Pirate Wolf Trilogy (9 page)

She tried one
last time to squirm free, to dislodge him, but he only chastened
her with a slow smile and pressed closer, making her aware of the
swelling expansion of his flesh as it responded to her futile
efforts.

Shocked that
there was any more of him to expand, her body went completely still
beneath him. Her breath came faster, the pounding in her blood
became distinct enough that he could feel her heart hammering in
her chest and see her panic throbbing through the small veins in
her temple.

“Was it
something I said?” he asked with a wolfish grin. “Or something you
might like me to do?”

His face was so
close, all she could see was the black slash of his eyebrows, the
splash of ebony hair flung forward over his brow and cheeks, and
the amused mockery in his eyes. She closed her own for a moment and
when she opened them again, they blazed with such fiery contempt,
he almost laughed out loud.

“I gather we
understand each other?”

She managed a
jerky nod and he cautiously eased the pressure from her mouth. He
did not remove his hand completely, choosing instead to rest it
across her throat in such a way as to lock her head flat and firm
on the desk, not allowing her the luxury to turn either way or
avoid the further confrontation in his eyes.

“I say again,
mam’selle. Quite the ferocious little corsair. Ferocious, warm, and
surprisingly tempting,” he added, shifting his hips slightly for
emphasis. “I don’t suppose I could interest you in a small skirmish
of another nature?”

She swallowed
and he could feel the movement of her throat muscles beneath his
hand.

“Get off of
me,” she rasped.

“
Ah.
Mam’selle declines,” he said softly.
“Pour le moment.”

“Get… off… of
me!”

He
watched her mouth shape the words and savored the echo of them as
they vibrated down his spine. He had made the proposition in jest,
yet his flesh was betraying the fact she
was
soft and warm and extremely tempting. And that
there were other needs besides food and water he had gone too long
without.

“If I do, I
want your word—your blood oath—that you will not try any more of
your foolish tricks.”

“My word?” she
spat. “My blood oath? How do you know you can trust it?”

“
Because
you are going to trust me when I give you
my
word, and
my
oath, mam’selle—”he lowered his head, lowered his mouth
until the heat of it renewed the flush of warmth in her cheeks—“if
you ever …
ever
draw
another weapon
of any kind
on
me, I will bind you hand and foot to the shrouds and flay your
backside into bloody strips. And that—”he molded his fingers more
poignantly around the arch of her throat—“only after I have sliced
out your tongue and fed it to the sharks.”

She swallowed
again and her lips parted, trembling as much from the force he was
exerting on her throat as from the cool promise mirrored in the
silver-blue of his eyes.

“Your word,
mam’selle?”

She tried
forming the words twice before there was any substance to her
answer. Her face felt as if it were on fire. Her hands were curled
into fists, cold as ice, and her limbs were aching from the strain
of trying to keep him at bay.

“You have it,”
she whispered. “You have my word.”

“No
tricks?”

“No
tricks.”

He allowed a
crooked smile to underline the warning in his finger as he lifted
his hand from her throat and traced a smooth line along the curve
of her lower lip. His other hand released her wrists and he was
struck by another image as he straightened: that of her lying
exactly as she was now atop the clutter of papers and charts,
naked, with her hair unbound and spread like dark silk beneath
her.

His flesh
jumped noticeably and he had to suppose, after being at sea so long
and having come so close to death, anything female, supple, and
breathing would have had the same effect. A purely reflexive
response, comparable to a thirsty man’s reaction upon stumbling
into a pool of fresh water.

He left
her to struggle upright on her own and walked back to the sea
chest. He found a pair of relatively clean hose and, testing his
sanity along with Beau’s word of honor, finished dressing with his
back to her. He did not bother bandaging his calf and barely
glanced at the raw wound before pulling on his boots. The pain
helped to clear his head and distract his body, and after thrusting
his arms through the sleeves of a leather doublet, he buckled his
belt, raked his hands through his hair, and was all business
again.

Beau had used
the same time to gather her faltering wits about her once more. Her
body still seethed with the impression of his, her skin was
stretched so tight in places, she wanted to scratch herself to ease
the tension. Her breasts in particular were as prickly as
pincushions. Her thighs ached from being nearly split asunder, and
the bridge of flesh between felt oddly hot and runny, as if the
sensation of melting she had felt earlier had not all been in her
imagination.

“I’m going up
on deck,” Dante said casually, eyeing her from across the cabin.
“Feel free to join me when you have finished here.”

He stepped out
into the passageway, ducking his head to clear the low lintel, but
only moved a pace or two into the gloom before stopping and cocking
his head back to listen.

He did not have
long to wait. The sound of Beau’s curse and the smashing of a brass
candlestick hurled at the door assured him her temper had not been
permanently sup- pressed. Why it should make him smile, though, he
had no idea.

CHAPTER
FIVE

The
Virago
managed
to stave off the pull of the sea for another ten hours. Although it
was a fierce race against time and nature, the crews, working
together, winched six of the monstrous demi-cannon on board
the
Egret
The added
weight—nearly twelve tons—settled the hull half a strake deeper in
the water, but under Pitt’s guidance, balance was maintained and
would even afford steadier handling in rough seas. A quantity of
powder and shot was salvaged as well, though the stores had been
badly depleted in the fight with the India guards. There were few
personal items worth rescuing, most having been lost to the bilges
and damaged by salt water. One large white
mouser—Clarence—adamantly refused to leave his hidey-hole and it
took an hour-long search by Pitt and two others to flush him out.
When he emerged, his fur more black than white, he refused to be
carried, but strutted, his back arched and claws extended in
disdain, along one of the grappling lines that spanned the two
ships.

Including
the cat, there were forty-one survivors removed from the
Virago.
When the guns were shifted and
warnings issued that it would be unsafe to remain aboard her much
longer, they filed slowly across the wide planks and, to a man,
remained by the
Egret’s
rails,
their faces taut, their bodies rigid, as they watched Pitt and
Dante make a final search through the wreckage on deck. It was
Simon Dante, with his ship groaning and trembling beneath him, who
climbed the shrouds to the top of the broken mainmast and removed
her flags. Carrying them in his clenched fist, with his limp more
pronounced and the pain graying his face, he was the last to make
the crossing. Pitt ordered the cables cut, and under the faint
stirrings of a breeze, he called for enough sail in the tops to
ease the
Egret
slowly
away.

The sun
was setting behind the
Virago
,
painting her ruined and battered hull in gold. The blaze spread
across the surface of the ocean and fanned orange and red across
the sky. One by one the eyes of the men turned away from the sea
and focused on the solitary figure standing on the afterdeck, his
hands gripping the rail, his profile etched against the crimson sky
as he watched his ship die.

Even Spence,
who had fed off his anger most of the afternoon, mellowed somewhat,
respecting the pain of a fellow captain forced to watch the last
bit of shadowy hull slide beneath the whispering sea.

“One clean
shot, Father,” Beau murmured, standing at Spence’s side. “I could
pick him off from here with one clean shot.”

“Aye, I’m sure
ye could, lass. An’ I’ll keep the thought in mind if I don’t hear
any answers I like.”

“You’re going
to let him talk his way out of this?”

“I’ll admit I’m
curious to hear what he has to say. A man o’ Dante de Tourville’s
reputation simply does not behave like a petty thief unless he has
a damned good reason.”

“He has stolen
your ship!” Beau hissed, wary of Pitt and the Cimaroon standing
half a deck away. “He has forcibly taken command and stolen your
ship! It is hardly petty thievery!”

“He hasn’t
stolen it very far yet,” Spence remarked dryly. “Nor will he so as
long as we outnumber him two to one.”

Spit McCutcheon
came up beside them, swabbing his face and neck with a large square
of red linen. There were lanterns and cressets burning amidships
where the men still worked in the thickening darkness.

“I can take
naught away from them brutes,” he said, hooking a gnarled thumb
over his shoulder. “Finest bronze bastards I’ve seen in my day or
any other. No more’n a year or two out o’ the foundry, but well
seasoned an’ not a crack or split showin’. They’ll fetch a damned
pretty price in Plymouth; he weren’t pullin’ your nose on that
count.”

Spence grunted,
allowing the cannon might be a valuable commodity, but it did not
explain their hellfire importance.

“
I … er,
been watchin’ an’ listenin’ to some o’ those
Virago
men, like ye asked,” Spit said, lowering his
voice. “Damnedest thing I ever saw. Most o’ them should have been
happy just to have their bellies filled an’ a sound deck beneath
them. But to a man they’ve put their backs into the work, restin’
only when our men rest, askin’ no favors an’ takin’ no more’n a
fair share o’ water an’ victuals. An’ all the while, it’s ‘Aye,
sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ ‘Begging pardon, sir.’ ’Tisn’t natural. Got my
skin crawlin’ worse than if I’d got a passle o’ maggots nestin’
under my codpiece.”

He spat over
the side of the ship and swabbed his face again, muttering under
his breath as he walked back to where a crew was struggling to seat
the last of the bronze monsters in its wooden carriage. The
foremast had been sheered of sail and put to use as a hoist. With
timber creaking and yards straining, ten men on cables hauled and
grunted over the huge barrel of the gun while half a dozen more
pushed and prodded with tackle and pikes to swing it up and over
its cradle of ten-inch square beams. The carpenter, Thomas Moone,
had cut a new port in the hull and was affixing the last hinge and
length of bracing tackle when the hoist lines were slackened and
the full weight of the gun settled into its carriage.

The
Egret
heeled
slightly, riding a low swell on the sea. Someone had neglected to
wedge chocks under the wheels of the gun carriage and the two-ton
monster started to roll forward with the motion of the deck. Thomas
Moone heard the warning shouts and the ominous rumble of wooden
wheels, and turned in time to see the great black hole of the
muzzle lunging toward his face.

He tried to
jump out of the way but his foot snagged on a cable and he went
sprawling flat on the deck, his leg sandwiched between the muzzle
and the raw edge of the gunport. His scream brought Simon Dante to
the rail of the afterdeck. Not bothering to seek the ladder, he
vaulted over the top and landed heavily on the main deck, barely
stopping to register the pain from his injured leg. Two long
strides brought him to the side of the gun at the same time as
Jonas Spence, who grabbed the nearest cable and shouted orders to
the men to take up the slack on the tackle. One of the large wheels
had split under the weight and the gun would not move. Dante, his
muscles bulging with the strain, thrust a steel pike beneath the
barrel of the cannon and put all of his strength into levering the
cannon long enough for Spit and Geoffrey Pitt to drag Moone clear
of the port. A split second later the steel pike snapped, the wheel
shattered, and the cannon slid forward, stopping only when it was
wedged fast in the gunport.

Spit
looked from the gun, to Moone’s bruised but intact leg, then to
Dante and the broken pike. He found Spence next, giving him a
pointed
I-told-you-it-weren’t-natural
glare.

Simon Dante,
meanwhile, had slumped down beside the gun carriage, his face
streaming sweat, his hands trembling where they were squeezed
around the bloom of fresh red blood staining his hose.

“Simon?” Pitt
dropped onto one knee beside him.

Dante shook his
head and spoke through a gleaming rack of tightly clenched teeth.
“It’s nothing. It will pass.”

Spence pushed
his way around to the side of the gun. “What is it? What’s
amiss?”

“His leg,” Pitt
said. “The stubborn bastard insists there’s nothing wrong with it,
but in two weeks, it should have healed by now. Have you a barber
or anyone with doctoring skills on board?”

“Cook knows how
to set bones an’ lance boils.” Spence nodded. “An’ we’ve a
sailmaker who turns a fair stitch with needle an’ thread.”

“It’s just a
bloody cut,” Dante insisted. “Jostled one too many times.”