The heat—the raging mania that had been in his eyes. It was suddenly incredibly clear. For some twist of fate she couldn’t explain, she was his world.
His world. Her.
There was no denying it, nor was there a shadow of doubt that he would die for her.
A truth she could barely begin to process before she had to pull the trigger on the other brute charging at Roe’s back.
She’d never killed a man, never even considered her life would deem it necessary. But there wasn’t the slightest hesitation of her finger on the trigger. Nor regret.
If Roe was going to keep her safe, she was damn well going to keep him from harm as well.
In those seconds, the hatred that she’d harbored for years for Roe had splintered into fine threads—wisps that she could no longer grasp a hold of, no longer clench to her gut to nurture the fury.
What if she had been wrong all these years?
She hadn’t wanted to admit to that possibility, but she couldn’t look at Roe another second without considering the very thing that could help her release every stitch of hostility she had toward him.
This was the moment she needed to know the truth. This was the moment she knew she would hear it.
Had he killed her family?
Roe’s lips pulled tight, disappearing in a thin line for a long second. One. Two. Three.
Her breath held, she couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop the torture of the moment until he opened his mouth.
“I told you I would never say it again.” The words from his lips slow, rough.
Her eyes closed for a long breath. “I need to hear it, Roe.” She opened her eyes and looked at him. “I need to hear it now—in this moment—now that I can listen.”
His dark grey eyes pierced her, his look not veering from her eyes as he shook his head. “I didn’t do it. The torch was put in my hand by their leader when I arrived. And he put a pistol into my back. But no. I never made one step with the torch toward the farm. I wasn’t with them. I never was. I was there for the smuggled barrels we were storing there. That was all.”
“You were only a smuggler?”
“I was.”
“Not a murderer?”
His eyes closed as a pained look crossed his face.
“Not a murderer?” she repeated, her voice lifting in desperation that she hated to hear in her own words.
His dark grey eyes opened to her. “I’ve killed people, Tor. I have.”
Her heart dropped into her gut.
“But never an innocent. Never your family. I was there for the barrels. But I was too late to stop anything. And I was a coward. I didn’t help. I walked away. And I have been living with that fact ever since that day.”
“You aren’t a coward, Roe.”
“I am. It is what I am, no matter what I’ve done since that moment I walked away from the fire. Since that moment I walked away from you on the ground, in flames, writhing in pain. A coward.”
The last words slipped out of his mouth with such raw, guttural helplessness, she blinked hard. He wasn’t saying it for pity, wasn’t saying it in a bid for forgiveness. He was saying it because he believed it.
Believed it to his soul.
This man didn’t kill her family, didn’t send flames onto her skirts, torture into her legs. She knew it now like she knew her own breath.
But to him, his actions that day were just as grievous—more so—because he actually had a living, breathing conscience, unlike those other brutes.
She stepped forward and slipped her fingers along the tear in the upper sleeve of his shirt. Gently, the pads of her fingertips went across the gaping slash in his arm. Blood crusting, the muscles of his upper arm twitched under her touch.
She stared at his arm, at the wound that would have to be sewn shut. The brutality of the moment when he’d stalked toward the blackguard that had held a blade to her neck flashed in her mind. He’d approached and killed the man without hesitation and with ruthless accuracy. Keeping her alive was the most important thing to him—she’d seen it the second she was dragged out of the cabin and he was rushing toward them. His sole mission was to keep her safe.
She was the most important thing. The only thing.
The instant she saw him, she wasn’t scared, no longer fighting to free herself. He had her, and she knew it.
Now he needed to know she had him.
Her fingers moved along the wound on his arm. “Do you remember how I told you who I had been was killed on the day of the fire? How I was never the same? And that I had to kill the person I became after the fire, because if I didn’t, I never could have moved forward?”
He nodded.
She looked up at him, her gaze intent on his steel grey eyes that were avoiding her. “You need to kill this person you think you are, Roe. Because you’re not him.”
“I am what I am, Tor.”
He made the mistake of meeting her look and her eyes locked onto his soul. “You are what I know you to be. And you’re not a coward. You’re the man that just gave up every purpose you have on this ship to keep me safe. The man that just saved me. You’re the man I want. The man I want now.” Her right hand moved up, her fingers curling around the side of his neck, brushing along his dark hair. “The man I want to feel inside of me. Feel in my bones.”
He blinked, stunned for a moment at her words.
Stunned so long she feared she had been imagining all of this. This inexplicable draw she had to him. This fire that crackled between them, embers spinning in a dance between hate and attraction.
She didn’t want to kill him. Not anymore.
She wanted to be with him. His body naked over hers.
An intake of breath shocked him into motion and he descended on her, his lips crashing into her hard, insistent, all the rage and disappointment and fury teasing every emotion between them into a heightened peak.
His hands dove into her hair and he tilted her head to the right, slanting his mouth on hers for better access. With a guttural exhale, her lips parted and he took full advantage, his tongue swiping inward to taste, explore.
Her hands went down, unbuttoning the waistcoat he still had on and tugging up on his white lawn shirt, dragging it off his body. His chest bared to the light, she found scar after scar running across his body. She pulled away from his fingers tangled in her hair and moved around him in a circle, her cold hands sizzling as they spread across his hot skin. Her fingers trailed along the cuts of his muscles, the white jagged lines of scars. Too many to count, too many to even ask about.
She rounded him and stopped in front of his torso, looking up at him. It hit her instantly, the look on his face, in his eyes—silently waiting for revulsion. His scars had changed his body—his spirit—irrevocably and he couldn’t hide from it in that moment. She knew the look, for it was the same reaction she had when someone saw her bare legs.
Her hands lifted to his face, capturing his look. “We are who we are, Roe. And I still want you.”
A tortured glint flashed across his eyes, her words striking so deeply she wasn’t sure if he was going to abandon her then and there.
Silence. Staring at each other. Their blood, the air pounding around them.
This time he picked her up as his mouth crashed onto hers. Picked her up and wrapped her legs about his waist. Even through her skirts and his trousers, she could feel he was already hard and pulsating for her. The thickness of him sliding between her legs, teasing her folds through the clothing and sending wicked shocks deep into her core.
Her legs tightened around him and he kept one hand under her backside as he shifted off the tight-fitting jacket of her habit and then tugged upward at her fine muslin shirt. Down to her chemise and stays, the room spun around her and he set her backside on the edge of the desk, his lips moving ravenous from her mouth to taste her neck.
He worked loose her short stays, yanking them off and then tugging down on her chemise to set her breasts free.
A growl
manifested from deep in his chest, the sound sending tremors into the air between them. “Your beauty shouldn’t exist on this earth, Tor. It’s not fair to the men who will never see this.”
She chuckled as his head dropped in front of her, taking her left breast fully into his mouth, sucking, teasing the nipple until it peaked, pulsated under the attention. The sensation a lightning storm funneling to her core, her legs drew him closer, begging his thick shaft to press hard into her folds.
“Minx.” He pulled up, a grin on his face she’d never seen before. So easy, as if the entire world had just lifted from his shoulders.
“I am what I am.”
He laughed and he pulled back from her legs about his body, setting her feet to the floor as his hands dove down to the top band of her skirt, freeing the buttons. In one quick yank her chemise and skirt disappeared, tossed to the floor. He swept her up, re-wrapping her legs about him, her thighs settling into the indentations of muscles right above his hips. “I want exactly who you are—hell—I’ve wanted this for too damn long, Tor.”
As he kissed her, his fingers went behind him to her boots and he untied them before she knew what he was doing. One boot tugged off, then the next, and his fingers were on the ties of her stockings along her thighs.
She jerked back, grabbing his upper arms. “I leave those on. I always have.”
His left eyebrow lifted. “You leave them on during sex? You’re not naked?”
Heat pinpricked its way up her neck. “No, my husband, he insisted I cover them—for that matter, I would keep my night rail on as well.”
“Was he naked?”
She shook her head. She didn’t want to disparage Apton, but she wasn’t about to lie on the matter, either.
He leaned forward, his forehead touching hers as his right hand lifted, his fingertips drifting along her breasts, swirling along her nipples. “I want you naked, Tor. All of you. There is no part of your body that you need to hide from me, because I want every bit of you. I know the scars. I’ve seen them. And they’re part of you, so I want them as much as I want this breast.” He dipped his head, setting the lightest kiss on her right nipple. “And this one.” He shifted to her left.
His dark grey eyes lifted to her. “Just give me permission.”
Her breath stolen—stolen so fully and completely by the rumble in his voice, the sincerity in his eyes—she could do nothing but nod.
Before she could reconsider permission, he stripped off one of her stockings with the lightest touch, then the other.
And she was naked. Fully and wholly naked before a man for the first time in her life.
“I’m far from a virgin, but I am a virgin to being naked with a man,” she said, awe in her voice at the feel of nothing but air and Roe’s hands drifting across her body.
He chuckled, the smoothest low sound that rang in her ears, searing onto her soul. Roe was always serious, cynical, but in this moment, he was light and free and she wanted to be there with him.
Her right hand clutching tight to the back of his neck for balance, she slipped her left hand along the side of his waist, her thumb cutting inward across the lines of muscles over his abdomen. So hard, every inch of him. As if he’d been forged from steel long ago and had never changed. Scars, cuts, bruises—but they could never change the impenetrable shape of his muscles. Of his strength against the world.
Roe stepped to the desk, setting her backside more fully onto the edge. Whether it could hold her weight or not, she didn’t care, for her legs were clamped so solidly around him.
His trousers. His trousers had to go.
She leaned back slightly, easing the grip of her thighs about him and her fingers went down to the front fall of his trousers, working free the buttons. Diving under the waistband, her palms slid along his skin, curling down his backside as she prodded the fabric to fall.
Downward the dark cloth went, and he was naked in front of her, his member tall and straining and demanding her body react.
It sent sparks flaming to something deep within her—a fire that had always been there, but had never dared to light.
Inside. She needed him inside of her. Salvation to the dying. Air to the drowning.
Her fingers dipped between them, tormenting the smooth skin along his member before she grabbed it fully, stroking.
A rumble deep in his chest—a gutted blasphemy or oath—and his mouth met hers, raw and hungry. His left hand dragged down from her breast, slipping into her folds and he found the crux of her. Swirling, his fingers plied her until her back arched, her body wrenching against his touch.
“In—I need you in me, Roe.”
Her breathless words didn’t finish before he had set the tip of him at her entrance, a bloodstock at the gates.
“We do this, we cannot go back, Tor.”
Her fingers curled around his neck, her nails digging into his skin. His touch was still in her folds, edging her past desperation.
“In.” She choked the word out, a whisper on her tongue.
He rammed into her. Wide and long and filling her like nothing ever had.
He pulled out, then slid in again, reaching further depths, and she shattered. Quick and immediate, her body froze in time, relief flooding her veins in a hot swell that took all sense of time and space and light from her.
And he kept on. In and out. Pulling wave after wave from her body in brutal, stunning surges that wouldn’t free her until the pleasure each one created had twisted every nerve in her body.
A last stroke that swelled, her body yielding to his, and a growl shook his chest, sending vibrations along her core. He pulled out of her, his seed coming hot and warm on her thigh.
Not deep within her, the same as her husband had always insisted. No children.
This part, she knew well, but she was surprised Roe had taken care of it—had the control to take care of it.
Everything he’d done with her since he’d dragged her onto this ship, he’d eased her gently into. Never pushing her for more than she wanted—or could handle. This was no different, and she recognized it for the kindness it was.
His face buried into her shoulder, his nose nuzzled into the thick of her hair. “I don’t want to leave you, but I have to go on deck. I have to set course—we’re setting the sails toward England. And I have to make certain the men are not about to revolt.”
Her fingers curled over his shoulder blades and the ragged bumps of the scars on his back reminded her of all she didn’t know of this man. Everything she probably didn’t want to know. “I don’t want you to leave either, but I understand. And I think it better that I hide in here for a spell. I don’t need to give the dagger eyes of the crew a place to land.”
“Aye, it probably is best for the time being.” He pulled away from her, rummaging through the clothes on the floor and pulling free his trousers and his white linen shirt. He tugged his clothes on, his look centered on her sitting on the desk. “Though I don’t want you believing for a moment the abandoned attack was your fault. It was my decision to pull back.”
A frown crossed her face. “For me.”
His finger went to her lips, silencing her. “And also my idea to attack with you on board—something I never should have done. There was far too much arrogance in that decision.”
Her mouth opened against his finger. “But my presence shouldn’t have stopped you from what you needed to do.”
His finger pressed harder against her lips. “And also my decision to bring you onboard in the first place.”
“But I followed you to—”
“Stop, Tor. This could run circles all the way back to the day we met and I don’t want to go there. Not now.” His steel grey eyes dipped down, ravenous on her naked body. “Not after this. Do you?”
She exhaled a sigh. “Fine. Go. I will stay in here and refrain from flogging myself.”
“Please do.” He leaned past her and grabbed a cloth for washing that was hanging off the side of the chair and then bru
shed it along her thighs, cleaning his seed from her skin. Slow. So slow and tantalizing, she feared she would refuse to let him leave the room.
Her breath quickened and it sent the slightest grin to curl about the edges of his mouth—soft against the hard scruff of whiskers that lent such darkness to his face. He leaned down, the roughness of his chin brushing along her cheek. “For I like your back as it is and I don’t think I can handle sewing your skin closed again.”
“You didn’t care for that?”
“I had to keep my eyes on your wound and imagine you were Weston. If I hadn’t, I would have been retching into your boot.”
She chuckled as he drew away, her vibrating chest not stilling until well after he left and closed the door.
The man was curiosity after curiosity.
She just hoped she wasn’t sliding down a well she couldn’t climb out of.
{ Chapter 11 }
Torrie woke softy, an uncommonly easy entrance into the day.
No nightmare.
No retching.
There was something different about the bed.
When she’d fallen asleep, Roe had been naked and half under her, his heat enveloping her.
He’d brought food back with him to the cabin the night before. No mutiny—at least not on that day. What he’d said to his men to make that so, he refused to tell her.
The dinner on the small table he’d brought in had led to their hands brushing against each other far too many times. And that had led to clothes being discarded. To the bed. To heights her body had never known, the feel of Roe deep inside of her, his hands mastering her body and drawing wave after wave of euphoria from her core.
But now there was emptiness. Cold.
She shifted long onto her left side, blinking the sleep out of her eyes as she pulled the sheet that covered her waist further up her nude body to ward off the chill in the air.
Roe had left the bed but not made it far. He was splayed out long on the floor on his back, his eyes closed and his breathing even and deep. He’d put on trousers but no shirt.
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