The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo

by Byrne, Kerrigan

  He strode to the bed and laid her carefully upon it, all the while calling her name. He checked her breathing, which was shallow, but regular. He shook her, and tapped at her alarmingly pale cheeks, a bleak emotion welling inside of him, one he hadn’t confronted in a handful of years.

  Terror.

  Because this was no mere maidenly faint. No matter what he tried, she wouldn’t wake.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Veronica Weatherstoke pressed her ear to the wall. The muffled sounds of violence and distress in the next room remained unamplified.

  A feminine cry of alarm had pulled her from her wretched state. She’d sat up on the bed, where she’d been heaped into a puddle of misery, at the first crash of what must have been glass. A second splintering crunch had drawn her to the wall decorated with surprisingly tasteful blue paint, and a collection of what appeared to be original and expensive art.

  This turbine-propelled steamship was built better than any her family had crafted, and she’d noted the sturdy thickness of the walls, and the barrier it would make against unnecessary noise.

  She couldn’t hear footsteps or voices from the hallway. Nor could she make out the din of the sea just beyond the laughably small porthole windows lining the far wall.

  The room was meant to be a gilded prison but, for some reason, sound could carry through this particular wall. But how? She ran her hand over the textured paint, tensing as a high-pitched pleading from the other side stoked her distress.

  Not Lorelai, she realized with a shaky exhale. She would have recognized her sister’s voice right away. She knew enough of the layout of this hall of the ship to understand Lorelai was being kept two quarters down at the end. Where she’d been carried by their black-haired, black-hearted captor.

  Then who was next door? Another captive? Was one of the prostitutes the Rook mentioned being mistreated?

  Men did not consider it an immorality to rape or beat a whore. Strange, they’d often similar standards for their wives.

  A wife she was no longer. She had a pirate captain to thank for that, at least. Though, it seemed, she’d been delivered from one form of fearsome incarceration into another.

  Whoever this man, this Rook, was to Lorelai, Veronica knew they were no safer on this ship than they’d been at Southbourne with Mortimer alive.

  Less so, surely, as evidenced by the chaos being wrought in the very next room.

  Veronica pulled her head back and examined the wall. If the sounds weren’t coming through the barrier itself, then there must be a weakness in the structure somewhere.

  She found it after only minutes of running her hands along the paint, all the while following the ceaseless clamor of chaos. An insignificant, circular perforation, no larger than her smallest fingernail, had been bored beneath the shadow of a bucolic painting with a disproportionately large frame.

  The faint cries were most audible here.

  Bending down, Veronica took a bracing breath against the dread gathering in her chest before placing her eye directly at the fissure.

  Squeaking, she popped back up again, leaping back from the sight.

  Clapping one hand over her mouth, and another over her racing heart, she stood and blinked and breathed for an unaccountably long time.

  Not only did the pirates keep their captives in this chamber, they spied on them, as well. This she knew, because the spyglass would have shrunken everything in the blue room for the examination of a watchful eye on the other side of the wall.

  Conversely, it focused on and magnified only one place in the next bedroom for her view.

  The desk.

  The desk from which everything had been violently swept to the ground.

  The desk on which a dark-haired woman writhed and squealed and pleaded as Moncrieff’s head danced between her thighs.

  Drawn by a macabre curiosity, Veronica returned to the spyglass, her breaths as loud as one of the band saws in her father’s factories.

  The sight was no less shocking the second time, even though she’d prepared herself for it.

  The woman was positioned so Veronica could see down the length of her naked body. Her coiffed, dark head lolled from the edge of the desk, her chin pointing at the ceiling.

  Veronica could assess her every expression, though upside down.

  Her eyes squeezed shut and her powdered skin stretched tight in a grimace of torment, or was it enjoyment? Her mouth remained open, forming perfect, rhythmic ohs.

  Veronica listened intently. What she initially interpreted as pleas could very well have been demands.

  But … why?

  Heartbeats became claps of thunder as Veronica looked between—what she could only assume was a prostitute’s—quivering bare breasts, past her taut belly rippling with strain, to where Moncrieff’s bronzed hair gleamed from between the V of the woman’s open legs.

  Veronica’s own thighs clenched on an aching pulse. The sensation threaded down through her veins to land in the very place that so absorbed his lewd attentions.

  She remembered the times her husband had demanded to use her mouth. How she’d hated it. Hated him. Resented the pleasure he found there. The pain and degradation he left behind.

  Never once had the possibility occurred to her that a woman might use a man’s mouth for pleasure.

  That a woman might find pleasure at all.

  The prostitute could be faking her bliss, she supposed. But why, then, would she hold such a craven look upon her face when he could not see it? The expression was so unnatural. So unpracticed. Almost madcap to an astonished voyeur.

  Moncrieff pulled back, and the woman’s eyes flew open. She lifted her dark head, and said something in a frustrated whine that Veronica could not quite catch.

  His wicked laugh awakened something inside of Veronica she wished she could lull back to sleep. Something that felt like the empty ache of hunger, in her belly

  No, not her belly. Lower.

  She watched the play of muscle on his arms bunch and ripple as he gathered his untidy hair into a queue and secured it behind him. His smile was teasing, dazzling. His words were guttural and crass, this she knew.

  What did he say to the harlot? What wicked things caused the woman to moan and part her legs in further, seemingly desperate, invitation? One of the nude lady’s bejeweled hands lazily toyed with her own breast, and the other idly slid down her lithe body, finding their own way to her sex.

  Veronica gasped at the luridness of it. The unabashed ignominy of them both. At the shameful response building in her own treacherous body.

  He seemed to enjoy taunting the woman. In watching her as she stroked at herself. She, in turn, seemed to be attempting the same physical repartee. He encouraged her as his big hands stroked up her ankles, her calves, thrummed behind her knees, and smoothed their way across her splayed white thighs.

  Her hips lifted off the table, and she made another desperate sound as his hands encircled her wrists and roughly pinned them to the desk beside her hips.

  Veronica groaned in protest before she pressed a hand to her mouth. They were making too much noise to hear her, and the spyglass was simply too small to see through unless one was pressed to it.

  Even so … it wouldn’t do to get caught.

  The woman spat lurid curses at him, wrapping strong thighs around his shoulders.

  Grinning lazily, he settled those broad, bare shoulders back between her legs, and lowered his full mouth back toward her sex.

  The inside of Veronica’s own mouth dried, her chest stilled, all breath becoming a rote impossibility.

  He hovered over the woman for longer than he ought, before his long, flat tongue slowly emerged and lapped at her softly. Once. Again. And yet once more.

  The strength gave out of the prostitute’s neck, and her head collapsed back below the edge of the desk again, a relieved and triumphant smile spread on her face as her hips surged up, seeking his tongue. Demanding it.

  He latched onto her, and in the space
of a few breaths, the prostitute’s gasps became pants, her pants became cries, and her cries became screams as she bucked beneath him, her hands freed to wildly grip and clutch at his hair.

  Something warm and wet released from Veronica’s own body as a persistent throb established in her sex and began to spread a foreign flush through her entire middle. She hadn’t realized her other hand had settled over her corset until she noticed it slipping over her womb and down toward her skirt.

  She hadn’t known.

  How could she not have known?

  Those disgusting, straining distortions of Mortimer’s features when his rutting reached its pounding, painful climax … the pleasure her mother told her only belonged to a man … could be had by a woman?

  A sob of wonder escaped her, and she looked from the pretty prostitute’s ecstatic expression back to the man who provided it.

  He was staring at the spyglass as his jaw flexed and rolled with the unfathomable, magical motions of his tongue. His gaze glittered wicked speculations. But not at the woman upon whose body he dined.

  At her.

  Veronica jumped away, propelling herself to the far side of the room to lean against the wall beneath the open porthole. Her quivering legs refused to properly sustain her.

  He hadn’t seen her. He couldn’t have done. Not from that distance, surely.

  But he’d looked.

  She sucked in moist, cool sea air and willed her boiling blood to cool, painfully aware of the slick sensation present each time her thighs rubbed together.

  Not him. She guiltily shook her head. She didn’t desire him. An unfeeling, hedonistic pirate with no blood, nobility, or conscience to speak of. Nothing could be more absurd.

  It was merely the act that had fascinated her. The witnessing of it. The illicitness of it.

  The unveiling of the truth.

  A woman could claim pleasure, if a man was willing to give it.

  Which posed another question What manner of man would pay a prostitute for her time in order to provide the lady her pleasure?

  His behavior certainly made no sense.

  And why had he looked at her room when another woman climaxed into his mouth?

  Another slim, mahogany-haired woman.

  With green eyes.

  Oh, dear God, had he been spying on her through that glass all this time? Had he watched her sleep? Eat? Wash?

  Her hands flew to her burning cheeks as different sounds drifted to her now.

  Rhythmic, masculine ones.

  Veronica blinked back toward the spyglass, invisible in the wall from this distance. Was he coupling with the woman now? Would the muscles in his neck and shoulders strain with his own pleasure? Would his eyes go dark with need? With danger. With violence.

  Just as Mortimer’s had.

  She wanted to see. Wanted to know.

  Should she look again? Perhaps this act wouldn’t disgust her if she witnessed it performed properly. Would the pirate’s oddly hard, magnificent body bunch and cord as he found his—

  The bolt to her door slammed aside seconds before the door, itself, crashed into the wall.

  The Rook’s black void of a gaze swept the dim room until he found her huddling in her corner. An icy chill instantly swept away the heat accumulated in Veronica’s body. His was a gaze you hoped never found you.

  Veronica dumbly tried to recover from the terrific and terrible sight of him in only hastily donned trousers and nothing else.

  He reached her in four monstrous strides, and hauled her toward the door by her arm. “She won’t wake up,” he snarled.

  “What?” Drat. Her blood didn’t seem to reside in her head anymore.

  “Lorelai—she fell. She won’t wake up.”

  “She fell?” Fully present now, Veronica picked up her skirts and kept his frantic pace down the hallway, her breath already short and labored. “Did you push her? Or strike her?”

  “I didn’t fucking hurt her,” he said from between clenched teeth. “She just—fainted.”

  Crossing the threshold, Veronica rushed to her dearest friend, carefully arranged on top of the counterpane, still in her wedding skirts and the pilfered flannel.

  Lorelai’s mussed, unbound curls spilled in a waterfall of gold down the side of the bed, as her lashes fluttered softly against cheeks bereft of color.

  “Lorelai?” Veronica searched her face for swelling, or redness, for the early signs of a blow, and surprisingly found none. Lord knew they both had suffered plenty. What if he’d hit her where it wouldn’t leave a mark? Her stomach, maybe? Her back? Maybe she’d hit her head.

  With gentle fingers, Veronica checked for bumps, again finding none.

  “Is she still fucking breathing?” The Rook almost shoved her aside to press his ear to Lorelai’s chest, which rose and fell with the gentle rhythm of a sleeping child. “I’ll get the doctor.”

  “There’s no need.” Veronica sighed out a hitching breath of relief.

  “What do you mean?” the Rook demanded, seizing at her wrists in a crushing grip. “What’s happening to her? Has it happened before? What is to be done?”

  It occurred to Veronica to be frightened, but an odd sense of wonder replaced her panic at a man’s aggressive touch. The Rook, the terror of the high seas and their ruthless, devilish captor, was … worried.

  She gaped at him. “I-it’s just a faint, she does this sometimes.”

  “This is more than a fucking faint. I’ve knocked men to sleep with my bare fists who’ve come around faster. I tried smelling salts, ammonia, even loud noises and shaking her. It’s been minutes.”

  “Sometimes a cold washcloth helps,” she ventured. “Or some ice.”

  “Ice. I can get ice.” He released her, and stalked to the door. “Ice will wake her? It’ll bring her back?”

  Veronica smoothed a hand over Lorelai’s clammy forehead. “In time.”

  “How long?” he demanded.

  She shrugged and shook her head, unable to venture a guess.

  He took a threatening step toward her. “How. Long.”

  “Hours, maybe.” Veronica stood her ground. “Once she was gone for an entire day. Thirteen hours in all.” That had been a good day to leave, she remembered sourly. A good time to miss one of Mortimer’s drunken rages.

  The Rook stilled, his black gaze smoothing over every inch of Lorelai’s prone form. His entire lean, predatory body rippled with tension and strain. “Gone?” he echoed.

  “The doctors all said it’s hysteria,” she explained, taking Lorelai’s limp, clammy hand in her own. “That it’s how her body reacts to trauma.”

  “Trauma…” He swallowed heavily, losing some of his own high color.

  “What did you do to her?” Veronica asked in a horrified whisper.

  He said nothing.

  A protective rage welled within her. Only hours ago, she’d been ready to take her own life on her best friend’s behalf, and now, it seemed, she’d be willing to do it again. “Did you hurt her?” she demanded. “Did you … did you force yourself upon her?”

  Had she been awakening the long-dormant lust within her body at the very same moment this monster had been thrusting his own upon poor Lorelai?

  Dear Lord, she’d never forgive herself.

  The Rook’s features darkened from sinister to brutal. It was a look that would fill demons with dread, but Veronica was beyond that.

  “It was only a kiss…” he muttered.

  “Not to her, it wasn’t,” she snapped. “She’s never even been truly kissed, you bloody fiend! Not since some sacred chaste encounter as a child. Now she’s been forced to wed a pirate? You terrified her, you—you monstrous boor! I mean, just look at you!” She gestured rudely to his unclad body. The vibrant, menacing tattoos of things with teeth and tails. The vast breadth of his shoulders. The muscles built upon other muscles screaming of brutal labor, vast years of violence, and barely leashed ferocity.

  Dear heavens, where did they build pirates these days
? On Mount Olympus? Weren’t they supposed to be a scurvy lot, unkempt and unwashed, with leathery skin and missing limbs?

  Not that such casts of males would be preferable to these men. Especially when coerced weddings were concerned.

  She realized they’d been glaring at each other for several seconds, and only then when he shocked her by breaking eye contact first.

  Did she read regret on his features? Was a man like him capable of such human emotions as remorse?

  “Stay with her,” he ordered. “I don’t want her alone when she wakes. I’ll send my valet in to fetch my clothing. Make certain she is well by the time I get back.”

  “When will that be?”

  He pierced her with a warning glare. “When I’m finished storming Ben More Castle.”

  “In the middle of the day? You can’t be serious.” She stepped forward before reason screamed at her to be less reckless with her life. “What if the Blackheart of Ben More overwhelms your forces and decides to take the ship? We’d be helpless.”

  Better the monster you know …

  “You’re helpless now,” he snarled.

  No they weren’t. Somewhere in the Rook’s dark soul, he fancied he cared for Lorelai. It’s what had kept them both safe up until now. But what if the Rook could no longer protect them?

  He answered the question he saw in her eyes. “A man like Dorian Blackwell is more vigilant at night. He is ready for his enemies to come at him in the dark because the dark is his domain. So, I will not strike when he is ready. When he is watching. I will raid when he is most relaxed. When he and his children are sitting down to supper. When his servants are busy and his men are full of food and sluggish with ale. And I will not relent until I get what I want.”

  “How … how do you know he won’t see you coming?” she couldn’t help but ask.

  “No one ever sees me coming. Until it’s too late.” He said this almost gently as he returned to Lorelai’s side and touched every inch of her face with his gaze, as though committing it to memory.

  “What … what do you want from her?” Veronica wouldn’t have dared ask, but for a ludicrous moment, he seemed almost … human. “What do you mean to gain from all of this?”