Kresley Cole: The Captain of All Pleasures

Her eyebrows shot up. Lower than even her reckless father had ever dared.

His course ran insanely close to the perilous seas around the Antarctic, cutting the distance and sailing time to Sydney. She had to have read it wrong.

“Don’t try to read that,” he advised. “It will only give you a headache.”

Her eyes narrowed. She’d been plotting since she was old enough to count. Indeed, she almost informed him with a sharp rap of her fingernails over the offending numbers thathe had made a mistake in one of his calculations. But she should probably let the error stand, since it could adversely affect his course in the race. It would be a cold-blooded thing to do, but this wasn’t a child’s game. If he couldn’t meet the challenge, then he’d fail.

When she said nothing, he scrutinized her and said, “It’s a course —a map of where I’ll sail this ship on my next voyage.” Had he explained that slowly?

Nicole’s nails bit into her palms as she quieted her arrogant pride. She managed a tepid smile as if impressed with his knowledge. Yet thoughts of the race vanished when he walked toward her in that slow, fluid way that made her belly tighten.

He reached out to her, his body so close that she would have to move to avoid touching him. Instead, she lowered her lashes. Would he kiss her again? Did she want him to touch her with those lips once more? Nothing happened for the space of what should have been a couple of breaths.

Her eyes flashed open; he’d reached past her toward a bottle of brandy. She didn’t think he’d seen her mortifying surrender, but that didn’t stop her from berating herself for being so vulnerable to him. Sutherland was a cruel man. A patronizing man. He expected, lest she forget, that she would be bought tonight.

Well, he could occupy himself with liquor all night if he wanted, but she would not let him touch her again. As if to illustrate his matching intention, he poured a generous amount and drained his cut-crystal glass in two long draws.

Inclining the bottle toward her, he halfheartedly offered her some. She couldn’t decide if this was because he didn’t think she’d accept or because he didn’t want to share. She shook her head in answer, the movement making her sway.

Perhaps she should have taken a drink, she thought as a sudden wave of exhaustion washed over her and chilled her. Shivering, she pulled her cloak closer and wrapped her arms around her body.

“You’re cold,” he said. He set down his glass and walked to a cabinet.

“I seem to be,” she confessed. “I become cold very easily.”

Their tones sounded so mundane that she thought of what would happen when reality claimed her. Thinking of tomorrow was like a wet blanket over all the sensations he’d produced in her, and she couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted him to kiss her or if she wanted to fall down where she was and sleep.

He turned from the cabinet and tossed a blanket at her, and though her sore body made it difficult, she awkwardly managed to catch it. Frowning, he looked her over; then, seeming to make a colossal sacrifice, he took it from her. Without a word, he tugged off her damp cloak to wrap the blanket around her, as if she were no more than a doll he was changing.

He looked her up and down, his gaze stopping at her feet. “Since I’ve already started this idiocy…” he muttered gruffly, as he bent to untie and pull off her filthy boots. Obliged to place her hands on his wide, solid shoulders, she had to resist moving her fingers over the firm bunching of his muscles.

When he removed the first boot, his eyes narrowed. He held it up to the lantern, where they both saw that the scuffed brown leather had soaked up splattered blood like a sponge.

“Are you hurt?” he barked as he dropped that one and rushed to remove the other.

“That’s not—that’s not my blood.” Merely thinking about where that blood came from, about the falls and the running enervated her.

His eyebrows rose in amazement, and he studied her face before returning to his task. Nicole felt foolish when he took off her socks, leaving her to furrow her toes in the cabin’s plush rug. But she stood unresisting, knowing she needed his help just now. He strode to his bureau and brought back a pair of thick woolen socks. She hadn’t realized her feet were cold, but when she spied those socks her body cried for them.

He jerked them over her feet, and her eyes closed in blissful comfort. “That feels so good,” she breathed. She opened her eyes and frowned at the sound of her husky, sensual voice. When had she ever sounded like that?

He looked at her curiously, then stood abruptly. As if he needed to explain, he said, “Your feet were like ice.”

Nicole nodded slowly, overwhelmed with fatigue. She took such a deep breath that her head moved with it. Her eyelids opened more sluggishly with each blink.

With something like resignation in his eyes, he placed a huge hand on her lower back and began guiding her to his bed. “Come on. You’re exhausted.”

“Oh. No, I can’t. I couldn’t.”

When she resisted, he said, “I won’t hurt you.”

She focused on his face to tell him she absolutely could not be in his bed, but no words came. Her legs shook. She must have gone soft in the rich surroundings of her last school, because a second later they simply gave out. She sank onto his bed, bewildered by her weakness.

“Will you be all right?”

“Yes. No?” she whispered. “I’m just so tired.”

“The night is catching up with you, so rest for a bit. Then we’ll talk about who those men were,” Sutherland said, his voice neither menacing nor kind as he lightly grasped her shoulder and pushed her down. He squeezed it firmly once, letting her know without words that he wanted her to stay put, before releasing her to walk over to the basin. He brought back a soaked cloth and began washing her scraped hands.

Nicole looked up at him one last time as he brushed at a smudge on her face, trying to decide if she could trust him, knowing she didn’t have much choice. She couldn’t tell anything. His face could have been made of marble for all the emotion it showed. Nicole unwillingly drifted to sleep and dreamed that Sutherland said in disbelief, “Her eyes are blue.”

Derek didn’t make as large a dent in his bottle as he’d intended while he sat and watched over the girl curled in his bed. He’d definitely not predicted his first night with her to be like this. Usually he was impatient to bed a woman and get her gone, but she had been afraid and possibly hurt. Still, he wasn’t resigned to having her sleep here the whole night.

He was, he had to admit, proud that tonight he’d overcome his natural selfishness in order to do something considerate. Why he was being so charitable to a prostitute, he had no idea. It must have been the liquor affecting his brain, because the girl could be prickly and rude, and he certainly did not get involved with women for more than purely physical reasons.

That’s just what he needed to be doing, taking on the troubles of a young prostitute. As if he didn’t have enough weight on his shoulders.

Even more remarkable, he was experiencing the wholly unaccustomed feeling of protectiveness. He wanted to kill the two who’d chased her. She’d put up a good fight, which was most likely why she’d survived. Hell, the little spitfire had actually drawn blood from someone.

The idea that she was a fighter intrigued him, probably because he had let go of so much so easily.

Oddly, she hadn’t behaved like a prostitute. No innuendos gone stale from overuse or practiced pouty smiles. And only minutes after she’d kissed him and made him want her with a surprising ferocity, she’d had to drag her feet back into his cabin. He’d automatically reached for a drink because she’d disconcerted him. A slip of a girl likely a decade younger had made him ill at ease on his own ship.