by Eris Adderly
Bone had put her in charge of pouring the nightly ration of beer into the sailors’ proffered mugs on their way out of the galley. Fist after fist came thrusting at her, each gripping a different sort of container. Metal, horn, fired clay, and most all well-worn. She’d lifted and refilled her pitcher from the barrel again and again, and imagined the line of men might never end.
Many of them had made crude comments, but in the trance of the moving queue, the repetitive actions, their words became a fog. Pour, pour, pour, refill, repeat.
When there were no more men, no more mugs offered, she’d stood there blinking as though she’d awakened from a dream.
It was her and the cook’s turn to eat at last, and whilst she’d remained standing, he’d chosen to pull up a low stool and balance his plate on a knee. She wondered if it hurt for him to put weight for long periods of time on his wooden leg. And a considerable weight she suspected it must be. The man was built like an ox.
Now that it was quiet again in the galley, and she could indulge her curiosity while Bone’s attention was on his meal, Brigit noted the dark wood that served the cook as a leg was worked in a detailed relief. She couldn’t make out all the designs, but the larger ones appeared to pay tribute to a life at sea. A ship she could see from her vantage point, and an anchor. Possibly what may have been a mermaid.
“See something ye fancy?”
Her eyes jerked away from the carvings to meet the sky blue gaze of the cook. He’d caught her staring, but the quirking of one side of his mouth told her he wasn’t upset by it. Still, she felt the need to apologise.
“I’m sorry Mr Bone, I shouldn’t stare.”
“Never ye mind, Mrs O’Creagh. I was only having a bit of fun.” He leaned forward, an elbow on his knee, and cocked his head at her, mirth twinkling from frank, appreciative eyes.
The way he held her gaze without appearing to be distracted by the scarring dashed across her face made a fluttering giddiness beneath her stays she hadn’t known since the earliest infatuations of her youth. Brigit still didn’t understand why he persisted in addressing her in such a formal manner, though. She was, by all accounts, not much more than a scullery maid at this point.
In an unusually nervous effort to be polite, and perhaps out of a healthy fear of her own thoughts in the silence, she ventured a question.
“Did you … did you do the work yourself, Mr Bone? The carvings?” She didn’t understand the tentative voice coming out of her, now. How had this man cowed her normal bold tongue?
“Oh, aye.” His face broadened in a quiet smile of pride as he looked down at the wood himself, running blunt, reverent fingertips over his handiwork. “When a man spends a great deal of time at sea, he finds himself with just that: a great deal of time on his hands. Cooking doesn’t take all day, ye know.”
Bone brought his eyes up, grinning at her, before his attention darted off to her right.
“Get over here, you!”
Brigit stood straighter with a grunt of confusion and looked about herself. Was he talking to—?
From the corner of her eye, a stout ginger cat appeared, wending its way towards the cook. It made sure to rub its face over every standing thing in the galley along the way, including Brigit’s shins through her skirt, before presenting itself to Bone with an arched back and slitted green eyes.
The cook delivered the expected scratching to the furry head and haunches, and Brigit suppressed a giggle at the sight of this enormous man catering to the whims of a single cat.
“And who’s this, then?” she asked, setting her empty plate behind her atop the block.
“Ah, this’ll be King George,” he said, making the name sound unsuitably grand. “He keeps the rats at bay, though ye wouldn’t know it as much time as he spends asleep under the steps in here.” Bone dropped a morsel of salt pork on the deck and the mouser saw to it directly.
His words about the cat raised a worry she’d put aside much earlier in the day. A problem made far thornier after the way he’d cornered her before evening meal.
“Mr Bone … where will I sleep?”
Blue eyes came up to meet hers again at this, interest in the cat forgotten at once. She felt the frank consideration in his gaze adding colour to her cheeks; men did not look at Brigit O’Creagh this way.
He rose from the stool, his ascent taking what seemed like days, reminding her again of his size. Weight on his good leg, his eyes travelled in a deliberate, earthy path from her face all the way down to her feet and back again. He took a slow, rolling step in her direction.
“That is a very good question, Mrs O’Creagh.” He’d pulled back the pace of his speech to a languorous crawl. His next step followed with the soft rap of wood on wood. Brigit wrestled with the urge to shiver.
“I’ve been asking it myself since the captain saw us in the council chamber.” His words came low and laden with insinuation as he closed the remaining distance between them with a lazy fluidity. She felt her hands draw back to rest on the edge of the block behind her, for what purpose she didn’t know.
Are you going to vault backwards over the bloody thing, girl?
With a final step, he had her trapped again between his broad frame and the infernal cutting block. He looked down at her then with a maddeningly placid expression and a single arched brow.
“Where will ye sleep? Brigit?”
They were close enough now that his words vibrated from his chest into hers, and she was very aware of the rise and fall of her breasts as they pillowed above her neckline. From his vantage point, there was no way he hadn’t noticed.
“I … I don’t …” She stammered, unable to form a coherent answer, held in thrall as she was by this man.
“We’ll worry about that matter in a moment,” he said, voice pitched for her ears alone, “but first …”
Before the startled squawk of protest left her throat, Bone had gripped her about the waist with both hands and hoisted her bodily up and backwards. She now sat atop the cutting block.
Another step brought him right up against its edge, and when Brigit gaped down at her new position she saw that she hadn’t the presence of mind to draw her legs properly to one side. The cook stood between her knees and there would be no bringing them closed now. Even an attempt would merely squeeze them against his hips.
This man wanted things from her. Things, Brigit admitted, she might even be willing to give, but her insides tightened with panic all the same. Pirates didn’t earn their reputations through acts of charity and kindness. And a ship wasn’t a very large place in which to run, if he was bent on doing her harm.
He leaned in, hands on either side of her knees, eyes hooded with … With what? Was that … desire? She wasn’t sure. It wasn’t the usual revulsion or loose tolerance she caught in the eyes of the few men who’d bedded her in the past. Cautious as a fawn at a forest’s edge, she attempted to draw him out.
“But first?” Her eyes were wide, holding his, her body tense and still. What would he do? Would he hurt her?
“First,” he said, in tones that spoke of endless time to spare, “I have another question I’d like answered.” Their noses were whisper close now, but she didn’t want to draw away. Her heart laboured with a wild hammering in her chest.
“What’s that?” She was almost inaudible, her words falling like feathers on the ruddy beard brushing at her chin. She blinked at him. Their lips were so very close.
“Brigit …” He laid her name down as the lightest caress, and closed his eyes.
His mouth was on hers in a blanket of warmth. Not demanding, not lewd. A question. An offer.
She accepted.
A further tilt of her neck and she moulded her lips up against his. A low groan rumbled up from his chest and it carried the song of a man left hungry for far too long. The deep, male sound of want made her breath catch, and the parting of her lips seemed a signal to him.
His tongue slid over her lower lip, another request for permission, and she opene
d, admitting the caress. For the briefest moment, the novelty left her stunned. These were not the sort of kisses she’d received from other men. In fact, those had hardly been any sort of kisses at all. Her worries disintegrated under the mouth of this pirate standing between her knees, and she felt an appetite swell up in their place, tight and full to the point of bursting.
Brigit answered him back in kind, tasting, pushing up into his mouth with her own tongue. This brought another growl from the man and, as they pressed in to sample each other, she felt a heavy hand glide up the back of her neck and lace into her hair at the nape. Another languorous stroke of his tongue at that same moment brought her attention to the heat simmering between her thighs.
A heat lodged against the waist of a man who seemed intent on consuming her whole.
Her head was swimming by the time Bone drew back from the kiss, and when her eyes came open to meet his, she found them searching her with a desperate fever. She had no words and could merely stare at him and attempt to breathe.
Never before had a man caused Brigit to feel this way. The strands of white threaded through his beard, the extra lines at his brow absent from the faces of younger men she’d dallied with, did nothing to quell the spiralling tension at her centre. The more deliberate way he handled her, perhaps a result of his age, was possibly even heating her further.
He can take whatever he wants, at this point.
Whatever he sought in her eyes, he appeared to find, because he descended on her again, this time urgent, greedy. His mouth pulled at hers, tongue inviting her in, drawing small, frustrated sounds of need from the back of her throat to join his own. The hand at her neck trailed down along her back before the cook returned his palm to the block, bracing himself on both arms once again.
Her jaw received his kisses now, and then her ear, her neck. She tilted her head away, giving him better access, and her lips parted as he took it and moved lower, lapping at the hollow of her throat. Somewhere in the fog of sensation, she noticed her knees were not merely parted by this man who was fast devouring her sanity, but that without realising it, she’d shifted on the block to fit her hips directly against his obvious arousal. Layers of skirts and petticoats, a set of breeches and a shirt, were all that lay between them.
Brigit hated the captain a trifle less now, for having handed her off to this cook.
He was nipping at her collar bone, lips and teeth tracing a fiery path, and his right hand was back, urging the fabric of her sleeve further down over her shoulder. A rough thumb smoothed over the top of the crease where her arm met her body, and his kisses moved from there to her neckline. Between her thighs, a dull, warm throb made demands.
“Mr Bone ...” His name came without thought, a sigh as her own right hand smoothed up over the arm that remained supporting the big man’s weight.
“John ... if ye like ...” he said, amid intent nuzzling and lapping at her flesh.
So. John Bone it was. Pirate aboard The Devil’s Luck.
He buried his face nose-deep between her breasts where they were piled high together by her stays and inhaled, letting out a groan of approval before his eager mouth set to work there as well.
Pirate. Cook. I don’t care what he is, so long as he doesn’t stop.
The man setting her body aflame soon became dissatisfied with the limitations set by her bodice and, with a grunt of frustration and a sharp tug, brought the entire affair some inches lower. Her remaining intact sleeve slid off its shoulder with the movement, and the bones of her stays prodded down into the meat of her hips. But now her breasts were completely freed and none of that mattered.
Bone righted himself and held her at arm’s length for a moment, taking in her freckled curves with those blue eyes of his. The pale pink of her nipples darkened, hardening under the raw need in his stare alone.
“Mmm. Look at that,” he said in the way a man might appraise a holiday feast. Brigit watched him chew at the inside of his lip and give a soft, disbelieving shake of his head before he bent to her once more, making new claims on her exposed flesh.
“John!” The newly-learnt name burst out of her with a gasp as he took one of her nipples into his mouth, plumping the breast around it with a warm squeeze of his hand.
Hot, wet suckling drew her in, and a hand moved over her other breast, palming its weight, brushing its stiffened tip with an idle thumb. Just as her head began to loll back in indulgence, however, she felt him pull away and stand again.
She opened her eyes to find him grinning down at her.
“Stay where ye are, Brigit O’Creagh,” he said in a lusty taunt, flashing his teeth at her. “Don’t. Move. Not one inch.”
He left her dishevelled there, hair mussed, bare bosom pointing at the ceiling of the galley, while he stole through the pantry door on the aft wall. Crockery rasped over wood and paper crinkled from somewhere in the little room as the cook rummaged through Heaven knew what.
Brigit sat with her thighs splayed under her skirts, feeling wanton indeed without the distraction of wandering male hands or a mouth to make her forget her lewd position. Her nerves nearly had the better of her, and she was a heartbeat away from hopping down when Bone reappeared with a sly smile on his face.
A squat, stoppered clay jar fit just in his palm and he held it up to her as he made his way back to the block. He came between her knees again and set the jar down on the cutting surface beside her hip, prying out its wide cork as he went.
She peered down into the container and saw it full of something glossy and amber-coloured.
“What’s this?” she asked him, curiosity and apprehension bubbling away inside her.
Bone pressed his forefinger into the jar and came out with a smudge of the stuff coating the tip. He lifted his hand between them, the raised finger poised to touch her lips.
“Open.”
Brigit screwed up her face. He expected her to put whatever this was in her mouth on faith?
“Go on.” He gave her an amused half-smile. “It won’t be bad, I promise ye.”
Narrowing her eyes at him, she decided to trust. He’d shown her only pleasure so far. She let her jaw relax and her lips parted. Bone slid the finger inside. As it came in contact with her tongue, sweetness flooded her mouth.
Honey.
His grin grew wider as he saw the recognition on her face. Brigit closed her lips around the treat he offered and used her tongue to clean the rest of the sticky goodness away, slowing down her movements while she held his gaze. She knew just what it would look like, and this small display rekindled some of her normal boldness.
A controlled hiss from the cook told her his imagination had conjured the only possible image it could, and he pulled back the finger with a wet pop.
“My private store,” he explained with a grin, “so don’t ye be telling anyone about it, Mrs O’Creagh.”
She chuckled at this. “You mean I shouldn’t gather the crew ‘round and tell them tales of how I came to know about their cook’s private things?”
“Such cheek.” He tried to be serious while blue eyes twinkled. His forefinger caught her under the chin and tilted her jaw that he might claim another kiss. “Ought to have ye … over my knee,” he said between distracted bites at her lower lip. “The good one, no less.”
Despite the rumbling jest in his tone, something exciting and dangerous crackled over her skin at the pictures this painted in her head. But there was no time for stray thoughts.
The hand went again to the jar, and this time his thumb came out bearing the honey. In a deliberate move, he cradled her breast and transferred the sweet glaze in a smudge over her nipple. Mischief alight in his eyes as he watched her reaction to this move, he did the same in turn to the other.
Are all ships’ cooks such decadent madmen?
“Now,” he said, eyes on his handiwork, “what finer thing could a man ask for?” With a satisfied nod to himself, Bone fell to her upturned breasts once more.
His first exploratory t
aste of them, she discovered, had been a mere shadow of the attention he gave to her now. The tight, honeyed bud found itself pulled into his mouth, the sensation gentle at first while his tongue rasped away the sweetness he’d laid there, but then more insistent as he worked to clean away every trace.
She could scarcely believe the sight of him at her breast. He looked a different man entirely than the imposing pirate she’d first seen in the council chamber. Not fearsome at all now that his eyes were closed in pleasure and quiet rumbles of appreciation drifted up over her moistened flesh.
Brigit bit her lip as her eyes moved down to his shoulders, their depth from front to back making her want to knead and push at them. The awkward young men who made up her limited past experiences had been all elbows and shoulder blades. John Bone was a great, solid beast of a man. A man whose weight she wanted to be smothered in, who made her want to roll about like a cat in heat. She would’ve been massaging and pawing away at him, if only she had sufficient hold of her faculties at that moment to do anything other than support her weight on her arms and be savoured.
When she thought there could truly be no more, he moved to the other side and began the process anew, relieving a second sensitive tip of its sugary coating. The suckling at this side grew almost painful as his mouth demanded more. The first nipple he’d worked at had been damp and cooling in the air of the galley, but now he took it up between his fingers, rolling and tugging. The parallel sensations worked to drag urgent whimpers from her throat.
“Please, John …” The words tumbled out of her, though she didn’t know precisely what it was she wanted from him. Only to beg perhaps. Beg for more.
Hearing his own name seemed to further stoke the fires of his kisses, and he carried them scorching up along her throat again until his lips found their way to hers. His mouth demanded for a final, clear moment, that Brigit O’Creagh acknowledge what was happening down here in the galley of The Devil’s Luck.