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D ancing in his arms was so exquisite it was almost painful.

Not only because his hands were so firm and his face so handsome and she felt like a belle being twirled around a ballroom.

But also because they were dancing as part of something bigger: as part of the night, as part of the crew, as part of the strange little family that gathered on the swaying deck and played jigs to celebrate their freedom from land.

It was magical enough that Rebecca let go of her worries about Captain Boukman, who lifted his heels in fancy footwork alongside the rest of them, and her fears about the future, and even a little bit of herself.

She was a dancer; she was Martin Sharkhead Chow’s wife; she was a part of the Ghost , just like everyone else on board.

If every night could be like this, Rebecca would never wake up in the clutches of anxiety, wondering whether she would end the day in the same bed.

They danced until the sun completely disappeared and the stars twinkled overhead.

The moon was but a sliver in the sky, yet it shone like ivory, bathing the whole ocean in shimmering bands of white light.

Fearsome Fred, the bosun, blew into his pipe to sound the switching of the watch, and the men who had been resting below crawled up to the main deck.

The fiddler packed up, replaced by Mad Murphy with his wheezing accordion, and Sharkhead’s hand moved from Rebecca’s waist to her palm.

“Come along, then,” he murmured, “it’s time to rest.”

Just that morning, they had still been in the lagoon—within eyesight of land, where Rebecca could flee at any point should she change her mind—and Rebecca had been a mere thorn in Sharkhead’s side.

She had known his rank, his gruff orders, and that the other men spoke of him with an equal mix of reverence and fondness.

Now she knew the feel of him inside her. She knew the dazzle that glazed his eyes when he desired her. She knew the name his mother had bestowed on him. She knew he had a mother, one who loved him, and that he was from some corner of England that was strange and kind, just like the Ghost.

How much could change, all in a day. She curled her fingers around his and let him lead her below deck.

There wasn’t much hierarchy on a pirate ship, but there was custom, and up until now, Rebecca had been told to hang her hammock at the very back of the ship, beside the livestock pens, where the air stank of animal shit and decaying garbage.

It was, she had been told, the fitting place for both the goat keeper and a newcomer, and so she had resigned herself to pinching her nose even in her sleep.

Sharkhead followed her now all the way to the back, and when she went to sling her hammock across its hooks, he pulled it away from her. “You’re my wife now. You’ll sleep beside me.”

The words worked their own kind of magic. Rebecca followed him back to the center of the ship, where the sway of the waves didn’t feel quite as severe. Here was where the old hands bunked: old de la Cruz and Fearsome Fred were already snoring away on the opposite side of the mast.

Sharkhead hung her hammock beside his, inside a little nook created by stacked barrels of provisions on one side and crates of gunpowder on the other. It was far from the privacy of a cabin with a door, yet when Rebecca stepped inside, she felt as if she had bid the rest of the ship goodbye.

There were only the two hooks, however, and so their hammocks were hung directly beside each other. Rebecca climbed into hers first, then held herself still as Sharkhead clambered into his. Their elbows clanged, and he slammed into the ship’s wall as he tried to settle farther away from her.

“This might be more comfortable if we were just sharing one hammock,” Rebecca suggested. At least then they wouldn’t swing into each other like church bells.

“I sweat when I sleep. You’d wake up soaked.”

“Is that why you haven’t had a woman all these years? Because you think you are the only person who sweats?”

She didn’t know why she was teasing him. They only had four hours until their watch was called again. They needed to steal as much sleep as they could.

She liked holding his hand, though, even if the connection meant their hammocks kept banging into each other.

“You don’t sweat like I do,” he said in the same tone that he had used to order her and Mrs. Adams back to shore that first day.

She didn’t intend to permit that tone to remain between them. “Perhaps not.” She moved his hand to sit just inside the upper part of her thigh. “But I get wet in other ways.”

His fingers firmed over her skirts. Rebecca waited, her breath refusing to come, to see what more of a reaction he would give her. It seemed like an eternity before he asked—the words scratching the back of his throat—“How wet?”

She thought of a dozen adjectives to describe the effect the question had on her junction. Soaking, gushing, slick; like a river, like a geyser, like an ocean; hot, eager, insatiable, liquid, impatient, desperate.

None of them would do the trick. She pulled her dress and petticoat up, instead, all the way up to where his fingers held the fabric fast. “See for yourself.”

In the lanternlight, his movements merged with the shadows.

He rolled onto his shoulder, the better to slide those tough fingers down the inside of her thigh.

She saw the gleam in his eyes and the curve of his lips, exaggerated by the darkness beneath them.

She heard his breath hitch as he trailed his thumb along her skin.

She matched it with her own gasp. A small, quiet one, because this time, she didn’t want the crew to overhear.

Yet she wanted to be overcome by the feeling, so she tipped back her head and shut her eyes.

She focused on his fingers, which skimmed her like a breeze over still water.

He stretched an ankle across their hammocks and hooked it around hers to keep them swaying in the same rhythm to the waves.

The connection—his stockinged foot against her bare leg—sent a shimmy of pleasure down her spine.

Pleasure that was outmatched when his lips found her ear and scraped a kiss in the tenderest part of her neck.

Rebecca stretched her spine, wishing her breasts free of the confines of her gown, wishing herself full of him like she had been that afternoon when he had knocked her senseless against the captain’s desk.

Yet Sharkhead had not even started the good part.

Because it was only after she arced against the hammock, only after she bit back a moan of desire, only after her body felt as red as the sunset, that he brought those fingers to her quim.

That thumb—so thick, so sure—found her clit, and those fingers that could do so much with a rope slid down through her wetness and plunged inside of her.

He worked her clit first, flicking it so fast and so lightly that she barely knew how to breathe.

As a hot spiral built from her deepest core to the magic of his thumb, her hips bucked up against those fingers of his, and he rocked his wrist with her natural movement so that the whole of her body was defined by the fiery desire connecting her clit to her slick channel.

She buried her lips in his neck to keep from letting the whole ship know what he was doing to her; when she broke—and she did, gloriously, almost as deeply and as wonderfully as she had earlier that afternoon—her cry was for him and him only.

But she wasn’t ready for it to be over. Seizing his wrist, she brought his fingers to her mouth and licked off the remnants of her desire.

His breath came jaggedly into the air between them.

Rebecca reached down to where he waited long and hard for her.

She untied his sashed belt, unbuttoned his trousers, and freed that cock.

It was warm and velvety in her palm, but she didn’t want to work it with her hands.

No, she climbed out of her hammock—carefully, quietly—and landed on her knees, propping her elbows on the insides of his sling to keep him in place.

Breathing hard, he tilted his hips to give her a better angle.

Rebecca took him in her mouth in the fluid, practiced movement she knew men to love so much.

Then, her hand at the base of his cock, she slid her tongue and cheeks up and down, up and down, tasting the sea of his flesh and feeling the throb of his desire.

She was gentle but firm, molding her mouth into a replacement for a sweet quim, matching her tempo to his breath, and when it sounded like he was nearing completion, she used her elbows to swing the hammock, too, so that his cock jabbed almost all the way to the back of her throat as if he were fucking her with all the force of his hips, and he came in a great spasm of body and breath.

“I should have gotten myself a wife a long time ago,” Sharkhead said as he returned to himself, and his hand cupped the back of her head as if she were something precious to him.

Rebecca swallowed. She climbed into her own hammock, even though she yearned for him to invite her into his. It was a hot night; their skin would chafe if they spent too long in each other’s arms.

“But then,” Sharkhead replied to himself, reaching out and taking her hand again, “she wouldn’t be you.”

Nice words. Rebecca told herself not to believe them too much. She knew from experience that nothing said after lovemaking was completely true. A phenomenon that made it easier to ask what she had been wondering all night:

“Do you think, if I showed up at Northfield Hall, that I might belong there? I mean, that perhaps I might be asked to stay?”

“Of course you would.” He tugged her closer. “But you needn’t go all the way there. You belong here, with me.”

She smiled, though she knew he couldn’t see it. The smile was for herself, to bask in this moment, even though it wouldn’t last. “Because I’m your wife.”

He yawned, and Rebecca thought she wouldn’t get a reply because he was already asleep. Until he murmured, “Because I like you.”

Words that nestled Rebecca to sleep at last.