Swept Away By a Kiss (9 page)

He meant to ease the tension, but Valerie’s hands still shook. She took another full breath and words stumbled out.

“I don’t know anything. I only hope.”

A long silence stretched between them. In the shadows, Valerie felt the intensity of his gaze upon her, watchful and waiting.

“Are you all right?” he finally asked.

After a moment, she nodded. He gestured toward the bed.

“You should rest now. Will you be able to?”

Stepping over the ropes tangled upon the floor, Valerie lowered herself onto the mattress. She pushed the woolen blanket to him. Opening the coverlet, she slipped stiffly beneath, but she could not lay her head upon the pillow.

In raw relief, she heard Etienne speak again, his voice now an easy rumble.

“Tell me about your mother, Valerie. No doubt you inherited your beauty from her.”

A peculiar tightness gripped her throat. Men had often complimented her on her looks. None ever did it so meaningfully. It did not matter that Etienne asked hoping to shift her thoughts from the events that had just passed and the horrifying hours she remained bound and gagged, alone and helpless. She wanted the distraction, the reassurance of old memories to soothe her and to calm the confused desire racing through her.

“I am like her in appearance, if only that.” She tucked her hands beneath her cheek and turned onto her side to look at the priest. He lay upon his back, still as burnished bronze in the nearly faded light. “She died when I was a girl.”

A long silence reached through the cool night air as the ship rocked upon the ocean’s mild surface. Valerie sensed it for the first time since returning below deck. How, during all those hours trapped, hadn’t she felt the sea’s lulling rhythm?

“I see,” he finally replied.

Her throat thickened.

“What do you see with your lion’s eyes, Etienne La Marque?”

He turned to her, his gaze unreadable in the shadows. But he did not speak. Valerie longed to reach out and touch his face, to put her hands on him deliberately and ease the frustrated ache of his accidental caresses on her body. To connect with another human, another body and heart and soul bound into one.

To touch him.

“You have the eyes of a lion,” she whispered. “It is a formidable animal. Powerful.” She didn’t know where the words came from, but she could not bring herself to stop them.

“Yet within a pride,” he said, his voice low, “the lioness is the predator to be most feared.”

Valerie’s throat closed. “I am not fearsome.”

“You are strong, Valerie. It is the very meaning of your name. Fortitude.”

She clamped down upon a rising sob. Tears pressed behind her eyes. She blinked them back.

“I am angry. At what he did to me. To you,” she said. “And I want to go home.”

“You will.” In the darkness, his voice curled around her like an embrace.

The midnight street blazed livid with fire. Black clouds billowed from the barricade fashioned of wagons and chairs, shop marquees and bales of straw. Her nostrils clogged with the smoke of burning flesh. She choked, gagging, and collapsed upon her knees. Her hair tumbled about her, obscuring her vision. She lifted a hand to brush it away, and her palm came up from the ground painted thick with blood.

A strong grip seized hers, slipped, clamped around her sticky fingers, and jerked her up. Reflected in his tawny eyes, the flames of a thousand bonfires caressed the silver stars with wild unconcern
.

Chapter 9

A
n unfamiliar sailor brought Valerie breakfast. Fevre stood behind him at the door, his stance edgy as he took in the discarded ropes. Then he instructed the other man to gather the ruined bindings and follow him out.

She paced the cabin until Zeus appeared to take her above deck. The midday sun shone bright again, startling after the dim lower deck. Valerie filled her lungs with salty, fresh air and threw back her shoulders. Sailors cast her glances as she crossed the deck. She returned them, but each snatched his gaze away. Bebain held his crew with a tight rein of fear. She would not find any allies atop, that seemed certain.

Reclining at a table spread with a lavish lunch upon the quarterdeck, the pirate captain inspected her. He stood, brushed flakes of biscuit from his pristine pantaloons, and set down his goblet of wine.

“How did you enjoy your adventure yesterday, little one? More importantly perhaps, how did our fine holy man enjoy it?” He trailed a sharp fingernail along her jaw to her bodice.

She turned her face away.

“It is to be like that, then, is it? He refused to speak of it too, the coward. And I know of your clever trick with the lamp glass.” He leaned toward her again, seeming to study her face. “I needn’t have bothered, eh? Ah well.” He sighed theatrically and shrugged. “So I am still waiting. Growing giddy with impatience, yet still waiting. Hasten your education, my girl. Perhaps I will invent another adventure to inspire our saint, shall I? We shall see, my beauty.” His fingers slid from her shoulder and curved around her breast with proprietary ease. Willing herself not to shy away where he pressed into skin rubbed raw from the ropes, Valerie set her jaw.

At dusk, when another unfamiliar sailor admitted the Jesuit to their shared quarters, she no longer felt so resigned. After hours alone to muse upon her plight and grow more anxious imagining the pirate’s next attempt to subjugate her, Valerie’s hope had become firm resolve.

As Etienne sat and removed the Bible and beads from his cassock, she rehearsed in her mind everything she had planned throughout the afternoon. She didn’t much like the strategy, but it offered her only chance at survival on her terms. If she waited for someone to save her out of the goodness of his heart, she would be aboard this cursed ship forever. And eventually, whether he considered her prepared according to his standards or not, Bebain would take her to his bed. Or kill her.

She could not employ Zeus’s help. He seemed immovable. In any case, her conscience would not allow it. She would not use a man to secure her freedom who had his stolen while still a child. She had only briefly seen Maximin atop this morning and hadn’t spoken to him. But something about his knowing grin told her he would not fall prey to manipulation. Not sufficiently to risk his life for her, at least.

No, she could not depend on the crew for her escape.

That left the priest.

He called them allies, but Valerie needed more than an ally to help her escape Bebain. She needed a devotee, the kind she had depended upon for countless escapades in her past, using the unstinting loyalty of boys and men so blinded by their lust for beauty and wealth they did not know a thing about who she actually was.

With her juvenile heart hungry for attention, she had cared about each of them in her own way, admiring them for one thing or another. But she had not loved them, at least not the way they professed their love to her. For two years she suffered over how she had behaved with willful, spoiled disregard for other people’s hearts. In her Boston isolation and grief, she promised she would never use another person that way again.

Now, however, her desperation swelled to panic. She could lie to Etienne and tell him she felt hopeful. But her skin crawled with terror imagining the pirate captain binding her to his bed the next time, and to his ship the same way he bound the sailors aboard. She saw the blood-caked mainmast and determined that one final time she must have a man’s devotion, someone who would bend to her will no matter what it meant to him.

She slid her gaze along the length of Etienne’s cassock, across his broad shoulders, to his face. Her breath stilled. He stared at her impassively again, golden eyes diffident. But his jaw was tight with control.

Valerie knew that look now. And she knew that although this man might have chosen a career in the church, he was not a celibate by nature.

The night before, he had wanted to touch her, perhaps as much as she wanted him to. His relief when he finished unbinding her told her that. But she would not let him resist any longer. She could not escape Bebain without help. If her fate meant having her body used for a man’s pleasure, she might as well arrange it to her advantage.

She took a fortifying breath and opened the lid of the sandalwood chest.

“There are some fine garments here, Etienne. You should look them over.” A gentleman’s linen shirt topped the pile. She caressed it with supple strokes.

“A man of the cloth has few material needs, Valerie,” he said easily enough, but a subtle tension had entered the chamber. Valerie’s heartbeat raced as she casually folded over several garments to uncover the lace night rail. Her hands arrested upon it for an instant. She pulled back as though surprised.

“Oh. I—” She bit her lower lip, her cheeks warming. Anna had always teased Valerie about her ability to blush on command,
only
on command until she met Etienne La Marque.

Anna would not tease her now.

“I—I cannot imagine what this is intended for,” she said prettily.

“Can’t you?”

Ignoring his flat tone, Valerie drew the night rail from the trunk and draped it across her lap.

“Perhaps it is some sort of undergarment.” She fingered the filmy lace bodice. “Or perhaps not.” Her gaze flickered upward.

Her eyes shot wide. Etienne’s gaze raked her with heat. Unlike the night before, he did not bother masking it. But something else simmered within the fiery depths of his eyes, something familiar and real, that same uncanny awareness of shared understanding she had seen on board the merchantman. Her breath halted, alarm and confusion tangling through her.

Gaze locked on hers, he stood and took a step forward. Reaching down, he curved his fingers tight around her hand holding the night rail and pulled her up. The power radiating from his body dizzied her, urging her to close the tiny space between them. His breaths came taut as his fingers entwined with hers, twisting the seductively soft silk between them, like twined rope but this time binding them together. His golden skin emanated the scents of sea and man and the faintest hint of lime. He filled her senses, his grip unyielding.

Heady with longing, Valerie tilted up her chin. He bent his head and drew her to him, trapping the silk between their bodies, pressing the back of her hand to his chest, his fist nestling between her breasts.

Aching for him, need singing through her breasts and pooling between her legs, Valerie parted her lips, no longer playacting. Far too late, she realized she never had been.

Chapter 10

D
on’t, Valerie.” His breath grazed her brow. Her heart tripped as his hand gripped hers tighter, jamming her knuckles into his hard muscle. “Don’t do this.” His voice was rough. His chest rose, brushing her sensitized nipples. “I told you already, I will be your ally. I swear you will not be harmed. Do not look for more assurance than that.”

Shame rushed through her, prickly and wretched. Smothering the alien emotion with anger, she yanked her hand away. The night rail fell to the floor.

Etienne picked it up and placed it in the trunk. He leaned back against the table, folding his arms across his chest. He took a deep breath before he spoke.

“If it helps to hear it, I don’t blame you.”

A sensation like humiliation, cold and wrapped in confusion, settled into Valerie’s midsection. She cast him a sharp look.

“You’d better not. Hypocrisy is particularly unappealing in a priest.”

Etienne laughed, the sound resonating with open honesty in the tiny chamber.

“Oh, come now, Valerie.” The corner of his sculpted lips lifted. “You are a beautiful woman. I would be dead not to notice that.” He paused. “Or to want to touch you.”

The coil inside Valerie tightened. Weak-limbed, she sank onto the edge of the bed, unable to meet his gaze and hating herself for it. Frustration and bewilderment warred inside her.

“Isn’t priestly training supposed to drive that out of a man?”

“Suppress it, perhaps,” he murmured. Her gaze slid up. He met it with frank acknowledgment. “Desire is not so easily defeated.”

Did he know how he affected her, or was this tumult of feelings hers alone? Men could so easily separate lust from emotion. She had known that for years. Why did she think this man should be different?