Page 70 of The Pirate Lord
He smiled down at her, his expression unrepentant. “I’m a pirate. I’m supposed to say indecent things.” Eyes twinkling, he tugged loose two locks of her hair, then arranged them over her shoulders and her breasts. “But if you insist on being prudish, I’ll speak of something less . . . indecent. Like your hair.” He stroked it with a delicacy she wouldn’t have expected of him. His voice was soft and almost wistful. “I love your hair. It’s like copper coins and raw silk and Miss Mulligan’s curtains.”
“Miss Mulligan?” She scowled up at him. “Who, may I ask, is Miss Mulligan, and what were you doing with her curtains?”
“Come now, Miss Willis, don’t tell me you’re jealous.”
The wretch. Of course she was jealous. But she’d never let him know that. Tipping up her chin, she tried for a nonchalant tone. “Wouldn’t I be a fool to be jealous of a pirate who’s probably bedded half the women in Christendom?”
That wiped the grin off his face. With a clipped oath, he fell back against the pillows. “Not quite so many. Probably only a quarter of the women in Christendom, though I do try to bed a woman every half-hour or so. It keeps me young.”
Ignoring his sarcasm, she snapped, “And Miss Mulligan was one of them, I suppose.”
“Oh, of course. I bed seventy-two-year-old women whenever I get the chance.”
All at once, she felt like a complete fool. “Oh.”
“Youarejealous, aren’t you?” He propped himself up on one elbow. “And with no need whatsoever. Miss Mulligan was an elderly spinster who ran one of the many boarding houses my father and I stayed in.”
Glancing up into his face, she noticed that his eyes now had a faraway look. “I wasn’t quite seven years old when we lived there,” he went on, “and we were only there for six months. That was longer than we stayed in most places.” He played with her hair, letting the strands slip through his fingers to pool over her shoulders. “But I remember the curtains in her drawing room so vividly. They were made of some scarlet, silky material, and when the sun shone through them, they looked like fire. I thought theywerefire.”
A smile touched his lips. “They fascinated me. Whenever Father was drunk and took the strap to me for doing my lessons badly, I’d run and hide behind those curtains in the drawing room, hoping that the fire would protect me.” His eyes met hers. “I guess, in a strange sort of way, it did. He never found me when I was behind those curtains. And whenever Miss Mulligan discovered me there, she gave me milk and cookies and let mecurl up in the bed with her while Father slept off his drunk. For a boy of six, that was heaven. She was kind and motherly and smelled of rosewater. I used to love the smell of rosewater.”
A lump formed in her throat. She could just imagine Gideon as a small boy, hiding fearfully behind the curtains of a drawing room, turning to an old woman for comfort. She touched her fingers to his cheek. “Did your father . . . take a strap to you often?”
His gaze met hers, startled, then aloof, like the look a sleepwalker gives a person who wakes him. Lying back on the bed and tucking one arm under his head, he stared up at the ceiling. “Often enough to make an impression on me, if that’s what you mean.” He cast her a quick, cool glance. “You probably think he should’ve done it a few more times, to flail some goodness into me. What’s that the Bible says? ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’?”
“Oh, don’t quotethatwretched verse! It’s awful how people use it to justify cruelty. Beating a child doesn’t teach him anything but humiliation and fear.”
He stared at her a long time as if trying to fathom her. “Yes,” he finally said. “That’s exactly what it teaches.”
Her heart twisted in her chest. Poor Gideon. No wonder he sought to create his own paradise. The world he’d been raised in sounded as if it were far from paradise. More like hell even.
“Where was your mother while all this was going on?” she couldn’t help but ask. “Did she approve of your father . . . beating you?”
His face grew shuttered. Abruptly, he rose from the bed and drew on his trousers. “She wasn’t around.”
Sitting up in bed, Sara clutched the sheets to her breast. “What do you mean? Did she die?”
Folding his arms over his bare chest, he rested his hip on the edge of his desk. His features were as remote and cold asthe figurehead on the prow of his ship. “Something like that. It doesn’t really matter, does it? She wasn’t there.”
She sniffed. “If you don’t want to talk about her?—”
“I don’t.” When she cast him a wounded look, he added, “We’ve more important things to discuss, Sara. Like what’s going to happen today.”
The abrupt change of subject threw her off guard. “Today?”
“When the women choose their husbands. Or have you forgotten?”
Oh, yes.That. Actually, in the wake of the fire and their night together, shehadforgotten.
He went on without waiting for an answer. “Obviously we can’t wait until new lodgings are built. That’ll take weeks. The men who went to Sao Nicolau returned this morning, so there’s no reason to delay. I need to know—” He broke off, a vulnerable expression crossing his face. “That is, I want to know whom you intend to choose.”
“Why? So you can approve him?” she snapped.
“What in blue blazes is that supposed to mean?”
It took all her effort to force some calmness into her tone. “The last time we discussed this, you made it quite clear you didn’t wish to marry me yourself.”
“That’s not true. As I recall, I said I wanted to ‘sample the goods first.’”
