by Eris Adderly
The balm of his kisses at the back of her neck made it difficult for her to speak. He still had her pressed against the edge of the long table and hadn’t yet released her from his embrace.
“Yes, Hannah?”
“It … I …” She fumbled for words in the stillness of the room, “This way was so much better, Edmund, than the first time you …” She didn’t want to make reference to the way she’d been forced, not and spoil the soft way he was touching and holding her just now.
She felt him stiffen at her back and knew he’d taken her meaning even with the damning words unspoken. He turned her by the shoulders then to face him.
“You’re right,” he said, a pinch of regret tightening his eyes. “And I cannot take it back. But you can be sure it will never happen again.”
It was not an apology, and she wasn’t even sure she could count it as a promise, but the remorse in his gaze was enough. Enough for her mind to accept what her body wanted with such obvious heat.
They were kissing again.
Surrender, she rationalised, or at least some measure of it, was far less upsetting than her initial struggles had been. If Hannah allowed worry to melt away, her reward was to find herself bounding through a sunlit meadow of sensory delights, led along first by one man, and then the other.
It was a curious thing, this situation with her and Blackburn and Mr Till. As the days spun into the inevitable weeks, and the ship ploughed toward Nassau, an unspoken agreement seemed to have arisen between the three of them. She might spend an evening in the captain’s arms, but a day or two later she’d find herself entangled again with the quartermaster. Hannah always slept in Edmund’s bed, however, because Till’s massive frame would in no way allow a second person to comfortably spend a night with him in his narrow bunk.
Neither of the two men ever spoke to her about her time with the other. It was as if they knew doing so would somehow break the spell and throw a delicate balance into chaos. Sometimes she did wonder, however, if the pair of them spoke about her when she wasn’t around. Hannah wasn’t sure whether it horrified her that they might, or if, for reasons she couldn’t begin to explain, the idea aroused her to no end.
Whilst her prior experience with lovers was non-existent, Hannah was aware, from books she’d read and gossip overheard, that men were often upset at the prospect of more than one of them pursuing the same woman. She did not understand how Edmund and Benjamin, as she was coming to refer to them in her thoughts, could seem to share her with such ease, and to stay on quite friendly terms with one another, at least as far as she could see. What sort of arrangement or history bound two such disparate men, that there could be such equanimity between them?
And disparate they were, Hannah thought, lying there in Till’s cabin, her skirts hiked over her knees to help her cool off. Somehow, over the course of her lifetime, she’d gained the impression that—at least as far as taking a woman to bed was concerned—men would be similar in the way they went about it. When comparing the captain and his quartermaster, though, she saw that this could not be further from the truth.
Edmund was by far the more aggressive of the two. Not in an angry or violent manner, but in the direct way he sought out contact between them, and led their encounters where he would. He was far more likely to tease and goad her, to speak of things that would make her blush and test the limits of what she would do.
She’d found one of his favourite means of passing their time together was to gather her into his lap and have her read to him from one of his books, while he challenged himself to see how quickly he could distract her from the task. His hands would be everywhere, his teeth and tongue working to make her skip a word or gasp in the middle of a sentence. It seemed he was learning her responses well—she was dropping the book sooner every time.
Yes, even though he would now heed her words if she weren’t ready, the captain always made the first move toward her. He seemed so eager to possess her each time, as though their encounters were sand slipping away through an hour glass, and he would soon lose his chance. Hannah had to admit she enjoyed the urgency with which he swept her up. The thrill of being the object of such fervent desire had its own heady charms.
Benjamin, on the other hand, had proven to be another sort of partner altogether. He preferred to wait until she showed an interest before he would even suggest anything outside of friendly conversation. If they found themselves alone he would always wait for her to reach out for him. Not that Hannah would be long about it. Not with the way he would smile that smile at her. The one that said he knew something about her she didn’t yet know, and he would be oh so very happy to help her suss it out.
When it came to the physical, Till was much more deliberate. The quartermaster took pride in coaxing every new sensation from her, and seemed to take real joy from introducing her to the many ways her body was capable of experiencing pleasure. His every action appeared to be designed as much for her enjoyment as his. The man didn’t take from her: he gave.
He would kiss her for stolen eternities until she was nearly limp with bliss, or take his time at her breasts or the inside of her elbows, his calloused hands ghosting over her flesh in a gentle caress that didn’t seem like it could come from a man of his size. Always looking for ways to delight her, it was Benjamin who’d introduced her to another sort of embrace.
She sat on the edge of his bed, one knee to either side of his waist as he knelt on the floor in front of her. Hannah tilted her head into their lazy kiss and his arms circled her waist.
“I want to taste you, Hannah,” he whispered, his shoulders moving beneath her palms.
“Are you not … doing that … already?” she asked him in the intervals when she came up from his lips for breath.
“Not as thoroughly as I’d like.”
His words puzzled her even as his mouth moved to her throat, her breasts. Till had sampled those portions of her before, though, so she didn’t follow his meaning. It seemed quite unlike his normal pace when he began folding her skirts back to expose her secrets. In the past, he had waited until she was all but begging him before he moved on to the main event. Now he appeared to be leaping for it straight away.
But soon Hannah saw he was up to something else. Kiss after kiss he planted along the insides of her thighs, bending to bring his lips to the silken skin there. He brought a hand up over one of her legs to cup her mound, his thumb brushing over the surface of her folds with only the barest exploratory dip between them. His attention was held by the prize between her legs now, and she somehow felt being stared at this way was perhaps more intimate than any single other act she’d partaken in thus far.
At the very moment Hannah thought she couldn’t feel more exposed or vulnerable, Benjamin leaned in and brought the flat of his tongue up in a long, deliberate rasp through the pink furrow of her sex.
“Mr Till!” she gasped, suddenly formal. Her knees tried to snap together in immediate response to the unexpected caress, but his hands were there, already petting and trying to soothe her out of her upset. “Have you gone mad?”
“No, my lovely Hannah.” He chuckled at her shock, the breadth of his grin dimpling the one side of his face in the way that always melted her from inside out. “But you may soon do.”
Her face was slack with disbelief as Benjamin bent his head again. Using his palms as a gentle wedge to keep her thighs apart, he returned his attention to his original intent. Hannah moved to squeeze her legs closed, in keen awareness of how spread open she was for his inspection, but he only wedged his shoulders in between, trying to quell her anxiety as he went. “Shh, now. Watch.”
Till said he’d wanted to taste her, and taste her he did. Hannah had never felt anything she could compare to this. The sensations produced by a set of fingers upon her, or even a man proper, were completely different from this new liquid caress he painted between her thighs.
Part of her wanted to shut her eyes against the impossible sight of a man’s face pressed agains
t her, brazen and intimate, but curiosity won out, as it frequently did: she was not able to look away. It was odd, the things she noticed at a time like this. The way his gold earrings pressed up against the wall of her thigh. The tiny lines of eager concentration on his forehead as he bent to his task.
There was no focusing on minutia like that for long, however, as her body opened like a budding rose to the skilled lips and tongue of the quartermaster. When he added a questing finger or two to complement the already overwhelming feel of his mouth on her, Hannah’s eyes flew wide and her body clenched in anticipation of where she realised he was about to bring her.
She would not have believed it possible, but as he lapped and stroked at her the tension built to an almost intolerable peak. When she thought she could take no more, Till drew that most sensitive bit of flesh into his mouth and, with a gentle pull, a patient suckling, he brought her right up to the edge and tipped her over it.
If someone were to have told her, prior to her arrival aboard The Devil’s Luck, that a day would come where a man would bend his head between her legs and draw such shocking feelings from her with this mouth, Hannah would have not only slapped the person for making such a lewd suggestion, but would have discredited the idea outright. She’d had no idea that men and women got up to such things. Such remarkable, sinful things …
It strained the limits of belief, sometimes, the extremities of expression found between the two men. The way one of them would take from her and the other would give. Hannah was coming to appreciate the appeal of both styles, she realised.
The one thing they did have in common, which had grown to amuse her to no end, was their mutual obsession with seeing themselves into her mouth. The first time she’d experienced such a thing, the day the captain had held her down for Till, Hannah had assumed the practice was nothing more than something they’d improvised to humiliate her as much as possible. Surely, she thought, this was not a place men had interest in exploring for any other purpose.
She’d had no idea how wrong she’d been. Though both men went about it in their own way, each was as eager as a boy offered a sweet. Edmund preferred to have her on her knees and guide her with a hand in her hair, pushing into her throat so that she sometimes had to pull away in a rush to get her breath. Benjamin was content to lie back and let her toy with him: to try for herself what she would while his noises of pleasure gave her encouragement.
All the same, each appeared to long for it so that she couldn’t help laughing to herself at their desperation. The act soon grew from embarrassing and uncomfortable into a moment she could always take for herself to exert a measure of power over the man in her care. Hannah was a quick study of what each of them liked and began to relish giving it to them, and then withholding it by turns, intoxicated by her newfound share of the control.
It seemed a woman could enjoy these forbidden fruits with just as much enthusiasm as could any man, and this discovery was causing her to reconsider any number of other long-held beliefs. What other illicit joys might she find to her liking?
Yes, if she could only reject, for a time, any thoughts of the inevitable problems she needed to resolve, Hannah Collingwood might finally be able admit she was beginning to feel quite pleasantly at home in her role aboard The Devil’s Luck. Worries about contacting her father and uncle—and hiding from them her scandalous behaviour—could wait until some other day.
* * * *
“It seems our widow is finally coming to accept us now, don’t you think?” Edmund said as he worked at breaking off a final piece of tack.
“That it does, my friend.” Till nodded his agreement while he filled his mug a second time with beer.
The two men picked at the remnants of their meal in the captain’s stateroom after a review of their plans for Nassau, and then Boston.
Supplies awaited the ship at the island port: foodstuffs, line, canvas, water. Various bits of hardware for the carpenter and cooper, paper and the like for the navigator’s records, and for Edmund’s personal use. Some of the crew would be going ashore to find clothing items they couldn’t make themselves, and in general to carouse. All except Graves, whose insubordination that day with Hannah at the mast had cost him the privilege of shore leave.
It did seem backward, at this point, for Edmund to punish the man for bringing Mrs Collingwood aboard in the first place, considering the very pleasant way matters had turned in his favour. The newly willing company of an educated, beautiful woman like the widow had not only livened up what would likely be an otherwise uneventful journey, but had gone a considerable way toward improving the general sombre attitude of the captain.
He would pass Benjamin out on the decks and they would trade knowing grins when the both of them knew that the woman they’d come to share was putting herself back together in one of their cabins or the other.
It was an odd arrangement, and one they never spoke of aloud. The tacit agreement appeared to be that they would not both have her in the same day and, unlike whores they’d passed between them, they didn’t compare their encounters with her. Both of them seemed to know somehow, that discussing her in those terms would make her into an object, and it was becoming more and more difficult to see her in that light.
What would he do when she found out about his agenda with her uncle? Her ignorance could last, at the longest, until their arrival in Boston. Once she became aware of his aims, Edmund knew exactly what would happen to the little castle he was building from sand. There was no possible way she would forgive him once he did what he intended.
Perhaps if she hates her uncle … But then why would she journey thousands of miles to take care of him?
No, better to stow thoughts like these for another day. Which day that would be, he had no idea. How many more sunrises would be an acceptable limit to the time he could spend with his lovely, perfect Hannah? Questions with no answers, the lot of them.
“Edmund?” The bald man stirred him out of his fretting by repeating his name a second time, with more volume.
“Sorry. Sorry. Say that again?”
“I said, how will you go about finding Prometheus once we anchor in Boston? Surely she won’t tell you herself where he is. And what will you do about her?”
As usual, Benjamin gave voice to the thoughts Edmund would prefer to ignore. He didn’t know what to say about the second question yet, but as for how to discover the whereabouts of Bertrand Symes, the part of him that was still Black Edmund, captain of the infamous Devil’s Luck, knew exactly what he would do. He laid out his methods and his oldest friend nodded in reluctance at his plan.
* * * *
Rowland Graves did not forgive, and he most certainly did not forget. That arrogant fool of a captain had taken his prize from him and now he paraded her about the decks the same way his older brother would steal a toy from him as a boy and dangle it over his head, taunting him with it just out of reach.
It was not only that Blackburn had stolen away the woman who all but promised to be the One, but the man had also attempted to humiliate him in front of the crew on his first day aboard the ship.
Who does that arrogant prat think he is? Did he study at Oxford? Does he speak four languages? Useless pirate swine.
The surgeon sneered to himself in contempt as he went about sharpening his implements in the quiet of his dank little cabin. The captain and his pretty words, pretending status when everyone aboard knew he was a bastard all the same. And that inked-up quartermaster of his, always skulking about with a watery green eye for Graves, making sure to impress the fact that he was watching him with a close eye.
The lot of them underestimated him. The coat a decade out of style, the lines on his face, the hair that was no longer full as it was in his youth. These things made them assume he was a common sailor, the same as them. This was an assumption he would make them come to regret, as he’d done with so many others who thought they knew what was in his heart. Graves had waited for years in the past to teach an appropriat
e lesson when people had dared to cross him, and he would have no trouble biding his time now.
And we’ve waited years for this dove to come to us as well, haven’t we, Rowland?
There were times when he had trouble deciding when the voice was his, anymore. As though it mattered. He’d listen, either way.
He stretched a leather strip taut a time or two, testing its strength. It would serve well enough as a gag, he thought.
Blackburn would pay for his insults. Perhaps not this week, and possibly not even this month, but the captain would be made to feel pain, and in no way as obvious as a knife in the back or a cudgel to a knee.
No, Graves knew now, as he watched the man day after day, just how he would hurt the captain most. He saw the touch of the bastard’s hands growing ever gentler at the waist of the widow who belonged to Rowland, the man’s eyes looking at her with increasing fondness when he thought she wouldn’t notice. Here was a man weak. A man blind to what was set right before his nose. He had been such a man himself, at one time.
The surgeon ran the pad of his thumb over the keen edge of his scalpel, the one he’d carried for all these long years, and smiled a cruel smile that only God and the Devil could see. He’d have his promising dove just as he’d wanted her—needed her!—in the first place, and slice out Blackburn’s soft, blind heart in the process with each cut he made into her jerking flesh.
Whoever heard of a pirate in love? Certainly not Rowland Graves. Once again, the people around him required a lesson on their place in the world, and he would be more than happy to give them one.
* * * *
The genuine smile on Brigit’s face was almost as startling to Hannah as the intimate discoveries she’d been making about herself over these past weeks.
As she made her way down into the galley, the scarred face of her former maid grinned back up at her. The expression looked as out of place as the sun would at midnight.