The Devil's Luck (The Skull & Crossbone Romances Book 1)

by Eris Adderly

  She sung an aria of protests that gradually had to compete side by side with whimpers and moans. But then even those noises came peppered with curses at the way her body was giving in to his tongue’s persistent efforts to unravel her resolve. Edmund felt a surge of moisture spreading over his chin and he knew his liquid caress was beginning to take its toll. He pushed on, sparked by her failure to conceal her reactions to his touch, pressing a fingertip at her entrance, gliding the pad over the defenceless silk there.

  “No!” The panic rose in her voice when she felt what he intended. “NO! Don’t you dare! Edmund!”

  The cry of his name was the sound of the dam of her resistance breaking and it trailed off into a wail of unwanted pleasure as he slid the threatening finger inside at last to merge its pressure with the pull of his mouth. She swore at him with the full force of her anger as she shuddered and clenched and came under the tenacious working of his tongue and hand.

  “Damn you, Blackburn!” She hurled the oath as her quivering subsided, her eyes fixed now to the ceiling, refusing to look at him.

  “Damn me indeed, Mrs Collingwood,” he muttered, hoisting himself upright, barely allowing her time to breathe before he was overcome by his own lust, plunging his raging desire within her in a single, glorious thrust. “Damn me indeed.”

  The sound of her startled gasp at his intrusion, coming so soon as it did after the climax he’d stolen from her body, nearly undid him. Edmund ground his teeth together and held himself as still as possible for a long, throbbing moment while he tried to bring his responses under control. The widow’s next words, though, did much to quench the flames.

  “Edmund, why?” she said, her eyes once again capturing his, searching for some meaning she wasn’t able to find.

  “Why, Hannah?” He tried to keep the anger out of his voice as he began to move his hips. “Because we both know this business with Boston is just an excuse.” The way her breasts were moving with the rhythm of his thrusts was mesmerising. “It’s an excuse for you to deny what this is, what we have.”

  “What we have?” Her walls clenched around him, a mirror to the tightness of her incredulous tone. “We have nothing, Captain Blackburn! You’ve seen to that yourself!”

  It was so very odd to be inside her, such exquisite warmth surrounding his cock, and to be having an argument like this at the same time. And yet he was not about to be distracted. Hannah was soaked. He could feel her moisture cooling against his skin as he pumped, and this was all the evidence he needed for his side of the debate.

  He lowered himself over her, bracing his weight on his arms, and ground into her. From above, he watched the woman beneath him endure his claims on her flesh. There was cold accusation in her eyes, but there was desire as well, which she fought to hold at bay. The intensity of his strokes increased. Edmund would see that desire win out.

  “We have everything, Hannah.” He came down on his elbows, his body slamming into hers now. Her feet had come up of their own accord to press into the bunching muscles of his backside as they delivered his need, his anger, deep into her perfect heat. Her cheeks were flushed and she held his gaze, defying him to call out the way she was beginning to return his movements.

  “It could be this way, if you let it.” Edmund laboured in and out, watching her lips part with the increased pace of her breath. “I see you trying to hide what you want from me, Hannah. You aren’t doing a very good job of it.” Her palms had come to his chest, but not to push him away now. The tips of her fingers curled slightly, nails digging into his skin. Her lip began to curl in fierce determination, lined with resentment.

  She was meeting him thrust for savage thrust now, and that meant he had little time left before he lost himself inside her.

  “I hate everything you’ve done to me, pirate,” she said, seething, her hips pummelling back at his, challenging him with her libidinous ire. It was possible his widow was even more beautiful cloaked in the heat of her wrath.

  Angry, joyous, wanton, afraid. Edmund wanted her every which way, no matter what. The pressure was building to that familiar, intolerable degree. He was swollen and desperate within her, on fire at the sight, the feel of her. In a move that would finally drive him over the edge, he leaned down to demand her mouth as well, bruising her lips with his kiss, her feminine growl of outrage resonating under his tongue.

  It was that scalding noise from her that did it. Edmund came into her with a growl, throwing his head back as he spent the full measure of his completion into the woman who had upended his world.

  Surge after surge of liquid ecstasy poured out of him as he shuddered through his climax, his stifled roar of completion one of barely contained triumph. The despairing sounds of gratification coming from beneath him told Edmund that Hannah could never completely hide her desire. The same way he couldn’t, no matter what lies he told himself.

  “Admit it, Hannah. This is where you belong.”

  * * * *

  “Get off me, Edmund,” she said to him in disgust, whipping a few damp strands of hair away from her forehead. This situation with the captain had gone from hopeless to maddeningly convoluted, and Hannah wanted him away from her after the mess he’d just made of her feelings.

  She twitched her hips at him, in what was, she admitted, not the best way to signal her desire to have him out from between her legs, and pushed at his shoulder with her good hand.

  To her surprise, after a final unnecessary kiss on the side of her neck, he obliged her and levered himself up and out, tucking his slick manhood back into his breeches as he went. One hand wiped at his brow and the other supported his weight as he moved to lean on the table and catch his breath.

  Attempting to gather herself, Hannah slid from the berth to her feet, standing upright on wobbly knees. The captain was between her and her now mostly dry clothing, and she was unsure yet whether she was interested in attempting to move past him for it. They eyed each other like two cats after a brawl, chests heaving in exhaustion, but still bristling in case one of them started another row.

  “Do you see it now?” he asked her, still nearly out of breath and swallowing to wet his throat, impatient for an answer. “Do you see how it is between us? How it has been every time?”

  Hannah drew herself up, bare body or no, and hurled his words back at him. “What I see, Captain, is someone who uses people as a means to an end. My uncle is a means to an end for you, and so you pursue him. Then I became part of that means and you scramble to keep me within your grasp. Of course you didn’t tell me when I translated those letters. That would have made things a sight more difficult for you, wouldn’t it? And where would I be now, without my use in your schemes? At the bottom of the sea once you’d had your fill of me? Back in that alley?”

  Her indignation all but lifted her off the ground now, and she cared not a whit for her lack of decency. Nothing was right in this world, where such a thing could go on. That he could use her this way and then add further insult by expecting her to agree that the two of them were involved in some sort of … of romance! Ridiculous!

  Then why did you meet his hips with yours, Hannah? Why did your eyes roll back under the caress of his tongue? Why were you drenched when you saw that angry glint in his eyes, so that you put your own heels to his backside and all but demanded he push his fury into you?

  Further unacceptable notions, the whole lot. The idea that seeing the captain in a state of anger might be a source of arousal flew in the face of all reason. Here were her mind and body attempting to trick her once again and, for once, she must refuse to listen.

  “Brave words,” he said, “for someone who seems to forget being all so recently whisked out of trouble. Your life would be forfeit, Mrs Collingwood, if not for me and Benjamin.”

  “You call this being ‘out of trouble’?” she all but shouted at him. “Because you saved my life, I’m now expected to quietly surrender my family to you? To endure whatever torments you wish to heap upon me, from now until … until y
ou decide to do otherwise?”

  Blackburn took a menacing step toward her, his eyes narrowing as a way to aim his next painful jab.

  “Torments, Hannah?” His voice dropped to a low, sinister caress. “You didn’t look so tormented when you were shuddering under my tongue a few minutes ago.”

  He stooped to gather up her clothes and in a stride was invading her space again, the garments clutched in his fist between them. For a moment, he loomed near, his dark eyes searching her for an answer to an unasked question. She schooled herself to stillness and did not react, meeting his stare with one of her own. When the moment passed, he thrust her gown and underthings at her, and she took them up as a reaction more than anything else.

  “Get dressed.” His order was cold. “It will be much easier before I attach the chain again.”

  Their previous flood of honest temper was almost completely dammed up now. Some of the things Blackburn had said in his passion had merely fostered more questions, but he was not talking now and she didn’t want to open the wound again. Hannah would have to live with the fiend for at least a few more weeks, and now that her only plan had failed, she was at a complete loss for how she would manage to endure it otherwise.

  * * * *

  The manacle around her ankle clicked shut and the quartermaster turned the key, silent as they completed the routine. He rose to his feet in the stateroom, pausing for a moment, as if he wanted to say something, but must have thought the better of it because he left Hannah standing alone in the dim light once more.

  A lifeless monotony had taken over her days since the last altercation with the captain, punctuated by uncomfortable sleep on the deck, bland meals, and the tedious process of being escorted to the head at various times during the day.

  That last bit was truly the worst, Hannah thought, as she paced the deck of the cabin in an effort to have something to do. She had no interest in interacting with Blackburn or Till if she could avoid it, and she found herself having to ask to be unchained and escorted through the ship. Where they expected her to run off to in the middle of the Atlantic, or why they thought she needed a chaperone, was beyond her. Regardless, every time she would have to traverse the deck with one or the other of them looming over her shoulder the whole way there and back. She was thankful they let her at least be alone for the act itself.

  Sometimes the captain would bring her meal when he returned to his cabin, and the two of them would eat without talking, Blackburn often reading from one of his books, and Hannah strenuously ignoring him. Other times someone would send Brigit ‘round with the food. The two women had never engaged in any heavy conversation, but the chain snaking from Hannah’s ankle to the leg of the table was an awkward reminder of how the situation had changed. She knew even less of what she might say to the woman now that things stood as they did, especially since Brigit wore no such chains.

  She rolled her shoulders and flexed the sore muscles in her back beneath her bodice. A hard floor for a bed was not something Hannah was used to, but she refused to share the berth with Blackburn, even though he’d made a gruff offer of it one evening. Her naiveté, she admitted, had pulled her in to a great deal of this predicament, but that didn’t mean she needed to carry it with her for ever. And naïve was what he surely thought she was, if he imagined she might sleep beside him again.

  The door to the stateroom swung open then, and she turned on her heels toward the sound. The captain stepped through.

  Speak of the Devil and he appears.

  Hannah leaned against the side of the berth, putting herself out of the way as Blackburn swept into the room. He began gathering items from the table into his hands. An inkwell, a quill, several leaves of paper.

  “You’ll take the berth tonight,” he said without looking at her as he moved about the room, fishing through drawers and cabinets as he went.

  “I most certainly will not.” She stiffened, readying herself for an argument. It was the longest sentence she’d said to him since the night he’d punished her with the belt. She could still feel the sting whenever she thought about it, and the warmth the memory brought between her thighs was most unacceptable.

  “I’ll be sleeping elsewhere, Hannah. You might as well.”

  These weren’t the words she was expecting from him at all, and without thinking, she balked. “And just where will you sleep then?”

  His coat had been draped over the back of a chair on the opposite side of the table from where she stood, and he took it up and folded it over his forearm, meaning to take it with him out of the cabin.

  “I don’t see how that’s your concern,” he said, meeting her eyes at last. His voice had gone tight, as though he was only allowing himself to release a fraction of the words he wished to say. “You can’t sleep on the deck for weeks at a time. It isn’t right.”

  She’d promised herself she wouldn’t speak to him any more than necessary, but his last statement jarred her away from her convictions.

  “And what would you know about what is ‘right’, pirate?” she snapped at him, thrashing her chain over the floor to illustrate her point. Hannah wanted to call the captain what he was as a reminder to the both of them that this was not any sort of normal situation between a man and a woman.

  Blackburn made a noise of exasperation and gestured with an inkwell-filled hand. “Just … take the bed, woman! Don’t be so bloody stubborn!”

  Before she could engage him in further argument, he was out the door in an irritated flurry of coat and paper, leaving her to glare daggers into his wake. Hannah wondered if, in the uncharted territory of her future, there could ever be another human being who infuriated her so much as the captain of The Devil’s Luck.

  * * * *

  The stateroom was dark as Hannah drifted in and out of sleep on her third night of having the berth to herself. Uninterrupted rest was impossible, as every time she shifted on the mattress, her chain would drag over the deck and wooden side of the bed, waking her with its metallic rasp.

  He’d given her sole possession of the berth for now, but when she fell into oblivion enough to be overtaken by dreams, the captain pursued her there instead. Blackburn waited for her, on the other side of sleep. Him, or Till, or sometimes both of them. Hannah couldn’t have named any sort of coherent plot or message among her dreams; nothing was ever so clear. All she could gather back into her memory upon waking were vague impressions of sinful whispers at her neck, Edmund’s body behind hers or Benjamin above; promises of bliss should she only surrender, which she vacillated between accepting and refusing.

  Waking to slick thighs in an empty bed, the weight of the shackle on her ankle was a bitter medicine every time. Surely there was some escape for her. There must be.

  We have everything, Hannah.

  The words he’d spoken as he took her in such a fury that night after the disaster at Nassau came scalding back to her like steam rushing out from under the lid of a boiling pot. She ought to have tears for a memory like that, but she was empty, so she silently cursed him instead.

  What had happened to the clean world of her books, where reality was ordered in neat, rational lines, and everything made sense? Why could she not get a harness on even one part of herself any more? Her heart leapt unbidden when he said her name, even now. Her thoughts took license to toy with ideas of what she and the men might be doing now if matters hadn’t gone so horribly sour. Her body … Her body simply took its own leave to heat up and throb at those thoughts, whether she wished it or no.

  She kept reliving in her mind’s eye the way she knelt before him in her feigned display of thanks, his length buried in her throat while she looked up at him. And then on the bed, after he saw through her ploy … He shouldn’t have been able to work that sort of pleasure out of her with that infernal tongue of his, incensed as she was. Hannah wanted it from him again, and was ashamed.

  Why, of all the people on this earth, did her uncle have to be the person whom these pirates sought?

  It’s
better you learnt when you did, Hannah, or you would’ve fallen much deeper into this mess by the time you reached Boston. Much deeper.

  It was that last most disturbing thought that waved to her from the dock as she drifted back off again into nothingness. A thought best swallowed up into the fog of dreams, lest it usurp her waking hours, as well.

  Poor thing. You’ve never tasted this flavour of hurt, have you?

  She hadn’t, it was true. Before all the revelations, before all the tears and accusations, Hannah had been walking eastward, just before dawn. The sun hadn’t broken the horizon yet, but the sky was growing bright and imminent daylight had threatened to blind her. She’d just been about to consider whether, for the first time in her life, she might be coming to know what it felt like to love.

  * * * *

  Hands were in her hair. A heavy thigh draped over her hip and hot breath was on her neck. The tip of a breast was being pulled into a wet, sucking mouth, she wasn’t sure whose. There were too many limbs entangled for just two people. Layers of flesh moved as waves and she rolled with them, pure want.

  “Hannah …”

  Edmund’s voice came as a whisper, a plea, a demand. She arched against a wall of male warmth that must be him. Somewhere, in an illusory background, she sensed someone looking on in disapproval, but she didn’t care.

  Fingers found their way between her thighs, seeking. Hannah sought as well, turning her head back to meet lips that promised to unravel the ties holding her in check. Firm desire was pressing at her through fabric, insistent.

  She answered his call in kind: “Edmund.”