Pleasure of His Bed

by Melissa MacNeal, Donna Grant, Annalise Russell

  He smiled at the fine, fetching woman beside him. She returned his smile, feline that she was. Sofia had taken charge but was careful not to remind him of it. Clever wench.

  And once on deck, with the brisk sea air caressing his face, Damon’s strength returned. Quentin Thomas stood on the quarterdeck, at the large wooden wheel, gazing out toward the horizon…and then at the ship sailing about twenty yards to their left, and then at the Odalisque, which led their trio from the other side of Havisham’s ship.

  Their sails were pregnant with a brisk wind, and the Atlantic whisked them along them like a sea-green witch with her effortless, rolling magic. Although he would prefer having the Courtesan as the lead ship, all was as it should be, with his partner out in front. He hadn’t missed a thing, nor had anything gone wrong in his brief absence. When they got closer to New Providence and went looking for Blackbeard, he would shift their position.

  “Fine day for a sail, Thomas!” he exclaimed with a nod to his quartermaster. “I’ll have a look at what’s ahead of us, from the bow.”

  “Aye, sir.” Quentin’s gaze lingered on the spot near his chin—the stitches now throbbed like a dog was clawing him there—but Quentin said nothing. Merely smiled and glanced briefly at Miss Martine.

  Damon took the spyglass from the wheel stand to stroll along the rail as though he felt perfectly fit. Sofia had assumed the air of his deferential slave once again, walking with her hands clasped and her eyes averted. When they reached the peak of the bow, he focused on the middle ship—twisted the end of the spyglass to correct the blur. All seemed calm aboard that vessel, as well.

  “Here—you look.” He handed the instrument to Sofia, who eagerly put it to her eye. “If you follow the railing of the Lady Constance to your left, you’ll spot something of interest.”

  Damon watched the smooth flow of her movement…the slow parting of her lips as she gazed through the spyglass. Her ebony hair teased him in the breeze until he wanted to grab it and pull her close for a kiss.

  “There she is! There’s Mama!” Sofia gazed eagerly toward the bow of the middle ship, holding her breath to concentrate. “She’s on the deck with the girls. Oh, Mama, it’s so good to see you…. I hope you’ve forgiven me for following my own selfish inclinations…stowing away and leaving you to carry out my duties.”

  Damon listened, spellbound. That this vixen would be concerned about her mother’s forgiveness took him by surprise. Was it because he’d seldom given a thought to his own mother’s well-being—or to forgiveness, in general? Or because he’d so enjoyed Sofia Martine’s impulsive decision to hide in his quarters?

  “Just a thought,” he murmured, “but perhaps you did your mother a favor. Lord Havisham and Lady Constance might have put her out, once she reached an age where she could no longer serve. You’ve provided her the same fresh start you’ve made yourself.”

  Sofia took the spyglass from her eye. Her look was one of astute gratitude. “I hope New York will prove a hospitable place, for I suspect the girls’ two grooms already have their own staff. Mama and I may well be on our own in a strange new country and—”

  “A resourceful woman like yourself will want for nothing.” Damon wasn’t sure where that sentiment had come from. To be sure she didn’t misinterpret his remark, he flashed her a foxlike grin. “And if mother is at all like daughter, she’ll find her place, as well.”

  “Are you saying you have plans for us, Captain Delacroix?”

  “No!” He chided himself for entertaining her fancy…leading her to believe she was anything other than a stowaway whose presence was forbidden. “America is a land of new opportunities. I’m expressing my confidence in your ability to capitalize on them.”

  “Ah. Which implies you won’t sell me as a slave once we’ve detoured to that port you mentioned earlier.” A grin lit her impish face. “Thank you, Damon!”

  “I—don’t go thinking…”

  And wasn’t that the whole trouble with this ebony-haired temptress—that she could think? Sofia had apparently remembered all he’d ever told her, and, dammit, he hadn’t anticipated how good this made him feel. How good her body made him feel….

  “And is Miss Daphne still sick to her stomach?” he asked, to change this dangerous subject.

  With a knowing smile, Sofia put the spyglass to her eye again. “She looks deathly pale and unsteady but resigned…at least until she meets her intended. And there’s Trixie, admiring the sailors as they perform their tasks. From the time she was small, I saw those tendencies in her, a magnetism that will lead her into trouble.”

  “The pot’s calling the kettle black, seems to me.”

  Sofia laughed aloud. “Are you complaining? What would you do if I was the type to fuss and fidget and bemoan my fate?”

  “I’d return you to your two charges immediately. You’d pay penance for all the trouble you’ve caused me and your poor mother!”

  Once again her direct gaze disarmed him: Sofia Martine had a knack for seeing right through him, for capitalizing on every verbal and physical opportunity he offered her. When she handed him the spyglass, Damon sensed he’d brought another fortuitous, happy moment to an end. Dammit.

  “Mr. Comstock will be needing me in the galley. I hope your wound stops throbbing soon, Captain Delacroix.”

  Just that fast, she walked away, her gray uniform alive with the sway of her hips and the subtle flex of her waist. And just that fast, the gash began to throb like a son of a bitch.

  How did she do it? How did Sofia twist everything to her own sly advantage yet leave him hungry for more of her company?

  Damon exhaled harshly and put the spyglass to his eye again. They were a few days from land, so he saw nothing ahead but the open sea…yet the freedom it had always brought him, knowing he was in command of his own fate and his own fleet, felt strangely lacking now.

  Nothing like a good fight with pirates to bring back the excitement! he reassured himself. Nothing like being a man among men—and being the captain of them all!

  Was there? Well, was there?

  8

  “N othing like a good fuck with a pirate to get me excited!” Sophia breathed in his ear. “Nothing like overcoming the captain himself—having my way with him until he succumbs!”

  She grasped his hands and raised his arms above his head on the rumpled bedclothes. Damon laughed raggedly as she nailed him in place against the mattress: he loved this playacting as much as she did, and he looked deliciously nefarious with a red bandanna tied over his dark hair and an eye patch from his medicine chest. The stitches along his jaw rendered him downright devilish.

  “Arrr!” he growled. Then he lifted his head to take a nipple between his teeth.

  Sofia squealed and bucked against him, driving his cock deeper inside her. How she loved being on top, riding this rigid staff and the sinfully sexual man it belonged to. He thrust upward, watching her eyes widen, wiggled his hips in a quick rhythm as he rubbed that sensitive nubbin that would drive her wild with need.

  When her breast slipped from his mouth, Sofia sat up and gripped his hips between her knees. What a fine sight he made by lamplight, with his smooth muscles and skin slickened from their lovemaking. Lord, they’d been at it since he’d escorted her downstairs from supper! As his clock struck midnight, she remained in awe of his stamina—his ability to bring her to climax again and again, his willingness to pleasure her with his hands and mouth before he’d recovered from his previous climax…and the one before that.

  It was sweet compensation for his unwitting little insults, wasn’t it? A tongue up her slit made up for many a slip of his tongue.

  Sofia smiled, feeling feline. Damon Delacroix didn’t vex her on purpose. He was simply accustomed to being in charge of everything. Needed someone—her, namely—to teach him that receiving could be as good as giving and taking.

  “You’re wearing me out, lover,” she murmured. Yet she couldn’t resist arching her back to wiggle her breasts at him.


  “Thank God you’ll finally admit that!” he rasped. “I was wondering if you intended to sleep tonight. Not that I’m finished!”

  She laughed as he wrestled her to the mattress to trap her beneath his powerful leg. “I don’t see how you can possibly come again after—”

  “Oh, ye of little faith.” Damon’s kiss took her from playfulness to need so fast her head spun—and then he rolled on top of her. “This time, however, it’s my turn to ride, sweet creature. You’re to lie absolutely still—no thrusting to meet my hips, no wriggling to speed things up. I have to please you one last time before we collapse, just to prove I can!”

  Yes, it was the captain’s almighty ego speaking, but who was she to argue? Sofia folded her hands beneath her head and settled deeper into his feather pillow. Morning—and galley duty—would come too soon, but for now she immersed herself in this fine, impassioned moment…in the crystalline glint in his eyes as he rocked against her hips…in the set of his jaw and the tightening of his chest as he increased his speed. The eye patch and that line of stitches on his stubbled cheek made him look so very dangerous. Bad to the bone and beyond redemption.

  It was so difficult to lie there and just take it! And Damon knew that. In and out his member went, inciting fresh fires in flesh that had burned feverishly for hours now. She fought the urge to grip him with her inner muscles—he loved that! Her fingers itched to caress his smooth, damp skin—or to ruffle the coarse black curls framing his root. Or she could distance herself—could think of something else completely to make him labor in vain—but Sofia disliked such mental games. Far more exciting to play along—to feel the subtle thrum of her reawakening need.

  “What a fine, feisty slave you are,” Damon whispered. He closed his eyes, maintaining the slick in-and-out while pressing into her pubic bone. “The line between captor and captive sometimes blurs, but for now—for this pièce de résistance—you are mine, sweet Sofia. Here to do my bidding. Here to climax at my command.”

  Sofia followed his patter, allowing her body to flow with his. She would gladly become more than his slave, but it was too soon to fall for that fantasy, wasn’t it? She must assume the captain would either deliver her to New York and then depart or sell her at a port before they reached America. But in her fantasies, Damon Delacroix wanted her for all time, wanted her in all the ways she longed for him.

  She felt the first stirrings deep inside, answered his thrust with hips that couldn’t hold still any longer. Her gasp echoed around his quarters like a wanton’s call.

  Damon growled low in his throat, a wild wolf summoning his mate. She grimaced, caught up in the impending wildfire. The ropes beneath the mattress creaked more insistently while the sounds of skin slapping damp skin goaded them on. His face tightened with the effort of holding back, waiting for her to fly high and fast with his release.

  “I’m…so ready to…explode.” He sucked air between his teeth, and his hips tucked inward. “But you’ve got to come along, my love. You’ve got to call my name and tell me when to—”

  “Damon! Damon!” she panted. Sofia loosed her pent-up passion then: her mind spun into high, wild circles as she convulsed. Her head rose from the pillow, and the breath rushed from her lungs. “Please! Take me—shoot your cum up my—”

  He gasped and poured forth. Again and again he drove himself inside her until she wrapped her arms around him and held him tightly against her breasts. Finally he collapsed. His breath tickled the hairs on her neck, slowing to normal over the next several minutes.

  “Incredible. Absolutely…incredible,” he breathed. And before he rolled off her, Damon snored softly.

  Sofia smiled in the flickering lamplight. It was one of life’s sweetest joys to cradle a sated lover…to know she’d satisfied him so thoroughly he had nothing left—not even the inclination for a sip of water before he fell asleep. His head found the crevice between her chin and shoulder, and he dozed peacefully.

  Very carefully, Sofia reached beneath the spare pillow—the one she’d arranged against his bed head this afternoon. Ever so gently she tugged on the chain she’d hidden between the mattress and the post—didn’t move another muscle as she slowly drew the handcuff across the untucked sheet. Damon had been accommodating enough to stretch his arm across her chest, and with one quick click she attached him to his bed.

  He smacked his lips and mumbled something unintelligible. Then he resumed his soft snoring.

  Sofia eased from beneath his body, again moving slowly, alert to signs he’d awakened. When Damon was deep in sleep, she slipped to the foot of the feather mattress and gripped the leg iron she’d attached to the bed frame.

  This would be trickier. She maneuvered the wide iron cuff around his ankle by pressing its opening into the soft mattress until it came up on the other side of his leg. The bedclothes muffled its click, and Sofia almost laughed aloud. Her lover was so exhausted he had no idea what had just happened to him.

  Captain Delacroix was now her slave, held hostage in his own manacles!

  She took a moment to admire his bare backside in the lamplight and the dip of his spine as it flowed into a strong back and broad shoulders that spanned the width of the pillow.

  “Sleep tight, my love,” she whispered. And out the door she went.

  9

  S ofia…Sofia, I long to see you. Are you doing well? Being treated well?

  Sofia stood at the ship’s railing as the mist rose around them before daybreak. What had drawn her to this post, with spyglass in hand? Inner voices had persuaded her to peer toward the Lady Constance, which bobbed languidly in the gray waters awaiting the wind. Thoughts of Mama made her gaze along the railing of the Havisham ship—

  Was that an arm waving at her?

  Sofia strained forward, holding her breath. Mama had always risen while it was still dark, before the rest of the household, so perhaps this habit had led her to the deck, as well. Her mother had surely learned she was aboard the Courtesan when Damon had fetched those spices for her, so—

  There it was again, a movement barely visible in the mist. Yet she swore her mother had hailed her.

  Impulsively she waved back, alive with the idea that fate had led her here—that her mother had called silently to her from across the water! Magdalena Martine had often teased the Havisham girls about having such powers, had convinced them she knew everything they did and said even when she wasn’t present. Daphne and Trix called it “witchiness,” but at this moment Sofia considered it a sweet gift, heaven-sent.

  A gust of wind cleared the mist, and the solitary figure became clearer. Sofia twisted the end of the spyglass, willing the image to be who she wanted.

  Again she waved, her heart pounding, and again came the reply.

  “Mama!” she called, although her voice couldn’t possibly carry that far.

  The figure stood straighter, and then it waved more vigorously! That was clearly a dark uniform sleeve coming from beneath a cloak Sofia recognized.

  “Mama, I miss you! I love you!”

  The figure raised both arms in a wide wave—and then blew her a kiss!

  Sofia’s heart thudded. The mist moistened her cheeks as she gazed at the woman—

  Someone was approaching from behind. His tread was silent…secretive. She turned to see who’d discovered her here, where she didn’t belong.

  “Miss Martine? How lovely you look without your leg irons.”

  How should she respond to Quentin Thomas? The quartermaster stopped a few feet in front of her, a panther on the prowl. She smiled and then looked toward the Lady Constance again. Perhaps Damon’s rule about not speaking to his men had merit, after all.

  “Such a shy lass. Yet I heard the captain’s bed rocking far into the night,” he ventured, stepping closer. “We could barely sleep, suspended in our hammocks down in the hold. The racket was so…suggestive.”

  Her eyes widened. Had every sailor aboard heard them cavorting, then? Every night since they’d set sail? No reason to look a
round, for no one else was on the mist-shrouded deck yet. And with Damon chained to his bed, he wouldn’t rescue her from this trap, either.

  As Quentin came closer, his features became clearly visible in the mist: the chiseled cheekbones and lines bracketing thin lips, nostrils that flared like a stallion’s when a mare trotted past, clothing more fashionable than the other sailors wore. This man was young and strong, and he wore his brass-buttoned frock coat and snug breeches well.

  Don’t accept the offer in those prying eyes, her inner voice warned. Or was it Mama, guiding her from the other ship? No doubt this man would swear he could keep a little secret, but word of her indiscretion would reach Damon in no time! Then the rest of the crew would be expecting a go at her—and what might Captain Delacroix do? She was his uninvited guest, at the mercy of his hospitality and moods.

  “I realize the captain has forbidden you to speak to us,” Quentin crooned, “but for just a quick kiss—a scratching of a desperate man’s itch—I could become a good friend and protector, were Delacroix ever…indisposed.”

  Her breath caught. Did Quentin Thomas know the captain was chained to his bed? Had he heard Damon crying out or cursing? Sofia kicked herself for pulling such a trick on him, thinking she could come outside alone for a breath of air without any repercussions. The quartermaster smiled engagingly as he backed her against the railing.

  “Think about this, then. If the captain decides to sell you—probably in New Providence, before we reach America,” Thomas continued in a low, conspiratorial voice, “you’ll be at the mercy of every unsavory character on the island. It’s a pirate hideaway, you see. Nefarious men like Black Bart and Calico Jack Rackham and Blackbeard hide—and sell—their booty there. Do you want the likes of them bidding on you? Buying you for God knows what sort of purpose?”

  Quentin’s face was only inches from hers. His words and persuasive expression confirmed her greatest fears. And if she didn’t get back to the captain’s quarters to free Damon before—if anyone saw her conversing with this man in such a compromising position—her fate was sealed with those pirates on New Providence, wasn’t it? Captain Delacroix suffered no fools—and she’d just gotten caught behaving like one.