Page 28 of Thief of Hearts
C HAPTER T WENTY-SEVEN
“C AP’N! CAP’N! THE LAUNCH! SAINTS BE praised, there she be!”
Tarn’s jubilant cry sent every hand aboard the Retribution rushing as one man to the starboard rail. With a resigned sigh, Kevin surrendered his spyglass to his brother, preferring its loss to the loss of his fingers.
Gerard squinted into the miniature telescope, brushing a ruffled lock of hair from his eyes. The wind had risen as the sun began its lazy descent into the sea, loosening the grip of the heat to a bearable embrace.
He didn’t know whether to celebrate his triumph or mourn his coming loss. He’d never allowed himself to dream beyond this moment, which was just as well, for without Lucy, the future loomed as nothing but a bleak haze, as gray and frigid as the North Sea in winter. She would doubtlessly spend the rest of her life hating him, believing him so mercenary as to have sold her to her own father for thirty pieces of silver and a worthless scrap of paper. A bittersweet victory indeed.
A rousing cheer went up as the delinquent craft drifted into view. It faded to pensive silence as the men, born sailors every one of them, detected something odd about the launch’s course. Instead of slicing purposefully toward the Retribution , it bobbed aimlessly among the rising swells, tossed this way and that by the whims of the mounting wind. The lowest edge of the sun crimped along the horizon, staining the sea a bloody orange.
“She looks to be empty, sir! No sign of Digby.”
Even before Tarn’s bewildered voice had sounded the alarm, Gerard had lowered the spyglass and given Apollo a cryptic signal. He watched with a sickening sense of dread as Fidget and Apollo lowered a second longboat into the choppy water. They threw their powerful backs into rowing, straining to catch the launch before the current could drag it farther out to sea. Tarn swung down from the rigging to add his silent hopes to their vigil.
The second craft seemed to dwindle in size as it skirted the Argonaut ’s shadow. His men’s vulnerability beneath the hungry mouths of the warship’s cannons chilled Gerard, but he was bitterly confident that the Admiral’s vanity would insist his handiwork be appreciated before it was destroyed. Apollo held the longboat steady while Fidget snagged the smaller boat with expert skill, dragging it back toward the haven of its mother ship.
Something was lying in the bottom of the launch. From a distance, it looked to be nothing more than a bloody bundle of rags, but Gerard knew better.
He closed his eyes against a wave of numbing grief, opening them only when he heard Apollo’s footfalls on the deck. His quartermaster stood before him, Digby’s pale, limp body draped across his arms like a sacrificial offering. The naughty twinkle in the gunner’s eyes had been permanently extinguished.
Pudge drew off his spectacles to swipe the fog from them with a scarlet kerchief. Tarn snatched off his cap, mumbling a paternoster. Kevin bit off an oath that would have done the cantankerous old gunner proud. Only their captain remained utterly still, as soulless in that moment as the lifeless husk in his quartermaster’s arms.
“A knife to the belly,” Gerard said coolly, eyeing the protruding silver hilt. “Neither a quick death, nor a painless one.”
Without so much as a flinch, he reached down and ripped away the paper secured by the blade. His men hovered nearer, but Gerard did not satisfy their curiosity by reading the words aloud. They were intended only for him.
All my life I have taken great pride in refusing to negotiate with men of your ilk. Nor will I begin now .
As Gerard crumpled the paper in his fist, the Admiral’s priggish sneer rose before him. Men of your ilk . It should have been laughably absurd that the man insisted on clinging to his charade of righteousness. But Gerard Claremont had just lost his sense of humor.
As the sea extinguished the rays of the sun, eerie fingers of twilight swirled around him. He no longer dreaded the dark, but welcomed it, eager to surrender to its seductive embrace. With infinite gentleness, he reached over and closed Digby’s sightless eyes for the last time, remembering when he’d done the same for his mother. What was one more death on a soul as damned as his?
When Gerard lifted his head, his crew recoiled involuntarily from his stark expression. “Perhaps the time has come to show the morally upstanding Snow just what a man of my ilk is capable of.”
Impatient to ease their feelings of helplessness at Digby’s death, his crew muttered agreement and exchanged eager nods. But instead of giving the command for battle as they expected, their captain started for the companionway, his swagger laced with the unreachable authority of his position.
Kevin was the only one who dared to step into his path.
The brothers faced each other, both their similarities and their differences enhanced by their defensive postures.
“Don’t do this,” Gerard said softly. “She’s not worth it.”
Kevin’s jaw jutted out much the way it had when he’d been five years old and refused to repent for peeking up the milkmaid’s skirts. “I happen to think she is.”
Gerard contemplated his baby brother through narrowed eyes. He’d never struck him and had no intention of doing so now. “Out of my way, mister,” he barked. “That’s an order.”
The impersonal words cut deeper than any blow. Kevin recoiled as if he’d been slapped. “Aye, Captain,” he spat with pure contempt, stepping aside to stand at rigid attention.
Gerard dropped through the companionway into the hold to find himself no longer pursued by shadows, but in glorious accord with them.
Upon reaching the great cabin, Gerard didn’t trouble himself with keys or bolts. He simply lifted his leg and shattered bolt and lock with one well-aimed kick.
Lucy looked up from her chair at the table, blinking as if she were too dazed to be alarmed by his peculiar method of entry. She had been reading by the lingering lavender of twilight, so caught up by the past unfolding between the pages of her mother’s diary that she’d been completely oblivious to the drama occurring right outside the porthole.
Her big, gray eyes were luminous with recent tears. Gerard steeled himself against their damp-lashed beauty. His pity had died with Digby.
His violence spent for the moment, he eased the door shut on its battered hinges, affording them a measure of privacy. Lucy rose to face him, clutching her mother’s diary to her chest. A thrill of satisfaction shot through him. This was no craven bully who hid behind nameless emissaries and took childish glee in browbeating women and gutting old men. This was a woman who boldly defied him each time he deserved it, whether for blowing smoke rings at her nose or for blindfolding her and kissing her insensible. Here at last was an opponent worthy of his mettle!
Lucy’s chin had come up, her spine stiffened. Her eyes glittered with mute challenge. Gerard adored her reckless courage, had adored it from that moment in this very cabin when she had dared to engage him in a verbal duel of wits with her body and his soul as the spoils of battle.
As Gerard approached like a stranger from the shadows, the diary slid from Lucy’s numb fingers to the floor. She stood her ground, refusing to be on anything less than equal footing with this man. An involuntary gasp escaped her as his face loomed out of the darkness. Its compelling planes had moved beyond mere handsomeness into an irresistible promise of Satanic beauty, stripped of compassion and utterly devoid of conscience.
He cupped her cheeks in his palms, his fraudulent tenderness making her shiver with perverse yearning. “One scream would probably bring my entire crew charging to defend your virtue. Wouldn’t that gratify you?”
“I remember a time not so long ago when one scream brought you charging to defend my virtue.”
Her absolution for the one sin he had not committed came too late. His thumbs pressed lightly against her lips, warning her that he would tolerate no reminders of his days as her knight-errant. “It seems the Admiral doesn’t care how I get my pound of flesh. Or from whom.”
Lucy had expected no less. She bowed her head, but the Admiral’s betrayal had lost its power to inflict mortal damage. She felt only a brief sting, a wistful grief for all the time spent dreaming dreams that would never come true. She’d been held in bondage just as Gerard had—for nineteen long years. Held hostage to the Admiral’s whims, his vanity, his selfish determination to make her life a sacrifice for her mother’s sins.
Well, Lucy Snow was done with sacrifices. What she did from this moment on, she did for herself. And for her future. She tipped her head back, giving Gerard the full effect of her haughty stare. “Have you come to ruin me then, sir?”
His hands dropped from her face as if scorched by her bluntness. She sauntered just out of his reach, knowing she’d been granted a brief reprieve, not a full pardon.
“I’ve never been debauched by a pirate before,” she said, pressing her advantage. “How would you prefer to proceed? Shall I drop to my knees and plead prettily for my virtue?”
His gaze strayed to her moist lips. They tingled beneath his invisible caress. “That should do…as a start.”
Lucy pressed the back of her limp hand to her brow. “Or shall I fall on the bed in a graceful swoon”—she shot him a naughty glance from beneath her lashes—“waking only after you’ve had your way with me, of course?”
He nodded thoughtfully. “An excellent suggestion. Although I’d prefer you to awaken while I was having my way with you.”
His evocative drawl sent tendrils of heat curling through her veins, giving her the courage she needed to stride directly toward him, her arm drawn back as if to deliver a stinging slap. He caught her hand perfectly on cue, just as she had known he would, his grip unyielding but without a trace of brutality.
She blinked up at him in guileless surprise. “I do hope I haven’t offended you. I thought you might enjoy a show of spirit. A flailing about of the limbs, if you will, to give you an excuse to overpower me and demonstrate your superior strength.”
Triumph surged through Lucy as Gerard’s eyes darkened with grim bewilderment. Using her captive hand as a lever, he snatched her against him, wrapping his other arm around her waist. “What in the bloody hell are you trying to do, woman? Provoke me to murder?”
Lucy shook a loose tendril of hair out of her eyes. “Why should I have to provoke you? After all, you’re the scourge of the North Sea, the enemy of all that is noble and good in humankind. Why, the very whisper of your name terrifies the hardiest of sea captains and chills virgins’ blood to ice. I’m only asking you to prove your mettle, sir. To show me what caliber of villain you are.”
Lucy’s sharp, mocking words were at direct odds with her posture. Instead of recoiling from the hard, ruthless planes of his body, she melted against him, rubbing the softness of her breasts against his heaving chest with the gentle insistence of an affection-starved kitten. She canted her hips to cradle his own, almost faltering at the inescapable evidence of both his power and his need.
She had accused him of being a gambler, but she was about to issue the riskiest challenge of her life. She tipped her head back until her lips were only a breathless whisper from his. “Do your worst, Captain Doom.”
His reaction was not what she’d expected. His hazel eyes flamed with jealousy. A frisson of lingering fear shot down Lucy’s spine. Had she summoned a dangerous creature of darkness into her arms simply by saying his name?
His fingers bit into the worn cambric sheathing her back. “Is that who you want, Lucy? Your darling phantom? Captain Doom?”
She shook her head helplessly, reaching to touch his bearded jaw, but he caught her hand, blocking her caress with even more desperation than he had blocked her blow. “Who’s going to make love to you tonight, Lucy? Me? Or Doom?”
Her voice trembled. “You.”
“Who am I?” he whispered fiercely, as if her answer would determine the absolute truth.
She searched his face, knowing it capable of reflecting both cruelty and tenderness, cynicism and hope, the basest of hatreds and the purest of loves. He could call himself whatever name he chose, but she would never again see him as two separate entities. He was simply the man she adored, with all of the complicated strengths and flaws inherent to his character.
Her fingers curled gently around his own, softening his grip. She brought their linked hands to his cheek, rubbing the back of her hand against the beguiling prickle of his beard.
“Gerard,” she confirmed. Then more softly, as if the incantation could somehow banish all the harm they’d unwittingly done each other. “Oh, Gerard.”
Gerard was paralyzed by the tenderness in Lucy’s eyes. The loving acceptance of all he had been, all he was, all he would ever be. He felt as if she’d given him back something he had lost in those dark, dank years in that French prison by the sea. Something more elusive than just his name or his pride or even his freedom. She had told him at their first meeting that the soul was eternal, but he’d never really believed her. Until now.
He turned her hand, bringing it to his mouth to kiss each delicate knuckle in turn. Her eyes misted with emotion as he slowly lowered his lips to hers. He’d come to her seeking damnation only to taste salvation in the intoxicating nectar of her kiss. He drank of it deeply, its flavor made all the more potent by the risk she’d taken in offering it to him.
As soon as Gerard’s lips touched hers, Lucy knew what had been absent from Kevin’s stolen kiss. Tenderness. Longing. A passion so strong it made Gerard’s powerful masculine body quake with want. Lucy remembered the exquisite care he had taken with her in the gatehouse, the selfless restraint that had given everything, but asked nothing in return.
She wrapped her arms around his lean waist and buried her face against his shirtfront, needing privacy for what she would say. “You don’t have to take the time to…to seduce me. I know you’ve waited six years for this.”
He cupped her jaw and gently tilted her face to his. His solemn gaze searched her features. “I’ve waited thirty-one years for this. For you.”
For you , Lucy silently echoed. Not for some deft, buxom beauty who could ease his grudging celibacy with the elusive skills taught only by experience. But for her. Shy, awkward, inexperienced Lucy. His revelation endowed her with confidence, making her heart sing to the remembered melody of a Viennese waltz.
“Are you certain?”
His crooked grin laid her heart bare. “I’ve waited six years. I’ll be damned if I’m going to rush you now.”
As if to prove his words, he moved away from her to light the lantern. The sight of him enveloped in its tawny haze made Lucy’s throat tighten with yearning.
For once, Gerard wasn’t afraid of the dark, but entranced by the promise of the light. He wanted to bathe every curve and hollow of Lucy’s luscious body in its revealing flame. He no longer wanted to come to her as a faceless phantom in the darkness, but to watch each nuance of pleasure flicker across her delicate features as she cried out his name in a plea for sweet release.
As Gerard began to disrobe Lucy, she stood utterly still, afraid to even breathe for fear of shattering the magic of his hands on her. His warm lips soothed her temple as he raked his fingers through her hair, scattering the taut braids. He slid each button of Tarn’s shirt through its mooring as if it were a ribbon of lace gliding through a silk chemise.
His hands drifted downward to the waistband of her breeches. His throaty words vibrated against her ear. “I liked you better in my breeches. I loved the thought of the fabric caressing you everywhere I couldn’t.” He reached around to cup one of her buttocks in his palm, giving it a provocative squeeze. “Here.” He nuzzled two fingers of his other hand into the hollow between her legs. “And here.” The coarse fabric abraded her, making her even more sensitive to his touch. She clung to him, gasping with raw pleasure.
Gerard’s hands drifted over her once more, his skills so refined that her clothing melted into nothingness. The cool air struck her fevered flesh, pebbling her nipples into throbbing buds that ached to be soothed by his tongue.
As the sham of Lucy’s masculine garments fell away, Gerard had cause to regret his rash promise to woo her. He might have endured the pouting beauty of her pink-tipped breasts. Might have withstood the temptation of her narrow waist and gently flared hips. But when Tarn’s breeches slid down her slender legs to pool at her feet, his flesh surged against the constraints of his own breeches with a violence that made him groan.
Lucy Snow was blond.
Everywhere.
Not even in the vibrant fantasies that had sustained him through his sleepless nights at Ionia had he imagined such pale, flaxen perfection. He wanted to bury himself to the hilt in those ethereal curls. He dropped to his knees, burying his burning face instead against her beautiful breasts.
Lucy was alarmed by the ferocity of Gerard’s grasp, his heartfelt groan. She sifted the unruly hair at his nape through her fingers, intrigued by its unfamiliar texture. “Are you all right? Have I hurt you?”
He strangled out a laugh. “Mortally, I fear.” She shivered at the provocative scrape of his beard against the sensitive skin of her belly, the underside of her breast. “But I don’t mind as long as I can die in your arms.”
Her arms welcomed him as his heated lips drifted over the swell of her breasts. Had she honestly been fool enough to believe his tongue would soothe her? He wielded it with diabolical skill against her throbbing flesh, flicking and teasing until her nipples tingled and ached beneath his sweet torment. When they were both rigid and glistening with the balm of his ministrations, he claimed first one, then the other, suckling her fiercely until her thighs clenched in an ineffectual effort to douse the answering tongues of fire licking between them.
He stroked the backs of her knees and she collapsed against him, straddling his lap. Gerard wrapped his arms around her, unable to suppress a rumble of pure joy. “A naked, blushing, oh-so-proper Miss Lucinda Snow dumped in my unworthy lap. Have you checked the calendar? It must be Christmas.”
“You don’t deserve any gifts. You’ve been a very bad boy this year,” Lucy mumbled into his throat, pressing against him to hide as much of her nudity as she could. Her shyness worked to her disadvantage. The contrasting textures of his clothing tantalized her bare flesh, making her writhe in frustration.
“Ah, but you’ve been a very good girl, haven’t you? So there’s no point in both of us suffering on my account.”
With that devilish observation, he swept her into his arms and carried her to the bed. Without him, its opulent splendor had seemed lonely and forbidding. With him, its sensual promise of luxury was fulfilled. As they sank as one into its feathered depths, Lucy tugged Gerard’s shirt from his shoulders, hungry for a taste of his golden skin.
Her open mouth glided down his throat to his collarbone, coming to rest against the circular ridge of scar tissue carved by her own hand. She pressed her lips to it with a soft sound of dismay.
“Don’t,” Gerard whispered, drawing her head up. “I deserved far worse. Let’s just be thankful you have such dreadful aim.”
“Oh, I’ve excellent aim,” she confessed. “I just couldn’t bear to stab you in the heart.”
He pressed her palm to the beguiling warmth of his chest. She could feel his heart thudding against it. “You would have come up empty for you’d already stolen it.”
As his lips leisurely caressed hers, Lucy’s nimble fingers danced down the remaining buttons of his shirt, freeing him from its restraints. He rubbed his chest against the inviting softness of her breasts, his crisp whorls of hair both tickling and torturing her sensitive nipples. His husky groan mirrored her own breathless delight.
He sucked in a bracing breath as her adoring hands drifted lower as if to sculpt the flat, muscular planes of his abdomen, his lean flanks, hesitating only when they reached the waistband of his breeches. She might have let her curiosity overrule her bashfulness had he not captured both of her wrists in his panicked grip.
“Not yet, angel, or all my noble intentions will be for nothing. Let’s not test my restraint, shall we?”
Gerard had no such similar qualms about testing her restraint. If she had thought the scrape of his beard against her belly beguiling, the prickle of it skating down the silk of her inner thighs maddened her to distraction.
She tugged helplessly at his hair, torn between delicious anticipation and mortification. “Please don’t. You mustn’t do such a wicked thing.”
His warm hands splayed against her thighs, coaxing them apart. “Oh, but I must. Wasn’t it you who so boldly invited me to ‘do my worst’?”
His worst proved to be her sensual undoing. All of her inhibitions melted beneath the scorching heat of his mouth. His clever tongue taunted her, whipping her into a frenzy of indescribable pleasure. Her deep-throated moans seemed to be coming from the mouth of a wanton stranger. She arched off the bed in mute plea, and as reward, his blunt, graceful fingers joined the dance, stroking hard and deep the moist, throbbing places his tongue couldn’t reach.
Lucy’s entire body shuddered, caught in a delirium of ecstasy. When she finally collapsed from its throes, Gerard was there to catch her, to cradle her breathless, trembling body in his arms and kiss tears she could not remember crying from her flushed cheeks.
His eyes gleamed with fierce hunger as he laid her beneath him and eased his breeches from his hips. When she would have indulged her curiosity with a nervous peek, he cupped her face and kissed her deeply, giving her a tantalizing taste of her own fulfillment.
Gerard was afraid it would take little more than the caress of Lucy’s eyes to finish him. It had taken every ounce of his control to come this far, and he was too near the edge to make any more reckless promises. He hadn’t lied to her. For him, this wasn’t like the first time in six years. This was like the first time ever, with all of its callow eagerness, its clumsy, self-seeking hunger.
Her eyes misted with blind need as he reached down to test her readiness for him. He’d hurt her enough in their brief acquaintance. He had no desire to compound his crimes with another, even more unpardonable, betrayal of her trust. His fears were unfounded. He’d never touched a woman as ready for him as she was. She fairly dripped with want. He groaned, rubbing his throbbing length in her luscious bounty as a precursor to his possession.
Her eyes widened with mingled shock and delight as he let her feel in remarkable detail what he had refused to let her see.
Biting back a smile at the charm of her innocence, he braced his palms against the bed and rose above her. He tried, but simply could not resist a glance downward to watch himself breach those damp, flaxen curls one exquisite inch at a time.
Lucy gasped with unexpected pain as her untried body strained to accommodate Gerard’s persistence. She felt him hesitate, poised on the brink of paradise.
“It’s all right,” she assured him shakily. “Really it is. It’s quite pleasant. I…1-like it.”
He glowered down at her, his frown mocked by the pleasure-glazed sparkle of his eyes. “You’re lying, you deceitful mouse. You don’t like it at all. But you will,” he vowed.
For the first time in their acquaintance, Gerard was as good as his word.
He withdrew slightly, surprising Lucy. She had expected to feel relief in his wake, but instead felt only a hollow emptiness that ached to be filled. She wrapped her legs around his hips, urging him deeper. He obliged her, then drew back again, making her whimper with disappointment.
“Oh, please,” she whispered.
She could not find it in her heart to begrudge him his triumphant grin. “As you wish, Miss Snow. I live to serve you.”
Serve her he did, using the copious nectar of her body to bury himself deep inside of her.
“Better?” he whispered, his own voice cracking under the strain.
Lucy’s dreamy smile was all the encouragement Gerard needed. From the beginning he had sensed the passion boiling beneath her icy veneer and she did not disappoint him. As he rocked against her, she arched off the bed to meet him, the provocative motion of her hips enticing him to abandon his exalted plan to treat her virgin body with the tender care it deserved.
He threw back his head, clenching his teeth against a premature wave of ecstasy. “God, Lucy, do you know what you’re doing to me?”
Lucy could feel something else seething beneath Gerard’s patience—a violence born not of brutality, but of deprivation. Its intensity frightened her, but she was determined to give him a gift even greater than that of her innocence. Her permission to lose control, to slake all of his selfish desires on her willing body.
She had learned more of his character than he had wished her to in the past few weeks. He took care of his crew. He took care of his brother. And even if he would not admit it, he had taken care of her more often than not. The time had come for someone to take care of him.
She caught his face in her hands and said fiercely, “Don’t hold back. Not with me. Never with me. I want everything you can give me.”
To Gerard, it was as if Lucy’s tender invitation opened up a sluice of tangled emotions. Lust seized him, so dark and primitive it was almost bestial. He ceased to think, becoming a creature driven by its basest instincts, instincts denied for so long that it took only Lucy’s generous coaxing to send them raging beyond his control. He gazed at her as Adam must have first looked upon Eve, as if she had been created solely to indulge his desires.
And indulge himself he intended to do. But with his last shred of rational thought, he angled his hips so that each of his deep, hungry strokes would rub against the pleasure-sensitive nub sheltered by those entrancing curls.
Lucy pressed her eyes shut, giving herself over to his pounding rhythm as Gerard gave her everything he had. And more. He drove her back against the headboard, then kept coming, giving no quarter, taking no prisoners. When she thought her body had reached its endurance of pleasure, he cupped her backside and lifted her, embedding himself so deeply within her that she could feel his heart beat as if it were her own. A soft, broken wail escaped her, a herald of the exquisite outpouring of ecstasy to come.
Lucy’s release was Gerard’s downfall. He had no time to ponder the irony before his own body surged with long-denied rapture. As he’d feared, the end had come too quickly, but it seemed to roar on for a sweet eternity, their joined bodies shuddering in magnificent accord, Lucy’s bewitching spasms milking him of every precious drop of pent-up pleasure.
His boneless body collapsed against hers. “Did I hurt you?” he murmured into her silky hair, awareness of their awkward position slowly dawning.
Her arms tightened around him, her gentle hands stroking and soothing his cramped muscles. “Mortally, I fear. But I don’t mind as long as I can die in your arms.”
Lucy tried to wiggle herself to a more tenable position; Gerard held her fast. “Oh, no, you don’t. I’m not through with you yet.” For once, his boyish grin was untainted by cynicism. “Hell, I haven’t even started.”
His lips lowered to hers for a kiss rife with all the tenderness she had forced him to forgo in their love-making. Lucy moaned at the fresh miracle of his body stirring deep within hers.
His heated lips strayed to her earlobe. She frowned. “Did you hear that, Gerard? It’s thundering.”
“Nonsense,” he murmured, nipping the sensitive appendage. “It’s just the pounding of my heart.”
Lucy gasped with pleasure as his tongue plundered the inner shell of her ear. She closed her eyes only to be startled by a starburst of light behind her lids. “I do believe it’s lightning as well.”
“You flatter me, darling. Why don’t we see if I can evoke a fanfare of celestial trumpets?”
His foray across the tender skin of her throat might have done just that had not the entire hold shuddered as if pounded by a mighty fist. The ship lurched, tossing them, blankets and all, to the floor of the cabin.
“Son of a bitch!” Gerard jumped to his feet, jerked his breeches up over his hips, and ran to the porthole.
Another clap came, sharper and more sinister than thunder. The mouths of the Argonaut ’s cannons erupted in gouts of orange fire. The Retribution pitched to starboard, forcing Gerard to catch hold of the wall or fall.
“That son of a bitch,” he breathed, the oath taking on a far more personal nature. “What sort of monster would fire on his own daughter? What manner of father is he?”
A sound even more unlikely than the rumble of cannons captured Gerard’s attention. He turned slowly, disbelievingly. Lucy had cupped a hand over her mouth, but her high-pitched giggle escaped through her fingers. She looked so enchanting with her hair tumbled around her face, her skin still rosy from his robust loving, that it was inconceivable to him that her teasing offer to die in his arms might prove prophetic.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, struggling to catch her breath. “I can’t imagine what’s come over me. I’m not usually so emotional.”
Gerard’s fear of losing her deprived him of any patience he might have summoned. He dropped to his knees and caught her by the shoulders. “Don’t you understand what’s happening? That miserable son of a—” He grappled for control, clenching his teeth against a wave of raw panic. “Your father is firing on us.”
To his shock, she tossed back her head with a fresh burst of laughter, her beautiful eyes luminous with tears. “Ah, but there’s the rub, you see, for that ‘miserable son of a bitch’ is not my father!”