And then he showed her. With his tongue still washing over the hardened peak of her breast, his fingers began to stray lower over her belly, her hips arching and guiding him on their own volition.
Touch me there,
her body begged.
Please touch me there.
When he did, she nearly cried out in delight, but his mouth had found hers again and cut of her ragged sigh with a deep, penetrating kiss.
As he shifted, closing any remaining gap between them, his body covered hers, and she felt his own hard need. A length of manly flesh, aroused and waiting for her.
His fingers had begun to explore the intimate folds of skin at her very core. Like longheld secrets, he coaxed each of them to reveal their need to him, her legs falling open, her hips arching to meet each gentle stroke.
It was like he was teasing her awake, pulling her toward something deep and unfathomable. Something her body wanted more than breath.
If it felt like this for her, surely, she thought, it must be the same for him. So with that in mind, she tentatively reached for him.
The heat of his manhood, the hardened evidence of what she aroused in him, made her bold. Her fingers found the buttons on his breeches and flicked them open, anxious to touch the flesh beneath, much as he had tugged and pulled at her chemise some time before. When the last button gave, the member beneath pushed through, springing up into her welcoming hand.
Now it was Robert’s turn to groan, and his hips followed the same dance hers had done. Like satin in her hand, she ran her fingers over and down it, and marveling at her own wantonness. And yet it seemed so natural to be holding him, so part of her own need to be touching him like this.
Her fingers explored him from the coarse curls at the base to the rounded, velvety tip where it was already moist, slick with his readiness for her. It seemed to throb with a willingness to please her, a heady promise to fill the ache his fingers were eliciting from her depths.
Robert’s touch had opened her, discovering a nubby jewel that seemed to have been waiting all this time for his caress.
So when he began to tease her, stroke her there, Olivia thought he was pulling the very breath from her. All her senses, the passion he’d been awakening in a long sensuous trail from her lips now converged in that one spot, begging for his touch, begging for release from that coiled prison.
“Oh, please, do that again,” she whispered, when his fingers dipped into her and slowly moved up and over her own blossoming need.
“Do you like that?” he asked as he did it again.
“Yes,” she managed to gasp.
Over and over he stroked her, bringing her to the brink of something she didn’t understand yet wanted with a staggering need.
His thick, hard sex pulsed in her hand, and suddenly she knew what it was that was missing, what her body craved to feel.
“Make love to me,” she told him. “Robert, please make love to me.”
He grinned at her. “I thought you would never ask.” Shifting his body so he fully covered her, his manhood nudged at her thighs, hard and insistent.
Olivia spread herself open to him willingly, anxious to have this empty, throbbing need inside her sated with his hardness. And as he pushed inside her, she sighed, arching her hips to take every inch of his velvet stroke—until he came to that unquestionable barrier.
Robert stopped abruptly and began to pull back.
Her eyes fluttered open; her hands caught his hips and held him fast, kept him inside her. There was shock on every feature of his face.
“What is it?” Olivia asked.
“You’re a virgin!”
It wasn’t a statement but an accusation.
She had wondered if he would notice, but obviously he had.
He started to pull out further, but she continued to hold him. “This is what I want, Robert. Don’t stop now.”
“But I can’t . . . I mean, I thought . . . You’ve never done this before.”
With one hand still on his hip, she caught his head with the other and pulled him down to her. Her lips caught his in a kiss, one she hoped would divert his attention. Inside her, she felt his member surge again, and she wanted to smile.
“What difference did it make to you five minutes ago? Make love to me, Robert,” she whispered into his ear, while her hips rode along his length, teasing him.
For a moment he felt caught—trapped between what was honorable and what he wanted. And when he gazed into her eyes, he also could see it was what she wanted, needed. He’d never had a woman look up at him with such smoke-filled passion in her eyes. Olivia’s eyes always revealed the truth about her, and right now she needed him to follow her lead.
She was also right. It hadn’t mattered to him before he’d discovered her secret, and now, if he was to tell the truth, it only made him want her more.
Besides, his body ached for release, while hers thrummed with life, urging him to carry her over that abyss as well. And so he did.
“This can hurt,” he said, breaking through her virgin’s seal and pushing himself completely inside her.
She flinched for a moment, confusion at this sudden pain misting the passion on her face.
Slowly beginning again, he started to rekindle her fires, stroking her back to the place where they had been before, where their passions collided and held fast in ragged, mutual need.
Her hips began to match his, and he knew whatever pain he had caused her was now a longforgotten memory. Her breath was coming in quick, anxious pants, and so he hastened his pace, urging her on.
Olivia wasn’t sure what was happening as her entire world spun into one narrow focus. She followed his lead, her hips rising and falling, her hands clinging to his back. And then suddenly her entire world exploded. It was as if one moment she stood teetering at the edge of the unexpected and then she fell, tumbling into the awareness of what a man and woman could do together.
The passionate spasms wrenched a surprised cry out of her, which Robert caught with his lips as he covered her mouth. His body moved within her with a hard, fierce urgency she understood. And then as suddenly he groaned, straining to fill her one last time as she sensed he too had fallen into that heavenly splendor that enveloped her senses and left her dreamy and fulfilled.
For a few moments, they lay coupled, one body, two hearts beating a wild, exotic rhythm in harmony that only they could hear. He stroked at the loose tendrils of her hair and whispered soft kisses on her bare shoulder. Her fingers splayed over those rough curls on his chest, loving the differences between their bodies and how completely they complemented each other.
“Thank you,” she finally managed to whisper.
He shifted off her and cradled her in his arms. “You shouldn’t be thanking me. I just ruined you.” He shook his head.
She waved off his words. “You forget, I was ruined years ago. You only gave me what I’ve never had.”
“What is that?”
“The memories of what I was missing!”
He laughed and reached over to toy with the chain around her neck, her only remaining adornment. “You should have told me,” he insisted. “Here all this time, I had been thinking that—”
His words stopped abruptly as his fingers came to the ring at the end of the chain. He turned the simple band in the light, examining it, while his eyes went from passionate and loving to cold, dark anger in a matter of seconds.
“Where the hell did you get this?” he demanded, catching up the chain from her neck and holding it up between them. It dangled and flashed in the moonlight, a simple gold band, yet Olivia could sense nothing would be simple between them again.
She snatched it back. “ ’Tis mine.”
“I didn’t ask that,” he said, clambering out of the bed and staring down at her as if she had suddenly changed into Medusa. “I asked where you got it.”
“It was given to me. As a promise,” she said. “And one that is none of your business.”
His eyes darkened with rage, with anger, with misunderstanding.
Tell him the truth,
that voice from the past urged her.
Tell him.
But before she could, the boom of a cannon drove them further apart.
A second report brought the sound of footsteps pounding over the decks and all around them, as the crew disassembled the partitions that made up the underdecks and moved the cannons into position.
Robert grabbed the blanket, wrapped it around his midsection and started from the cabin. “Stay here,” he ordered, before he left her in the darkness.
Olivia fumbled for her clothes, finding her chemise and the dimity gown she’d hung on the hook when she’d changed for dinner. Next came the pair of boots that Georgie Danvers kept aboard.
She knew she should probably stay below and out of the way, but her curiosity and fears drove her above. Besides, she had no intention of taking orders from Robert Danvers.
Above deck she found the entire crew of the
Sybaris
aloft, far above her, scampering over the crossbars and through the lines, setting the sails and making the ship ready for flight.
Even as she searched the deck for any sign of Colinor Robert, a flash of powder, followed in an instant by the booming sound of a cannon sent her gaze across the sea where there loomed a great ship. Three decks high, a ship of the line, she thought they called them, a great towering enemy capable of vast destruction.
Just then the ball it had sent their way splashed not far from the side of the
Sybaris.
A little bit closer and they would be . . . Olivia shuddered, not wanting to consider the ugly possibility.
She climbed the ladder to where Captain Danvers was shouting orders at the men aloft. Robert was at his side, but his eyes were focused on the ship gaining on them with every moment.
“French,” he told her. Robert turned to Colin, who had just ordered his crew to turn out to sea. “What are you thinking? You’ve got enough cannon to take him. Show him what you’ve got below.”
Jemmy had joined them on the deck, his eyes wide with excitement, a pistol in his hand.
Robert spared a glance at the young man, then asked his brother again, “Dammit, Colin, what are you doing? This is war. When have you ever run from a fight?”
“I can’t,” came Colin’s terse reply as he marched across the deck and barked another order up into the rigging.
Robert was right behind him. “Why the hell not? That’s the enemy. When did the Royal Navy start fleeing the French? It doesn’t even look that well armed. With the cannon you’ve got hidden below you could—”
Olivia stepped forward and caught Robert by the arm. “He can’t.”
Both men turned and stared at her. She squared her shoulders and explained, “Your brother can’t let them get close to us. His entire hold is filled with powder. One shot from that ship and we’ll light up the entire coast.”
Colin acknowledged her revelation with a tight nod of his head.
Robert’s face paled for a moment, not from fear, Olivia knew, but from cold dread born out of an understanding of what would happen to all of them if the French found their mark. “How can I help?”
Colin nodded to the hatchway leading to the gun-decks. “Get below, all of you,” he said, indicating Jemmy as well, “and help Livett get the cannon ready. If we must fight, I want to disable that bastard with one run and then get the hell out of here. I’ve got orders not to lose this cargo.”
Robert turned to Olivia. “Get below. It will be safer.”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t want to be trapped down there. I’d rather take my chances up here.”
“Then keep your head down.” With that, he raced off to join Jemmy, who was already halfway down the open hatch.
Olivia shrank into the shadows, getting herself as far out of the way as possible. Her body still seemed caught in the cadence of Robert’s lovemaking, thrumming with wild abandon and trembling with the chaos of confusion at his sudden, blinding anger.
It was as if he had recognized her ring. Had held it as if it were his own.
As if he’d known the original owner.
The realization shocked her to her very core. Robert had known that agent. Of this she was positive. But how? And who had that boy been to Robert? If only she could find the mysterious Hobbe, then she suspected she would finally find the truth.
Then a series of powder flashes erupted from the other ship’s gunports, the report of the cannon louder and closer than it had been before.
Right then, Olivia doubted she would ever gain the answers she longed to find, for the French ship was gaining ground with every second.
Seconds the
Sybaris
and her crew could ill afford.
A
cannonball whistled overhead, passing over the bow of the ship without hitting anything. Several of the men whooped in joy, but the others, the more experienced hands, only cursed.
They knew, as Olivia guessed, that the next round wouldn’t miss.
Robert’s words uncoiled in her mind.
When did the Royal Navy start fleeing the French?
The Royal Navy?
The
Sybaris,
a naval ship? Every time she started to think she knew the Danvers men, another mystery landed in her lap. What other secrets were they keeping from her? For she had no doubt there were any number of them about to pop out of the woodwork.
Colin continued to bark a steady stream of orders, and the sails, every inch of them, unfurled and strained in a noisy, flapping whoosh of cloth and rope. As if in answer to the prayers of all on board, a fresh breeze found them, sending the
Sybaris
leaping ahead on her new course at a breathless speed, riding over the waves and into the narrow line of moonlight that earlier had lit Olivia’s berth.
The French ship moved to follow but had missed the breeze and now had to turn to tack, sails flapping impotently, their momentum slowing until they were nearly dead in the water.
The crew of the
Sybaris
cheered and jeered at their enemy, sending the taunts across the water in a cacophony of languages and vulgarity. The French were obviously not happy, for several of their sharpshooters started to fire aimlessly at their lost prize.