of her mouth before she knew she’d made the decision.
“I’ll just be a few minutes,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Her heart was pounding so fiercely the blood was ringing in her ears by the time she reached his room. She tapped, just twice, with her fingertip. “Captain Hardy,” she said, mouth nearly pressed to the door.
She nearly toppled in when he opened it. He tugged her gently inside, closed the door and locked it.
An enormous towel was knotted about his waist. Water sheened his thighs and chest. It clung in beads to the slopes and angles and gullies of him, the smooth mountains of his shoulders, the ditch created by muscles along his spine.
The blood left her head and headed straight for her groin.
“I only have a few minutes.” Her voice was a shred.
Doubtless he noted that her expression was probably somewhere between Mr. Delacorte’s at the dinner table and an appraiser of antiquities who’d been handed the Grail.
He unfastened the towel and dropped it.
She’d unlaced her dress on the way there and now pulled it over her head and dropped it. Then divested herself of the rest of her clothes.
His expression in response to her sudden swift nudity suggested he’d taken a mallet to the head, and she exulted while she feasted unabashedly with her eyes. He was like a slightly nicked and dented idol unearthed from a chamber of a pharaoh’s tomb, perhaps, beautiful, carved from good sturdy metal rather than precious: from the cut of his calves, the hard curve of his thighs, the pale taut buttocks with convenient little scoops where her hands fit when she was gripping them. The flare of his torso from them.
The white slashes and dents of old scars made her stomach contract with an odd sort of desperation: How dare they shoot at him as though he were expendable?
It seemed impossible that anyone had ever gotten the better of him.
Nothing about him appeared soft or vulnerable, apart, perhaps, from his eyelashes.
She crouched to seize the towel he’d dropped, and followed the terrain of his body, first with the towel, then her lips, then her hands. She slid her fingers down the trench of his spine. She lightly scored her nails across his chest. She made him tell his story.
“This scar . . .”
“Pirate . . . boarded our ship . . .” His voice was an enthralled rasp.
“Did you kill him?”
“It was that . . . or . . . be killed.” His answer, swift, staccato, riding out on a ragged breath.
So she kissed him there, on that scar. “I’m glad you killed him.”
“Delilah . . .” he half choked, half laughed.
“And this one?” She’d dropped to her knees to drag her fingers along his hip, where she could guess at how he’d come to sport that puckered scar.
“Shot. I was ill for weeks.”
“And you lived through sheer cussedness.”
“Because I had a fever dream of you on your knees before me, literally licking my wounds. It kept me alive.”
She did lick that scar. Then she dragged her tongue from his hip to where curly hair surrounded his swelling cock and kissed him coyly, near and yet so far.
“Delilah,” he groaned, as surely as if he’d been shot again. “Your mouth. Please. Take my cock in your mouth.”
“Not yet, Captain,” she said.
He called her a string of muttered oaths. She merely smiled, drunk on power, and arousal.
“And this . . .” She’d found a scar across his arm.
“. . . was a child . . . stole an apple . . . from a costermonger.” He was sweating now.
She didn’t ask for details. She understood that the only reason Captain Hardy was invincible now, was standing here before her, complicated and passionate and desirable, was because he’d been caught a time or two. So she kissed that scar.
And dropped to her knees, and when she took his cock into her mouth, his head fell back, and his hands dropped upon her hair as a long, low animal moan was followed by a string of curses and deities he clearly felt the need to call upon to support him in this time of untenable pleasure.
Now this. This was wicked. She allowed her tongue to play over the smooth dome of it. His hands laced into her hair. “Oh God. Whatever you do . . . Don’t stop . . .”
She paused. “This is apparently called the Vicar’s Hobby.”
He gave a short half laugh, half moan. “Your hands . . . your hands, too . .