For Her Love (39 page)

“Nay!” Grace cried. “If I am your gift to unwrap, then so are you mine.”

He took her hands in his and led her to the bed, where he sat so she could more easily pull his shirt off herself. She ran her hands under the garment, letting the light dusting of hair there tickle her palms ere she took the fabric in her fingers and pulled the shirt off. He rested his hands lightly on her hips while she ran hers over the firm, hot flesh of his shoulders and chest. Then he reached down and tugged her shift up over her thighs so he could pull her into his lap, her legs straddling him.

They kissed again, tongues exploring mouths, hands exploring bodies. Giles untied her shift and pulled it down to her waist so he could feast upon her bare, honey-colored breasts. His face was so deeply tanned that, in the dusky light, it seemed to Grace there was little difference in the color of their skin. His torso was somewhat lighter, but he must have worked without his shirt from time to time, for it was also tanned. He lifted his head and began nibbling and sucking at the tender flesh of her throat, and with a sigh, she let her head fall back to give him more.

Grace’s skin was smooth against Giles’s mouth, and between the ardent murmurs of desire that slipped through her lips and the fact that she had begun to press her core against him where she straddled him, he had to fight to take things slowly. Somewhere along the way, she had mastered her fear of him, but he wasn’t about to press his luck. He broke away for a moment to gently pull her shift off. In all his life, he would swear he had never seen anything more exquisite than his wife, naked, there in his lap. He took each of her breasts in his hands, hefting their weight and brushing his thumbs across their dark, rigid crests.

“You are so beautiful,” he sighed. “This cannot be real.”

Grace slipped from him, kneeling on the floor and untying the waist of his breeches. She was tired of fearing the unknown, of only having half the story. She wanted to see him. He lifted his hips from the mattress, and she slid the breeches from him. Mayhap she should have been embarrassed or shown more modesty, but she studied him openly, and he did not seem to mind. The sight of his turgid sex wasn’t frightening. He was large enough that she could see why joining might hurt, but not so large that it would be unbearable. She took him in her hand, and he moaned.

“Did I hurt you?” she asked, drawing her hand away.

He shook his head vigorously, and she smiled. This was so different than anything she had ever before experienced. She was not restrained in any way, and now he was leaning back against his arms, his nude, work-hardened body completely open to her. She could do with him as she wished, and stop whenever she chose.

Grace had rather more knowledge than most virgin brides, been told far more about the things that went on between men and women than anyone should have told her. What had seemed an utterly repulsive act when she was told of it now struck her as completely natural, and she leaned forward and brushed her tongue across the tip of him. He gasped, and she looked up at him, worried that she had committed some unpardonable perversion.

“Is this bad?” she asked.

“Nay,” he answered, his voice strangled. “‘Twas only unexpected. Do not let me stop you.” He smiled shakily, and she took him into her mouth, savoring his firm flesh and salty flavor, even as she looked up into his face softened by surrender.

He allowed her to have her way for a moment, but soon, with a groan that was very like pain, he lifted her chin. “Not yet,” he whispered. “Mayhap you need a taste of what it is you do to me.”

He pulled her back up and guided her onto the bed where he had sat. Then he took her place kneeling on the floor.

“Nay!” Grace protested, pressing her knees together.

“Why not?”

“Because you will see me!”

Giles laughed heartily. “You saw me!”

“‘Tis different!”

“How so?”

“I know not, but it is!” No one had ever told her that a man might do the same to a woman! It had been one thing when he had been at her mercy. This was another.

“As you wish,” he conceded. She relaxed, and he eased his hand between her thighs and caressed her. “But you do not find the thought wholly displeasing, I can tell.”

She blushed at the moisture she knew was coating his softly stroking fingers. And then it began to happen, that strange and frighteningly intense building of sensation that had made her stop whenever she had tried touching herself. “Giles,” she protested, trying to push his hand away.

“Lie back, Grace. Let go.”

She tried to say something else, but with one hand he kept stroking while with the other he pressed her back onto the bed. She lay on the soft mattress, moving with the rocking of the ship and the rhythm of Giles’s touch, gasping for breath as something inside of her kept tightening and tightening until she was sure that she was going to break somehow. She felt his hands, warm and rugged, part her thighs, and then felt his mouth plunder her sex. At last that inexplicable feeling that had been building inside of her exploded, and her entire body was consumed by wave upon wave of agonizingly exquisite sensation.

There was no terror in his wife’s screams this time, Giles knew. For one thing, he could feel the pulse of her pleasure against his lips. For another, she had her fists clenched tightly in his hair and held him fast against her as she raised her hips from the bed and arched her back. Perhaps, some other time, he would pleasure her thus for a long while, but at this moment, he had a burning need of his own. He raised himself from the floor and moved over her.

The ecstasy waned too quickly. For all that had just happened, Grace panicked. The thought of being pinned underneath him filled her with the urge to flee. She squeezed her eyes shut, ashamed of her fear after what he had given her.

Giles watched her face carefully, determined that nothing would mar this first experience. He sat next to her and, with one finger, lightly traced a line over her breast, circling her nipple. It puckered prettily. She wasn’t too frightened. When she opened her eyes, he gestured to his lap. “I rather liked having you up here.”

She smiled nervously. “I rather liked being there.”

This time, as she swung her leg over his hips, he positioned himself at her entrance, and she held herself above him, her weight on her knees. Giles put his hands on her hips and looked up into her face.

“We’ll go as slowly as you like. If it hurts too much, you can stop.” She nodded, and he gently pulled her toward him, letting her determine the pace and the pressure. It was excruciatingly erotic, being ever so slowly enveloped inside her. He felt the barrier of her innocence, and she paused, flinching slightly.

“I—I think it would be better to have done with this,” she whispered.

“You’re certain?”

“Aye.”

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and nodded. Giles thrust his hips upward as Grace pulled herself hard against him with a little cry of pain. The moment he had entered her entirely, he stopped and watched her. She slowly opened her eyes.

“Was that it? It is done?” she asked.

He swallowed. God he hoped not. “Not quite. Can you…?”

“Aye, if the pain isn’t much worse.”

He smoothed her hair away from her face. “I think the pain is mostly done.”

Grace relaxed as his hands moved gently from her face, down her shoulders, over her breasts, finally coming to rest again upon her hips. He used them to urge her to move up and down upon him, while he moved sensually underneath her. He was right. The pain was mostly done. It was a little uncomfortable, but she began to feel her belly tighten and her nether regions tingle. She knew now where she was going, and began to move faster, hastening to get there.

They wrapped their arms around each other, sweat-slicked torsos sliding over each other, mouths pressed together, tongues lapping at one another’s moans, hips grinding until they each cried their release into the other, and then their heads fell back and they panted to catch their breath.

The ship must have hit a swell, for Grace felt it lift and then fall, an echo of the surge that had lately risen within her. She languidly lifted her head up to look down upon her husband. His face was soft, blissful, and she smiled at him in wonder.

“Did I do that to you?”

He raised his head, too, and smiled back. “Have you some doubt? We are still joined, though not for long I’m guessing.”

“I
know
I did that. I mean did I do
that
? Make you feel as though you were dying somehow, like you were no longer yourself alone but…”

“But somehow a part of you, as well? Aye. You did that.”

“This is what I have been so afraid of for so long?”

“You need never fear again.”

“Indeed not.” She threw her head back and laughed, then cast him a rueful look, for her mirth had cost them their connection. “We shall do this again.”

He nuzzled her neck. “Indeed we shall.”

“Soon.”

He laughed softly and his breath tickled her throat. “How soon?”

“Now?”

“It may take a bit of work.”

“Then we should waste no time.” She brushed a sweat-dampened strand of hair from his face and tucked it behind his ear. “How sad to think I feared you once. My uncle had best hope he need never face me again, damn his depraved soul.”

Giles’s face sobered. “There is time enough to speak on that, my love. This is not pillow talk.”

She tossed her wild curls. “What is?”

He whispered in her ear, and she blushed all the way down to her throat, and later, when he pressed her body into the mattress, she welcomed his weight.

Grace sank down onto the grass beside two graves at the far edge of the rear courtyard. Simple wooden crosses marked them both, but one was carefully tended, while the other was gradually beginning to vanish under the rapidly encroaching ground cover. She ran her fingers across the name carved in one of the crosses, then dropped her hand to her stomach. It was just beginning to expand, and her bodice pulled uncomfortably across her waist.

“Well, Father, you shall have what you always wanted. Welbourne will pass from you to at least two heirs. But I will not be a meaningless splotch somewhere in family history. My mother will not be forgotten. Your grandchildren and their grandchildren will know they have African blood flowing through their veins. It will not be some terrible secret for which innocents must suffer.” She paused and leaned down to lay her cheek against the mound. The fecund soil and green grass were as warm as living flesh. “But I forgive you. I just want you to know that.”

She sat up again and studied Iolanthe’s grave. She would never understand what had turned Iolanthe and her brother into the cruel and calculating people they had become. She wasn’t sure she ever wanted to. For her own peace of mind, she wished she could forgive them, as well, but that would be a long time coming. Faith had once said she did not believe anyone beyond redemption, but God help her, Grace hoped Iolanthe and Jacques had earned their own little space in hell, at least for a few millennia.

Footsteps behind her startled Grace from her brooding thoughts, and she turned to find that Matu had joined her. Matu stared down at the grave for a moment in supreme indifference, then reached down and helped Grace to her feet. She made the sign for Saran, Grace and Giles’s adopted daughter, and pantomimed reading a book.

“Saran needs help with her lessons?” Grace asked, and Matu nodded.

One of the first things Grace had done when she had returned home was to start a school for the all the plantation’s children so they could learn basic reading and ciphering. These seemed like vital skills, although she knew the children would be unlikely to use them in the Caribbean. They were not likely to grow up to be clerks or merchants, but this was, after all, their own little corner of the world. Mayhap they could do little to change what went on around them, but on this patch of earth, anything was possible.

Grace joined Saran, who sat in an upholstered chair in the keeping room. The little girl was learning to speak English very quickly and even to read, with the help of her primer. She was also adapting well to her most unusual new parents, the horrors of Havana well behind her. When Grace lay her hand on Saran’s head, the girl looked up and smiled, eager to show off her latest accomplishment.

“Listen, Mama.” Her finger carefully followed the words. “‘T is for turtle.’ I know turtle. De turtle make good soup!”

“Aye, it does,” Grace agreed. “Perhaps we should ask Uncle Geoff to bring us a turtle the next time he comes. Then Keyah could make us some soup from it.”

Grace’s hand fell back to her stomach. Saran was the dark-skinned child of her heart, but the child growing in her body would likely be fairer even than she. In time, it would learn that not every light-skinned, straight-haired youngster had a sister with ebony flesh and midnight hair that curled tightly against her head. But Grace would delay that awakening for as long as possible.

“Dis lesson be hard work,” Saran said.

“Her spoiled, you know,” Ciatta said to Grace, leaning through a rear window left open to the courtyard.

Grace laughed. “Come in here, silly. ‘Tis far too hot out there for a woman in your condition.”

Ciatta waved her hand in a dismissive gesture, but she accepted the invitation. She stepped through the back door into the shade of the house and sighed. “You soun’ like me husban’. Ev’ryting ‘bout me
condition
.” She rubbed her hands over her round belly.

“I’m going to enjoy it while I can,” Grace replied. “Giles hardly lets me lift a hand. Once these babes are born, the real work will begin.”

Ciatta laughed. “Dat a fact!”

“Of course,” Grace amended, pulling Saran from her chair and hugging her tight, “mine shall have a fine big sister and a strong father to help keep him or her out of trouble.”

Ciatta rubbed her hands over her stomach again. “Mine not do so bad. We got us a fine, free African wit’ big shouldas.”

“Not much jingle in Jawara’s pockets, I’m afraid.”