How To Please a Pirate (23 page)

Not of embarrassment. Jacquelyn was far
beyond shame. If it were possible she’d die of pure white-hot
pleasure.

She moaned. She writhed. She twisted her
fingers in his hair and whispered incoherent encouragement to
him.

The world was bunched in a tight fist and
threatened to shatter at any moment.

Gabriel moved up her body, leaving her
throbbing mound. She arched herself against him, pressing a wet
trail down his chest and flat belly. His mouth was at her breasts,
paying skillful homage to her aching nipples.

The tip of him teased her wet folds.

All thought of restraint fled. Need crowded
reason to a dark corner of her mind and Jacquelyn eased herself
down, trying to impale herself on his hard shaft.

His head popped from under the linens and the
full length of his body covered hers. A mere inch of him pressed
through her swollen folds and stopped. Frustration tore at her
throat, but she resisted the urge to squirm under him as he gazed
down at her.

“I believe I’ve warmed you thoroughly,” he
said. “Shall I take my leave?”

“Do you think you can?” she asked
incredulously.

“No,” he said with a wicked smile as he slid
his full length into her.

He held perfectly still and she reveled in
the sweet sensation of fullness. Jacquelyn groaned and draped her
arms over his shoulders. She tipped her chin up and offered him her
lips.

He took them.

And took them. The joining of their mouths
was less a kiss and more a conquest. She put up only the slightest
of defenses, which he battered away with heart-stopping sweetness.
Then she began a campaign of her own, teasing him with her tongue
and stealing the breath from his lungs.

Then his hips began to move.

She arched into each thrust, raising her hips
to meet him. Tension clenched her gut. As she neared a point of
collapse, he held her tightly and rolled so that she was on top of
him.

“Sit up straight,” he urged.

She did, blood coursing through her body
rendering her suddenly oblivious to the room’s chill. One of his
hands teased her breasts. The other found the exquisite little
point of pleasure between her folds and played a lover’s game with
that quivering bit of flesh. Jacquelyn threw her head back and
growled with pleasure, astounded at the sounds coming from her own
throat, but powerless to stop them.

Then Gabriel grasped her hips and pressed her
down hard on his groin. His body stiffened and shuddered. She felt
him pulse like a fountain inside her and she answered his release
with her own shattering completion.

Body convulsing in waves of pleasure, she
collapsed onto his chest. His heart pounded beneath her ear like a
battering ram slamming against a castle’s stout oak doors.

That’s it exactly,
she thought
drowsily.

He was driving himself into her heart through
her body. And she’d just proven she was powerless to stop him.

Strangely enough, Mistress Wren didn’t give a
tinker’s damn.

Oh, she was vaguely sure she’d care most
vehemently later, but for now, she’d have sooner lopped off her
right hand than sever the sweet connection of their flesh and the
warmth of his breath on her crown.

* * *

Her breathing grew slow and even. Gabriel
felt the last knot of tension slip from her as her hand went slack
on his shoulder. Lyn was boneless as a cat lying on his chest.

A beautiful, naked cat.

Gradually, his erection settled and he
slipped from her moist cleft. He sighed. For a few blinding
moments, they shared one heartbeat, one breath. No longer. They
were separate beings once again.

This woman was the closest to heaven a pirate
like him was ever likely to come. Who knew when, or if, he’d ever
breach her defenses again?

One of the muscles in his calves spasmed in a
cramp, but he didn’t want to move for fear of waking her. He
pointed and flexed his foot to work it out.

He inhaled her sweet, well-satisfied womanly
scent. There were other things he needed to work out as well. Like
how in hell he’d be able to marry another when Jacquelyn was all he
craved.

He chanced a kiss on her tousled crown and
was pleased when the rhythm of her breathing didn’t change.

The future was a fog. Whenever he’d run up
against a moist gray curtain while he captained his pirate corsair,
he’d felt his way through the low lying cloud. He sounded the depth
at regular intervals, trimmed his canvas and ran silent, hoping for
a break in the miasma.

Somehow, there was a way through this mist
that would keep Jacquelyn by his side.

He’d just have to find it.

A ray of sunlight shafted through the window
and teased Jacquelyn’s eyes open. Her first conscious thought was
how wonderful her bed felt this fine morning, all toasty and
comfortable with the linens and coverlet bunched perfectly. Her
second thought was how splendid a thing it was to wake beside a
gloriously naked man.

She sat bolt upright.

“What are you still doing here?”

Gabriel stretched his limbs and yawned
hugely. “Sleeping. Trying to, at any rate.” He laced his fingers
behind his head and cast her a lop-sided grin.

Their heart-stopping lovemaking rushed back
into her with a brush of remembered passion. A low drumbeat in her
belly thumped once or twice.

“Well, you can’t stay here,” she said,
frustrated that she must force him from her bed. “You must begone
and quickly.”

“Really, Lyn, you need to stop ordering me
about.” He made a ‘tsk’ of disapproval while giving her a mock
stern look. “Did I miss something or am I no longer Lord of Dragon
Caern?”

“You are yet lord.” She rolled her eyes at
him. “But that doesn’t give you leave to sleep in my bed.”

“No, seems to me last night
you
gave
me leave to sleep in your bed.” He ran his fingers up her arm and
past her shoulder to slide his hand around the nape of her neck.
“Along with certain other liberties.”

“Gabriel, please . . .”

His smile grew more wicked by the moment.
“Those are the magic words, Lyn.” He pulled her down and kissed her
thoroughly.

Gasping, she tore her mouth from his, her
fingers splayed on his bare chest. His smooth skin felt so good
beneath her palms, but she forced herself not to dwell on it.

“What if someone goes to your chamber and
finds you missing?”

“They’ll think I’m someplace else?” he
suggested unhelpfully.

“No, they’ll start looking for you from one
end of Dragon Caern to the other,” she said, “and it won’t do for
us to be found naked in my chamber.”

“The secret passageway is still open. How
about if we’re found naked in
my
chamber?”

She swatted his shoulder. “Why do you insist
on making things so difficult?”

“Oh, Lyn, give it a rest. This early in the
morning, I’ll wager none are about but Mrs. Beadle who’s more
interested in making my breakfast than where I make my bed.” He
drew her beside him in a way that brooked no refusal. “Don’t spoil
a perfectly lovely interlude by borrowing trouble. Can we not enjoy
a moment’s peace?”

With her body flush against his, peace was
not the first thing that leaped to her mind. But she laid her head
in the crook of his shoulder and let his warm masculine scent wash
over her. She didn’t have the will to fight him any longer. In
fact, last night had proven she had very little will at all.

Come disaster, come calamity, come a rabble
at the door bearing certain ruin, she wouldn’t leave this man’s
side.

He stroked her spine and let his fingers draw
lazy circles around the dimples above her buttocks. A tingle of
arousal fizzed through her, but she was satisfied for the moment
just to let him hold her.

Last night’s passion was still fresh in her
senses. Her whole body ached in a loose-jointed way, but it was a
pleasant ache. It was as though her every knot had been untied,
every kink pressed smooth. She was content as she had never been in
her whole life.

“I’ve been thinking,” Gabriel said as his
hand crept around to cup one of her breasts.

It didn’t take a gypsy fortune-teller to
divine the direction of his thoughts, but she felt bound to ask,
“What about?”

“That treasure,” Gabriel said, absently
thrumming her nipple with his thumb. “Seems to me there must be a
way to turn it to our advantage.”

“Well, of course, there is,” she said,
wishing if he were going to make love to her he’d get on with it.
After last night, she didn’t know how much teasing her body could
bear before she was reduced to pleading. “We could use the treasure
to buy new livestock and help your tenants improve their houses.
There ought not to be old thatch on any roof on your whole estate
by the time we’re finished.”

“That’s not exactly—”

Thinking of the possibilities presented by
the dragon’s hoard of gold beneath the Caern, Jacquelyn pushed
awareness of her growing arousal aside. “We could build a school, a
new infirmary. Oh, there are any number of things that treasure can
do.”

“I meant something more personal.” Gabriel
slid a finger under her chin and tipped her face up to his. “We
both know I must marry. You are the one I want, Lyn. What good is
that money if it can’t help me have you?”

He wanted her! It wasn’t exactly a
declaration of undying love, but her heart still did a jig against
her ribs. Then reality lashed her and her brows knit together.
There was no way for him to take her to wife and meet the Crown’s
requirements.

“You must marry a wellborn lady. I am the
bastard girl-child of a courtesan.” She rolled over to give him her
back. “No amount of money will render my birth noble.”

“I still don’t see why that matters,” he
said, raising himself on one elbow and running his other hand from
her shoulder down past her waist. He edged closer to her, leaving a
proprietary palm on her hip.

“Believe me, it does,” she said. “All my
life, I’ve known I was different. The head-mistress at Lundgrim’s
Academy for Young Ladies of Good Family tried to insulate me from
slights, much good it did. I believe she even circulated the tale
that my mother was the widow of some minor French nobleman who’d
retaken her English name upon his death and then died herself, but
the rumors persisted. And when all the rest of the girls went home
for Christmas, I stayed at school.”

The old hurt throbbed in her chest, but when
Gabriel pressed a kiss against her temple, it eased a bit.

“Isabella didn’t have either the time or the
space for me. She rarely visited the school and when she did, the
head-mistress was clever enough to keep her out of sight of the
rest of the students.” Jacquelyn bit her lip. “My mother is . . .
not an inconspicuous person.”

“You say you didn’t spend much time with her
as you grew up, and yet it seems you knew her well. Probably better
than I knew my father.”

“Isabella was a great letter writer,”
Jacquelyn said with a sigh.

Whenever one of her mother’s missives arrived
at the school, Jacquelyn was summoned to the headmistress’s office,
where she was expected to read the letter and then surrender it
immediately. The head mistress always burned them in her sight.
Unlike the other students, Jacquelyn wasn’t allowed to keep the
letters to pour over later, lest any of her mother’s ‘less than
salubrious’ correspondence fall into the hands of ‘impressionable
minds’ and corrupt any of the other students with ‘worldly vice.’
The immediate loss of her mother’s letters probably led Jacquelyn
to absorb and remember more of Isabella’s words than she might have
if she’d been allowed to keep them.

But destroying the missives was probably a
wise course of action, especially since Isabella took it upon
herself to fully educate Jacquelyn about what passed between a man
and a woman through several detailed letters. Ears tinted scarlet
as she read silently under the head mistress’s watchful eyes,
Jacquelyn learned about fleshly love from one who might be
considered a true expert.

‘
Ignorance
,’ her mother had written,
‘
is not always conducive to bliss.’

“She wrote to me faithfully,” Jacquelyn said.
“Isabella always said she filled her days with maintaining her
correspondence because her nights were filled with . . . other
things.”

And now Jacquelyn was intimately acquainted
with those ‘other things.’ Sharing her mother’s passionate nature
helped her understand Isabella better, but Jacquelyn still resented
her for placing her own needs above her child’s.

Gabriel spooned his body around hers and
whispered in her ear. “That treasure is worthy of a king. What if
we were to use it to provide a dowry for your mother? Wouldn’t that
induce your father to wed her and claim you? Surely that would
settle your nobility sufficiently for those who care about such
things.”

“First of all, I don’t know who he is,” she
said testily, trying to ignore his erection pressing against her
bottom. “Perhaps Isabella doesn’t either. Not for certain. And
second, even if she does know who he is, he’s no doubt already
married. I don’t think my mother ever took a lover who wasn’t. In
that respect, she was very particular. She always said married men
were ‘more generous and less complicated,’ whatever that
means.”

“Well, then we’ll use the treasure to lure
some other titled gentleman to wed her and claim you.” He planted a
wet kiss behind her ear. “Lord knows, men have done far worse to
gain a fortune.”

“It would take too long. We’d have to travel
to London.” She noted with surprise that his body stiffened
slightly at this. “Then I’d have to try to convince Isabella to go
along with the scheme. I doubt she would.”