The Unraveling of Lady Fury

by Shehanne Moore

  She could not bear to turn her head. There would be no enjoyment in this for her. Enjoyment, after all he had done to her, would be the ultimate betrayal of herself. Yet, now the inevitable was upon her, the circumstances were such that she was shocked by her desire to change things. This man wasn’t the Flint she knew.

  “If you desire.”

  “I don’t, sweetheart, but here goes anyway.”

  Exhaling sharply, he leaned forward on his elbow, and she focused all her gaze, every particle of it, on the bedside table, hiding her alarm beneath an impressive façade. He fumbled his hand at the opening of his breeches.

  “James.” Her throat fluttered. “You—”

  “Hush. I don’t need the distraction.” He skirted his fingers over her sex. “I mean, this is how you want it, right? I mean, I’m to—”

  She stared harder. So much so, her eyes watered. The closeness. The feel of his breath on her cheek, her forehead. The warm scent of him. He panted as he spoke, in that way she remembered so well.

  “I don’t care. Just do it. With as little touching. Thank you.”

  He adjusted his weight, and she closed her eyes, her breath catching, as she felt him enter her.

  “So, how’s this?”

  She felt the tension in his muscles.

  “Am I touching you as little as possible?”

  He reached over her and grasped the bed railing with one hand. “Hmm? You want me to go on?” His voice came from deep in his chest.

  “Please.”

  “You’re dry. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  She didn’t care. A little pain might be a good thing. A little pain might stop her heart pounding and her breath coming in shallow waves.

  “See, I don’t want you slapping me with a rule about that next.”

  “I won’t. Please. I just want you to do it. As you promised.”

  How on earth was her voice so calm—a little faint perhaps—when she herself trembled from head to toe?

  “Did I?”

  Her insides tightened. But not because of what he said. Or the knowledge of what would be discomfort, if not pain, when he pushed inside her sensitive flesh. If only. No. It was the knowledge of being sex against sex like this. Of feeling his hardened flesh against her. Just like before.

  As he grasped the bed rail tighter and thrust so she could feel every hard inch of him, she had to keep her fingers fisted on the bedcover for fear she’d raise them to his face and do something silly, like drag it down so her lips could meet his and she could immerse herself in the heat, the ecstasy, the passion she had known with this man.

  The physical sensation of him inside her was too much. She had to master it. This was not old times. This was a business transaction. Lady Margaret. Lady Margaret. Lady Margaret.

  “If you want me to do something about the fact you’re dry as dust, say so. But don’t say I never warned you about the cream.”

  “It’s fine. Pray continue.”

  Pray? She would like to. She would like to pray to…Lady Margaret. England, they said, was very nice at this time of year. Full of daisies. And the thing—the awful thing was he’d no sooner thrust than her discomfort eased. How was that?

  “Silently.” Although he hadn’t opened his mouth, she felt obliged to remind him.

  She reddened at the telltale moisture between her legs, as if she wanted him. She didn’t want him. She couldn’t afford to want him. Mindless copulation was all she sought to father the Beaumont heir. Her body could lie all it liked. Her mind knew what was required.

  But he was exactly as she remembered. Except he’d not set a rhythm yet. She fisted her hands tighter on the silken damask. She’d rather he didn’t wait. She shifted on the bedspread, a tingling sensation in her blood.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be silent and quick as I can.”

  She smothered the words No, you don’t have to.

  “I just don’t want to touch you more than is humanly possible.”

  “Perhaps if you used both your hands?”

  “Hmm? You mean you want me to—”

  She jerked her eyes open. “To grasp the bedrail, that is.”

  Had she said that? She ground her teeth. Of course she had. And she’d said it to protect herself. She’d never thought it would be as awful, as basic, as this. Or that what would rise would be so primitive. Flint hadn’t kissed her. He hadn’t, beyond that brief sensation of his cool fingers against her skin, touched her. Yet some animal part of herself stirred. She tightened her muscles against it.

  “I’m doing my best.”

  He was. And so was she, to bite back everything that flooded her mind. She closed her eyes again in a frantic bid to remember how this had been with Thomas. At that moment Flint embedded himself so deep, her body teetered on the edge. Telltale tingles, too delicious, too pronounced to ignore, spiked her center. It might be fine now to take that warm, wanton pleasure, but how would she feel afterward?

  She felt him reach fulfillment. No, she would not let herself. She braced, holding her breath till she feared her lungs would burst. It was over. Thank God.

  For a long moment she lay, trying to collect her shattered thoughts and drag some air into her parched lungs, trying to keep her face averted. How it had been for him, copulating with a woman he didn’t even like, wasn’t something she wished to consider.

  Loosening his hold of the bedrail, he pulled out. The movement sent warm ripples cascading through her. Pleasure bubbled, to her mortification. In a panic, she jerked upright.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “What do you think I’m doing? I’m getting up.” Under no circumstances would she consider what she quashed—pleasure. Under even less would she let him believe he had, in any way, pleasured her. “I want to… My leg has a cramp. I just need—ouch—I need to stand.”

  “Fine. But you do that and you’ll have to do it all again.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  She couldn’t do it all again. Not without setting some very stringent conditions on it first. Were there any left? She jerked her head around to meet his gaze. She didn’t want him knowing she didn’t have cramp either.

  “Me too, sweetheart. And you might say I’m not for it right now. Later.” He cut her off as her lips parted. A bargain was a bargain after all. “Now, you want that heir, you lie down.”

  He reached toward her, a study in rumpled sexuality. His shirt cascaded over his breeches, which somehow adhered, just, to his narrow hips. Nothing, yet everything on display.

  “I don’t see what business—”

  “Didn’t your ma teach you anything? Or wasn’t she around long enough?”

  “Let’s leave my mother out of this, shall we? This has nothing to do with her, or indeed, with you.”

  “Fine. But you want to be one yourself, you need to give things time to settle.”

  The fine hair stood up on the back of her neck.

  “You haven’t the faintest notion what I’m talking about, do you?”

  A huff of breath escaped her. The faintest notion? He was the one who didn’t have that.

  Mastering the thought, she lowered her gaze. She had only to observe how spectacularly she had ruined this so far to know, if he had something to impart, some knowledge, the gist of which she could actually guess, she should govern her fury and pretend to listen.

  It wasn’t as if she wanted to sleep with him.

  “My mother died when I was four.” A blush crept up her cheek. God rest her, if she saw the lengths Fury had gone to, the straits she was in, it was probably as well. “You’re meaning I should lie down if I want to conceive?”

  “Absolutely. I couldn’t put it better. You’re a married woman. How come you don’t know these things?”

  “How come you do?”

  “Because I been halfway ’round the Caribbean. But maybe that’s why you and old Tommie had a problem.”

  Old Tommie? Governing her fury was going to take a bit of doing. Her vo
ice lashed out as a hissing snap. “Thomas, which is what you will call him, was a year younger than you.”

  “Younger?”

  He raised his eyebrows, and his voice rose on the word. No doubt he thought living with her must have put years on Thomas, aging him beyond recognition.

  “He was twenty-nine. Why does that surprise you?”

  Flint shrugged.

  “Illness had, of course, wreaked havoc on him.”

  “Tommie was ill?”

  A horrified furrow dented the bridge of his nose. Now he was going to accuse her of poisoning him, wasn’t he? But he did, just possibly, have a point about the conception. She had not been able to lie down with Thomas, not since he had become ill and his physical cruelties had been things she needed to escape.

  Although quite how the blazes he could know, a man like Flint, who didn’t care where he spilled his seed, was beyond her comprehension.

  “He was very ill.” She swiveled her legs back onto the bed. “Especially by the time I had finished with him.”

  Flint shifted, uncomfortable. That was to be expected. But the thing with Fury Fontanelli was, you never knew. The Lord couldn’t have been harder on Moses. She might as well have added Thou shalt not shag to those stone tablets she’d hammered him with.

  And what had he just gone and done? Screwed her.

  It wasn’t even like it was a good screw. In fact, lousy was the word for it. And he hadn’t had a screw in months. Months and months. It was something else that had been denied him.

  “Here.” He stuck a cushion under her feet. “You should keep them raised.”

  He blamed the bed for the fact he’d screwed her instead of scarpering. It was the one welcoming thing in this whole damned place.

  “My feet?”

  “No. Your legs.”

  But it would have been just his luck to get caught flogging her candlesticks. Also these damned jewels of hers looked paste, even if they gleamed around her neck. He’d know for certain if he bit one. But so far, she hadn’t let him near enough to sink his teeth into anything.

  He’d thought this would be simple. He’d thought—all right—he’d protested a bit about the screwing. Maybe he wasn’t eager. But she opened her legs, and a woman was still a woman. Once he’d gotten in the swing, he reckoned he could do worse.

  So it was a great shock him to realize he couldn’t. This was as bad as it got.

  He should never have risen to her bait. The baggage meant every word she’d said about rotting.

  What the hell was she going to do if he kissed her? Or, for that matter, yanked her skirt up and touched her in places he remembered touching? Made her give him her body the way he wanted?

  When he’d done that before, she had been his though, hadn’t she? It wasn’t about that. It was about his damned boat. If he got in tugs with her, well, he’d just have to suffer the various cuts to his pride.

  “There. That’s the way you’ve got to lie.”

  She looked at him as if he were incapable of chivalry, although his generosity was motivated by purely altruistic intentions. All these terms and conditions and the length of time it might take to make this baby. He wasn’t hanging around that long, putting up with it. Putting up with her. He would get this over with fast. If not today, then tomorrow, provided he hung about that long. He might still see what was worth plundering and scarper.

  “James, I…I…”

  Did she think he was just low enough to attempt to maneuver her into some fancy position? Where he could screw her better? Not for all the boats in the Caribbean.

  “Trust me. What do you think I’m doing here? Trying to get my way with you?”

  She bit her lip. “To be truthful, I don’t know.”

  “What do I need to do that for, when I’ll be getting more of it later?” Lucky him.

  “I didn’t. It just seems…you know a lot.”

  The blush that spread across her face—even that first time, when he’d informed her how he knew she wasn’t Celie (and if anyone was bound to know she wasn’t, it was him) she hadn’t blushed like that. He was sure he’d remember. It was almost infectious. Enough to drive the thought she probably suspected he planned on escaping from his head.

  “I don’t say I know it all, but I do know some stuff about this.”

  “W-what? James, that’s—”

  “You got to lie down with your legs raised. Give the seed a chance to plant. It’s what you want isn’t it?”

  “It…it is. Yes. But I—I just don’t know how you can know. I didn’t think it ever bothered you whether your seeds got planted or not.”

  “I’m a man. Long as I didn’t get the clap was as much as I worried about.”

  He trailed off at the indignation brimming in her eyes. All right, maybe that wasn’t the thing to say right now. But it was true. So long as he didn’t get it, what did anything else matter?

  The thing was he’d never quite understood what it was about Fury Fontanelli. In seven years he had not thought of her, at all. Except perhaps now and again—he wouldn’t say it was more than that—that little moment when he dumped her on Fishside Wharf.

  Oh, and just maybe occasionally, like once, twice a year—he wouldn’t say it was more than that either—the first time he’d glimpsed her, standing at the rail of the Calypso. In Celie’s frock. At least, he hadn’t known it was Celie’s frock. Only that Celie had one just like it he’d given her from some French frigate he’d plundered.

  Because his attention had been riveted straight off by the knowledge that it clung a hell of a lot tighter to this woman’s breasts and hips than it had to Celie’s.

  Then he had been riveted by the fact that his first mate, Black Hawk Dawkins, said she had put it around half the crew that she was Celie. Celie, who was dead—information he got from Fury eventually after he’d threatened to make her walk the plank in Celie’s pretty shoes, a mile out to sea.

  Though quite how she died or how Fury had come by Celie’s trunk, her clothes, her identity, he didn’t ask. Such interest would have shown Celie meant something. The handful that Fury was though, he’d had suspicions.

  He had wanted revenge for Celie. Hell, how was he meant to spend a voyage with no woman in his bed, warming his nights—and his days? And every other moment it needed warming? But even then, even now, he knew, Fury threatened him on some bone-deep level.

  It had disturbed him, when it had been meant to be revenge for Celie, that he should enjoy it so much. Not the revenge. Her. Fury Fontanelli. Of course he had needed to keep her at arm’s length. He always did with specimens he didn’t understand. And he had made damn sure, though she warmed his bed, it was all she had warmed. Women and boats didn’t mix. Not permanently.

  There was always a port with some harlot in it. One he could kiss goodbye to. Although harlots carried risks. Like clap.

  “I don’t have it by the way. In case you’re worried about this heir. Leastways, I reckon I’d know about it by now if I did have it.”

  Her green eyes glinted in the shaded light. “How refreshing to know. For a second there I thought you were going to surprise me.”

  “Me, sweetheart? This cushion, isn’t it a surprise?”

  “If you stuck it over your face, perhaps.”

  “My face?”

  What the hell had he gone and said that was wrong now? Until he’d come in here he hadn’t realized it was possible for him to say anything that was.

  Even as he opened his mouth to say Your face is as good a resting place as any, he gravitated back to her troubled gaze. And his tongue froze. His eyes too. He’d never been more conscious of staring at a woman right on the edge. Maybe she hated him. But she needed him. And if he walked out that would leave her stranded.

  Maybe it was as well it was a lousy screw. A halfway decent screw with her could conflict him. It wasn’t all down to what she had in that cellar that made him unwilling. Gut instinct was whispering Don’t.

  “Don’t you worry about what yo
u might give me.”

  “Well, I’m—”

  “Not? So?” She shifted in a rustle of silk. “How long am I meant to lie here?”

  Listening to his insults? He could be mean, couldn’t he? Suppose too, he sat her here while he rifled the house. Except the way she looked…

  “I don’t know. Ma always said—”

  “Ma? What is this, old wives tales now? Next you’ll be telling me that if you’d kept your boots on or I stood on my hands in the washbasin there, it would be a boy. Ma. Excuse me, I’m getting—”

  “She was a midwife—before she was a whore.” Her stillness made him wish he hadn’t admitted that.

  She had always thought, as had everyone else, he was just a dirt-poor farm boy from Savannah. Because that was as much as he let them think.

  “You never said—”

  With difficulty he bared his teeth. It wasn’t that he was ashamed. It wasn’t that nothing he’d done had ever been enough to outrun the humbleness of his birth and his childhood. It wasn’t even that he’d somehow parted with this miserable fact. It was that her eyes studied him as if she felt his pain with a sick certainty. Her brows knitted, her lips parted…

  It was vital her lips didn’t, that he re-erect the barrier, close the tiny rift that had somehow opened in his chest. The one that seemed to point the way to him not running out on her.

  “You could say she knew her stuff. And I just hope it’s something you’ve thought about. But maybe you’ve not.”

  “Thought about what?”

  “Married woman who doesn’t know about lying down and things? Probably not.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He didn’t know. But he didn’t want her to know he didn’t know. He’d only spoken to mask his discomfort. And now, now he needed to come up with something.

  “Thought about if it’s a girl. I mean anything’s possible in this crackpot scheme you got here.”

  “I didn’t notice you thinking so last night, when you blackmailed me into it. But for your information, Lady Margaret did not specify as such.”

  “What? Doesn’t she care?”

  “A girl could not succeed to the actual title. But, so long as I provide a child from a confirmed pregnancy, there is nothing Lady Margaret can do about the inheritance. Beggars cannot be choosers.”