Mariah's Prize (10 page)

Shaken, Gabriel reached down to slip his fingers into her hair, letting the curve of her cheek fill his palm. Her lips were parted and swollen from his kiss, her eyes dark with passion. So much passion for such a little maid! He couldn’t fathom it, or her. If she could rouse him this much with only her kiss, what kind of heaven would he have found with her by daybreak?

With Mariah’s hands still linked around his neck, Gabriel swiftly gathered her into his arms and lay her across the pillows on the bunk, the rose silk shushing as her skirts fell around her body. She didn’t speak, and neither did he, unwilling to break whatever spell it was they’d created between them. Shyly she reached up to touch his face, her fingers traveling from the rough beard of his jaw to the curve of his lips. He caught her fingers in his and pressed them to his lips, savoring her touch as he kissed her captive fingertips. By the candlelight he would have noticed if she blushed, and she didn’t. How much knowledge did she have of what would come next?

“Sweet Mariah,” he murmured as he bent to kiss her throat.

“My own sweet poppet.”

Mariah closed her eyes as his lips found her pulse in the hollow at the base of her throat, the tantalizing sensations of his warm, wet mouth on her fevered skin. She tangled her fingers in his long hair, the bow slipping off as his hair slid, untied, around her wrists. She didn’t realize he’d unpinned her bodice until he eased the silk from her shoulders, his fingers teasing along the edge of her shift. When his tongue found the soft bud of her nipple, she gasped, her back arching against the pillows as he held her steady. Her fingers clasped convulsively into the velvet of his waistcoat as he suckled her soft flesh into firm arousal. She whimpered and dragged his mouth back to hers, her body twisting beneath his with her need, a need she still didn’t truly comprehend. She only knew the fire came from Gabriel, and only Gabriel could show her its meaning.

His breathing harsh, he shoved back her skirts, his hand sliding up the length of her leg beneath her shift, to the warm, bare skin of her thigh above her stocking. Lord, his hands were shaking like a green boy’s! She moved restlessly beneath his touch, and when he found her she was wet and ready for him. He moved his hand against her, and she gasped with pleasure and surprise, curling her legs around him as she strived to draw him in. The womanly scent of her, her small, breathy whimpers, the sight of her pale legs tangled in the rose silk, her dark red garters against her white skin, her head pressed back into the pillows, the flush of desire already dark on her throat and breasts—all of her more enticing, more erotic, than anything he could ever imagine. With every one of his senses on edge and his arousal painful from its intensity, he tore at the buttons on his breeches.

Salvation, that’s what Ethan had called her. Fleetingly Gabriel thought of the war that lay before him, of slaughter and destruction and the screams of mutilated men. Salvation. And now Gabriel knew if he didn’t have her, he’d be damned forever.

He kneeled between her legs, and instinctively she welcomed him, shifting her body to accommodate him, and again he marveled at her rare combination of innocence and passion. But for all her willingness, she was still a maid. Even as he lay hard and ready against her, for her sake, he could not forget that.

“Mariah, sweet, mark what I say,” he said, his voice rough with the effort it took to restrain himself.

“I don’t want to hurt you, but this first time I must. Then I swear to you I’ll never give you anything but pleasure.”

Her eyes flew open, stunning Gabriel with the pain already there, and she pressed her hand to her mouth to stifle a sob.

“No weeping, now, poppet,” he “said as, bewildered, he wiped away the tear that slid across her cheek toward the pillow.

“I’m sorry, but since Eve in the garden there’s been no help for this” “—Nay, but you will hurt me, no matter if you mean to or not!” she cried, her words breaking with emotion and anguish. She covered her eyes with her arm.

“You’ll go, and I’ll be left with nothing save the right to mourn you!” “Mariah, listen to me” — “I loved Daniel, and I promised to wed him when he returned, promised against the wishes of my mother and father because I loved him, and he loved me!” She rolled away from Gabriel and curled herself on her side, lost in misery. She hadn’t wanted to remember Daniel, not now, but once she’d begun she couldn’t stop.

“I wished him fare-thee-well and waved until I could see his ship no more, and then I waited and lived on my hopes and his promise. He was second mate on a Jamaican schooner, and their run was fast, but two days from Newport he was lost in a squall in the dogwatch.

“And I did not know. I waited and waited on the dock while all the other men came ashore, and then at last the captain came to tell me, almost like he’d already forgotten Daniel had ever lived, and I wanted to die from the pain of it. My poor, sweet, forgotten Daniel!”

Gabriel was known as a ruthless man, one who had made his way in the world by taking what we wanted. But as much as he desired the sobbing girl beside him, he knew he’d let her go. For once his conscience left him no choice.

He had lost her this night to the ghost of a drowned boy, lost her to a heartbreaking grief that excluded him.

He watched her as she wept, her dark hair wet with her tears, her fingers digging into her folded arms. Gently he smoothed her hair from her face. With a sigh he lay down beside her and pulled her close, holding her and murmuring her name until her sobs finally died away and she lay still in his arms.

He listened to waves on the beach below and held Mariah, just held her. He thought of Catherine, and wondered if she would have mourned him if he’d been lost, instead, as fiercely as Mariah did her Daniel.

He had never felt more alone in his life.

The house was dark when Mariah returned home. In the kitchen she took off her shoes, unwilling to wake her mother or sister on the stairs, and in her stockinged feet she padded through the hallway. She felt desolate and empty inside, loneliness already echoing within her soul, and though she would go to bed she knew she’d find no sleep or comfort from her misery.

She was halfway up the stairs before she saw the dark mass of the figure huddled on the landing and the empty pitcher on the top step.

“You don’t love me, neither of you do,” said Mrs. West hoarsely. In her hands was a folded paper, and over and over her shaking fingers smoothed the crease.

“The truth’s written here, where I’can’t deny it.”

“Come, Mama, I’ll take you to bed. It’s very late, and you’re tired.”

“Read this, daughter, and learn how a mother’s love’s repaid!” Pulling herself unsteadily to her feet, Mrs. West thrust the paper toward Mariah.

“Jenny’s run off with her precious Elisha.”

All that morning during the final hectic preparations before the tide turned and the Revenge sailed, Gabriel both dreaded and anticipated Mariah’s appearance. He didn’t doubt she would come—he’d left her little enough choice-it was only when that kept him wondering, that and what mood she’d be in when she finally appeared.

He had driven her to Newport himself, and for the entire trip she had been miserably silent and withdrawn, and clearly shamed by what they’d done. Or hadn’t done, by his reckoning. She’d no notion that she was the first woman in his life he’d sent home unsatisfied, and that questionable distinction rankled at his pride. But worse than that was realizing that he cared less about his own disappointment than about hers. He cared that she was unhappy, even if the source of her unhappiness had nothing to do with him.

The sorry truth was that in the past weeks, while he thought he’d been giving her the chance to come to trust him, instead he’d been the one who’d come to know and like her for more than just her lovely face. He liked the way she bantered and bartered with tradesmen, how quickly she’d learned to cope with the thousand details of outfitting the Revenge, even how, when faced by her father’s obvious incompetence, she’d remained devoted to his worthless memory.

This small, dark-haired lass with the rippling laugh was beyond all his experience. There’d been plenty of women whose company he enjoyed, and one—Catherine—whom he’d loved dearly, but Mariah West was the first that he had ever liked as much. It was the damnedest thing, and it did absolutely nothing to improve his temper this morning.

He scowled at the sloop’s long, red pennant waving languidly against the slate gray sky. He didn’t like the heavy look of the clouds, a sure sign of foul weather to come, and the air was too hot and still to suit him. Already his shirt was stuck to his back beneath his coat, and tide or no tide, it was high time they headed out to the deep water, where the winds would fill his sails and clear his wits. This morning he had no patience with the crowds of laughing, cheering townspeople come to the docks to see them off, and though he suspected they were counting on him to make some sort of patriotic, death-andconfusionto-the French speech, he had absolutely no intention of obliging them.

Once again he scanned the milling crowds on the dock. Where the devil was she, anyway?

He turned and tripped over a small, towheaded boy coiling a line around a pin.

“What the thundering hell d’you think you’re doing,” he began as the boy cowered before him, ‘you fumble-fingered little son of a”— ” You needn’t swear at the boy. Captain Sparhawk! ” said Mariah warmly.

“From where I stood, you were the one who was clumsy, not he!”

Gabriel swung around to face her, his feelings at seeing her again decidedly mixed. She stood with her balled fists on her waist, and beneath her wide-brimmed straw that her eyes were narrowed and her face flushed with anger. Oh,

they were a righteous pair this morning, he thought grimly, trying to remember how differently he’d planned this reunion.

Ignoring her for the moment, Gabriel cuffed the boy lightly on the side of his head. “Off with you, puppy. Find Mr. Fair and tell him I said to put you to more useful work out of my sight.”

“You’ve no right to strike him!” declared Mariah indignantly.

“He’s scarcely more than a child!”

“I’ve every right in the world, and if he’s in this sloop’s company, he’s not a child.” He didn’t really expect her to back down, and she didn’t, her little chin raised stubbornly and her black brows tugged down low over the bridge of her nose.

“If you were a man, I’d seize you up for back talk and have the bos’n give you a dozen lashes to take the bile out of your tongue.”

“Then perhaps you’d best prescribe two dozen for yourself, Captain!”

This wasn’t going at all as Mariah had expected, though in a peculiar way it was easier. Easier to be angry at Gabriel than to let him know how hard it was for her to come to him after last night, better to have him berate her for interfering than whisper honeyed lovers’ words that confused and shamed her. All better than having him kiss her and caress her and make her world turn upside down with the sweetness of his touch.

“I’m quite certain your bos’n would be willing to oblige.”

“What in God’s name are you doing on board now, anyway?” he demanded, as if he didn’t already know. Against his best intentions he pictured how she’d looked last night, her eyes seductively half-closed and her lips parted as she’d arched back against his pillows.

Some things, it seemed, hadn’t changed one bit between them.

“I’m coming with you.” The determination in her eyes dared him to object.

“My sister has eloped with a young man, and I must go after them to bring her back. They sailed last night with your friend Captain Richardson. I would have been here earlier, but I had to make arrangements for someone to stay with my mother while I’m gone.”

He looked at her closely, wondering from her mention of Richardson if she’d discovered his role in Jenny West’s flight. If he could, he would have undone it in an instant. He’d wanted Mariah with him when he thought she’d be only a pleasant, cooing diversion until they reached the Caribbean and then he’d send her home. Now that she wasn’t his mistress and most likely never would be, he didn’t want to be laden with the responsibility of having her on board.

“Then you can go right on home and unmake your arrangements, because I’m not taking you with me.” He waved his hand toward her in a gesture of dismissal.

“I’ll find your foolish sister for you and ship her home myself.”

“I’m the owner of this vessel, and I can give you orders if I want. It says so in your commission from the governor. I’ve every intention of sailing in this sloop to Bridgetown, and nothing you can say will dissuade me. And there’s another consideration, Captain Sparhawk.”

She lowered her head and her voice so that he had to bend over to hear her.

“I wouldn’t trust you to walk my sister across the street, let alone fetch her back to Newport.”

Before he could answer she turned and scurried toward the companionway, leaving him to follow.

“Mariah, come back here!” None of the crew dared to comment or even notice that their captain was chasing their owner down the companionway, but Gabriel knew that later, between decks, they’d laugh and talk of nothing else,

and his fury grew. He dropped to the lower deck without touching a single step.

“Mariah, you’re going ashore if I have to carry you off myself!”

She was sitting perched on her sea chest in the middle of his cabin when he charged in after her, grateful that she’d had the foresight to have her few belongings already brought below.

“I’m staying, Gabriel,” she said, struggling to sound calm.

Deliberately she untied her that and set it on the chest beside her, smoothing the satin ribbons into two straight, overhanging lines.

“Here, I mean. I’m going with you.”

“The devil you will, Miss West.” He wanted to throttle her and her gracious, mannerly airs. He could see in her eyes that she was every bit as angry and full of fire as he was himself. What else could he expect after last night? All that heated blood still swirling around inside them both with no release. “There are other ships bound for Bridgetown. One of them will suit you fine.”