The Barbarian's Mistress (26 page)

‘Yes. As soon as the word went up, I grabbed the money bag and my hold-all and climbed down here. I was going insane in the dark alone, not knowing what was happening up there. Are we going to survive?’

A sudden blow to the hull and a shudder added extra impact to her question. Lara’s arms tightened around him.

‘We didn’t get the sail down in time, so the master is angling the ship so that the full force of the wind isn’t hitting the sail. It means we’re really flying along out there, and as long as the oarsmen steering us can keep us at the right angle, the sail is safe. Who knows, we might reach shore ahead of schedule, depending on how long this lasts.’ He tried to sound upbeat, and the fact that she relaxed a little in his arms convinced him he’d succeeded.

She reached for his hand in the dark, and he couldn’t hold back the grunt of pain as she squeezed it.

‘Oh, what’s wrong with your hand?’

‘Nothing. I cut it, that’s all.’ He tried to draw it away from her.

‘No, no, let me bind it up for you. Is it bleeding a lot, or is this seawater I feel?’

‘Probably my blood. It was a deep enough wound. I suppose binding it would stop me losing more blood.’

He felt her move away a little, and rummage around in what he assumed was her carry-all. Then he heard a tearing sound. He wondered what garment had met its end for him.

She felt for, and found his hand again, then carefully began to bind the wound up tight. His wife was an endless source of amazement to him. How did such a shelter
ed patrician become so capable?

After she was finished, he flexed his hand to see how it felt. It still hurt, but with the edges of the wound closed, and no more salt water to aggravate it, the pain was easing. His kissed the top of her head in gratitude.

He settled down at her side, determined to give her a few moments of his time, while he gathered his strength to get back out there. Every able bodied, competent sailor was needed if they were to keep the vessel afloat. Hiding in the bowels of the ship was no help to anyone. But if he left her, she would be alone in the dark again. And her imagination would go haywire, as it already had. She was a brave girl, but even the bravest had their breaking point. Leaving her would only add to her terror.

His heartbeat was coming back under control, finally. Nuzzling in to her cheek, he began kissing her. Just little, playful kisses designed to make light of their situation. Suddenly something ignited between them. Fear of death, fear of separation… whatever it was, became fuel to ignite the explosion. Before he could think better of it, before logic told him that he was risking their lives by staying down here, he had her mouth and was kissing her with
a desperation like no other.

Lara’s senses of smell, touch and taste were magnified in the utter darkness of the heaving ship. All she knew for certain was that she had her man beside her at last, and he was kissing her like this was their last moment on earth. Maybe it was.

She focused on the taste of him, the sleek touch of his lips against hers, his tongue as it stroked hers. His hands were everywhere at once, touch, taking, driving her headlong into a passionate response that bordered on madness.

Her hands tore at his loin cloth, his tore at hers. In what felt like moments, he was lifting her up and sitting her astride him on the floor, guiding her hips down over his hardened length. Nothing had ever felt like this; feeling him sink deeper inside her without anything else to distract from the sensation. His breath was harsh against her ear; his arms were strong and sure as he lowered her inch by exquisite inch, until she’d taken all of him.

‘Ahhh,’ she moaned, almost weeping. ‘Vali…’

He gave no reply. All his attention was on lifting her up, and then drawing her back down again. The heat in her core was like a furnace. Every stroke built the flame. She began to use her own thigh muscles to create the momentum, and he let her, his hard body rigid beneath her, all concentration focused on their joining.

The ship bucked and rocked crazily around them, but it only added to the madness between them. The s
trokes became faster and harder – more furious. She threw back her head and cried out, the first blinding flash of release rolling over her. Then another orgasm followed directly after the first, more explosive than the one before. When she reached for, and grasped the third release, her muscles contracting around his pulsing arousal again, and he lost control. He cried her new name – Lara -- for the first time, as his body convulsed against hers, driving him deeper into her as his hot seed filled her.

When he gave a final shudder, and lay still in her arms, she felt too stunned to move. This coming together had been … cataclysmic. She still felt the little explosions going on deep inside her.

‘I think we’re the only ones enjoying this experience,’ Vali said against her ear, with a little chuckle. The feel of his hot breath on her neck sent a tantalizing shudder through her.

‘That was…’

‘Hmmm… it was. But unless we want to risk that being the best sex of our lives, I better get back up on deck, and see how I can be useful. Holding the oars in place is going to take strength, and I can provide that, at least.’ He eased her off him and to his side. ‘Although I think I’ll wait a little while longer. I doubt I could crawl at the moment, no less walk.’

Lara giggled. He always had a way of making a joke of even the most serious situations. Her body was lethargic and satiated. More content than she had felt in days, she curled up against his side as the ship heaved around them.

‘An extreme way to get me alone, but well worth it,’ she said as she moaned with pleasure as his uninjured hand slid beneath her rucked skirt and curved around the juncture between her legs.

‘You feel so hot and wet,’ he mumbled into her neck as he kissed her there, behind the ear.

He reached over and felt for him in turn. His rod was hardening again already. She stroked him as he stroked her.

Then he drew her hand away, reluctantly. ‘Gods, I could be inside you again right now. But I want you alive … Will you be all right down here alone? I’m not sure what’s happened to the other passengers. I saw a couple braced into corners on deck.’

‘I’ll be fine. Just be careful, please. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you…’

He kissed her mouth and then slowly edged out of their little nook. The cool space he left was not welcome.

‘I don’t know how long this will last. But I’ll come down to check on you whenever I can. Try to sleep, if possible. Better than worrying.’

Then he was gone, and she heard him scrambling along the deck away from her. Panic rose to replace the contentment of moments before. She wanted to cry and call him back. Make him stay with her. He was a passenger. It wasn’t his job to risk his life like one of the crew.

But she knew it was selfishness that drove her. Vali needed to be out there with the men, fighting the elements. It was what he was bred for. He needed to feel like a man. No matter how much she wanted to deny it, she knew that he belonged up there, not here beside her.

She closed her eyes and focused on her breathing. If she counted each breath in, and each breath out, then the panic would recede. If she continued counting long enough, maybe the ship would stop rocking and the storm would die away. If she kept counting long enough maybe they’d arrive at land, and Vali would take her to a real bed and make love to her again. 

So she kept counting and breathing… and the hours passed.

Chapter Nineteen

16 September 79 CE, Sparrow Hawk Island SARDINIA

Braxus lay on his back on the rocky outcrop. His body felt broken in a hundred places. How long he’d laid there he wasn’t sure. Days? It felt like it. Only the rain that had fallen the day before, or… whenever it fell, had kept him alive. Sparrow Hawks soared above his head looking for a meal, little crabs snapped at him, after the same meal.

Neither would be satisfied. From somewhere deep inside him, he found the strength to lever himself off his back and flip over onto his side. His eyes were crusted with salt and sand, so he could barely see. The sun seemed far too glaring.

A memory of how he got here surfaced like a dolphin. He’d been working with the crew, trying to keep them afloat. Some fool from below decks had opened a hatch. The wind had caught it, and flicked it up as easily as if it were papyrus. He saw it flying toward him, and only had time to reach out in front of him, warding it off, before the wooden hatch drove him over the edge of the railing and into the turbulent sea.

Somehow, he’d held on to that hatch. It floated like driftwood. He’d dragged himself onto it, and passed out. When he came to, someti
me later, he’d discovered he’d been washed up on a cobblestone beach. The hatch was gone.

Damn, the chills were back. His whole body began to convulse with
them. If thirst didn’t kill him then whatever this sickness was, certainly would. Had the odds ever been stacked so completely against him before? Even when he was stolen by pirates from his home as a lad of barely ten summers old, he hadn’t felt this hopeless.

As he tried to get his sluggish mind to focus on his present predicament, images of that time played at the corners of his mind, torturing him afresh. His family had been fisherman, his home a small village off the mainland of Hispania. When the pirates had attacked, they’d killed his father, raped and killed his mother, and taken him hostage. They’d kept him for sex, and because he was as agile and fast as a monkey, climbing the mast and yardarm. He’d learned to be useful, unlike others of his kind that came and went, sold at slave markets or dead from abuse.

There had been no hope of rescue. His people were all dead at the hands of those brutal men. His only hope was survival, and he learned that well enough. By the time he was big enough to kill anyone who tried to take him, he was ready to fight as a pirate in his own right. Somewhere between his eighteenth and twentieth year he’d finally fought his way to second in command. He’d lost count of the bodies he’d left in his wake.

Then the Roman Navy had caught them, and he’d been enslaved for his crimes. Those early lessons of survival served him well for the three long years he’d fought and killed in the arena as a gladiator. Before he won his freedom. He’d been twenty three, by his reckoning, when he’d gained his manumission, and found himself adrift and alone in the underbelly of Rome for the first time. If Menolus hadn’t found him, drunk in some whorehouse, and offered him work, he might have died there.

What pirates and gladiators hadn’t been able to achieve, alcohol and aimlessness had almost succeeded in doing. Now he only drank when he wasn’t working. It was his gift to himself only then: too much wine, too many women and too much food. For those interim days between jobs it made up for what he’d lost. It made up for what he’d become.

He shook his head to clear the morbid memories. Too many of them to let them out now. If he let them take him, he was dead.

Braxus had somehow managed to get himself above the high tide mark. As he crawled on shaking hands and knees, he found rock pools containing fresh water. He drank them dry and chewed on the creatures he found there. Having been raised on just such a barren shoreline as this made it easy enough to find food to appease his empty belly. Not enough. Not nearly enough. But it kept him alive. For the moment.

He crawled under a rocky outcrop to shelter from the blistering sun. Then he allowed himself to rest. The darkness that took him
then was not sleep.

Ninia staggered along the rocks, her bare feet torn and bleeding. Her mind was numb, thoughts distant. There was no yesterday, there was no tomorrow. There was only this: glaring sun and a thirst that threatened to drive her mad. Somewhere a little voice of sanity warned her not to drink seawater. For the moment, she listened to that voice. But for how long…?

Flotsam had washed up on the cobbled beach. None of it was human. None of it was useful to her. But there was a great deal of it. Where had it come from? Her mind wouldn’t tell her.

She staggered on around the headland and into yet another little inlet of cobbled stones and pockmarked rocks. A sparrowhawk circled overhead, its call eerie and mournful. Prickles ran down her spine.

Out of the corner of her stinging eyes she saw an outline. At first she dismissed it as shadows from the rocky overhang. But it was too dark, too
well-defined to be merely shadow. Deviating from her aimless path, she scrambled toward the dark shape. The closer she got, the faster her heart began to beat. It couldn’t be a man, could it? Not here in this desolate, lonely place?

By the time she was sure of what she saw, she was crying, crawling on her hands and knees to get to him. He was probably dead. How couldn’t he be dead in this deathly place? But hope dragged her on. When she finally fell at his side, she reached out to feel his skin.

Not cold. Warm, too warm. She leaned in and placed her head on his chest. A heartbeat. She could hear a heartbeat!

Suddenly a hand came up and clutched at her hair. Ninia jerked back in terror and surprise. Dark, salt crusted eyes opened and stared at her. They were so bloodshot they looked more red than brown. Half his face was crusted with sand.

‘You’re alive,’ she told him. His cracked and bleeding lips curled up at their edges.

‘Do you know where we are?’ she questioned him, even though the sane part of her mind told her he was in no fit state to answer her.

‘I’m so thirsty,’ she told him, just so she felt some kind of bond with this stranger who had obviously survived the storm as she had done.

‘Rock pools…’ His voice was more hoarse croak than words, but she understood him. Frowning
, she shook her head.

‘Salt water. We can’t drink salt water.’ Her explanation made her want to cry.

‘Rainwater…’

She looked across the flat, pockmarked plateau of rock they sat on. They were above the waterline. Could he be right? She remembered rain as she’d floated. It had fallen into her mouth and had saved her. But could there still be some here?

Carefully, she crawled over to one of the little pools. She leaned over and lapped at the water like a dog. It was hot but fresh, and she swallowed more of it until the pool was empty. Then she collapsed.

When she felt more revived, she crawled back over to the man. He hadn’t moved an inch, still propped up against the rock wall, his head bent forward. Dead. He looked so dead.

Tentatively, she reached out to feel his chest again, just to assure herself he was still alive. His body shuddered once, twice, and then curled into a ball, rigid.

‘Are you all right?’ she demanded, brushing his long dark hair back from his face so she could read it more clearly. The sand encrusted side lay against the sharp rocks,
the other side, face up, was pale as a ghost.

‘C…cold…so…. Cold,’ he managed to get out.

‘But it’s hot! Stifling hot!’ Ninia said in confusion. The sweat was running in streams down her back. Being under the overhand kept the sun off them, but it didn’t mitigate the heat.

‘C…cold…’he contradicted, without lifting his head from the rock. He was shivering so much now, his teeth chattered.

What should she do? Her sluggish brain didn’t want to co-operate. Then she found she was lying down on her side, her arms reaching out to him, wrapping around him, as if they had a mind of their own.

He gave one last shudder and
then curled into her, seeking what she offered. As his face nuzzled in to her neck she felt an odd tenderness for this stranger who was far worse off than she. Without moving from her position around him, she began to stroke his hair, and murmur words of comfort.

When he fell into a deep sleep, she began to draw back from him. But his hand clamped tight to her arm, holding her in place, even in sleep. Resigned, and not unhappy to stay where she was, she shuffled into a more comfortable position, and let herself fall into sleep too.

The sun was setting when she woke again, her thirst clawing at her throat. At first she didn’t realise where she was, or who she was with. Then the memory of the man came back to her. A shipwrecked stranger. Sick.

She drew back from him
, and this time he let her. He was awake, and as she eased off him, he dragged himself up into a seated position again. In the golden glow of the setting sun, the side of his face she could see looked gauntly handsome. Hispanic? His features seemed to indicate as much. Several days’ growth covered his hollow cheeks and prominent chin.

‘You need water. I can’t bring it to you. Can you make it to that little sinkhole yourself?’

He nodded and leaned forward onto his hands. Then, painfully, he shifted his legs under him and began to crawl the few feet to the hole she indicated. It still held water, and he dropped his head into the fluid and drank thirstily.

Ninia found another one still full of rainwater a little further away. The heat of the day had evaporated some of the holes, but the larger ones still contained water. Never had she drunk anything that tasted as good.

When she was revived, she moved back to his side.

‘Now all we need is food. My stomach is cramping with hunger.’

He lifted his head and began to study the rocks at shoreline. ‘Down there. You’ll find oysters. Do you know what an oyster looks like?’

She nodded. She’d had to shell enough of them for her mistress’ parties over the years. But how would she get at them? She didn’t have a knife.

As if reading her mind, the man began patting his way around his waist. On the side away from her, he suddenly stilled and then withdrew a short, sharp dagger. It was an ugly thing, but in that moment Ninia didn’t think she’d ever seen anything so beautiful.

She took it from his shaking hand, and struggled to her feet. They hurt her badly, but her knees were in no fi
t state to be crawled on that far. So she gingerly made her way across the rocks and down to the water’s edge.

It was neither high nor low tide. And she could see the dark, ugly shells clamped to the underside of the rocks here. She dug at them with the point of the knife, prying them away from their homes.

It was slow, painful work, but as the sun finally slipped into the gilded sea, her pile of shells grew big enough to make a meal from. Tearing up the side of her tunic, she placed all the shells into the fabric, and carried them back to her companion.

He gave her a small smile of acknowledgement. He may as well have clapped her on the back and told her he was proud of her. Her heart soared.

Embarrassed by how pleased she felt by his response, she sat down beside him and began to open the oysters. But after a moment, he reached over and took the dagger from her. When had her fingers begun to bleed?

With more dexterity than she would have expected, the man began to work on the shells, laying them open in front of them. After he’d done about half their number, he took the last he’d opened and cut the meat away from the smooth interior. Then he handed it to her.

Flustered, Ninia took it and lifted it to her lips. She tipped the shell up and let the slimmy, salty creature slide down her throat. It was the first oyster she’d ever eaten, and she wasn’t sure she liked it. But it filled her aching stomach, so when he offered her another, she took it without protest.

By the time they’d shared all the oysters, Ninia was replete. Her skin was burned raw, her hands and feet were bloody and stinging, her whole body ached as if she’d been run over by a chariot, but she was content for the first time since she’d woken in this desolate place.

‘Did your ship sink when the dust storm hit?’ she asked him, as she sat back against the rock under the overhang beside him.

‘Not sure if it sank. I got knocked overboard when some fuckwit opened the hatch, and it blew off, taking me with it.’ His disgust and foul language didn’t worry her. He deserved to feel as he did.
‘What about you?’

‘I… I can’t remember a lot. I remember the storm and the foresa
il they hadn’t got down in time driving us along so fast. But it was the wrong way. Someone was yelling that it was the wrong way. Nobody could see anything, the dust… it was awful. I was supposed to be below deck, but I’d come up to get air. I don’t handle confined spaces very well. But there wasn’t any air. It was just flying sand. Oh…oh gods…’

Her stomach threatened to reject the oysters, as her memory threw up an image of her father, his dark face twisted in fear as he reached for her. The ship was breaking up. The ship was breaking up.

He moved swiftly for a sick man. In less than a second he had her shoulders in his hands and he was shaking her hard. ‘Stop it. Don’t think about it! It’s over now.’