Claimed by the Rogue (6 page)

She brought the wine to her lips with a trembling hand. “Thank God you were spared,” she said with feeling, the first to warm her voice since she’d revived.
 

Watching her closely, he answered with a nod, wondering what it would take to thaw her. Alone though they’d been left, she’d yet to meet his overtures with anything approaching affection.
 

She lowered the glass. “And afterward?”
 

Robert hesitated. “Eventually I made my way to India,” he said as if the two intervening years spent as a slave in a Malagasy granite quarry had never happened. Would to God that might be so! “Once arrived at Fort William, I learned that my post had been long since filled, myself believed to be dead, drowned along with the others. My attempts for an interview with the commander were received with contempt. Rather than expend time and breath attempting to convince my superiors that I was who I claimed, I left and took a new name, Robert Lazarus, and commenced my maritime training with the Company with an eye to captaincy.”

“You changed your name? To
Lazarus
?” she emphasized, lobbing him a look as though he’d added blasphemy to his sins’ mounting heap.
 

He shrugged, the burden of subterfuge weighing upon his shoulders as once the slave yoke had done. “Given my circumstances, the Biblical reference seemed fitting.” A swift swig of port served to clear some of the emotion thickening his throat. “Altering my identity was easier than you might think. What valuables and money I’d sailed with were either pilfered by the pirates or sacrificed with the sunken ship. Without so much as my packet of orders to commend me, I had no means of proving my identity. It wasn’t long before I resolved that a career at sea, not land would prove the more profitable course.”
 

The privilege of pursuing one’s personal trade had drawn many an ambitious man to East India Company service at sea. As a ship’s captain, Robert was entitled to carry his own cargo as well as that belonging to the Company.
 

She slammed her glass down upon a marble-topped table, sending sticky liquid slopping. “What of my aspirations, my hopes and dreams, most of which perished once I thought you dead?”

So he hadn’t imagined it. She was well and truly angry, her standoffishness a subterfuge to screen her seething—thank God!

Grateful for the thaw in her—he far preferred fury to the previous prickly politeness—he nonetheless crafted his response with care. “I’d survived the ship’s sinking, but nothing had changed, not really. I still had nothing to offer you.” Not even his life, which overnight had become the property of another man. “Staying dead whilst I sought my fortune seemed the kindest course. It’s taken me the devil of a long time, but I’ve become a man of means, deucedly rich.”
 

It was no idle boast. Coffers of gold and silver, silks and precious gems, and East India Company coin had been his reward for foiling an attempt on the life of the silk merchant, his final master. His first purchase as a free man had been Caleb. Liberating his friend had still left him with wealth beyond his youthful imaginings. The spices and silks from the present voyage alone should more than suffice for setting his Sussex estate to rights, the home to which he meant to take her once they were wed.

The glare she gave him might have melted iron. “How nice for you.”

“Not for me but for
us
. It’s taken me a while—very well, bloody long, but I’m finally in the position to take proper care of you.”

Her eyes darkened, the pupils all but obliterating the silver-blue irises. “Do I look as though I’m in need of caretaking?”
 

The girl he’d left behind had been both softly spoken and sweetly disposed. The woman to whom he’d returned was prickly as a porcupine and bitter as carbolic, her resemblance to the Phoebe he’d known and loved limited to her fair looks.
 

“I only meant I am able to provide the life you deserve.” Patience nearing its end, he drained his glass. Setting it aside, he swiped the back of his hand across his mouth, freezing when he saw how her lip curled. “Bloody hell, what does it matter where I’ve been or how long or even why? I’m here now. I’m here to stay.”
 

Weary with waiting, he reached out and took her face between his palms. Her skin was silken as he remembered but marble-cold. He searched her beautiful eyes, but they were cold too.
 

Resolved to resurrect the light in them, in
her
, he added, “If you believe nothing else, know this: there was not a single day or waking hour that I did not think of you.”

“Ha!” Phoebe surged to her feet. “Tell me, in the throes of all that…
thinking
, how could you not trouble yourself even once to put pen to paper and let us know you lived?”

The torturers hadn’t only rent his flesh. Appalling as his scars might appear, the very worst of them were on the inside. Even after he’d won his freedom, it had taken a year before he’d been able to stand the sight of himself in a mirror; closer to two before he could bear a hand upon his shoulder without flinching. Even now, the slightest human touch upon him tended to make his flesh crawl. How could he have come to her like that, broken, a wreck? Kinder to allow her to remember him as he’d been than to foist the leavings upon her, a shell empty of all but pain and horror, until death did them part. But now he was better, so very much better if substantially less than perfectly fine, and wholly resolved to reclaim his life—and his bride.
 

He rose up beside her, nearly tipping over the table. Tall though she was, he topped her by nearly a head. “I did…the best…I could,” he ground out, thinking of the crumpled paper carpeting his cabin floor. As if of their own accord, his hands took possession of her shoulders. His fingers firmed, digging into her gown’s rich velvet. “I’ve never stopped thinking about you—” he paused to suck down more air “—or loving you.”

“Leaving me to mourn you for dead isn’t love. At best you’re in love with the idea of me.” She braced both palms against his chest and shoved.

Her puny push couldn’t begin to budge him, but her hard words crashed into him with the power of a pugilist’s punch. “Damn it, woman, we have a chance to be happy, a second chance such as few ever receive. Can’t you see how deucedly rare, how bloody precious, that is? Do you really mean to cast it all away for the sake of your wounded pride?”

“
My
pride! Why, you puffed-up popinjay, you insufferably selfish lout! You made your choice. You chose to remain dead. You chose not only for yourself but for all of us who lost six years mourning you. But this time it’s not for you to choose. It’s mine.”

Feeling as if his heart were cradled in clutches of ice, he demanded, “Phoebe, what are you saying?”

Her steely gaze struck his. “I want you to leave, Robert Bellamy or Robert Lazarus or however you style yourself these days, not only this house but London. Go back to whatever godforsaken port of call you make your home and forget I exist.”

Rage ripped through Robert, freeing him to think—to act. “You cannot mean that.”

She glared up at him, her anger a match for his. “Oh, but I do.”

All at once the cork he’d kept upon his feelings blew. “In that case, allow me to make it memorable.”
 

Though the thought of her touching him anywhere below the neck still sufficed to send him sweating, the reverse no longer held true. He slid his hands down her arms to her wrists. Before she might move away, he shackled them to her sides.
 

Her breath caught. “What do you reckon you’re about?”

Humbling you, teaching a much-needed lesson, claiming my bride.

A gentleman would have released her and walked away, but Robert was hardly that, not anymore. Heedless of her recent faint, he hauled her hard against him. Predictably she struggled, the doomed effort bringing her breasts chafing his chest—and his manhood firming.
 

“Don’t you wish to cry out for your Frenchman?” he taunted, holding her pinned hands behind her. Her wrists were so slender he needed but one hand to bind them.
 

She wasn’t cold now. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes blazed. “Don’t tempt me. I may yet.”

Robert let out a mirthless laugh. “Pray do. I welcome the opportunity to gut him.”

“You would, wouldn’t you?” Defiant, she lifted her chin. “Do what you will. I’ll not see Aristide murdered because I was foolish enough to entrust myself to your honor.”

“What a perfect little martyr you make,” he remarked wryly, thinking what scant notion she had of how very breakable human beings could be.
 

In the past he’d treated her as if she were fashioned of Dresden china, but those bygone days were done indeed. She was a flesh-and-blood woman,
his
woman, and he meant to claim her in every way he could.

He angled his face to hers. “Don’t even think of biting me,” he warned.
 

Her eyes flared, confirming she’d contemplated doing just that. “And if I do?”

“I’d be obliged to bend you over my knee and paddle your pretty posterior until it glowed rosy.”

The prospect made his palm tingle—and his cock thicken. Initiating Phoebe to the sensual pleasures shared by couples in the Orient, including light striking, biting and even bondage, wasn’t something he’d considered when his image of her had been one of peerless purity—but he did so now. The spirited woman before him wouldn’t shrink from his darkness, he felt sure of it. But first she had a lesson to learn—and he a long-overdue kiss to claim.

Her blackening eyes betrayed her, her dilated pupils all but blotting out the silver-blue irises. Whether she owned it or not, she badly wanted to be kissed, conquered,
claimed
. But if she needed the pretense of force, Robert was only too happy to oblige her. He’d wager his ship and all its holdings that beneath the folds of heavy fabric her nipples were hard—and her sex moist. Nor was she alone in her arousal. His hardened manhood pressed tautly against his trouser front. His balls felt tight and tender, heavy and aching. For a few fraught seconds, the primal desire to sheath himself inside her and well and truly claim her as his nearly eclipsed all morality or reason. But despite years of living less as a man than as a beast, he was no rapist. He hardly meant to become one now with the woman he loved, royal bitch though she was being.
 

Phoebe’s face was a hairsbreadth from his, so close he could see the flare of her nostrils, feel the brush of her breath. “You wouldn’t dare.”

The question smacked of a challenge. Meeting it, Robert smiled his first true smile since her faint. “Try me.”
 

Stilling, she looked up at him as though seeing him for the first time. “You’re an animal.”

Robert didn’t deny it. Brushing his mouth over her ear, he dropped his voice to a whisper and asked, “Shall I show you what a beast I can be?” He bit lightly down upon her lobe.

Phoebe shivered. Likely she’d steeled herself to endure a swift, brutish assault. If so, she’d soon find herself sorely mistaken. Instead he took his time, nibbling kisses along the shell of her ear, the line of her jaw, the pulse point striking the side of her swan-like throat, the very throat that had inspired his ship’s renaming.
 

Laying a hand along her cheek, he turned her face to his. Ever stubborn, she locked her lips, but Robert refused to be daunted—or defied. He brushed his mouth over hers, whisper-soft strokes that sent her breath catching and her lips parting. Ravenous, he ran his tongue along the seam, urging her to grant him her bounty. Another sharp inhalation and her body’s slackening signaled her surrender. She opened and Robert delved in. She tasted of the spirit she’d sipped and the lemon-flavored comfits he suddenly remembered her fancying. The hungry lips opening to his were no longer those of an endearingly awkward girl but of a woman well accustomed to kissing. Her obvious loss of innocence both infuriated and aroused him. He should have been the one to school her, but instead that pleasure and privilege had fallen to another. Now the chaste embraces with which he’d satisfied himself six years ago belonged to another lifetime.
 

Like the pirate she’d accused him of being, Robert possessed, pillaged, plundered. She fought him, not that he’d expected otherwise. Their tongues met, warred, melded. Robert entwined his with hers, driving her hard. Her utter submission—nothing less would suffice. With his free had, he sank greedy fingers into her hair, gathering the thick silk into a fist. He tugged, bringing her head back and her breasts and pelvis jutting forward. Holding her flush against his body, he drank in her every breath and moan as once he’d quaffed water, fed on her fear-laced lust as a starved man might fall upon a feast. Insatiable, he drew the bruised fruit of her bottom lip into his mouth, suckling the delicate flesh, savoring the tangy, raw sweetness.
 

Lifting his lips from hers, he looked into her heavy-lidded eyes. “Tell me you still mean to marry your Frenchman.”

As soon as the words were out, he owned that uttering them had been an enormous mistake. Phoebe turned to stone in his arms. “Given my age and history, I count myself fortunate he would have me. After all that has transpired tonight, I only hope he still will.”

Catching the quaver in her voice, Robert let his hands slip away. Matured though she might be, she’d never before been kissed like this, not by Bouchart, not by any man. Robert felt both certain and glad of it. He also, for the first time since they’d started sparring, felt a wrench of guilt. Be she frosty or warm toward him, foul-tempered or sweet, she was still Phoebe, his Phoebe, his first and only love, and despite her bold words and bravado she was trembling like a wind-shaken leaf—because of him.