Again Patrick caressed her mouth with his thumb. “What?” he prompted quietly.
Frankness won the hour, being so integral a part of Charlotte’s nature. “You didn’t come to our bed last night,” she said, faltering but determined.
He grinned. “Did you miss me?”
Charlotte wanted so to say she hadn’t, but it was a lie she couldn’t manage. She skirted the question, countering with one of her own. “Do you have a mistress in Costa del Cielo?”
Patrick arched one dark eyebrow. “Only a wife,” he replied. His expression was very serious, although Charlotte thought she saw merriment lurking far back in the depths of his eyes. “As unconventional as our wedding was, my dear, I’m afraid we
are
married.”
She met his gaze directly, bravely, hoping he could not see how crucial the whole matter was to her. “You could end it just by clapping your hands together three times and repeating, ‘I divorce you,’ “ she reminded him.
“Is that what you want?”
Charlotte looked away for a moment, found her courage. “No. But it seems to me, Mr. Trevarren,” she said, “that all the advantages of this union are on your side. I have no assurance that you won’t take up with another woman, or sail away and leave me on some wharf—”
“Those things could happen even if we’d been married in a church in Quade’s Harbor, with all your family looking on,” Patrick pointed out reasonably. “Besides, it isn’t only husbands who stray, Charlotte. You could leave as easily as I could.”
She opened her mouth, realized she didn’t have a sensible response prepared, and closed it again.
Patrick laughed and bent his head to give her a tantalizing kiss. “I will be very busy, tomorrow and the next day and for a lot of days after that,” he told her, while she was struggling to catch her breath again, “but I won’t neglect my duties as a husband.”
Charlotte was at once elated and embarrassed. “Until this
morning, when I saw her clearly in the light of day,” she confessed, “I thought Pilar was your mistress.”
Her husband uttered a long-suffering sigh. “Pilar is a child,” he said.
“She’s old enough to send perfumed love letters,” Charlotte argued.
Patrick was obviously trying to look stern, but the laughter in his eyes gave him away. “You’ve been going through my desk,” he accused.
She bristled. “It was an accident,” she said.
“Umm,” Patrick said thoughtfully, frowning as he considered. His hands rested low on the small of Charlotte’s back, pressing her close with graceful insistence. “Did you read the letters?”
Charlotte’s face warmed. “No.”
“Because they’re written in Spanish?”
She was deliciously aware of Patrick’s proximity, of the scent and power and sheer substance not only of his body, but of his spirit as well. “I didn’t need to read them,” she faltered, and although she’d intended to sound defiant, her words seemed petulant instead. “The perfume told me quite enough.”
Idly Patrick lifted one hand to cup her breast. “Pilar is convinced she adores me,” he said. “At some point, she’ll come to her senses and I’ll give the letters back to her.”
A web of delicious sensation, centered in the plump breast Patrick was caressing, unfolded into every part of Charlotte’s being. It was a struggle to keep her mind on the subject of their conversation. “You could simply destroy the letters, couldn’t you?”
Patrick shook his head, sighed, and deftly drew down the neckline of her borrowed gown, as well as the muslin camisole beneath, baring her. “No,” he answered. “She would always wonder if I had really destroyed them, or if they would turn up later to embarrass her. A lady shouldn’t have to worry about things like that.”
Charlotte trembled as his thumb moved across her nipple, lightly shaping and preparing it. Her reason was fleeing rapidly, but she clung to a few remnants. “In that case—why not give them back now?”
He sighed again, focused his attention on the breast he was clearly hungry for. “That would be unkind,” he answered, his voice slow, sleepy-sounding. “Pilar’s adoration is harmless, after all. She’ll grow out of it sooner or later.”
Charlotte was in an anguish of wanting, although the courtyard certainly wasn’t the proper place for the playful intimacies of a husband and wife. She let her head fall back in helpless surrender, moaned when Patrick leaned down to take her nipple between his lips.
He took his nourishment freely, with no apparent concern that they might be interrupted, then put Charlotte’s camisole and bodice back in place and gave her well-attended breast a fond little pat.
Charlotte’s need had risen to a fever pitch. “Patrick—” she pleaded, hating her weakness and his strength, stunned once again to know how easily he could stir a violent tempest within her. A storm only he had the power to still.
He touched his fingers to her lips. “I’ll be back tonight,” he said, and then he left her, striding across the courtyard, disappearing through a gate.
Charlotte sat down on a stone bench, unable to stand because of the riot of emotions besetting her. She loved Patrick, she hated him. She wanted to obey him, and to rebel against him.
When she’d recovered somewhat, a process that took considerable time, she took a pen, a bottle of ink, and some stationery from the desk in her room. Then she sat down at the table in the courtyard again, and wrote a second long letter to her family.
Rashad had insisted that he’d mailed the first missive, composed while she was still a member of Khalif’s harem, but Charlotte was taking no chances. Her loved ones were probably frantic with worry as it was.
She spent the afternoon laboring over her letter, only nibbling at the midday meal of fruit and cheese and dark bread a servant brought. During the hottest part of the day, while most citizens of Costa del Cielo enjoyed a leisurely siesta, Charlotte wrote pages, crumpled them, and composed others. It was important to make her father and Lydia
understand that she loved Patrick and truly wanted to be with him, despite their strange courtship.
Charlotte had fibbed in the first letter, for she’d been a captive then, without hope of escape, wanting to protect her loved ones from the pain the truth would have caused. Now, excluding only the most intimate details of her relationship with Patrick, she recounted the adventure incident for incident. In the end, she had such a thick sheaf of pages that her writings would have to be sent in a packet instead of an envelope.
That night, wearing yet another borrowed dress, this one cream-colored, with touches of antique lace decorating the bodice and cuffs, Charlotte dined with the Querida family. It was a pleasant meal, although conversation was awkward, due to the differences in language. And there was no sign of Patrick.
After the meal, there was music in what would have been the drawing room in England, or the parlor in America. Señora Querida played the harpsichord, while the señor offered a hand to his daughter, with teasing formality, and drew her into a dance.
Charlotte watched in delight, but there was a bittersweet ache in the center of her heart. Often, while Lydia played piano, Millie and Charlotte had taken turns dancing with their father in much the same way. Again, still, she missed her dear ones with a painful poignancy.
Just when she would have made a polite excuse and fled to her room, Patrick appeared. He had exchanged his usual garb of trousers, high boots, and a flowing shirt for a finely fitted evening suit, complete with a gray-and-charcoal-striped ascot and a stickpin.
Charlotte had thought she’d grown used to his magnificence, for he was heart-stoppingly handsome even under ordinary conditions. On that magical night, however, the pirate was posing as a prince. When he took Charlotte in his arms and began to whirl her gracefully around the room, in time with Mrs. Querida’s sprightly assault on the harpsichord, she forgot everything that had troubled her before.
During that single dance, it was as though Charlotte’s soul and Patrick’s touched and then fused into one. Not a word
was said, and all the dictates of propriety were observed, and yet the experience was somehow more profound than their most intense lovemaking had been.
Charlotte realized, with glorious despair, that her heart had gone to this man for sanction, to remain with him not only throughout their mortal lives, but throughout eternity as well.
If Patrick had felt this fundamental shift in the course of things, he gave no sign of it. He danced with Charlotte twice more, and then with Pilar, who was obviously charmed. The señora beamed from her bench at the harpsichord, while her husband leaned against the mantel over the marble fireplace, watching fondly.
Not even a whisper of envy moved against Charlotte’s heart, but she was overwhelmed by her emotions, and she needed time and solitude to sort them out. She’d been so certain, before that night, that it wasn’t possible to love Patrick more than she already did. Now she was reeling from the sudden expansion of her sentiment; the vast ocean had, without warning, taken on the dimensions of a universe.
She slipped out of the richly furnished drawing room, hoping to go unnoticed, and hurried along the corridors to the suite.
There, in the wash of moonlight flowing in through the windows, she paced, full of reckless, elemental energy. She could not accommodate these new feelings, she fretted silently, wrapping her arms tightly around herself. In those treacherous moments, Charlotte feared her very soul would burst.
“Charlotte.”
She whirled, saw Patrick standing in the doorway of the suite, cloaked in shadows. She couldn’t read his face, because of the darkness, but she heard concern in his voice, and quiet understanding.
She began to cry, and snuffled out, “What’s happening to me?”
Patrick lifted her easily into his arms. “I couldn’t tell you, goddess,” he confessed, in a raspy whisper. “I’m feeling pretty dazed myself.” He kissed her, and Charlotte felt the
universe begin to unfold again, doubling and redoubling at a dizzying speed. He broke away finally, and carried her to the bed, and Charlotte couldn’t separate his trembling from her own. “I want you so much,” he said, taking down her hair with awkward fingers, “that I’m afraid of what will happen when I have you.”
She peeled away his tailored coat, pulled the stickpin from his ascot, clawed at his shirt buttons. Just as frantic, Patrick stripped her to the skin, in a matter of moments. There were no sweet preliminaries that night, no tentative caresses, for their yearning for each other had melded into a single, primitive desire, as unstoppable as an earthquake.
Patrick laid Charlotte on the bed and thrust himself into her, and she welcomed him with a passion older than the stars.
Their loving had been like some kind of joyful battle that night, Patrick thought as he lay staring up at the ceiling, a sleeping Charlotte curled against his side. From their first encounter, she had been like a spirited jungle cat, responding with ferocious abandon to the things he taught her. Still, something new had happened between them tonight, even before they had tumbled into bed. While they were dancing, so innocently and circumspectly, something within him, long disjointed, had been wrenched back into place.
Patrick was glad of the darkness and Charlotte’s deep slumber, because suddenly there were tears in his eyes, tears of the most profound, poetic wonder. After the wonder came fear of the purest sort, for he loved this woman—for the moment, at least, he couldn’t deny that—and by loving her, he had opened himself up not only to happiness, but to incomprehensible pain.
Even as he drew Charlotte closer, her body warm and supple against his, he wished he’d never seen her, wished she’d never left Quade’s Harbor, never ventured into the marketplace and gotten herself kidnapped. His old life had been a lonely one in some ways, but he hadn’t been unhappy. Despite his many and varied adventures, during which his body had been in indisputable danger, his soul was always safe.
No more, he thought grimly. If he lost Charlotte, whether to death or indifference or the love of another, he would never be whole again. He would have to live out his days with a crippled and twisted spirit.
She stirred beside him, this woman who was both his rescuing angel and his conqueror, and spread her fingers over his bare belly. Patrick moaned when those same fingers clasped his manhood and brought it to instant and rather painful attention.
“Come here,” she purred sleepily. “I’m not through with you.”
Helpless to resist, Patrick rolled onto her, resting the weight of his upper body on his forearms, and positioned himself between her warm thighs. “You might show me a little mercy,” he pointed out, only half in jest.
“Not tonight,” Charlotte teased, lifting her hips and taking him inside her easily, drawing him deep. “Perhaps, if you’re very good, I’ll let you sleep tomorrow.”
Ever since he’d had his first woman, at the age of thirteen, Patrick had always done the taking. Now, incredibly, he was
being taken,
and he couldn’t begin to comprehend the emotions the fact stirred in him. He moved in rhythm with Charlotte, following her lead, unable to stop himself. The response was instinctive, the needs behind it as unfathomable as the sea itself.
She crooned senseless words of encouragement, and he was frantic to obey her. When she bucked beneath him, then stiffened and cried out in triumph, Patrick misplaced his soul. He flexed wildly against her, reaching deep, and the walls of her feminine channel clenched around his shaft.
He cried out as he spilled his seed, the pleasure almost beyond bearing, and Charlotte spread her hands over the taut muscles of his buttocks, urging him, comforting him, commanding him. Finally she allowed him to collapse—he no longer had a will of his own, he knew—but as soon as his breathing had evened out, she wanted him again.
She got a basin of water and a cloth from somewhere and slowly, gently washed him. “Sit up,” she said, and somehow he obeyed her, even though he had no strength.
“Charlotte,” he pleaded raggedly, tilting his head back,
knowing he could not escape. Nor could he rebel, because as she kissed and fondled him, he grew hard again, his staff resting against his belly like an oak.