My heart danced. My legs quivered. Then I was moving, being lifted by strong hands and set onto the edge of the table.
He wedged his hips between my thighs, shoving the skirt up and out of the way to make space for his indomitable physique. Through it all, his mouth stayed with mine, refusing to release that glorious, voracious kiss.
Teeming with hunger, I leaned into him and reached for his cheek. His jaw flexed beneath my buzzing fingertips, the skin supple and smooth over unbending steel. He cupped the back of my head and angled my mouth where he wanted it, deepening the crush of our lips.
My hand slipped to his corded neck, caressing the tension beneath his cravat. His Adam’s apple bounced against my touch as he swallowed our kisses in greedy gulps.
Tucked into the hollow beneath his iron jaw, his jugular throbbed and swelled beneath my finger. His heart definitely existed. It had beaten for his sister once. And now it pounded for me.
My body thrummed with awareness as he kissed me into oblivion. I was so lost in the intimacy I hadn’t realized where my hand wandered until he gripped my wrist, stopping me from seizing him between his legs.
He didn’t halt the kiss, though. Guiding my fingers up his body, he flattened my palm against his neck. But I kept going, reaching higher, until I discovered the soft, thick texture of his hair.
With a groan, he expressed his pleasure in the touch. His arm hooked around my back as his mouth feasted and fed with no end in sight.
Gradually, in a melting of lips, the kiss dissolved on its own.
His brow fell against mine, our breaths rushing forth in sharp spurts. My heart dealt blows like a hammer, my entire body trembling in a sheen of restless want.
I’d enjoyed that with a recklessness I didn’t want to analyze. But as my pulse slowed, irrational guilt crept in.
I hadn’t kissed another man since I’d met Priest three years ago. The betrayal tasted like stale ale in my throat, and this was only the beginning.
I banished the thought before it grew roots.
Ashley leaned back, and his eyes captured mine, intense and dilated.
“You feel this.” I glanced at his groin, unable to see the engorged ridge I knew was hiding beneath his frock. “You took as much pleasure in that kiss as I did.”
“Relish it.” He lowered his mouth and kissed me with infinite kindness, as though for the first time. Or the last time. He straightened and retreated a few paces. “It won’t happen again.”
I slid off the table and abolished the distance, pushing into his space and craning my neck way back to meet his eyes. “Is the view so very different from up there?”
He glared down at me, nostrils pulsing. “What I see is—”
“A whore sleeping beside a naked man every night? Tell me how this cozy situation doesn’t become cozier.”
In answer, he clutched my waist with both hands, lifting and setting me aside as if I weighed nothing. Then he strode into the day cabin and vanished around the corner.
I simmered until he returned with two cocked hats. One, he jammed onto his hard head. The other, he wriggled onto mine.
After adjusting my braid to drape just so, he offered me an elbow. “Would you like a tour of the finest warship ever built?”
Since talking seemed to get me nowhere with him, I welcomed the change of scenery.
“Yes, my lord. I would like that very much.”
I didn’t feel like a prisoner.
As Ashley escorted me through the passageways of His Majesty’s Ship, which stretched nearly two-hundred feet fore to aft, I didn’t feel like a pirate or a whore or anything comfortably familiar.
With my fingers loosely curled around his muscled forearm and my skirts swishing over my bare feet, I heard the greetings and commands he gave the sailors he passed. But I focused on what wasn’t being said.
I was, on the surface, ignored by all. No one looked at me. Not directly. Yet every man in the vicinity was viscerally aware of the woman on their commodore’s arm. I could practically hear their arseholes clenching.
The last time they’d glimpsed me, I’d just been plucked from the sea like a drowned rat, wearing only a man’s shirt. Today, garbed in a gown made from Lord Cutler’s frocks, I looked refined enough to be a lady.
If I’d wanted that title, I would’ve followed my mother’s rules, married the Marquess of Grisdale, and perhaps both of my