My Lady Pirate (42 page)

Maeve gave a harsh cry and came hard against him, her body convulsing violently and her

belly clenching into a savage, twisting knot as sobs tumbled from her throat and wave after wave of climax swept down on her; dimly, she felt him moving up to cover her, to lower himself down to her, his mouth hungry and hot against her own as he guided himself to her slick entrance and began the timeless motion of love.

She was lost. She knew it even as his mouth drove against hers, his tongue ruthlessly

plundering its depths; she knew it even as his strokes grew strong, deep, perfectly controlled and masterfully orchestrated; she knew it even as he put his weight on one arm and with the other hand, reached down to rub and thumb her entrance at the same time he was sliding in and out of her, bringing her rapidly toward a second stunning precipice.

There had never been any contest between them. Faster and faster he moved, building the

rhythm, taking her with him on a spiraling, breathless climb to the clouds. Her breath came in short, hard pants and gasps, and she felt her release building, climbing, peaking—

With a last, driving shudder, he impaled her to the very hilt of himself. She arced up to meet him as her own release came hard and fast, his hot seed pulsing within her and tears of joy and love streaming down her cheeks. And when it was over, and the admiral lay in her arms, belonging to her and no one but her, she thought of what it might be like to be married to him, and making wild, uninhibited love like this for the rest of her life.

“I guess you win,” she murmured, against the salty skin of his shoulder.

“Nay, Maeve,” he said, still breathing hard. “We both do.”

She felt his lips curve in a smile against her throat, the brush of his lashes tickling her skin.

He held her for a long time, keeping his weight on his arms so as not to crush her. Then he raised himself up on one elbow, idly playing with a damp chestnut curl as he smiled down at her.

“Maeve.”

“Sir Graham?”

“Marry me?”

She reached out and touched the dimple in his jaw, the arching black brows, the plane of his cheek. Sighing, she looked into his eyes, determined but twinkling behind his thick lashes, and shook her head. “Gray . . .I need time to think, to make sure I’m making the right decision.”

“When will you know, then?”

“I don’t know. Soon. For now—for now, I think I’d prefer to have another contest of

patience.”

And then, as she squealed in delight, he went about ravishing her once more, and this time it was indeed the admiral who lost the contest.

He was the scourge of London.

No pirate who’d ever swung a cutlass this side of Jamaica had ever looked more formidable.

Dressed in a billowing white shirt and breeches, with a patch over one eye and a kerchief around his throat, Sir Graham Falconer, Knight of the Bath, Rear Admiral of the White, savior of the season’s richest convoy, and now, fresh from a long and stuffy meeting with his crusty old superiors at the Admiralty in London, stared up at the open window of Maeve’s hotel room, two stories above his head.

He held a grappling iron in one hand, its long rope in the other, and a gleaming dagger

between his teeth. God help him if anyone saw him engaging in such outrageous behavior. But hell, if
this
little performance didn’t convince Her Majesty of the lengths he would go to get her to the altar, then he feared nothing would!

He was tired of waiting.

And he was beginning to find he wasn’t such a patient man after all, not where
she
was concerned.

Her crew had remained in Portsmouth with
Kestrel,
but for the sake of appearances, Orla had checked into a room with Maeve, and he had taken a neighboring one. It was not an

arrangement he intended to keep. Oh, hell no. He had no intention of sleeping alone.

Just as he had no intention of allowing her to dally anymore with regard to this whole

marriage business. She’d damn well give him an answer tonight—or, he’d carry her off to
Triton
and have his own flag-captain marry them, and amen to
that
!

Aaaaarrrh, me pretty!,
he thought with sudden, reckless glee, warming to his role and beginning to thoroughly enjoy himself. “I shall have ye, yet!”

He looked up at the square of golden light directly above him. A shadow passed before the window. Good. She was still awake . . .

And now, for the proposal to outdo all marriage proposals . . .
pirate style.

A noise sounded behind him. He whirled, but it was only a cat, staring at him in fright.

He removed the knife and bared his teeth, making the face he'd used on Colin’s pet.

The animal hissed, and shot off into the darkness. Gray laughed. Then, narrowing his eyes in concentration, he put the knife between his teeth once more, tightened his hand around the rope, and began to swing the grappling iron in a wide, powerful circle, focusing on the sill two stories above.

One last circle, and he let the grapple go.

Chunk!
The iron claw found purchase and he froze, waiting to be discovered.

Nothing.

He let out his breath, relaxing, grinning, rubbing his hands together in anticipation of snaring his prize. “Aaaargh,” he growled happily, rolling the words around his teeth as he figured Blackbeard must’ve done, “ye’ll not escape me now, wench!” He pulled on the rope, testing it.

That was all he needed, to begin climbing and have the damned thing let go to send him crashing to the street. But no, the grapple was solid, strong, tightly in place.

With a last wary glance behind him, he pulled himself up and began to climb, the knife

clenched between his teeth, cutlass at his side, hair trailing between his shoulders, powerful arms and bare feet pulling and pushing him up the thick rope.

I’ll have ye yet, woman,
he growled, reveling in the role of marauding pirate.

Higher and higher he went. Heights did not bother him; he was, after all, the most fearsome freebooter ever to sail the Spanish Main, the most dangerous pirate ever to stalk the streets of London. Adjusting his eye patch and sheathing his dagger, he paused just beneath the windowsill, breathing hard, grinning fiercely, and wondering how to best make his surprise entry. Then, in a single movement, he pulled himself cleanly up and through the window, and drawing his cutlass, leapt into the room with a savage, bloodcurdling yell.

“Aaaarrrrrrghhhhhh!”

“Eeeeeaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

An elderly woman, in slippers and nightgown.

“SHIT!”
Gray cried, and bolted for the door.

“Thief! Intruder! Somebody,
help
!”

Cutlass in hand, he tore frantically down the hall, the old woman’s screams echoing in the corridor behind him.
How could he have chosen the wrong room?!
He tripped, nearly fell, cut himself on the blade of the sword, and finding speed, darted away from an opening door, when he heard more calls and shouts ringing out behind him.

And as he charged around the corner he saw two flag officers in cocked hats and epaulets

just entering the hotel dining room.

He feinted to the right, charging down a carpeted corridor—

“There he is! Thief! Somebody, stop him,
thief!
”

Behind him he heard pounding feet, knew the two admirals had seen him and were in hot

pursuit.

Bloody hell, where was Maeve’s room?!

He charged around another corner, running as fast as his bare feet would take him, shirt

billowing, hair flying out behind him. There, thank God, thank God, thank
God!,
her door—

“Maeve, open up!”

“Gray, darling? Is that you?”

“For God’s sake, Maeve, open the goddamned door,
now!
”

“Now Gray, that’s no way to talk to
royalty
.”

He pounded savagely against the door, nearly holing the elegant wood. “Jesus, Maeve,

OPEN THE GODDAMNED DOOR!”

He heard more people running toward him. The old woman in her nightgown, hotel

personnel, maids, clerks, a nobleman in elegant silk—
Oh, God, not the Marquess of Anderleigh

—”I say, Sir
Graham,
is that
you?
”—and then the two flag officers, not just
any
flag officers, but Lords Hood and Barham, both admirals and the latter, the most senior man in the entire bloody
navy,
from whose office Gray had just come not an hour before—now striding with tight-lipped authority around the corner.

He slammed his fist against the door a final time. “Maeve, for the love of God,
open the
door!”

“SIR GRAHAM!”
Lord Barham’s voice thundered through the hall. “What in
GOD’S

NAME
are you
DOING?!’’

Silence. He fell back, plastering his spine against the door, a pirate with a patch over his eye, a cutlass in his hand, his shirt open to his navel, and their shocked eyes upon him, while the crowd gaped and stared and gathered and smirked.

The door opened and he fell, prostrate, at the Pirate Queen’s feet.

“Maeve!
Say you’ll marry me!”

Several hours after Maeve Merrick agreed quite publicly to marry Rear Admiral Sir Graham

Falconer, a post chaise carrying one Captain Henry Blackwood arrived at Nelson’s home,

Merton, with the news that Villeneuve was holed up in the Spanish port of Cadiz with more than thirty ships-of-the-line. And so began the last stage of events, all rushing toward that final decisive battle that the admiral, in those last weeks of his long-suffering life, knew was coming.

In the Channel, and in the French and Spanish ports of the Atlantic seaboard, great fleets stood poised for the final confrontation while Europe stood waiting . . .

Off of the Spanish port of Cadiz, where Villeneuve’s forces had fled for refuge, the bored and frustrated blockading fleet under the British Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood complained bitterly about their dour old “Cuddie’s” puritanical ways: “For charity’s sake, send us Lord Nelson, oh ye men of power!” wrote one of the desperate captains, in a letter home to his wife.

And in England, while anxiously waiting to go aboard
Victory
for the last time, Lord Nelson paid his bills with his dwindling resources, put his affairs in order, and spent his time playing with his little daughter. On one of his trips to London he stopped to pay a somber visit to an old friend, fashioned from the mainmast of the French flagship
L’Orient
which he had defeated at the Battle of the Nile, and now, waiting patiently for that time when the two of them would be together forever. That old friend had traveled many miles with him; now, it rested safely in the care of one Mr. Peddieson.

“Get it properly engraved for me,” Nelson joked to Peddieson, “for I shall probably need it upon my return.”

That old friend was his coffin.

###

son, the days of his own leave numbered before he returned to his West Indies command, eagerly awaited his marriage to the Pirate Queen, to be held at Nelson’s nearby home, Merton Place.

Gray’s happiness over that upcoming event was heightened by an urgent message sent to

him by Lord Nelson, but he did not tell his Pirate Queen the surprising contents of the admiral’s note. For Sir Graham knew that his lady must conquer her demons herself—and as her wedding day dawned, she did.

She got up that morning, dressed, and long before the house awoke and Gray’s six younger

sisters sought her out for tales of piracy on the high seas, tiptoed quietly from her bedroom and down the great staircase . . . across plush carpeting and marbled floors . . . past the statues and busts and paintings of ancestors that lined the walls, until she saw the half-open door to the study.

It called to her. It was now or never. She could not live with the pain anymore.

She paused only once on her way to that room and all the fears she would confront there,

and that was to stop, as she always did, beneath the magnificent portrait that dominated the wall just outside the door. It was a glorious portrait, stretching from the height of her waist to the tall ceiling, of a pirate standing before a dark and roiling sea with storm clouds gathering behind him like a great, unholy halo. His hair was black, magnificent, wild; his eyes were bold, his stance, godlike and commanding. He leaned on a cutlass, wore a flowing shirt of white silk, and jackboots that reached to his knees. Behind him was a fleet of ships,
his
ships, and the elaborate nameplate affixed to the painting’s gilt frame read,
Rear Admiral Sir Graham Falconer, K.B.

Maeve tilted her head back, stepped forward, and kissed the only part of that magnificent portrait she could reach: his boots.

Leave it to her Knight to be painted as a pirate, when any admiral worth his salt wouldn’t be caught dead in anything but his finest uniform.

She touched the portrait one final time, as though the courage of the man himself could

reach her. But he had gone to London last night to meet with the Admiralty, then on to Merton to see Nelson, and she had yet to hear the hoofbeats signifying his return.

“Gray,” she whispered, staring into the dark, commanding eyes, “how I wish you were here, right now. I need you. I’m afraid. But I must do this thing that has to be done . . . and I must do it alone.”

She was trembling. She heard the sounds of the big house, amplified by the intense quiet; the ticking of a clock somewhere down the hall, various creaks and settlings of aged wood, and outside, the crow of a rooster. Sunlight, weak and orange, slanted through the tall windows, angling toward the door of the study as though directing her to do what needed to be done.

What difference did it make, now? She was getting married today. She should have written

the letter to her family weeks ago, when she’d first learned they hadn't deserted her, after all.