Face to Face (The Deverell Series Book 2) (15 page)

Merry’s eyes widened, by way of giving response, but she paused, concentrating on her finger as she toyed with wayward particles of berries, since she hadn’t a clue what part of her that was or why any man would cherish it. She took note of the ruin she’d made of the bedding, and she wondered if she dared asked him to explain that comment. That she debated at all, instead of voicing a logical response, made her feel only more pathetically young and unsure.

Not willing to abandon all carefulness within herself just yet, she pressed a piece of berry until it stuck on the tip of her finger and held it before his black eyes. “The vexing nuisance part of me is that part that just ruined your bedding,” she whispered. “Why would any man cherish that?”

He caught her finger, and Merry watched him slowly bring it to his mouth, kiss it once in the gentlest of touch, and the berry was gone. “That part of you brought you to me. I will always cherish it the most.”

Taking her finger back, she focused on the spot where he kissed. Blushing, she remarked, “It is also the part of me that makes me a shameful girl in your bed. It was kind of you not to point that out, since I am not very comfortable with my shamefulness at this moment.”

This time Varian had no choice but to laugh. She was so dear to him in every way, even now, tragically appalled with herself, not out of regret, but only because she wasn’t regretting behaving shamefully. It would have been a harsh intrusion in this sheer ecstasy of her, if she were regretting him.

The hovering smile on Merry’s lips told him she was starting to feel less unsure within herself. “Come back to me, Little One. I am just going to hold you.”

With carefully placed touch, Varian eased her to him until she sat a little curled ball with her back against his chest. Merry tilted her head as his lips moved in her curls, light touches bent on comfort, nothing more.

She became conscious there had been tension in her body before by how it felt now easing back into his chest. She lay her face turned up, bathed by his kisses and the glide of his fingertips on her arms.

Merry’s voice beneath him was an amused, though confused, whisper, “We are a mismatched picture in puzzle in every way. The only not mismatched piece between us, as far as I can see, is we are both shameful.”

“Oh, Merry, you see all things as either black or white. You don’t see shades of gray. We are very alike in the ways that matter. I don’t think of either of us as shameful,” he whispered, hearing the smile in his voice. “I think of us as perfectly matched and fortunate. Too few people ever share what we share in passion. Stop thinking badly of yourself over something that is a treasure we are fortunate enough to share.”

Merry looked down at his arms relaxed around her, fascinated by the well-formed muscles with their hairs so different from the soft spray on her own pale flesh. His hands went to her shoulders, his touch through her shirt reminding her that her desire for him breathed in her flesh and never slept. It quieted. But it never slept. It danced through her in this moment, when she wanted only to be calm with him.

“A treasure? We are behaving gluttonous in this. Merry is gluttonous. Varian is gluttonous...” she gave a little laugh. “... I think Morgan was the only one, of the three of us, with any proper restraint of conduct.”

As serious as her mood was, she laughed after that, but he fought his own laughter because in trying to make logic of who he was, she had separated him into two beings, Morgan and Varian. It worried him she didn’t understand there was no complete separation ever possible. Some of the less appealing parts of him were merely bound to him by necessity. Some of the other less appealing parts, she discounted, were really him.

Her muscles tensed beneath his light massaging.
One problem at a time
, he thought,
she doesn’t need more.
Burying his lips in her hair, Varian tried to reason a way to help her through this. Perhaps he’d been wrong to let their passion run its course, however it would, without trying to pace it for her.

Merry, innocent of touch, was fiery in passion, a brilliantly twirling prism of mood. Even at his age, he was in awe of her and had not expected their first joining to run in a two day frenzy unlike anything he had ever known.

It had started with the sweetness of finding a virgin bride in his bed on his wedding night, and had passed in mad hours of rapture bound in every type of flavor. He had been a man starving and, willingly, had let this run its course. But Merry hadn’t even known she was hungry.

“The voracious hunger I have for you, Merry, isn’t only about the remarkable pleasure you give me with your body. I am learning parts of you I could not know until we shared them this way. Everything I discover about you makes me hungrier for you, closer to you, more claimed by you. I want all of me claimed by you, Merry, and all of me touched by you. Touched by your spirit.”

On softly gasping laughs, she said, “Ah, so I may hope when I claim all of you and you’ve been touched by my spirit, we will both acquire an impulse to stop this from time to time?”

Varian’s laughter caressed her neck, as his lips dropped to her shoulder. His voice held a wicked edge as he said, “You would do better to develop a proclivity to run, whenever your whim is not to want me touching your spirit.”

Merry’s laugher shimmied through her limbs with more of its natural flow. Varian ran his hands up and down her arms, while her muscles fluttered beneath his palms. That she was laughing was good. Laughter and temper were her two shields to protect the fragile woman within. Her center would not have survived this world without protection.

Varian buried his lips in her hair, breathing in her sweet scent, before allowing himself one kiss there. She didn’t need more of him. She needed diversion to settle inside herself again.

With slumberous devilment, he said, “In my long line of tutors, during my years inclined to torture those of the education profession, I had in possession for a time one that was not a man of letters, but had been a proprietor of a Gin Shop.” At once, she was laughing against him. “We used to get the barn cats drunk, so we could watch them totter. I did not crack a book the year he schooled me. I developed an iron stomach and a proclivity to enjoy the inebriation of small animals. I am tired of the dog watching. Can we get him drunk?”

Merry’s face whipped towards him, flushed with indignation. “How dare you suggest such a thing? You are a wicked man. You will leave my dog alone.”

Then she started to giggle. She looked into his face, with satiny eyelashes wide, and announced, “I find pug is shameful in this as well. Port, gin or wine? How many glasses do you think it will take? I don’t want him dead, just in a stupor.”

Varian tried everything, rum, wine, and port, in crystal glass or out of a silver bowl; the dog wouldn’t drink. Merry was rolling on the floor in laughter, and in the end, after an imposing scowl at the tiny puff of fur, Varian tossed the dog from the cabin.

Turning back from the door, Varian’s breath caught at the picture of Merry. She was reclined on her side, the dark pattern of the Persian rug an exotic backdrop to her creamy flesh, angel arms and legs peeking from the billowy puff of his shirt twisted around her. Her dark curls streamed across a stack of pillows, her face flush-bright from the laughter that had consumed her through their endeavor. The laughter had burned itself out of Merry about a quarter hour ago, but it had left its dew on her face and in the languor of her limbs.

Varian sank down on the floor beside her and he knew that look in her eyes. The sun was gone in the west, gathering shadows in the cabin, and the glow from the candle he lit touched one side of her face. She plucked at the parting of his robe and ran a finger down his chest.

“You are a kind man, Varian, to be willing to be preposterous for me, when you are not a preposterous man ever, in any way.”

Varian caught her arm and placed a kiss on the beat of her wrist. “You would do well to run, Merry.”

That comment made the fire rekindle in Merry’s flesh. In all the different ways she’d thought of Varian, she could hardly grasp he had passed an entire afternoon in nonsense with a dog to please her. Her eyes glided over the taut flesh covering the curve of his cheekbones, the aristocratic nose, the erotic mouth, and the intense blackness of his eyes. The thought hit her that he was both kind and cautious in his dealings with her.

Even in the wild ways they sometimes coupled, there was careful handling, as though she were glass and he was afraid to handle her the way he wished to, afraid for some reason she would break. Her heartbeat was high in her throat, making her ache and pulse in the vital parts of her. She was sure it the cause of the sudden brazenness she felt.

“Come here, Varian.” Her voice was breathless as she opened her arms for him. She felt the warm surrounding of his body, and the fire of his mouth against hers.

When his face eased back from her, his voice came again, softly brushing her cheeks. “I can’t get enough of you. If you don’t stop me I will burn you to ash.”

Merry lifted her hands, spreading her fingers wide apart on his cheeks, their pale tips stroking his tanned flesh. “Then burn me to ash,” she said hoarsely. That sent a shudder through him.

Tracing her lips along the ridge of his chest, she made little twirling darts with her tongue and felt more shivers run through him. She heard his intake of breath and had the impression of his desire and tenderness for her battling within him.

Merry undid the buttons of her shirt and let it fall open. The blackness of his eyes turned to liquid as she lie bare and pliant for his touch. She ran her hands up his torso to his shoulders, discovering the tension of his muscles and the drive of his blood through his veins, finding an intensity within him unlike any of the other times they coupled.

With an unsteady hand, she brought her wineglass to her mouth, running the rim for a moment along her lower lip. Intending to consume a bolstering drought, she spilled a dark trail along the surface of her slopes. She looked down, then noticed Varian’s eyes following the red drops as they spread over her body.

Her eyes brightened as she recognized want and restraint in his gaze. Merry closed her hands on the sides of his face, letting him sip the droplets of wine from her lips. Varian was dragging his lips across her like a man starved.

Into the play of his erotic demand, she whispered, “Varian, I love you. Let me give you all you want from me...”

It was her hands that moved his face lower, as he followed with his lips the lazy path of wine that had done a trek on her flesh. Everywhere he moved on the delicate plane of her body, rippled with convulsion, somehow heightened by the moisture on her flesh.

He brought his mouth to rock gently over her throbbing lips, his hands kneading her skin below her waist, along her thighs, inside. A vague consciousness rose in her dreamy mind, the slippery glides of his fingers and palms lubricated by more wine having been poured on her flesh.

She closed her eyes as his face skimmed her erect nipples, the lush underside of her breasts, down the smooth length of her abdomen, and then across to her center. He lingered on the fleshly tops of her thighs, down a leg, behind a knee, an ankle, to toe and up again. She felt her leg gently molded around his arm, his lips seeking wine on the shockwave nerves on the inside of her legs, near where she pulsed, but never there.

As she trembled through her rioting senses, her body whispered to her that with the wine smears he was kissing every part of her, lingering everywhere but
there
. She realized there was in him, in this wildly erotic passion, a want to go there and a caution that wouldn’t let him. Every cell in her body was pulsing and demanding; the ache low in her was agony.

She whimpered as he slid his fingers inside her, deep, and his mouth was a flame across her smooth flesh from hip bone to hip bone. The brushing of his wine soaked fingers melted with her hot dampness as his face eased back upward to hers. Desperate and anxious, she felt him lift her from the floor.

She saw him, a vision above her and into her demand, he whispered, “You are in your every breath everything I could ever want.”

Arching her back beneath his mouth roaming over her breasts, his fingers soft like brushing feathers, and her head thrashed on the pillow as she wondered,
do all women feel this way with a man? Is that why we all eventually end in a man’s bed?

Feeling Varian ease his hands beneath her, molding her limbs into his possession, Merry let herself flow away with the dazzling riot of her senses, and with it went thought. Sometimes it was better not to think. Sometimes it was better only to feel.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Merry woke to be greeted by the lush swirls of a plumy-violet sunset beyond the stern windows, the sharp sound of rapid activity on the upper-deck, and the warm form of a slumbering man beneath her. It took a moment to pull into focus the words that had taken her from sleep. “Sail ho.” They had moved in an unthreatening blur through her hazy functioning brain, her passion kissed senses only claimed by the man she had stayed in bed with, now her second day.

She realized, with an untroubled awareness, that the ship was making sail, the bucking motion telling her they were running to the wind and running hard. The wood screeched and groaned with the effort like a giant beast beneath her. The man beneath her, a giant beast as well, was more peaceful.

She relaxed back against Varian, watching the cabin playfully sway as the ship lurched, tacking westward and then southward over and over again. She heard without alarm Tom Craven’s order to load guns. She had heard it before many times, and never once their full thunder.

They had taken three ships since she had joined Varian and the events had been bloodless affairs, which seemed to more require strength and stamina, rather than ruthlessness. Sailors had superbly fit bodies for a reason. It took hours to shift a cargo from one hold to another, and though the pirates spent the night hours in revelry and drink, she was reminded of Varian saying
if boredom killed, Little One, half the men at sea would be dead.