Under the Boardwalk: A Dazzling Collection of All New Summertime Love Stories (45 page)

This, then, was what Jack loved most about her.

Even with her eyes closed, her grin was slightly lopsided, slightly challenging as she stretched toward him, and her lips glistened wetry from the perry that she hadn't licked away. He remembered when she'd pulled off her hat, but somewhere else she'd lost her demure little cap, too, as well as most of her hairpins, for now her hair spilled freely over her shoulders, tousled and wanton. Her neckerchief had come untucked and she hadn't bothered to put it back to rights, leaving him with a voluptuous view of her round, full breasts above her lacing.

He'd pulled off his shirt in the boat, and this was how she'd answered him. He'd offered her the pear liquor and she'd drunk her fill. He'd touched his thumb to the plump cushion of her lip as a preamble to a kiss, and she'd openly savored the touch, inviting more. She'd never been a coward, not his Princess Miriam, and she wasn't going to become one now.

He'd seen enough of the world to understand that, anywhere else, this would have been called seduction, mutually pleasing and agreeable. But here on their island Jack knew it was simply one more dare, the same kind of daring that he and Miriam had done to each another as long as he could remember. Yet this time the dare wasn't as simple as who could race faster along the sand to the boat, or even who would lean forward and kiss the other first. This time, this night, there was so much more at stake that for the first time in their shared life, Jack shook his head and sat back on his heels.

She heard him sigh with regret, and when he did not kiss her, she suspiciously opened one eye, then the second "Jack Wilder," she said. "I vow, if you intend to torment me like this the entire night, why, then, I shall—"

"I cannot do it, lass," he said sorrowfully. "Not to you, and not like this."

"You have not done much of anything that I've noticed." She sat back, too, her skirts rustling beneath her as she folded her hands in her lap and studied him with wary unease. "Except the kidnapping part, of course."

"Then your memory is either very short, or very forgiving. The little fire popped, and he jabbed another piece of driftwood into the flames. "By bringing you here, I've ruined you for any kind of decent life. You said so yourself. I haven't laid a finger—well, yes, maybe that one thumb—upon you, and yet I've ruined you just the same."

"Oh, Jack." Instantly her expression lost its wariness, her smile wobbling and her eyes shining so brightly by the firelight that he feared she'd begin to weep. 'I know I said that, but if I'm to be honest, you ruined me years ago."

"Aye, but it wasn't as willful as this. When we sat beneath the dock together that night, I hadn't planned on anything happening, leastways not the way it did."

"Maybe you didn't plan," she scoffed, "but I will wager you
hoped
, just like you're hoping tonight. Don't forget how well I know you, Jack Wilder. But when I said you ruined me, I meant that after you, no other man would seem so—so right for me."

"Ah, Mirry, don't be going on like that," he said uncomfortably, poking at the fire again as he tried not to think about the velvety shadows that were playing across the valley between her breasts. After four years with only thieves and blackguards for company, he was having a very difficult time being as honorable and noble with her as he wished now to be, and as she deserved. He took a deep breath and began again.

"I love you, and I'll always love you," he said as firmly as he could. "There's no secret to that. And because I love you, I'd never wish you any harm. But look at me, Miriam, just look at me, and tell me I'm not the greatest load of harm that's ever come your way."

She gasped, her eyes round with indignation. "That's not true, not a word of it!"

He rose to his feet instead of answering, turning his back on her to stare out at the open sea with his hands knotted into fists at his sides. The weather was changing; there'd be rain by morning. Away from the fire the breeze off the water was cool, or maybe the chill on his skin came simply from leaving Miriam.

"Look at me, Mirry," he said, despair rising up within him. "Look at me true, not as you want me to be. I'm twenty-four years old and I've yet to do one single thing in my life that's worthy of you. I'm a bad man, lass, and you're the only one in the world that would dare say otherwise."

"Please don't do this to yourself, Jack, please—"

"I'll do what I damned well please, sweetheart, because I always do." He laughed bitterly, his mood growing darker by the moment. Because he loved Miriam, he had to tell her the truth. But the irony of it was that once he did, she'd never be able to love him again.

"I told you I hated those bastards who were my father's friends, and aye, at first I did. But the farther we sailed from here, across the Atlantic and down the Guinea coast and around the Horn, the more those two black-hearted men—Long Will Stevens and Asa Paton—became my friends, too. They were my mates, and when they told me tales of my father, I could see him as a flesh-and-blood man. They made him real to me, Miriam, and for the first time in my life I knew who I
was
. I was one of them, and I liked it. I liked it just fine."

He had, too. The
Dasher
had been the largest ship he'd ever sailed in, and Captain Ellis had been a better master than many of the respectable Christian captains he'd known. He liked seeing lands so different from Massachusetts. And once they'd reached the Indian Ocean and began taking prizes, he'd discovered he liked that, too, the excitement of the chase and the dangerous challenge of the capture, of being tested in battle against wild-eyed men as desperate as himself.

"I was a true pirate at last, Mirry, the same as my father, but it wasn't like the games you and Zach and I played here on Carmondy. Pirating's only a fancy word for being a thief; I know that now. But then I kept thinking of you, sweetheart, how proud I'd make you by coming back a rich man with real treasure, the kind we'd always dreamed we'd find here. But I couldn't even do that right."

"You don't have to be rich, Jack," she said behind him, and from the way her voice broke he could tell he'd made her cry—one more sorrow he'd brought her. "That isn't why I love you."

But he shook his head again, and he didn't turn around because he didn't deserve the comfort of her sympathy. The hardest part to tell was next, the part mat still haunted him, awake and asleep and in between, and always would.

"I could have been a rich man, Mirry, rich enough to buy all of Westham with jingle left in my pocket. I could have made you proud of me at last." He hunched his shoulders low, unconsciously bracing himself against the shame of the past. "It was off Madagascar that we fell in with two small ships. Some great mogul's treasure ships, they were supposed to be. The first, when we took it, was filled with gold and ivory, more than any Englishman can fancy. But the second had only the mogul's wives and daughters and their poor servants. Our captain was wicked unhappy, declaring they'd lied to us, and now must pay."

He took another deep breath, knowing he must finish. "I—I couldn't do it, Mirry," he said, his voice cracking beneath the burden he'd shared with no one else. "I couldn't follow those orders, not for all the gold and ivory under Heaven."

He would never forget the terrified screams of those Indian women, or their wails of grief when the ones who'd survived were cast adrift in their empty ship, without a crew to guide them. Captain Ellis called it merciful not to have slit their throats to silence them, but Jack knew the real horror had been in letting them live.

He was shaking now and could not stop, and when Miriam's arms slipped around his waist and held him tight, her skirts fluttering against his legs and her face pressed against his back, he could feel the heat of her tears on his skin. Blindly he felt for her hands, covering them with his own as he bowed his head.

"They thought I'd gone daft, Mirry," he continued, his voice now scarcely more than a rasping, raw whisper. "How could I be Johnny Wilder's son? They laughed at me, but when I tried to help those poor, weeping creatures, they locked me below like a madman. Then they damned me for a coward, for a traitor and worse, and only my father's name kept them from killing me, too. But I knew then I was done with pirating. Never again, Mirry. Never, do you hear? The hour we touched shore again, I ran, and I left them and all their cursed treasure behind for the devil himself to claim. I ran, and I didn't stop until I reached you."

Her fingers twisted and curled into his, all the gentleness and solace his battered soul craved there in her little hands.

"You're home now, Jack," she murmured. "Everything else is done, finished, and now you're safe home with me."

"But that doesn't change what I am, Miriam. I've nothing to give you in return, not one blasted thing that's worthy of you."

With infinite care, Miriam slid around to face him. She had never seen him like this, never seen this bleak, haunted emptiness in his eyes, arid it broke her heart to know how much he must have struggled to keep the demons locked within, to keep up the bluff, brash face that had fooled the rest of the world.

She could barely imagine what he'd suffered, and only guess at everything he hadn't told her. Yet when she remembered how much his unknown father and the stories about him had meant to Jack, she understood with poignant clarity how he could have been seduced by the excitement of his father's outlaw existence—and how fortunate he'd been to escape before he'd shared his father's death.

"Oh, Jack, you great oaf," said Miriam softly as she lifted her hands to each side of his face, his beard rough upon her palms as she drew him down. "Why can't you believe that all I ever wanted was you?"

When they'd kissed before it had been from desire, from pleasure shared, but now when their mouths sought and found one another the passion that burned between them was raw with a different kind of longing. She
needed
to be his, to belong to him in every possible way and prove to him the depth and the breadth of her love. With this kind of love, the horrors of his past could be healed and recede, and with love they could begin to fmd their way through whatever came next

Her lips parted forhim at once, yielding to his hunger as she cradled his face. She fete his hunger in his touch, too, his hands sliding over her, scorching her through the layers of her clothes as he pulled their bodies closer together. She braced her hands across his bare chest, relishing the textures of hair curling over warm skin, skin over taut muscle. She found the puckered scar that sliced across his chest, another mark of how he'd suffered, and another way, too, that she could mark him as her own, her lips tracing a hot, teasing path along the cruel seam to the top of his hip, to the edge of his breeches.

But it couldn't begin to be enough, and as the fever grew hotter between them he began to pull at her clothes, yanking at the laces and knots and ribbons that barred his way. She broke away from the kiss to help him, her fingers trembling as first her bodice slipped from her shoulders, then her petticoat fell from her hips.

He had no patience with her stays, and she grinned, too, when he snapped the cord in the back and the whalebone and buckram fell away from the fine linen of her shift. He filled his hands with her newly freed breasts, murmuring lover's nonsense to her as he kissed her lips, her chin, her throat, before at last he tugged at the drawstring on her shift, lower, lower, until his lips could suckle on her nipples. She gasped as the pleasure swept through her, bowing her head over his as her ringers clutched convulsively at the hard muscles of his shoulders.

His fingers spread to cover the swell of her hips, gliding down the outside of her thighs until they reached the hem, shoving aside the fragile linen. She shuddered as he moved higher along the inside of her legs, easing them apart to touch her intimately with the same thumb that he'd rubbed across her lip. She gasped, swaying into him for support, and gently he rocked her backwards, into the hollowed nest of the coverlet over the sand.

As he tore away his breeches, she watched him with eyes heavy-lidded with desire. Before there'd been no time to admire him for the beautiful man that he was, to see his maleness like this, hot and powerful and gilded by the glow of the fire.

But desire gave them little such time now, either, and as she pulled off her shift to be the same as he was, he joined her, his weight welcome on her body. She kissed him again, and when he lifted her hips and entered her, her cry of joy was lost in his mouth. She gasped as he began to move, driving into her with a rhythm she was quick to answer, and pleasure whirled them higher with every stroke. Her body tightened and arched, frantically seeking the release that could only come from him, and as she cried his name one last time it did, sweeping them both along in its path and leaving her trembling and spent beneath him.

"You're home, Jack," she whispered as she held him tight, and kissed away what could have been a tear from his stubbled cheek. "You're home to stay, and so am I."