“Nicholas?” she murmured, a slow smile tugging at her lips. “I think the pillow is on fire.”
“Blast the pillow,” he choked out. “Let it burn.”
He couldn’t move toward her, couldn’t make himself turn away, couldn’t tear his gaze from her. For one long, glorious moment, he drank in her smile, the look in her eyes, the love—feasted on it like a condemned man devouring his last meal.
Then, in agony, he closed his eyes.
And turned his back on her. “We all make mistakes in life, angel.” He tried to sound careless, cool, but instead his voice sounded hoarse. “You’ll get over the mistake of falling in love.”
With a frustrated oath, she launched herself from the bed. “Listen, you stubborn…impossible…” She seemed to run out of words to describe him—and fell back on an old favorite. “Rogue. Clarice told me you’re not worth losing my appetite over. Foster told me you’re not worth dying for. Everyone you’ve ever met seems to have a low opinion of you—”
“Which should make you think twice about what you just said,” he retorted.
“It doesn’t. Because I’ve been thinking twice about what you said earlier—that ‘they’ are not always accurate.” She stopped a few paces behind him.
He could hear her breathing, rapid and shallow.
“Nicholas,” she said more softly. “I don’t think they really know you at all. I don’t think you’ve ever allowed anyone to know you. Not the way I do.”
Her words, so gentle, so caring, lashed him more painfully than any whip that had ever scarred him. And the sound of his name on her lips—his real name, spoken so tenderly—cut deeper than the hot iron that had branded him. “You don’t know me as well as you think you do, Samantha,” he said roughly. “You don’t know the truth.”
“I know that Clarice said you gave up piracy. That you quit. That’s when you went to the Colonies, isn’t it? You weren’t lying to me about that, were you?”
“No.” He tipped his head back, glared up at the ceiling. “I wasn’t lying.” Hellfire and damnation, he wanted to lie. Wanted to deny, conceal, walk away. Wanted to do anything but tell her what she was forcing him to tell her.
He had never admitted the truth. To anyone. Had never spoken the words aloud.
But he couldn’t lie anymore. Not to her. And there was no point in trying to save himself.
“Then I don’t understand,” she said in that same quiet, gentle, compassionate tone that tore at him. “How can you say—”
“She didn’t tell you why I quit, did she?” he snapped. It was best to get this over with quickly. Once and for all.
“No, she—”
“Of course not. Because Clarice doesn’t know. No one knows.” He turned on his heel so suddenly that he startled her. “You want the truth? All right.”
He made it swift, sudden, final, like a single thrust of a cutlass, severing everything between them.
“I killed a child, Samantha. That’s why I quit and walked away. I killed a child!”
Sam stared at him, so shocked at both what he said and the brutal, blunt way he said it that she couldn’t speak.
“A boy only ten or twelve years old,” he continued harshly. “A Royal Navy cabin boy. I took his life without even thinking.” He took a step toward her, as if inviting her to either strike him in outrage or back away in horror.
She did neither, unable to move or even breathe. Her entire body seemed suddenly made of stone.
“I shot him,” Nicholas went on when she remained still, his voice savage and stark. “I killed him because he stood between me and vengeance. That was all I wanted. All I cared about. I spent so many years seeking vengeance that I wasn’t even human anymore. I was exactly what they’d made me. An animal. So blind to anything but blood and violence that I didn’t even realize it until I—” His voice suddenly choked out. “Until I watched that boy falling to the deck and I could…” He shut his eyes, as if saying the words aloud brought it back too clearly. “I could see myself in his eyes. I could see what I’d become.”
“Oh, Nicholas,” she whispered, wanting to touch him and not daring, hurting inside for what he had done, and for what had been done to him.
“So that’s the truth about me,” he snarled, his eyes piercing her once more. “That’s who you think you’re in love with.”
“Nicholas…dear God…” she whispered. “But h-how…how did it come to that? Why? Why were you seeking vengeance?”
“I was after the men who killed my father,” he said curtly.
“But I thought your father was executed for some terrible crime. I thought—”
“That he was a criminal and I was innocent?” he scoffed. “Wrong again. My father was an innocent man, a good man.” His voice faltered, then picked up again, angrily. “He was betrayed by his friends. By people he trusted.”
Sam kept silent as he spilled out the words, the pain that had been locked inside him for so many years.
“My father was a privateer during the war with Spain,” he explained tightly. “His job was to harass and plunder Spanish ships. He worked for the bloody navy, called the officers his friends. He took all the risks while his raids helped fatten the crown purse and build the Royal Navy fleet. But after the war was over, the crown decided that the privateers had outlived their usefulness. Some of them had crossed the line and turned pirate—so the navy rounded them all up. Decided they were too dangerous to be left roaming the seas. My father was arrested on a trumped-up charge of piracy and…”
“Executed,” she whispered, shutting her own eyes, remembering how Nicholas had called out during his fever, the horrifying images of his father’s hanging.
“Executed,” he confirmed, turning away from her. “The rest of us on the ship were spared—”
“But what were you doing on his ship?” she asked in confusion. “You couldn’t have been much older than—”
“Ten.” He stopped before the hearth, picked up the figurine of the dancing lady from the mantel. “I was ten.” He paused, turning the delicate porcelain in his dark, callused hand. In his present mood, Sam half-expected him to break it, or throw it.
Instead, he set the figurine carefully back in place. And when he spoke again, some of the fury had left his voice, replaced by wistfulness. “My mother died when I was eight. My father took me to live with relatives, but I would have none of it. So I slipped away the very next morning and snuck aboard his ship.” He stared down at the coals in the grate. “By the time Father discovered me, we were well out to sea. He was furious.” The soft sound that escaped Nicholas almost could have been a laugh. “He kept threatening to put me ashore…but he didn’t want to be apart from me any more than I wanted to be apart from him.”
Sam wrapped her arms around her middle, feeling everything inside her knotting with pain. As he spoke of his family, she heard an emotion in his voice that she had never expected to hear from him: love.
The love he felt, especially for his father, shone through his words, clear and strong even after so many years. “So when your father was arrested, you were only a boy,” she said softly, understanding fully for the first time, “and that was why you were sentenced to the prison hulk?”
“Aye, they ‘spared’ me because I was so young.” He rubbed at his chest. “And sent me to the Molloch. That was where I spent the next eight years, until I escaped during the riots. By then, all I cared about was revenge. I wanted to repay the navy for what they had done to me. And to my father.”
“And that’s when you became a pirate.”
“That’s when I became what they had made me,” he corrected. “And I was good at it—”
“Because you were reckless,” she said softly, moving toward him one quiet step at a time, her bare feet soundless on the polished oak floor. “Because you didn’t care about your own life.”
He kept his back to her, and his broad shoulders rose in a shrug, but his breathing was shallow, his body tense, as if he were waiting
for something. “I joined up with one pirate crew after another, and the price on my head went up every year. All I cared about was making as much trouble for the navy as possible. I was a thorn in their side for fourteen years,” he said with satisfaction.
“So all the legends about you being greedy and—”
“Rich and having treasure chests buried on every island in the Caribbean? Bilge invented by the admiralty. I never kept a shilling. What the hell did I care about the future? I didn’t know and didn’t care if I was going to have one.”
She stopped when only a few inches separated them. “But you finally got the vengeance you wanted?”
He started to answer, then stiffened, as if sensing how close she was to him. His entire body went taut. But still he didn’t look at her.
She wanted to reach out to him, to offer the kind of reassurance and comfort he had once offered her, but she stopped herself, unsure whether he would accept her caring.
Her love.
A heartbeat passed. Another.
His breathing and his voice were both sharp when he finally answered her question. “Aye, I got the vengeance I wanted. I don’t even remember parts of that fourteen years. Some of it’s nothing but a blur. All blood and swords and pistols.” He shook his head. “And faces. Sometimes I still see the faces. People I hurt.” His voice broke on the word hurt and he stopped, breathing hard as if he had run a great distance. The words came faster when he continued. “Then on that last night, when I finally had Eldridge in my sights—the man who had betrayed my father—when I finally found what I had wanted for so long…I realized I had lost…”
Yourself, she thought. Everything of value. Everything that mattered. Unable to stop herself this time, she reached out and touched him, placing a trembling hand lightly, gently on his back.
He was so lost in his memories of that night, he didn’t seem to feel her touch. “The ship was on fire. I was cut off. Cornered. I couldn’t reach him. The navy crew were swarming all around me. I was…sweet Jesus, I was so blinded by rage.” His voice started to shake. “I saw what I wanted slipping through my fingers. I turned and fired at the first blue uniform I saw and…it was only a boy. A cabin boy.”
“Nicholas…” She moved closer, slid her arms around him, tried to offer something more, words of comfort, but her own voice broke.
“I watched him fall,” Nicholas whispered. “I was staring right into his eyes, and I watched him fall…” Tremors shook him, so strong they seemed to come from the depths of his muscled body, from his very soul. “And I could hear my mother’s voice, reading to me when I was his age. Even over the sounds of the battle, I could hear her…”
He paused, as if suddenly aware of Sam’s presence, of her hold on him. But instead of stiffening or pulling away this time, he turned toward her, into her embrace, burying his face in her hair as the words slipped out of him.
“Thou shalt not kill,” he whispered brokenly, his powerful arms trembling as they came around her. “Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not kill.”
She pulled him close and held him tightly, tears sliding down her cheeks. She could feel his hurt like a knife inside her, could feel how the guilt tore at him. He had lived with this bottled up inside him for so many years. Had cut himself off from the world, from people, from anything gentle or caring or kind. Condemned himself to an isolated prison of his own making. Not merely because he needed to conceal the truth about his identity.
But because he believed he didn’t deserve to be part of anything good.
“Nicholas,” she whispered, a sob tearing from her throat.
“So now you know the truth,” he said a moment later, his voice still unsteady, though his hold on her was unyielding. “The full truth about who and what I am.”
She only held him tighter. “And your name, the one you used in South Carolina?” she asked, her tears dampening his shirt. “The ‘James’ was for your father, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “His name was James Brogan.”
She closed her eyes, feeling as if she were meeting Nicholas for the first time, realizing that she was perhaps the first person ever to truly know him, to understand him.
He had so much good in him. So much caring and kindness learned during his childhood. It was so deeply a part of him that even years of abuse and violence hadn’t destroyed it.
But he was torn apart by remorse, consumed with pain and guilt over what he’d done during those years—guilt so terrible that he couldn’t forgive himself. Couldn’t set the good, decent, true part of him free.
Not by himself.
She lifted her head, wiped at her tears with one trembling hand. “So you gave up piracy on that night. And ever since, you’ve been living by the name of Nick James, as a planter in South Carolina.”
“Thinking I could leave it all behind,” he said hollowly, unwrapping his arms from around her, letting her go. “Almost thought I’d done it, after six years.”
The longing, the defeat in his voice brought a lump to her throat. “Almost…” She didn’t move away when he released her. She stood her ground, gazing up at him. “But you have been living peacefully all that time. You’ve been trying to live as a law-abiding man. And you succeeded until Foster forced you out of retirement.”
“I can’t blame him for what I am.”
“But what you are now is not what you were all those years ago,” she insisted. “You’re not the same man you were then. I know that even if no one else does. Even if you can’t see it—”
“Samantha—”
“You’ve changed,” she said stubbornly. “The good and honorable side of you, the side that the navy guards on that prison hulk tried to beat out of you, is still there. They failed, Nicholas. They didn’t destroy you. The good…the love,” she amended quietly, “has been right there, all along, hidden deep inside. Waiting for you to reclaim it.”
His eyes gleamed brightly as he gazed down at her, his expression one of astonishment that was very close to awe.
“And now you have,” she whispered, sliding her arms around him again. “You have. You are a good man. You deserve forgiveness. And love.”
His arms enveloped her, and she both heard and felt all the breath leave him. “You can forgive what I’ve done?” he choked out, his hold on her fierce, his voice raw with emotion. “Even knowing the truth?”
“The truth is that you’re not a harmless planter. But you’re not a dangerous pirate, either. You’re a little of both. Innocent and outlaw.” Her voice grew softer with each word. “Like me.”
Reaching up, she cupped his face in her hands, as he had done so many times with her. “The truth is,” she whispered, “that ‘they’ were wrong about you, Nicholas Brogan. And I’m not one of ‘them.’ I can’t condemn you. I know you too well.” She pulled his head down to hers, parting her lips for his kiss. “And I love you too much.”
A rumpled pile of clothes lay forgotten on the floor, skirt, petticoat, breeches, shirt discarded by impatient hands. The sheets felt soft and cool beneath her as Nicholas lowered her to the bed, his touch gentle and strong as his fingers glided along the curves of her body. Her heart pounded with a rhythm as tender and fierce as the kisses they shared, while the lamplight bathed them both in gold.
Balancing his weight on his braced arms, he lifted his mouth from hers, eyes sparkling with what might have been a trick of the light…or dampness. Sam felt her heart unravel as she realized he was still trembling, still overwhelmed by the words she had spoken.
Twining her arms around his neck, she whispered them again. “I love you.” She pulled him down to her, wanting no distance between them, ever again. “I love you, Nicholas Brogan.”
He gazed at her as if he would be content simply to look at her for all eternity. Then his name on her lips became a sigh of desire as his mouth covered hers once more, his hands caressing, claiming. The rough silk of his beard against her jaw, her chin, sent tendrils of fire unfurling through her, the mat of hair on his ch
est creating delicious friction against the sensitive tips of her breasts.
She opened beneath him, welcoming the satiny glide of his tongue against hers as she welcomed the heat and hardness of his body. His weight pressed her down into the mattress, his fingers seeking her feminine heat. She gasped as he parted her intimately, heard his groan of pleasure and need as he discovered the hot rain below.
His mouth left hers to close over the tight pearl of one breast, wringing soft cries from her lips. The heat of his mouth, the wet touch of his tongue made her arch beneath him, offering more of herself. All of herself.
With feather-light brushes of his thumb, he teased the downy triangle between her thighs, the sensitive bud hidden within, until she was writhing beneath him, pleading, whispering helpless words of need. She buried her fingers in his dark hair, drawing him back to her, wanting more of him. All of him.
His arms circled her as if he were embracing life itself, holding on with all his strength. Her lips parted as their mouths met in a kiss so deep it felt infinite, their breath and longing joined, pulses racing. They had been away from one another only a few days and it felt like an eternity. Dear God, she had missed him.
She had ached for this, during too many long, empty hours—for his kiss, his tenderness, for the indescribable feeling of having Nicholas with her, beside her, part of her.
Losing him had shattered her heart, but with every kiss, every touch, every emerald-fired glance, he mended and healed, restored and renewed. He made her heart beat wildly and her soul sweep toward the heavens, with his.
They were both sheened with sweat, shuddering in the grip of passion before he gave in to her, to them both, pressing her back into the sheets. He gathered her beneath him, enfolding her in his strength, his potent power, every muscle taut as he positioned that rigid, male part of him at the damp entrance to her body.
He brushed fevered kisses over her cheeks, her lips, her jaw, then pressed forward in a single thrust that dragged a groan from deep in his chest. She instinctively arched her hips, taking him deeper inside her, moaning at the feel of his heat and hardness becoming part of her in that ancient, mysterious way.
Escape with a Scoundrel (Escape with a Scoundrel Series Book 1) Page 31