Desire in the Sun (39 page)

As she squirmed to escape, he pinned her on his lap with one hard arm, and jerked up her skirt with his other hand.

“Stop it! Stop it this instant, or I … Oh! Ouch! Stop!”

His hand whacked her backside with a resounding slap. Lilah cried out. Quickly she muffled the sound with her hand pressed tight against her mouth as she realized a scream might well bring someone to investigate. At all costs she could not be found in Joss’s hut, much less in such a compromising position! She kicked and squirmed and fought, but silently and to no avail. He smacked her bottom again, hard, and then again, the blows stinging madly. She tried her best to wriggle free, kicking and beating at his thighs with her fists, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from shrieking her rage at him. Her bottom burned with each blow, but he held her in an iron grip she could not break. Finally, as he showed no signs of either relenting or listening to her gasped pleas for a hearing, her temper blew. When his hand slammed down for what must have been the dozenth
time, she bit him as hard as she could through the rough cotton trouser into the hard muscle of his thigh.

“Hell-born bitch!” With this oath he shoved her off his lap. Lilah landed on her hands and knees on the hard-packed floor.

“You low-down, dirty, rotten, smelly son of a bitch!” she hissed, leaping to her feet. So furious she could cheerfully have whacked him over the head with an axe, Lilah drew back her arm and slapped him across the face with such force that her palm stung.

He clapped a hand to his abused cheek, and jumped to his feet. Lilah had to scurry backwards to avoid being knocked over. As he towered over her, emanating rage like a stove gives off heat, her eyes blazed up into his and she gave not an inch. His eyes were as hot as hers, and his mouth twisted furiously. For a moment they glared at each other, murder at the forefront of both minds. Then, when he reached for her, meaning no doubt to shake her or commit some other act of mayhem against her person, Lilah suddenly remembered that this was the man she loved, the man who believed she had betrayed him. With a disgusted sound she stepped toward him, inside the arms that were seeking to hurt her. She lifted her hands to catch him by both ears.

“You dolt!” she said, her voice softening fractionally. Then, without loosening her grip on his ears, stretching up on tiptoe, she slanted her mouth across his.

XLVII

“D
olt, am I?” he muttered against her mouth, but his hands were not bruising her. Instead they settled almost reluctantly against her waist, not exactly holding her but not pushing her away, either.

“Yes, dolt,” she repeated, her mouth lifting scant millimeters from his but her hands retaining their grip on his ears. “Stupid, blind man! If I hadn’t claimed you as my slave to Captain Rutledge he’d have hanged you as a pirate!”

She kissed him again, lingeringly, using the lessons he had taught her against him. His mouth was warm and firm, tasting faintly of ginger. Resisting, he sought to pull his mouth away. Lilah tugged sharply on his ears. He yelped, and his hands came up to free the prisoners.

“Did I not keep you safe and whole, have your wounds treated? How else could I have managed that, pray, without claiming you as … as property?”

Hands held fast in his now, she kissed him again, running her tongue over the obdurate line where his lips remained firmly closed, nibbling his lower lip with her teeth.

“I’m the one who should be angry, not you! I’ve dared as much as my life is worth to come here tonight, and how do you greet me? What do you do? You beat me, that’s what! For shame!”

“I did not beat you. …”

He was weakening under her ministrations, not surrendering but weakening. Lilah pressed her lips to the bristly underside of his chin, freed her hands to slide them around his waist, her palms relishing the contact with the satin-over-steel muscles at his waist.

“Then what would you call it?”

“Lovepats?”

“Hah! Lovepats! When I won’t sit for a week!”

She ran her hands over the bare skin of his back, stroking the flat muscles on either side of his spine, rubbing her fingertips over his shoulder blades, pressing herself against him all the while.

“Whatever they were, they were well-deserved, and well you know it, witch! A small price when you consider your words cost me my freedom!”

“Saved your life!”

“I thought we agreed that when we were rescued, you would say naught of my circumstances? I’d not be digging bloody holes for sugarcane every waking hour if you’d kept your tattling little tongue between your teeth!”

Despite his scolding words, much of the heat had left his voice. His arms had wrapped around her waist, his hands gently stroking the area they had so recently bruised.

Lilah pulled back to look up at him. “I truly had no choice. It was either tell them who I was and that you were my slave or watch them hang you. I would not have said what I did under circumstances that were any less dire, truly I wouldn’t. It was no betrayal, Joss.”

He looked down at her for a moment, his eyes moving over her face. One hand left its gentle massage of her posterior to ruffle her shorn hair, now shining clean and curled but definitely not the long seductive silk he had loved before. Still, as he had observed on the deck of the
Bettina,
it suited her.

“You know, I like you like this: a curly blonde boy with the face of an angel and the body of a woman. Tantalizing. I suppose Keith thinks so?”

The bite was back. Lilah’s eyes widened. Kevin was a subject she definitely did not want to discuss with Joss at the moment.

“I don’t want to talk anymore. Aren’t you ever going to kiss me, Joss?”

Her voice was plaintive, her eyes soft as they met his. He looked down at her for a moment, his eyes shining hotly as she pressed her legs against his.

“Please, Joss?” It was a seductive murmur, and he was a willing victim. One hand came up to cup the back of her head, tugging it backward, tilting her face up for his mouth. As his head came down he muttered something, but her blood was drumming so loudly in her veins that she didn’t hear it.

His mouth touched hers, and her eyes fluttered shut. His lips were warm and soft as they found hers, his kiss gentle.

“I’ve missed you,” she said against his mouth, her eyes opening. His eyes were dark with passion as they met hers.

“Now I don’t want to talk,” he growled, and took her mouth again.

This time the kiss was hard and deep. When he lifted his head a second time he led her to the cot. She sat on his lap, her arms twined around his neck, her head arched back against his shoulder as he pressed stinging kisses into the soft skin of her throat.

“What the hell are you wearing underneath this? Nothing?” His hand was moving over her breast, making the nipple spring visibly to life beneath the thin muslin.

“Just—a petticoat.” Her voice was unsteady, and she shivered under the ministrations of that caressing hand.

“Is going around half naked another of your barbaric island customs?”

This growl surprised a tremulous little chuckle out of Lilah. “We wear as many clothes on Barbados as you do in England. But I had to dress myself. I didn’t want Betsy to know. …” Her voice trailed off guiltily.

“About me,” Joss concluded, his voice grim, his hand stilling in its fascinating journey over her body.

“Oh, Joss. …” she began miserably, sitting up in his lap.

“Hush,” he said, pulling her back to kiss her again, fiercely, as if to stop her mouth and his thoughts. Then he was pushing her back on the cot, stretching out beside her, turning her toward him so that he could get to the buttons at the back of the gown, his mouth never leaving hers. She was scarcely aware when he peeled first the dress and then the single petticoat from her body. When she was naked, he shed his own trousers, nudged her over on her back. She arched and her legs parted instinctively as she waited with trembling anticipation for him to come into her.

But he did not.

Instead, he pulled her legs even farther apart and knelt between them. His hands slid, warm and strong, up over her slim calves, over the quivering softness of her thighs. He stroked her belly, her breasts, came back to her thighs again. Lilah caught her breath at the exquisite tightening that began inside her, in the place he so scrupulously forbore to touch. When his hands passed over her again, still without touching the place that needed touching most, she moved sinuously, inviting his hand to come where it would not. He concentrated instead on rubbing his thumbs over her nipples, kneading her breasts and belly before sliding his hands maddeningly down the insides of her thighs. When he began his teasing assault for the third time, she made a small protesting sound and her eyes opened.

The sight that met her eyes would have shocked her to the core six months ago. His face was hard and handsome, eyes like emeralds as they ran over the prize spread so delectably before him. He was kneeling between her wantonly parted thighs, seeming every inch the conquering, predatory male.

Following his gaze, looking down at herself, Lilah saw her own nakedness as if for the first time. She was all smooth white skin, unmistakably female. He was all hard muscle and unmistakably male.

Sprawled naked against the rough gray blanket, her own body was the most shocking thing she had ever seen. And he was seeing it, too, every detail mercilessly illuminated by the smoking lantern.

“Joss.” It was a barely audible murmur, forced from her lungs by the years of ladylike modesty that had been drummed into her.

“Hmm?” He didn’t stop what he was doing, didn’t even pause in his sensuous massage, but his eyes met hers. They were green as emeralds, ragingly ablaze.

“The light,” she managed faintly, barely able to breathe as he continued to inflict his particular brand of delicious torture on her.

He shook his head. “Oh, no. Not tonight, sweetheart. I want to see you—and I want you to see me. I don’t want you to have any doubts at all about who is making love to you.”

“But—”

“Shhh.” He silenced her by stopping her lips with a hard, hungry kiss. For a moment he rested atop her, his weight a heart-stopping sensation in itself as he crushed her down into the thin prickly mattress that creaked on its rope supports. Lilah kissed him back, pressing against him, feeling delicious shudders of need race over her wherever their bodies touched.

When his mouth moved lower, found her breasts, took
her nipples, she moaned and ran her fingers through his hair.

When he moved lower yet, pressing tiny stinging kisses along her abdomen, his tongue delving into her belly button, she moved invitingly beneath him. Her hands slid to his shoulders, tightened.

Then, when he moved lower yet, at last touching the woman-part of her with his mouth, not his hands, she cried out, her hands clutching at his hair, tugging frantically for him to stop. Her eyes flew open, and she looked at him wildly, driven half out of her mind by her own conflicting needs, wanting him to do what he was doing with every fiber of her being but knowing, knowing that it was shocking, wanton, wrong, and he must stop.

“Joss … no …” she gasped, trying to close her thighs against him. But he was there between her legs, holding them open, gently stroking her, giving her at last the kind of touching she had wanted—but determined to give her more, too.

“Shh, now. It’s all right.” He gentled her as he would have a frightened mare, his voice soothing, his touch distracting. Even as she geared herself up for one more protest he dipped his head again and kissed her, deep between her legs, shamefully, sinfully, and yet the heat and pressure of his mouth against her set her ablaze and she could no more have told him to stop than she could have gotten off that cot and walked away.

Her eyes shut and she was his to do with as he pleased.

By the time he poised himself over her, his shaft hard and throbbing and demanding entry, she was gasping, her body writhing, mindless with his loving.

“Tell me.”

The words barely penetrated.

“Tell me.”

He was insistent, holding himself just outside the place
that cried out for him, making her give him an answer before he would give her what she craved.

“Tell me.”

When she gave him his answer, she gave it freely.

“I love you, love you, love you,” she moaned against his mouth.

Then he took her to heaven and back again.

XLVIII