Pirate Wolf Trilogy (42 page)

“He will be all
right,” Pitt assured her. “If he were going to start his own
private war, he would have done it by now. We would have heard the
alarm bells or seen a sulphur flare … or something. Go below, Beau.
I’m sure you will be the first one he comes to see when he gets
back.”

Beau blinked
against the weight of the rain and searched his handsome face a
moment. “I just … didn’t expect to be so worried.”

“None of us
ever does, until it happens.”

“
But … I
never
wanted
it to
happen. Part of me still doesn’t. Part of me just wants everything
to be simple again, like it was … like it was before…” She stopped
and agonized over the admission, not even absolutely sure what she
was admitting.

Pitt saw her
shiver and put his arm around her shoulder, drawing her against
what little heat he had to spare.

“I am truly
sorry, Beau, but when you love a man like Simon Dante, nothing is
ever going to be simple again, believe me.”

Beau looked up
at him through the rain, but there was no point in arguing or
denying the charge.

“Nothing?” she
asked forlornly.

“Nothing. But
if it is any consolation, I would say you have managed to confound
the hell out of him, too, he’s just too proud to admit it.”

“I wouldn’t be
too proud to admit anything right now,” she said with honest misery
in her voice, “if he would just come back.”

“He’ll come
back, I promise you.”

Beau peered one
last time through the driving rain and mist, then touched Pitt’s
arm to thank him. She was about to descend the ladder to the main
deck when she saw a blur of movement near the gangway. She stood
poised with one bare foot on the top rung and her hands gripping
the rails, watching as something big and black swelled over the lip
of the decking and rose to what seemed like monstrous proportions.
It curled over and rose again and Beau was opening her mouth to
scream when she caught a glimpse of light reflecting wetly off the
curved blades of Lucifer’s scimitars.

“Mister Pitt!
They’re back!”

“I’m right
behind you,” he said, too gentlemanly to push her off the ladder,
but not too rash to vault over the rail and skid to a landing on
the slippery deck below.

Lucifer grunted
when Pitt arrived by his side. He was bent over, trying to haul a
deadweight up the wooden steps on the hull. Beau held her breath.
She covered her mouth with her hands, scarcely daring to watch as,
together, the two men pulled Jonas Spence up the last two rungs and
dumped him in a sprawl across the deck. Beau fell onto her knees
beside him and lifted his head onto her lap. His eyes were closed
and his mouth slack, but at the feel of a welcoming lap beneath
him, he raised his eyelids and beamed up into the rain.

“Ay-y-y-ye, an’
a jolly wee lass she were, she were; a jolly wee lass, wi’ a hand
up her … eh? Beau? Is that you, girl?”

“Father?”

“Blow my
ballocks, who’d ye think it were?”

She sat back on
her heels—driven back, more’s the like—by the overpowering smell of
spirits on his breath. “You’re drunk.”

“Aye, that’s
me, lass. Drunk an’ useless.” His head flopped back on her lap.
“Too useless to be any good to the likes o’ Drake an’ his lot, so
I’ve been told. Sendin’ us home, he is. Says we’ll be doin’ him a
favor, takin’ his sick an’ his sour home. Watchin’ over his wee
pinnace. Aye. His wee pinnace. ’At’s what he has, all right. A wee
pinnace fer a wee man.”

Beau looked at
Lucifer. “What is he talking about? What has happened?”

“What’s
happened,” said a voice from the top of the gangway, “was that we
had a hell of a time loading him into the jolly boat, and an even
more hellish time finding the right damned ship.” Dante sighed
expressively, his breath as thick as the mist, and held out his
hand. “Lend a poor, drowned sailor a helping hand, mam’selle?”

Beau surged to
her feet, heedless of Spence’s head bouncing down onto the deck
again.

“
We were
worried sick about you. Pitt and I were both worried sick about
you. We have been
back
and
forth”—she
punctuated both words with
angry swipes of her hand—“in the
cold
and the
rain!
We have
been watching and waiting and worrying about all of you.
We thought you were
dead!”

Dante pulled
himself up the final few steps. “Would it please you any to know I
might very well have been? Black as it is, I damned near walked
into a loose spar. Lucky for me, Lucifer saw it in time and swung
it back.”

“Did he hit
anything on the return?” Pitt asked casually.

“
He may
have. We had our hands too full of Spence to check.” He looked at
Beau. “I’m sorry if we worried you. And I’m sorry if your father is
drunk, but he did not take too kindly to Sir Francis insisting he
take the
Egret
home.”

“I suppose you
did everything in your power to argue in our favor.”

“I happen to
agree with him,” Dante said quietly, “for the reasons I told you
before. And a few other concerns I may not have mentioned.”

Beau stood in
the rain, trembling against the cold, her fists clenching and
unclenching as she glared at him. “Your reasons don’t interest me,
Captain. Neither do your heartfelt concerns.”

She spun around
and ran through the hatch, cursing when she stubbed her toe on a
step, swearing vociferously when she slammed the door to her cabin
shut behind her. She limped the length of the room twice before she
thought to return to the door and slide the iron bolt into its
ring, but she was a split second too late. Dante pushed his way
inside like a strong wind, shedding water with every step.

“My reasons may
not interest you, but you’re going to hear them anyway.”

She offered up
an anatomically impossible retort as she presented him with her
back.

Dante
reached out a hand, thought better of it, and raked it through the
heavy, wet waves of his hair instead. “Are you not even
interested
in knowing if I saw Victor
Bloodstone or not?”

“I am assuming
he was the ‘spar’ who hit you on deck.”

“As a matter of
fact, he wasn’t; he was long gone by then.”

“Gone?” Her
head turned, barely enough to notice. “You didn’t kill him?”

“No. I didn’t
kill him. I stood closer to him than you and I are right now—much
closer, dammit—but I did not kill him. I wanted to. I did … in my
mind … a dozen different times, a dozen different ways, but I kept
hearing your voice in my ear saying ’don’t be a fool’ ‘don’t be a
fool.’”

“You’ve never
listened to me before.”

Dante’s throat
worked for a moment, but the words would not come, could not come,
and his hand, still threaded into his hair, started to wilt down by
his side.

“
Because
I did not think it was possible,” he said finally, “to feel
anything but hatred anymore. It was all I was when I came on board
this ship: hatred and revenge. It was pure and undiluted and so
strong, I did not think anything that was soft or beautiful could
find its way inside me again. Then tonight”—he paused to take a
breath—“when I saw Bloodstone, the desire, the
need
, was still there to kill him … but so was the
need to come back here, to feel your arms go around me and your
body take me where it’s soft, and beautiful”—he looked at her
squared shoulders and the small white fists clenched by her sides,
and his voice fell to a whisper—“and safe. And if I don’t know how
to say the right words anymore it’s because—it’s because I never
thought I would
want
to say them
again.”

Beau’s
shoulders sagged and the anger drained out of her in a rush. She
lifted her hand and dragged it across her cheek, pushing back a
strand of wet hair that had fallen over her brow, and when she
turned around, her eyes were huge and dark and glistening in the
candlelight.

“I hope … you
are not trying to tell me …”

“That I love
you? I’m afraid I am, mam’selle. And I’m afraid I do. Very much
so.”

She stared at
him for a long moment, then bowed her head and shook it slightly.
“You can’t. You just … can’t.”

He arched a
genuinely curious eyebrow. “May I ask why not?”

“Because … it
just isn’t fair,” she whispered. “How am I supposed to hate you
when you tell me something like that?”

He closed the
gap between them and framed her face between his hands. He held her
that way for the short breath it took to whisper her name, then his
lips were brushing her temple, her eyes, her cheeks, the corner of
her mouth. The lush heat of him drew her inside, and the kiss
deepened, became bruising and urgent, claiming her, branding her as
his own.

“I do hate
you,” she gasped. “I do.”

Her hands went
around his shoulders and his arms brought her crushing into his
embrace. Her toes came off the floor as he lifted her and he turned
her in a slow circle, once, twice, before he set her down again.
His hands slid up from her waist and she heard the damp rasp of
tearing cloth. It was all she could do not to comment on his
impatience as he growled another lame apology, but his mouth was
hungry and insistent upon hers and patience of any kind became the
farthest thing from her mind.

He stripped off
her shirt and stripped off her breeches and his mouth followed his
hands everywhere, intent upon inflaming her body with a need as
urgent as his own. Blood was drumming through his temples, through
his fingertips, through the raw nerve endings on his skin, but when
he stood back to fling off his own clothes, her hands were already
there.

She grasped the
open neck of his shirt and tore it down the center seam, opening a
gash all the way to his waist. She fumbled next with the buckle on
his belt and cast it to the floor, then tugged at the shrunken
wetness of his hose, the stubborn, clinging barrier of wool that
would not budge until she broke free of his mouth and fell to her
knees, peeling the recalcitrant garment down his thighs with
her.

Her hands
circled the iron-hard shaft of his flesh and her tongue slid over
him like a hot, wet flame. Dante swore and pushed his fingers into
her hair, trying, in the beginning, to hold her away, to keep her
from bringing him out of his skin too soon … too soon … But her
hands stroked his thighs and her lips stroked his flesh and he
could only groan a warning as his whole body began to shake, to
tremble. His hips began to buck against the pressure and a raw,
ragged gasp broke from his throat. The heat flooded into his loins,
threatening to explode, and a moment before he did, he lifted her
roughly into his arms and carried her the few steps to the bed.

“And you accuse
me of not playing fair?” he rasped.

Without
preamble he buried his mouth between her thighs. Beau arched up off
the bed, but he would have none of it; he kept his hands on her
belly and breasts, and his tongue ravishing, plundering, pillaging,
until she was hoarse from crying out and weak from the waves of
pleasure so relentless and powerful, there was no stopping them, no
interrupting them, not even when he rose above her and sank himself
into the hot, drenching splendor.

“You need me,”
she whispered some time later. “You know you need me.”

“I don’t know
any such thing,” he said, his teeth clenched through a snarl.

“You don’t know
this Edward Carleill, you don’t know what kind of a helmsman he is.
For that matter you don’t even know the ship, or what she is
capable of doing. You need me, Simon Dante, and by God”—her mouth
closed around the dark disc of his nipple and worked it until she
heard him gasp out a curse—“I intend to make you admit it.”

“
I admit
it freely, mam’selle. I need you. I need you.” He twined his
fingers through her hair and angled her face up to his so that
there was no mistaking his meaning. “I
need you.
But not on the
Scout
It’s too dangerous.”

Beau
pushed herself upright and saw the quick flexing of muscles across
his chest. She was straddling his thighs, he was buried hilt deep
inside her, and they had been dueling over the finer points of his
leaving the
Egret
long
enough for both of them to be covered in a fine sheen of
sweat.

“After all my
father and I have done for you, how can you just let Drake send us
home with a pat on the head?”

“You’re going
home with your holds full of plundered treasure.”

“A pox,” she
said, sliding her hips forward, “on plundered treasure.”

He swore again
and rolled his head to the side. If the bed had been an inch wider,
he could have easily tossed her over and reversed their
positions—and then she would have learned the true meaning of
torment. As it was, she kept her knees locked firmly to his hips,
and braced her hands, when he made any attempt to extricate
himself, on an overhead beam, pushing down as hard as he pushed up.
Moreover, she was showing remarkable control. His own fault, he
supposed, for bringing her to climax half a dozen times before he
found himself splayed and pinned like a starfish out of water. If
it weren’t so unbelievably arousing, he might have become
annoyed.

She
cupped his chin in her hand and forced him to look at her again.
“You said you thought it might have been one of Bloodstone’s men
who ambushed you on the
Bonaventure
tonight.”

“When did I say
that? I never said that.”