Face to Face (The Deverell Series Book 2)

by Susan Ward

  Her muscles tensed beneath his light massaging. One problem at a time, he thought, she doesn’t need more. Burying his lips in her hair, Varian tried to reason a way to help her through this. Perhaps he’d been wrong to let their passion run its course, however it would, without trying to pace it for her.

  Merry, innocent of touch, was fiery in passion, a brilliantly twirling prism of mood. Even at his age, he was in awe of her and had not expected their first joining to run in a two day frenzy unlike anything he had ever known.

  It had started with the sweetness of finding a virgin bride in his bed on his wedding night, and had passed in mad hours of rapture bound in every type of flavor. He had been a man starving and, willingly, had let this run its course. But Merry hadn’t even known she was hungry.

  “The voracious hunger I have for you, Merry, isn’t only about the remarkable pleasure you give me with your body. I am learning parts of you I could not know until we shared them this way. Everything I discover about you makes me hungrier for you, closer to you, more claimed by you. I want all of me claimed by you, Merry, and all of me touched by you. Touched by your spirit.”

  On softly gasping laughs, she said, “Ah, so I may hope when I claim all of you and you’ve been touched by my spirit, we will both acquire an impulse to stop this from time to time?”

  Varian’s laughter caressed her neck, as his lips dropped to her shoulder. His voice held a wicked edge as he said, “You would do better to develop a proclivity to run, whenever your whim is not to want me touching your spirit.”

  Merry’s laugher shimmied through her limbs with more of its natural flow. Varian ran his hands up and down her arms, while her muscles fluttered beneath his palms. That she was laughing was good. Laughter and temper were her two shields to protect the fragile woman within. Her center would not have survived this world without protection.

  Varian buried his lips in her hair, breathing in her sweet scent, before allowing himself one kiss there. She didn’t need more of him. She needed diversion to settle inside herself again.

  With slumberous devilment, he said, “In my long line of tutors, during my years inclined to torture those of the education profession, I had in possession for a time one that was not a man of letters, but had been a proprietor of a Gin Shop.” At once, she was laughing against him. “We used to get the barn cats drunk, so we could watch them totter. I did not crack a book the year he schooled me. I developed an iron stomach and a proclivity to enjoy the inebriation of small animals. I am tired of the dog watching. Can we get him drunk?”

  Merry’s face whipped towards him, flushed with indignation. “How dare you suggest such a thing? You are a wicked man. You will leave my dog alone.”

  Then she started to giggle. She looked into his face, with satiny eyelashes wide, and announced, “I find pug is shameful in this as well. Port, gin or wine? How many glasses do you think it will take? I don’t want him dead, just in a stupor.”

  Varian tried everything, rum, wine, and port, in crystal glass or out of a silver bowl; the dog wouldn’t drink. Merry was rolling on the floor in laughter, and in the end, after an imposing scowl at the tiny puff of fur, Varian tossed the dog from the cabin.

  Turning back from the door, Varian’s breath caught at the picture of Merry. She was reclined on her side, the dark pattern of the Persian rug an exotic backdrop to her creamy flesh, angel arms and legs peeking from the billowy puff of his shirt twisted around her. Her dark curls streamed across a stack of pillows, her face flush-bright from the laughter that had consumed her through their endeavor. The laughter had burned itself out of Merry about a quarter hour ago, but it had left its dew on her face and in the languor of her limbs.

  Varian sank down on the floor beside her and he knew that look in her eyes. The sun was gone in the west, gathering shadows in the cabin, and the glow from the candle he lit touched one side of her face. She plucked at the parting of his robe and ran a finger down his chest.

  “You are a kind man, Varian, to be willing to be preposterous for me, when you are not a preposterous man ever, in any way.”

  Varian caught her arm and placed a kiss on the beat of her wrist. “You would do well to run, Merry.”

  That comment made the fire rekindle in Merry’s flesh. In all the different ways she’d thought of Varian, she could hardly grasp he had passed an entire afternoon in nonsense with a dog to please her. Her eyes glided over the taut flesh covering the curve of his cheekbones, the aristocratic nose, the erotic mouth, and the intense blackness of his eyes. The thought hit her that he was both kind and cautious in his dealings with her.

  Even in the wild ways they sometimes coupled, there was careful handling, as though she were glass and he was afraid to handle her the way he wished to, afraid for some reason she would break. Her heartbeat was high in her throat, making her ache and pulse in the vital parts of her. She was sure it the cause of the sudden brazenness she felt.

  “Come here, Varian.” Her voice was breathless as she opened her arms for him. She felt the warm surrounding of his body, and the fire of his mouth against hers.

  When his face eased back from her, his voice came again, softly brushing her cheeks. “I can’t get enough of you. If you don’t stop me I will burn you to ash.”

  Merry lifted her hands, spreading her fingers wide apart on his cheeks, their pale tips stroking his tanned flesh. “Then burn me to ash,” she said hoarsely. That sent a shudder through him.

  Tracing her lips along the ridge of his chest, she made little twirling darts with her tongue and felt more shivers run through him. She heard his intake of breath and had the impression of his desire and tenderness for her battling within him.

  Merry undid the buttons of her shirt and let it fall open. The blackness of his eyes turned to liquid as she lie bare and pliant for his touch. She ran her hands up his torso to his shoulders, discovering the tension of his muscles and the drive of his blood through his veins, finding an intensity within him unlike any of the other times they coupled.

  With an unsteady hand, she brought her wineglass to her mouth, running the rim for a moment along her lower lip. Intending to consume a bolstering drought, she spilled a dark trail along the surface of her slopes. She looked down, then noticed Varian’s eyes following the red drops as they spread over her body.

  Her eyes brightened as she recognized want and restraint in his gaze. Merry closed her hands on the sides of his face, letting him sip the droplets of wine from her lips. Varian was dragging his lips across her like a man starved.

  Into the play of his erotic demand, she whispered, “Varian, I love you. Let me give you all you want from me...”

  It was her hands that moved his face lower, as he followed with his lips the lazy path of wine that had done a trek on her flesh. Everywhere he moved on the delicate plane of her body, rippled with convulsion, somehow heightened by the moisture on her flesh.

  He brought his mouth to rock gently over her throbbing lips, his hands kneading her skin below her waist, along her thighs, inside. A vague consciousness rose in her dreamy mind, the slippery glides of his fingers and palms lubricated by more wine having been poured on her flesh.

  She closed her eyes as his face skimmed her erect nipples, the lush underside of her breasts, down the smooth length of her abdomen, and then across to her center. He lingered on the fleshly tops of her thighs, down a leg, behind a knee, an ankle, to toe and up again. She felt her leg gently molded around his arm, his lips seeking wine on the shockwave nerves on the inside of her legs, near where she pulsed, but never there.

  As she trembled through her rioting senses, her body whispered to her that with the wine smears he was kissing every part of her, lingering everywhere but there. She realized there was in him, in this wildly erotic passion, a want to go there and a caution that wouldn’t let him. Every cell in her body was pulsing and demanding; the ache low in her was agony.

  She whimpered as he slid his fingers inside her, deep, and his mouth was a flame acro
ss her smooth flesh from hip bone to hip bone. The brushing of his wine soaked fingers melted with her hot dampness as his face eased back upward to hers. Desperate and anxious, she felt him lift her from the floor.

  She saw him, a vision above her and into her demand, he whispered, “You are in your every breath everything I could ever want.”

  Arching her back beneath his mouth roaming over her breasts, his fingers soft like brushing feathers, and her head thrashed on the pillow as she wondered, do all women feel this way with a man? Is that why we all eventually end in a man’s bed?

  Feeling Varian ease his hands beneath her, molding her limbs into his possession, Merry let herself flow away with the dazzling riot of her senses, and with it went thought. Sometimes it was better not to think. Sometimes it was better only to feel.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Merry woke to be greeted by the lush swirls of a plumy-violet sunset beyond the stern windows, the sharp sound of rapid activity on the upper-deck, and the warm form of a slumbering man beneath her. It took a moment to pull into focus the words that had taken her from sleep. “Sail ho.” They had moved in an unthreatening blur through her hazy functioning brain, her passion kissed senses only claimed by the man she had stayed in bed with, now her second day.

  She realized, with an untroubled awareness, that the ship was making sail, the bucking motion telling her they were running to the wind and running hard. The wood screeched and groaned with the effort like a giant beast beneath her. The man beneath her, a giant beast as well, was more peaceful.

  She relaxed back against Varian, watching the cabin playfully sway as the ship lurched, tacking westward and then southward over and over again. She heard without alarm Tom Craven’s order to load guns. She had heard it before many times, and never once their full thunder.

  They had taken three ships since she had joined Varian and the events had been bloodless affairs, which seemed to more require strength and stamina, rather than ruthlessness. Sailors had superbly fit bodies for a reason. It took hours to shift a cargo from one hold to another, and though the pirates spent the night hours in revelry and drink, she was reminded of Varian saying if boredom killed, Little One, half the men at sea would be dead.

  He had been most probably correct. It seemed a tame adventure, filled with backbreaking work at best, the most frequent diversion to the endless hours of water.

  So she was not particularly alarmed with the increase of sound and motion, and instead settled back against Varian to listen to the steady flow of his heart beneath her cheek. Instead of the man’s ship, her thoughts were filled with wispy images of what she had shared with the man. He had pulled her tight atop his body, arms entwined around her waist, and even in sleep he hadn’t released his hold. It was clear what he would want when he awoke. The man, it seemed, was insatiable.

  Varian had systematically disarmed every fear she had carried about sharing a man’s bed. She been raised with the warning that it was an unpleasant duty that would hurt and embarrass her. It was unclear where it had come from, the belief that a man’s passion only stirred in the darkness, but she held that foolish thought as well.

  She had come awake this morning to shots of sun reflected off the water warmly dancing in playful darts against her flesh and Varian’s black eyes, heavy lids wide, wickedly glowing and watching her. She had tensed twice. First, in awareness of where she was. Then in awareness of what Varian was doing.

  He had slowly uncovered her to the dawn and his leisurely gaze, and she had laid in shocking wantonness as he looked at her, every detail in the brilliantly illuminating sunlight. Her conduct was growing more shameful with each passing breath, but those dark eyes, beguiling, carried her with him.

  There were any number of things that should have brought her up sharply in alarm with herself, including the tenderness that reminded her of the change in her body that sat in strangely pleasant harmony with the sweet favors of his passion. The worries she had betrayed every part of who she was that sat in not pleasant harmony with her repeated willingness to continue to do so, and her fears about the cost that would be demanded for these hours in his arms.

  The sunset lost a bit of its luster as she looked at it. All that seemed clear was she had stepped from the trap of wanting the man into the trap of having had him. The winsome joy of her flesh didn’t match the truth of what she was doing or lessen the slowly claiming fear of what would become of her. It did, however, keep her in his arms.

  The explosion that howled through the cabin brought Merry back to earth with the cruelest of landings. Varian’s canons had let loose in a fury of a full broadside, which rocked the cabin, violently tilting it, suspending it for a nerve-racking pause, and then righting itself. Startled, Varian went from slumber to full wakefulness in the blink of an eye. The look on his face sat in shuddering comprehension the ship was going into quite a different kind of battle than the ones she’d witnessed before.

  Everything from that moment on held the surreal repulsiveness of a nightmare for Merry. Reality had a way of settling upon you with hard blows, in unkind whim, as it was doing just now. She sat alone in the center of his bed, curled in a tight ball, his covers huddled up against her, as she watched him rapidly move about the cabin pulling on his clothes to get on deck.

  Continuing to dress, his goliath body filled with purpose, Varian ordered, “Lock the cabin behind me, Little One. Don’t leave until I return. Open the door for no one except Indy or Shay. If we get the worst of the fighting I will send one of them to take you by boat out of here.”

  Merry’s wide doe-eyes fixed on him, in a lost way, that reminded Varian of child trying desperately to make reason of the world. Her hands were still cupping her ears in reaction to the percussive explosions of his guns. They were shaking.

  Another thundering broadside rocked the cabin. Varian paused only long enough to cup her chin and give her quick kiss. “Don’t be afraid, Merry,” he said gently. “It sounds worse than it is. Stay in the cabin. Do you want me to send Indy or Shay to be with you?”

  Merry, shocked into silence, could only shake her head. The rush of action all around made her vibrate. The sound of the guns, the whiz of musket fire from the rigging, the racing footsteps pounding the deck, and loudly, madly shouting voices. As frightened as she was by it all, she didn’t need one more thing to unnerve her, like having someone see her in his bed. It was foolish that concern should could come to her now, after two days of being there with him, but it did and it brought other thoughts as well.

  Varian left her then, walking calmly out of the cabin and into that horrifying unknown, as though he were going to deck for his usual duties. The sight of the cabin door closing brought her up sharply with an unsettling succession of simple truths. Somehow she had forgotten in her desperation to have him who this man was, who she was, and where she was. Lady Meredith Ann Merrick had just spent two days in the bed of the infamous pirate Morgan, as his lover, and he had left her body still warm from his passion to go commit murder and mayhem on the seas.

  Truth, in blunt form, brutal and unchangeable. Somehow, for the past two days, each piece of her circumstance had remained mercifully separated from the others, but they were not separated any longer. Their sudden joining, belated, was no less harsh in its deferred arrival. Tears began to stream down Merry’s face.

  The battle raged on in minutes of agonizing slowness. Merry remained in Varian’s bed only long enough for function to return to her limbs. Grabbing Indy’s clothes, she covered her cold, sweat damp body, and then picked her way across the cabin scattered with the broken dishes from their dinner. She couldn’t contain any longer the hideous need to see in undiluted clarity what it was she had put herself in the middle of, or the need to know that Varian was all right.

  Opening the cabin door, she stared out at the hatchway. Merry now understood Varian’s order had been a wise order. It was hell. There was no other word. The swarm of cursing, panting men and what battle did to their faces. The swirling gr
ay smoke from the decks, not blurring enough, the grim and frantic activity on the battle. The sounds of the canons and guns were no longer mildly altered by the sheltering wood of the cabin and were now horrifying in their loudness.

  Numb as a sleepwalker, Merry went to the top step, lowered there, and watched it all. She wished she hadn’t, even while she seemed unable to stop herself. The battling ships raged before her in a scene of utter madness.

  Flames were licking the deck of the other ship, racing upward the rigging, dotted of men with muskets in hand, and on the mast hung a tired, bullet ridden flag she identified without effort.

  The bold colors of Great Britain were proudly flapping over ruin. That struck her in two leveling blows. First, in the love in her heart for her country. Then, in the love in her heart for a man who had brutally disappointed her in this.

  In the convenient workings of her mind, it had never occurred to her that Varian could kill her countrymen. He had never once entered battled with England, and it had come to be almost as if her belief of his inability to do so made him something he wasn’t.

  The battle forced Merry for the first time to accept and acknowledge Varian for what he was. He wasn’t that man of fine birth who still found gentlemanly pleasure in the elegant refinements of his youth. He wasn’t exclusively those elements of himself which had captured her heart. He had moved beyond that and acquired a part that was something feared and obscene. Morgan. And this was no shirt he slipped into. It was part of him.

  He was a pirate. Without country. Without loyalty. Capable of any violence, any destruction in self-protection or greedy want, and infinitely skilled in the ruin which fell from his hands—she thought of herself, brushing anxiously at tears—ruthless and capably so.

  Then through the smoke she saw Varian, the image he made an even greater shock to her senses because it was fresh in her with another image. How he had looked in the glow of a candle, brushing her flesh with such wondrously gentle fingers, his tender mouth slowly roaming her body along the trail of wine she had allowed him to wickedly pour onto her.