Chapter 12 #3
“Good Lord! And a swagger too.” A smile traced on the erotic mouth. “From Merry with an e and two r’s to Anne Bonney, scourge of the Indies.”
Anne Bonney was a celebrated female pirate of the last century who ended her cutthroat career not, as one might think, on the business end of a gibbet, but in unsanctioned pregnancy. If there was a lesson in that for Merry, she had no wish to figure out what it was.
“Piracy is a hateful trade,” she said, with a belligerence she would rapidly come to regret, “and if you think that wearing britches makes me into one, then I’ll take them off right now.”
As blunders went, it ranked among her worst. Catching the inference on the last word, Merry tried to choke it back in; naturally it was too late. She turned hastily to spare herself the shame of having to watch him laugh.
Before long she felt his hands, warm on her shoulders.
She was pulled backward and settled kindly against the firm support of his body, the contact neither forced nor cruelly suggestive.
Instead, it had almost a matter-of-fact quality to it and a reluctant affection.
His fingers searching comfortably in her hair, found and exposed her ear, and she could feel his breath there.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “We don’t punish maladroit ladies here by making them unbritch publicly.” His lips brushed her delicately, barely touching her skin. “You and I probably aren’t ready for anything as audacious as polite communication, but should we see if we can manage a crude facsimile?”
Light-headed from his touch and from the effort not to show it, Merry nodded. He turned her in his hands to face him and then stepped back and released her.
“Subjective evidence to the contrary, my sweet captive, I don’t make a habit of carrying off and maltreating very young women, be they ever so unwisely bed warmers for my enemies.
You amuse me, and that’s probably going to save your life, but at best your presence is damnably inconvenient.
Why don’t we get rid of one another? I’m willing to make you one final offer: For the answer to my question, only one, I’ll give you your freedom, plus a payment in gold, the sum to be your choice, within reason.
And I’ll make sure that you’d never be traced as the information source. ”
The telltale blush was still staining her cheeks, brightly spread like cheap rouge. She ought to have told him to stop right there. She would have told him to stop right there if her jaw hadn’t been paralyzed with wrath.
He said, “All I want, Merry, is the name of either of the two men who were with you that night at the Musket and Muskrat.”
His searching gaze was thorough, and Merry, having more than a nodding acquaintance with the swift processes of his mind, worked quickly to damper the telltale indignation. There would be no saying “How dare you! Do you think that I’d sell out my brother and my cousin for your filthy money?”
“I won’t do it,” she said with dignity and received back a long, cool stare before he shrugged and answered her good-humoredly.
“It’s your life, angel.”
“And now,” said Merry, her expression brittle and sparkling, “you’ll turn me over to the crew?”
“Will I? It isn’t likely to do me much good. They seem to have already turned themselves over to you. Baubles for the fairy queen; toadstool umbrellas for the pixies; you have your own sorcery, don’t you?”
It was not easy to tell precisely what he meant, but it didn’t imply a great deal of trust. “I suppose,” she said, “that you’re disappointed not to find me lying dismembered on the deck.”
“Try to see things sometimes in shades of gray, Merry. I’m interested in a little sensible compromise; the less I hurt you along the way, the better. You might try taking some of the responsibility for finding an intelligent solution.”
“But I thought we already had one,” she responded quickly. “You were going to sell me into slavery—”
“Did I say that?” His vivid eyes twinkled appreciatively in mock surprise.
Furiously, “You know you did! Why are you smiling about it now? Did you mean it, or were you just trying to frighten me? It’s as Cat told me, isn’t it? That you’re out to buffet my—my emotions.” She could not bring herself to say the word guts.
Slight as it had been, he caught, understood, and grinned at the hesitation.
“Merry—” The dying sunlight graced her, pinking the white porcelain cheeks, where the skin was as finely textured as a young child’s.
There were times when her eyes became so wide and susceptible that their expression, like that in a caricature, was almost silly, a structural trick of sumptuous facial bones.
It was hardly the kind of thing he would have expected to find endearing, and he might not have, had it not been combined in her with a dazzling lack of awareness.
Not once had he seen her use her looks as a weapon, which was amazing, because it was a remarkable one, and it was not as though she had many.
He would’ve sworn she’d been raised in a mythological kingdom where there were no mirrors.
“I’m no more immune to sorcery than the next man,” he said softly, gazing down into her blue eyes, fixed on him with an infant’s unwinking stare.
“Hoodlum though I am, I’m not going to barter away your seductive little hide.
” Nor was he ready to take the chance of setting her free until he learned something about who and what she was; and while, for that reason, he had tried to scare the truth out of her, Cat, as usual, was correct.
You cannot keep a young and obviously fragile person in a state of constant terror.
“Then you’ll release me?” she said, almost sick with hope. “Please. You’ve admitted you don’t want me.”
“No. You’ll leave when you talk, Merry.”
It was having to make statements to her of just that kind of stagy vulgarity that was most offensive to an intellect that knew better.
Melodrama, which he’d always hated, seemed to be an integral part of the abductor role.
The corners of his lips teased upward into a smile.
“And you misunderstand. I said you were inconvenient—but not that I didn’t want you. I do want you. Or have you forgotten?”
His hands found her waist in a movement that was swift and graceful, and Merry was drawn into a firm embrace before she’d had time to begin the work of relaxing the hard knot in her throat.
Inside her skin was a body that was reeling, a heart bouncing painfully into ribs that seemed not to fit any longer in her chest. His clothes and hers, under normal circumstances perfectly adequate, were suddenly a shockingly thin layer, a sparse weave of threads that allowed too clearly the caress of one body by another.
Exploded was the happy fiction that it had all been Morgan’s drugs, the first night with Devon in his cabin, that had made her dissolve like ice crystals in an oven.
As little as she knew about intimacy, she was getting a very strong hint from that space in her body where the blood was starting to convene; it had certainly vacated her head.
Everything neck up was cold and giddy, and everything neck down was hot and swimming.
And everything from her waist down was boiling like spiced stew.
She tried desperately to strain her hips away from him, and all she got for her pains was the flat of his spread hand sliding down her back, and then, resting on a part of her body she never mentioned by name, he cupped her gently back to him.
“Don’t,” he said, and in his voice there was a smile. “That’s the best part.”
All she could do after that was to close her eyes and pretend she wasn’t there.
His hands, behind her, were moving idly, discovering as though for the first time the down-soft hollows and fertile curves.
Aware of the stiffly held angle of her head, he lifted one hand, threaded under the heavy surface of her hair, and massaged the back of her neck until her cheek relaxed against his chest and her body rested from its resistance.
“Where are we now?” he murmured. “Are we admitting we like it, or are we still pretending we don’t?”
Clinging hopelessly to some remnant of pride, Merry said, “Why do you think it’s pretending I don’t?”
“Well.” His hands drifted downward again and lifted her lightly into him. “There’s the faintest trace”—he moved her softly—“of a response.” Bringing up her face, he smiled at her with eyes so rich in warmth they could have melted cold lead.
She was trying to find a good answer as he tilted her head back and laid careful kisses on her eyelids, with their delicate shadowing of blue-veined tracery.
Her cheeks burned under the graze of his lips, and then he moved lower, pressing his mouth over hers and spreading the rounded fullness, probing slowly through the velvet flesh.
Faint and pressureless, his fingers played in the dainty lines of her ear.
The hand supporting her back rocked her back and forth with languid sensuality.
Under the press of his body Merry ached in colors; the reds of the shore fires, the brilliant russets fading in the western sky, the white milk-mist from the distant stars; she tingled every hue in the prism.
The world was a collection of sweet and vivid light beams, and she was one of them, and mindless, a spinning miscellany of liquid cells.
When finally he lifted his head, his breathing sounded soft and even to her, while she could barely pull the air in and out of her sore lungs.
She said, “If you’re done, just prop me there against the foremast.”