Her Captive

by Connie Brockway

  He smiled grimly. “This has nothing to do with the law, Pip. This is between you and me. I will never let you go. ”

  In some perverse manner, his words excited her. He was the only man she’d ever met who could control her to any degree. He would not allow her to go too far, not without being there to protect her from her own passionate nature.

  But that time was past. In the future she would only be courted by tractable, tame men. She would learn to guard her tongue and consider her action. In short, she would become a tame hearth tabby rather than the wildcat all of Trecombe had named her.

  “When did you discover who I was and what I was doing here, I wonder?” he asked, recalling her to the present situation. “Was it before we ever kissed? In fact, was it before my arrival? Did you know that first night you claimed to come to be able to say you were the first to set eyes on the Masterson heir? Was it by his design?”

  “Oh, no,” she shook her head and her hair flew about her shoulders in angry denial. “I am not the one adept at subterfuge.”

  “No. You have other talents.” He looked down at the thick bulge in his trousers. She averted her head sharply and he laughed without humor.

  “You know what you are, Philippa?” he asked, prowling up and down like some big, chained cat.

  She didn’t answer.

  He smiled, almost tenderly “You’re the worst kind of cheat. You’re a tease.”

  Her head flew back as if he’d slapped her. “I am not.”

  He braced his arms wide on the edge of the bed and leaned over it. His chest leapt into sharply delineated detail. His stomach corrugated with muscle. His biceps bulged, revealing a tension belied by the throaty purr of his deep voice. “What else do you call a woman who makes promises she does not deliver on?”

  “I promised nothing.”

  “Not in words,” he allowed. “But every touch, every stroke of your tongue, every shift of your hips, made promises. Vows.”

  He might sound as if he’d calmed down, but his eyes tracked her ruthlessly

  She took a step back, determined not to pay any attention to his words ... or his eyes.

  “You don’t scare me.”

  He laughed grimly and straightened. Casually, he wrapped one big hand around the bedpost and slouched against it. “Then you’re not only a tease, you’re a fool. Because right now, darling, I scare me.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this.”

  “But you do. Unless, you want to take a shot at it... ?” He nodded toward the door. She vacillated. “Go on, darlin’, give it your best go. Or is this, like the rest of our relationship, to be hallmarked by your refusal to finish what you start?”

  “Stop talking to me that way!”

  “Make me.” His lips barely moved.

  “I am saving someone I love from you. Even you should be able to understand that. You have no right to be angry with me.”

  “No right?” he mused quietly. “Oh, darling. I beg to differ. You entice me with your body, you play me for a fool, you use my weakness for you to chain me here and then, after arousing me to the point of agony, you manacle me to this cursed bed, unsated, heavy with want, and humiliated beyond endurance.”

  His knuckles turned white from the stranglehold he had on the bedpost but his voice remained soft, even calm, and was all the more frightening for it.

  “Forgive my presumption in arguing with a lady, but damn it, I do, indeed, think I have earned the right to be angry.”

  Chapter Four

  “As for the ‘someone you love,’ ” Ned sneered, “to hell with him. To bloody hell with him. If he were half the man you take him for, he wouldn’t be hiding behind your skirts. And if you were half the woman you pretend to be, you’d let me go finish my business with him.”

  “Yes,” Philippa shot back sarcastically. “That is a fabulous plan. You destroy the only man left on this green earth who means anything to me and I stand back and allow it to happen without so much as a sigh of discontent. What sort of woman would I be then, Ned? Less than half. A dribble of a woman.”

  His expression grew stony, his eyes like jasper shards. “Do not call me by my Christian name.”

  “Why?” she demanded, hands on hips. He’d whispered love words to her, stroked her with lips and hands, and now she was forbidden to use his Christian name? After all they’d done and so nearly done?

  She was angry, furious, but it had always been like this between them, a tinderbox of emotions awaiting ignition. Once she had yearned for that fire, been willing to step into the very heart of conflagration that erupted around them whenever they touched, spoke …did anything. Now, she simply wanted him to burn. She was already a cinder.

  “You never took exception to my use of your name before. Or is it only when a woman is nearly undressed and lying beneath you that she has permission to speak your hallowed name?” she spat out derisively.

  He trembled, the sleek elongated muscles shivering to life beneath the clear pale skin. “No. Yes.”

  She turned away, aching with hurt.

  “Yes,” he continued, “only when you’re beneath me. You.

  “Fool that I am, I don’t want to hear you speak my name with contempt. I don’t want that supplanting the voice in my mind. I want the memory of you panting my name, your throat arched for my kiss, quivering with desire. Desire only I could satisfy. Tell me, Pip, damn you, tell me, who satisfies you now?”

  She blanched. He could not believe that she’d done this with other men. But of course he would. She’d acted the wanton with him and thus, wanton she was and always would be. Still, it wounded her that he thought she would immediately seek to replace him and gratify desires he’d evoked with the first convenient candidate.

  “You are no gentleman,” she said.

  He laughed. “And don’t try to tell me you weren’t damn glad of it. A gentleman couldn’t have done to you what I did, Pip. He wouldn’t have the imagination. Or the skill.”

  He was intolerable. And this conversation was at an end.

  “Fine, Captain Masterson, I won’t call you by your Christian name.”

  But having discovered a way to torment her, he wasn’t going to give it up. He leaned against the post, crossing his legs nonchalantly at the ankles, ignoring the jangle of the chains as he folded his arms over his chest. He might have been a young buck, lounging outside his club in Mayfair. He regarded her with lazy interest. “Not that you weren’t a prize pupil, Pip. You were. But I see you’ve added some new tricks to your repertoire.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  The slight smile on his lips dissolved and when he spoke again his tone was rough and accusatory. “Who taught you to accommodate a man’s body so lushly, to open your mouth so deliciously?”

  How dare he!

  “You!” she shouted furiously. “You and you. If I am expert, you are my tutor. Are you proud of your student? Would you like a further demonstration of what I learned at your hands?”

  For a second something stark appeared on his face. “God. Come, Pip. Let me go and when I return we’ll finish this matter.”

  But she heard only his threat to John. Let this creature with his sculpted body and his savage eyes have her brother? Never. “No!”

  “Coward.”

  “I’m not going to be baited by you.”

  “Pity. Does he really mean that much to you?” He spoke so easily, so conversationally, yet the look in his eyes promised violence and the muscles in his body stood out even more sharply. She only wished that she could ignore his nakedness, his dangerous masculine beauty and coiled strength.

  But John was all the family she had left. “Yes.”

  He regarded her stone-faced, a tic jumping in the side of his throat. “How sweet. And here I’d thought what we—” He broke off. “I could have sworn there was a day that you felt something for me. When did that end?”

  She wheeled around and faced him. “The same day I realized that you’d used me to fin
d the smugglers.”

  “I didn’t.”

  She laughed bitterly. “Excuse me for doubting you, Captain, but to my overly suspicious mind it seems too convenient, this sudden decision of yours to see your inheritance, the hitherto neglected Masterson Manor. And how timely your courtship of me!”

  “Courtship,” he repeated. “Is that what we were doing? It seems an insipid term for what we enjoyed.”

  She flushed. “I am only country-bred gentry. If I prefer to think you were courting me rather than simply seducing me, you must excuse my gross naiveté. I misunderstood.”

  If she pricked his conscience, he gave no sign. “I never seduced you. You’re a virgin, still. Or were.” She did not honor that with a reply and his face turned dusky with anger.

  “So, we were both deceived, Pip,” he continued. “Because I mistook you for a woman who would only give yourself to a man you loved.”

  “Then you were not mistaken,” she replied haughtily, head raised and eyes flashing.

  For some reason she could not divine, her words bled the color from his face, leaving him stricken looking. “So,” he said softly, as if to himself. “So. I see.”

  He looked up, shook his head as if clearing a blow. “Brava, Pip. Just when was it that you realized how important he was to you? Before or after I came?” Philippa hesitated, frustrated by the absurd bent of the conversation. “What does it matter?”

  “It matters to me.”

  He sounded so terrible, and while she wanted him to suffer, she could find no satisfaction in refusing to speak.

  “I have always loved him but ...” She hesitated, seeing Ned raising his chin fractionally, a soldier facing the flog. “But I never appreciated how important he was to me or what I would be willing to do for him until I realized you were planning to send him to rot in some stinking hole.”

  For some reason, her words seemed to relieve him. “You heeded nobility’s call. Of course, you would,” he murmured. “Tell me, my dark angel, if I had been a murdering, thieving coward instead of the man sent to stop him, would you have taken my part, too?”

  She eyed him coldly. “But you aren’t. And you seem to have missed an important part of the picture, Captain. You aren’t my—”

  “I know!” He broke into her statement that John was her brother before she could finish it. But he’d understood. “I’m not.”

  He turned his back to her. “It won’t matter you know,” he said after a moment. “I’ll get him eventually.”

  “Not tonight,” she vowed.

  “What difference does a night or two or even a week make, Pip?” he asked. “He is what he is. He’ll not change.”

  “No!” she said. “No. I’ll convince him to quit this. He listens to me sometimes. We’ll leave here. Maybe go to London. Or somewhere on the continent. He’s not stupid just—”

  “Just vicious. Oh, haven’t you seen that side of him, darling?” He turned back around. “He cut a fifteen-year-old’s finger off to make sure the boy understood the gravity of the pledge he’d been forced to take. Or didn’t he tell you that?”

  Calm swept over her. For a moment, she’d considered letting Ned go to plead with him to stop her brother from the course he’d chosen. She’d almost trusted him to be merciful. He’d always been just.

  Now, she regarded him scornfully. Clearly, he would say anything to get her to release him. But in this instance, he’d misjudged her. He’d lied and she knew it. John was reckless and hotheaded but he was not cruel and nothing Ned Masterson said, no matter how convincingly, could make her believe it.

  “Give me the key, Pip,” he urged her, fatigue creeping into his voice. “He’ll never change. Not even you can change a man like that.”

  “No. Not now. Not any time soon.”

  “For God’s sake, woman, I am trying to save people’s lives.”

  So many lies. But she knew him now. He’d revealed himself with that ridiculous tale about John. He’d lied to her before, he’d lied to her again, and sooner or later, because he was a very, very good liar and she was not, he might even persuade her into believing one of his lies. Because she’d believed them before.

  She backed toward the window. Outside the thunder rolled in on a dark bank of clouds that slowly eclipsed the star-bright night.

  “Pip ...”

  She threw open the window and leaned out, her arms braced on the casement. The rising wind caught her hair and lashed it across her face. She closed her eyes and lifted her face to the elements as spray pelleted her forehead and cheeks and stung her lips. Far below, the dark ribbon of the river churned swift and angry. “A storm’s coming.”

  “Philippa.”

  She heard the sound of the chain clatter against the post and when he called her again, his voice was raised in urgency. “Philippa!”

  She looked down longingly. But, creature of the cliffs and moors that she was, even she could not descend the wall of the manor at night in a storm.

  “Phillipa, don’t! For God’s sake!” Behind her the bed groaned. She turned. He stood at the end of the chain, his pale skin white as frost, bright blood beneath the steel bracelet, his eyes burning like the heart of an emerald, the bed a half foot closer to where she stood.

  She didn’t care. She wouldn’t care. “You always could get ’round me, Ned Masterson. But you’ll not talk me into letting you go. I swear it.”

  Chapter Five

  The wind whipped Philippa’s hair into a gorgon crown of inky black locks. With her face flushed with victory and the chill night air coloring her lips and brightening her eyes, she looked just like she had the night he’d met her nearly a year ago.

  One of Philippa’s friends had bet her that she wouldn’t be the first to meet the lord of Masterson Manor. Philippa had never backed down from a challenge in her life. Within the hour, she’d ridden from town, arriving in a rainstorm at his doorstep. He’d come out of the library and found her standing in a pool of water in the hall, shaking the silver droplets from her black hair, her cloak sodden, her boots mud- spattered but her eyes triumphant and amused.

  She’d taken his breath away. She always had.

  “Philippa. Close the window.” She turned her head and looked down. She glanced back at him, her eyes glowed with dark intensity, her lips parted on a spontaneous smile, heady with the euphoria of daredevilry.

  She was going to try to climb down the facade.

  “No!” Reflexively, he lunged toward her again, hyper-extending his arm behind him, nearly breaking it. She glanced once more with a certain piquant longing at the wind-lashed wall beneath her and with an annoyed twist of her lips, jerked the windows shut.

  He relaxed, aware that he’d nearly given himself away. Again. For an intelligent and intuitive woman, she was ridiculously ignorant where he was concerned. How could she not know he loved her? But she didn’t.

  And he wasn’t about to tell her.

  How could he? She’d use that knowledge to break him just as she was using her knowledge of his desire for her to try to break him. And of late, she’d come damn close.

  She ran untamed and undisciplined, as likely to speak her mind as a bird is to sing, tethered to respectable behavior only by the thinnest of cords and that held by an elderly, half-deaf aunt. She knew nothing of guile, little of inhibitions, less of pretensions. Indeed, as of this night every man and woman for ten miles ’round knew Philippa Jones loathed him. Because she was as passionate in love as she was in enmity. He’d tasted both.

  She had wanted him once. She wanted him still. There was no possible way she could have feigned her reaction to that kiss. But wanting and loving were not the same. Particularly, not in the lexicon of a wild creature like Philippa Jones. Though once he had thought...

  Was it so few months back that she’d desired him and been so breathtakingly obvious in that desire? She’d conveyed it each time they’d met by her dilated eyes, her parted lips, and the veil of delight that cloaked her skin. And if desire hadn’t had t
ime to ripen into love, she was young. He could wait for her heart to awaken.

  But then she’d discovered he’d kept the truth of why he’d come to Trecombe from her. And having been deceived in one matter, she refused to believe he hadn’t deceived her in all others.

  Even now, regardless of the price it had cost him, objectively he knew he’d had no choice. Because as easy to read as she was, as obvious in her affections, he hadn’t dared risk telling her the identity of the man he pursued. Only recently had he discovered it was the man she’d “loved forever,” Hal Minton.

  But she hadn’t come to realize she loved Minton until after she’d discovered Ned’s “treachery.” It was like her to fall in love with someone she considered an outsider. She’d probably built Minton up into some misunderstood folk hero. The truth was that Hal Minton was two-faced, self-serving, and mean-spirited. But he’d been born and bred on the Cornish coast. And Philippa’s loyalties ran deep.

  Damn her, for her unreasoning heart, which mistook loyalty for love. Anger and frustration hummed in his blood, mixing powerfully with the lust she’d awakened. From the first, he’d wanted to conquer his wild Cor­nish lass without breaking her spirit.

  She stood before the window, the storm building on the horizon a dramatic backdrop for her beauty. She raised one slanting brow challengingly. Philippa: his promise and his blight, the most exasperating wench he’d ever been plagued by.

  At that moment, he could have gladly throttled her.

  He’d had about as much of her cold contempt as he was going to take. She’d started this and, by God, she wouldn’t leave this room until it was either ended or she was stepping over his dead body.

  “Now what are you going to do?” he asked.

  She shrugged elaborately. “Wait until the maids come. Then leave. Unless you plan to assault me in front of them?”

  She was deliberately provoking him. She shouldn’t be playing these games with him. Not now. Not after all the other games she’d played with him throughout the last four months.