Pirate Wolf Trilogy (32 page)

“We’ll make a
pretty sight when the watch changes.”

Beau frowned
and leaned forward, silencing his common sense with her lips. His
tongue was too gallant to refuse her invitation and she welcomed
him into her mouth with a languid sigh, running all ten fingers up
into his hair and refusing to let him go until he’d been properly
rebuked.

He groaned but
still he eased her reluctantly away. She resisted halfheartedly for
another moment, then let him lift her off his thighs and settle her
back on the yardarm. They were both embarrassingly wet, although he
seemed to regard the evidence of their expended passions with
somewhat less mortification than she.

“
Mon petit corsaire féroce”
he mused.

“What?”

“My fierce
little corsair. Only you could have inspired me to such desperate
measures.”

“
So you
admit it. You
are
mad.” She
glanced at the belling sail below them. “On a yardarm, for pity’s
sake. We could have both ended up in the sea.” She looked to her
rumpled and torn clothing and sighed. “It would not hurt to learn a
little restraint.”

“Me?” His dark
brows shot up. “I have been showing remarkable restraint this past
week. You cannot know the number of times I have been tempted to
haul you out of your miserable hammock again and— By the way, you
never thanked me.”

“For what?”

“For letting
you enjoy a good night’s sleep … alone … in your own bed.”

Distracted
momentarily by the shape of his mouth and the intriguing way he
used it to fashion words, she gazed up into his eyes and wondered
if she should feel cheated or guilty.

“So … why did
you do it?”

“For one thing,
you were dead tired. For another … I did not intend to force
something on you that you didn’t really want. I foolishly
thought—like the arrogant bastard you believe me to be—I would wait
until you came to me.”

'
I did not come
to you tonight,” she pointed out quietly.

“Not by design,
no. But neither did you push me away. Or refuse me my madness. And
after tonight, whether I come to you or you come to me, it will
make little difference in the end.”

A gust of
wind caused Beau to turn her head and look out over the vastness of
the sea. It defied all logic to be straddling a yardarm thirty feet
above the gundeck of a moving ship, her thighs slick, her body
runny and warm, her sex pouting, quivering for more. It defied
every shred of common sense and judgment to even let there be an
‘after tonight’ … yet what could she do? Where could she go to hide
from him? The
Egret
was a
small ship and she was an even smaller fool.

“Surely you
know … this cannot possibly last beyond the first step we take on
English soil.”

There was a
very noticeable hesitation before he said, “England is more than
two weeks away. We could grow quite bored with each other in that
time—gallery balconies and swaying yards aside.”

She rested her
head against the mast, feeling suddenly trapped in the narrow space
between his outstretched arms. “And if we become bored with each
other before then?”

He shrugged
blithely. “Then it’s you to your solitary hammock and me to my
solitary bed.”

“And on to a
civil parting on the quayside in Plymouth?” she added dryly.

“It will be so
civil, mam’selle, the angels will weep.” He laughed at her
expression and pulled himself up so that he was standing on the
yardarm. He adjusted his clothes, then reached a hand down to help
her to her feet, and on an impulse drew her against his chest,
holding her there long enough for her to feel the hardness rising
in his body again.

“
But for
now,
ma
petite
, and for the next
two weeks, we’ll make them weep over other things, shall
we?”

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

Over the course
of the next three days not a moment passed that Beau would have
described as boring, occupied as she was with the normal, if
somewhat nerve-wracking, routines of guiding an overburdened
galleon through seasonable squalls and strong currents.

The evening
meals continued to be a trial, more for Spence than anyone else,
once it was deemed a certainty that Agnes Frosthip had set her
sights on him; she even appeared at the dinner table with her
moustache shaved off, a clear indication to everyone but Jonas that
he was a doomed man. As the duenna’s attention turned more and more
to Spence, it lapsed even further toward her royal charge. Had the
duchess been willing, Pitt’s stolen moments could have become
outright theft of virtue for all her chaperone seemed to notice. It
was Doña Maria, however, who took care never to be caught alone
again with the handsome master gunner, although it was obvious to
anyone with half a wit—which excluded Pitt by this point—that he
would not have had to resort to theft; she would gladly have given
him anything he cared to take.

Beau continued
to excuse herself early from the evening meals, wanting nothing
either by word or gesture to put more of a suspicious gleam in her
father’s eye than was already there. To her credit she managed not
to blush whenever Dante glanced her way, which he did with reckless
frequency and with more suggested intimacy than she would have
preferred. Conversely, at other times, it was a struggle for her to
keep from staring openly at his starkly sensual countenance,
especially if the light caught his smile a certain way, or his
hands moved in a manner that brought to mind the treacherous skill
of those long, deft fingers.

She took to
pacing out her frustrations on the gallery balcony during the
politic quarter hour before Dante joined her. Sometimes they
talked. Sometimes they argued. Always it depended on the mood Beau
had worked herself into, whether she had accepted what they did
together as casual and finite and a pleasurable way to pass the
nights … or if she was convinced it was foolish, reckless, callous,
and predatory on his part, senseless and potentially destructive on
hers.

Either way they
ended up naked and breathless in a tangle of sweat-slicked arms and
legs, with Beau telling herself it was the last time. It had to be
the last time. He was becoming too powerful an intoxicant in her
blood, drugging her with his passion, draining her with his prowess
and potency. It simply wasn’t fair.

Once. Once only
she had managed to escape the cabin before his eyes, his hands, his
mouth, had lured her into the realm of sensual decadence. She
managed to stay away too … long enough to wonder why he had not
come after her. To wonder if he was, indeed, growing bored.

She had
returned to the cabin on some lame excuse and found him bent over
his infernal documents again, his handsome face awash in
candlelight. His expression had been cool enough to suggest
indifference, but his eyes had betrayed too much relief for either
one of them to waste effort on words. She had gone to him and he
had taken her as he had wanted to take her that first day, sprawled
naked on a bed of scattered papers, her hair spread in a wild spill
of auburn beneath them.

The morning of
the fourth day, she woke when dawn was nothing more than a hint of
pearl-gray seeping over the horizon. Dante was actually asleep
beside her, a rarety she had come to appreciate in the short time
she’d had a chance to study his habits. It was as if he begrudged
wasting even that much time, letting life go by without being in
absolute control, absolute command.

Not
wanting to disturb him, she eased herself out from beneath his arm
and padded barefoot to the chair, groping through the gloom for an
identifiable garment in the pile that had been so hastily
discarded. Her shirt, she was not surprised to discover, was ripped
into two halves, drawing a muffled curse from her lips. Dante’s was
beside it and she pulled it over her head, losing herself briefly
in the voluminous folds. She went out onto the gallery and leaned
on the rail, letting the wind comb through the tangles in her hair.
From the sound of the wash and the height of the wake curling out
behind them, she guessed their speed to be between eight and ten
knots; the faint sound of a bell overhead tolled the fifth hour of
the morning.

She sighed and
cupped her chin in her hands. The soft, indistinct light that hung
over the far edge of the sea was spreading in gauzy strips,
lightening to pinks and golds and grays. Soon the sea would become
a vast, shimmering puddle of bronze and the wash would glitter with
the first pinpoints of sunlight.

There was a
chill in the air and she closed her eyes to savor the crispness.
Her skin rippled with a spray of goose-flesh but before she could
hug her arms and chafe some heat through the cool linen of Dante’s
shirt, a pair of large, warm hands slid around her waist and
invited her to share the heat of his body.

“I thought you
were asleep,” she murmured.

“Mmm.” He
nuzzled aside a tousle of curls and pressed his lips to the nape of
her neck. “Come back inside and wake me properly.”

Desire stirred
along her spine, spreading outward like a slow, rolling wave. After
three nights of avid explorations of each other’s body, she would
have expected to have at least grown more immune to the timbre of
his voice, but even that small measure of control had deserted her.
The low, throaty vibrations were as tempting as sin itself and she
found herself shifting slightly in his arms, inviting his hands to
cup her full, swollen breasts.

“
I am
surprised
you
aren’t still
asleep,” he murmured against the curve of her spine.

“I … wanted to
watch the sunrise.”

“Really? I
would rather watch you rise all flushed and pink beneath me.”

“I rose quite
enough last night,” she said through the catch in her voice, “thank
you very much.”

He laughed
softly and his hands slid downward. They met over her belly, then
continued lower, pressing into the juncture of her thighs, pulling
her even closer to his chest. As cool as the air was, his big body
was as hot as a brazier. His skin was heated velvet, the muscles
smooth and hard, burnished as bronze as the sea in the growing
light. He loomed extremely large behind her and she felt as she
always did: too short, too small, too inadequate, to accommodate
all that massive power and strength.

Yet she knew it
wasn’t true. She fit him as a glove fit a hand, snug and sleek and
tight.

“You’re
thinking of something other than sunrises,” he mused, “I can
tell.”

His fingers
seduced her through the linen and another ribbon of heat unfurled
within her, coiling between her thighs, slithering past flesh that
had become far too knowledgeable in such a short time. It was
shameless, that’s what it was. It was shameless and brazen and
…

“There,” she
whispered, “please.”

Dante smiled
against her nape and snatched up the hem of the shirt she was
wearing. A hard-muscled leg urged her thighs apart, wide enough for
him to slide his partly aroused flesh into the warmth. Beau cursed
softly at this new torment, this new wickedness to add to his
repertoire. His fingers were still dancing and stroking, now his
flesh was stretching and expanding, vying for equal attention.

Beau leaned
forward at his murmured urging and he curled an arm around her
waist, holding her firmly against him. He probed the lush, pearly
folds, not quite deep enough to penetrate, but teasingly enough to
send her head bowing forward on a shiver.

“I have the
morning watch,” she groaned.

“It’s hours
away yet.”

She sucked in a
quick breath and shuddered as his big body stretched and throbbed
and taunted her with a brief, swiftly retracted thrust.

“You are taking
shameful advantage of my position, Captain,” she whispered.

Dante’s hands
encircled her breasts, finding the nipples peaked into hard beads.
He kneaded them, caressed them, gently chafed them, until she was
pushing back against him with wriggling impatience.

“If I am, you
have only yourself to blame. Standing here, robed in my shirt, with
those long, luscious legs bare beneath it”—his lips nuzzled her
neck and he withheld more than he offered—“how could I resist?”

Her lips parted
with a moan and she braced her hands on the rail.

“How indeed,”
she accused breathlessly, “when you know I don’t have the strength
to fight you off?”

He
offered up a low, husky laugh. “You should never make an admission
like that to a man,
mon enfant
But
why do you still think it is necessary to fight me, even after all
this time?”

“Why do you,”
she gasped, “always think your attentions bring a woman pleasure?
Is it so inconceivable to imagine a woman not wanting to share your
lusty ways each time the urge comes upon you?”

“You mean if
she, for instance, wanted to watch the sunrise instead?”

“Some people
do, you know.”

His body
stopped moving. He withdrew himself completely and stepped back a
pace, offering a formal bow. “Then by all means, I would do the
gentlemanly thing and let her watch it.”

Beau stood with
her mouth open and her body trembling. The shock of watching him
walk back inside the cabin, combined with the sudden absence of
heat, eventually spurred her into following him, but by then he was
standing over the washbowl, humming faintly to himself.

“What are you
doing?”

“What does it
look like I’m doing?” He held the sharpened edge of a knife to his
cheek and started to scrape away the shadow of beard stubble. “How
was the sunrise?”