When the Perfect Comes (The Deverell Series Book 1)

by Susan Ward

  “If you please, Little One, I can hardly dine while you glower at me. Sit and be a good girl for a change. There is no need to fret and brandish that knife, as though you fear I will attack you. It’s only a butter knife, after all. So, unless you mean to spread me, I suggest you stop pointing it at my face and put it to use with the jam.”

  Blushing, she let the knife fall from her hand to drop with a clank against her plate. “I find your treatment of me intolerable. You can’t expect me to live alone in your cabin, forever.”

  “I am heartened to hear you don’t wish to be alone. If I had known your changed stance on the subject of my company I would never have left you to your own devices for so long. You need to practice at being more direct, Little One.”

  She puffed up like a suddenly inflated balloon. “That is not what I meant.”

  Morgan reached out, fingering one dark curl on her shoulder, and his smile could only be called wicked.

  “Would that it were. Here I have been entertaining a delightful image of you pining in my bed all day. Really, Little One, you do know how to crush a man’s fantasies.”

  Crushed was the last thing Morgan looked. His amusement was a thing that filled the room.

  Slamming her fork down upon her plate in rage, Merry screamed, “Doesn’t it matter to you I have no wish to be here? That I have done, absolutely, nothing to deserve this punishment? That I have a family worried sick over my disappearance?”

  “I find that my conscience can be quite a flexible thing, where you are concerned, Little One. Especially since you are the one determined to stay with me.”

  She sprang furiously from the table and stared down at him like a tiny game hen ready to do battle.

  “You have no conscience or human heart for that matter. What am I to you? Another bauble, to add to your plunder. I am no threat to you. You know that. You keep me as a toy, to pick at in your boredom. You have no interest in me as a woman, if you even have any interest in women at all, for that matter. But I am not a toy. I don’t wish to stay here. I demand that you return me to Falmouth.”

  Morgan leaned back in his chair and his eyes began to sparkle.

  “Oh, Little One, you do like to play with fire, don’t you? Are you imagining, because I have not raped you, you are safe from me because my tendencies go elsewhere than women?” He began to laugh softly. “Is that why you think I left you on the bench all night?”

  Merry’s eyes rounded to their fullest. Instinctively, she took a step back as he stood.

  “If you touch me, I will kill you,” she hissed with another hurried step.

  Laughing, he said, “Oh, Little One. Somehow, I think if I touch you, you’ll learn a thing or two about yourself, and most definitely a thing or two about me.”

  Merry had flattened herself against the wall. He was there, impossible to escape. His handsome face filled the world above her. Unable to fix on anything else, she did not see those long, capable fingers come to her cheek with suave gentleness. The touch of them made her tremble, at once.

  “Please. I did not mean to say that.”

  Tracing the line around her mouth, he said, “Oh, but you did say it, Little One. It would be wrong not to make you aware of how much danger you are in. So, you never let down your guard, unless you wish to. Never forget that I am a man. Aren’t you tired of wondering about this? How it will feel for me to kiss you. I am. Give me your mouth.”

  Merry would have spoken again. In an artful move, Morgan swiftly lifted her face. His lips calmly lowered to hers. With the sweetly measured skill of a well-versed lover, he noted the stiffening shock at first contact. He gentled his lips against her, at once. They were a light, teasing glide, moving in an almost absurd chasteness, that he was surprised he was still capable of managing.

  It had been a long time since he’d had to manage this level of restraint with a woman. But it was necessary to make this tiny creature, as rigid as a statue of Lot’s wife, into one of lushly made body parts slowly relaxing and pressing forward.

  When she brought her body flush against him, on her own, he eased his lips back, just enough, letting his fingers coax around her mouth in expert strokes. Beneath the subtle pressure she was too inexperienced to understand, her lips parted and he reclaimed them.

  He deepened the kiss in careful degrees as his hands moved in comforting patterns through her curls. When she made a small whimper at the intrusion of his tongue, he deepened and gentled the skilled rhythm, until there was no resistance at all.

  The girl made a small, involuntary tremor, but she didn’t pull back. Slowly with his fingers he pushed aside the thin gown, sweeping her with their masseur’s caress. Then, he turned her head from side to side, dragging his lips across hers.

  The ease of her surrender was nearly laughable. Why that should make him feel pity for the girl, Morgan wasn’t sure. He eased back, touching her passion-flushed face with only the tip of a finger.

  “You are right to be afraid,” he said in a slow voice. “Never forget, Little One, that I am a man.”

  He followed the warning with another expert kiss.

  It was not the first time Merry had been kissed, but it was the first time a man had ever kissed her to teach her a lesson. However, the harsh sting of that did nothing to help rally a defense against him.

  This was no chaste kiss of a gentleman. This was not kissing marble. This was a man’s kiss. She was horrified by her body’s response and her inability to fight him. The blood seemed to rise in her skin to meet his touch, and everywhere his fingers worked there was fire. Her muscles had ceased to obey her will. To her alarm, she did nothing to stop the beguiling exploration of his hands over her body.

  Somewhere far back in her mind, the memory of who this man was tugged at her. The horror of that, finally, gave her the strength to fight the pleasure of it.

  Terrified the kiss would not end at a kiss, she acted upon the first inspiration that came to mind. Galvanized by fear and mortification with herself, not thinking about the consequences, she brought up her knee swiftly. She tried to strike him in that area of the anatomy Grandmamma had suggested, in such circumstances. What she earned for her effort was a numbing explosion of pain as she connected with the hard length of Morgan’s thigh.

  Morgan’s face lifted above her at once, and he was grinning. “That, as I am sure you’ve already guessed, was not even close to the right spot, Little One. Would you care for me to show you the right spot? You would have done better to simply ask me to stop.”

  Merry turned red as a turnip. More than a little frightened he would kiss her again, she shouted, “I might have missed, but you had better think again, if you think I will let you...” she broke off, unable to say the word.

  Running her flushed cheek with a fingertip, he said, “There is no need for violence, Little One. I am perfectly able to contain my urges at present.”

  Trembling in fury, Merry screamed, “If you kiss me again, I will kill you.”

  His reaction was not what she expected. He smiled in a softly tender, amused way. Humiliated and unstrung, Merry aimed another kick at him, which only succeeded to make him laugh more. She was trying to work her hands free to slap his face, when his fingers moved to take hold of her shoulders.

  In a flash, she found herself trapped and being carried in his powerful arms across the room. He set her into the lambskin chair, releasing her with the infuriating indulgence of a man patiently dealing with a vexing child.

  “If there is any doubt left in you that I desire women, then I suggest you be in my bed when I return,” he told her, laughing softly, even as he finished his wine. Those black eyes were oddly gentle as he paused at the door and looked at her. “You can go to sleep without fear, Little One. We’re done with kissing for a while. You are a rather unpredictable creature at times. Unpredictable and very safe.”

  Merry watched his towering figure, hating every inhuman inch of him. She picked up his logbook and threw it at Morgan, narrowly missing his head.
He didn’t stop and in a moment the cabin door clicked closed behind him.

  ~~~

  Merry was asleep on the window bench when he returned. Morgan had not expected otherwise. He stood above her, staring down into her young face, feeling a pleasant type of smile surface. He noted her features held the most comical expression in sleep.

  Kissing the girl had been a mistake. It had stripped away the fiction he’d carried that he did not want her in his bed.

  While he was sure it would take little more than a small seduction to have her willingly—very small, he amended—it was quite clear her female emotions were still fresh and untried. If he pushed her along too fast, in this, he would harm her.

  One had to have a gentle, patient hand when dealing with virgins. Especially, with fragile creatures like this girl, if one wanted to have them without emotional scarring and destruction.

  Morgan shook his head, amused and unclear by what motivated him in this. Age? Vanity? Boredom? He had absolutely no reason to keep her.

  Whatever she’d been doing at Grave’s End had nothing to do with him. Five minutes in her company and the striking proof of her innocence had told him that. Why had he decided to keep her, when the logical thing would be to return her to Falmouth?

  He could buy her silence with the same forces that controlled all people, coin or fear. Was it Rensdale, his hatred for the man, the knowledge of that vile character sleeping behind such fashionable elegance and what Rensdale’s pursuit of her would mean to her, in the end? Or was it the girl, her youth, her beauty, her wild spirit and innocence? Those elements she possessed, in such exaggerated abundance, so far removed from his world?

  He understood Merry more than she would ever be able to fathom. His eyes fixed on her, remembering her in his arms. The charming, honest awakening of her young senses, the sweet freshness of guileless passion. The shock of her surprise, and then the panic, the quivering, followed by wild fight.

  He was certain the girl had never been kissed before. Her reaction was, among many things, one of dismay. She did not want to be bothered with men, but more so, because she’d liked being in his arms and had never expected to.

  Gently raised, surrounded by foppish young boys who could not begin to understand tenderness, it was little wonder her opinion of men was so low. He was sure her beauty and spirit worked only against her. It made a man anxious, determined to master her. This girl did not wish to be mastered.

  Push and, of course, the girl would fight. Had even one grasped that fire was often a mask for fragility? That thorns were there to protect the rose? Had he even fully understood that at twenty? Could any man at twenty understand the fragility of a woman’s heart?

  Morgan settled in a chair, staring at the girl, while another image slipped over his mind. How long had it been since he had thought of her? Why did he think of her now? There had been a time when he had never expected to be free of her image.

  The other girl had been less beautiful than this Little One sleeping before him, less wild, less afraid.

  Closing his eyes, he let the time trapped picture fully form.

  Dear Heart, was I as patient and tender with you, as I should have been? Was I all the things you deserved? If you had come to me now, to the man I am today, no longer twenty and wild and too foolish as young men are prone to be, would I have made you happier? Would you be alive with me now?

  Regrets, useless, wasteful things. Like memories, pain, and cruelty, all the things that hurt the living.

  I have not loved another woman since you, dear one. But of course, you know. Spirits, gentle spirits, you hover and know all. Are you the one who sent me this girl? Dear Heart, is this your plotting?

  The boy was more than enough to manage and now there was this girl in his care. This girl, so young, who did not realize he was a man at all. Who stared at him as though he were only a phantom of legend, not human, not flesh. Innocence, untarnished innocence of mind and body. And the boy, the result of innocence lost through brutality and force.

  The sound of her breathing—slow, measured, and calm—pulled him from his memories.

  How peacefully Merry slept, her cheeks turned toward the warmth of the stove and tiny fingers tucked beneath her chin.

  Nudge me, Dear Heart, if I should step too harshly on her. Climbing into his bed, Morgan indulged another look at Merry and laughed softly. No, Dear Heart, better to kick me soundly in the ass.

  ~~~

  Ominous charcoal-gray clouds scudded across the midmorning sky. As soon as the cabin door clicked, Merry sprang from her icy-cold resting place to huddle her shivering limbs beneath the lightly scented warmth of Morgan’s bedding.

  It was a ridiculously large bed, mounted on gimbals to lessen the feel of the seas rolling, plushy deep with pillows and quilts. When she found herself in its center she suffered the sensation of being swallowed by it.

  The night had progressed with frosty fingers that gripped at her through the glass. Only the sounds of Morgan’s slow breathing had held her on the bench, while her eyes fixed on the lambskin chair, knowing it would be an improvement. The days had grown steadily colder, which tallied five by her count. If the weather continued to conspire against her, the bench, wretched now, would prove unbearable.

  No power on earth could force her to suffer the indignity of sharing Morgan’s bed. Not while Morgan was in it. Not even the pleasant warmth, which lingered several hours after his rising.

  Last night, shaking and miserable, she had watched him reclined on pillows, comfortable still above the quilts, reading endlessly. Those black eyes fixed on the book in hand, slowly swirling his wine glass, a gesture she had come to know as a habit. She cursed him for whatever power he had not to be affected by the elements.

  Struggling to maintain her battered dignity, Merry had kept herself from asking for another quilt. Morgan’s indifference to the chill was second only in her loathing, to his indifference of her. Foolish pride, perhaps, but her pride was suffering sorely.

  She had unpleasantly discovered in her character a basic flaw, unknown before. A total intolerance to indifference. While arousing any man’s interest was always the farthest desire in Merry, inexplicitly, she found it unbearably annoying to inspire no interest.

  He had kissed her once, in a way that had made her shamefully burn. Now he treated her as though she were furniture. What little conversation he made was short and civil. If he had a purpose for keeping her, at all, Merry could not begin to make reason of it.

  Whatever else could be said about sharing a room with a man, Merry was certain it couldn’t be said it was the path to understanding that man. Morgan was a creature beyond all comprehension.

  For reasons she couldn’t begin to fathom, the less he seemed to notice her, she strangely found herself more unwillingly compelled to notice him. Studying Morgan had become an obsession to her. She tried to tell herself it was the natural result of her boredom. There were precious few amusements to be found alone in Morgan’s cabin. Perhaps it was the simple fascination of having followed this man’s life in the Times. She knew if she allowed herself to be honest, the cause went much deeper.

  She had come to know well each line in that handsome face, the subtle changes of light in those lustrous black eyes, the moods that they preceded, and the graceful, effortless movement of that goliath body in total mastery of the world around him. Nothing Morgan did ever held the look of insignificance.

  On the days Merry woke early, she would find him still in the cabin pouring over his desk. She could no longer deny the striking figure he made. His ruffled shirt was always opened, just the right amount, over his iron chest, three buttons. His darkly glossy head was without a single hair ever out of place. The candle assisting the pale early sunlight cast shimmers in those intense dark eyes.

  Grudgingly she conceded, he was the most handsome man she had ever seen. She was more fascinated by him than any man she had ever known. Merry found herself watching him more and more, even though she didn’t
wish to. Perhaps it was because he had a way of giving all things dash.

  His garments, while expensive, were of simple lines, their affect anything but simple. He was always fresh faced, fresh groomed in the mornings, though she never seemed to see the process by which he got that way. When he returned from deck with a light dishevelment from the elements he only seemed to look that much the better. Even in sleep, somehow, he managed to maintain the air of supremacy about him.

  His cabin was a place of totally respected isolation and solitude. No one ever dared knock, except Indy, when relaying messages from the deck or seeing to the captain’s continued needs. Other than the boy, only Tom Craven, Morgan’s quartermaster, ever passed through the red oak door. He never came uninvited, always by summons. Though at times, they shared a conversation or a bottle of wine, she would not call what they had a friendship. She had never run across anyone who seemed to have less of a need for people. In truth, Morgan seemed to have no needs at all.

  After five days Merry had studied Morgan, so thoroughly, she knew the meticulous routine of each thing he did. What she didn’t know was a thing about the man.

  ~~~

  Merry came awake with a start not knowing what had stirred her, until she lifted her cheek from the soft, pleasant smelling texture of Morgan’s blankets. She fixed her eyes on grim reality standing across the cabin.

  Morgan.

  He was staring out the windows, his back to her. She realized the soft plopping rhythm from the decks was rain.

  Humiliated to her marrow he had discovered her snug within his sheets, Merry started to scramble from his bed when that low voice stopped her.

  “You don’t have to flee in a fit of youthful panic, Little One. I prefer you where you are at the moment.”

  Blushing, she wondered how he knew she was awake. His eyes never moved to her. She froze like a naughty child having been caught stealing the baker’s pies.

  “If you think my being in your bed gives you any inducement...”

  His black eyes turned to her and began to sparkle.