The Acquisition

by Louisa Trent

  CHAPTER FIVE

  She awakened naked in a strange bed, with Josh naked on top of her, covering her just like Mary had predicted. How this had happened, Harry didn't exactly recollect, but only a fool looks a gift horse in the mouth. Thanking her lucky stars, she got to work on forcing Josh to see her as a woman, not as the child who had followed him around the docks since she was old enough to walk.

  A wiggle, Mary informed her, was irresistible to the male. A wiggle was the best place to start a seduction.

  Harry slowly undulated her hips.

  A muscled arm folded over her. The man attached to that muscled arm growled, "Stop that!"

  To her mind, this proved Mary wrong; Josh didn't like the wiggle. And if Mary was wrong about the first step, her friend was more than likely wrong about the last step too, that step being the part where the male puts his thing inside the female and does that.

  Ben always said, if there was a man he never wanted to make angry, it was Joshua Kane. For the life of her, she couldn't see it. Josh might bark at her, as he had just done then, but he didn't bite. Big and ferocious to look at, he had never been anything less than gentle with her. And because she loved him, she was willing to risk the slight outside chance that perhaps Mary might still have been correct about some aspects of doing that. Because ... well ... Josh was covering her like a blanket, just as her friend said a man would do when his thoughts turned to mating.

  Harry was determined to whip those mating thoughts into mating action.

  Scooting around the steel enclosure of sinewy arms, Harry ran a lazy finger over Josh's back.

  As far down as she could see, no telltale pale skin marred the all-over perfection of his lustrous tanned skin. He must strip down on board the Regina Marie...

  Alas, though her eyes held to a downward cast, she couldn't see all of him. Nothing below the waist, that is. Specifically, his thing. However, she had stumbled upon enough seamen pissing into the Acushnet River, to speculate that poor Josh had been born with some sort of deformity, for unlike the tiny soft hoses those pissing seamen owned, Josh's male part felt hard and huge between her legs. Also, it blazed poker hot, landlocked as it was on the inside of her thighs.

  Despite Josh's odd irregularities, Harry moved onward with her seduction. Her best friend told her men liked touching a woman's chest--it got them hot and bothered and ready for doing that.

  Harry looked up into the handsome face she loved. "If you would like to give my titties a tweak, you may." There! That should tell him she meant business!

  "Titties, Harriet?"

  At long last, she had caught Josh's full attention, if for all the wrong reasons. Was that disgust registering on his vocal cords?

  "Yes, titties. You needn't tweak 'em first, not if you don't have a mind to," she amended. "I only thought you might like to." That Mary must be the biggest liar in all of New Bedford!

  "Breasts, sweetheart. 'Titties' is coarse."

  Oh! It was only the wording he disapproved of, not the action. Josh objected to foul language in general and obscenities in specific. On more than one occasion he had given her a stern lecture--and a threatened spanking, which he had never once delivered, more's the pity--when she had used a particularly salty cuss word. Josh could be such a stickler for decorum at times!

  Buoyed by drink, she squeezed Josh's big hand--was there perhaps a correlation between hand size and thing size?--up onto her chest, covering the small bump on the otherwise flat terrain.

  According to Mary, men preferred big chests. As there was nothing she could do about the deficit, Harry simply closed her heavy eyes, and enjoyed the lovely sensation of having his warm hand on her naked and cold tittie.

  Mmm. His fingers moved! Now that felt wonderful, indeed.

  "They might yet grow," she said by way of apology when he quickly ran out of territory to cover, and there was nothing left for him to hold onto except the tip.

  "They might. And if they don't, that's all right too," Josh said, rubbing his fingers together around the part that goes into a babe's mouth.

  Mrs. Shaunnessy suckled the youngest of her brood in the taproom's back kitchen. The babe latched onto the long brown teat and gulped noisily, then belched.

  Harry's lids snapped wide. An idea was born.

  Men. Babes. Where was the difference, when it came right down to it? As long as Josh didn't belch afterwards. Belching wasn't very romantic.

  "Would you like to put your mouth on the teat?" she asked politely, making up the seduction as she went along.

  Josh's hazel-green eyes, usually so warm with understanding when directed at her, suddenly hardened. His tanned face hardened too. This was not the same Josh whose hand she had held as a child. Who was this fierce man?

  She had made a mistake in comparing this stranger to a babe. Josh was definitely a full-grown man, Harry realized. With his curly blue-black hair, rich dark skin, tall stature, and seaman's muscles, this unfamiliar Josh must have the ladies swooning over him. What chance did she have against those exotic foreign ladies he met in every port? Someday he might go away for good, never to return...

  She wouldn't be able to go on living if Josh never returned.

  Though this new Josh frightened her a little, as the old Josh never had, as brash as a seaport doxy, Harry offered up her teat to him. "Go on," she urged. "Suck it."

  His mouth landed and drew the tip in, his teeth biting the suddenly pointed end.

  Odd, that point. Only cold weather made her point like that. Though it was still breezy in the room, she was no longer cold. In fact, she was very pleasantly warm with Josh in bed with her, on top of her, covering her.

  As Josh suckled her, Harry's hands clenched on his wide shoulders, and then reaching down his back, she scratched him like a cat. She couldn't help it! She just had to do it, for when he suckled her, her belly fluttered and her female parts gnawed, and down below, she grew moist, then wet, just as when she had touched herself. Her scratch was the end result of all that, and beyond her power to prevent.

  Boldly, she placed his hand over her privates.

  Josh rubbed the heel of his palm against her opening, and the pressure made the ache more bearable, but it still wasn't enough. Panting, moaning, her pelvis lifting, Harry rocked against his hand, grinding her opening against his palm for relief.

  "I want ... I want ... I want..."

  Good heavens! She wanted what Mary told her about. She wanted Josh to do that to her! "I want ... you to come inside me!"

  To gauge his reaction to the idea, she looked up.

  There was an unusually stern cast to Josh's face. She had never seen that severe expression before. Did the idea repulse him? Just wait 'til she got her hands on Mary!

  But much preferring her hands on Josh, she reached for that hot poker searing the inside of her upper thigh.

  "Harry, no!" Josh shouted, but his eyes, now hot points of green jungle flame, drifted to her loins, as he posed himself up on his arms over her.

  He wanted to put his thing inside her; she could tell.

  "Do it now," she demanded.

  Growing up, Josh had always admonished her to be brave, especially down at the wharf when he was leaving on yet another extended voyage, and she would start to blubber. So as not to let him down, she would always make up a story, tell him soot had landed in her eye, or some such nonsense, to explain her smarting eyes.

  She opened her thighs, lest she weaken and show fear. For now that Josh had come up on his elbows, she could see his thing was a fearsome sight. Not only long, it was thick as well, with bulging veins and a monstrous wide top, from which something oozed like a volcanic eruption.

  Josh wasn't built like a normal man. That's why he felt so huge and hard and hot against her thighs. Mary had prepared her; her friend told her mating hurt. But Mary didn't know Josh was deformed. Mating with a man like Josh, a man with such a huge appendage where a small soft sausage should be, might very well kill her.

  His freakish thing st
arted to grind against her. She could tell he was trying to hold that enormous mistake of nature away from her, but it seemed to have a mind of its own, a life of its own. And though it belonged to Josh, and therefore she loved that deformed part of him too, she couldn't help but wish that he had a large nose instead, or big floppy ears, or anything, anything else, just so long as that anything else didn't have to knife its way inside her.

  Despite her consumption of ardent spirits, she went rigid on the bed. The lovely, wet, widening sensation Josh had provoked inside her when he sucked at her titties, had dried up, until her opening felt as though it had shrunk to the size of a darning needle's eye. Doing that would hurt. Oh, she would suffer! But to ensure Josh's return to her, she must let him.

  Biting her lips until she tasted blood, two hands around his neck in a chokehold, Harry dragged on Josh until that enormous appendage rammed at the gate to her passage.

  The best she could hope for was to get the agony over with as quickly as possible

  CHAPTER SIX

  "Harry wait!" His lust swelling like the mountainous waves of a nor'easter at sea, Josh rasped, "Sweetheart, no!"

  But while his mouth said one thing, his manhood was saying something else again. Fair means or foul, his cock wanted into her.

  He wished he could be that mythical figure for Harry, but he was only a man, a flesh-and-blood man. He would be gone to sea for four lonely years, and God help him, but he hated the endless monotony of that ocean duty, hated the blood and stench of whaling, hated picking the bones of those great ocean beasts, hated boiling down what remained, their blubber, for oil. Whaling ships weren't called floating butcher shops for nothing.

  Injured whales roar when the eleven-foot lances pierce their thick flesh. Not from the throat, as the great beasts had no vocal cords, but somewhere deep within the bowels of the belly. Even then, even after whales are speared, they don't go down easy. Each and every one fights unto death for their freedom. In a wake of bloody foam, they drag the stout whalers on sleigh rides across the waves, until tired and weak and yes, finally beaten, the harpooners move in for the kill.

  There was truth in the saying, "a dead whale or a stove boat; an injured whale could reap destruction on boats and men alike." Still, Josh had to ask himself why. Where was the need for all that destruction? For what reason? So landlubbers could have clean-burning spermaceti candles and baleen-boned corsets?

  And so he could make his fortune. Mustn't forget that.

  For the sake of his ambition, he had blood on his hands. To make something of himself, he put up with the misery and the loneliness of the endless days on the ocean, subsisting on naught but hardtack and dried fish. While scouts perched on the masthead lookout kept a constant eye peeled on the horizon for skyward spouting, signifying the majestic presence of whale herds, Josh kept his eye peeled on the future. He blood-slaughtered whales so that one day, someday, he would rise above his lowly station in life.

  But someday was far off, and Harry felt good right now.

  A shudder raced through Josh. He could wait no longer. No use pretending he was the noble hero he had tried to be for Harry. Tonight he would forget his sordid past and trapped future, and make Harry his in the here and now. Time enough on the morrow to make the necessary arrangements to wed her before he shipped out...

  Though there was something he needed to tell her first. A secret he must reveal. It was because of Harry's father that Josh was now doing everything he could to make sure folks not born free had a chance to live free before they died, and he did those things illegally. Harry needed to know who he was, and what he did, before she cast her lot with him. After he told her, and if she agreed, he would go talk to the minister before leaving on this next voyage.

  He worked the pretty pink nipple, rolling it gently between thumb and finger, back and forth, petting her, and Harry moaned. Heatedly.

  His hand looked huge on her, hard on her, dark on her, but his darker, harder, bigger body needed no further persuasion than that heated moan, that heated moan told him everything he needed to know.

  "That's right. That's right," he soothed, but breathing rough. Carnality soaring, his free palm slid down her flat belly to her loins. Mouths joined, he continued to court a nipple, while sliding a careful finger to those seductive outer lips, easing open the plump folds, gaining admittance to her lush wet tight channel.

  There it was, the virginal barrier; his middle finger had bumped into it.

  Josh grunted in pride. Harry was his, all his; she had never belonged to another.

  Withdrawing his touch, he let his cock delve her, just a bit, just to get a taste of Harry.

  She broke the kiss. "Josh?"

  "Hmm?" He asked, keeping a smile in his voice so as not to scare her off, though he wanted to grimace, the pleasure was that painfully intense.

  Harry, the little seductress, wiggled her hips. And his cock surged ahead into Harry's tight, virgin sheath. And he wanted to crow with pride at the possession, crow and laugh and cry too, at that first small breech of Harry. So good. So good. So painfully good, to be inside her if only that one little bit, her pure body clamped to his not-so pure body, the innocence of her devastating the experience of him, her brightness such a contrast to the darkness of him.

  Ah...

  His cock twitched, burying deeper, wet deeper, hot deeper, pulsating deeper, her muscles, her muscles, her muscles...

  Fighting him. Trying to keep him out.

  "Joshua, no! I ... I have changed my mind."

  She was a virgin. Naturally, there would be reluctance, even fear. This is what he had guarded against; he never wanted Harry to fear him.

  "Hush," he whispered, pushing forward. "Just let me, Harry. It will get better soon. When the membrane breaks, I will stop and rest a spell before continuing. Only when you get accustomed to me inside you, when your muscles relax, will I start to move."

  "No, I tell you! I have changed my mind. I thought I could do it, but I cannot," she cried, and pushed off against him, her hands hammering to keep him at bay.

  "Shh," he said, firmly; it was too late for him to stop now. Didn't she understand that? And she owed him. He'd sacrificed years of freedom for her. Everything he had done, he had done for her. Too late. Much too late to call a halt to this now. It had gone too far, and she felt too good.

  He butted her maidenhead. "One push and I am in, and you are mine." Harry was too stubborn and willful for her own good, for his good too. He would not have a cock-tease in his bed! She was to be his wife, and wives must obey their husbands. He would not tolerate a woman who defied him!

  And he would make it good for her, he swore that he would, just as soon as he got inside her, all the way deep inside her...

  "No!" she said, and tried to buck him off. "You bastard! Let me go! I want someone better than the son of a whore! A gentleman. Someone with money. Someone who doesn't stink of fish guts."

  "Hold still!" he raged, restraining her squirming body with the weight of his much larger body. When she still wouldn't hold still, he held her down, a hand on each of her wrists. In a red haze of anger and unrequited lust, he pushed hard and deep while she writhed.

  To his dying day, he knew he would never forget Harry's pain-filled scream as he ripped through the barrier.

  He had never caused a woman pain, and here he had hurt Harry, the one person he had never wished to hurt! Everything he had done, he had done for her! His ambitions were for her. He loved her. Loved her! Purely. With everything that was good and true and decent inside him.

  Lust died. Josh eased out of Harry as carefully as he could, then jumped from the bed.

  Closing up her legs, Harry faced the wall. "I hate you, Joshua Kane!"

  "You are young yet. Only a child," Josh said, the weary words dragged out of him. "I should have explained to you about how it is between men and women."

  "I am not a child. It's you, Joshua Kane. I don't want you. I am tired of making do, of always wondering where my next
meal is coming from. Look at this room," she seethed, as a drop of virgin's blood trickled down her thigh. "This room is squalid. I deserve better. I will have better than the likes of you! Someday, I will be a fine lady with fine clothes upon my back, and a fine carriage, and a fine mansion up on the hill, away from the sounds and smells of the piers. My someday cannot include you."

  Josh stumbled into his clothes, angry, frustrated, concerned, all rolled into one. Why didn't she just come right out and say it? Why let it hang there between them?

  When push came to shove, the Quaker teachings Harry's abolitionist father preached, a religion that maintained that a man's heart, not his race or creed, is what counted, had not been sufficient to breech the insurmountable barrier of their differing skin tones. Finally, Harry had seen the truth that stared her in the face, a truth that stared him in the face every morning when he shaved.

  A mixed bloodline was his birthright, and he could not change it. But he could change the course of his destiny. No, he would change the course of his destiny. He was strong and smart; ambition burned inside him. He would work his fingers to the bone, seize every opportunity, take every risk, if only to prove her wrong. Someday, he would make her eat those words of derision. Someday, he would be on top of the world looking down.

  Josh took out his purse and placed it beside Harry on the bed. It was the money put aside for the bank. Every last coin he owned in the world was inside the purse, enough to pay the back rent on her shack, enough so that she wouldn't starve during the four years he was gone. He had just handed her the start of his future, a future he had hoped one day to share with her. That was the best he could do.

  "I won't bother you again, Harriet," he said formally, and left the brothel room.

  * * * *

  For a good long while after Joshua left, Harry lay there naked and stunned. When the numbing left, the hurting took over. Pain was the impetus she needed to sniff back her tears, sit up in the bed, and upend the leather purse, emptying its contents between her folded legs.