The Pirate Prince (38 page)

Their slow, languid play was interrupted when the crewmen banged on the door, bringing the tub and first buckets of water for his bath. Allegra moved back a few inches from him and smiled tenderly as she caressed his face.

“You let me take care of you tonight,
capisce
?” she said softly.

He reached out and tapped her nose gently with one fingertip. “I am yours to command,” he whispered.

She smiled again, sighing with love as she slid off his lap and let the two crewmen into the cabin to complete their work. Lazar slouched wearily in the armchair, long legs sprawled out before him, his dark eyes watching her every move.

Working in silence, the two crewmen hastily filled the great wooden tub near the stern wall. Allegra lit three candles to pierce the dark of night, then poured glasses of wine for herself and Lazar.

When the mates had gone, she locked the door behind them once more and scattered dried flower petals across the surface of the bath, then she turned to the chair where Lazar rested, eyes closed, his face turned away from her. She went over to him and gave his flat stomach a fond caress.

“My dear,” she called, gazing softly down at him.

He turned his face to her and covered her hand with his where it lay on his stomach. He captured her hand, kissed it, then placed it over his heart.

Mystified, they stared at each other for a timeless spell.

She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead, then began, gingerly, to undress him. He lay back, watching her in weary, wry amusement while she slid the vest lower and reached boldly for his belt. His frank stare made her skin warm as she unbuttoned the fall of his breeches.

“You’re doing a good job,” he remarked, his eyes dancing, his expression subdued.

When all the golden, gleaming sculpture of his naked body was before her, her gaze swept over him in pure worship, the hard swells of muscled breast, the intricate ridges of his chiseled abdomen, and all the smooth expanse of taut, fine skin, like rose-copper satin in the warm candlelight. She stared at his strong legs and his feet, and then she stared at his most masculine part in wonder. It was relaxed, and already it was huge. It would kill her, she thought.

He laughed as if he could read her mind, then turned away, going to the tub.

“Are you going to scrub me now, Miss Monteverdi?” he asked.

“Thoroughly,” she replied, blushing already.

A moment later, he descended into the tub with a luxurious sigh.

“I’m all yours,
chérie
. Do with me what you will.”

She stood, and as she approached, she clasped her hands lightly behind her back. “You are comfortable?” she asked, pausing several feet away.

“Mmm,” he purred. His inky lashes drooped with pleasure as he sank back against the rim of the tub.

“Very good,” she said. Then she walked around to stand fully in his view, where she took off her clothes for him, just as he had asked her to the night she had denied him.

Lazar hooked his arms over the rim of the tub and watched her every move with fire in his eyes.

When all her clothes were removed, she loosed her braids and fluffed her hair free over her shoulders.

He tore his heated stare from her body and looked up into her eyes. She quivered as she stood there, naked, before him. She gazed into his eyes with an incredible sense of aching sweetness, and he barely breathed, he was so still. But for the deep, soughing murmur of the sea on the hull and the slight creaking of the great ship as it rocked on the water, a reverent silence filled the cabin—their reverence for each other. A moment passed. Each delicate current of air crept across her skin like cool ribbons, and behind her the long, translucent curtains blew slowly on the evening wind from the sea balcony. She became acutely aware of shy little territories across her body she had never noticed she possessed—all because his stunned and poignant gaze was as eloquent as touch: for the first time in her life that she could remember, she could actually feel the oval turn of her navel, the outward curve of her knee; it was, all of it, for him.

“Come to me, my Allegra,” he breathed at last.

She walked toward him, took his outstretched hand, and joined him in the bath. He put his arms around her as she lowered herself into the hot, scented water. He pulled her to him, pressed her to him, showed her for the first time the texture of his bare skin all against hers. She closed her eyes in rapture. He lifted her hand and kissed her pale wrist. He kissed her palm, the juncture of her thumb and fingers. He licked vaguely at the tip of her thumb, nuzzled her fingertips, caught her pinkie gently between his teeth. Then he placed her hand over his shoulder and pulled her more tightly into his arms.

The warmth and beauty of him all along the front of her body mesmerized her, the powerful thighs under her buttocks, the expanse of his broad shoulders looming before her for all the world like some dear, solid fortress. She embraced him, ran her open hands slowly up his back over the tough, gnarled skin there. She threaded a trail of kisses from his earlobe down his neck, drunk with the feel and salt and musk of him.

His hands moved down over her hips, limning the shape of her silhouette in the water while he buried his face in her hair.

“I’ve waited for this for so long,” he whispered, trembling.

“I know you have, sweetheart. So have I.”

Her hands slid over the supple mounds of his shoulders to glide together behind his neck. She could hear her own deep, rapid breath against his skin.

He gripped her buttocks in both of his hands while his breath came faster at her neck. She ran her fingers up the back of his neck, through the short, glossy black of his hair, eliciting from him an almost inaudible moan. When she looked down at him, his sea-black eyes were liquid pools of longing.

“I love you,” he whispered. He began to kiss her. He kissed her eyelids, her cheekbones, the corners of her lips, and when she sought his deepest kiss, he ravished her mouth.

Kneeling, she settled astride him in the tub, and as they moved together, some of the water overflowed the side. The rising steam from the bath soon covered them in sweat, and the flower petals clung to their skin.

She strained against him, intensely aware of his swollen member resting upright against her belly. It bumped the lower arcs of her breasts as she chafed restlessly against him. She ran her open hand down his stomach, felt his hot quiver of anticipation as the muscles leaped beneath her palm. He drew in his breath and tilted his head back, eyes closed, when her fingers grazed his rigid shaft.

“You like that,” she said, watching his face.

He nodded dreamily.

She drew out her touch, tracing the mysterious length of the organ to the curious rim near the end. She could tell it pleased him when she cupped the thick, round tip, but after a while, he captured her hand and guided her, wordlessly teaching her his secret wishes until she understood just what to do.

Then she was ruthless, serving his wondrous body with diligent ardor until he shoved wildly against her grasp. He clung to her with one hand, his grip white-knuckled on the edge of the tub. His groans fascinated her, plucked barbaric notes deep in her blood. His face, rapt with the pleasure she was giving him, was more beautiful than ever. He stopped her suddenly, clamping his hand around her wrist.

“No more,” he gasped as his chest heaved. Trembling, he raked his hand through his hair.

“Then I shall bathe you now, my Lazar,” she told him indulgently, smiling with a very feminine sense of satisfaction as she kissed his ear. “And when I am through, you will be clean of all the dust from that place forever.”

She proceeded to give him a slow and thorough bathing, discarding the sponge to clean his face with her fingers in a tender, stroking massage. She leaned down and kissed him, and he bit at her lower lip with a playful growl. This time it was she who deepened their kiss, wrapping her arms around him, parting his lips to fill his mouth with the vigor and taste of her. Her eagerness fired his passion, and she reveled in his exquisite devouring. He melted on her tongue like warm, heavy rain.

He moved on, kissing her neck, her shoulder, her chest. She sighed anxiously as he took her breast in his mouth. He teased and tantalized each nipple in turn until she thought she would swoon, breathless with delight. She ran her hands over the thick bulges of his biceps as he sucked and swirled his tongue around her erect crests. She gloried in the softness of his mouth and the hardness of his strength with sweet, rising lust.

Reaching down between her legs, his fingertip found the center of her pleasure, hard and smooth as a polished opal, but she stopped him with a whisper, determined that he should receive pleasure from her more than give it tonight. “Patience, my love. I’m not done washing you yet.”

He gave her a heartbreaking smile as he lay back again against the rim of the tub. “You may make a saint of me yet, Miss Monteverdi.”

She smiled, pulled him forward, and reached over his shoulders to wash his scarred back lovingly. Finally, she ordered him to close his eyes, and she dunked him under the water. He brushed the water from his eyes with a hearty sigh. He gazed into her eyes for a moment tenderly.

“There’s something I want to tell you,” he said. “Now that you know the worst of it, you might as well know the rest.”

She stared at him evenly. “Go on.”

He gathered her into his arms, and it was several minutes before he spoke. “That night—the night of the storm—my father told me to run. So, I did. The assassins chased me to the brink of the sea cliffs, where the only choice I had was to die at their hands or jump, just like your legend says. As they closed in on me, I turned around and jumped off the rock face. They weren’t expecting that. But my father had told me to survive at any cost for Ascencion’s sake, and I never dared disobey him.”

He took a drink of wine.

“Somehow I managed to miss the rocks below. The storm washed me out far from land,” he went on. “I was in the water for probably twenty hours, well into the next day.”

“How awful,” she murmured.

“My mind was a blank after what happened to my family.” He was quiet for a while, then he kissed her forehead and continued. “It was not so much the thirst and fatigue that bothered me as this one big, ugly,
ugly
hammerhead shark that kept swimming by me. I thought for sure I was dead. I hate sharks.” He gave her a rueful half smile. “How I kept still until that thing lost interest in me, I have no idea. I only thank God I had no cuts or abrasions from my fall to entice it with the scent of blood.”

She stared at him, wide-eyed.

“Blazing sun above frying me, damned ugly shark below. Then a ship finally came. A felucca. I didn’t know what it was, it looked so strange, but I didn’t care.”

She gave him a puzzled look, and he explained, “Felucca. That’s the name of the narrow, lateen-rigged ships the Barbary corsairs prefer.”

“Oh,” she said in awe. “Malik’s men rescued you?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it rescue.” He gave her a grim smile. “But they did get me away from that shark, and they gave me water. I was barely conscious enough to drink it.”

“How frightened you must have been to have found yourself among those heathens.”

“Don’t recall. I imagine I was, but after what I had seen happen to my family, I didn’t really care what became of me.”

She winced and reached out to caress him. He took her hand and played idly with her fingers as he continued. “I was taken to Al Khuum and held there for two years until Captain Wolfe came to discuss the opium traffic with Malik. Wolfe took pity on me—or, rather, saw a use for me—and aided my escape.”

“Two years?” she whispered. “Oh, my love, how ever did you endure it?”

He shrugged. “The second year wasn’t so bad,” he said, glancing up at the deckhead as if to avoid her sympathetic gaze. “That’s when Malik sent me to train with his Janissaries—bodyguards, all slaves taken in childhood, trained for the express purpose of defending the sheik. Deadly warriors. I had to convert to Islam and take a vow of chastity,” he said with a shallow laugh. He shook his head, mulling over his own thoughts. “I threw myself into my training and learned all I could, living off my fantasies of vengeance.”

“What about the first year?”

He glanced uneasily at her. “I was like that boy Darius, a servant. But I kept trying to run away, causing problems. I even set the grand salon on fire. Malik almost killed me for that, which would have been fine with me. But instead he…found a way to keep me docile.” He narrowed his eyes, then looked up at the ceiling again. “Opium. I would have done anything for it. I lived for it. It was extraordinarily degrading, a slavery within slavery.”

She reached to hold him, but he held her off with a gesture.

“When I realized that he could control me for the rest of my life with that drug, I forced myself to refuse it. I went rather mad, hallucinating. That’s when I cut my wrists. I was thirteen.”

Tears flooded her eyes. “Sweetheart,” she whispered. She leaned forward and kissed his cheek gently. “It’s all behind you now. I promise.”

“No, Allegra, I don’t think it ever will be.” He looked up into her eyes with a lost, tortured stare.

“Why do you say that?”

He shrugged slightly, looking very young. “Nightmares,” he whispered.

“Lazar.” She took his face between her hands and kissed him gently on the mouth.

“I don’t have nightmares when you sleep with me,” he told her in a choked whisper. “I have never needed any living thing as I need you.”

She was very still in his arms. She laid her head on his broad shoulder. “Lazar,” she said softly, “they say when a man and woman become one, each bears half the other’s pain. Show me how to give myself to you.”

He paused and hugged her close, all his muscles taut. He stroked her hair to the ends of her tresses. Reverently he traced the curve of her lower back.

“I cannot let you give this gift to me.”

“Why? It is mine to give to whomever I choose.”

He found her heels and cupped them in his palms, then he rested his forehead on her shoulder for a long moment.