She wanted him; she could not help herself. She arched toward him, her leg muscles stiff and her breath sobbing in her throat. She plucked at his shirt, and with slow reluctance he released her, shifting to draw her nightgown off over her head. She helped him then to divest himself of his own clothing, pausing as she explored in sensual wonder the ready maleness of his body. Then, he caught her to him, molding her to his hard length.
She took his face between her hands, setting her mouth to his in hunger, boldly probing its firm contours with the tip of her tongue, thrusting inside. His grasp tightened, and he rolled with her, bringing her on top of him. He ran his hand down the tapering slimness of her back to her hips, and, twining her legs with his own, spread them wide as he pressed into her.
The scented cloak of her hair fell forward around them. Of her own accord, she moved upon him, wanting, needing that sweet and fervid friction. Pleasure mounted to her brain, intoxicating, overriding thought. He aided her, his hands encouraging, inflaming, taking the strain of her weight from her. She was soaring in an ageless rhythm, transfigured with the delight that sang in her veins. Only her own frailty, her inability to sustain the pace, held her earthbound.
He shifted, turning with her so they lay on their sides, gently, but surely taking from her the responsibility for her pleasure, and his own. He stepped up the pace, making it faster, more vital, so that she clung to him, motionless, suspended in splendor, feeling the dissolving of her being. Love was an ache, a joy, inside her and she buried her face in his neck, whispering his name, parting her lips to taste the salt of his skin.
With a hoarse sound in his throat, he heaved himself up and over, turning her to her back. His penetration was deep and violent. The shock of his thrusts rippled over her in waves of pleasure. Her eyes flew open and she caught his arms, feeling their trembling as she rose to meet him. Together they strove with fevered effort and hoarse, ragged gasps for air. The surface of their skin burned and perspiration made their bodies slippery to the touch.
It burst upon her abruptly, a wondrous thing, a tumult of the senses that defied petty reason, a voluptuous reveling in bodily gratification, bliss, so intense it affected the nerves, being perilously near pain; joy that verged on despair.
With a strangled cry, Lorna went still, her fingers frozen on Ramon’s arms. He gathered himself and plunged deep, pressing her down, holding her as the dark explosion gripped them.
Long moments later, he eased from her and rolled to his side. He drew her against him, freeing the ends of her hair, smoothing back the tangled tresses from her face as her head lay pillowed on his shoulder. His chest rose and fell in a sigh of deep contentment. He was still. Lorna’s hand clenched his side, then relaxed. Like one near unconsciousness, she slept.
It might have been a quarter of an hour or an hour later when she awoke. Ramon lay tense, listening, beside her. After a moment, she heard what had alerted him. It was the scrape of footsteps. They came from the veranda beyond the open French doors, though farther along, back toward the piazza from her room. There was about them a deliberate sound, as if someone was moving slowly, trying not to awaken the people sleeping. With each alternate step, there was the creak of strained shoe leather.
Ramon brushed a hand over her shoulder in reassurance, then with swift grace rolled from the bed. He found his trousers and slipped into them, then pulled on his boots, his head up, listening. He moved to stand between the two French doors, his back to the wall. Turning his head, he pressed back until he could see out the left door.
The footsteps came nearer, almost creeping. Ramon’s tall form merged with the still darkness. The breeze from the sea moved into the room, causing the mosquito netting to sway. It brought with it the night coolness and the soft rustle of the palms in the garden, which sounded a little like falling rain. With wide and burning eyes, Lorna stared at the door opening, her hands clenched on the pillow that had somehow worked its way down beside her.
The slow creak came again, just outside. A shadow moved, looming large, then crossed the threshold into the room. Ramon lunged, grabbing an arm, twisting it behind the man’s back. At the same time, he locked his other arm around the man’s neck. There was a savage grunt and a curse; then, all was still.
“The light,” Ramon said.
Lorna scrambled erect, finding her nightgown, pulling it on without thought of whether it was right side out, snatching at her wrapper as she leaped from the bed and went toward the gas fixture. With fingers that trembled, she found matches and struck one, then removed the globe and held the flame to the burner before turning the key. Only then did she turn toward the two men at the French doors.
“Nate,” she said. There was no surprise in the sound, only angry disgust.
In the glow of the gaslight, his face was contorted with rage, darkened by the blood that suffused his face from the strength of Ramon’s grip on his throat. “Who did you expect, another of your precious blockade captains to bed you? I should have known one had preceded me when I found the rope and saw the outside guard missing.”
The words ended in a shallow wheeze as Ramon’s grip constricted his breathing still further. “Keep a civil tongue in your head, if you care about living,” he advised in harsh tones.
Nathaniel Bacon was forced up onto his toes by Ramon’s hold on him. His arrogance was scarcely troubled, however. “You won’t harm me, not here. You may as well let me go before I decide to make trouble for you.”
“You make trouble for me?” Ramon asked in grim amusement. “I wonder how Her Majesty’s police would feel about a sneak thief creeping up and down the verandas of the Royal Victoria? Don’t you think they might find that a bit suspect?”
“You would have to explain to them why you were here with our dear Lorna. You won’t go to the officials.” Nate raised a hand to the arm clamped at his throat, clawing at it.
“She isn’t our Lorna,” Ramon corrected with deadly softness. “She is mine.”
“And who else’s?”
Nate had lowered his hand. Even as he coughed, choking at the relentless increase of the pressure on his windpipe, his fingers went groping to the pocket of his waistcoat of grass green brocade.
Lorna guessed his purpose before she saw the glint of dark metal. She started forward, crying, “Look out, he has a gun!”
Ramon released his hold, throwing himself to the right even as Lorna’s former father-in-law twisted around, pulling the trigger. The snub-nosed derringer went off with a shattering roar in the nights stillness. A pane of glass fell tinkling to the floor.
Hard on the sound, Ramon cannoned into Nate, driving him backward. They hit the floor with a resounding crash. The derringer flew from Nate’s hand, skidding across the floor. Lorna dashed forward in a flurry of white batiste to scoop it up, then whirled out of the way as the two men wrestled on the floor.
From outside the room came the sound of running feet, the cries of awakened hotel guests. “Douse the light,” Ramon snapped.
As she swung to obey, she saw the tight fury that darkened his face, the vicious strength that went into the blow he drove at Nate in the last rays of the fading light. The older man gave a groan; then all was quiet. She heard the thud plainly as he fell back against the floorboards.
Ramon sprang up, looking, groping for his shirt. He slung it around his neck, then spun back toward Nate. At that moment, a hard knocking began on the corridor door.
“Miss? Miss Forrester? Are you all right?”
Ramon leaned to grasp the lapels of Nate’s jacket, heaving him up and over his shoulder. He swung toward the French doors, then pivoted back. His voice low, he said, “Answer them. Stall as long as you can, but don’t take any chances.”
“What shall I tell them?” she asked in dismay.
“Anything. Make up something, and don’t forget the gunshot.” He leaned to kiss her, a brief, hard salute on her lips parted in protest. Then, he was gone.
“Miss Forrester?” As the call came again, the d
oorknob rattled.
“Yes, just a moment,” she answered. “I … I’m not dressed.”
She could not resist following Ramon to the French doors, watching as he moved like a burdened wraith along the veranda, merging with the darkness. Even as she whirled to go back inside, however, a woman screamed several doors down. A man in a nightshirt to his ankles and a tasseled cap appeared in a doorway. He stared fixedly at the dim movement where Ramon, with Nate on his shoulder, was straddling the railing, beginning his descent on the rope. As the hotel guest started along the veranda toward Ramon, Lorna cried out, running toward him, clutching his arm and babbling hysterically of intruders, prowlers, everything she could bring to mind. From the corner of her eye, she saw Ramon swing out, then disappear from sight.
“Here, I think I saw your intruder just there,” the man said, trying to shake off Lorna’s grasp. “He’s getting away. Hey! You there!”
He was about to set the chase hard on Ramon’s trail. There was only one thing she could do, and, without hesitation, she did it. She gave a low cry and swooned with boneless elegance into the man’s arms. He held her for a stunned moment, his hold slowly tightening; then carefully, as if she were made of finest porcelain, he lowered her to the floor just inside the room from which he had come.
“Well!”
The man’s wife, a woman of large girth made larger by a yoked nightgown with layers of ruffles and sleeves to the wrists, appeared in the doorway. With her fists on ample hips, she stared at Lorna, at her creamy shoulders sweetly curved above the rounded neckline of her nightgown with her wrapper falling open, and at her hair lying in shining splendor across her husband’s arm as he held her.
“She fainted, pet,” he said helplessly.
“Did she indeed?” Lorna, watching the woman through slitted eyes, saw her swell with indignation.
“She had a fright, I think. A man outside her room. Perhaps if you could bring your smelling salts?”
“A few drops of water in the face sometimes suffices,” the woman declared with a voice of grim authority.
Lorna, seeing her step ponderously to the bedside carafe, pour a full glass, and start back, thought from the look of bland malice on the woman’s face that it would be prudent if she revived by herself. Accordingly, she let her lashes flutter upward, sighing artistically. She looked around her, began to raise a hand to her face only to realize she still held the derringer and lowered it hastily again. She assumed an air of delightful confusion, frowned, then gave a realistic shudder, her gaze going to the woman now standing over her.
“Oh, Madam,” she said. “It was a prowler, a murderer at the least, come to smother us in our beds and steal our jewelry. I saw him outside my window and fired my little gun, but he got away.”
“So, that was you who made that infernal racket?” the woman said, her small mouth pinched as if she tasted something sour.
“I saw the man, too, Martha,” her husband said placatingly. “Looked like he was carrying something to me. What did you think, my de — uh, young lady?”
“I couldn’t say, I’m sure. I just closed my eyes and pulled the trigger of my pistol as my dear uncle taught me. I don’t think I even hit him, for there is a great hole in the glass of my door, and I don’t know what the owners of the hotel will say about the damage.” She gave a worried shake of her head, then brightened. “But, perhaps I scared him away, which is the important thing, or so my uncle always says.”
“Yes. Yes, indeed,” the man agreed. “I expect we may all owe the safety of our valuables, if not our lives, to you, young lady.”
“Humph,” his wife said, her gimlet gaze on Lorna’s shoulders where her husband still held her.
By that time, the veranda was filled with people, all talking at the same time. Lorna, shivering now with reaction, was happy to have the man she had accosted take over the task of explaining. Gaining her feet with his solicitous help, she turned from them all to the veranda railing, staring with anxiety as a group of men emerged from the hotel entrance down below and began to look around. Among them was the desk clerk, the night watchman, and, ironically, Lorna’s own guard. They turned, shouting up, wanting to know if anyone had seen which way the prowler had gone. A man, down from where Lorna stood, pointed toward the harbor. Immediately, she contradicted him, declaring that she had seen a definite movement on the carriage drive to the right. She turned to the man in the nightshirt, urging him to corroborate her observation. To her delight, he did so, though she was well aware that he had not so much as looked in that direction since she had latched hold of him. Her only worry was that Ramon, instead of striking for the harbor and the Lorelei, had actually gone in the direction she indicated.
By the next morning, it was plain that he had not, for though police constables had been called in and the streets combed until daylight, no sign of the prowler had been found. They had discovered Nate Bacon lying behind a grogshop on the lower end of Bay Street. He had smelled of cheap whiskey and his pockets were empty; not surprising, considering the locality in which he had been found. The questions put to him by the constables had been met with surly answers. He had no memory of how he had come to be where he was, he said, and did not consider the matter anybody’s business except his own. Making his way to the docks after he was released, he was seen to stare in rage and chagrin at the place where the Lorelei had been tied up the night before.
It was Lorna who saw him. Unable to sleep after the turmoil, she had risen early, put on her clothes, and left the hotel. She had walked for a time but turned, finally, as if drawn, toward the harbor. Seeing Nate, she had hung back out of sight, coming out only after he had stalked away uphill toward the Royal Victoria. She stood for a long while, resting against a piling, gazing out at the blue-hazed North West Channel, where Ramon’s ship had steamed away during the night. She watched the fishing boats going out, followed by clouds of gulls with the light of the rising sun on their wings. The shifting colors of the water were still a wonder as the sun grew stronger, filtering through its clear depths. As the haze on the water cleared, Hog Island loomed sharp and clear, so close a strong swimmer could reach it with little effort. The wind blew the smells of decaying conch shells and ripening fruit down the shoreline to vie with the smell of coffee and baking bread from somewhere nearby. It rustled the palms and sighed through the sea grape trees. Men woke and stretched where they had been sleeping rolled up in the lee of the warehouses. They shouted at each other with rough oaths and obscenities. When one, down the dock from where she stood, unbuttoned his trousers and began to attend to a necessary morning function against the trunk of a palm tree, she turned away. Gaining Bay Street, she swung west, walking aimlessly, leaving behind the hammering and sawing of construction just beginning.
Ramon was gone. He could not have delayed, not and been able to make the run with a chance of success. She had not expected him to stay behind after the fiasco of the night before; still, she felt numb, bereft, as if a part of her had been severed. Would it have been so terrible if he had elected not to make another run? Would it?
What was she going to do? Her lack of control when near Ramon was degrading, a bitter blow to her pride. He had only to touch her, anywhere, and she became weak and pliant in his hands. The sensuality that he brought forth within her was an affront. She did not want to be so aware of her body and its responses, to crave the feel of his under her hands. She wanted peace and order and self-respect. She wanted an end to this peculiar suspended feeling in her life. She wanted stability. She wanted love.
Ramon did not love her. He was obsessed with his need for her body, with the passion she evoked in him. He cared nothing for her as a person, had only contempt for the processes of her mind. It did not matter to him what she felt, whether she was abased by the strength of the desire he aroused in her, or whether his every act of possession drew tighter the bonds of love that held her. But, if he did come to feel some more tender emotion toward her, what then? He had made it plain he had no
place for a woman in his life — other than as a release, a convenience separate from the job that he was doing.
What would happen if she ceased fighting him, if she succumbed to the lure of his desire for her and lived only to be with him when he wanted her? Could she bear such a life in the shadows, or would the sweetness of the times they shared change slowly to the bitterness of shame? She was certain, given her own strong sense of herself as a person of value, that what she feared most would happen but, oh, how tempting it was to throw caution into the sea and take the risk.
“Lorna!”
She turned at the sound of her name and saw Peter hastening after her. His smile was wry as he neared, removing his hat to sketch her a quick bow.
Her mouth curved in gentle mockery. “Looking for me again?”
“Conceited wench,” he said, “Of course I was. I called to you three times just now, but you were so preoccupied you didn’t hear.”
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. She took his arm, and they strolled, leaving the warehouses and shops behind, coming into the open road with only a straggling house or two on the left and the wide expanse of the sparkling turquoise ocean on their right. They spoke of the captains who had left on a second run, and of the engine repairs that had kept him from being among them — thus leaving him able, to his delight, to serve as her escort. He mentioned the opera, and so full had been the time since she had said goodbye to him the night before that it was a moment before she could recall it and enter into a discussion of its merits. In a few minutes, they came to a clump of sea grape trees growing beside the sea wall that had been erected just there. He stopped and dusted the top of the wall with his handkerchief before seating her and dropping down beside her.
Peter hesitated, as if choosing his words with care. “I understand there was some disturbance at the hotel last night.”
“You are a master of understatement. Your British heritage, no doubt,” she said, sending him a smiling glance. “The disturbance was a prowler. I shot at him.”
Love and Adventure Collection - Part 2 Page 34