by Angel Payne
“I know.”
“You left me.”
“I’m sorry. So sorry. Christ, your skin is so delicious.”
“Where were you?”
“You talk too much.”
He raised his head sank his tongue into her mouth, parting her lips so they could take the full, dominating demand of his passion. Golden sank against him, her knees puddling with the torrent of hot desire that the kiss undammed in her. She arched her back as Mast clawed the bodice of her dress down and bit down into both her aching breasts. At the same time, he feverishly set to work on Maya’s handiwork of her corset ties.
Golden labored for air with him, entwining her gaze with his in the union their bodies craved.
“Don’t do it again,” she said, though the force of her need transformed the command to a plea.
And then it happened again. That same strange twinge of pain shot through his features, like a despairing sea gathering in his eyes. “Don’t do it again? Oh no, hellion,” he whispered. “I couldn’t leave you again. You see, I didn’t leave you to begin with. Stop. Don’t give me backlashes or anger. Just listen. Listen. Do you hear it? That’s my heart pounding, Golden. The heart that was frozen in place until you came snarling your way into it, and even opened up a few compartments I never realized the damn thing had.”
He took a weighted breath before finishing in a tight, solemn growl. “I never left you, Golden, because you never left me.”
She didn’t breathe. She didn’t even remember thinking, except the part of her mind which tried to digest the blinding, blazing beauty of his soft-spoken words—and, the hardest part, tried to accept them.
“Oh,” she whispered. “Oh.”
“You were with me all the time. In here.”
She gazed at the dark outline of his hand, covering her lighter skin as he brought her palm to his chest. “Oh.”
“And you were with me up here, in all my thoughts, in all my dreams. And you sure as hell were in every ache I had…here.”
His voice rasped lower as he guided her to the swell at the apex of his thighs. Mast shuddered, his neck arching back. Golden trembled, her fingers closing around him.
“Oh.”
The word was now an affirmation on her lips, not a meaningless blurt. She reconfirmed it against Mast’s throat as she felt him grow beneath her hand. He answered her with a low groan of pleasure as he raked her thighs with possessive strokes. He glided then receded, stroked and grasped, dragging more and more of her skirtings with each journey that ventured closer to her center of arousal.
Reality began its merciful slide away, banished to a netherland far beyond this burgeoning star point of heat and need. The ball’s laughter and music faded to this passion song of here and now, this primal tempo of their bodies swaying, rocking, kissing. Mast licked her upper lip, Golden sucked his lower. A moan shuddered its way up his throat, a sigh trembled from hers. He recited every saint he could think of in slow, erotic thanksgiving, and Golden responded with the corresponding Caribbee deities.
He climbed his hands higher and higher on her legs, until he finally gripped her bottom beneath her chemise. He kneaded her ass cheeks in time to the pleading, needing thrusts of his tongue inside her mouth.
“God help me,” he grated between deep, heaving breaths. His eyes seared her with their blue-flamed intensity as he raised his palms to her face. “God help me,” he repeated, “because if you are a witch, I’ll cast myself freely to hell.”
Idiotic tears rolled from her eyes. They added a sweet, salty taste to the kiss she turned and gave one of his palms. “I’m just the hellion who loves you.”
A nerve flinched at the corner of his eye. He swallowed deeply as he brought his thumb across her cheek, wiping away the wetness there. “And I’m just the poor bastard who loves you.”
And then he kissed her.
He kissed her deeply and thoroughly as his hands once more traversed the contours of her body, until his long fingers found the moist softness of her thighs and gripped them. He pulled her legs tighter and higher around him, until suddenly Golden found herself lowered onto the bench and watching Mast fall to his knees upon the grass in front of it.
He raised his eyes to hers.
She gulped back a stunned gasp.
An animal, not a man, cast its gaze over her through the brimstone-black hair. He was driven now by the deepest needs of his being, the wildest calls of his instinct. She’d never seen this beast. Never, in her most outrageous musings, thought he existed. The finery encasing the taut-muscled chest over her was the only sign of the Mast she thought she knew.
For a strange moment, fear sliced through her. This creature touched her core in a way the scowling captain of the Athena never did. But Mast was still in there, too. Deep in his night-dark eyes, she still saw his hungry heart. His raw need. His reckless desperation.
And the animal in her came alive in answer.
She moaned. Lowly and achingly.
His jaw clenched. He reached and jerked the buttons between his thighs free.
“Come. Here.”
He yanked her forward on the bench until she nearly fell off. In one stroke, he was inside her. His erection filled her, stretched her. It even hurt a little but the ache was so good, so right. She mewled into his mouth as he began pumping, driving, taking, conquering.
The cry turned into a gasp when he found the sensitive folds at her apex, and began circling there with his thumbs.
“Wider,” he told her. She gripped his shoulders, growling at him in unthinking need as she parted her legs farther for him. With her teeth at his collarbone, she returned his demand with one of her own.
“Harder.”
Her head fell back as he pounded forcefully. Heat spiraled through her from the inside out. Maybe he was right. Maybe they were both going to be damned for life for this. She didn’t care. She didn’t care.
“If this is hell,” she gasped to him, “then let me burn forever.”
Mast stopped inside her for a long moment. A strange grimace enveloped his face as he whispered back, “Oh, hellion, it quite possibly could be.”
As fast as the expression took him, he set it free. Raw lust overtook his features again. He pumped into her with desperate strokes, using every muscle in his body with every long thrust. “Love me,” he demanded in a rasp against her throat. “Love me like it’s the last time before we die.”
“No!” She gripped his head as the spiraling inferno of heat flared hotter, redder, sweeter between them. “No. The very first, always, with you.”
He answered with a cry that was pure primal need. His moan tore through her, too, throwing off the fetters on the last of her inhibitions. She grabbed his head and held on tight as the sweet sparks of release took over, clutching every inch of her sex.
“Mast!” she sobbed. Her spasms gripped him, tightening around his hardness until he growled her name with the same intensity as his body seized like some wild game animal gunned down as it pounced against the heavens. He flung his head up to lock his gaze into hers as he spent his passion inside her, his eyes stormy and intense, his body hot and furious.
Very slowly, his breathing evened and his body began to calm. Golden lifted the pads of her fingers to his tanned jaw, nose, and cheeks, tracing each carved angle to affirm what her eyes told her. A tremor of joy overcame her when Mast started to explore her features in the same way.
How long they remained like that, stares, bodies entwined, Golden didn’t know or care. Even as the strains of civilized music and conversation began to seep their way back into their contented haze, time hung suspended; an unreal and faraway concept.
She didn’t think she could be any happier.
“I love you,” Mast whispered.
Nay. She could be happier.
She smiled and kissed him softly.
The last time her stomach twisted so suddenly into the next moment’s alarm was when the French army’s cannon blasts first shook across Saint Kit
ts. But the explosions erupting into the garden tonight were twice as frightening—because they came in the form of shouts that detonated with one distinct charge.
“Captain Masterson Blake Stafford!”
Mast jerked out of her and away from her in one movement.
“Mast?” Golden sprang up from the bench as he backed away from it. “What is it?”
“Get dressed.”
For a moment, all she could do was blink. His voice had grown icicles. Every syllable dripped freezing shock into her.
“Not until you tell me what’s going on. Mast? Damn you, Mast, look at me!”
His shoulder tensed beneath her hand but Golden refused to let go. He took a ragged breath. His sensual peace of two minutes hence was now coiled rage.
He lifted his fingers to hers, and squeezed them painfully. “Get…dressed.”
He flung her hand away and then bent to righting his breeches.
The voices grew louder as they burst onto the terrace and then snaked through the garden, still calling Mast’s name with accusing authority.
Golden didn’t move. Motion would mean thinking. Motion would mean feeling. Motion would mean acknowledging the dread and alarm waiting greedily just beyond the realm of her composure, closing in on her with every moment.
“By the great god Puntan!”
It was Maya. Golden turned toward her sister. Maya’s arms and face were akimbo as she burst upon the alcove first. Dinky was a step behind her. There was a flurry of movement; a cloak of some sort flying off Dink’s shoulders and around hers. Maya ordered, “I’ll take care of her. Peabrooke, get him out of here. Go the back way. Now!”
But the wind didn’t have a chance to carry away Maya’s hest before a bonfire’s worth of torches lit up the hedges and the bench—and the twisted faces of the men who carried the blazes. The most prominent savage—one of Papa’s dignitary friends!—pointed a gnarled finger at Mast and Dinky and boomed, “These are the fiends!” The others closed in and shoved them into the arms of two English soldiers.
Golden charged with the unleashed strength of her outrage and terror.
“Leave him alone!”
She hurled several of the barbarians aside before clawing mindlessly at one of the soldiers. “He saved my life, damn you! Leave him alone! Let him be!”
“Mary and Joseph! Get this bloody shrew off me!”
“Somebody calm her down!”
“Just slap the damn bitch!”
Mast’s unmistakable roar silenced them all. Golden looked up. The rage on his face was so severe, even she took a step back. Veins bulged from his temples and sweat trickled down his neck. The two soldiers pulled his arms back so tight, his elbows nearly touched and his ribs were visible beneath his shirt.
“If you so much as touch her”—his seething stare made a complete circle of the surrounding faces—“so help me God, I’ll kill every one of you.”
A round of laughter was his answer.
Blinding fury inundated her. Golden leaped toward the center of the mob with a snarl, but a pair of arms suddenly pinned her back, as well.
A third English soldier stepped forward then. The gold decoration on his uniform declared him as leader over the other two. Still chuckling, the pompous man held his chin in his hand like he was nothing short of God. “I’m afraid that amazing feat will be quite impossible where you’re going, Stafford.”
“No,” Golden blurted. “What do you mean, where he’s going? He’s not going anywhere. You can’t take him anywhere!”
The soldier turned and leaned over her. A knowing sneer crept over his shriveled lips. For a heart-stopping moment, Golden was certain he was going to throw open the cape about her shoulders, exposing her breasts and raising Mast’s fury to a self-destructive pitch. He merely smiled wider as he declared, “My gentlemen and lady friends, the charges against the prisoners, one Masterson Blake Stafford and his accomplice—”
“Accomplice!” Maya jumped forward with comprehension of the soldier’s slandering overtone. “How dare you—”
“His accomplice,” the soldier repeated, “one James ‘Dinky’ O’Dinkham, is equally accused of the following: Larceny of the high seas, pertaining to and including thievery, smuggling, and piracy—”
“No!” Golden screamed. “We fought pirates! El Culebra! Braziliano! Mast, tell him!”
“As a result of said larcenous acts, a second count of high treason against the king and country who trusted him with their flag at his mast, and therefore, their honor.”
The bastard knew just how to emphasize the last word. Golden watched Mast’s dark eyes squeezed shut. His body tensed as if dealt a physical blow.
“Liar!” she spat, lunging for the hawk-nosed bastard. “You filthy liar!”
The lead soldier cocked an eyebrow at her. “Lastly,” he drawled, his eyes now fixed to hers, “the charge of murder on at least twelve proven accounts—”
“Nay!”
“All executed behind the disguise of one criminal hereby termed ‘the Moonstormer…’”
Nothing beyond that charge made sense. Golden’s hammering heart drowned out the rest of the world’s sound. Through the murk of disbelief and pain, she watched Mast turned to her. His face was ghostly grim, his eyes so dark and fathomless, she longed to tear herself away from them forever.
But she couldn’t. She opened her lips, remembered moistening them somehow, so she could speak to him.
“Tell him. Tell him he’s wrong. Please.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mast said nothing.
She lifted a clenched hand to the burning pit in which her chest had erupted.
This isn’t happening.
This isn’t real.
Fear and doubt, suspicion and hatred—they were the past Mast had helped her conquer and leave behind, not the searing, wrenching pain consuming her now. He had a flawless explanation for these beasts. He did. Damn him, he did.
“Open your mouth,” she ordered him through trembling lips. “Defend yourself! Tell them they’re wrong!”
The tension on his face only solidified. He was a shadow of the man who had passionately swept her into this nook only an hour ago. A demon to the midnight angel who had taken her soul as he’d taken her body.
At that moment, even the wind shunned the alcove, leaving an oppressive humidity that pressed the air from her lungs and the hope from her heart. Only the sharp click of steel against steel penetrated the thick air: the shackles that the soldiers slammed around Mast’s wrists. With each jerk and rattle of the chain, Golden dug her teeth harder into her lip. She recalled all too clearly what kind of pain the brusque actions induced upon a prisoner.
But she couldn’t imagine what kind of torment came with the fight Mast waged to approach her one more time.
“Golden,” he said softly.
She tried to respond. She strained to heed the supplication in his voice. But a slow and anguished fury gnarled through her, planted by his all-telling silence to the soldiers’ accusations. She turned her head and closed her eyes against the sight of his pain-filled face.
“Golden,” he entreated again. “Golden, I lo—”
“Stop.” She flung a shaking hand up. “Don’t you dare say that. Not now!”
The shackles clanked again as the soldiers jerked at Mast. He asked for one more moment, though his tone made the question a command. The soldiers gave him nothing but disdainful snorts. They yanked harder on the chains.
An insane laugh burst on her lips as her body flinched at the painful sound. “It’s come full circle, hasn’t it, Stafford? You first found me in shackles. And now—now you—”
Nothing else would come. No more words, no more thoughts. Nothing except the deepest pain she’d ever felt in her life. The most mind-numbing anger. The most twisted confusion. She opened her mouth, trying to force some sound out, but her chest constricted tighter with each effort. She stood numb and motionless in the middle of the clearing, watching the walls of her
world tumble down.
Again.
“Golden,” said a firm voice behind her.
“Papa!”
She ran to the shelter of his hefty outstretched arms. A sob finally broke free at her lips.
“I’m sorry, nug,” he murmured. “So sorry you had to see this.”
She felt his arms stiffen. Golden looked up to behold Papa’s profile as she’d never seen it before. The gentle lines of his face were grooves of trembling anger. His eyes reminded her of a wrathful dragon from a fairy tale he’d told her once, flashing green fire as he stared over her head at Mast.
Silence fell like a death sentence. The two men squared gazes for a long minute. At the same time, Golden looked back and forth at both of them. An unnerving instinct gripped her, as if Mast and Papa were exchanging an entire conversation and she was the only one who couldn’t hear it.
“Papa,” she said again. Stony silence. She tugged at him. “Papa?”
“Bastard,” came his only response. “You goddamn bastard. I trusted you with everything. Great God, my own daughter!”
“Wayland.” Mast’s voice was tight yet desperate. “I can explain, for Christ’s sake.”
“Take him away.” Papa slashed his arm once through the air then spat at Mast’s boots.
Golden couldn’t bring herself to emulate the action. Something held her gaze to Mast’s imploring face. Something dark and uncontrollable, pulling her back to those eyes that now stared with the black turmoil of a stormy sea. She wanted to echo her father’s condemnation at him. Oh hell, how she needed to. Bastard! her mind screamed. But unbidden and unwanted, the spirit behind those dark-blue eyes reached to her, pressing the word into tormenting silence.
“Books and covers,” he said into the quiet. He nodded with slow surety, as if trying to engrave the words on her mind. “Books and covers, Golden.”
The soldiers hauled him away.
True to precedent, the news traveled through every household in Abaco before supper the next day. At sunrise tomorrow, the Moonstormer and his conspirator would be executed by firing squad then tossed to a watery grave among the sharks in the Providence Channel.