“Kieran,” she breathed, “Oh, God….”
He was kissing her breasts again, her nipples. She locked her arm around his nape, her breath coming in labored gasps.
“Rosalie,” he managed, his voice strained. “Open your eyes.”
She did as he asked. His face was there just above hers, the beautiful, melted-caramel color of his amber irises glowing with warmth, the dark brows drawn ever so slightly together in concentration.
She stretched her hand down and found him. He moved slightly, accommodating her as she wrapped her fingers around his width and guided him toward the hot, molten center of her.
“Dear heavens,” he murmured, and then he was kissing her fully on the mouth once more, his tongue plunging through the seam of her lips to find her own, his breath ragged against her cheek as she rubbed the rigid head of his arousal through her slick wetness. He stiffened, choked out something unintelligible, and she gasped as his hand found her own sex, fingering it until she writhed anew in sweet torment, one hand gripping his hair to anchor herself, her head forced back against the pillow by the force of his kiss, her breath exiting her nostrils, bouncing off his cheek, coming back to her in hot, feathery little waves against her face.
“Damn,” he said, on the verge of losing control. “Rosalie—”
She guided him between the folds of her damp cleft and with a groan he sank down atop her, holding his weight on his forearms, his mouth buried in the curve of her neck, her hair tangling with his own. He filled her. She felt herself stretching, stretching more and then more again to accommodate him, felt him sliding into her, inch by inch all the way to the hilt and she began to tremble, the deep and searing ache blossoming between her legs once more, spreading upward through her belly.
He began to move within her, slowly at first, his hips coming up against her softness, that hot, skin-to-skin contact, his weight pressing her down into the mattress with each thrust. She shut her eyes and wound her arms around his neck, pulled her legs up and locked them around his hips and hung on. Momentum built. Speed and heat and passion. Their breathing became as one, measured and strained. The bed began to squeak beneath them, keeping time. With something like desperation his lips left her neck, her jaw, and found her mouth, his breath hot against her cheek. And oh, oh, this shattering joy, this exquisite agony was coming upon her once more, and she tightened her legs around his hips and thrust upwards into him and locked him close, riding it through to its end as he choked out her name and stiffening, pumped his seed deeply up inside her. She felt it pulsing into her body; felt his skin burning damp against her own, and it was hot and messy and intense and glorious. They lay there for a long moment. Eventually she heard his breathing begin to slow and return to normal as he took his weight upon his arms and lay atop and alongside her.
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, her legs still around his hips, and held him to her.
Time passed.
The night breeze drifted through the open windows and swirled against their skin.
And then Kieran spoke against her neck. She could feel his lips curving in a grin.
“Rosalie Merrick, my beautiful wife, I look forward to doing this for the rest of my life—”
She laughed and swatted his thigh, he laughed too, and they both lay panting in the gathering darkness.
Chapter 26
Outside, the night-insects had begun their shrill cacophony and in the street below a group of sailors passed, singing a bawdy song as they made their way to some waterfront tavern. The breeze pushed at the curtains and made the candle flicker and from far off, Kieran heard the distant rumble of thunder.
He lay beside his new bride, sweating in the heat. The odor of cooking drifted in from Baltimore’s kitchens. He could smell the heady fragrance of the sea, the musky scent of their passion, the aroma of roses drifting up from a little garden below.
Again, the rumble of thunder, closer this time.
“Kieran?”
He turned his head on the pillow. Her eyes were luminous in the near-darkness, and he smiled, reaching out to caress her cheek. “What is it, love?”
Was she afraid of thunderstorms? Did she have regrets or wish he’d been gentler, rougher, slower, faster, or anything but what he’d been in the marriage bed? Was she—
“Do you think we made a baby?”
“A baby?”
“Well yes, Kieran, a baby. What else could we have made?” Her eyes sparkled. “A puppy?”
He laughed and traced the curve of her nose with his finger. “I guess we’ll know in nine months. Or, we could make love again just to up our odds.”
“Maybe we should wash, first. I don’t feel very pretty right now.”
“Aye, this heat is the very devil, isn’t it? And being on an upper floor doesn’t help. It’s like an oven up here. I’m not used to it.”
“I’m not sure one ever gets used to it. Our summers are unbearably hot.”
“And our winters are wretchedly cold.”
He could drown in the depths of her eyes as she looked at him in the gloom. “Maybe we could live in Newburyport during the summer and Baltimore during the winter,” she said. The thunder rumbled again, low and not quite so distant. “And I bet Liam would like that.”
“Yes, his rheumatism plagues him.”
“I’m not talking about his rheumatism, Kieran, but about my Aunt Annis.”
He looked at her askance, and then realized what she meant. Of course. Liam and Annis.
The idea warmed his heart.
The rest of him was warm enough as it was. He leaned forward, kissed his new bride, and rose from the bed. The washstand beckoned. Pouring water from the pitcher into the accompanying basin, he rinsed his face, trying to find relief before he wilted. A small towel lay folded over the rail. He dunked it in the bowl, wrung it out, and returned to the bed.
Rosalie was watching him, her brows raised.
“Turn over,” he murmured. She shoved the pillow away with one arm and lay flat on her belly, her cheek against the sheet, her thick, glorious hair spread out around her.
Her thick, glorious, probably very hot hair.
She was probably suffering even worse than he was. He wrapped his hand around her hair, lifted it off the back of her neck and gently, tenderly, caressed the damp skin there with the washcloth, bathing and cooling her.
She sighed with pleasure. “I don’t deserve you, Kieran.”
“No, you deserve better.” He shook out the cloth, refolded it, and gently ran it down the groove of her spine, over her shoulder blades, down along her ribs. He traced the dip in her back and the rise of her buttocks, turned her over and dragged the wet towel up her thighs and between her legs, gently washing away the evidence of their lovemaking until she reached for him once more.
Ten minutes later, they were both hot and sweaty all over again, but no matter.
By then, the storm was moving in over the bay, the temperature was dropping, and the breeze was kicking up. With a savage blast of lightning, the rain came down, hammering the rooftops outside, pounding against the windows and roaring through the night with abandon.
Kieran got up to partially close the windows and returned to the bed.
Another purple flash illuminated the room, and a resounding roll of thunder shook the foundations of the hotel itself.
Rosalie snuggled up against him and he drew her close, content. They lay together, listening to the storm rage outside.
“It was a beautiful day, Kieran, wasn’t it?”
“The best of my life.”
Rain pounded outside. She reached up to touch his cheek. “And yet, I sense a sadness in you.”
“If you do, my love, it has nothing to do with you. You’ve made me the happiest man on Earth.”
“Then is it that unfinished business back on the island?”
He couldn’t deny that. “In part.”
“I don’t want to look back, Kieran.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want you to go find Escobar and finish what he started,” she said quietly. “It’s too dangerous. I don’t want to go back to the Caribbean, and I don’t want to stay here, either.”
He raised one brow, watching her.
“Take me home to your Newburyport, Kieran,” she said simply. “Take me home.”
Home.
He said nothing. She placed her hand against his chest and eventually grew still. He listened to her breathing grow regular and pressed that little hand to his heart. But sleep was not yet for him, because she was right.
There was indeed a sadness in him.
His mind drifted back over their wedding day. His lovely bride. A feast of traditional Maryland dishes. Laughter and dancing, Liam standing beside him at the altar as the most beautiful woman in the world walked up the aisle toward him. His heart had swelled with pride, but the ceremony had been oddly empty.
Incomplete.
His family had been missing—and two people in particular. Two people who should have been there, who would have been there were it not for his brother Connor.
Mother and Dadai.
Another brilliant flash of lightning, and the answering crack of thunder before the sound rolled off into the night. Kieran did not have his sister’s gift of the Sight, but electrical storms always made him feel tensely aware of things of, or perhaps beyond, this world that he didn’t understand, as though the lightning itself split a veil between the visible and the imagined, reality and possibility, life…and death.
Mother
Dadai.
Did storms like this somehow connect this world and the next?
Rosalie made a little noise in her sleep and he cradled her close. She would never know his parents and they would never know her, and neither would their children. As he lay there in the darkness, the gross unfairness of it rocked his heart. Dadai… Mother…. You should have been here today, but Connor took that from me. From you. From all of us.
He lay there listening to the drum of rain, steady and quiet and reminding him of emptiness. Loss. Sorrow. He felt the sting of tears and in his mind, heard his father’s voice, the wisdom and gentle humor in the voice that had never lost its Irish accent. Dadai. He swallowed hard. There were times, fleeting, oh so very fleeting, when it felt like he was still here, near enough to touch, to talk to…then gone as if he’d never been. As if he’d imagined his presence for that heartbeat of a moment, as if he’d conjured it out of his desperate will to see him one last time.
Another flash of lightning, another roll of thunder. The sound of the deluge outside changed in pitch as the storm lessened and began to move off.
Kieran lay staring up at the ceiling for a long while. Eventually he drew the sheet up over them both, turned his head to watch the last of the lightning flickering outside the windows, and heard the shrill sound of the crickets once again dominating the night.
Dawn touched the sky. He finally closed his eyes and slept.
* * *
Many miles away, Juan Escobar grabbed a telescope from the rack and scanned the horizon.
In their wake lay the burning wreckage of an American brig which had been on its way from Charleston to Annapolis when he and his crew, bristling for a fight, had happened upon it in the early morning hours.
Its captain, a pimply youth whose face had yet to take on the burnished tones of a seasoned sailor, had nearly pissed in his britches when Escobar had sent a ball across his bows and boarded his unresisting command. “The ship is yours,” the pup had stammered, thinking that compliance might earn him Escobar’s mercy. Scorn had filled the pirate at the youth’s terrified capitulation, his weakness, his shaky answers to Escobar’s questions—What are you carrying? Where are you bound? And have you seen or heard word of the sloop Sandpiper out of Newburyport?
No, but they had spoken the merchant ship Potomoc out of Annapolis and last week she had spoken a sloop answering that description bound for Baltimore.
Baltimore. Of course. It was the home port of Penelope’s ginger-haired captain and the place he’d be most likely to return following his escape at the hands of that stinking dog, Merrick, who’d stolen Sandpiper back.
Merrick, who alone knew where his little brother was.
The spot-ridden youth had served his purpose. Escobar had no use for a cargo of foodstuffs, and dead men told no tales. The pimples had stood out against his paling face as one-by-one, Escobar had directed Rocco to cut the throats of his crew, laughing as the Americans’ protests had turned to terrified pleas for mercy.
Escobar had forced the boy-captain to watch the slaughter, taking an obscene pleasure from his horror, his begging for quarter, and at the end, the unmanly tears that had streaked down his cheeks. He’d been blubbering like a baby when Rocco had come up behind him, hooked him around the chest with one meaty arm and pinned his skinny arms to his sides to deliver the fatal blow. But Escobar’s frustration, his rage over his missing brother and the fact that only that damned New Englander with the solemn eyes knew where he was, were grinding away at him—and he needed an outlet for his passions.
He took the knife himself and as Rocco yanked the youth’s head back, Escobar swiped the blade across the exposed throat in one angry, backhanded slash.
Two days ahead of them lay Baltimore.
He would enjoy having his way with the orange-haired wench.
He would enjoy forcing Merrick to watch, and he would enjoy watching those solemn eyes turn terrified.
Escobar wiped the blood from the knife as he sneered down at the corpse twitching at his feet. And he would enjoy, he would very much enjoy, passing this same knife across that scoundrel’s throat after he wrung from him every last detail of where he’d sent his missing brother.
Chapter 27
Journal of Captain Kieran Merrick, 6 June 1814
Baltimore, you are a pretty little town, and some day soon I will get to know you better. But for now…for now, it is time to go home. To stop avoiding the inevitable. To confront the emptiness and stark reminders of loss that await me, to look them in the face, let them do their damage, and then try to make peace with them. Because these reminders…we are tied to each other from here on in. But I’ll get through this. Rosalie tells me I’m her anchor, but the truth is, she is mine. I can’t wait to introduce her to what remains of my family—Uncle Matt and Aunt Eveleen, my cousins, all of them—and start the rest of our lives together. With her by my side, I am strong. With her by my side, I can do this. I can do anything.
I think, dear journal, that the day is swiftly approaching when I will have no further use for you as my confidante. In short, you have been replaced.
It didn’t take long to provision for the relatively short trip home.
With the exception of those containing the goods she’d collected to sell to the ladies of Baltimore, Rosalie’s trunks had remained on Sandpiper. More fresh water was taken aboard as well as foodstuffs, salted beef and ammunition, and with reluctance on Liam’s part as he waved goodbye to Annis Cutter and resignation and resolve on Kieran’s, the sloop weighed anchor and filled her sails with a fresh northeasterly that sent them quickly down the bay.
The afternoon lengthened. Night closed in. Darkness descended and Sandpiper glided south, the lights on both east and western shores marking small towns along the great Chesapeake. And there, not two hundred feet away in the darkness, Kieran spied one of British Rear Admiral George Cockburn’s warships lying at anchor.
Her job was to keep shipping and privateers like himself safely contained within the bay.
His job was to sneak quietly past her.
She could blast them to bits with one broadside, and as he often did under times of duress, Sandpiper’s captain took the tiller himself.
“You’re as clever as a fox,” Rosalie whispered, coming up to join him at the helm as he steered the sloop past their deadly adversary. They could see her great gunports sliding past in the darkness, each open to catch the breeze
and air out decks that had baked all day in the heat. They could see her furled topsails against a few scudding clouds. The moment was charged with tension.
Danger.
And then Rosalie’s hand grazed his arm in the darkness and drifted to his groin. Found him. Rubbed him. Kieran sucked his lip between his teeth. Not twenty feet away, Joel and Liam stood at the rail, all but holding their breaths as the dim shape of Cockburn’s frigate loomed large in the night and the laughter of the British crew drifted across the water.
Kieran didn’t trust himself to respond. The tension of the moment was only surpassed by the agony of not saying a word as Sandpiper whispered past the big warship, of not lashing the tiller and pushing Rosalie up against the mainmast, lifting her skirts and finishing what she’d started.
They were nearly past. The scent of pipe smoke came from across the water. Clipped English voices, the solemn clang of the warship’s bell as the watch ended. Galley smoke. Splashing as someone threw slops overboard. The lights of the distant shoreline disappearing behind the frigate’s great hull as they overtook her, reappearing again.
“Rosalie, you’re killing me,” Kieran managed, trying to peer ahead in the darkness as he gripped the tiller in a desperate attempt to anchor himself. “I need to see where we’re going.”
She leaned close, raised herself on tiptoe and whispered in his ear. “I know these waters better than you ever will, and trust me, I know where I’m going.”
With that, she reached out with her other hand, pushed the tiller slightly to starboard and Kieran swore under his breath as a dinghy, moored just feet away, bobbed fiercely in their bow wake. If they’d hit it, every man on that frigate would have heard the splintering boom in the darkness.
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