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“Then why did you do it?” She should stop this conversation immediately, grab the bucket, beg his pardon, and run like the wind. Instead her feet were frozen to the floor.
“Pain isn’t something to be avoided at all costs, Mary—that’s the name you’re using, isn’t it? In fact, there are those who can find a certain pleasure in pain.”
“I cannot imagine it. Sir,” she added. What did he mean, that’s the name you’re using? What did he think she was?
His smile was fleeting, disturbing, a flash of white teeth in his dark face. “If you’re a good girl sometime I might show you,” he said softly.
Good luck to that, she thought grimly. She had to get away from him, as quickly as she could. She’d always been able to put importunate young men in their place—she certainly should have been able to handle a retired pirate.
But this man was different from the London beaus, and he was about as easy to handle as one of the wild jungle cats she’d seen in the London Zoological Society. He fascinated her, drew her, frightened her, when she was a woman who refused to be frightened. But she couldn’t make herself leave him. Maybe it was that unsatisfactory time in Tarkington’s bed that was suddenly making her think about things she shouldn’t be thinking about. Such as whether he would feel the same between her legs, if he’d be harder, if he’d be larger, if he’d know how to awaken her longings instead of driving them away as Tarkington had done. She already knew the answers to those questions. He’d pressed against her, that hard, rigid part of him, so very different from her limited experience. And she’d felt more pleasure from his mouth than she’d received from all of Tarkington’s fumblings. She could suddenly see why some women sought out the degrading experience. For the sake of kisses like that it would almost be worth it. Almost.
She could feel her face flush.
“Whatever are you thinking about?” he said with a soft laugh. “Whatever it is, it must be quite decadent to make you blush like that. Would you rather I put on my shirt?”
He was so close she could see the tattoo perfectly, stretched across his golden skin with gold-tipped scales. So close she could feel the heat from his body, so close she could simply sway toward him and she’d be in his arms. She wanted him to kiss her again, she wanted him to touch her again.
She was crazy, she told herself. Tarkington’s efforts shouldn’t make her think of the captain in the same light. There’d be no reason she’d ever want to do that again unless she had to. Marital relations were just the faintest bit unpleasant if not for the snuggling before and after, and there hadn’t been enough of either. She was hardly eager to try with someone new. The captain didn’t look like a man who snuggled.
In fact, he was a man who might very well have betrayed and murdered her father, a man who was disturbingly shirtless in a bedroom in the middle of the night, watching her with unreadable dark eyes.
She started forward, but he was too close, his eyes glittering and wary in the darkness. “Beg pardon, sir,” she said breathlessly, reaching for her accent and knowing she fell short. “I don’t know what got into me. I didn’t meant to fall asleep. I was tired—I just closed my eyes for a moment. Please don’t tell Mrs. Crozier.”
“Mrs. Crozier answers to me,” he said, not moving. “You may come to my bed any time you please.”
She took a deep breath. “I’m a good girl, sir.”
“And I do prefer bad girls,” he said with a sigh. “But good girls don’t lie. And they don’t move into a man’s house and pretend to be a maid.”
A moment of shocked silence in the darkness, and her irrational longing vanished into cold fear. “What makes you think I’m pretending anything?”
“A maid doesn’t speak like a toff sometimes, a Geordie the next, and a Cockney for good measure. A maid doesn’t have your lack of stamina or your dull but expensive clothes or your dislike of being told what to do. And a maid would know how to kiss. I could teach you.”
“Why?” The que
stion came out before she could stop herself.
He laughed. “Don’t be ingenuous, my sweet. I don’t kiss strange women on the docks of Devonport unless I want to fuck them.”
Her cheeks flamed at the crude word, at the image. He remembered. Of course he did! Steady on, girl, she told herself. This was a tricky game she was playing, and she had to watch her step. “I told you, sir, I’m a good girl. And why would I pretend to be something I’m not?”
“I have no idea. That’s why I’m asking you.”
She took a deep breath. She’d thought this through ahead of time, prepared for questions. “It’s simple enough, sir,” she said, favoring her Northern tones. “My mother was from Lancashire and me father was from Shepherd’s Bush, and I worked for a lady who gave me some of her cast-off clothes and was helping me learn to better meself, including my way of talking. If it weren’t for her husband sniffing around me skirts I would be well on my way to being a lady’s maid by now.”
“Maybe he recognized his wife’s skirts.” He was entertaining himself, she thought, irritated. This was a game to him. The odd, sensual languor in the air was simply part of his entertainment, the bastard. He continued, “You don’t like it when Mrs. Crozier or Miss Haviland tell you what to do.”
“I don’t like Mrs. Crozier or Miss Haviland,” she said, then could have bit her tongue, but he simply looked amused. He moved back, and suddenly Maddy could breathe again, though the strange tension inside her still held.
“I’m not sure I blame you. But being in service means being told what to do.”
“That’s what me mother said,” she replied pertly. “I’ve always been a bit impertinent. I need to work on it.”
For a moment he was silent as he considered her. “I don’t tend to sleep with my servants,” he said in a soft voice, out of the blue, and she could feel her face flame.
“Then why did you kiss me?”
“Some temptations are too difficult to resist, and I don’t tend to resist even the easy ones. Come to my bed and we can pretend you’re exactly what you say you are.”
