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to the table. He fed her dates and offered her honeyed mead from a chased goblet. He was still
erect. She ran her hand through his hair as she might pet a dog. She lifted his chin to look at his
face, opened his eyelids wider to see the blue. She fingered his nipples and rubbed his throat. Then
her caresses grew rougher. He felt the compulsion in his mind grow until she held him tight in
mind and body once again and began her demanding.
This time she opened her knees to him. In spite of his need, he entered slowly, as she allowed him
to do. She held his testicles approvingly as he pushed inside her. Ian s breath was already coming
short and shallowly. His body sweated as he thrust inside her, his cock filling her as she wanted to
be filled. He would go on as long as she wished to go on, because he had no choice and because it
was her choice if he was to have a release. She would choose the time and the strength and the
means. Or she might choose no release at all and keep him hard and needing forever. She arched
into him and pressed her breasts against his heaving chest. Then she drew him down on top of her
and began licking at his throat. He thrust on as she clamped her legs about his hips and banged in
counterpoint. A sharp stab of pain at his neck that was not pain but something akin to ecstasy
almost put him over the top, but she had him firmly, and they rocked together as she suckled at
his neck. Ian gasped for air as she sucked on, and then he felt her release for the second time, a
grunting throb that threatened his consciousness. It rocked on and on. Then she allowed his own
release as hers ebbed. He came in a shrieking burst as she stopped the sucking at his throat and
he collapsed against her, almost unconscious. She pushed him away. He lay there on the carpets,
strangely weak. He could barely lift his head. The scent of cinnamon and ambergris made him
want to gag. She told him to go, and he had to crawl to the flap of the tent. He looked back to see
her rearranging her garment into some sort of order. Then hands took him and tied his rope to a
post driven into the sand just outside the door of the tent. He lay
there, sand clinging to his sweating body until he was dried by the warm sirocco. He fingered the
place where she had pierced his throat and suckled. There were two round, raised wounds. The
memory of the other slaves, covered in those round marks, made him wail inside. Now that it was
over, the full horror of what had happened overwhelmed him. She could make him do anything.
He would service her like her own private stud. He was no stronger than the others had been.
There was no escape. The memory of the red eyes tormented him. She was not human. And he was
wholly in her power, at least until he went mad, like the Frenchman, or died of his wounds. He
prayed for an early death, without hope that his prayers would be answered.
Ian shut his eyes as despair washed over him. It lurked in him still, ready to submerge him under its dark
waves. Pray as he might, death was denied him now. He could heal a broken neck. The burns from going
naked into the sun had left no trace. If he had needed any more proof of his invincibility, tonight had
certainly provided it. His only recourse was to put as much distance between him and the desert as he
could and try to forget the monster he had escaped. He could only hope to resist becoming a monster,
too. He would not think of her. He would not let her poison who he was with her foul practices, her
despicable& And yet had he escaped? Was he not fouled as surely, as insidiously, as if he still knelt in
chains at her side?
Ian swallowed, tried to breathe, and huddled into his bloody quilts. He squeezed his stinging eyes shut. If
he could not pray for death, at least he might pray for sleep. Who would answer prayers from such as
he? What God would allow this to happen to one of his creatures?
Beth woke from uneasy sleep before dawn, raised from her dreams of red eyes by the noise of sailors
holystoning the deck and singing some chantey. At first she wondered whether she had dreamed the
whole battle with the pirates and the confrontation with a man who might not be quite human as she knew
it. She raised her hand. There was the nail she had broken grabbing up the capstan bar. The black dress
hanging on the door was stiff with dried blood.
It was real. A kiss she had asked for, pirates attacking, furious battle, Mr. Rufford s extraordinary feats
of heroism, the awful price he paid in wounds, frantic fear for his life, the shock of his healing, and her
strange acceptance of his unnatural qualities. Had she accepted them? Why? She gave a shudder as she
remembered the red glow that had suffused his eyes.
Now, as she lay in her cot, the sensations of last night poured over her. What stood out was an
overwhelming sensation of the& maleness of him. As she lay in her gently swinging cot, remembering the
feel of his lips on hers and the silk of his skin against her fingers made her breath hiss in the back of her
throat. She thought herself immune to the naked male body, yet his had an intrinsically different effect on
her from the many natives she had seen. It made her flush even in memory. Her eyes swam and she
seemed to drift away to a place where she could remember perfectly the hip bone beneath his flesh, the
hollow of his belly dusted with an arrow of light brown hair that pointed to his sex. His nipples had been
soft over the swell of pectorals. His neck was a pillar of strength with that pulse beating in the most
vulnerable hollow of his throat. The muscles in arms and shoulders had been heavy. He was not lean or
rangy like so many men. Then his face handsome, surely, but very particular in its character. His waving
hair, thick and soft as a girl s, only made him seem more intensely masculine.
The heat that suffused her seemed to gather in her loins, producing a strangely satisfying throb. Was it her
mother s Egyptian blood in her veins that pulsed inside her? Her mother had bequeathed to her the heat
of the desert. That blood was not something she was proud of, but perhaps she could not avoid its
effects. All she knew now was that she wanted to find out more about Ian Rufford and that he called to
her in some elemental way that her blood understood, if she did not.
He would not be on deck. It was daylight. But, after last night, could she not use her concern as an
excuse to look in on him?
That got her up and dressed in a fresh black kerseymere dress. Two bells struck on deck. It was only
seven in the morning. She could not go calling this early.
Beth went out on a deck just drying from its morning scrub. The blood from the night was washed away.
The wind was fresh. The ship bore a cloud of sail in the pale, clear light. Carpenters mounted a new main [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]