Scandalous Desires (Maiden Lane #3)(31)

She inhaled sharply. How dare he remind her of that night? Suddenly it was too much: the hunger, the edge of darkness in his voice, and this room—this too familiar room. No one had believed she’d been untouched after that night.

No one had heard her.

She looked at the pirate luxuriating in his bath and a great rage swelled up in her, a mixture of hunger, frustration, lost love, and fear for Mary Darling.

And scorn. Oh, there was plenty of scorn, as well.

“Do you know what you cost me?” she demanded, her voice low and trembling. “When you played your cruel game with me?”

He looked at her, but didn’t say a word. His black eyes reflected no light, fathomless and without expression. Was his heart made of stone that he could play with lives—her life—so carelessly and not feel a thing?

Silence balled her fists, trembling. “It was as if I became a cipher after that night. No one I loved believed me. You silenced me. What you did to me cost me everything I valued in life—my family’s respect, my marriage, my love.”

“And was yer marriage so perfect before ye came to me?”

She gasped, the breath catching in her breast in rage. Of course her marriage had been perfect, hadn’t it?

Hadn’t it?

“We had true love,” she said, drowning out the tiny voice of doubt in her mind.

He turned his face from her, which only made her angrier. In four strides she was beside him, kneeling on the rug next to the tub of water. She reached out and took his face in her palms, turning it so he had to look at her, his lean cheeks cool and a little rough beneath her hands.

“Yes, love.” She hissed the word like a curse. “I loved my husband, my William, and he loved me. That is until that night you kept me here. You destroyed what we had as thoughtlessly as a boy pulling the wings from a butterfly.”

His wickedly sensuous upper lip pulled back in a sneer. “What is love?”

She leaned close to him. “Something you will never have. Something you’re incapable of feeling. I pity you, Mickey O’Connor, for I may have lost my true love, but at least I had him for a time. You’ll never feel love.”

His sneer had grown and his voice was low and terrible. “I may not feel love, but I do feel this.”

He grabbed her hand and thrust it beneath the bathwater.

She struggled so violently that the water splashed over her bodice and the rug, but he was stronger than she. He forced her palm down against his male part, hard and thick, and held it there as he grasped her hair with his other hand. He yanked, pulling her hair, arching her neck, and suddenly his mouth was on hers, cruel and merciless. He ground her lips against her teeth, used his hold on her hair to angle her head for his greater access. She felt the push of his tongue against her lips. For a moment she stopped fighting. She opened her mouth and let him in, hot and searching. She could taste the heady liquor on his tongue, feel the sudden gentling of his mouth as he got what he wanted. His kiss was overwhelmingly masculine. Overwhelmingly dominant.

Something clenched inside her—something primitive and needy, something that had nothing to do with love.

He groaned.

And she lurched back. Her hand came out of the water and she hit him as hard as she could across the face. The sound of the blow was loud in the room.

“No!” she cried, her heart pounding, her breasts aching. “No. You don’t have the right.”

He watched her retreat, his eyes lazy, and his body unmoving. A trickle of blood seeped slowly from the corner of his mouth. He let her get nearly out of the room before he spoke, “I may not have the right, Silence, me love,” he drawled so soft she nearly didn’t catch the words. “But I would’ve listened to ye. I would’ve believed ye.”

Chapter Six

Now on the third night when dusk drew near, Clever John thought long and hard about the feathers he’d found on his person and the fact that he and his cousins could not stay awake no matter how they tried. He took a bit of candle wax from the castle and stopped up both his ears. Then he took up his position beneath the cherry tree and waited for nightfall….

—from Clever John

Mick woke the next morning to the sound of Lad retching by the fireplace.

“Don’t ye dare!” Mick growled, lunging up.

Lad stood frozen on the hearth, tail between his legs, and tiny triangle ears flat to his head. The dog rolled his eyes at Mick.

Mick narrowed his. “Heave in me room, ye damned dog, and I’ll spit ye and serve ye to the crew tonight for supper.”

Lad whimpered and lay down.

Mick sighed and flopped back onto his pillows. A far cry this was from how he’d used to wake in his bedroom. No scented female flesh to warm his bed, only a sick mongrel on the hearth.

And the memory of his kiss with Silence Hollingbrook last night. Aye, and he hadn’t acted the gentleman, had he? No, he’d seized and taken and he would not regret his actions in the light of day, for the kiss had been sweet and hot and all that he’d imagined that a kiss with Silence would be.

Well, not quite all. In his lusty thoughts such a kiss hadn’t ended with her hitting him—nor stomping from the room. No, in his dreams, there’d been much more than that almost chaste meeting of lips. Enough to make his already stiff John Thomas twitch with interest.

He winced, feeling an ache in his arms from the unexpected swim last night. He needed to deal with the Vicar and soon, but first there was the matter of Silence Hollingbrook and her stomach. Harry had kept him informed and the maddening woman hadn’t eaten all yesterday—despite being smuggled food. Perhaps she thought she was protecting the servants or perhaps she was refusing food in some sort of ridiculous protest against living with him. Or perhaps she was simply not eating to irritate him—and if that were so, well it was certainly working.