The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(51)
“Please, just…” She gasped on a shuddering breath. The words, combined with her slight squirming against his nude, aroused body threatened to drive him beyond all control.
His shirt, already enormous on her slight frame, had come lose in their clench, and his composure slipped in time with the collar as it drifted down her bare, pale shoulder. His lips followed the seam, exploring the softness of her skin on an expedition toward her breast. All he had to do was expose it, taste it—but in order to do that, he’d have to cease his soft thrusts against her core.
“Wait,” she groaned, tugging at his hair. “I’m going to…”
Was she going to come already? He hadn’t even started yet.
“I meant what I said,” he crooned against her skin. “My body is yours, to use as you will. I will be a slave only to your desires. What do you want me to do?”
“Stop,” she sobbed.
He froze, pulling away to gaze down at her, and saw the panic in her eyes. Her skin flushed from pink to pale in the course of a stunned breath, and a sheen of sweat bloomed at her hairline and over her lip.
“Lorelai?” He carefully lowered her to the ground, his arousal turning to alarm as she frantically pushed him away with feeble trembling limbs. “Lorelai, are you hurt?”
She shook her head, but her eyes clouded, her movements almost inebriated. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, reaching out for the edge of the tub, for something to stabilize herself upon.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded, fighting the urge to shake her, to stun life back into her eyes.
“I’m sorry … Ash.” Her eyes rolled back and every limb slackened. She felt as limp as a corpse when he caught her and lifted her into his arms.
He strode to the bed and laid her carefully upon it, all the while calling her name. He checked her breathing, which was shallow, but regular. He shook her, and tapped at her alarmingly pale cheeks, a bleak emotion welling inside of him, one he hadn’t confronted in a handful of years.
Terror.
Because this was no mere maidenly faint. No matter what he tried, she wouldn’t wake.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Veronica Weatherstoke pressed her ear to the wall. The muffled sounds of violence and distress in the next room remained unamplified.
A feminine cry of alarm had pulled her from her wretched state. She’d sat up on the bed, where she’d been heaped into a puddle of misery, at the first crash of what must have been glass. A second splintering crunch had drawn her to the wall decorated with surprisingly tasteful blue paint, and a collection of what appeared to be original and expensive art.
This turbine-propelled steamship was built better than any her family had crafted, and she’d noted the sturdy thickness of the walls, and the barrier it would make against unnecessary noise.
She couldn’t hear footsteps or voices from the hallway. Nor could she make out the din of the sea just beyond the laughably small porthole windows lining the far wall.
The room was meant to be a gilded prison but, for some reason, sound could carry through this particular wall. But how? She ran her hand over the textured paint, tensing as a high-pitched pleading from the other side stoked her distress.
Not Lorelai, she realized with a shaky exhale. She would have recognized her sister’s voice right away. She knew enough of the layout of this hall of the ship to understand Lorelai was being kept two quarters down at the end. Where she’d been carried by their black-haired, black-hearted captor.
Then who was next door? Another captive? Was one of the prostitutes the Rook mentioned being mistreated?
Men did not consider it an immorality to rape or beat a whore. Strange, they’d often similar standards for their wives.
A wife she was no longer. She had a pirate captain to thank for that, at least. Though, it seemed, she’d been delivered from one form of fearsome incarceration into another.
Whoever this man, this Rook, was to Lorelai, Veronica knew they were no safer on this ship than they’d been at Southbourne with Mortimer alive.
Less so, surely, as evidenced by the chaos being wrought in the very next room.
Veronica pulled her head back and examined the wall. If the sounds weren’t coming through the barrier itself, then there must be a weakness in the structure somewhere.
She found it after only minutes of running her hands along the paint, all the while following the ceaseless clamor of chaos. An insignificant, circular perforation, no larger than her smallest fingernail, had been bored beneath the shadow of a bucolic painting with a disproportionately large frame.
The faint cries were most audible here.
Bending down, Veronica took a bracing breath against the dread gathering in her chest before placing her eye directly at the fissure.
Squeaking, she popped back up again, leaping back from the sight.
Clapping one hand over her mouth, and another over her racing heart, she stood and blinked and breathed for an unaccountably long time.
Not only did the pirates keep their captives in this chamber, they spied on them, as well. This she knew, because the spyglass would have shrunken everything in the blue room for the examination of a watchful eye on the other side of the wall.
Conversely, it focused on and magnified only one place in the next bedroom for her view.
The desk.
The desk from which everything had been violently swept to the ground.