by Eris Adderly
“So, my dear lady,” he said as though they were at a formal affair and she were not naked in front of two strange men, “you pointed out earlier that you no longer use your father’s name. Where is your husband, then? Shouldn’t he have come along for your protection against scoundrels such as ourselves?”
“Mr Collingwood is dead.” She met his eyes with the words, her features devoid of emotion at her revelation.
Edmund should not have been happy to learn this. The loss of her husband had to have been some time ago, because she hadn’t worn the black of widow’s weeds, or even the grey of half mourning. He schooled his features to neutrality and made himself continue with his designs without the pleased expression that threatened to creep onto his face.
“I’m ever so sorry for your loss, Madam,” he said, sounding about as unapologetic he’d ever heard himself. “Please, allow a pair of gentlemen to ‘console’ you.”
Catching her off guard, he took up her wrist again and hauled her bodily over his lap. She let out a noise of surprise and then hissed as the sunburnt tops of her breasts slid over the material covering his thighs. He brought her arm behind her in a quick movement before reaching over her squirming form to capture its twin and folding her forearms at the small of her back.
“Captain! Please don’t! Please!”
His indignant widow was off balance now, without her arms to use for support, and so her full weight was teetering over his lap, her toes able to touch the floor because of the height of the stool, but only just.
He ran the fingertips of his free hand between her shoulder blades where their surrounding muscles came together in the centre of her back in a most pleasing series of lines. As he trailed them over her pinned arms and brought his touch to rest on the prettily upturned bottom she presented him, he felt her stiffen.
“Come now, Mrs Collingwood,” he said as he smoothed his palm over the perfect cheeks, “you haven’t even properly thanked Mr Till yet, as we discussed.”
Her breath had become shorter and he knew she was not far from panicking again. His next move would not help with her unease, he imagined. Bringing his stroking fingers again to the centre of her body, he slid them down along the cleft of her bottom to find what she’d been so desperate to hide from him with her hand. His face lit up in a rare smile when he did: she was thoroughly damp. He let out an involuntary groan at her arousal, his already straining erection twitching again in response beneath her weight.
When his need tapped against her belly, she broke out again in a bucking struggle, the reality of her predicament spurring her again to resistance, if only to prove to herself she was still a lady. He withdrew his probing fingers and brought his palm down in a crisp slap on her backside. A yelp shot out of her mouth and her head came up. Edmund had her attention.
“Be still for me now,” he said. “Haven’t you learnt your lesson? Now, Mr Till”—he turned his head to his friend, still stroking over the pink mark he’d left on the bare cheek—“Surely there’s something here Mrs Collingwood has to offer that will serve as an adequate repayment for your saving her skin? Come ‘round and take a look for yourself.”
Benjamin circled the table from where he’d remained in relative silence for this entire unlikely scene, and came to stand a pace or so behind the bared secrets of the woman Edmund held over his lap. He took up his toying with her once again, pushing his fingertips across the coveted territory between her thighs for the benefit of his friend. He grinned at his quartermaster.
“Look, now Benjamin,” he said, dropping formalities, “she’s already soaking wet for you. She—”
“No I’m not!” She screeched a protest, trying to crane her neck around to see what was happening behind her. A second swat on her bottom brought another indignant cry.
“Quiet please,” he intoned a reminder, shifting her weight a bit over his thighs.
“When’s the last time you sampled a bit of honey, my friend?” He turned his questions back to the man at his left. “Wouldn’t you at least like a taste?”
“I, err…” Benjamin cleared his throat, his voice thick with lust now that he had a better view of the fleshy banquet before him. “I think I might, Sir.” His friend adjusted the swelling that had stirred to life in his breeches, his eyes fixed on Mrs Collingwood’s pink prize.
“Mr Till, no! Please!” She directed her plea to the man she realised would now be responsible for the majority of her treatment. “You don’t have to do this!”
Perhaps she thought because the quartermaster had shown her mercy at the mast that matters would somehow change in the captain’s stateroom.
“Nonsense, my dear, of course he does.” Edmund brushed off her protests as he continued to manipulate the damp folds between her legs. “How could you possibly resist such a gracious offer of thanks, Mr Till?”
“I, um … I don’t think I can, Captain,” Till admitted defeat in the face of temptation and thumbed his breeches open over the top of his erection. The Quartermaster of The Devil’s Luck pulled at his cock, testing his readiness to bury it inside Mrs Collingwood.
This arrangement was strangely novel for Edmund: he’d shared women with his friend before, any number of times, but usually they both took their pleasure at once. He couldn’t remember ever having held one down for Benjamin to rut upon, but he found the notion to be oddly appealing now that he’d had the occasion to try it first-hand.
He moved his fingers away from her entrance now to allow his friend proper access. Benjamin stepped forward, bringing the head of his shaft against the hot moisture the blonde in his lap was no longer able to protect from their violations.
“Oh no.” She moaned and defeat sounded in her whimpers. “No, no, no …” She knew the point of no return had come and gone for her and he could feel her breathing grow shallow in anticipation of the inevitable. Edmund throbbed with unmet need at her desperation.
Sufficiently lubricated from his sliding against her, Benjamin pushed the first of himself into Mrs Collingwood in a smooth motion, dragging a moan from her throat that sounded to Edmund a good deal more like startled pleasure than protest. This he noted along with the fact that his friend had met with no resistance at all to his initial entry, so wet was their squirming guest. Her objections were loud, but her body spoke otherwise.
Once seated to the hilt between her lovely legs, Benjamin leaned as best he could over the widow, in light of her folded arms at her back and Edmund’s upper body being somewhat in the way, and spoke close to her ear, as though they were the only two in the room.
“Were you under the impression, Mrs. Collingwood,” he said with a subtle push of his hips, and it seemed even an odd note of regret in his voice, “that I was not also a scoundrel?” Edmund heard her draw a shuddering breath at this. “Sorry to disappoint,” his friend went on, placing an incongruous kiss, and then another on the woman’s bare shoulder, “I am, in fact, a deeply flawed man.”
Entirely true of both of us, that. And unusually forthcoming on the quartermaster’s part, he marked as well.
After disabusing her of any inaccurate notions, Benjamin stood straight again and began to work with a slow, deliberate rhythm into the now panting Hannah Collingwood. Edmund smiled to himself at the effect the leisurely strokes were having upon his captive; his friend had always been unreasonably popular with the women who parted their thighs for him. He was not certain whether he might be, of all things, jealous at the moment.
Behave, Edmund, you’ll have your go, even if not tonight, he told himself. He settled for swapping out the hand that pinned her arms to her back, moving his new free palm to cup a warm handful of breast where her chest hung over his leg. Toying with her nipple brought a sharp intake of breath from the impaled female draped over his lap.
Hands gripping her hips now, Benjamin was lost to the slick feminine core surrounding him. He pumped into her with a will, green eyes unfocused, jaw tight with effort, pushing percussive umphs of acceptance out of the bouncing widow
in time with his thrusts. Edmund felt another uncharacteristic boiling of envy rise in him. He realised he wanted to be the first to claim this entrance of hers with the spilling of seed.
“Mrs Collingwood here makes a great deal of noise at the touch of a man, my friend,” he said. “Perhaps you’ve means to fill that mouth of hers and give us some quiet?”
The move was selfish, he admitted, but it proved effective. The quartermaster growled with lust at the suggestion and plunged a final time into the widow’s molten core. Edmund watched in relief as his friend pulled out of the prize he coveted and came around to stand in front of her flushed face.
“Huh?” She shook her head into clarity as she realised the pumping between her legs had stopped. When she opened her eyes to see Benjamin presenting his cock less than a hand’s breath in front of her face she gasped at the implication. That was all the opening Mr Till needed to fill up her startled mouth.
Wide-eyed noises of protest came from her around the man between her lips and she began to wriggle anew in denial of what was happening.
“I would remind you, Madam, of the lessons you’ve recently learnt about biting,’ he said, not wanting the lustful progression of events to be interrupted by another … incident.
Edmund could tell by her shocked sounds she’d never even considered such an act before, let alone been party to it. He was painfully hard now at the thought of her introduction to this most improper of embraces.
Seeing her panic at his invasion, Benjamin was kind enough to move in and out of her throat at a calm, careful pace, his fingers trailing under her chin as he tried her in this new way.
Edmund lost himself in the sight of her lips stretched wide this way. Her inability to fend off the invasion of Mr Till was driving him nearly to madness. He realised with a surge of lust that this change in positions had freed up her glistening sex now, and he dipped his hand back into the pooling moisture there. Wet mewling sounds came from around the cock in her mouth as he pushed two of his fingers inside, testing her heat.
The silk inside her felt extraordinary and he groaned in anticipation of the first time he’d be able to slide something more substantial past her wet barrier. He worked his fingers in and out of her at a casual pace, stopping at intervals to withdraw and massage at her swollen nub before gliding back inside. Her squeals of surprised enjoyment at the passes he made over her most sensitive bit of flesh made him wonder what sort of husband the late Mr Collingwood had been: it was obvious he’d never pleasured his wife this way. Or if he had, he’d been horrible at it.
What other sensations had she never felt, he wondered? Moving his wet fingers away from his first conquest, he drew a digit up along the dividing line at her centre until he came to a new opening he also suspected had no prior knowledge of a lover’s touch.
She let out a muffled gasp at the questing of his fingertip and clenched against what it promised. Benjamin was working in earnest now at her mouth and Edmund could see that she was at the edge of her sanity. He circled the tight entrance with a gentle pressure, easing her body’s tension at this new possible invasion. Already slick from her plentiful moisture, Edmund worked a single fingertip past the tense ring of muscle and into her forbidden heat.
Her body spasmed at this new sensation and he pushed further inside until his knuckles came to rest against her parted cheeks. She bucked against his touch, whether to throw him off or as an involuntary jolt of pleasure he couldn’t tell. Her confused entrance squeezed at him, an involuntary response to the invasion, and he hissed at the thought of what it would be like to have her that way.
“That’s a good girl, Hannah.” He dispensed with the formality of her last name, murmuring down at the sight of her bombarded from either end and moaning from the violations of the two men.
Without any great deal of insertion and withdrawal, Edmund massaged the indecent finger in lazy circles inside the bottom of the helpless creature in his lap. To his delight, she was pushing back against him by her own efforts now, and when he looked up, he could see his friend was near completion.
A wild thrust or two more and Benjamin gritted his teeth in apparent ecstasy, shooting his triumph deep into the throat of the well-used Mrs Collingwood. He stretched her jaws wide with the last of his straining before taking a stumbling pace back from her, the evidence of his climax dripping from her chin onto the deck.
Edmund gave a last thrust into her tight little arse to hear what she sounded like now without a man in her mouth and, pleased with the preview of her gasp of pleasure, he withdrew his hand and clapped it against her cheeks a final time, signalling the end of their play for the evening.
“Very lovely, my dear,” he said, complimenting her while Benjamin tucked himself with shaky hands back into his breeches.
Edmund released her arms, which must have grown quite uncomfortable pinned that whole time to her back, and she didn’t even bother using them to fight him. Instead, she gripped the legs of the stool to steady herself and catch her breath.
He brought his fingers in tender strokes along the back of her neck while she relaxed, and moved to the muscles of her back, and then her thighs.
“An exemplary maiden voyage, don’t you agree?” he said to the room in general. “With thanks of that quality, one can only imagine the favours Mr Till will be leaping to do for you in the future, hmm?”
Till leaned against the table, thoroughly spent, and shot a merry but tired look of gratitude at his oldest friend. The two of them exchanged nods, but Edmund was already deep in plans for his next encounter with the exquisite Hannah Collingwood, and all the other means by which he might attempt to coax such sounds from her proper, well-bred mouth.
* * * *
The abrupt withdrawal of Mr Till from her mouth brought an end to his unthinkable violation of her, and Hannah fought to catch her breath. The captain was not quite finished toying with her, however, and drove a final startled gasp from her lungs with that finger he had lodged where no part of another person should ever be.
With a rude slap at her bottom, Blackburn let go her arms, and they ached terribly at the shoulders as they fell forward again into a more normal position. It took all of her remaining strength to do no more than keep a grip on the tall stool supporting the captain and not go sliding onto the floor, limp and wrung out as a dish rag.
Hannah wanted to voice a complaint at the way he was stroking at her back now, in a mockery of a true soothing gesture, but she hadn’t the wind nor the clarity of mind to form a complete sentence. The two men traded words she couldn’t focus on, some of which they might have even directed at her for all she knew, but in her current state of bewildered exhaustion, there was no making sense of the deep voices.
After the trial of the day, with little food or water and a final challenge to the limits of her endurance, Hannah’s senses were a fog. She felt her body being let down from the captain’s lap, her loose limbs crumpling under her own weight. There was a vague sensation of being lifted into a man’s arms and carried, while her head lolled over the crook of an elbow.
She was lowered onto something soft and felt the surface give under the press of another body settling in next to her. This and her continued nudity struck Hannah somewhere distant as wrong, but there wasn’t the energy to sort notions like that out in her current state.
The quiet stillness now in the cabin and the heavy feel of her tired limbs left only Hannah’s mind agile enough to fuss. And fuss she did. Swirling fragments of thought coalesced as she contemplated the scene of debauchery in which she’d just been a participant. An unwilling one at that. Just as they’d ignored her protests at their first meeting, when the captain’s hands had taken their license and Till had held her in place, the two pirates had cared nothing for her pleas this time, either.
They’d used her body to fulfil their lustful needs, but this was not what truly bothered her. Her eyes searched for one answer behind her closed lids to the question that troubled her most. Why, after she’d b
egged them to stop, had her tongue begun to dance of its own accord over the thick heat of Benjamin Till when he’d claimed her mouth? And why had her hips arched to meet the perverse thrusts of Edmund Blackburn’s fingers into her vulnerable, traitorous body?
* * * *
Chapter Three
Latin and Secrets
“For sudden joys, like griefs, confound at first.”
– Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
* * * *
Hannah struggled to button the dress the captain had given her the next morning as a replacement. She’d resorted to turning the garish thing around backwards to fasten the line of tiny buttons before rotating it back into place again. It was the only awkward solution she could think of without another woman to help her. She daren’t ask for her maid—could she even call the other woman that any more?—as she was almost certain she wouldn’t want to pay the price a request like that would cost. And asking either of the men was an invitation to more trouble.
The vivid cerulean fabric made a far more ostentatious display than the usual subdued shades she preferred. She gave a rueful shake of her head at the ruined cream coloured gown the captain had sliced away from her the day before, rent apart beyond any hope for repair.
When he tossed the new gown her way that morning, Blackburn had pointed out how fortunate she was he’d managed to find any such fine garment at all in the stores of purloined clothing the crew referred to as “slops”. Usually, he’d noted, the crew would already have traded any rich bit of fabric for coin at the nearest port, or cut it into pieces for embellishments to their existing garments.
She was thankful to have her body covered at last, if nothing else. The captain had deposited her spent form in his bed that night, but she’d still had no clothing to speak of. Once she’d regained her senses she’d spent the entire time huddled as far as was possible on the inner edge of the thin mattress. Hannah had tried to avoid him as best she could, what with the wall of his body at her back and the panes of the window that ran the length of the berth in front of her. She was relieved: other than a few strokes of his hand to her back and hip, he’d made no further moves to molest her.