The moment her husband bussed her lips, the world righted itself. How strange that a single kiss had the power to raise broken dreams, heal wounds, and chase away dark shadows. One. Pure. Kiss.
Another miracle, Madeline thought, as he drew her deeper into his embrace, threading his fingers through her mussed hair, caressing her mouth with slow and deliberate thrusts. So attentive.
She relished the sensuous feel of him. Her blood warmed, then simmered. Her skin prickled, then shivered.
A steamy hand soon dipped under her shirt and played across the knobs of her spine, feathery strokes, so teasing, yet so full of sensual intent. She shuddered, over and over. Her heart hastened. She clinched his arms, holding him tight, then tighter still . . . like a storm brewing in the distance.
“Lift your arms,” he bade, his hot lips still brushing hers.
Her lungs quickened. She eased her grip on his arms. Gently, he hoisted the shirt over her head. Her hair rained across her backside. Her breasts swelled in the heady night air. Her nipples puckered, lengthened with want.
Another buss, more firm, stirred a soft moan from her throat. His strong hands went to her hips, unfastened the rope at her waist. The trousers dropped to the floor with ease, and she kicked them aside. Naked. Throbbing. Waiting.
He removed his own shirt and vest, more hastily than he’d tended to hers. He almost ripped the red scarf from his neck. But when he reached for his trousers, she stopped him, enveloped his hands and set them aside, fingering the buttons herself . . .
As she tugged and pulled, unhooking one button, then another, she sensed the man’s taut muscles vibrating, every titillating hum, and it stoked her own desire even more.
He growled at her slow progress. “You must really be pissed at me.”
She smiled inward.
“It’s my wedding night,” she whispered, nipping his chin with her teeth. “I intend to enjoy every moment of it—so keep still.”
His muscles hardened.
“Better,” she murmured.
As she loosened the final button, parting the flap, she gathered her breath, quivering, and slipped her hand across his hard length.
“Maddie!” he cried and dropped his head back in ecstasy. Or perhaps surprise. Or both. But the way he shouted her name, as if it were torn from his throat, thrilled her.
She raked her bottom lip with her teeth, dazed by her own bold gesture. She cusped his erection, tracing the thick veins of his cock, rubbing him with a primal impulse that defied all her good breeding—and good sense. Tempting a man like William would get her a rough bedding, not a tender one. But she clasped him just the same. And her control over him was more tasty than breath.
She pressed her breasts, so aroused, into his chest, and ordered, “Take off your pants.”
His eyes lighted on her again, almost black with lust, and her heart spasmed. He stripped off his trousers and together, bare fleshed, they stood in each other’s presence for a tense moment . . . before he steered her toward the bed.
Her nerves thrummed in expectation as they tumbled onto the mattress. He covered her with his hot body, captured her mouth in a ravenous kiss, and wrapped a muscular arm around her waist. She tasted the salty spray of the sea on his skin, felt his muscles jump and caper under her explorative touch. She hungered for him. So deep in her soul.
He rolled her on her side in a swift movement, and she offered a startled gasp. Her unruly hair whirled and landed across his face, where he buried his lips against the back of her throat.
“William!”
He ignored her entreaty, wedged his leg between her moist thighs. Her heart thundered at the uncompromising position he’d placed her in, her back caged against his chest. But when his wicked hand grazed the length of her torso, slipping between her flushed breasts, across her taut midriff, and over her pulsing clit, she seized in pleasure.
“William,” she groaned in surrender this time.
She thought she heard a grunt of satisfaction, but her thoughts soon disbanded as he lifted her thigh higher, opened her quim wider—and pushed inside her with a hard thrust, stretching her, making her arch in a maelstrom of unfamiliar sensations. She squeezed her muscles, but his raspy voice tickled her ear with, “Trust me, Maddie.”
At his comforting words, she eased her flexed tendons and joints and settled against him. He rocked her. So slow at first. It took her several moments to respond to his rhythm and match his tempo, but soon she undulated in blissful harmony with him, unleashing soft whimpers as he pounded her core with ever deeper, ever quicker penetrations.
“Yes,” she cried. “Yes!”
She gasped with every rutting stroke, her quim trembling, so wet with need. The tense pressure building at her clit released, and she let out a passionate scream. Her muscles throbbed. Fluids streaked her thighs, draining her of strength.
William rammed her hard, seeking his own orgasm, bumping her hips in frantic strokes before he spasmed inside her with a feral groan.
The couple stilled.
Madeline gathered her pulse and steadied her heartbeat, offering a euphoric sigh, and a little voice inside her told her he’d given her everything that she’d wanted—even a child.
She smiled in a dreamy fashion. “A good bedding is very troublesome. It takes so much effort.”
The husky chuckle at her backside quickly evolved into hearty laughter. “Hell, woman. Was that a complaint?”
“A compliment,” she assured him, still catching her breath.
He rolled her again, bringing her flush with his handsome features. He pushed aside her tousled hair and bussed her lips. “I love you, Wife.”
Her heart fluttered. “And I you, Husband.”
His lashes flickered. She sensed his drowsiness. But she wasn’t about to let their wedding night end so soon.
She nudged his nose, grazed his cheek with her fingertips. “Tell me about your past, William?”
“Now?”
“Yes, now. I want to know everything about my husband.”
It might have been wiser to learn more about the man before she’d married him, but most newlyweds knew even less about one another, their courtships public or supervised by chaperones.
“There isn’t much to tell,” he hedged.
“Your sister married a duke. You sailed the seven seas for twenty-five years. And there isn’t much to tell?”
In truth, she wanted to hear about his life. She wanted to know every detail about the man, to treasure his tales and, one day, to pass them on to their child.
He smoothed the frown lines from her brow with the pad of his thumb. “Fine.”
At his warm caress, she balled up the pillow, resisting the swell of emotion in her breast, and listened.
“Once upon a time—”
“Stop.” she sighed. “What are you doing?”
“I’m telling you a fairy story.” He tucked his muscular arm under the pillow. “My sister married a duke, after all.”
“I’d like an honest tale.”
“No embellishments?”
“If you please, luv.”
He offered her a smoldering look at the sassy endearment, and it warmed her unlike any blanket or fire. She savored the warmth and waited. And waited.
Her husband wasn’t much of a conversationalist, it seemed. A good listener, aye, but otherwise not one for chitchat, so she prodded, “How was your boyhood?”
“Fine.”
She rolled her eyes.
“James and I were content,” he said at last. “Our father, Drake, worked as a carpenter. He made a good income and we wanted for naught. Our mother, Megan, dotted on us. We were lucky . . . for a time.”
“What happened?”
“One night, Father didn’t come home. Twelve years passed before we saw him again.”
She gasped. Twelve years! “Where had he been all that time?”
He seemed perturbed, and she offered him a moment to reflect, to regain his composure before he resumed with:
“He’d been abducted by a press gang and forced to serve aboard a naval vessel.”
Madeline fisted her palm and brought it to her lips. She had heard about such injustice during the eighteenth century, when The Royal Navy was desperate for sailors. Few enlisted voluntarily because of poor pay and even poorer treatment, so press gangs were hired to kidnap young and healthy men and drag them aboard ships.
“For ten years,” said William, “Father remained imprisoned, malnourished and mistreated.”
“And the last two years?” she whispered.
“The naval vessel was attacked by pirates, raided for supplies. But before the pirates returned to their own rig, their captain, Dawson, offered the weary sailors an opportunity to join his crew—and Father accepted. He turned traitor.”
“I understand.” After a decade at sea, away from his family, abused . . . it was enough hardship to turn any man traitor. “So your father was a pirate for two years?”
“Aye. He and Dawson became friends. My father was quick with a mallet and nail, repaired the ship after every battle. It earned him a place in Dawson’s good book. The pirate captain even gave my father this ring.”
Madeline eyed the large band around her husband’s finger, the emblem an hourglass with wings. Strange, she thought. She’d never noticed the ring before tonight. “What does the symbol mean?”
“Time getting away. It appeared on some pirate flags at the time, hoisted just before an attract, warning the other ship her luck was running out.”
“I’ve never seen you wear the ring.”
He twisted the band around his finger. “It belonged to Belle. It was a gift from our father for her twentieth year. A reminder not to flitter away time. It’s too precious.” He paused, then, “Belle gave it to me tonight, as a wedding gift.”
He seemed moved by the gesture from his sister, but the ring—or rather its message—unnerved Madeline.
“What happened, then?” she asked, shaking off the unsettling sensation. “Between your father and Dawson?”
“After two years touring the Caribbean, Father had paid his debt to Dawson. He asked to be released, to return to his family in England. Dawson didn’t want to lose my father’s carpentry skills, but he agreed—reluctantly—on the ground of their friendship. He let my father go with his fair share of the stolen bounty.
“The years had been hard for us without Father. James and I assumed him dead. But Mother never lost hope he’d come home. And one day, he did. Belle and the others came along soon after, until Mother died in childbirth to Quincy.”
“I’m sorry, William.”
He rubbed his brow. “James and I reared the babes, while Father took to the sea as captain of his own ship, the Bonny Meg, named after our mother. We later joined him. A governess was hired to look after the fledglings, until they, too, came of age.”
“So you travelled the world with your father, trading at exotic sea ports, meeting exotic peoples. You and Grandfather have so much in common.”
“Exotic sea ports, aye, but we didn’t travel as merchants.”
“Oh?”
He stopped there.
“Go on, William. Were you privateers? Explorers, like Grandfather?”
“Pirates.”
As the word seeped into her pores, her blood simmered, and she scrunched the pillow harder and harder. “P-pirates?” She almost choked on the word. “You’re a pirate?”
“Retired.”
As if that made a bleedin’ difference. She thumped his shoulder, then pounded it, then slapped him so hard, her fingers ached. “You hypocrite!” She crawled away from him, kneeling on the bed. “You threatened to hang me for theft, called me a pirate when we first met, and you’re the rotten buccaneer?!”
“Retired,” he repeated.
She slapped him again. “How dare you! I can still feel the threat of the noose around my neck?”
He blocked her blows. “Maddie, I was protecting Edmund and Amy at the time.”
“I know,” she hollered, her heart hammering. “You’re still a wretched hypocrite!” She dropped on the bad and turned her back toward him, heaving.
“Maddie . . .”
“I’m tired. Goodnight.”
A second later she shrieked as he pulled her into his arms, smothered her in an intimate embrace. “You will not go to sleep angry with me, woman.”
“And what do you intend to do about it?”
At first, he made no movement . . . but then his treacherous fingers caressed her arm in sensual strokes, and his hypocritical lips bussed her throat, and his manipulative tongue slipped into her mouth, stirring every nerve and muscle to sensuous arousal.
She nipped his tongue.
“Bloody hell, woman!”
“I’m still mad,” she huffed. “Do not seduce me, pirate.”
He sighed, licking the blood from his lips. “Maddie, it’s been six years since I was a pirate. As soon as Belle married the duke, we all retired from piracy, to protect her. When I met you, I didn’t want my past catching up with me. Or my family.”
She could accept that—though she was still furious.
“Pirate,” she mumbled, still in disbelief. “I married a bloody pirate.”