Across a Moonlit Sea (31 page)

 O
ver the course of the next three days not a moment passed that Beau would have described as boring, occupied as she was with the normal, if somewhat nerve-wracking, routines of guiding an overburdened galleon through seasonable squalls and strong currents.

The evening meals continued to be a trial, more for Spence than anyone else, once it was deemed a certainty that Agnes Frosthip had set her sights on him; she even appeared at the dinner table with her moustache shaved off, a clear indication to everyone but Jonas that he was a doomed man. As the duenna’s attention turned more and more to Spence, it lapsed even further toward her royal charge. Had the duchess been willing, Pitt’s stolen moments could have become outright theft of virtue for all her chaperone seemed to notice. It was Doña Maria, however, who took care never to be caught alone again with the handsome master gunner, although it was obvious to anyone with half a wit—which excluded Pitt by this point—that he would not have had to resort to theft; she would gladly have given him anything he cared to take.

Beau continued to excuse herself early from the evening meals, wanting nothing either by word or gesture to put more of a suspicious gleam in her father’s eye than was already there. To her credit she managed not to blush whenever Dante glanced her way, which he did with reckless frequency and with more suggested intimacy than she would have preferred. Conversely, at other times, it was a struggle for her to keep from staring openly at his starkly sensual countenance, especially if the light caught his smile a certain way, or his hands moved in a manner that brought to mind the treacherous skill of those long, deft fingers.

She took to pacing out her frustrations on the gallery balcony during the politic quarter hour before Dante joined her. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they argued. Always it depended on the mood Beau had worked herself into, whether she had accepted what they did together as casual and finite and a pleasurable way to pass the nights … or if she was convinced it was foolish, reckless, callous, and predatory on his part, senseless and potentially destructive on hers.

Either way they ended up naked and breathless in a tangle of sweat-slicked arms and legs, with Beau telling herself it was the last time. It had to be the last time. He was becoming too powerful an intoxicant in her blood, drugging her with his passion, draining her with his prowess and potency. It simply wasn’t fair.

Once. Once only she had managed to escape the cabin before his eyes, his hands, his mouth, had lured her into the realm of sensual decadence. She managed to stay away too … long enough to wonder why he had not come after her. To wonder if he was, indeed, growing bored.

She had returned to the cabin on some lame excuse and found him bent over his infernal documents again, his
handsome face awash in candlelight. His expression had been cool enough to suggest indifference, but his eyes had betrayed too much relief for either one of them to waste effort on words. She had gone to him and he had taken her as he had wanted to take her that first day, sprawled naked on a bed of scattered papers, her hair spread in a wild spill of auburn beneath them.

The morning of the fourth day, she woke when dawn was nothing more than a hint of pearl-gray seeping over the horizon. Dante was actually asleep beside her, a rarety she had come to appreciate in the short time she’d had a chance to study his habits. It was as if he begrudged wasting even that much time, letting life go by without being in absolute control, absolute command.

Not wanting to disturb him, she eased herself out from beneath his arm and padded barefoot to the chair, groping through the gloom for an identifiable garment in the pile that had been so hastily discarded. Her shirt, she was not suprised to discover, was ripped into two halves, drawing a muffled curse from her lips. Dante’s was beside it and she pulled it over her head, losing herself briefly in the voluminous folds. She went out onto the gallery and leaned on the rail, letting the wind comb through the tangles in her hair. From the sound of the wash and the height of the wake curling out behind them, she guessed their speed to be between eight and ten knots; the faint sound of a bell overhead tolled the fifth hour of the morning.

She sighed and cupped her chin in her hands. The soft, indistinct light that hung over the far edge of the sea was spreading in gauzy strips, lightening to pinks and golds and grays. Soon the sea would become a vast, shimmering puddle of bronze and the wash would glitter with the first pinpoints of sunlight.

There was a chill in the air and she closed her eyes to
savor the crispness. Her skin rippled with a spray of goose-flesh but before she could hug her arms and chafe some heat through the cool linen of Dante’s shirt, a pair of large, warm hands slid around her waist and invited her to share the heat of his body.

“I thought you were asleep,” she murmured.

“Mmm.” He nuzzled aside a tousle of curls and pressed his lips to the nape of her neck. “Come back inside and wake me properly.”

Desire stirred along her spine, spreading outward like a slow, rolling wave. After three nights of avid explorations of each other’s body, she would have expected to have at least grown more immune to the timbre of his voice, but even that small measure of control had deserted her. The low, throaty vibrations were as tempting as sin itself and she found herself shifting slightly in his arms, inviting his hands to cup her full, swollen breasts.

“I am surprised
you
aren’t still asleep,” he murmured against the curve of her spine.

“I … wanted to watch the sunrise.”

“Really? I would rather watch you rise all flushed and pink beneath me.”

“I rose quite enough last night,” she said through the catch in her voice, “thank you very much.”

He laughed softly and his hands slid downward. They met over her belly, then continued lower, pressing into the juncture of her thighs, pulling her even closer to his chest. As cool as the air was, his big body was as hot as a brazier. His skin was heated velvet, the muscles smooth and hard, burnished as bronze as the sea in the growing light. He loomed extremely large behind her and she felt as she always did: too short, too small, too inadequate, to accommodate all that massive power and strength.

Yet she knew it wasn’t true. She fit him as a glove fit a hand, snug and sleek and tight.

“You’re thinking of something other than sunrises,” he mused, “I can tell.”

His fingers seduced her through the linen and another ribbon of heat unfurled within her, coiling between her thighs, slithering past flesh that had become far too knowledgeable in such a short time. It was shameless, that’s what it was. It was shameless and brazen and …

“There,” she whispered, “please.”

Dante smiled against her nape and snatched up the hem of the shirt she was wearing. A hard-muscled leg urged her thighs apart, wide enough for him to slide his partly aroused flesh into the warmth. Beau cursed softly at this new torment, this new wickedness to add to his repertoire. His fingers were still dancing and stroking, now his flesh was stretching and expanding, vying for equal attention.

Beau leaned forward at his murmured urging and he curled an arm around her waist, holding her firmly against him. He probed the lush, pearly folds, not quite deep enough to penetrate, but teasingly enough to send her head bowing forward on a shiver.

“I have the morning watch,” she groaned.

“It’s hours away yet.”

She sucked in a quick breath and shuddered as his big body stretched and throbbed and taunted her with a brief, swiftly retracted thrust.

“You are taking shameful advantage of my position, Captain,” she whispered.

Dante’s hands encircled her breasts, finding the nipples peaked into hard beads. He kneaded them, caressed them, gently chafed them, until she was pushing back against him with wriggling impatience.

“If I am, you have only yourself to blame. Standing here,
robed in my shirt, with those long, luscious legs bare beneath it”—his lips nuzzled her neck and he withheld more than he offered—“how could I resist?”

Her lips parted with a moan and she braced her hands on the rail.

“How indeed,” she accused breathlessly, “when you know I don’t have the strength to fight you off?”

He offered up a low, husky laugh. “You should never make an admission like that to a man,
mon enfant
But why do you still think it is necessary to fight me, even after all this time?”

“Why do you,” she gasped, “always think your attentions bring a woman pleasure? Is it so inconceivable to imagine a woman not wanting to share your lusty ways each time the urge comes upon you?”

“You mean if she, for instance, wanted to watch the sunrise instead?”

“Some people do, you know.”

His body stopped moving. He withdrew himself completely and stepped back a pace, offering a formal bow. “Then by all means, I would do the gentlemanly thing and let her watch it.”

Beau stood with her mouth open and her body trembling. The shock of watching him walk back inside the cabin, combined with the sudden absence of heat, eventually spurred her into following him, but by then he was standing over the washbowl, humming faintly to himself.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” He held the sharpened edge of a knife to his cheek and started to scrape away the shadow of beard stubble. “How was the sunrise?”

Beau bit down sharply on the fleshy pulp of her lip and moved away from the gallery door. She kept a wary distance between them, not entirely believing him to have
given up so easily, for it was enormously apparent he was still as aroused as she.

“I trust your hand is steady enough not to cut your throat.”

He winced, having done just that, and glared at her across the room. His fingers grasped the knife tighter and he turned back to the small square of polished metal that served as a mirror, smiling grimly as he concentrated on avoiding major veins.

Beau sat petulantly in the chair behind her chart table and tapped her fingers on the wooden top. Her bare feet rustled on the papers that had been swept to the floor last night, and still keeping a glowering eye on the pirate wolf, she leaned over and started gathering them up. There were the original documents in Spanish as well as Dante’s translations and as she picked them up she separated them into two piles. Other sheets had nothing but scribbling and angry black scratches of ink, and there were at least a dozen pages crumpled into balls and tossed to the floor in frustration.

“I hope,” she said as she stared beligerently at the expansive waste of precious vellum, “you are not squandering all of my valuable paper on your scrawlings.”

“When we reach Plymouth, I will buy you a thousand more sheets. And they are not scrawlings. They are diligent attempts to untangle the mind of an ambitious, bloodthirsty, ruthless fanatic who uses religion as a sword to carve an empire for himself.”

Beau arched a delicate eyebrow. “Whereas we heretics of the world are more honest in our greed and ambition?”

“We don’t use God as an excuse to conquer,” he snapped angrily. “I have seen whole villages burned, people tortured and mutilated, all in the name of Catholic purification. These”—he pointed to the scars that crisscrossed
his back—“were not given to me in an effort to make me convert. After twenty lashes I was willing to pray to anyone who would listen.”

“So … you are a heretic in the true sense of the word?”

“You sound shocked at the notion. Dare I suppose I can have lowered myself any further in your esteem?”

Beau’s brow cleared. “It would hardly be a noticeable decline.”

Her sarcasm earned a caustic glance. “In that case, what shall I offer in my defense? My mother, rest her soul, was English and a devout Protestant. Father, may the devil and all his disciples be enjoying the former comte’s company, made pilgrimages to Rome each year in order to wash the pope’s feet. My brother owed a great deal of money to the Jews and married one to clear a debt. My own wife would have worshipped any idol, so long as it was made out of gold, but her preference was for pentacles and ram’s horns and kneeling before altars draped in black.”

“She worshipped the devil?”

“Au
contraire
, mam’selle. She
was
the devil and took pleasure in sacrificing men’s souls.”

As familiar as Beau was becoming with his body and his moods, the man himself was as much of an enigma as ever. He did not like to talk about himself. He rarely referred to his life in France and never ever spoke of his former wife without first sharpening his tongue on a curse. Thus Beau could not help herself, she had to ask. “Why on earth did you marry her?”

“Why?” Dante glared at the distorted reflection in the mirror as if it could provide the answer. “Because it was my duty, as the Comte de Tourville, to do so. Because she was beautiful. And bewitching. And because I still had a soul, possibly even a conscience then too. She made short work of both, however, and I made short work of her.”

“You divorced her?”

“I would have preferred to drown her, like a stray cat, but, aye, at great expense to my pocket and what was left of my reputation I rid myself of her.” He glanced speculatively at Beau’s reflection before he continued. “There were children involved. Two of them: a boy and a girl. Neither of them was mine, a fact that still keeps my name prominent on the tongues of Court wags.”

The admission was made altogether too casually and Beau wondered exactly how strongly he had braced himself before making it. Because he strove to give the impression his titles and responsibilities meant nothing to him at all, it probably should not have come as a shock to realize that they, like his wife, must have mattered very much at one time. The ridicule, the jokes at his expense, the general knowledge he had been cuckolded not once but twice, would have scarred his pride as deeply as any welts from a lash, and she could understand why he wore his arrogance like armor. He did not want to take the chance of being cut again.

“What did you do to her lovers?” she asked in an equally casual voice.