Page 45 of Devil of the High Seas
“It’s not what you’ve done—it’s what youhaven’tdone.”
He looked baffled. “What haven’t I done?”
She buried her face against his neck, hiding from him. Her hopes of seducing him had come to a crashing end.
“Josie, love, what haven’t I done?” He gently rocked her, yet his tenderness only made it worse somehow. She was no brave pirate—she was only playing one like she played at everything else in her life.
“You won’t make love to me,” she finally confessed.
“Oh...that.” He breathed the words heavily against the crown of her hair, almost in relief.
“Am I undesirable?” she dared to ask. “Too inexperienced?”
His lips pressed soft kisses to her forehead.
“Quite the opposite. You’retoodesirable, Josie. ’Tis my fault. I wanted...”
He halted on whatever he’d been about to say, so she pressed a kiss to his chin to encourage him to continue.
“I wanted to take my time with you. The best things in life are not rushed. They are savored.” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Would you be patient with me?”
A watery laugh escaped her. “You wish formeto be patient while you take your time to seduce me?” she asked. “I thought pirates took what they wanted?”
“I am a pirate, through and through, but ’tis different with you. You aren’t like any woman I’ve ever met. Your first time in a man’s bed should have meaning to you as well as the man. Call me a romantic fool, but with you, that matters. I do not want you to come to my bed out of a need to rebel at the restraints life has put upon you. Come to me because you wantmeand for no other reason.”
Oh, but shedidwant him. If only he knew how much. She had wanted him from the moment he’d fallen beside her bed that stormy night. But she sensed he would not believe her if she told him.
“I’m not simply some prize you stole?” she asked, her cheek nuzzling his. She wanted to hear him say that he loved her madly, that he’d cross every ocean to be with her, but that was a dream likely out of her reach.
His wry chuckle made her burrow closer to him. “I think we both know that from the moment I saw you it was alwaysmorethan that.” He kissed her cheek. “When I stole you from your home, I wasn’t quite prepared for what you make me feel. I don’t wish to rush into this, not with you.”
She stared up at him. His brown eyes were so warm, so soft with tenderness. Yet his face still held a hint of his piratical fierceness. He was looking at her the way she imagined a pirate would upon stumbling into a cave of golden jewels that had been hidden away from the rest of the world for more than a century. It was a look of wonder, obsession, andlonging.
“How did you become a pirate, Gavin?”
He blinked at the change of topic. “Pardon?”
“I mean, I know you left home at nineteen, but how did you end up here?”
Gavin settled deeper on the bed, still holding her in his lap as he laid his head against the headboard.
“It is neither a short tale nor a happy one,” he warned, his eyes darkening with an old pain.
She stroked his face with a fingertip, tracing his lips. “Sometimes those are the stories we need to hear the most.”
He rubbed her back with his palm as if by soothing her he would soothe himself.
“When I was seventeen, I met Charity. She was the first woman I ever loved. But as you know, she choose to marry Griffin, when were nineteen and I decided to leave Cornwall. I took only a small bag of belongings to St. Ives Bay, where I booked passage on a merchant ship and sailed for the Carolinas. From there, I knew I needed work and was able to get hired aboard a private vessel. It wasn’t until we were two weeks out to sea that I learned the captain and the crew were actually pirates.”
“What? Why didn’t they tell you? I thought pirates had codes they lived by?”
“They do, but needs must, as they say. Captain Harding had lost a third of his crew to malaria a month before he hired me and the newest sailors on board. He was in dire straits, needing to replace his crew quickly to man his vessel. Pirate ships carry fewer men than navy vessels, but even they cannot get by indefinitely with a skeleton crew. Each time a pirate ship takes a prize ship, they must send men from the original ship over to the captured vessel to crew it. Harding explained to me and the others that we were now pirates, and as such we might as well officially join the crew. We would be allowed to leave at the next port if we wished, but it would be a month before we would make berth in a pirate haven.
“I was reluctant at first, but I soon realized that Harding and his crew were good men who’d been driven to desperate measures to support their families and themselves. They chose to live outside the bounds of the law, but they didn’t kill unless they had to when they captured prize ships. You have to understand, lass, pirates have more rights, more freedom, more money, and more food than most men who live on the sea. I took to pirating quite easily. Harding targeted heavily laden merchant ships that we oftentimes knew were headed our way, ships owned by wealthy merchants. He kept us clear of the Spanish and British navies. I lived that way for three years and worked my way up to being his quartermaster.”
“And how did you become captain of your own ship?”
“We plundered many good prizes from the sea, and I saved my share. I was determined to claim my own vessel one day, but none of the prizes we’d taken felt right to me. They didn’t feel likemyship. We paid a brief visit to the Carolinas in my fourth year at sea, and that’s when I saw her, theLady Siren—or rather, the ship that was to become her.”
