan and grasped his waist, asking him with her insistent touch for more. He thrust deeper, still moving carefully because of his size and her inexperience. He drew back and gave it to her again, again. A few more deep strokes, and he pulsed still bigger inside her, his heart beginning to pound. He felt his control dissolving.

How will I ever get enough of her?
he wondered at the back of his mind.

She whispered his name, calling forth the storm he’d held back so long, a fury of passion he had never unleashed with any woman. He became aware that he was speaking to her, growling at her through his breathlessness, making fierce demands that she never lie with another, never dare leave him, let him take her every night, and every breath she breathed against his mouth was yes. The tide carried him closer.

“
Allegra
.”

When he gasped her name, she thrust her tongue into his mouth, seizing her opportunity like a pirate. Holding his face between her palms, she ravished his senses with her wild, virgin kiss, shattering the remnants of his control.

He took her like a hurricane, as if she were the last woman on the earth, the only woman.

He was too rough, too fast, he knew, but he couldn’t stop. It was not seduction, no; he was mating with her, with this woman and no other, driven to blinding need by the animal imperative of instinct, survival. He braced himself on his hands above her, arching his head back, consumed by her body’s writhe and pull, pumping gigantically into her. Her breasts shook with his rhythm—he thought the whole ship rocked. Her nails raked him, and her groans twined with his, one louder than the next.

She hit her climax, hard and suddenly, convulsing under him with a series of high-pitched, frenzied little screams of wild delight. Her body gripped him tight in its wet, silken glove, unbearable pleasure as she baptized him in her liquid surge.

The intensity of her orgasm drove him over the edge. Every muscle in him went rigid, and he clasped her under him, roaring out as he shot forth, filling her with his essence. Eternity shattered around him as if he’d struck his head on one of the star’s crystal spheres and broke it.

The vision of heaven left him covered in sweat.

“Oh, my God,” he said at last as he fell upon her soft body in a jellied heap of shaking limbs and sweat.

“Ohh, Lazar,” she murmured.

Unseen by her, he grinned with weary arrogance against the pillow as he caught his breath.

Moving languidly a few moments later, she drew her knees up against his sweat-slicked hips, arching her back with a catlike stretch beneath him. The movement wrung from him a soul-deep groan that turned to a laugh when she idly raked her nails down his arms. She answered his nibbling kiss with a throaty purr of satisfaction that sent his pride soaring.

He felt himself throb within her, and somehow he found the strength to lift his head and look down at her. Her eyes were closed, and the beatific look on her face made him smile. She was Venus in his arms, positively decadent, the goddess of sensuality he had intended to turn her into from the start.

“Liked that, did you?” he growled softly.

She nodded, never opening her eyes.

She winced when he eased himself out of her body. He moved to her side, still lying partly atop her, his arm thrown across her flat stomach. She was very still, one arm sprawled carelessly above her on the mattress, her chestnut hair cascading all over his pillow.

He rested his head beside hers, brushing the tip of his nose back and forth against the elegant line of her cheekbone. In the warm silence, Lazar thought he could be content to lie there for the rest of his life, just smelling her skin, and if he ever got bored with that, he would take up counting her freckles.

She linked her fingers through his, then closed her eyes with a sigh.

They lay together in motionless union, only breathing, deep and spent, drifting as one upon a timeless current of peace. Soon they slept, their bodies still entwined.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The three weeks that passed as the fleet crossed the Atlantic were the most exhausting, exhilarating days of Allegra’s life. Lazar and she forgot meals and barely slept, caught up in the whirlwind of designing Ascencion’s future and, she very well supposed, shaping their country’s history.

They argued over which coast should get the shipyards and how exactly the penal code should be reformed, but the one thing they agreed upon was that he should marry Princess Nicolette Habsburg and her two million gold ducats. They discussed it only once, then mutually avoided the topic.

Allegra knew full well Ascencion needed the money because her father had robbed the place blind. Princess Nicolette, like her older sister, Marie Antoinette, who had married the Dauphin of France, had been born and bred to fulfill the position of queen.

She contented herself as best she could with her role as the mistress he loved and whose opinion he valued when it came to making decisions for the good of Ascencion. It was a fall from grace for a woman who had once tried so hard to be a good little girl, but she loved him unto distraction and would not have missed the restoration of Fiori rule for the world. Everything she had to give was his for the asking.

Still, every time he came to her and made the world dissolve behind the blue velvet curtains of his bed, she fell a little more deeply in love with him, until she wondered how she would ever stand it when the day of his royal wedding came.

As the days passed, they were aided in their quest by Vicar’s wisdom and Bernardo’s knowledge of the people’s wishes. Bernardo, incidentally, had approached her to offer his deepest apologies for having deserted her on the coast of Al Khuum. Gazing at her almost in awe, to her amusement, the fat little bard of the people swore that if there was anything he could ever do for her, she had but to ask. She only chuckled at him. There was too much work to do to hold on to petty grudges.

From the moment Lazar pulled her father’s boxes out into the cabin and opened them, Allegra learned that even as highly as she’d admired her captor before, she had still completely underestimated him.

The enormity of the task galvanized him, as if he thrived on the very challenge of it. The fact that it seemed impossible marshaled up resources of strength, imagination, and ingenuity within him that took her breath away and that he clearly never realized he possessed.

Lazar was tireless. His ability to concentrate on a dozen different problems at the same time astounded her. Sure enough, when he grasped the answer to any one question, he found a way to tie the solution in to several others in unexpected ways, his mind as nimble as the deft, browned fingers with which he tied his intricate sailors’ knots. In awe, she watched him forge a kingdom out of thin air.

She could arrive at no other explanation than that he had been born for it and that he was the most brilliant man she’d ever met.

She made contributions of her own to his enterprise, such as her plan for a system of schools for the peasant children of Ascencion and her ideas for how housing could be improved for the pensioners. She also suggested that a memorial grove be planted at the site of the royal attack, with a tree to commemorate each person slain that night.

Every time her energy flagged, he would fire her excitement anew, presenting with a mischievous sparkle in his eyes some brilliant new idea based on this or that concept he’d encountered in his travels around the globe. A solution to the problem of transportation on Ascencion could come from the Netherlands, while a broad point of law could be inspired by anything from ancient Rome to the wild savages of the New World, to the Brethren’s creed of one vote per man.

In one night—with a little help from Vicar—he sketched out a constitution and a parliament based on the British model, two things Ascencion had never had. The next day he blocked out a new Belfort, a modern city inspired by Paris, with broad thoroughfares and grand public buildings. It was to stand on the grounds of the medieval Belfort Castle, high in the cool, forested central highlands of Ascencion.