“Checkmate,” she said, taking his king with her queen and enjoying his look of complete confusion.
“Devil take it,” he said. “What move was that?”
“The Queen’s Triumph,” Joanna said. “My uncle invented it. There was a great deal of fuss at first and correspondence flying back and forth, but in the end it was agreed that it is quite within the rules.”
Alex was retracing the moves on the board. His gaze rested on her thoughtfully. There was admiration in it. “I should have seen it coming,” he said.
“Indeed you should,” Joanna said. The look in his eyes was making her feel breathless. “Would you like a chance to win back some pride at least?”
“No, thank you.” Alex put his head on one side as he watched her stack the set away. “I can accept when I am bested.”
“Then you are a very unusual man,” Joanna said.
“I hope so.”
The silence washed between them, taut and alive with sudden possibilities.
“I think I shall go up on deck for some fresh air before I retire,” Joanna said abruptly, standing up. She knew what was going to happen between them and she was shocked at how nervous it was making her feel. She had slept with him before, she reminded herself desperately. It had been nice. In fact it had been more than nice. Nice did not do justice to the experience. There really was no need to be afraid…
Alex eased himself from his seat. “An excellent idea,” he said. “I shall join you.”
Panic gripped Joanna tightly. “You cannot retire when I do,” she said. “I shall take at least two hours to get ready for bed and shall require Frazer’s help—”
“It will be more fun to have mine.” Alex held the mess-room door open for her most courteously. “I am sure that anything Frazer can do, I can do better.”
“I require my sheets to be warmed,” Joanna said, feeling even more nervous.
“I can do that,” Alex said promptly.
“With a hot-water bottle,” Joanna corrected. “And someone to unfasten my gown and brush my hair…” She stopped.
Alex spread his hand. “Again, I am most adept.”
“At brushing hair?”
“At helping you out of your clothes,” Alex said. His hand was warm on hers as he guided her up the companionway. “Accept it, Joanna.” His breath brushed over her skin, raising goose bumps in its path. “You are my wife and I want you and if you had not been sick for the whole voyage, I would have been in your bed for the entire time. That is how to pass one’s time on a ship and playing chess be damned.”
The blunt assertion stole Joanna’s breath. “You would have been in my bunk.” Her voice sounded strained, even to her own ears. “That…that box downstairs cannot be dignified by the word bed.”
“The precise description does not matter,” Alex said. “I don’t care what you call it, but I am your husband and I will occupy your cabin. With you.” He paused. “How singular. You have not argued with me yet. Can it be that for once we are in agreement?”
Joanna fidgeted. “You are asking this because…?”
“You are answering a question with a question. And you must be aware of the reason. I am asking it because I have a strong physical attraction to you and a desire to make love to you again.” Alex sounded impatient, Joanna thought. Even, possibly, slightly annoyed. Her own feelings of annoyance prickled in return.
“Well, that is very like you,” she said. “You admit to liking me—”
“No, I admit to finding you very attractive. Mere liking does not cover the situation at all.”
“You admit to finding me attractive and then you make it sound like an insult.” Joanna stamped up the steps to the sloop deck. “For about five minutes whilst we were playing chess I actually felt quite…quite in charity with you, Alex, but that is all gone now!” She threw out a hand in exasperation.
Alex trapped her body between him and the sloop-deck rail. “Give in to it,” he said. “You know you want me, too.” He kissed her, all heat and Arctic cold until the contrast made her head spin. “You are my wife and I want an heir,” he whispered against her lips. “We had an agreement.”
His words were like a shower of cold water over Joanna’s burning skin. In an instant she remembered that Alex’s need for an heir was his sole concern. It was why he had agreed to wed her and the reason that their marriage was built on sand. She and Alex had made a bargain. It was time for her to start paying.
Joanna took a deep breath. Frighteningly, treacherously, she found that she wanted to tell Alex the truth. There had been a fragile truce between them that evening that could never grow to more if it was stunted by lies and deception. She could not make love with him again knowing that she was deliberately misleading him about their chances of conceiving an heir. Already she hated the dishonesty.
“Alex,” she said again, “there is something I must tell you—”
“Darlings!” Lottie swooped down on them out of the shadows like an enormous moth and Joanna heard Alex swear under his breath. A feeling of relief overwhelmed her. Already her pitifully small stock of courage was fading and the moment for truth had passed.
“There really is no privacy on a ship,” Alex said ruefully, releasing her. “Mrs. Cummings—” he bowed abruptly “—what may we do for you?”
“No one can sleep because it is so light,” Lottie said, “and so I decided that we should have a little party instead.” She gestured to a ragtag-and-bobtail group of the crew who were following her carrying a variety of musical instruments. “Mr. Davy tells me the crew are all prodigious musicians.”
“Good gracious,” Joanna said, glancing at Alex. “I had no idea sailors had so many talents.”
Alex laughed. “Purchase’s crew are all former navy men and they are trained to be competent in sewing, carpentry, sail-making, net-making, shoemaking and barbering, as well as proficiency on three musical instruments,” he said. “And they have to be able to haul sledges and navigate by the stars.”
“Goodness,” Joanna murmured, wincing as the impromptu band started to tune up. “I had no notion. I expect that their sewing is a deal neater than mine as well.”
Alex drew her to one side of the deck as the band struck up a jig. Lottie was already dancing with the quartermaster. The crew were laughing and clapping and the music hung on the night air and the lanterns flared and the rum rations were passed around and the spirit burned Joanna’s throat with its hot, sweet power and the night suddenly seemed brighter and more vivid still. Someone snatched her from the circle of Alex’s arms and whirled her away and she spun across the deck in a wild dance, passed from hand to hand, the blue arch of the sky overhead, the cool night breeze on her face, the laughter ringing in her ears. Alex caught her and they twirled back into the dance and he refused Dev’s laughing request to cut in, holding her close so Joanna could feel the beat of his heart thundering against hers. The rum came around again and she took some more and saw Alex shaking his head, but he was smiling. Eventually she was exhausted and Alex spread a rug on the deck in a quiet corner away from the melee and he drew her down to sit beside him. The wood was hard at her back, but Alex’s arm was around her and his body warmed hers. She rested her head on his shoulder and felt the sky whirl overhead.
“I do not imagine it is always like this,” she said dreamily. “In the winter it must be bleak beyond belief.”
“Yes,” Alex said. “One winter that I spent in Spitsbergen was as a very young midshipman on one of Phipps’s expeditions. We became trapped in the ice and we thought the ship would be crushed. We managed to cut away the ice around the ship so that it sat in a pond of water, but there was no way in which we could escape.” He gave a short laugh. “Tempers became very frayed that year.”
“What happened?” Joanna asked. Sitting here on this balmy night within the protection of Alex’s arms it was so difficult to believe that this land could kill as well as delight, even though she knew that David himself had died here.
> “Our senior officers kept us all very, very busy,” Alex said. “We were roused by a bugle call for breakfast and then obliged to run around the ship for two hours on the ice. We measured out a track and marked it with posts and lighted it with lanterns. We called it Rotten Row.”
Joanna laughed. “Did you all survive?”
“The food almost killed us even though the ice did not,” Alex said. “We were lucky to escape with our lives.”
Joanna shivered, as though David’s shadow had fallen between them. Alex did not speak, but she knew that he, too, was thinking of his friend. Joanna snuggled closer to him, trying to banish the ghosts. For a moment he did not respond and there was a stiffness in his body, as though he was resisting the intimacy, but then he sighed and drew her close, his cheek against her hair. The night was getting cooler. She shivered a little.
“Are you cold?” Alex asked.
“No,” Joanna said. “I am afraid.”
“Of the journey?”
“Of what is waiting at the end of it,” Joanna said. “There is so much that is unknown.” She tilted her head so that she could look at him. She did not know why she was confiding in him. Perhaps it was the rum loosening her tongue. He was not a man who invited confidences, she thought. He was too reserved, too well defended to approach. The sun had dipped behind the mountains now and the polar dusk was full of long shadows. It was impossible to see Alex’s expression.
“You have set so much store by finding Nina and giving her a good home,” he said. “It would be strange if you did not have some anxiety now that you are so close.”
“Anxiety!” Joanna said before she could help herself. “I am terrified!”
She thought he was smiling. “There is no shame in being afraid,” he said. “You are venturing into the unknown. You are very brave, Joanna.”
Joanna was so startled that for a moment she was silent. “Do you think so?” she said slowly. “I thought that venturing into the unknown was to sail the seven seas and trek through uninhabited lands and that courage was to shoot dangerous wild beasts.”
Alex laughed. “You mistake. Courage is facing the things that frighten us, the things that we do not want to do. Courage is mastering that fear, not allowing it to dictate to us.” He shifted. “You did not want to have to come here, but you came. You did not let your fear dictate your actions. That is true bravery.”
Joanna shivered at his words. She was feeling anything but brave. Alex took his coat off and placed it about her shoulders. Immediately she felt enclosed, protected in some mysterious way by his presence. The coat smelled of him, of cedar cologne and cold Arctic air and she wanted to draw it close about her even as she made a feeble attempt to give it back.
“Oh, no!” she said as she saw him in the crisp white of his shirtsleeves. “You will literally freeze out here without a jacket!”
“We shall go below shortly,” Alex said. He bent his head to kiss her again and this time the warmth unfurled in her stomach in a slow curl of sensual pleasure. Navy rum rations, she thought hazily, were a wonderful thing. They lulled her fears and smoothed the hard edges from the guilt that stabbed her each time she thought of her deceitful bargain with Alex.
“I am glad that you came with me,” she whispered.
She felt him go very still for a moment and then he rubbed his cheek against her hair. “Truly?” he said. There was an odd note in his voice.
“Truly.” She felt very warm and grateful and happy. “Thank you. You’re prickly,” she added sleepily, irrelevantly, raising a hand experimentally to rub the stubble on his lean cheek. “A gentleman always shaves, no matter the situation.”
She thought she heard him groan at the soft touch of her fingers on his skin.
“Enough,” he said, capturing her hand in his and kissing her fingers. “It is not my style to make love to a woman who is three sheets to the wind, but you do tempt me.”
“I am not so very foxed,” Joanna whispered.
“Then you give me no choice.” He had swept her up in his arms even before she had caught her breath and was carrying her away from the light and the laughter and the noise, down the companionway into the secret darkness below. Joanna’s world rocked with the gentle shift of the ship on the swell. There was hot excitement inside her and Alex’s arms about her were like steel, sure and hard. He placed her gently on her feet outside the cabin and pressed her back against the door, kissing her, his tongue stroking deeply. The pleasure rippled through Joanna and she made a soft sound of need in her throat. Alex held her trapped against the door and kissed her long and lingeringly until they were both gasping for breath.
He flung open the cabin door and they tumbled inside. Joanna looked at the tiny box bunk.
“How do we—” she started to say.
Alex silenced her with a finger against her lips. He slid his hand into her hair, tilting her head up so that he could kiss her throat. Joanna could feel his smile against her skin as his lips grazed the hollow behind her ear. His teeth nipped the tender line of her neck and she squirmed. She wanted to tell him to be careful he didn’t tear the Gothic-style ruffles on her bodice—and God forbid that he rip one of the flounces on the hem of her gown—but the worry was lost in a tide of sensation so sweet and fierce that she shook with it.
Alex pushed the bodice of her gown down to free one of her breasts and held it in his palm, tugging gently on the nipple, rolling her between his finger and thumb until she groaned. In all her twenty-seven years, Joanna thought faintly, she had had no idea that her body could provide her with such exquisite delight. It was a shocking revelation. She was afraid that her legs were going to give way completely.
Alex bent down and slowly circled the nipple with his tongue. Joanna gasped and he drew her into his mouth, biting gently down, sucking and teasing until she moaned. It was such delicious torture. She could feel her muscles jump and quiver, feel a heat in the pit of her stomach that built and burned. And then she felt him lift her until she was sitting on the high edge of the bunk, and he fell to his knees and his hands were beneath her petticoats, hot on her skin through the silk of her drawers. He tugged the ribbon at her waist and Joanna felt the material ease and then he was pulling them down. He pushed up her skirts with all their ruffles and flounces so that they foamed over the white skin of her thighs, leaving her silk stockings with their pretty red ribbons exposed and above that the pale expanse of her naked skin.
It was too much. Joanna’s body felt hot and tight and ready to explode. She grabbed Alex’s shoulders, her fingers digging into him through the material of his shirt, and dragged him to her so she could kiss him again, her mouth slanted against his, her nipples pressed hard and tight against the barrier of his chest. Without breaking the kiss Alex stood and Joanna stretched up, raising herself to keep her mouth beneath his and keep that sweet, demanding contact. The bunk was high and she was straining to maintain the connection between them, bracing her hands behind her on the bed, her muscles taut as she tilted her head back to take Alex’s kiss.
“Don’t move.” His whisper was laced with wickedness. He eased back and Joanna opened her eyes to see that he was looking at her and his gaze was intent and hot. In a flash she knew what she must look like, her hair spread about her bare shoulders, one breast cupped by the neckline of her gown and thrust forward by the position she was in, as though begging for his hands and his mouth on her. She gave a little moan and Alex lowered his head and kissed the underside of her breast, running his tongue up to the nipple and making her catch her breath on a scream. The skin all over her body rose instantly into goose bumps, sensitive to the slightest touch.
She felt Alex’s hands move, heard something give, then felt him pull her forward so that she was sitting on the very edge of the bunk. His fingers were against the softness of her inner thigh, parting her to his touch, drifting over her hip and her stomach, returning to her cleft to torment and tease. She shifted forward instinctively and then he was pressing inside her slic
k heat and she gasped in relief. She strained forward wanting all of him, but he held back. Each gentle sway of the ship against the tide eased him a little deeper inside her then out, until Joanna started to wish they were in the teeth of a gale again. She wanted more than this gentle torment. She wanted all of him. She squirmed, but the position he was holding her in made it impossible to drive him deeper. His hands were on her bare thighs above the stockings, forcing her legs wide apart, and she had to keep herself braced against the bunk in order not to tumble backward. She was shaking all over, the muscles in her stomach tightening and jumping with intolerable need.
“Alex! No, no more!” She almost felt like crying. It was too much. The shimmer of intense desire and the force of such overwhelming emotion threatened to overcome her.
“Please,” she begged. “I cannot bear it.”
Alex leaned forward and kissed her lightly and the movement brought his body more tightly into hers and she whimpered with dazed pleasure. He slid his hands beneath her hips and lifted her, forcing her at last to take all of him, driving in and pulling out, hurling her body into a tender, terrifying climax. She was conquered, mastered, and yet she felt powerful and triumphant and shaken to the core by the strength of the emotion within her. Tears prickled behind her eyelids and she did not understand why. Her body felt soft, satiated. She felt Alex’s hands move over her, undressing her, easing her onto the bunk where he lay curved behind her, his chest against her back.
“We can sleep like this,” he said. His arms were about her. It felt astonishingly comfortable. She had not felt so safe in a very long time.
Chapter 13
THE BUGLE CALL AT SIX O’CLOCK in the morning almost split Alex’s head in two. “Goddamn Purchase,” he muttered under his breath. He rubbed his face. Joanna had been right last night. He was in dire need of a shave.
Alex rolled over. Joanna was lying beside him in a tangle of honey-brown hair, and the bugle call had not even caused her to stir. She felt so warm and soft and smelled so sweet that for the first time in his navy career Alex was tempted to ignore reveille and stay exactly where he was. For a few moments he simply lay watching her. There was something so trusting and vulnerable about Joanna in sleep, so different from the guarded woman who hid beneath that superficial carapace. He kept getting glimpses of a different Joanna, but the more he grasped after them, the more they seemed to slip from his reach. He was not even sure why he wanted to know her better. He had gone into this arrangement asking nothing of her except that she provide him with an heir and make no emotional demands upon him, but it was proving impossible to remain so detached. Last night, he thought, he had not even been thinking about conceiving his heir. Good old-fashioned lust had driven such thoughts from his mind and it had been Joanna he had wanted, not the son she would give him. And yet it was not even as simple as lust. He was committed somehow when he had sworn he would not be. He had thought the extent of his obligation would be no more than a practical matter, ensuring Joanna’s physical safety on the journey, but from the moment he had kissed her the day before, it had turned into something far greater than that.
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