Page 16 of The Princess Stakes
The problem with having the last word in a battle of sexual innuendo was dealing with the provocative images that said words produced. Namely that particular woman doing as he’d recklessly advised—fingers lodged between her soft, sweetly scented thighs—and bringing herself to swift, heated completion.
Rhystan had seen the arousal in her overbright eyes. If he’d delved under those skirts, she would have been slick with it. Hell, he was at full mast himself. An hour later at the helm, outrunning a persistent bitch of a storm and sodden to the bone from rain and ice-cold sea spray, his erection had not diminished. Nor had thoughts of her touching herself.
Therein lay the problem.
“Conquered your frustrations yet?” his quartermaster yelled through the wind.
“Fuck off, Gideon.”
“That’s what she said, and what did that get you?”
Rhystan scowled. “When this storm turns, I’m going to thump that shit-eating grin off your face.”
“You can try if it will make you feel better,” Gideon remarked, folding thick arms across his chest and propping a boot on the rail as if the wind wasn’t howling like a wild animal between them. “But I suspect it won’t.”
Rhystan’s fingers tightened on the wheel. If it were a live thing, it would have been strangled to death by that point. Gideon was the only one who knew scant details of what had happened with the woman he’d left behind in Joor.
The memories he’d been fighting came back in force.
He’d been hunkered down in a room at the Flying Elephant when the messenger had come from the princess, missive in hand and followed closely by Markham’s mercenaries. Before he could receive the message, they’d overpowered him at gunpoint, thrashed him senseless, and tossed him unconscious and shackled on a convoy bound for Bombay.
As if being injured and starved wasn’t enough, he had arrived plagued with malaria. Abandoned in the barracks, his fevered brain fought to stay alert. Was Sarani in trouble? Did she need him? The thought of her believing he’d left without her had gutted him. And then, weeks later, when the fever finally broke, Markham had come himself to take great pleasure in giving him the crumpled parchment and informing him of her marriage to the regent.
She had chosen another.
Weddedanother.
It was Gideon who found him half drowning in drink and opium and convinced him to join the privateering ship leaving Bombay. Rhystan had kept the small miniature of her that he’d had on his person—inside a locket he’d intended to gift her—but before he left, he’d written a reply to the princess of perfidy herself. His sentiments had been less than kind, but he’d left the note behind with most of his Royal Navy trappings, not caring whether it reached her or not. Obviously, it had. That pompous, bigoted arse of a vice admiral must have delivered it to her.
Not that Rhystan had cared.
But now she was here. On his ship. As intoxicating as ever. She’d always held some mystical sway over him, though he was older now. And wiser. She’d had her chance and thrown him over for a marriage to a peer. Lady sodding Lockhart.
Once he outran the storm, Rhystan intended to get some answers. Namely why she needed passage so bloody quickly to England, why she was traveling only with a maid and a houseboy, and what had happened to her husband. Other burning questions like why she’d chosen to turn her back on him would never escape his lips.
She’d made her bed, and he’d made his.
Doesn’t mean you can’t share one now.
The sly thought made his raging desires flame anew. He thought of her straddling him on the bunk, the feel of her trim ankle in his fingers and the heated rise of her bosom. He’d been a hairsbreadth from yanking her down on top of him when he’d realized who she was. The comprehension had been like a bucket of ice-cold water to his brain. The rest of his sex-starved body, however, continued to march on, despite reason.
Even now, drenched in salt and frigid spray, he wanted her.
Perhaps he should have sought out willing female company before they’d left port that last night in Bombay and braved the consequences. Anything would be better than the lust eating away at him. Rhystan shoved a hand through the wet clumps of his hair, ignored the demands of his stiff nether regions, and focused on the matter at hand—steering them out of the path of the oncoming storm.
“You truly intend to put her to work?” Gideon asked, piercing his thoughts.
He ignored the man’s tone. “Yes. They took the places of two boatswains. Everyone contributes onboard.”
“She’s a lady, not a servant.”
Rhystan scowled. “She’s a goddamned princess. But she came here under false pretenses, and she’ll pull her weight like everyone else.”
“And the men?”
He hadn’t thought of them. For the most part, he trusted his crew, but he’d taken on half a dozen new men after a bout of malaria had culled his ranks. Two of them had taken bribes from her over honest work, which didn’t say much for them. And the others were unknowns.
Rhystan knew he had a ruthless reputation, but even he couldn’t have eyes on a lady and her maid every minute of every day. Two females onboard for several weeks could prove disastrous.
