The Least Likely Bride

by Jane Feather

  When she awoke, it was to a pale darkness. And she was not alone in the bed. Something heavy was holding her down into the deep feather mattress. Olivia investigated and found that it was an arm across her waist. And it was another leg that was tangled with her own.

  As she lay, rigid with shock, she could hear her bed-mate’s deep, even breathing. She investigated further. He was as naked as she was.

  “Did I wake you?” the pirate asked sleepily.

  “You’re in my bed!”

  “Actually it’s my bed.”

  Even through the tendrils of sleep, Olivia could hear the laugh in his voice.

  “But I’m sleeping in it,” she objected, wondering why she wasn’t screaming her maidenly outrage. Maybe it was the magic again, but she was utterly aware in every fiber of her body of the powerful physical presence beside her. This was not entrancement, it was reality, and the reality held only fascination.

  “It’s been my bed for three nights … or is it four?” she murmured.

  “This would be the fourth,” he said, his breath rustling against the back of her neck. The arm around her waist moved so that his hand flattened on her belly.

  Olivia’s stomach contracted involuntarily. She tried to push his hand away with as much success as an ant trying to move a mountain. But then, she didn’t seem to be pushing with true conviction. “You didn’t sleep in it before,” she protested.

  “In the opinion of your physician, you were too ill for a bedmate,” he responded solemnly. “The medical opinion has now changed.”

  The hand on her belly remained still and warm and curiously unthreatening. Olivia felt his other hand now on her back, moving up between her shoulder blades, clasping her neck firmly, pushing up into her hair, cupping her scalp. It felt wonderful and strangely familiar, as if sometime he’d touched her in this way before.

  “Let yourself go,” he instructed softly. “Just lie still and feel.”

  He pressed his lips into the groove at the back of her neck, and the hand on her stomach moved upward to cup her breasts. Her nipples hardened as if she’d been dipped in cold water. Olivia felt herself slipping back into the dreamworld of the past days, where her mind was adrift and her body merely a sensate shape floating in feathers.

  Fingers caressed the curve of her hips, danced down her thighs, played in the little hollows behind her knees. She could feel the length of him against her back, and she could picture his body as vividly as if she were facing him. The small nipples so different from her own, like little buttons in the broad expanse of his chest, the indentation of his navel in the concave stomach, the darker line of hair drawing her eye down to his sex.

  But what had once been quiescent was now rampant. Olivia could feel the hard length of his penis pressing into the crease of her thighs. Jubilation … wicked, outrageous, delicious … throbbed in the secret places of her body.

  And then she stiffened, straightening her legs. “I’m not going to marry,” Olivia said. “Never. I’m never going to marry.”

  “A laudable determination,” the pirate murmured into her hair as his flattened hand slid between her thighs. “One that I share.” He caressed the inside of her unban-daged thigh until she relaxed once more, her body softening against him.

  “But we can’t do this if we’re not going to marry,” Olivia protested.

  “Celibacy is not the same as chastity,” Anthony reminded her, touching his tongue to her ear, nibbling her earlobe. “We had this discussion once.”

  “But … but I might c-conceive,” Olivia murmured, wondering why it should be that such considerations seemed to have lost all urgency. “Then we would have to marry.”

  “I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen,” he said, and he was laughing, she could hear it in his voice. “You’re still an innocent despite all your learning. Intellectual experience is no substitute for reality, my flower.”

  Olivia made no reply. She was incapable of reply.

  Anthony turned her onto her back. She saw his face in the pale starlight from the still-open window. He bent to kiss her mouth and she gave a tiny sigh against his lips.

  They were wonderfully pliant lips, soft and yet muscular. His tongue pressed for entrance and her own lips parted. He tasted of wine and cognac and the salt spray from the waves that lifted Wind Dancer and the wind that filled her sails.

  She sucked on his tongue with sudden greed, and he held her face, probing deeper into her mouth. The length of his body was hard against her own softness. She put her hands in his hair. No longer confined in the black ribbon, the locks, gold as guineas, fell to his shoulders. His face was a wedge of light in the moon’s glimmer from the window as she pushed the hair away and in her turn held his face.

  “I am dreaming you,” Olivia said.

  “No, no dream.” And he parted her thighs with his knee.

  Olivia felt her body open, a liquid rush filling her loins with an anticipation of delight. His hands slid beneath her bottom, lifting her. The stab of penetration shocked her for a second and then there was only this wonderful liquid fullness and her body closed around him. She raked her hands through the golden fall of his hair, caught his mouth with her teeth, lifted her hips to meet the steady thrusts of his body.

  “You are miraculous,” Anthony said.

  “You are a dream,” Olivia replied. “But it was a dream I was always going to have.”

  “And I,” he replied. He withdrew to the very edge of her body.

  “Am I supposed to feel like this?” Olivia ran her hands from his buttocks along his hard muscular thighs as he held himself above her. “In the interests of intellectual inquiry?”

  “I believe so.” He moved slowly, burying himself within her again. Then he touched her. The hard little nub that Olivia had never known she possessed. He brushed it. Touched it. Rubbed it. And he moved within her.

  Olivia was no longer Olivia. She dissolved into myriad parts. She was lost in the Milky Way. She thought she cried. She clung to the body that was her only connection to reality. She clung and she was held, tight, warm, safe, until she came to herself.

  Anthony gathered her against him. He had known, known from the first moment she’d been delivered to his waterside doorstep, that Olivia Granville was going to govern his life in some impenetrable, unfathomable fashion.

  Five

  SHE RAN, the deserted corridor stretching ahead of her, impossibly long. She would never get to the end before he caught her. She could hear him behind her, his step almost leisured compared with her own racing feet. He called, softly taunting, “Run, little rabbit, run.” Her breath came in gasps, hurting her chest, her throat was dry with fear and despair. He would catch her as he always did, just by the last window before the massive ironbound door that led into the family rooms of the castle.

  She was almost abreast of the window when the footsteps behind speeded up. He grabbed her around the waist, swinging her into the air. She kicked, her short stockinged legs flailing. He laughed and held her well away from him so that her struggles were as effective as a fly’s in a spider’s web. “You haven’t wished your brother good morning, little rabbit,” he taunted. “Such discourtesy. Anyone would think you weren’t pleased to see me this fine morning.” He set her on the thick stone windowsill that put her on his level. She stared into his hateful face and shook with helpless terror. He held her wrists clipped at her back, and she knew that if she opened her mouth to cry out, he would shove his handkerchief into it as a gag and she would feel as if she were suffocating. “Let’s see what we have here,” he murmured, almost crooning as he pushed his free hand under her skirt….

  Olivia pushed herself upward through the slimy black tendrils of loathsome memory, thrusting herself towards the bright sane sunburst of waking reality. Her eyes flew open. Her heart was racing, her breath coming in labored gasps as if she were still running for her life.

  She sat up, hugging her knees, shivering as the sweat dried on her skin. She was alone in the cabin
but the pillow beside her own still bore the impression of Anthony’s head. Sun poured through the open windows and slowly her panic receded, her heart slowed, her breathing became normal. But she couldn’t shake the horror, or the latent terror of what had been no nightmare but a re-creation of long-buried reality.

  A jug of water stood inside a basin on the marble-topped dresser, and Olivia pushed aside the sheet and stood up. She ached from top to toe as if she’d just lost a wrestling match. The water in the jug was hot. The verbena soap was in the soap dish, with fresh towels folded beside it.

  Olivia poured water into the basin and washed. As she sponged between her legs, she shuddered, knowing now what had unlocked the dreadful memory. After the night’s loving with Anthony, she felt the same stretched soreness that had tormented her after her stepbrother had walked off, whistling, leaving her quivering on the windowsill.

  Every time, it had been the same during that hideous year when Brian Morse had lived at Castle Granville. Every time that he’d hurt her, ravaged her with his hard probing hands, he had whispered with soft yet utterly convincing menace that if she ever told a soul, he would kill her. And then he’d walked off, whistling, leaving her on the windowsill like a discarded doll.

  How old had she been? Eight or nine, she thought. And she’d been so certain he would fulfill his threat that she had simply refused to allow herself to remember what had happened.

  Olivia felt sick. It was an old familiar nausea. She rested her hands on the dresser, waiting for it to pass. Her nakedness troubled her as it had not done before, and she turned from the basin, one hand massaging her throat. She had put her makeshift gown back in the cupboard before she’d gone to bed last night.

  Feverishly she flung open the cupboard door and pulled out the nightshirt. Only when she had it on did she feel safe again. She went to the window and looked out at the sea. It no longer stretched smooth and unbroken; there was land ahead. The humpbacked shape of the Isle of Wight. They were nearly home. Anthony had said that if the wind was fair they should see the island by noon today.

  Olivia turned back from the window, her arms wrapped around her body as if she were cold, although the sun was warm as it fell across the oak floor where she stood barefoot. All the joy seemed to have been leached from her soul. She felt tarnished, violated, somehow unworthy. And it was as old and familiar a feeling as the vile memories that would not now be put back in their box.

  Her eye fell on the chessboard. In an attempt to distract herself from the tormenting tempest of emotion, Olivia examined the problem she hadn’t been able to solve the previous evening. And once again, as so often before, the mental gymnastics soothed her, took her out of herself.

  “Solved it yet?”

  Olivia spun around at Anthony’s light tones. Her heart began to race again and she was unaware that she was staring at him as if at a monster, her face milk white, her eyes big black holes in her ashen countenance.

  “What is it?” He came forward, the smile on his face fading; his voice lost its customary light amusement. “Has something happened?”

  “No,” Olivia said, shaking her head. Her hands lifted as if to ward him off, and she forced them to her sides. “The problem,” she said vaguely. “I was just absorbed.” She turned again to the board but her back prickled as he came up behind her.

  He bent and kissed her nape and she bit back a cry.

  “Olivia, what is it?” He put his hands on her shoulders and she stiffened with revulsion, holding herself rigid as she stared fixedly at the chessboard.

  Maybe if she didn’t move, didn’t speak, he would go away.

  Anthony looked down at her bent head. What could have happened? He’d awoken holding her, her body curled softly against him. He had been filled with the most wonderful sense of completion, his mind drowsily revisiting the wonders of the night. She’d been fast asleep when reluctantly he’d left her … three hours ago …

  So what had happened? He could feel her revulsion, feel the power of her will as she tried to drive him away from her.

  “White rook to bishop three. Black queen’s bishop’s pawn to knight three,” she stated dully without moving the pieces.

  “Yes,” he said, letting his hands fall from her. “Exactly right.” Her relief as he released her was palpable, but she didn’t raise her eyes from the board.

  “How soon before we get home?”

  “We’ll reach our anchorage after dark,” he replied. His hands lifted again to hold her shoulders and once again fell to his sides. “Will you not tell me what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” Olivia said, moving chess pieces at random, still unable to look at him. “Will my clothes be ready, do you think?”

  “Adam was putting the finishing touches a while ago. You slept through breakfast but I came to tell you that we do eat at midday if we’re not otherwise occupied. The table is set on the quarterdeck.”

  The words were warm, reminding her of the boarding of the Doña Elena … of that exhilaration … of what it had led to … of how hungry she had been. But she could summon no answering warmth. “Thank you.”

  Anthony waited a moment, then said, “Will you come, then?”

  “Yes … yes, in a minute.”

  Again he hesitated, and the silence stretched, taut as a lute string. He left the cabin, going on deck with a deep frown on his brow. He felt that somehow he had offended. But that was ridiculous.

  They had been so in tune, body and soul, each complementing the other. He had felt it and he knew she had too. From the first moment she’d fetched up at his doorstep, he’d felt it. And suddenly it was as if that connection had been abruptly severed.

  Was she regretting their loving? Regretting that she was no longer a maid? Was she frightened by the consequences of what had happened and blaming him? It would not be an unusual response, and yet Anthony would have sworn Olivia would not respond in predictable ways.

  He climbed to the quarterdeck and stood behind Jethro, looking up at the sails, then across to the hump of the island. The green of its downs, the creamy white of its cliffs, were now faintly visible. He called an order and men swarmed up the rigging, loosening the sheets of the great white topsail, furling it on the yards as it collapsed.

  Olivia stood on the lower deck watching the operation.

  It was all so smooth and neat, each move clearly ordered. It reminded her of finding the solution to a chess problem or working out a particularly satisfying mathematical formula.

  The table was laid on the quarterdeck as it had been for their supper, and as she climbed the ladder Anthony left his position at the wheel and came over to her. His face was grave, the light in his eye extinguished.

  Olivia sat down at the table. There were boiled eggs in a bowl, wheaten bread and a crock of butter, a jar of honey, a pink ham, a jug of ale. Despite her inner torment she was hungry.

  Anthony sat down opposite her. He tilted his face to the sun and the breeze, closing his eyes briefly.

  “Why did they bring down that sail?” She tried to keep her voice calm, ordinarily interested, as if there was no reason for there to be constraint between them.

  “The topsail is the first sail to be visible from land,” he told her in neutral tones. “I don’t want to draw attention to our approach.” He picked up the jug and leaned forward to fill her tankard. His eyes lifted, met hers, and Olivia turned from the puzzled question in his gaze.

  She took a boiled egg and tapped it on the edge of the table to crack the shell. “Do you want to approach secretly because you’re a pirate or because of the war?” she asked, trying for his own neutral tones.

  Anthony shrugged. “Either or neither.”

  “But you’re for the king,” she insisted. “You talked of my father as the king’s jailer.”

  He regarded her through narrowed eyes. “I have no time for this war. The country has been soaked in blood for close on seven years, brother against brother, father against son. And for what? Th
e dueling ambitions of a king and a Cromwell.” He gave a short, rather ugly laugh. “I’m a pirate, a smuggler, a mercenary. I sell my ship and talents to the highest bidder.”

  His bitter tone and the cynical statement chilled her to the marrow. She said almost desperately, “How am I to go home?” Her fingers shook as she peeled the egg and it slipped to the table. She picked it up again, flushing.

  “What is it?” he asked quietly, and his eyes were once more soft, the bitterness gone from his expression.

  Olivia just shook her head. How could she speak of something that she had held locked inside her for so long? And how to speak of it to the man who had forced the vileness back into her life, now as vivid in memory as it had been in reality during that dreadful year of her childhood?

  “If you don’t wish to draw attention to yourself, how am I to go home?” she repeated, removing the last shard of shell from the egg.

  Anthony carved ham. Hurt warred with anger, and anger won because for as long as he could remember, he had protected himself from the hurt of rejection. If this was the way she wanted it to be, then he wouldn’t fight for her confidence. He had more important things to concern him. Olivia Granville could come and go in his life and leave barely a trace. So, for once he’d been mistaken. His instincts had been awry. As Adam had said, there was always a first time. He would let the little innocent go back to her calm, privileged life. She’d suffer no untoward consequences, he’d made sure of that.

  “May I offer you a slice of ham?” he asked coldly.

  “Thank you.”

  He laid a slice on her plate, then said in the same cool tone, “One of the crew who has family on the island will take you ashore, where you’ll be met and driven home. The story you will tell will not be far from the truth. You lost your footing on the cliff and fell to the underpath. The farmer, Jake Barker, found you, took you back to his cottage, where they tended you. Mistress Barker has some experience of physicking. She has more children than I’ve ever been able to count.”