Across a Moonlit Sea (26 page)

His heart thundered in his chest, his blood pounded in his veins, and he could hear her name whispered over and over on his lips. He could feel his body gathering in upon itself, channeling all the heat, the power, the feverish hunger,
into nothing more noble than the savage rise and fall of his hips.

As Beau arched up beneath him, he threw his head back and braced himself on outstretched arms, stiffening, shuddering in the throes of an orgasm so bright and brilliant, it was all he could do to keep from roaring his pleasure out loud. As it was, he was helpless to hold the smallest part of himself back as he spent himself in a white-hot and seemingly endless climax within her.

Beau was melting. Trembling. Quivering like a silk pennant on a shiver of wind. Dante’s solid presence was still inside her, thudding against dewy folds of flesh that had gone slack and buttery with shock. Her hands were still grasped to his hips and her legs were locked tightly around his. His breath was warm against her throat, his body was heavy and damp and, where it was wedged between her thighs, as reluctant as she was to relinquish the gentle rocking motions that were bringing them slowly back to reality.

A final satiated groan brought him to a languid halt. He was all chest and arms and rock-hard thighs and he must have felt her trying to shift slightly beneath him, for he lifted his head out of the crook of her shoulder and thoughtfully transferred some of his weight onto his elbows.

Sometime between being outside and coming inside, the candle had died and there was only moonlight bathing their features. His face was a mixture of pale light and shadow, mostly the latter because of his hair, which had become as wild and tangled as her own.

“Well,” he murmured, and then just “Well,” again.

Beau searched for something equally profound to say, but her tongue seemed to have become too clumsy to do more than keep company with her teeth. Her hair was spread across the bedding, and her legs—one was wedged
against the cabin wall and the other had nowhere to go but off the side of the bed—felt chafed and tenderly abused along the inner thighs. A movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention and she turned her head slightly—with Dante following the motion—to see a pair of hose snagged on the corner of the chart table where he had tossed them.

Reading the consternation in her eyes, Dante bent his head down and nibbled gently at the corners of her mouth. “You will have to forgive me, mam’selle, if I was a tad overeager. It has been a long time and my … manners … may have been somewhat lacking.”

“You tore my shirt,” she said, frowning. “And threw it overboard.”

“It was worth the price of a replacement,” he murmured, running his lips along her chin and down the supple length of her throat.

“A belt and a knife as well.”

“I’ll buy you a dozen more. For that matter, you are a wealthy young woman now, you can afford to buy your own and to throw them overboard after each time you wear them.”

Beau let her senses track the progress of his mouth as he nuzzled her temple, her cheek, the tight, damp curls that lay below her ear. A smile curved her lips and for one mad, irrational moment, she wanted to thank him, for he had done his best and she had survived, emerged with all of her faculties intact. She could breathe, think, react, reason. She could regain control again.

The moment passed and the smile became an open-mouthed sigh. His lips were around her breast, grazing impudently on her nipple.

“Are you not … the least bit sleepy, Captain?” she asked dreamily.

“Truthfully?” He paused and warmed her skin with a slow roll of his tongue. “No. Are you?”

Beau contemplated her answer while she watched his mouth take a meandering course from one pinkened nipple to the other. If anything, she felt remarkably exhilarated, even though seconds ago she could have sworn every muscle and bone in her body had melted away to nothing.

His tongue made a final, wet revolution before his dark head came up and he gazed thoughtfully at the lushness of her mouth.

“Because if you are”—his hands twined around the silky ribbons of her hair and the heat of his body pressed forward, stretching and swelling within her—“I am afraid you are going to have to tolerate my ill manners again. And possibly again after that.”

Beau’s great golden eyes shimmered up at him. Her hands skimmed lightly around the strong column of his neck and threaded themselves with equal conviction into the glossy black mane. “Father would say good manners are required only at the Queen’s table.”

“Your father is a wise man.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I know.”

 T
he grappling lines between the
Egret
and the
San Pedro de Marcos
were cast off two hours after sunrise. There was plenty more cargo in the holds of the Spanish galleon, valuable cargo that would have brought a small fortune with the London merchants. But there was simply no room left onboard the
Egret.
They had already made one hard decision to dump the weightier bars of silver overboard rather than leave it on the
San Pedro
to benefit the Spanish king. After the gold was loaded, what little storage space that remained was saved for the lighter, more exotic, and therefore more profitable bales of pepper and cloves.

Jonas Spence had already been on deck when the sunrise spread orange and pink clouds across the horizon. Spit had come to fetch him when the last available cranny had been stuffed and sealed. Crews had been working all through the night on repairs; and with their holds bulging, their next priority was to put as much open sea between the two ships as possible.

With the Marquis de Moncada dead, command of the
San Pedro
had fallen to the next senior officer, one of the
two who had been in on the original discussions of surrender in the captain-general’s great cabin. His name was Recalde, and he had been standing less than a pace from Moncada when Dante’s shot had torn away most of the Spaniard’s face. He would not soon forget the name of either Jonas Spence—as Dante had given it—or the
Egret.

Spence had been carried on deck to supervise the ungrappling. Thomas Moone had still not fashioned a new limb, and as the irascible captain was already bleary eyed and thick tongued, there were few men brave enough to venture onto the foredeck where their bullish captain hobbled along the rail roaring orders until his face was as red as his beard.

Used to her father’s temper, Beau appeared on deck ten or fifteen minutes after Jonas but preferred the company of Billy Cuthbert and her charts. It would be her job to plot the course least likely to be intercepted by any ships sent to hunt them down, not to mention the many predators from England, Portugal, or France who regularly stalked the sea lanes looking for easy prey. Dante’s guns would act as somewhat of a deterrent, as would the obvious signs of a battle hard fought and won. Even so, Beau would have preferred a little heavy weather and stronger winds to hasten them on their way.

Before the confrontation with the Spaniard she had estimated they were three weeks out of Plymouth, but that was also before adding several tons of plunder to their ballast. Their speed would suffer, as would their maneuverability; there would be a detectably heavy difference in the way the Egret responded to orders from the helm. But she was fixed with a new arm for the tiller, stouter and stronger than the first, and a crew determined to reach the shores of England with their newfound wealth intact.

The last transfer between the
San Pedro
and the Egret may not have been the most valuable in terms of monetary compensation, but to some on board the English galleon, Doña Maria Antonia Piacenza’s presence was as comforting as Dante’s demi-cannon. She crossed the ladeboard with only her duenna and Geoffrey Pitt as escorts. Her two other maids had, for lack of any comfortable quarters to house them, been left behind. She was permitted to bring only three of the twenty-three leather trunks that held her personal possessions and, for her protection, was assigned hastily cleaned and reconfigured quarters opposite the captain’s great cabin. Beau’s tiny sail locker and the weapons armory were consolidated into one cabin and refurbished with a bed, a washstand, and Persian carpets taken from the
San Pedro.

It was one of the few times Beau’s head came up from her charts. She stood by the after rail and watched as Geoffrey Pitt led the tiny duchess across the planks, one gingerly taken step after another. She was bundled head to toe in a hooded velvet cape, with only a suggestion of huge frightened eyes and a pale face peeping out from the circle of fur trim. Her gloved hand was clutched to Pitt’s arm as if it were a lifeline. Equally dainty satin-slippered feet stepped down onto the deck of the Egret with all the confidence of a bird fluttering to its doom.

Dante had said Pitt was smitten by her beauty, so it was no surprise to see him acting so protectively and attentively. It was surprising, however, to see some of the weathered tars doff their caps and stare, with their mouths gawped open and their normally lewd and ribald catcalls choked back into their throats as the Duchess of Navarre passed.

As chance would have it, she had to pass directly under where Beau was standing in order to make way to her
cabin. The large eyes, darting every which way in trepidation, looked up and, for a moment, registered shock at seeing another woman on board. The hood slipped back and the creamy white, heart-shaped face was exposed. And if all the sweetness, innocence, and virginal naïveté were not cloying enough, a traitorous breeze pushed aside the edges of the duchess’s cape and revealed a gown of polished lavender silk beneath. The hem was decorated a foot or more with a banding of elaborate gold tracery; the overskirt was parted almost to the waist and pinned back to display the elegantly brocaded petticoat of dark, rich rose. Around her neck she wore a crucifix, the cross positioned directly over her heart; around the impossibly narrow span of her waist, she wore a long, jeweled belt, the ends falling in a cascade of rippling gold links.

Beau looked down at her own dull hose, shirt, and doublet, none of which could be called perfectly clean or perfectly whole. Her hair was once again pulled back and fettered in a braid, leaving nothing to camouflage the large blue bruise on her forehead or the scabbed crease that ran into her scalp. Her hands, where they rested on the rail, were tanned and weather-roughened, the nails chipped and stained. The palms, at least, were minus a few layers of calluses, but the rope burns had left them as red as if she had dipped them in crushed berries. Her mouth was probably no better off, having been suckled and kissed for the better part of the night. Her chin and throat were tender as well, chafed by an irreverent jaw stubbled blue-black with coarse hairs.

As for the rest of her body …
dainty, delicate
, and
virginal
were hardly the words she would use to describe how she felt. Despite the fact that Dante had spent an inordinate amount of time massaging each muscle, each square
inch of skin, with his scented oil, she was aching and tender in places that brought a blaze of hot color to her cheeks just thinking about them.

And where was he, anyway?

He had not been in the cabin when she had groaned herself out of bed at dawn. He had not been on the fore-deck with Spence or on the main deck to greet Pitt and his delicate little duchess, although she imagined the pretense of his being the captain of the Egret had ended the moment the ladeboard planks had been withdrawn from the
San Pedro.

“Good morning.”

Beau jumped an inch or so out of her skin and whirled around. He was standing behind her, dressed in a clean white shirt and tight black hose, looking as fresh and roguish as if he had slept another three-day stretch. He had shaved and bound the waves of his hair back with a leather thong. The ends of each strand glistened with water, suggesting he had just emerged from the sea.

“Good morning,” she said, and hastened back to her charts.

“To everyone’s good fortune it looks like we will be under way several hours ahead of schedule.”