Pirate Wolf Trilogy (62 page)

“Have you never
been told it is impolite to stare, my lord?”

The whispered
query sent his gaze snapping up to her face. Her eyes were open
beneath a dark brow that was arched upward with curiosity.

“There is a
difference,” he said slowly, “between staring and... admiring.”

“Is that what
you are doing? Admiring?”

“I am not a
monk, madam.”

“In truth, it
would be a waste if you were,” she murmured.

The observation
was made with a husky honesty. While the crescent moon had rendered
Juliet’s skin a pale, creamy blur where it peeped through her
shirt, it gilded Varian’s broad shoulders with bold strokes,
emphasising every curve of muscle on his chest, every hard band
over the ribs, and the sight caused Juliet to experience something
strangely like the sparks of St. Elmo’s Fire they had witnessed
earlier

She had come
awake the instant he had stepped out onto the gallery. Instinct had
sent a hand into the sheath at her waist, but when she saw the
vaunted twelfth Duke of Harrow emptying the contents of a
thunderpot over the rail, she had relaxed and eased the dagger down
by her hip. She had hoped he would simply creep back inside and
return to bed, but when he continued to stand there, and then to
fondle her with his eyes, she thought it best to end the charade
before he noticed the effect all that visual intimacy was having on
her own body.

“
Whatever
would your betrothed think,” she mused aloud, “if she could see you
standing there
admiring
another
woman’s breasts.”

He did not
answer at once. The wind funnelling off the ship’s hull snatched at
his hair and cast it forward over his face so that all she could
see was a faint glitter where his eyes should be. “You do not make
it easy for anyone to befriend you, do you?”

“Have I given
you any reason to believe I need or even want more friends?”

“Not by a
single word or deed, madam. In that you may be absolutely
confident.”

“You should
tell your body that, my lord,” she said, looking boldly at the
obvious ridge in his breeches. “It would appear to need more
convincing.”

“I prefer to
think my mind has a stronger will. Just as yours does, no
doubt.”

She smiled and
folded her arm under her head as a pillow, further displacing the
edge of her shirt. “Are you suggesting I am inwardly seething with
the desire to bed you, sir?”

“I am
suggesting nothing of the kind, although it has been my experience
that women do not usually strip down naked in front of a man unless
they want to do more than simply change their clothing.”

“Nor do men
rise up like the mythical phoenix if their minds and thoughts are
as pure as spring water.”

“Forgive me if
I repeat myself, but I am neither monkish nor insentient. Bare your
breast and I will look. Bare it under moonlight and I will admire.
Rest assured, however, there are more than enough deterrents to
keep my lust duly restrained.”

She laughed.
“None quite as potent, I would argue, as a man clutching a pisspot
in his hands.”

Quicker than
she thought him capable of moving, he tossed the enamel pot over
the rail and moved to the side of the hammock. He caught her by the
wrist and wrenched the concealed dagger out of her hand, then with
a sniff of satisfaction, grasped the lip of canvas and jerked it
with enough force to tumble her out the other side.

Juliet hit the
deck in a tangle of arms and legs. When she sprang to her feet, he
was ready for her. He caught both wrists and twisted them savagely
around to the small of her back, locking them together in one iron
fist while he used his big body to pin her against the rail. Still
bearing the scab under his chin where she had pricked him last
night, it was his pleasure now to press the sharp edge of her own
dagger against her throat and let the cool steel caress the
strained white arch.

“
Be
advised,
Captain
,” he
said evenly. “I learn from my mistakes and rarely make the same one
twice.”

“Brave words,”
she spat, mocking his accusation from the night before, “with a
knife in your hand.”

The knife went
spinning away over the rail. He crowded closer and wrapped his hand
firmly around her throat so that her chin was in a cradle and his
fingers were able to locate and pinch a sensitive cluster of nerves
below her ear. There was enough ruthlessness in his fingertips that
her body sagged and her lips gasped apart with the pain.

“I am without a
pisspot now, madam,” he hissed against her cheek. “Shall I warm
myself elsewhere?”

Her curse came
out a strangled gasp. Taking crude advantage, he turned his head
and kissed her hard on the mouth. When she tried to clamp her lips
shut, he gouged his fingers deeper into her neck, winning another
cry, another shuddered gasp of pain. His tongue plunged between her
open lips and he took what she refused to give, using his mouth,
even his teeth to stifle her efforts to dislodge him.

When she
managed to wrench her mouth free, he captured it again. When she
tried to kick and wriggle out of his grasp, he wedged a thigh
between her legs, lifting her until her feet were raised off the
deck and she was perilously close to tipping over the rail.

His tongue
plundered her mouth without mercy, without allowing a scrap of air
or sound to escape. Her hands escaped and in one pounding
heartbeat, she transformed all the rage and anger she was feeling
into defiance. Fisting her way through his attempts to recapture
her hands, she clawed them up into his hair and instead of pushing
him away, held him fast and began to return each thrust of his
tongue, to match each slant and turn of his lips as he ate at her
mouth.

Shocked by the
sudden and completely unexpected reversal, it was Varian’s turn to
try to break free but Juliet twisted her fingers around clumps of
hair, threatening enough force to tear chunks out of his scalp if
he pulled away. She used her body too, pushing her breasts against
his, riding the wedge of his thigh until she found something more
vulnerable and volatile to abuse. He was already half aroused from
his imagined triumph, but now the friction and her eagerness in
applying it brought them both straining together, feeding one off
the other, neither sure who was the aggressor and who the victim
now.

It was that
uncertainty that caused Juliet to push his mouth away. She knew it
had been too long since she had felt the heat of a man’s body
between her thighs, but she also knew this was the wrong man to
want there. Any man, at the moment, would be wrong, but this one in
particular was too potent, too unsettling, and for someone who
decried the very notion of trying to seduce her, he was doing a
damned fine job. Her mouth was hot and wet with the taste of him
and now her flesh was betraying her. There were tremors in her
arms, in her legs, and if the hand that had been sliding boldly
down her hip had been allowed to curve a few inches lower, there
would have been tremors elsewhere she would not have been able to
control.

On the other
hand, despite his own obvious arousal and the hard glitter of fury
in his eyes, he was making no attempt to overcome her rejection and
pull her back into his arms.

“You disappoint
me, my lord,” she said harshly. “You call yourself a master
swordsman, but even a novice knows better than to attempt a finesse
when he has not the strength or wit to see it through.”

His eyes
continued to glitter, his hands to flex and unflex by his sides.
“It was... an unconscionable reaction to an unconscionable
situation and I can only offer profound apologies for my conduct.
If I have misrepresented myself in any way—”

“You haven’t,”
she assured him bluntly. “I thought you were an arrogant, self
indulgent bastard when we first spoke, and nothing has happened to
change that now.”

She dragged the
back of her hand across her mouth to wipe it clean and pushed away
from the rail, striding past him without another word or glance.
She was too furious with herself, too furious with him to trust
herself to remain in his company a moment longer. Her mouth was
tender, her breasts ached. Her knees were weak and her limbs felt
like jelly, throbbing with a violence that made her want to walk up
on deck and ravage the first man she found; to strip him, ride him
until they both screamed for mercy, then toss him over the side
with the galley scraps.

As a poor
alternative, she snatched her doublet off the hook, grabbed her
boots, and left the cabin, spending the rest of the long and
sleepless night alone on her perch in the mainmast.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

The sun
was well past noon when the shout of “land ho” brought Juliet to
the quarterdeck at a run. The faint purplish smear off the larboard
bow was no more than a jagged bump on an otherwise smooth horizon,
but when they drew closer and that one single bump proved to be
five distinct islands, the crew of the
Iron Rose
was all smiles. Within the hour, the order was
given to shorten sail, to reduce the sheets to steerage only.
Riding in her wake, the
Santo Domingo
did likewise.

The reason for
this became clear when they passed through a band of pale blue
water. A reading off the cable put the depth beneath the keel at
six fathoms—roughly six times the span of a man’s outstretched
arms—up drastically from the hundred fathoms of inky blue that had
been beneath them for most of the morning. Less than a league
later, the water became a bright turquoise that changed after
another two hundred yards into pale cobalt. In all there were seven
distinct bands of blue that formed a shimmering aura around the
cluster of atolls. The palest bar measured a mere three fathoms of
clearance, the bottom so close and the water so clear, the crew
could see schools of yellow tiger fish feeding on the crowning
heads of coral.

The broken ribs
of shipwrecks were also visible, lying in their watery graves. An
untold number of captains had allowed their curiosity to bring them
too close onto the reef and for their trouble, they’d had their
keels ripped open stem to stern. One ship in particular, whose
identity and origin was unknown, lay almost intact on the bottom,
her single mast pointed in a south-westerly direction. It was this
marker that the lookout in the crow’s nest searched for and located
with an excited shout.

Juliet
quietly relayed an order to bring the
Iron Rose
about on a course that followed the outstretched
finger of the sunken mast. After calculating wind speed and
direction, she turned a specially marked sand glass on its end.
There were two men on cables now, one of whom continuously called
out depth readings from the bow, while the other dropped the
logline off the stern and counted the number of knots that played
out over the course of a minute to measure their speed. The rest of
the crew stood silent, half of them poised in the yards, ready to
act upon any orders the instant they were given. The other half
stared forward to where Juliet now stood perched at the very tip of
the bowsprit, communicating instructions to the helmsman by way of
pre-arranged hand signals. Although she knew these waters as well
as she knew the rifts and valleys of her own body, there was only
one way through the reef, only one narrow channel of deeper water
that took several twists and turns and did not forgive the
arrogance of any pilot who failed to show the proper
respect.

Almost to
the mark, as the helmsman signalled that the last grain of sand had
fallen through to the bottom globe of the hour glass, Juliet waved
that the bow was over deep water again. Balancing between the taut
stay lines, she returned along the bowsprit and jumped lightly down
onto the forecastle deck where Johnny Boy was waiting with her
spyglass. She took it, snapped open the brass and leather tube, and
trained it anxiously on the much larger
Santo Domingo
, which was just beginning her run through
the reef.

“She turns like
a pig,” Juliet muttered. “I warrant Nathan has chewed his cud to
mush.”

“I’ll wager
Cap’n Simon is chewing a thing or two as well,” Johnny said,
grinning.

Juliet swung
the glass around and brought the islands into sharper focus. Four
of the atolls were just that: caps of ancient volcanic rock that
had pushed up through the surface of the sea. They were covered
with tangles of brush crowned by a few scattered palms but were
inhabited mainly by turtles and lizards. They offered no anchorage
and promised nothing to passing ships except a splendid view of
massive white waves crashing with spectacular violence against the
barren rocks.

It was
the fifth island, nestled in the middle and rising higher than the
others, that housed the most sought-after secret in the Caribbee.
Formed roughly in the shape of a C with overlapping arms, it had
once been the uppermost rim of a volcano. An ancient upheaval on
the sea floor had cracked the rim and created a natural deep water
harbor in the bowl of the crater, a harbor completely shielded by
walls of seemingly impenetrable rock. Simon Dante had discovered
the island sanctuary purely by accident some thirty years before
when a storm of horrendous proportions had produced fifty foot
waves and swept his ship over the razor-like teeth of coral reef.
It had taken him nearly six months to repair the damage to the keel
of his beloved
Virago
and find
a way out again—time enough to explore all five islands. He named
the largest Pigeon Cay after the small clutch of gray birds his
quartermaster had brought on board. They had been the first, when
released from their cages, to fly straight at the base of the most
improbable wall of sheer rock and show them the way through the
entrance to the crater.