Page 45

O ver the course of the next three days not a moment passed that Beau would have described as boring, occupied as she was with the normal, if somewhat nerve-wracking, routines of guiding an overburdened galleon through seasonable squalls and strong currents.

The evening meals continued to be a trial, more for Spence than anyone else, once it was deemed a certainty that Agnes Frosthip had set her sights on him; she even appeared at the dinner table with her moustache shaved off, a clear indication to everyone but Jonas that he was a doomed man.

As the duenna’s attention turned more and more to Spence, it lapsed even further toward her royal charge.

Had the duchess been willing, Pitt’s stolen moments could have become outright theft of virtue for all her chaperone seemed to notice.

It was Dona Maria, however, who took care never to be caught alone again with the handsome master gunner, although it was obvious to anyone with half a wit—which excluded Pitt by this point—that he would not have had to resort to theft; she would gladly have given him anything he cared to take .

Beau continued to excuse herself early from the evening meals, wanting nothing either by word or gesture to put more of a suspicious gleam in her father’s eye than was already there.

To her credit she managed not to blush whenever Dante glanced her way, which he did with reckless frequency and with more suggested intimacy than she would have preferred.

Conversely, at other times, it was a struggle for her to keep from staring openly at his starkly sensual countenance, especially if the light caught his smile a certain way, or his hands moved in a manner that brought to mind the treacherous skill of those long, deft fingers.

She took to pacing out her frustrations on the gallery balcony during the politic quarter hour before Dante joined her.

Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they argued.

Always it depended on the mood Beau had worked herself into, whether she had accepted what they did together as casual and finite and a pleasurable way to pass the nights …

or if she was convinced it was foolish, reckless, callous, and predatory on his part, senseless and potentially destructive on hers.

Either way they ended up naked and breathless in a tangle of sweat-slicked arms and legs, with Beau telling herself it was the last time.

It had to be the last time. He was becoming too powerful an intoxicant in her blood, drugging her with his passion, draining her with his prowess and potency. It simply wasn’t fair.

Once. Once only she had managed to escape the cabin before his eyes, his hands, his mouth, had lured her into the realm of sensual decadence. She managed to stay away too … long enough to wonder why he had not come after her. To wonder if he was, indeed, growing bored.

She had returned to the cabin on some lame excuse and found him bent over his infernal documents again, his handsome face awash in candlelight.

His expression had been cool enough to suggest indifference, but his eyes had betrayed too much relief for either one of them to waste effort on words.

She had gone to him and he had taken her as he had wanted to take her that first day, sprawled naked on a bed of scattered papers, her hair spread in a wild spill of auburn beneath them.

The morning of the fourth day, she woke when dawn was nothing more than a hint of pearl-gray seeping over the horizon.

Dante was actually asleep beside her, a rarety she had come to appreciate in the short time she’d had a chance to study his habits.

It was as if he begrudged wasting even that much time, letting life go by without being in absolute control, absolute command.

Not wanting to disturb him, she eased herself out from beneath his arm and padded barefoot to the chair, groping through the gloom for an identifiable garment in the pile that had been so hastily discarded.

Her shirt, she was not surprised to discover, was ripped into two halves, drawing a muffled curse from her lips.

Dante’s was beside it and she pulled it over her head, losing herself briefly in the voluminous folds.

She went out onto the gallery and leaned on the rail, letting the wind comb through the tangles in her hair.

From the sound of the wash and the height of the wake curling out behind them, she guessed their speed to be between eight and ten knots; the faint sound of a bell overhead tolled the fifth hour of the morning.

She sighed and cupped her chin in her hands.

The soft, indistinct light that hung over the far edge of the sea was spreading in gauzy strips, lightening to pinks and golds and grays.

Soon the sea would become a vast, shimmering puddle of bronze and the wash would glitter with the first pinpoints of sunlight.

There was a chill in the air and she closed her eyes to savor the crispness.

Her skin rippled with a spray of goose-flesh but before she could hug her arms and chafe some heat through the cool linen of Dante’s shirt, a pair of large, warm hands slid around her waist and invited her to share the heat of his body.

“I thought you were asleep,” she murmured.

“Mmm.” He nuzzled aside a tousle of curls and pressed his lips to the nape of her neck. “Come back inside and wake me properly.”

Desire stirred along her spine, spreading outward like a slow, rolling wave.

After three nights of avid explorations of each other’s body, she would have expected to have at least grown more immune to the timbre of his voice, but even that small measure of control had deserted her.

The low, throaty vibrations were as tempting as sin itself and she found herself shifting slightly in his arms, inviting his hands to cup her full, swollen breasts.

“I am surprised you aren’t still asleep,” he murmured against the curve of her spine.

“I … wanted to watch the sunrise.”

“Really? I would rather watch you rise all flushed and pink beneath me.”

“I rose quite enough last night,” she said through the catch in her voice, “thank you very much.”

He laughed softly and his hands slid downward.

They met over her belly, then continued lower, pressing into the juncture of her thighs, pulling her even closer to his chest. As cool as the air was, his big body was as hot as a brazier.

His skin was heated velvet, the muscles smooth and hard, burnished as bronze as the sea in the growing light.

He loomed extremely large behind her and she felt as she always did: too short, too small, too inadequate, to accommodate all that massive power and strength .

Yet she knew it wasn’t true. She fit him as a glove fit a hand, snug and sleek and tight.

“You’re thinking of something other than sunrises,” he mused, “I can tell.”

His fingers seduced her through the linen and another ribbon of heat unfurled within her, coiling between her thighs, slithering past flesh that had become far too knowledgeable in such a short time. It was shameless, that’s what it was. It was shameless and brazen and …

“There,” she whispered, “please.”

Dante smiled against her nape and snatched up the hem of the shirt she was wearing.

A hard-muscled leg urged her thighs apart, wide enough for him to slide his partly aroused flesh into the warmth.

Beau cursed softly at this new torment, this new wickedness to add to his repertoire.

His fingers were still dancing and stroking, now his flesh was stretching and expanding, vying for equal attention.

Beau leaned forward at his murmured urging and he curled an arm around her waist, holding her firmly against him. He probed the lush, pearly folds, not quite deep enough to penetrate, but teasingly enough to send her head bowing forward on a shiver.

“I have the morning watch,” she groaned.

“It’s hours away yet.”

She sucked in a quick breath and shuddered as his big body stretched and throbbed and taunted her with a brief, swiftly retracted thrust.

“You are taking shameful advantage of my position, Captain,” she whispered.

Dante’s hands encircled her breasts, finding the nipples peaked into hard beads. He kneaded them, caressed them, gently chafed them, until she was pushing back against him with wriggling impatience.

“If I am, you have only yourself to blame. Standing here, robed in my shirt, with those long, luscious legs bare beneath it—” his lips nuzzled her neck and he withheld more than he offered— “how could I resist?”

Her lips parted with a moan and she braced her hands on the rail.

“How indeed,” she accused breathlessly, “when you know I don’t have the strength to fight you off?”

He offered up a low, husky laugh. “You should never make an admission like that to a man, mon enfant. But why do you still think it is necessary to fight me, even after all this time?”

“Why do you,” she gasped, “always think your attentions bring a woman pleasure? Is it so inconceivable to imagine a woman not wanting to share your lusty ways each time the urge comes upon you?”

“You mean if she, for instance, wanted to watch the sunrise instead?”

“Some people do, you know.”

His body stopped moving. He withdrew himself completely and stepped back a pace, offering a formal bow. “Then by all means, I would do the gentlemanly thing and let her watch it.”

Beau stood with her mouth open and her body trembling. The shock of watching him walk back inside the cabin, combined with the sudden absence of heat, eventually spurred her into following him, but by then he was standing over the washbowl, humming faintly to himself.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” He held the sharpened edge of a knife to his cheek and started to scrape away the shadow of beard stubble. “How was the sunrise?”