Chapter 8 #4
Minutes had passed since Devon had been able to think about anything more than his need to bury himself within this charming opiated creature, with her enamel-blue eyes and velvet skin.
Delighting in a desire that had not been so vivid for many years, he was slow to realize that her bare shivering legs were doing their best to shove him away.
He pressed a broad palm to her thigh, and while the feel of it was enough to make his head swim, he was able, with kindness, to still the pace of her foolish struggles.
“Remind me tomorrow,” he told her, “to teach you the best place to kick a man.”
Her open senses burned under the sting of his amusement. “I intend before then to find it myself!”
“Oh, Lord,” he said thickly, laughing, pulling off her.
“A riposte. Soon we’ll probably be sounding like Kate and Petruchio.
” Against the swell of her mouth his smiling lips quoted, “ ‘For thou art pleasant, gamesome, passing courteous, but slow in speech, yet sweet as springtime flowers.’ ” And when she tried to pound against him with her fists, he caressed her with a whisper: “ ‘Come, come, you wasp; in faith, you are too angry.’ ”
She knew the play. In an unexpected moment of self-discovery Merry found it a point of pride to cap his quotation. She said, “If I be waspish, best beware my sting!”
She felt the twitch of his cheek as his mouth curved into a grin. “Not such execrable taste in literature after all. Not that I’ve ever particularly liked that play.”
Like the graceful turn of a dancer’s wrist that alters subtly the sense of a ballet, the pirate’s kiss changed.
What had been demanding became comforting, light touching rather than brutal tracing.
A different woman might have read pity there, but for one moment, for the flash of a falcon’s wingbeat, Merry’s spirit, with its undiscovered complexities, fused, frightened and resistingly, with his.
They were, ever so briefly, two intuitive people swept together in a desire that chagrined the one and shamed the other.
Kissing her, he mused that really he ought to be better organized about this; a woman who memorizes Shakespeare shouldn’t be taken against a table like a field whore in Spain.
Merry caught the rough shadow of his thought and read there, though more innocently, his amusement, and his admiration, and his intention.
There was no point in trying to pray, no point in trying to struggle, because by now the mind-trails to her muscles had ceased to obey her will.
All that was left for her was to lie, inert under the beguiling caress of his mouth and the warm floating movements of his skilled hands over her body.
Her lips were parted, the tip of her breast was hard and aching under his curving fingers, and she felt so idiotic that it seemed instead of kissing her he ought to be boxing her ears.
The ship moved beneath them like a great groaning elephant.
Lantern light sprayed through the room, transforming every color Merry saw into a shimmering scale of green or yellow.
Suns with black burning centers and sharp yellow runners littered her vision.
Earlier today there had been another dark sun, and a reedy voice that said, “I crave the wench,” and Merry drug-dreamed Jack in her mind and smelled his dirty whiskers and saw the greasy string of spit on his chin and knew that she was going to be sick.
“Devon,” she said. And she had repeated it twice before he said, “Yes, love?”
“Devon, please help me. I—I—”
“What?”
Need suffocated the embarrassment attendant on what was about to happen. “I’m sick,” she managed. “I really am.”
She was the only woman who had ever lain in his arms and told him such a thing. He said in a reassuringly sensible voice, “What kind of sick?”
“Going to be sick,” said Merry, groaning like the ship.
Devon lifted his head and saw that it was true.
“That’s what you get,” he observed under his breath with an expression that she couldn’t understand, “when you force yourself on a seasick woman splattered with bhang and bruises.”
She protested as he made to move her, but he lifted her in spite of it and advised her tartly that whatever she might enjoy doing flat on her back, egesting the contents of her stomach couldn’t be one of them.
And he did the civilized things that he could for her with simple decency; when he saw it was too late, he brought the washbowl and gave her the support of his arms, having an errant memory of doing the same for his cousin Steven at his…
what? sixth birthday? fifth? That her young body should remind him of his smallest cousin was an uncomfortable thought; he retained it, using it to force moderation on the high pump of his pulse, which was slow in recognizing the change in circumstances.
Her stomach didn’t seem to realize it was useless; the drug had entered through her lungs and would not be thrown off with a simple purge; and as she lay exhausted in his arms, on the bed, she felt once his lips touch the back of her neck and heard him say, with a murmur of laughter, “I hope, my love, that you realize this is an incalculable blow to my self-esteem.”
She fell asleep with his patient fingers stroking her cheek. God, who had a much better sense of humor than she had ever before suspected, had heard her prayers with a grin.