by Eris Adderly
Not only were her eyes wide, but it seemed every part of her was held wide open as well. As Edmund worked his way up into her impossibly tight, protesting channel, Hannah knew an inescapable fullness. Every muscle between her legs stretched taut around the men and she felt her body filled to the brim in such a staggering, intimate way as she never could have imagined.
Hannah was whimpering and panting by the time he’d wedged himself all the way in, and the three of them held themselves motionless for a time as she attempted to master the pace of her breathing and relax to accept the entirety of the invasion her two lovers had orchestrated with such care and skill.
Edmund flexed within her—she didn’t think he could help it—and the pulsing sent a jolt of new sensations coursing back and forth between her thoroughly stuffed passages. If even one of the two men were to move, she would surely go mad.
And so she did.
Benjamin was the first to resume motion, but he did so at a careful pace, his eyes reading her for signs he was pushing her too far.
Her world shattered.
Edmund followed suit, drawing back with a startling outward pull, only to slide back in, opening her again to the slick steel of his flesh. The cry that he pushed out of her then rose at the end, as if it were a question.
Whatever it was she’d asked, in whatever unknown universal tongue she’d asked it, the men gave her their replies as their sinful, exquisite dance began.
It was beyond all reason, this thing they did, and more so the way it felt.
Her gates were flung open, and thick, competing manhood thronged to overrun her defences at either door. The pumping, the stretching, the damp slap and rub of working bodies. There was no escape from this unholy union and Hannah didn’t want one.
The staggered timing of their three-part rhythm had been such that, whilst before the two men were thrusting into her in tandem, they now were alternating strokes in and out. This inconceivable new sensation launched her from the ledge of sanity and her orgasm burst from her like cannon fire, her walls rippling around her lovers as she rode unstoppable, hysterical waves of ecstasy.
The scene devolved into madness.
Edmund, Hannah, Benjamin. The Quartermaster, the Widow, and the Captain, joined in a chaos of divine, carnal achievement. Unimaginable glee arced like lightning back and forth and forth and back between the three of them.
This is Heaven. Hell. Heaven.
Hannah came and came and came, her primal noises hurled high and wide to join with those of the men. Her hearing had gone fuzzy and her vision blurred, and any sort of limits her mind could have imposed she’d long ago stepped across and obliterated behind her.
There were strained male cries of exertion from behind her and a molten, liquid pulsing drove deep within her bottom as Edmund found his ultimate release. Mere seconds later Benjamin joined them from below, his eyes shut tight against the onslaught of his climax, his cock buried to the hilt as he filled her with his hot seed.
The fluid evidence of their fulfilment leaked out around the firm, but sated men inside her and Hannah was triumphant.
Tomorrow might bring all manner of misfortune upon her, but this was Today. And today, in the arms and bed of her Edmund, her Benjamin, Hannah had tasted eternity. She needed nothing more.
* * * *
Chapter Six
A Pointless Bargain
“No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for, being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned…. A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company.”
— Samuel Johnson
* * * *
“What’s the meaning of this, Father? I barely drop anchor before men come running to tell me of fires? A rebellion? What has happened?”
Edmund couldn’t believe the state of his father’s study. Papers strewn around the man’s usually neat desk, servants hurrying in and out, taking and bringing messages as Nathaniel Blackburn issued commands from under an increasingly furrowed brow and loosened cravat.
The young captain of The Devil’s Luck couldn’t put a name to the force that compelled him to return from time to time to his father’s estate, but today’s homecoming had found the plantation in a churning uproar.
“What has happened, my wayward son,” his father said with an impatient sneer, stabbing a bony finger into an open ledger, “is the plantation has been half burned to the ground in the eruption of a bloody slave rebellion! This season’s cane crop is destroyed, and the stores as well.”
The senior Blackburn ran a distracted hand through his hair, the dishevelled strands unbound, long and straight like Edmund’s, but almost completely silver. He’d never seen the man in such disarray; he was always the picture of icy calm condescension. The second attribute, at least, he retained. Only a massive loss of profit—a loss like the one Edmund was beginning to realise had taken place—could put the old man in such a temper.
“A rebellion? How did this come about?” Edmund was incredulous. His father always had everything so firmly under control.
“Well, perhaps if you weren’t out ‘making a name for yourself’ in Nassau and Tortuga with that useless ‘friend’ of yours, you would know the answer to that question.” The man’s voice dripped with venom, looking for any nearby target to strike with his anger.
A male servant scurried in and made a quick bow to the pacing head of the estate.
“Sir,” he began, cringing a bit, hat in hand, eyes down, “I’ve had them check with the Harbourmaster. No one has seen or heard anything of Symes, not last night, nor today.”
“Bah!” His father waved a disgusted hand at the man. “And we’ve lost everything from his rooms at the monastery? No papers? Books?”
“It’s gone, Sir. Everything burned to ash. The monks know nothing, at least not as they’ll say. And the dogs have found nothing, Sir.”
The elder Blackburn made a noise of irritation and dismissed the harried servant with another wave of his hand. “Be around if I need you.”
The nervous man dipped a quick bow, backing out of the room. “Sir.”
The interchange between his father and the servant had confused Edmund even further.
“Symes? Isn’t he the linguist I would always see having tea down at Ivey’s book shop? What’s he to do with all this?”
“Oh, what indeed!” the old man spat. He drained the last bit of whiskey from a glass Edmund hadn’t noticed on the desk and thumped it back down to punctuate his frustration. Another irregularity, Edmund noted—his father tended to abstain from drink.
Nathaniel Blackburn began to move about the room, his hands clenched behind his back in a way that said he was making a titanic effort to check his temper. The afternoon light filtering in from the tall windows cast the man’s already severe features in stark contrast as he spoke.
“Our linguist, it seems, decided to make it his business to ‘educate’ some of my slaves. Filling their heads with foolish notions about ‘all of God’s children being equal,’ like some bloody Quaker.”
So there was the whole of it. Edmund knew where this line of explanation headed, but waited in silence for the man to continue. He knew better from his childhood memories than to interrupt.
“Well, of course one thing leads to another. Ideas are dangerous, you know. Soon we have slaves thinking they shouldn’t have to mind their place. Then we have last night.” His father finished another circuit of the room and looked squarely down at Edmund where he’d now taken a chair. “They raise a mob, start some fires. What did they think to accomplish?”
Edmund shook his head partly in disbelief and partly from a lack of anything useful to say. His father continued.
“Oh, we have them under control now, worry you not. Not soon enough to save the yield, of course.” The man continued his pacing. “I’ve had men all over the port after that little tick of a man, but Mr Symes, it seems, knew exactly where the blame would fall. As you’ve just
heard, he’s nowhere to be found. I know he’s made it off the island somehow, that worm. Who tells slaves they might hope to be the equals of their masters?”
The extent of his father’s ire was unprecedented. Edmund had expected the regular stiff dinner and impersonal exchange of empty greetings and inquiries that were the usual accompaniment to his infrequent pilgrimages home. What he’d returned to instead was a disaster. The old man was completely unguarded in his rage, something Edmund had only seen on a horrible few occasions in his youth.
“Is there something you wish me to do, Father?” He regretted the question as soon as it left his lips. It rarely did him good to attempt to involve himself in the man’s affairs any more. But somehow, it unnerved him to see the immovable rock of a man in such a state. If Nathaniel Blackburn couldn’t keep himself under control, what hope was there for anyone else?
“Yes!” His bellowing response startled Edmund nearly out of his chair. “You can find me Symes! That coward will answer for the trouble he’s caused. It isn’t just the loss of the profits. Once these ideas take root, they’re nearly impossible to carve out. We’ll be fighting down rebellions for years now.”
“But, Father …” He didn’t know how he could possibly do what the man asked.
“Will you sail the seas until they eat you alive?” His father was raging now. “Is that how you will go to your grave? Don’t think I don’t know what they call you, Black Edmund!” He snorted in disgust. “Is that what you want for yourself? After the upbringing I gave you, son of a whore, is that how you’ll repay me?”
“You’ve made it quite clear I’m not exactly welcome back under your roof!” Edmund could no longer contain himself.
“So I have! And so you’ve earned. Well this is your last chance, you ungrateful little bastard. Will that please you? A last opportunity to earn your place? Find me this … this bloody Prometheus, leave that cursed ship and crew of yours behind, and you will have the estate once I drop off the perch. Now get out of my sight before I see I’ve made a pointless bargain.”
* * * *
The hateful words were said ten years ago, when Edmund was only twenty-six, but they still burned fresh in his memory. Nathaniel Blackburn held the lowest opinion of his only son, but the man had offered him at long last the barest sliver of hope. He didn’t want to think about what Benjamin had suggested: that the old man might not honour his promise. Not now, with Prometheus so unexpectedly in his grasp.
Is it what you want, Edmund?
The thought gnawed at him, making holes in his long-held, careful plans. Did he want to live and die at sea? Did the old man’s acceptance even matter any more?
He’d fought to build this crew, this life of his own for so many years. And he did have a measure of pride in his reputation, despite his father’s absolute disapproval. It was something to have your name known in every port, even if it was as a pirate.
Edmund had all but given up on ever finding Bertrand Symes. Prometheus, his father had called him, after the Titan who stole the fire from the gods of antiquity and gave it to humanity. He rolled his eyes at the dramatic parallel, shifting in his chair in the darkness of his stateroom.
The stub of a candle had long ago burned down to nothing, and he was alone for the night. Hannah was with Benjamin, and perhaps it was better that way, considering his mood.
It had only been three years ago, on another of his returns to Kingston, when the idea had struck Edmund to pay a visit to Nicholas Ivey, the bookseller who was nearly ancient, even then.
He’d remembered one evening as his idle steps had taken him past the darkened store window—the same window he’d first seen Benjamin through as a boy—that Symes was frequently a guest of Ivey’s behind the counter. The two men had been friends, as far as Edmund could see. Perhaps Ivey knew something about the elusive linguist?
He’d learned more than he’d expected out of the frail old man. It hadn’t taken much in the way of looming and threats for the bookseller to hand over a small bundle of Symes’s possessions, which he’d claimed the fleeing rat had left within his care the night of the fire.
The bulk of the find had consisted of useless books, Biblical transcripts, pressed flowers and leaves. All these Edmund had discarded after a number of years as he judged them useless. The only thing he’d kept had been a handful of what had appeared to be letters, in Latin, which he couldn’t read.
Ivey had insisted Symes had never returned to Kingston and had never contacted him, which Edmund happened to believe. The point of a dagger tended to make people unfailingly honest.
He’d worried over the stack of letters at first, but over the years he’d put them aside, their presence forgotten as other matters pressed him and the excitement of the initial find had waned.
But when he’d discovered Hannah Collingwood could read Latin, and she’d then recognised the writing as her uncle’s own, his entire crusade had come crashing back to the forefront of his priorities.
There was a location now, which is more than he’d ever had before. Boston. Edmund knew the port would be the last stop for whatever this thing was that brewed between him and the widow. He had a mere handful of weeks left to him to make the most of it. To drink her in.
He sighed into the empty cabin, the gentle roll of the ship tumbling his thoughts as he worried an absent finger over a flaw in the grain of the table’s wooden surface.
The day she’d given herself over to him and Benjamin … allowed herself to admit what it was she wanted … He thought he’d seen her true hidden self before that day, and he’d been wrong. She’d been unrestrained. Free. Naked, and in more than just the flesh. Edmund had seen a Hannah who made him … well, made him many things, most of which were too dangerous for a man to allow himself to think about. Uncomfortable, was one of them, though. Uncomfortable with the idea that her presence was changing him in small, but not inconsequential ways.
What was he to do with her?
There seemed to be only two options, if his plans for Boston were to go as he imagined. He could leave her there, or keep her on the ship.
Neither of those two alternatives was satisfying. The obvious problem with leaving her there was that he would no longer have her. Neither would Benjamin. Never again. Hardly a desirable outcome.
But to attempt to keep her on the ship would be a disaster in its own right. Once he’d laid hands on Symes, Hannah’s good will would be lost to him entirely. How else could he expect her to react, when he planned to have her uncle locked up in his brig? And furthermore, once he handed the man over to his father? He supposed he could go back to having her as he’d done at first, with threats and cries of protest. That idea disgusted him, though. He’d had her sweet; he no longer wanted her bitter.
Edmund would have to do the thing that made his chest clench, black and cold as the bottom of the sea. He would have to leave her behind. There was no other way. He couldn’t have her around as a reminder of what he’d be losing.
And what of his crew? And Benjamin? Would he cast them away as well, as his father had demanded all those years ago? Perhaps his friend might join him in the export business once matters fell out. Again, perhaps not. Till had already voiced disapproval over actions that might upset the widow. Edmund couldn’t delude himself into thinking he was the only person who had an interest in her disposition.
His quartermaster would simply have to tolerate the situation. The man had known of Nathaniel Blackburn’s promise since the day it was made. His oldest friend knew the importance of this matter to him. He would have to see reason.
His father’s recognition of him was the first treasure Edmund had ever chased, before any purse he’d cut with Benjamin as a boy, before any stolen bounty at sea, and certainly before the chest-tightening smiles of any woman. He’d invested decades in pursuing the very thing the old man had offered him, and now it was closer to being his than it had ever been. It wasn’t Symes he was after, but the approval the man’s capture would buy him.
<
br /> If only she’d stop looking at me that way when I say her name.
Edmund shook his head, trying to force the images of Hannah out of his mind. The flash in her blue eyes when she laughed at the worst of his jests. The line of her neck while she slept beside him. The sight of her knees coming up over his hips. This woman was doing things to him.
He shouldn’t care about what she thought or felt.
Will you do it then? Will you watch those eyes of hers cry?
He should not care about her.
Fair enough; she can’t possibly care about you.
The thought taunted him, and he let it gain purchase so that it might help him harden his heart for what he must do. Yes, there was no way he could hold any interest for her once she’d made port. Women of her status did not one day decide to take up with criminals, and was that not what he was?
Fool! She makes the best of misfortune. You lie to yourself if you believe you’ve charmed her to your side.
The widow was entertaining some fancy of hers by playing the part of the bawd while she found herself sequestered away where no one knew her name. She’d needed some way to pretend what had happened to her was acceptable, and so she’d resigned herself to acting the lightskirt for the course of the journey.
If she could pretend, then so could he. From now until Boston, he’d act as though nothing was amiss. That they had all the time in the world to tangle in the sheets and whisper lovers’ nothings. That he wasn’t about to cast her aside for a greater prize.
That she isn’t tying a knot in your heart.
But what if her sighs against his ear were not counterfeit? If she returned to his cabin each night not because it was the most comfortable place to sleep but because he was there? Was it possible she burned for him the way he did for her?