Authors: Donna Thorland
Cheap nodded. “Best chance is to join the morning traffic on the wharf. I’ll find us a cart and lie low until dawn.”
It was the most sensible course of action, the surest and safest way to get Benjamin Ward, injured as he was, and Sparhawk, a wanted man, marked by his height and coal black hair, out of Boston. It should work. They had only to play the part of sturdy fishermen in the murky predawn light, to traverse less than a half mile of twisting streets. If they were stopped, it was unlikely to be by a large party of soldiers—Gage’s forces were spread too thin guarding the city to conduct a proper manhunt—and Cheap and Sparhawk, even encumbered with an injured man, ought to be able to fight their way free to the boat.
The devil of it was that this sure and sensible plan left Sparhawk in the one circumstance he did not feel equal to: alone with Sarah Ward.
Sarah stood frozen in the hall, looking up at James Sparhawk.
She had not expected to see him again after the
Hephaestion
, but tonight Mr. Cheap had come to her, up the floating back staircase of Trent’s manse, quiet as a mouse despite his hulking size, to say that Benji and Sparhawk had not made their rendezvous with the
Sally
, and that boats were passing between the castle and the admiral’s flagship.
Sarah had grown up in a town with more widows than wives, and when the
Charming Sally
was overdue, she had learned to follow her mother’s stoic example of staying busy and keeping her fears and her doubts to herself. She was fifteen, three years in the clutches of the dame school, when she hauled up her courage to confront her mother and ask how she could remain so calm when her husband and son were six weeks past due from London.
Her mother’s answer had been simple and sensible and more difficult to master than Latin or Greek or needlework: “Do not catalog the terrors of the sea in your head. Do not imagine them drowned, crushed by a spar, or thrashing with fever. Do not, when it is your beau instead of your brother, imagine him in the arms of another woman. Picture him in the privacy of your mind on his deck, with a clear sky, a good wind, and calm seas, and there at least, it will be so.”
Sarah had tried to envision her brother and Sparhawk, escaped, hiding on one of the harbor islands perhaps, but her treacherous mind had painted them captured and killed a thousand ways; she had seen Molineaux’s head explode and blood run past the toe of her shoe on the deck of the
Sally
.
And she had thought of Sparhawk’s proposition on the
Hephaestion
the day before—and wished she had accepted it.
He could not marry her. There was no security in being a man’s mistress. She had been sensible to refuse him.
She would regret it for the rest of her life.
She busied herself brewing coffee that Mr. Cheap surreptitiously tossed in the fireplace when he thought she wasn’t looking, and toasting—or to be accurate, charring—bread that he slipped behind the sofa cushions.
Then the boy had arrived and told her that she must come quickly.
Mr. Cheap had not liked the sound of it. The North End was a tough neighborhood. He’d wanted to reconnoiter on his own first and report back, in case it was a ruse. She had insisted on going, in case it was not, and had finally prevailed.
Now she was here, alone with Sparhawk, in a meeting she had neither anticipated nor prepared for. She had found his beauty disconcerting in the close confines of her father’s cabin on the
Sally
and in her Salem home. She had steeled herself against it for her visit to the
Hephaestion
. Since then she thought she had become inured to it, but tonight, confronted with his startling physicality and conscious of the service he had done her, she could not ignore his glamour.
She stalled for a few minutes, rechecked her brother’s temperature, which was normal, his pulse, which was strong, and the rum bottle, which was empty. That was just as well. He was deeply unconscious now, and would likely sleep through the night; the best thing for him. When there was nothing else she could fuss over, she closed the door on her brother and found Sparhawk waiting for her in the hall.
“I am sorry to have alarmed you,” he said. “I sent my message when I did not yet know if I would be able to find a doctor, or how your brother would fare.”
“There is no need to apologize. You brought him back, when you might have cut and run.”
“There were moments when I was tempted,” he replied. “Your brother is brave and capable . . . and irritating as hell.”
“Now imagine growing up in the same house with him,” she said. Then a question occurred to her. “Whose house is this?”
“It is yours, actually. I bought it and put it in your name.”
“Oh.”
“Sarah,” he said, taking a step forward and then stopping himself. “I have acted wrongly in all regards toward you from the moment we met. My comments about pressing you on the
Sally
were thoughtless. My advances in your father’s cabin were ungentlemanly. And in your father’s house worse still. I regret the proposal I made yesterday on the
Hephaestion
. It was selfish and ungrateful. I am sorry, for all of it.”
The lady her mother had hoped she might become, that the dame and the dame school had trained, would have accepted his apology with a condescending nod, and made a graceful exit, but Sarah Ward was not that lady, and never, she was coming to realize, would be.
“I wish you had not dismasted the
Sally
,” she said honestly, “and that you had not been arrested, but otherwise, I am not sorry for any of it. And I am not sorry to be here with you now.”
“Our meeting here like this”—he gestured to indicate their closeness in the hall—“was unintended. I meant to call at Chelsea for the papers your Rebel friends prepared for me and sail for England with your brother. I still mean to do that, to do the right thing, to leave you alone,” he said.
She took a step forward. “
That
isn’t what I want.
That
I
would
be sorry for.”
“Your brother is in the next room.”
“My brother is unconscious.”
“Mr. Cheap will return,” said Sparhawk.
“Not for several hours.”
“Then it would be wrong to abuse the trust he has placed in me,” said Sparhawk.
“Mr. Cheap trusts that you will not force yourself on me. And that I am old enough to make my own choices.”
“But it is as you said in Salem. What you want—what we both want—would leave you worse off in the morning.”
“Not if we were careful,” she said. Her mother and the dame might have been disappointed before. They would be positively horrified now.
Sparhawk wasn’t. He was tempted. She could see it in the stiffness of his posture, in the way he held himself as far back from her in the tiny hall as he could manage. “I never meant to be anything else with you,” he said.
They were dancing around it, but she must be certain they both held the same understanding. “You must pull out,” she said, feeling her face flush. She had received a graphic and thorough education in the matter. Not from the dame, of course, but from the well- meaning trollops on the Salem docks. Now, as then, her cheeks colored and her tongue failed to form the words. She was a pirate’s daughter, but Micah had been her only lover, and they had not discussed anything beforehand.
“Micah did not,” she said. And afterward, it had only deepened her humiliation. When he started talking about settling money on her, buying her a house near his wharf, making her his mistress, not his wife, she had realized her folly. She’d told him she would never consent to being his mistress. “You won’t have any choice if you are pregnant,” he’d replied.
He’d been right. The Wards were too stretched already. They could scarcely support themselves, could not bear the loss of even a fraction of Sarah’s labor, or afford to feed and clothe a child. She had spent the better part of the next month in anxious misery. News of her broken engagement raced through town on the wind of gossip, but she seemed to move through the days between her night with Wild and her next courses like a ship becalmed.
For two years she had raged at the way Micah Wild had robbed her of her ability to chart her own course. She had struggled, ever after, to remake her future. Tonight with Sparhawk, not only could she change her future; she could also change her past, dislodge Micah Wild from his place in her history as her only lover, as her logline for passion and intimacy.
Sparhawk took a hesitant step forward in the hall. “Before you arrived, I resolved to part with you, for your own good.”
“I know you fear acting the part of the rake and seducer, but here, tonight, you are not the authority of the Crown, and I am not the fugitive from its justice. Only our sexes make us unequal, and that is a distinction of bodies, not of spirit.”
• • •
She had demolished all his arguments. Sparhawk had known Sarah Ward to be his equal in spirit from their first encounter on the
Sally
; he knew he would not meet her like again.
He took her hand in his. It was small but capable, softer than it had been on her father’s schooner, a delicate gold bracelet circling the wrist. He lifted it to his lips, and she came lightly into his arms as he pressed a kiss in the center of her palm, then over her pulse point, and again on the downy inside of her forearm.
His heart beat faster, and the last of his misgivings fled. He was sorry her first lover had been Wild, but he was also glad she was not a virgin. He had never deflowered one, never known the responsibility of setting the pattern for a woman’s future passions. He was glad of that as well. He had not understood, until now, that first encounters were more than physical experiences. Wild might not have hurt Sarah physically, might even have given to her generously of pleasure and attention. It was
himself
he had withheld.
Sparhawk would not make the same mistake.
• • •
Sarah felt the last of Sparhawk’s resolve crumble. He pulled her close and his mouth descended; his lips covered hers; his tongue sought entry and gained it. His mouth tasted molasses sweet with the rich dark rum he had shared with her brother, whose life he had just saved.
He backed her to the wall until his taut body met every inch of hers. She felt the cool plaster against her shoulders through the thin cotton of her gown. Her center of gravity shifted. Weight pooled between her legs. His body responded, thick and urgent against her belly.
She had been land bound in Boston for so long that the tang of sea and salt in his hair, on his skin, thrilled her senses and made her want to drown in him. The familiar textures beneath her questing hands, the soft snowy linen of his shirt, the starched white cotton of his neck cloth, the soft wool of his fawn breeches, were made startling and new by the presence of his hard muscular body beneath.
He stepped back and looked down at her, eyes wide with wonder. She shared his excitement. “Upstairs,” he whispered, his inflection at once hungry and solicitous.
She nodded and took his hand, as eager as he was for this thing that was unfolding between them.
They climbed the first two steps, but when they reached the bend in the stair, he stopped and turned to her to kiss her lips, her eyes, her hair, and whisper her name over and over. She could feel the beat of his heart in his chest, setting an insistent rhythm that her own body echoed.
They were as close as they could be with layers of muffling cloth between them, but it was not enough. She needed him. Flesh to flesh. Skin to skin. She raised her knee and hooked it over his hip, bringing them closer together
there
. He moaned and grasped her buttocks, then lifted her and turned to mount the next stair.
She locked her ankles at the small of his back, kissed his throat where his tanned skin was bare above the ruffle on his shirt, opened her mouth and flicked her tongue against the pulse in his neck.
That undid him. He staggered and set them down, locked together, on the stairs.
“I meant for you to have a bed,” he whispered.
“I don’t need a bed,” she said just as quietly, still dimly conscious of her brother sleeping downstairs. “I just need you.”
The stairs were dark, but there was enough moonlight coming from the landing above for her to see the expression of sensual intent that suffused his face.
He reefed her skirts, neat as a foretopman, folding each layer of cotton back until there was only the gossamer silk of her chemise covering just her knees. This he reefed as well, carefully, almost reverently, until she was completely exposed to him.
“Beautiful,” he said, stroking the thatch of blond curls with the backs of his knuckles. She was already slick and ready for him, but he took his time to please her anyway, and she came very near knowing just how good it could be if he did it for her before he stopped.
Then he opened his fall front. He stroked his shaft to spread the moisture beading at the tip. There was nothing preening or self-conscious about the gesture, just a pure carnality that freed her to embrace her own.
He knelt over her. She grasped a banister and leaned back. The risers of the second flight bit into her back, but she didn’t care. His hardness was stroking her slickness, back and forth, a prelude to the joining she hungered for, and when she raised her hips and he lowered his, they slid together in a perfect fit, a dovetail joint.
She had a little leverage, with her feet upon the stair below, her hand upon the banister, to move with him, to arch and meet his thrusts and find for herself that which she had passively waited for Micah to give to her. And that discovery made the moment, with Sparhawk, wholly new.
Right as her body went slack, his tensed. He gasped, stilled, and pulled out, just in time.
He rested his forehead against hers. She could hear his deep-drawn breaths, feel his heartbeat reverberate through her whole body.
They climbed to their feet, whispering endearments, straightening each other’s clothing, kissing, touching, smiling at their own impatience. Together they crept up the stairs, like errant children sneaking back to bed.
They discovered three chambers on the second floor. The first two were small and sparsely furnished with simple low beds and practical straw ticks. The third was obviously meant to be the great room, and like the rest of the house, reflected the taste of a previous century. The bed was heavy oak and paneled, the posts carved in a frenzy of stylized floral motifs. No doubt it had been quite grand once, but age had darkened the wood almost to black, and much of the fine detail was lost. It did, however, boast the plumpest feather mattress Sarah had ever seen.
“I asked my man of business to buy and furnish a love nest,” Sparhawk said, by way of an explanation.
Sarah flounced on the edge of the cloudlike mattress, and a feather floated up. “It would seem he has a very literal mind. At least the bed is roomy and there is no need to bend me over it.”