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PART III

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MAY, 1780
THE DOVECOTE
LONDON, ENGLAND

CELIA CLOSED HER eyes and sighed when Elliott finally sank himself fully within her, slowly, as if savoring every fraction of movement. His body was warm under her left palm as she caressed him gently down his back until she clutched the tight muscle of his arse.

“Harder,” he whispered in her ear.

She dug her fingernails into his skin.

“More.”

He dropped his forehead into the pillow when she gripped him so hard she once again drew blood. “God, yes,” he breathed. “Slap me.”

Celia complied as hard as she could, gasping at how hard he drove himself into her with the arch of his back.

“Wish I had a bloody crop to put in your hand,” he growled, capturing her jaw just before kissing her harshly, as if he could forget himself within her.

She wished for one, too, simply to learn exactly what such pain could evoke from him. Elliott’s mouth moved from hers to her jaw, down her throat whilst he plowed her somewhat leisurely. She did not truly understand his need for pain (though Nonny had attempted to explain), but it led her to believe he, like Talaat, would find something else particularly pleasure-enhancing …

She sucked the middle finger of her right hand and maneuvered so that she could reach his other arse cheek. She had barely breached the cleft between his legs—

He snatched her wrist in an iron grip. “Don’t,” he snarled at her. “Do not ever do that.”

Vaguely aware that he had gone completely flaccid, she stared up into a stunning expression of rage. They stayed frozen for moments upon moments.

“Release me, Captain,” she said softly, and watched as the rage began to leach off. He loosed her wrist. Slowly, so slowly, she brought her palm to his cheek and caressed the high bone with her thumb even as she dug her left-hand fingers deeper into the flesh of his arse. Struck him lightly.

His chest heaved and though he had not looked away from her, he was not seeing her. He was far away from her, this bed, this moment, to a past she did not need described.

“Commander,” she said again, low, soothingly, the way she had once spoken to a terrified kitten to untangle it from a noose of vines. “Return to me, Judas,” she murmured. She reached for and found his hand. Put it to her breast. “I am a woman. Underneath you. Feel me.” A flicker of recognition in his eyes. Fingers closed in on the soft mound. “It is the year of our Lord seventeen eighty and you are thirty-eight years old.” His fingers tightened. “Your ship, the one you command, is a third-rate frigate. Sixty-six guns. Twenty-one swivels.” Tighter. “You have sunk innumerable British ships and stolen their gold. You answer to no man nor government nor god.” She dragged her fingernails from the mess of blood smearing his arse up his back, leaving furrows. “I am Celia. Captain Fury. Your lover.” She snapped her fingers in his face. “Captain.”

Finally he focused. Blinked. “Don’t do that,” he whispered. “Please.”

“I give you my word.”

“Why did you think—?”

“It was the only way my husband could climax,” she said simply. Elliott stared at her aghast, as if he had never heard such a thing. “I had thought to bring you to a higher pleasure. It is an assured climax for a man.”

Elliott’s jaw ground. “I know that,” he snarled. “All too well.”

God almighty. “Kitteridge,” she murmured.

His body jerked.

I do not prefer men and I haven’t fucked one since I was twenty-three.

Voluntarily.

“I ken,” she whispered.

They stayed that way, her breast crushed in his hand, his back slick with blood, looking at each other. Celia waited for him to catch his breath while caressing his face. “Stand down, Captain,” she whispered. “There is no Lord Kitteridge. You killed him. There is no HMS Ocean. You sank it.” She shifted, grasping his hip and pushing gently. “Here, love. Lie down.”

She heaved gently upward, pressing at him until he complied and lay on his back, watching her, keeping his hand on her somewhere. “Sleep. I will take this watch.”

But he did not close his eyes, instead choosing to watch her settle herself cross-legged on the bed beside him, fussing over him, caressing his chest, running a finger in the crease between his leg and torso, petting his yard as if it needed soothing, cradling his sac in her softened palm and rolling the stones gently. “My husband did not have these,” she said matter-of-factly, thinking how much she had always taken a man’s stones for granted.

“Explain,” he said brusquely, putting his hand to his eyes and pressing.

Celia stopped, shocked. “Why? So that you may compare your suffering with his?”

Long silence. Then, “Aye.”

Men suffered. Some bore it better than others, and Elliott surely had a stronger constitution than most of the men she had ever met. Even Talaat had succumbed to bouts of sorrow and self-pity, for which she had never thought less of him. Certainly he had cause.

“I was not there when he was gelded and he would not speak of it. I do know he was taken by Ottomans who wanted access to his accounts. He sacrificed his manhood and community for his fiduciary responsibilities. His honor. And he was prepared to die for it. He would not have that stripped from him. In the end, he became more powerful as people learned what he had endured to protect his clients’ wealth.”

“How old was he when it happened?”

“Twenty and eight. He was rescued and avenged by a wealthy Berber merchant with a band of mercenaries in his employ and would not allow his moneylender, thus his money, to be so threatened. I gather Talaat was lucky to live at all. His wife—she was his second. His first one died in childbirth, along with the child. She left him once he recovered, although her brothers stoned her for it, and he had had no female companionship for ten years before we met. He never had but the one child who died.”

Elliott’s silence was, Celia knew, simply a command for her to continue.

“Then,” she said softly, “he was tortured and murdered.” Yet again tears stung her eyes. She looked down. “And, as he would not speak of his time with the Ottomans, as you will not speak of your time in the hold of the Ocean, I will not speak of what was done to him. I was the sole cause of it.”

“Celia, that is not your burden to bear.”

Celia’s eyebrow rose. “Oh? Good enough, then! I shall put that aside as soon as you put aside your own shame.”

“Shame?!”

“Aye. I have been on the deck of a ship since I was eight years old. Do you think I know not what happens to men? By the same mechanism I could bring a eunuch to climax, so can any man be brought to climax against his will. Strong men do not break satisfactorily when they are bound and violated. But! When they are forced to pleasure in spite of their helplessness and violation, the shame of it breaks them.” She paused. “I dare say you could have dismissed your experience as simply something that happens at sea had you not come. Am I mistaken?”

The silence was broken only by the usual sounds of the brothel.

“Every time,” he finally murmured. “And there were many. It certainly put paid to any further temptation I might have to take solace in men.” Celia sighed. “Two years alone in Newgate was a—” He searched for the word. “Respite. From the Navy. From Kitteridge’s command of me.”

“And your scars?”

“Also from that time. They were not disciplinary floggings.”

Celia was confused. “You refuse the one thing but retain your need for pain?”

He chuckled reluctantly and dropped a hand to her breast, studying it, fondling it as if to remind himself how a woman felt. “That perversion I had always kept to myself. He didn’t know me well enough to exploit it, else it would be gone.”

“Oh, Elliott.”

“Do not pity me, Madam,” he said softly. “As you reminded me, I got my revenge.”

“And my uncle’s as well. What was done to him?”

Elliott heaved a long sigh. “He was strapped to a table and water was dropped onto his forehead at irregular intervals.”

Celia’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “I understand he was confined, but that seems innocuous enough.”

“It’s maddening, particularly if it goes on hours at a time. Rathbone is very much like you in his need for perfect order, thus it was the unpredictability of the drops that broke him. There were different tortures. Kitteridge experimented until he found the ones that would make us beg for mercy. I broke when I could no longer bear being unable to discipline my body against forced pleasure.”

Celia stared at him blankly, simply too aghast.

“And now you know all my secrets, Madam.”

“I have very rarely seen slaves treated that way!” she protested. “At least not for the sheer sport of it. Certainly, Skirrow didn’t, and he was the most cruel man I have ever known.”

Elliott snorted. “Slaves are valuable. British sailors are ripe for sport—even high-born ones.”

“Why?” she whispered.

“Why did he do it or why did the government allow him to continue to do it even after they had evidence?” Celia opened her mouth to answer, but he went on, “I don’t know the answer to either. There are some things that cannot be answered.” He paused. “Hylton found us. Rescued us. Testified for me at my trial and got me acquitted. But when I learned that he had assigned Kitteridge to command that pay fleet … ”

“Judas,” Celia whispered. “You were betraying Bancroft.”

“I respected him. I served under him and he is who made a commander out of me. I might even go so far as to say I loved him. He risked his career to save me. But even knowing the things Kitteridge did, he still put him in command of so many men. It was an insult to me, everything I believed, everything the Crown had put me through.”

“And now you know why he sent Kitteridge out … ?”

He picked up her hand and closed his eyes while pressing his mouth to her fingers for a great long while before he pulled her gently down beside him and gathered her in his arms, then began to run his fingers through her hair. She sighed, unable to resist closing her eyes and melting into him. “If that were his true goal, he could have accomplished it by simply asking one or several of us to serve as Kitteridge’s officers for the express purpose of staging a mutiny and killing him without losing the gold. I would have agreed to that. Munro most certainly would have. It was not efficient and invites scrutiny, and thus, I cannot forgive.”

Celia thought on that a moment and compared it to Bancroft’s shock that Dunham may have sold her into a harem. “His motives appear eccentric, but his circumlocution is nothing short of fantastical. In his mind, the gold had to be a sure loss.”

“I do not want to think on that question too closely, Madam, else I draw conclusions more confusing or heinous or both.”

The bewildered weariness in his voice made her heart hurt. “You are a greatly complicated man, Elliott.”

He shook his head. “No. I’m a simple farmer seeking his independence. Everything that has gone before are rocks in the soil that I must remove before I can continue to plow.”

“You’re a poet, as well,” Celia said dryly, swirling her finger in the silvered black hair on his chest where his scars had not rendered him bare. “I will not allow you to sway me otherwise.”

Elliott’s fingers continued to pay homage to her hair. “I promise not to let you starve, Celia,” he said abruptly. Celia grunted, unwilling to bestir herself to point out that he could not truly promise that, not when his fingers brushed her cheek. “Sleep now, Captain, my captain. Perhaps we can solve our problems on the morrow.” He paused. “And whilst you slumber, I beg you think on something.”

“Mm?”

“It snows in Ohio.”

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Pirates!