The Least Likely Bride

“Why don’t you go below now? You can barely keep your eyes open.” The pirate leaned back in his chair, a glass of cognac cupped in his hands, regarding Olivia with a slight smile.

Olivia stifled a yawn. It was true, she was very sleepy. The remains of dinner had been cleared away, and while Anthony sat savoring his cognac, she had been drifting in a half sleep to the music of the wind in the rigging and the motion of the ship on the gentle swell of the night sea.

“It’s such a perfect night,” she said, looking up at the sky. “You never see stars like this on land.”

“No, you don’t.”

“When will we get back to the island?”

“If the wind holds fair, we’ll sight land by noon tomorrow.”

“And will it hold fair?”

He shrugged and smiled. “That’s hard to say. The wind is a fickle mistress.” He called softly to the helmsman. “What do you think, Jethro? Will the wind hold fair for us?”

“Might drop towards dawn.”

“What am I to say at home?” Olivia cupped her chin on her elbow-propped hands. “How am I to explain things?”

“Why don’t we cross that bridge when we reach it?” Anthony leaned over and brushed the curve of her cheek with a fingertip. “Are you so anxious to break free of entrancement, Olivia?”

She shook her head. “No, but this is just a dream and I must wake up sometime.”

“Yes, you must. But not before noon tomorrow.”

“I suppose there wouldn’t be much point waking up yet, since I’m still kidnapped,” Olivia observed gravely.

“Precisely so… Go to bed now.”

Olivia pushed back her chair and rose reluctantly. “I would like to sleep under the stars.”

“You would be cold.”

“Even with blankets?”

“Even with blankets.”

Olivia continued to hesitate, looking at him as he sat at his ease swirling the cognac around the crystal. He returned her gaze, that smile deep in his eyes, and something else that she couldn’t read. It was a promise of some kind. She was aware of a quiver in her belly, a strange tightening in her thighs.

She turned to the steps leading down to the main deck. “Good night.”

But he didn’t return her farewell.

The cabin had been cleaned and tidied, the lantern above the bed lit, throwing a soft golden glow over the polished wood and the rich colors in the Turkey rugs. The windows had been closed and damask curtains drawn across them.

Olivia pulled back the curtains and flung open the windows again. It was too fresh and beautiful a night to shut out. She turned back to the cabin. There was clean linen on the bed; the covers were turned down invitingly. She fingered the emerald sash at her waist, then untied it, folded it carefully, and replaced it in the cupboard in the bulwark. She began to untie the ribbons at the neck of the nightshirt when her eye fell on the chessboard.

Anthony had set up another chess problem, she remembered now. She went over to look at it, twisting the silken ribbons around her fingers as she gazed down at the pieces in frowning concentration. It was definitely not as immediately solvable as the previous one.

A deep yawn took her by surprise, and Olivia lost interest in the problem. In the morning, when her mind was fresh, she’d solve it in a minute. A problem she couldn’t solve in a minute was what she was to sleep in. Her makeshift gown felt too much like a gown now to do double duty, and besides, she would need it in the morning.

She’d slept naked ever since she’d arrived on Wind Dancer, and Olivia, on reflection, could see no reason to do any different tonight. She pulled the nightshirt over her head, folded it as carefully as she had folded the sash, and put it away, then she climbed over the wooden sides and into the bed. The sheets were cool and crisp and the bed was wonderfully familiar.

She turned onto her side and closed her eyes only to realize that the lantern was still lit. But what did it matter? She was too tired to be bothered by such a soft glow, and it would go out in its own time when the oil was burned…

When she awoke, it was to a pale darkness. And she was not alone in the bed. Something heavy was holding her down into the deep feather mattress. Olivia investigated and found that it was an arm across her waist. And it was another leg that was tangled with her own.

As she lay, rigid with shock, she could hear her bedmate’s deep, even breathing. She investigated further. He was as naked as she was.

“Did I wake you?” the pirate asked sleepily.

“You’re in my bed!”

“Actually it’s my bed.”

Even through the tendrils of sleep, Olivia could hear the laugh in his voice.

“But I’m sleeping in it,” she objected, wondering why she wasn’t screaming her maidenly outrage. Maybe it was the magic again, but she was utterly aware in every fiber of her body of the powerful physical presence beside her. This was not entrancement, it was reality, and the reality held only fascination.

“It’s been my bed for three nights… or is it four?” she murmured.

“This would be the fourth,” he said, his breath rustling against the back of her neck. The arm around her waist moved so that his hand flattened on her belly.

Olivia’s stomach contracted involuntarily. She tried to push his hand away with as much success as an ant trying to move a mountain. But then, she didn’t seem to be pushing with true conviction. “You didn’t sleep in it before,” she protested.

“In the opinion of your physician, you were too ill for a bedmate,” he responded solemnly. “The medical opinion has now changed.”

The hand on her belly remained still and warm and curiously unthreatening. Olivia felt his other hand now on her back, moving up between her shoulder blades, clasping her neck firmly, pushing up into her hair, cupping her scalp. It felt wonderful and strangely familiar, as if sometime he’d touched her in this way before.

“Let yourself go,” he instructed softly. “Just lie still and feel.”

He pressed his lips into the groove at the back of her neck, and the hand on her stomach moved upward to cup her breasts. Her nipples hardened as if she’d been dipped in cold water. Olivia felt herself slipping back into the dreamworld of the past days, where her mind was adrift and her body merely a sensate shape floating in feathers.

Fingers caressed the curve of her hips, danced down her thighs, played in the little hollows behind her knees. She could feel the length of him against her back, and she could picture his body as vividly as if she were facing him. The small nipples so different from her own, like little buttons in the broad expanse of his chest, the indentation of his navel in the concave stomach, the darker line of hair drawing her eye down to his sex.

But what had once been quiescent was now rampant. Olivia could feel the hard length of his penis pressing into the crease of her thighs. Jubilation… wicked, outrageous, delicious… throbbed in the secret places of her body.

And then she stiffened, straightening her legs. “I’m not going to marry,” Olivia said. “Never. I’m never going to marry.”

“A laudable determination,” the pirate murmured into her hair as his flattened hand slid between her thighs. “One that I share.” He caressed the inside of her unbandaged thigh until she relaxed once more, her body softening against him.

“But we can’t do this if we’re not going to marry,” Olivia protested.

“Celibacy is not the same as chastity,” Anthony reminded her, touching his tongue to her ear, nibbling her earlobe. “We had this discussion once.”

“But… but I might c-conceive,” Olivia murmured, wondering why it should be that such considerations seemed to have lost all urgency. “Then we would have to marry.”

“I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen,” he said, and he was laughing, she could hear it in his voice. “You’re still an innocent despite all your learning. Intellectual experience is no substitute for reality, my flower.”

Olivia made no reply. She was incapable of reply.

Anthony turned her onto her back. She saw his face in the pale starlight from the still-open window. He bent to kiss her mouth and she gave a tiny sigh against his lips.

They were wonderfully pliant lips, soft and yet muscular. His tongue pressed for entrance and her own lips parted. He tasted of wine and cognac and the salt spray from the waves that lifted Wind Dancer and the wind that filled her sails.

She sucked on his tongue with sudden greed, and he held her face, probing deeper into her mouth. The length of his body was hard against her own softness. She put her hands in his hair. No longer confined in the black ribbon, the locks, gold as guineas, fell to his shoulders. His face was a wedge of light in the moon’s glimmer from the window as she pushed the hair away and in her turn held his face.

“I am dreaming you,” Olivia said.

“No, no dream.” And he parted her thighs with his knee.

Olivia felt her body open, a liquid rush filling her loins with an anticipation of delight. His hands slid beneath her bottom, lifting her. The stab of penetration shocked her for a second and then there was only this wonderful liquid fullness and her body closed around him. She raked her hands through the golden fall of his hair, caught his mouth with her teeth, lifted her hips to meet the steady thrusts of his body.

“You are miraculous,” Anthony said.

“You are a dream,” Olivia replied. “But it was a dream I was always going to have.”

“And I,” he replied. He withdrew to the very edge of her body.

“Am I supposed to feel like this?” Olivia ran her hands from his buttocks along his hard muscular thighs as he held himself above her. “In the interests of intellectual inquiry?”

“I believe so.” He moved slowly, burying himself within her again. Then he touched her. The hard little nub that Olivia had never known she possessed. He brushed it. Touched it. Rubbed it. And he moved within her.

Olivia was no longer Olivia. She dissolved into myriad parts. She was lost in the Milky Way. She thought she cried. She clung to the body that was her only connection to reality. She clung and she was held, tight, warm, safe, until she came to herself.

Anthony gathered her against him. He had known, known from the first moment she’d been delivered to his waterside doorstep, that Olivia Granville was going to govern his life in some impenetrable, unfathomable fashion.

Chapter Five

She ran, the deserted corridor stretching ahead of her, impossibly long. She would never get to the end before he caught her. She could hear him behind her, his step almost leisured compared with her own racing feet. He called, softly taunting, “Run, little rabbit, run.” Her breath came in gasps, hurting her chest, her throat was dry with fear and despair. He would catch