Teresa Medeiros (45 page)

Lucy’s entire body shuddered, caught in a delirium of ecstasy. When she finally collapsed from its throes, Gerard was there to catch her, to cradle her breathless, trembling body in his arms and kiss tears she could not remember crying from her flushed cheeks.

His eyes gleamed with fierce hunger as he laid her beneath him and eased his breeches from his hips. When she would have indulged her curiosity with a nervous peek, he cupped her face and kissed her deeply, giving her a tantalizing taste of her own fulfillment.

Gerard was afraid it would take little more than the caress of Lucy’s eyes to finish him. It had taken every ounce of his control to come this far, and he was too near the edge to make any more reckless promises. He hadn’t lied to her. For him, this wasn’t like the first time in six years. This was like the first time ever, with all of its callow eagerness, its clumsy, self-seeking hunger.

Her eyes misted with blind need as he reached down to test her readiness for him. He’d hurt her enough in their brief acquaintance. He had no desire to compound his crimes with another, even more unpardonable, betrayal of her trust. His fears were unfounded. He’d never touched a woman as ready for him as she was. She fairly dripped with want. He groaned, rubbing his throbbing length in her luscious bounty as a precursor to his possession.

Her eyes widened with mingled shock and delight as he let her feel in remarkable detail what he had refused to let her see.

Biting back a smile at the charm of her innocence, he braced his palms against the bed and rose above her. He tried, but simply could not resist a glance downward to watch himself breach those damp, flaxen curls one exquisite inch at a time.

Lucy gasped with unexpected pain as her untried body strained to accommodate Gerard’s persistence. She felt him hesitate, poised on the brink of paradise.

“It’s all right,” she assured him shakily. “Really it is. It’s quite pleasant. I … 1-like it.”

He glowered down at her, his frown mocked by the pleasure-glazed sparkle of his eyes. “You’re lying, you deceitful mouse. You don’t like it at all. But you will,” he vowed.

For the first time in their acquaintance, Gerard was as good as his word.

He withdrew slightly, surprising Lucy. She had expected to feel relief in his wake, but instead felt only a hollow emptiness that ached to be filled. She wrapped her legs around his hips, urging him deeper. He obliged her, then drew back again, making her whimper with disappointment.

“Oh, please,” she whispered.

She could not find it in her heart to begrudge him his triumphant grin. “As you wish, Miss Snow. I live to serve you.”

Serve her he did, using the copious nectar of her body to bury himself deep inside of her.

“Better?” he whispered, his own voice cracking under the strain.

Lucy’s dreamy smile was all the encouragement Gerard needed. From the beginning he had sensed the passion boiling beneath her icy veneer and she did not disappoint him. As he rocked against her, she arched off the bed to meet him, the provocative motion of her
hips enticing him to abandon his exalted plan to treat her virgin body with the tender care it deserved.

He threw back his head, clenching his teeth against a premature wave of ecstasy. “God, Lucy, do you know what you’re doing to me?”

Lucy could feel something else seething beneath Gerard’s patience—a violence born not of brutality, but of deprivation. Its intensity frightened her, but she was determined to give him a gift even greater than that of her innocence. Her permission to lose control, to slake all of his selfish desires on her willing body.

She had learned more of his character than he had wished her to in the past few weeks. He took care of his crew. He took care of his brother. And even if he would not admit it, he had taken care of her more often than not. The time had come for someone to take care of him.

She caught his face in her hands and said fiercely, “Don’t hold back. Not with me. Never with me. I want everything you can give me.”

To Gerard, it was as if Lucy’s tender invitation opened up a sluice of tangled emotions. Lust seized him, so dark and primitive it was almost bestial. He ceased to think, becoming a creature driven by its basest instincts, instincts denied for so long that it took only Lucy’s generous coaxing to send them raging beyond his control. He gazed at her as Adam must have first looked upon Eve, as if she had been created solely to indulge his desires.

And indulge himself he intended to do. But with his last shred of rational thought, he angled his hips so that each of his deep, hungry strokes would rub against the pleasure-sensitive nub sheltered by those entrancing curls.

Lucy pressed her eyes shut, giving herself over to his pounding rhythm as Gerard gave her everything he
had. And more. He drove her back against the headboard, then kept coming, giving no quarter, taking no prisoners. When she thought her body had reached its endurance of pleasure, he cupped her backside and lifted her, embedding himself so deeply within her that she could feel his heart beat as if it were her own. A soft, broken wail escaped her, a herald of the exquisite outpouring of ecstasy to come.

Lucy’s release was Gerard’s downfall. He had no time to ponder the irony before his own body surged with long-denied rapture. As he’d feared, the end had come too quickly, but it seemed to roar on for a sweet eternity, their joined bodies shuddering in magnificent accord, Lucy’s bewitching spasms milking him of every precious drop of pent-up pleasure.

His boneless body collapsed against hers. “Did I hurt you?” he murmured into her silky hair, awareness of their awkward position slowly dawning.

Her arms tightened around him, her gentle hands stroking and soothing his cramped muscles. “Mortally, I fear. But I don’t mind as long as I can die in your arms.”

Lucy tried to wiggle herself to a more tenable position; Gerard held her fast. “Oh, no, you don’t. I’m not through with you yet.” For once, his boyish grin was untainted by cynicism. “Hell, I haven’t even started.”

His lips lowered to hers for a kiss rife with all the tenderness she had forced him to forgo in their love-making. Lucy moaned at the fresh miracle of his body stirring deep within hers.

His heated lips strayed to her earlobe. She frowned. “Did you hear that, Gerard? It’s thundering.”

“Nonsense,” he murmured, nipping the sensitive appendage. “It’s just the pounding of my heart.”

Lucy gasped with pleasure as his tongue plundered the inner shell of her ear. She closed her eyes only to
be startled by a starburst of light behind her lids. “I do believe it’s lightning as well.”

“You flatter me, darling. Why don’t we see if I can evoke a fanfare of celestial trumpets?”

His foray across the tender skin of her throat might have done just that had not the entire hold shuddered as if pounded by a mighty fist. The ship lurched, tossing them, blankets and all, to the floor of the cabin.

“Son of a bitch!” Gerard jumped to his feet, jerked his breeches up over his hips, and ran to the porthole.

Another clap came, sharper and more sinister than thunder. The mouths of the
Argonaut
’s cannons erupted in gouts of orange fire. The
Retribution
pitched to starboard, forcing Gerard to catch hold of the wall or fall.

“That son of a bitch,” he breathed, the oath taking on a far more personal nature. “What sort of monster would fire on his own daughter? What manner of father is he?”

A sound even more unlikely than the rumble of cannons captured Gerard’s attention. He turned slowly, disbelievingly. Lucy had cupped a hand over her mouth, but her high-pitched giggle escaped through her fingers. She looked so enchanting with her hair tumbled around her face, her skin still rosy from his robust loving, that it was inconceivable to him that her teasing offer to die in his arms might prove prophetic.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, struggling to catch her breath. “I can’t imagine what’s come over me. I’m not usually so emotional.”

Gerard’s fear of losing her deprived him of any patience he might have summoned. He dropped to his knees and caught her by the shoulders. “Don’t you understand what’s happening? That miserable son of a—” He grappled for control, clenching his teeth
against a wave of raw panic.
“Your father
is firing on us.”

To his shock, she tossed back her head with a fresh burst of laughter, her beautiful eyes luminous with tears. “Ah, but there’s the rub, you see, for that ‘miserable son of a bitch’ is not my father!”

L
UCY HAD IMAGINED A MYRIAD OF REACTIONS to her revelation, but the stark horror reflected in Gerard’s eyes was not among them. He sank back on his heels, gazing at her in mute shock.

She supposed it was a bit late for modesty, but she drew the counterpane over her shoulders just the same and swiped a bothersome tear from her cheek. The attack had come too soon after their loving, leaving her with no defenses.

She forced a watery smile through her chattering teeth. “It seems Kevin and I have more in common than you thought. We’re both bastards.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s all in my mother’s diary.” Lucy sniffed, dabbing at her nose with the back of her hand. “The really tragic part is that she loved the Admiral just as much as I once did. But she finally had to accept that he would never return to her bed, that his interest in her had been nothing more than a brief infatuation, another conquest of the French. That’s when she turned
to other men. We should be celebrating, you know. I’m not the daughter of your enemy after all.” She disguised the pain of the words with a flippant shrug. “I’m not anyone’s daughter.”

Lucy had thought herself privy to the most potent tenderness Gerard could offer, but his hands cupped her face with such reverence it was as if he could absorb her pain through his fingertips. A rumbling salvo of cannonfire rocked them.

His eyes darkened with dawning agony. “Dear God, what have I done?”

Then he was gone, snatching his shirt and leaving her shivering in the heap of blankets that still smelled of the spice of his skin and the musk of their coupling.

Wracked by chills, Lucy hugged the counterpane around her and stumbled to the porthole. The
Argonaut
, nearly obscured by smoke, belched another round of fire. Was the Admiral pacing the freshly swabbed deck, she wondered, bellowing orders in his stentorian voice? Orders that would reduce the
Retribution
and the woman he had given his name and raised as his daughter to splinters of wood and bone.

Anger surged through her veins, warming her. She had always believed that if she could only be good enough, her father would love her. But now that Gerard had given her an intoxicating taste of true love, she realized the Admiral was nothing but a petty tyrant, incapable of loving anyone but himself.

Lucy narrowed her eyes as the smoke cleared, its ugly columns dispersed by the rising wind. A full moon bathed the
Argonaut
in unholy light. The seventy-four-gunner sat motionless, poised to pounce on its helpless prey, the abrupt silence of its guns more ominous than a fresh barrage of cannonfire.

A terrible suspicion flickered to life in Lucy’s mind.

“No,” she whispered. Then more loudly, “No!”

She dropped the blanket and snatched up Tarn’s shirt. The hem fell to her knees so she wasted no time wriggling into the breeches. She raced for the door, praying she wasn’t already too late.

This time the twists and turns of the
Retribution
’s hold failed to confound Lucy. Most of the lanterns had been extinguished by the ship’s uneven pitching, but she plunged through the darkness with blind confidence, her love for the vessel’s captain the only light she needed.

Within seconds she’d reached the mirror hiding the secret companionway. She pounded on it, but it refused to budge. Its hidden latch had been wedged shut by one of the
Argonaut
’s blows. Lucy collapsed against the cool glass, fighting her first impulse to weep with frustration. Instead, she shoved back the hair straggling over her eyes and glanced frantically around, finally locating a fallen timber small enough for her to lift. Without an ounce of remorse, she drew it back and smashed her reflection into a thousand fragments.