The Sea Rose (6 page)

He grabbed her by the waist and drew
her back into the bed beside him. She watched him warily, not
exactly sure if she wanted him to seduce her or not. She knew she
wouldn’t have the fortitude to stop him if he kissed her
again.

“
We will be pulling into
Nassau today. Do you know where to find your fiancé?”

“
I have an address where I
sent letters to him, but it was in my trunk,” she paused when she
realized she no longer had the scrap of paper.

“
And your trunk is at the
bottom of the ocean,” he finished for her. His finger strayed to
her collarbone where it skimmed along the ridge there. “How will we
find him?”

“
We?” she asked, “You’re
going to help me?”

 “
I’m certainly not
going to abandon you in that town alone. Nassau is Sodom and
Gomorrah reborn, and I won’t have you wandering around there with
no escort.”

She tried to ignore his wandering
finger for a moment and focus on the words he’d just said. “I did
just fine by myself in London on the merchant ship. You don’t owe
me anything.” She made every effort to be indignant, but he was
very distracting.

“
And look how well you
faired on your first voyage.” The finger had a mind of its own and
down it went as it followed a path between her breasts.

“
Well, it’s hardly my
fault that the ship sank, now is it?”
Where was his finger going now?
A
trail of fire followed in its wake.

“
Believe me, if you fall
into a bad situation in Nassau, you will be wishing you went down
with that ship.” He pressed a kiss on her shoulder. Of course, one
kiss led to another and then several more connected from her
shoulder to the sensitive indention at the base of her throat. “I
only want to insure your safety, my beautiful Rose.”

“
Did you say ‘your’ Rose?”
She was nearly past the ability to speak, but his endearment caught
her attention.

“
At least for this
morning.” Jack slid his thigh between hers, laying half on her. “Do
you trust me?” he asked her.

Roselyn looked into the well of his
black eyes and saw strength of character that she wasn’t sure even
he suspected he possessed. Why shouldn’t she trust him? If he’d
wanted to hurt her he’d had ample opportunity the previous day and
night. He hadn’t harmed her when she first came on board, or in the
bathtub or, at her most vulnerable, when she was drunk and willing
in his bed. Of course she trusted him.

Go ahead, be
wanton,
her darker self urged.
Father accused you of it enough.

As it turned out, she was perfectly
capable of making decisions for her life. Had she known all that
was available to her, what the world outside her small English
village offered, would she have allowed her father to betroth her
to Rupert? Rupert, a man exactly the same as her father, two men
cut from the same cloth. How might her life have been different if
her mother had lived? Roselyn had never known her. The woman died
from a bout of influenza when she was only two. Was her mother the
meek and subservient woman her father tried to mold his daughter
into?

Did she trust him?

She answered him with a searing kiss
that she hoped properly conveyed her desire to continue to unfold
all the mysteries her body held. Jack pulled her shift over her
head and threw it to the floor. His hands and mouth branded her
naked skin with passion.

She had never felt this way. In fact,
she hadn’t known these feelings were even possible. She only just
realized in the last two days the wealth of experiences her father
had sheltered from her. Not like any father would allow for this
experience per se, but she was finding many things on this voyage
to broaden her horizons.

His hands and lips caressed her, and
now was not the time to contemplate deep thoughts and what ifs.
Jack was magic, the things he made her feel–no wonder her father
talked of such things as wicked.

Maybe feeling pretty is
wicked, but if this is how pretty feels, then I want to be
wicked.
Jack made her feel pretty.
Actually, Jack made her feel beautiful.

Jack’s kisses traveled down from her
throat until he found her breast and then a nipple. He drew the
rosy bud in his mouth and her body responded, a most scintillating
current raced down her body and pooled in the center of her being.
He settled his body fully between her legs, his mouth never leaving
her breast except when it traveled over to lavish attention on the
other one. His hands caressed her, spread her legs wider, kneaded
the muscles of her thighs. He raised himself to take her mouth once
more, his tongue hot and insisting, his hands spanned her waist and
roamed further down to settle on her hips.

“
Will you bloom for me, my
Rose?” he whispered against her mouth.

She had no idea what he was talking
about, but he could have asked her to fly to the moon and she would
have agreed. She was completely open to suggestion at this point,
as long as she kept feeling this way.

Roselyn nodded, and then gasped as his
fingers found her very center. Her legs moved restlessly and her
hands grasped the sheets at either side of her. Clever fingers wove
their way through the curly hair at her apex, found the secret
pleasure point there, and gently rubbed.

”
Jack,” she called out,
her voice husky and low. “Oh my God, Jack.”

Roselyn knew this wasn’t the same kind
of love making she was likely to get from Rupert, especially if his
perfunctory kisses were any indication. Jack was a handsome man
when clothed in his pirate’s garb, but when naked he was
breathtaking, magnificent.

Tension mounted in her stomach, in her
womb, that she couldn’t name and didn’t know how to slake. Her hips
moved, jerked when he added more pressure and, when she felt one
long, masculine finger slide inside her, she let out a strangled,
little scream. He withdrew his finger slowly, circling the
entrance, and then slid it in again. His thumb massaging her as the
pressure built inside. And almost the same instant that he slid in
a second finger, the pressure burst and she screamed his
name.

Jack observed her, gratified that he
had been the first to make Rose bloom. At the same time he mourned
her. He knew that his release was not forthcoming. He would have to
allow her husband to have that honor, and it angered and saddened
him deeply. After the ship docked and they found her fiancée, there
was very little likelihood that Handsome Jack would ever see her
again, and the prospect made him uncharacteristically melancholy.
He would have to give his beautiful Rose to some other man; some
other man surely unworthy of her.

If this Rupert was a husband her
father had chosen for her, likely he had selected a man of similar
nature, and the thought of Rose being trampled under further cruel
dictates and punishments made him want to hold her forever. He
wanted to protect her from the harshness of a husband like that, of
a life that consisted of mashing down her spirit. But he was a
pirate, his previous life of no consequence, and she a lady borne
of good character. This was not a story that could end in happily
ever after.

He kissed her stomach and each hip
while she lay panting and settling back to earth. He placed his
head on the cradle of her stomach and her fingers found his
hair.

“
Oh my God,” Roselyn
whispered, “that was the most amazing thing…I don’t have
words.”

“
You’re amazing, Rose.”
Jack really believed it. After all the experienced women he had
known, he simply couldn’t get past the amazement that this sweet,
unspoiled minister’s daughter should be the one to wrap up his
heart. He rose on his elbows and kissed her breasts reverently,
then the hollow of her throat. She placed a hand on each side of
his jaw and drew him to her mouth and kissed him deeply. A quick
learner, her kiss soon escalated from sweet and gentle, to
passionate and desperate.

Jack could feel himself losing
control. Unless he ended this immediately he wouldn’t be able to
stop. He pulled his mouth away from hers and sat up, his rear
resting on his heels, still sitting between her legs.

Oh it would be so easy. It
would be so good.

“
Rose,” was all he said
before her curious fingers wrapped around his cock. “God! Rose.” He
grasped her wrist. “You’re killing me.”

“
You’re very large.
Probably because you’re such a big man, but it’s not like I have a
point of reference.” Her eyes fixed on what she held in her hand.
“What just happened, what you did to me, that wasn’t everything was
it?” she asked him.

“
No.” He gritted his teeth
against the sensation of her free hand sliding up his thigh. “There
is much more.”

“
I want it all,
Jack.”

He wanted to give it to her and his
control hung by a thread. “Are you sure? One more kiss, one more
inch with that hand, and there’s no going back.”

Roselyn sat on her knees in front of
him. With her hand still gripping his rock-hard cock, she kissed
him. Her mouth hot and urgent, her tongue entered his with passion
that Jack could only interpret with the part of his body she held
in her grasp. It was more than Jack could take. He pressed her back
on the bed and tested her center with his fingers, found her even
wetter than before.

“
Now, Jack,” she urged and
lifted her hips, her eyes begged for him.

He slowly entered her, her slickness
and warmth begged to be plundered. Jack clenched his teeth for
control until he reached the barrier and, with exquisite
tenderness, he pushed through. If the pain bothered her, she didn’t
give any sign of it.

He withdrew and slid nearly all the
way out. She clutched at his hips and made a mewling sound of
protest, clearly not wanting him to go. An entirely unnecessary
plea once Jack set the rhythm. He filled her and then retreated
only to fill her again and again.

“
Jack? Jack!” she
cried.

Several more thrusts and Jack’s
explosive climax followed hers.

They lay in the bed, nestled together,
back to front. Jack felt her steady breaths through the rise and
fall of her breasts once she drifted back to sleep, her warm
exhalations against his arm, her head cradled against his shoulder.
This was his woman. He knew this in his gut, in his heart. But, he
had just promised to see her to her fiancé. He knew that was the
honorable thing to do, but he never wanted to do anything less in
his life. Never before had something felt so wrong.

If only there was a way. For the first
time in his life, Jack was overcome with regret. Regret for the
choices he’d made, the life he’d led. In some ill-thought-out,
juvenile quest to prove his father’s assertions that he was “no
good”, and to lick the wounds inflicted from a faithless lover, he
had chosen a life of a Corinthian, and that fateful decision so
many years ago promised to threaten everything he thought he might
now come to hold dear.

Chapter Nine

July 27, 1718

Roselyn stood in the circle of his
arms, both of his hands on the wheel of the ship. Around them
jostled a flurry of activity as the sailors prepared to bring the
ship into port. The old sailor who saved her from the sinking
merchant ship had blended into the pirate crew. Finally emerging
when Mr. Blake called down that the ship was in sight of their
destination, the lovers had spent most of the day in bed. Though
much of the time was devoted to making love, they also fed each
other, talked, and laughed.

Of all the things that she could have
imagined on this journey, Roselyn never imagined that she would
dread seeing the harbor of New Providence Island as she did now.
How could she have ever conceived that she would fall in love with
a pirate? She knew she loved Handsome Jack, the Captain of the
pirate ship Neptune’s Revenge, with a certainty that brooked no
doubt.

She also knew that she would have to
let him go because he was a pirate, a man of the sea and adventure,
and because she was simply a poor minister’s daughter. As much as
she wanted to believe his flowery words and compliments, it was
difficult. After all, she knew he’d had a great amount of
experience flirting with women and he was a lovable rogue till the
end. She would keep her adventure on her pirate ship close to her
heart and endeavor to live a quiet life with Rupert.

The prospect made her heart
ache.

After the great ship had dropped
anchor and the rigging lowered, Jack and Roselyn disembarked,
leaving the crew on board ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Jack
and Mr. Blake had decided some scouting was in order before the
crew left on leave.

Roselyn gasped at the grizzly sight of
three men hanging from gallows just off the pier.

When she looked to Jack for an answer,
his reply was cryptic. “It’s a warning.”

They were able to obtain the address
for her fiancé from the first church they came upon in the town.
While Roselyn spoke with the vicar, Jack waited outside.