Surrender of a Siren (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy #2)(63)

Her lips were pouty and swollen with passion and just begging to be kissed, long and slow and deep. His groin was still throbbing with the memory of her erotic little gasps, her back arched in ecstasy. Oh, Gray, she said. Oh, Gray, indeed. As in, oh Gray what the holy hell has come over you and what the devil do you intend to do about it?

He took the coward’s way out. He looked away.

“I thought you were painting a portrait. Of me.”

She turned her head, following his gaze to her easel. A vast seascape overflowed the small canvas. Towering thunderclouds and a violent, frothy sea. And slightly off center, a tiny ship cresting a massive wave.

“I am painting you.”

“What, am I on the little boat, then?” It was a relief to joke. The relief was short-lived.

“No,” she said softly, turning back to look at him. “I’m on the little boat. You’re the storm. And the ocean. You’re … Gray, you’re everything.”

And that was when things went from “very bad” to “worse.”

“I can’t take credit for the composition. It’s inspired by a painting I once saw, in a gallery on Queen Anne Street. By a Mr. Turner.”

“Turner. Yes, I know his work. No relation, I suppose?”

“No.” She looked back at the canvas. “When I saw it that day, so brash and wild … I could feel the tempest churning in my blood. I just knew then and there, that I had something inside me—a passion too bold, too grand to keep squeezed inside a drawing room. First I tried to deny it, and then I tried to run from it … and then I met you, and I saw you have it, too. Don’t deny it, Gray. Don’t run from it and leave me alone.”

She sat up, still rubbing his cheek with her thumb. Grasping his other hand, she drew it to her naked breast. Oh, God. She was every bit as soft as he’d dreamed. Softer. And there went his hand now. Trembling.

“Touch me, Gray.” She leaned forward, until her lips paused a mere inch away from his. “Kiss me.”

Perhaps that dagger had missed his heart after all, because the damned thing was hammering away inside his chest. And oh, he could taste her sweet breath mingling with his. Her lips were so close, so inviting. So dangerous.

Panic—that’s what had his knees trembling and his heart hammering and his lips spouting foolishness. It had to be panic. Because something told Gray that he could see her mostly naked, and watch her toes curl as she reached her climax, and even cup her dream-soft breast in his palm—but somehow, if he touched his lips to hers, he would be lost.

“Please,” she whispered. “Kiss me.”

“I can’t.” For the second time that day, he pulled her hand away from his face. For the first—and, he suspected with distressing certainty, the last—time ever, he slid his hand from her breast. “I just can’t.”

The pain in her eyes devastated him. “Then I suppose you’d better leave.”

The bell clanged through the silence, insistent and ceaseless. An alarm to match the frantic pounding of Gray’s heart. Did the whole ship know the danger he was in?

But as his consciousness filtered back, he became aware that the dull thunder in his ears wasn’t his pulse. It was real thunder. And the roar of breath rushing in and out of his lungs was drowned out by the howl of distant wind. The ship gave a lazy tilt, and a small cake of pigment rolled the length of the table before crashing to the floor. Then a wild lurch cleared the rest of her paints and had them both grasping the bolted table for balance.

“All hands! All hands!”

Gray pushed back in his chair, glancing up through the ventilation grate. As he rose to his feet, another sudden dip swept the chair out from under him. “Sweetheart, I—”

“I understand, Mr. Grayson.” Her voice was weak. “Go. Please, just go.”

And with one last look in her welling eyes … God help him, he left. Gray emerged from the companionway to a scene eerily similar to the one on Miss Turner’s canvas. The Aphrodite hurdled over white-capped swells, and a bank of forbidding black clouds clung to the horizon. As he made his way to the helm, seawater dashed over his linen-clad shoulders, reminding him he’d left his coat belowdecks. Regret hollowed out his chest. His coat was the least of what he’d left there. Any shred of courage or decency he possessed. His heart, the shriveled, black thing it was.

And her.

Above him, a pair of sailors were deftly reefing the main topsail. Gray envied them. That was what he needed: He needed to work. He needed to perform hard, physical labor until he was numb to the fingertips and blind with exhaustion. He needed to sweat her out of his system. He met Joss at the ship’s wheel. “Seems we’ve got our wind back.”

“Aye,” Joss said. “And then some. I don’t like the look of those clouds.”

Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“Nor the sound of them,” Gray added.

Joss lifted a spyglass to his right eye, squeezing the left shut. “There’s a sail approaching to windward. I’ve given orders to lie-to and hail her, see what they can tell us about the squall. Perhaps they’ve just come through it.”

“Or around it.”

Joss lowered the spyglass to give him an enigmatic look. “What are you doing abovedecks, anyhow?”

“The cry went up for all hands.”