Under the Lash

Under the Lash By Carolyn Faulkner ©2011 by Blushing Books® and Carolyn Faulkner

Copyright © 2011 by Blushing Books® and Carolyn Faulkner All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Published by Blushing Books®, a subsidiary of ABCD Graphics and Design 977 Seminole Trail #233 Charlottesville, VA 22901 The trademark Blushing Books® is registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office. Faulkner, Carolyn Under the Lash eBook ISBN: 978-1-60968-550-8 Cover Design: by ABCD Graphics

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Chapter One Cassandra Solange Constance Mary Winthrop–Sutton clutched the big tapestry bag that held everything precious to her – and even a few more practical items – much closer to her, as she moved stealthily towards a small cove. The island was to have become her home. In truth, she hadn‟t been there anywhere near long enough to consider it as such – the brief tour she and her mother had been given by her stepfather when they first arrived notwithstanding. He had shown them a small village that had sprung up around the harbor, some beautiful architecture, a few historic sites, as well as the bell tower in the ornate church, mentioning in a tone that sounded downright threatening, that neither of them was ever to venture into town at night alone because of possible raids, as well as the fact that as pretty as the bell tower looked, it served a more practical purpose as a warning to the residents when they were in imminent danger of being overrun by deadly pirates. Until then, she had been busy trying to look thoroughly bored by the proceedings, which wasn‟t that hard considering her mother‟s new husband did have a distinct tendency to drone on while her mother hung nauseatingly off his every syllable. And although Cassie was dying to learn more about the pirates – which was at least somewhat interesting, she nevertheless held her tongue, not wanting to give the false impression that she was paying attention to much of anything he said. It wasn‟t that the man had been overtly cruel to her, and, in fact, if she were pushed to admit it, he had been nothing but a gentleman in the brief time since she had come to live with him. He had carefully not positioned himself as a replacement to her father, but rather seemed to be making a genuine effort to get to know her as more of a friend, which only seemed to annoy Cassie just that much more since she was hard pressed to find fault with him. In fact, he had been quite generous with her, even to the extent of ordering a whole new wardrobe of lighter dresses for her to wear once they landed at San Miguel Island, where the heavier, warmer dresses of home would have been quite oppressively hot and cumbersome. Not that she ever intended to wear any of them, but there was no need for him to know that. She had allowed herself to be guided to the dressmaker‟s and let him buy her a truly beautiful wardrobe that was expensive beyond her wildest dream. Still she refused to wear anything but the black of mourning that her deep sense of loss demanded. To Cassie‟s shock and dismay, however, she found that her mother had allowed herself – several months before her father had been gone a year – to be convinced to abandon proper mourning clothes in favor of wearing outfits that would entice the Don and display her charms to their best advantage. It was a blow from which Cassie was finding it hard to recover. Other than that, though, she couldn‟t come up with a single thing that the Don had done to warrant her ire. He didn‟t seem to need one penny of their money, although Cassie knew that could have been a ruse to gain their trust. If she were to be honest with herself, which was a state of mind she assiduously tried to avoid, she was more than a little jealous and frankly disheartened that her beloved father had been replaced so easily, and by a man whom Cassie thought of as a cad and well beneath her mother‟s notice, despite the lack of evidence to support her theory. Her mother seemed gayer and happier

than she‟d been in a long time – since even before her father passed, and there was no doubting the love and affection she saw in Duque Gregorio‟s eyes when he looked at Lysette, who was obviously just as dismayed at her daughter‟s attitude towards her new husband. On the few occasions that they had been alone since the Don had arrived on the scene, she often beseeched Cassie to give the Don a chance, certain that if she got to know him, she would come to like him. But Cassie didn‟t want to like him! She wanted him to be the stereotypical gold digger after a delicate widow‟s fortune, and did her best to paint him as such in her mind, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Even here, alone in the dark, she couldn‟t keep herself from rolling her eyes at the thought of how drastically her mother had changed since her father had died. She barely recognized the sycophantic love slave that that formerly strong, intelligent woman had become. Until tonight – during their alarmingly short courtship – Cassie had had no idea just what it was that had caused such a drastic change in her mother‟s usually practical, pragmatic demeanor. This night, however, she had had a very rude awakening as to exactly what it was that had drawn her mother to a man that Cassie considered to be well beneath their station – Don or not – and what she had seen had been the impetus for her midnight flight from the safety of Duque Gregorio De la Fuente‟s gorgeous mansion into the unknown hazards of a night that seemed to be drawing further in on her with every breath she took. She wasn‟t exactly sure what it was that had her panting; there was no way that anyone would know that she was gone until mid–morning at the earliest, considering that the newlywed couple tended to skip breakfast in favor of spending their morning in more intimate pursuits. That thought had Cassie shuddering in reaction to the shocking memory of what she had seen transpire between the two. Cassie and her parents had been an inordinately close family, and her parents were – despite their arranged marriage – truly in love. They preferred nothing more than to be in each other‟s company, doting endlessly on the fruit of their love, showering her with the best of everything and taking her with them everywhere, despite how scandalizing their conduct was considered by their contemporaries, who believed that one must do one‟s duty in having children, but left the dreary task of actually raising them to the help in favor of as urchin–free an existence as could be managed. When her father, the Earl of Sutton, had died suddenly during a cholera epidemic that swept through their remote village and even managed to reach their estate, her mother had been her only source of consolation. They had clung to each other in the depths of their grief. Desperate to keep from sliding into a deadly decline at the loss of her one true love, Lysette had decided after seven long, tear–filled months cloistered in their cavernous home, that they needed a change of scenery, and so the two of them set off for their London townhouse – draped, of course, as required, in yards and yards of the requisite black crepe of mourning. Cassie had already made her debut into London society several years before. The three of them were so happy together that they weren‟t in the least concerned by what would normally have been considered an alarming dearth of offers for her hand. That just meant that they could enjoy each other‟s company for that much longer. Her parents

– unlike the majority of their peers – were in absolutely no hurry to rid themselves of their precious daughter and Cassie had less than no interest in placing herself under any man‟s thumb when she had nearly unlimited freedom under her father‟s roof. One of the most treasured memories Cassie had of her childhood was being cosseted and fawned over at bedtime. Both parents would come to her room to kiss her goodnight, and often stayed for long moments while her father regaled them with familiar stories of what her mother always referred to as his misspent youth, during which he was roundly scolded at least once by his beloved wife, who considered that the majority of his stories were highly improper for a young girl‟s ears – not that she ever managed to stop him from telling the tales in the first place. Cassie was also more than free to join them in their bedchamber, which, again, unlike any of her friends‟ parents; they actually shared instead of maintaining separate rooms and having the occasional physical encounter purely to fulfill the need for an heir. Many long, happy hours had been spent wedged between the two, safe from the thunderstorms that terrified her. Her parents coddled and spoiled her outrageously. Last night, alone and lonely in her huge and lavishly appointed, but strange and impersonal room, Cassie had innocently gone in pursuit of the closeness with which she had been raised, determined to suss out her mother and try to rekindle the relationship they seemed to have lost since venturing to London, where the smarmy Don had entered their secure little world and knocked it out of orbit. But what she‟d discovered instead, had been the impetus for her flight away from the sterile and somewhat sinister walls of her new home – and her beloved mother. Her heart had lifted when she finally made it through the maze of hallways and glanced down the long, elaborately decorated corridor to see that the door to her mother‟s chamber was open a few inches, as if in invitation. Not certain whether she might have fallen asleep with it open, and not wishing to disturb her, Cassie had crept quietly up to peep in, certain she‟d find her Mama with an ever present book on her lap, snoring softly having fallen asleep while reading as she often did. The sight that greeted her virgin eyes – and ears – however, had nothing to do with slumber at all, and everything to do with the depths of depravity she had been certain she‟d seen in the Duque‟s eyes from the moment she was introduced to him not three months ago. Her mother was bent over the chair of her ornately tapestried vanity; the one her father had given her as a wedding gift, done in golds to echo the ornate frame of the mirror that topped it was well as the drawer pulls and legs of the chair, with a cornflower blue background decorated with touches of mauve and cream flowers. How many memories could she conjure of seeing her mother sitting in that seat, brushing her long still mostly reddish hair in the mirror while her father looked on adoringly, or even ran his fingers through those luxurious locks in a moment of intimacy she‟d been more embarrassed to witness as she grew older. But this wasn‟t embarrassingly tender – it was alarmingly lewd! She could see that her mother was still in the dress she‟d worn to dinner, but the skirt had been bunched up onto her back as it slanted downwards to where her hands gripped the seat of the chair rhythmically as if begging for deliverance. Cassie could clearly see the way her fingers clenched and unclenched in time with long, low moans that – if she had been asked at the time, she would have never said could have been issued from her sweet mother‟s mouth.

And she was being given more than ample reason for those moans by the man who was standing tall and strong – despite his years – behind her and just to one side, viciously wielding a doubled up length of leather against that defenselessly proffered bottom. As Cassie covered her mouth and began to back away, she could hear the Don saying something that she immediately regretted overhearing, “My naughty Lysette, this will teach you to behave. When your husband commands your presence in his chambers, he means immediately – not when you decide it‟s the proper time. Am I making myself perfectly clear?” The strap rose and fell relentlessly and each explosive crack had Cassie flinching for her poor Mother, and despite how committed she had been to retreating as far as she could in the opposite direction when she‟d first come upon that little scene, she immediately became just as fervent about rescuing her precious Mama from even one more stroke so full of such raw humiliation. So instead of yielding to her first impulse and scurrying back to her room like a frightened mouse, Cassie instead ran to grab a pike from one of the many suits of armor the Don liked to display about his mansion, returning to her former position to fling the door open and storm into her mother‟s room, intent on rescuing her from this senseless beating. No one had ever laid a hand on her mother before, and she wasn‟t about to let this no account Don hurt her in any way – no matter the fact that he was half again her size and conditioned by years of fighting for his King. But despite her fervor, after her first untrained attempt at skewering the man through the middle, she found herself relieved of her weapon after only having gotten a few steps into the room, and now both she and her mother were at his mercy as he chuckled and hefted the lance once or twice, before turning to place it carefully against the wall behind him, well out of Cassie‟s reach. Putting her ignominiously quick defeat behind her, she nevertheless stormed up to the man whom she considered the usurper of her mother‟s affections, to say nothing of an abusive lout who seemed to take great pleasure in inflicting pain on weaker beings, and spat in his face, shouting for him to stop beating her mother and let her go. But again, the Don was too quick for her, and he captured her forearms and held them well away from him, neutralizing this threat as well, without much thought, holding her until she‟d exhausted herself physically, although she continued to rain invectives down on his head. “Enough!” he roared, and Cassie flinched, finding herself unexpectedly turned loose while the Don produced a pristine handkerchief with which he wiped his face. Instead of renewing her attack, all she could think to do was to rub her arms where his hands had restrained her, as if his mere touch had sullied her, somehow. During all of this, a very distraught Lysette had tried to stand up, but one look from her new husband had her back in place seconds later. She couldn‟t hold her tongue as her face blushed nearly as furiously as her backside. “Cassandra! Go back to your room this minute!” she ordered. Cassie wasn‟t listening. All of her attention was focused on the man in front of her. She was determined to rescue her mother from his lascivious clutches. But when she opened her mouth again to let loose with another stream of invectives that called not only his own honor but that of his ancestors‟ into question, he cut her off merely by taking a step forward.

Despite her inward castigation of herself as a coward, Cassie couldn‟t prevent herself from snapping her mouth shut and taking a corresponding step back at the same time, although she did manage to keep her eyes locked with her opponent‟s. The Don was to be commended for keeping the vitriol that Cassie knew had to be lurking somewhere within him from showing in his calm, almost but not quite soothing tone. “I know we don‟t know each other very well yet, Cassandra, but you should know better than to come bursting into your mother‟s room uninvited. To say nothing of the fact that you should have been taught to think twice – and then twice again – before deciding to interfere with what transpires between a man and wife,” he said, surprising her by taking several steps back himself. “Do as your mother suggested and return to your room. And don‟t go venturing out of it again once you‟ve gone to bed or you might find yourself even more appalled at what you discover happens between men and women in their bedchambers.” Cassie swallowed and stood her ground although she could see how tightly his jaw was clenched the longer she remained in place. Seeing that his more gentle speech was not having any effect, Gregorio said almost off handedly, “Not that it‟s any of your business, but you might consider the fact that your mother isn‟t bound or restrained in any way. What does that tell you about her part in this little tableau, hmmm?” “Gregorio!” her mother gasped, looking up at him as Cassie began to back away, not in obedience to her mother‟s – or the Duque‟s – order, but because the reality of the situation was just hitting her: her mother was a willing participant in this horrifying pursuit. As much as she didn‟t want to, after a few backward steps, Cassie simply turned tail and ran. She couldn‟t possibly get away from that bedroom fast enough, but before she made it to the safety of the hallway, she heard her stepfather say, “Maybe we need to find you a man who can do the same for you, Cassandra – keep you firmly in line, where you belong.” Cassie refused to listen to what he was saying, although the words seemed to seep in despite the fact she was doing her best to ignore them. “Your parents have spoiled you; and like your mother, you are sorely in need of a husband who‟s not going to be anywhere near as indulgent.” Although she had already turned the corner and continued to run as fast as she could away from that disturbing scene, her keen ears could still pick up her mother‟s indignant squeak of “Gregorio!”, as well as what she was rapidly coming to recognize as the crack of something unyielding against flesh, which prompted her to continue her sprint with her hands firmly over her ears, lest they hear anything worse than they already had. With the abhorrent visions of what she had just witnessed racing through her mind, Cassie did exactly what she had been expressly told not to do. First, she changed into her rattiest dress, knowing she wouldn‟t want to sully any of the nicer ones, and filled the largest valise she thought she could carry – and not with the most practical of items at that, preferring to take remembrances and mementos from her father rather than the warm cloak and more sturdy shoes she was feeling the acute absence of right now. Luckily for her, as the Don lived a more countrified life here, away from civilization, and her maid, Mary, hadn‟t made the long voyage yet, there was little need

to sneak around as she slipped boldly out the front door, although she still did her best to make sure that no one saw her, especially as she was out in the open as she crossed the courtyard. Once she found the entrance to the path she sought at the edge of the jungle–like woods, she started at the sound of some wild animal or bird, plastering herself against the side of the tree. She knew she would end up somewhere near the beautiful beach she‟d found while wandering about on her own one day. But she had neglected to bring a lantern, and she wasn‟t really sure that that wasn‟t a good thing, since she had neglected to notice that the night was intermittently overcast and she was only given occasional glimpses of the shoreline as she was headed down a steepish hill. At least she could smell the water and knew she was headed in the right direction. The problem was that she didn‟t really have a plan as to what to do once she got there. She headed there because in the short time that she had been on the island, it had become her haven away from the house she was rapidly coming to hate, but she only knew the one way in or out. And regardless of where she ended up, she was trapped on an island that her stepfather governed. Her only hope was to stow away on a ship bound for somewhere – anywhere – but she knew that none was in residence at the moment because Duque Gregorio had mentioned that they would have to wait for the next ship to arrive to post the letters with instructions for the staff at both of their houses that her Mother had written recently. For the moment, once she felt sand shifting beneath her feet, she stayed relatively close to the path that had lead her here, allowing her eyes to adjust to the darkness. But as soon as she realized that she‟d been staring at more than the empty cove, she turned as quickly and quietly as she could, knowing that it was even more important that she remain undiscovered, considering what she‟d already had the misfortune of seeing. A large ship – larger by half again than the one on which they had sailed from England – had slipped silently into the unprotected cove and a boat had already landed not three hundred feet from her, its men scurrying about like rats, whispering harshly to each other only when it was absolutely necessary. Not a light was lit on the entire vessel, and this behavior had even the innocent Cassie alarmed. Her fears were confirmed when a large party of ruffians gathered and lit huge torches, then began marching towards what she was concerned was the exact path she was standing next to. It was then that she could see the skull and crossbones flying high and proud at the top of the mast of the ship where it lay anchored just off shore, and she knew that her worst fears had been confirmed: pirates were raiding the town, and she was the only one who seemed to be aware of that fact. And if she could see them, they could probably see her, as well. She knew she had to get to the church to send up the alarm, but she wasn‟t even sure she knew the way there, especially not in the dark and not from this tiny cove. She‟d only ever seen it that one time when the Don had shown it to them, and she certainly hadn‟t been expecting that she would ever need to find her way back to it. But despite what she‟d seen transpire tonight, Cassie had absolutely no interest in losing her mother so soon after watching her father waste way, so she headed uphill, remembering that the church was on a high point, overlooking the harbor. She didn‟t question her luck, however, when minutes later she ended up exactly where she needed to be. The doors to the church were enormously heavy but unlocked,

and she just managed to pull them open enough to slip inside, then felt her way across the altar to a set of stairs that must lead to the bell tower. The chamber was small enough that, once she‟d climbed to the top of the stairs and taken two steps, the bell pull brushed the top of her head. Cassie reached up to grab onto it, then pulled with all her might, feeling a tremendous sense of relief when the old bell clanged to life, even though she felt herself lifted entirely off her feet as it swung back. Until someone‟s alarmingly strong arms closed tightly around her midsection, and she found herself relived both of the rope and the ability to do what she wanted most in the world to do at this time – scream – as a huge hand clamped itself over her mouth. “Move and I‟ll kill you,” came the rough promise from lips that were pressed much too intimately against her ear.

Chapter Two Whoever he was let the rope back up very slowly and gently, so as not to allow the bell to sound again, all the while maintaining a rib cracking hold on Cassie, who despite her earlier bravado had been thoroughly frightened into obeying his rough command, at least for now. Seconds later, they were out of the church and she recognized that she was being taken back in much the same direction she had come – although much less tentatively than she had been traveling, as if the person who held her captive knew his way around the island without much thought. Now she was even more terrified than she had been before, and she knew she was in grave danger. If this pirate managed to get her onto his boat, she would be lost forever, in more ways than one. Her reputation would be in ruins. Even if her mother was able to find her somehow, which was highly doubtful, she wouldn‟t be considered much worth rescuing by anyone in their society. It would be assumed by all and sundry that her virtue had been compromised, and there would never be any hope of making a good match for her with any gentleman. So despite the threat he‟d issued, Cassie began to fight for her life, only to find that all her kicking, punching and wiggling got her was a sharp swat on her backside that had her positively howling indignantly from behind that massive hand. His attempt at childish chastisement only encouraged her to redouble her efforts, at least until they were again on soft sand. She expected that he would simply cart her over to the boat she had seen them beach. But instead he surprised her by taking a seat on a large boulder that was conveniently situated at the end of the path. Before she could say or do anything, she found herself flipped quite expertly over his lap, her skirts over her head and her bottom bared to receive the righteous correction of his platter sized hand connecting with her bare, ample flesh so fast and furious and exquisitely painfully that it stunned her into a long silence, during which she could only manage to breathe in until she thought her lungs would explode with it. And then they did. Her indignant screams ripped through the night, getting her what she thought she wanted. The spanking stopped almost immediately, and she was once again half dragged, half carried by the behemoth at her back, that almost suffocating hand firmly back in place across her mouth. It was then that Cassie realized – although her struggles to be released hadn‟t gotten her anywhere yet, there was another avenue that she would more than relish pursuing. And that was when she sank her teeth ruthlessly into the only portion of his anatomy that was readily available to her – the tender heel of the hand that had been thrashing her seconds before. And she didn‟t let go until he dropped her and she had no choice but to release her painful grip on him, or she would still have been holding on to him. “Why you little!” Her tangled skirts hampered her efforts at getting away from him although she‟d tried to get up to start running as soon as her feet hit the sand. But before she could even begin to get away, he reached out and hauled her back to him by her slim ankle, dragging her through the sand until he could reach under her skirts to her petticoats, easily ripping

a long section of the ruffled material from the well–worn dress with his bare hands while she still tried desperately to scramble onto her feet. Then he casually reached down just as she thought she might have eluded him and had a chance to escape, grabbing a much too intimate hold of her leg just under her knee to drag her back towards him, then standing to tug on her upper arm until he‟d lifted her up onto her feet and turned her towards him, smashing her up against his marble slab of a chest and nearly knocking the wind out of her. Cassie opened her mouth to give him a thorough verbal comeuppance and announce to him exactly who she was, but she didn‟t get a word out before he used the rag he‟d relieved her of to shove into her mouth, binding it expertly at the back of her head, rendering her at once both silent and much less deadly. When she was turned away from him, he also dealt with her flailing hands, binding them behind her and then pushing her down onto her butt in the wet sand so that he could make embarrassingly short work of doing the same to her feet. When he rose, he leaned down and scooped her into his arms, but when she continued to struggle as best she could, he simply shifted her to a very uncomfortable position over his broad, muscular shoulder, where she was most conveniently positioned so that any time she made any movement whatsoever, he could simply reach up and give her a hearty whack on what Cassie considered to be an already well tenderized bottom. She was almost more affronted by the idea that this heathen pirate had manhandled her in the ways he had than the idea that she was being kidnapped. No one – not even her beloved father – had ever dared to take a hand to her, and yet this man seemed to be making a habit of it. Unfortunately for her, he wasn‟t explicit about how he wanted her to be treated when he handed her off to one of his men, so she was put into the boat somewhat less than gently, which drew his ire to that unlucky sailor when he heard her head connect with one of the seats as he put her down and saw that she had been hit in the back of the head hard enough for her to lose consciousness. And although he gave the man a piece of his mind for not being more careful of their precious cargo – a term that drew a chuckle out of the man he was reprimanding – he had to admit that it was actually a lot easier to get her onto the ship when she wasn‟t wiggling any more. He tasked the same man with delivering her to his quarters, and more specifically to put her in his bed to recover from the blow, being sure to mention that she was not to be touched or molested in any way by the likes of him – or anyone else. And one look into the smaller man‟s eyes let him in on the fact that if the order was disobeyed, he would surely know. That got him more ribbing and chuckles from the crew, not that he acknowledged them. Instead he began issuing commands to get them the hell out of the cove as fast as they could before the townspeople descended on them. True, she‟d only been able to ring the bell once, and that probably hadn‟t aroused much of anyone, especially since they hadn‟t come into the proper harbor, but he wasn‟t one to take chances with his crew or himself, and so they navigated back to the open sea post haste. Before he went below to more tantalizing pursuits, he‟d given further orders to his first mate, made sure they were on the course he had prescribed and checked every last detail about how the ship was running down to how well the lowliest swabby was doing –

or not doing and drinking or lollygagging himself into a stupor – his job. Only then did he allow himself the luxury of entering his own cabin, to which he owned the only key. She was right where he‟d imagined that Scully had put her, waves of titian hair fanned out beneath her, but the rest of her still trussed up like a Christmas goose and also still dead to the world, which would be easier for her in the long run. By the time she awoke, they‟d be well out to sea, and that should help her disabuse herself of the notion of any kind of a rescue, not that he expected some trollop who was wandering alone on the beach in the middle of the night to have a family with the means to mount any such thing, of course. He frowned for a moment, though, looking down at her and noticing for the first time how fine her clothes were. It was faded and worn, but still obviously of good, quality fabric. Probably stolen, he thought. No, there was no way that she was anything more than a common tramp. He rubbed his hand where it still ached from the chunk she‟d tried to take out of him, noticing that he bore the stamp of her little teeth on his flesh. A tramp with damned good teeth it seemed, he mused, and an inflated sense of outrage. She‟d bitten into him as if the preservation of her virtue demanded it, but he highly doubted there was really anything left for her to fight about so furiously. He poured himself a half a tankard of rum from his own private stock and sank into the comfortable chair behind his small desk, grumbling to himself about how taller, bigger men were never meant to go to sea. There was a knock on the door – not a tentative one like most of the men would have made, but a much stronger, bolder one that let him know exactly who had issued it. “Come.” The only slightly smaller man ducked his head on the way into the cabin, just the way he had to, his eyes darting to the big bed that dominated the room even more so than its original occupant. “Ah, so I see it wasn‟t just a rumor. There is a woman aboard.” He crossed the floor to pull a chair from the scaled down table that was bolted in place against the wall and carefully put it within reach of Anjel‟s rum, which he grabbed and took several gulps from before replacing it exactly where it had been. “A bold move, Anjel. Truly. Although I have to say that bringing a female onto your ship might not be the best move as far as the men are concerned.” He reached for the mug again, but Anjel beat him to it, lifting it to his own lips and draining it dry in one gulp. “Get your own damned rum, Ashcroft.” His friend as well as first mate had already read the writing on the wall and was already halfway to the bottle before he had a chance to extend the invitation, but then Anjel expected nothing less. “If any of the men don‟t like it – or if they decide to misbehave while she‟s with us – then they‟ll be invited to make the long, shark filled swim home.” Rory Ashcroft, the spare in the “heir and a spare” scenario of the vaunted house of the Duke of Ashcroft, lifted his eyebrow as he sat back down with a full mug. “Just how long do you intend to keep her?” he asked, planting his feet on the desk next to the charts his friend was studying. “As long as I wish.” He fixed the other man with a determined gaze. “Don‟t tell me you of all people have managed to dig up a conscience?” A derisive snort greeted Anjel‟s ears. “Hardly. I was just thinking that where and when you might want to disabuse yourself of this bit of fluff might determine in what

direction we head. She‟s beautiful enough that, if you could see your way to keeping her even somewhat chaste, she would probably fetch quite a nice price if we sold her to the Turks.” Rory watched the expected tic develop in Anjel‟s cheek, and if he hadn‟t thought it would mean he‟d end up with his friend‟s not inconsiderably sized fist crashing into his jaw, he would have had the audacity to mouth the words along with him. “I do not peddle flesh.” “Ah yes. And you were needling me while imagining my nagging conscience – which I‟ve assured you on innumerable occasions that I don‟t own – but there you go again, performing against type again as the pirate with a heart of gold . . .” He fully expected Anjel to have pushed his big, imposing feet off the edge of his desk by now, but he wasn‟t prepared for him to stand up and reach under his booted ankles, using leverage against him to tip him backwards out of his chair. “Keep your feet off my desk and your observations to yourself, Mr. Ashcroft,” came the clipped command. Rory was wearing what had been left of his tankard and was fairly baptized in the stuff. “Bloody hell, Anjel, you just wasted perfectly good rum!” But Anjel wasn‟t looking at his long time friend as he replied, “Just consider yourself a little more marinated than you usually are.” He was leaning against one of the posts of his bed – his one requirement when this ship had been built was that the captain‟s quarters be large enough to accommodate a bed that was big enough that his feet didn‟t hang over it. As a result, the shipwrights had built a four post bed into the ship itself, and that suited Anjel perfectly. “All I can say is that it‟s a good thing you can fight like the very Devil, or you might have a mutiny on your hands with a woman as good looking as that on board. You know how the men can get.” He did. And from personal experience, too. But he didn‟t bother to answer Rory, who finally got the point and made his way out, closing the door behind him. *** Cassie awoke slowly to a throbbing headache and a heart stopping sense of alarm that had her trying desperately to ignore the pain enough to sit up and take stock of her surroundings, but it was impossible. Every time she lifted her head, the room began to spin and she couldn‟t make much sense of anything she saw, anyway, although she was glad to realize that the dizziness, as well as the pain, did dissipate some after multiple attempts. It was her frustrated groan that alerted the other occupant of the room that she was – at last – awake, which was the last thing she wanted to do. Before she knew it, her field of vision – such as it was – was filled with the sight of the very large man whom she recognized with a start as the one who had kidnapped her, and he was gazing down at her with a fierce frown. Cassie couldn‟t understand why he seemed to be so upset, since it was obviously his fault that she was here and that she‟d bumped her head. But she couldn‟t remind him of either of those facts since he hadn‟t removed the impromptu gag from her mouth, and she was horrified to realize that she was also still very well trussed up and could barely move a muscle.

“Headache?” Anjel asked, sinking down on the bed beside her, ignoring her looks and squeaks of outrage and lifting her just enough that she could lay propped up against his side – if he could get her to stay still, that was. She was wiggling and writhing in a manner that had him much more interested than he really wanted to be, feeling himself rising with every careless movement of that lithe body. “Stay still, damn you, or headache or no, I‟ll take you over my lap.” The instant he issued the threat – which she already knew was no lie – she went completely still, making him chuckle softly at how obedient she suddenly became. And somehow, even on such short acquaintance, he knew that was a lie. He loosened but didn‟t remove entirely the gag he‟d employed not so long ago, replacing it with his tankard, which he‟d filled with the same ale as the crew drank. He wasn‟t about to waste his good rum on a doxy like her. Cassie took a grateful swallow; her throat was frightfully parched. But when she got a second taste of the swill he was offering, she spewed it out entirely without thinking, succeeding in drenching the two of them. She‟d never tasted such a horrible concoction in her life, and she knew that if she took another sip of it, it wouldn‟t be ale that she showered them in. Anjel roared his displeasure, replacing the gag immediately, and Cassie found that she couldn‟t resist in the least, because whipping her head back and forth was completely out of the question because the dizziness that had receded some came back in full force as soon as she attempted to avoid the gag by doing just that. He produced a rag, with which he mopped himself, but didn‟t bother to apply it to her. Instead, he sat back down on the edge of the huge bed and reached for her, placing her with no effort at all over his lap. The only time Cassie had ever been put in this position was by this horrible man, and she knew she needed to get away from him as soon as possible – before he began whacking away at her defenseless bottom. But there was no hope for escape, bound as she was. His one arm across her back was weight enough to easily hold her in place, even if she hadn‟t been hampered by her makeshift bonds, but he also clamped that hand most familiarly onto her far hip and trapped her other hip tightly – and obscenely – up against his rock hard belly. The end result was that she could barely move in any direction, despite how thoroughly affronted as she was to have been manhandled in such a manner. She was absolutely and inordinately furious, but thwarted at every avenue when she tried to express her rage. Even the invectives she was heaping on his head were completely muffled by the gag. But if she had had some notion of being unhappy to have been positioned in such an intimate manner by a man she barely knew, it flew out of her mind as soon as that oak like hand landed on the backside he had – during her useless struggles – expertly managed to bare. In fact, she had managed to kick her own bloomers across the room by violently bending her knees up then down, which was one of the few movements she was still allowed although it hadn‟t worked out in her favor in the least. The spanking was bad enough, but he had the audacity to lecture her about her behavior while he was roasting her rear! “You are hands down the most thoroughly annoying, irascible woman I have ever met! You seem determined by dint of your atrocious behavior to spend the majority of this voyage over my lap. Well, believe me, my girl, that can be arranged.”

Cassie was beside herself with the humiliation from the situation she found herself in – she was nearly twenty– one years old – but even more so from the sheer stinging, aching roasting she was receiving. Some of her friends had been spanked by the servants – or even occasionally their parents – while they were growing up together, and she had always been curious – and as she grew even a little titillated, if she allowed herself the freedom to admit it, which she didn‟t – as to what it actually felt like. Now she knew that it was something to be avoided at all costs! She was quite certain that he wasn‟t using a hand on her behind, but rather a torch since every inch of her skin from stem to stern felt as if it had been most thoroughly scorched, to the point – she was quite certain – of blistering. “I think you‟ll need regular punishments during our time together, just to remind you exactly who it is that‟s in charge here. You‟re an uppity little thing, and you‟re obviously in sore need of someone to keep you firmly in your place.” And he was more than willing to apply for that position. Now that he had had a little more time – and much better light – with which to observe her, he realized that she was quite beautiful, if treacherous. He had been hard put to keep his hands off the waves of red gold hair that had spilled onto his bed and now nearly to the floor in consideration of her position. And her skin was absolutely flawless – not a pockmark or a scar to the found, and he could see a fair amount of her since he‟d thrown over her skirts and disabused her of her underthings, which were – surprisingly – of the same kind of quality material that her careworn dress was made of. She was laid bare to him from the first gentle swell of her hips to her tiny pebble toes, and he had appreciated every creamy rose inch of her until he began to change a large portion of that silky skin into a much angrier, unhappier shade of violent red. Anjel applied a fresh layer of swats up one side and down the other of that lovely bottom of hers, then up and down each of her already deeply reddened legs, feeling the heat from them each time his palm connected with her skin with a resounded whack. “I think at meal times today and then right before bed for the rest of the week might be just about right for you, until you learn unconditional obedience – when the ship bell rings for meals today you‟ll know what you‟re due, and then again before bed, so that whenever you turn over you‟ll remember just who it is that you must obey. That should help you learn to keep your teeth sheathed, and be grateful for whatever drink you‟re given!” he almost roared at the end before getting a hold of himself. He rarely yelled at the men, but this little baggage seemed to get under his skin like no one else, and had almost succeeded in making him really lose his temper.

Chapter Three Cassie had never felt such loss of control in her relatively young life. There was very little that she hadn‟t been able to get from her parents – usually in the form of gifts, but if neither her birthday nor Christmas was anywhere near, she could always wheedle what she wanted out of one or the other of them. She rose when she wanted to, slept when she wanted to, and had arranged her life exactly to her liking. It was one of the reasons that she had deliberately sabotaged her first season, making certain that there were few if any offers for her hand by regaling the men who signed her dance card with tales of her adventures. They were mostly fictitious, of course, but a few of them had the spark of truth in them, and she made them outlandish enough that not one of her dancing partners ever signed up for the same harrowing experience twice. Cassie knew that, once she got married, she would lose all of the freedom she had with her parents and be placed firmly under her husband‟s thumb. It was not a position she coveted in the least, and so she did everything she could to avoid the possibility of an actual suitor. She had been extremely happy with the resulting lack of eligible bachelors beating their way to her father‟s study to ask for her hand, and although she knew her parents were just the slightest bit worried about her apparent disfavor within society, they were more than overcome with joy at the idea that their happy, insular little family would remain intact. Since her father‟s passing, however, she had come up against the realization that that singular misfortune meant she had very little say in what happened to her any longer, and that was a concept of which she was distinctly not very fond. Her mother had barreled headlong into a relationship that Cassie found less than acceptable on almost every level – even before she‟d been so blatantly exposed to their unsavory tastes. She had been forced to come down here, to a backwards island where she would probably never see any of her friends again, expressly because she wasn’t married and she couldn‟t stay in England without a chaperone. And now she was struggling with the idea that, although in the past she had never really encountered anyone she couldn‟t manipulate into doing what she wanted, that era was drawing to a rather abrupt end. Cassie sensed that what this man said, he meant, and she already knew from experience that he wouldn‟t hesitate to back it up by laying down the law on her rear end. When he stopped spanking her, she expected that he would put her back on the bed, but he didn‟t. Instead he did something that surprised her – he loosened the makeshift hobbles he‟d put around her ankles. But he warned her like a child to behave as he did so. “I‟m going to let your legs loose now, missy, but I expect you‟ll well remember the spanking you just got and keep them quiet. I know you‟re not used to it, but I expect you to act like a lady.” Not used to it? She howled in outrage behind the strips of fabric in her mouth. She had never been anything but a lady all her life. Of course she immediately discounted those years when she was younger and apt to climb trees and run away from anyone who came near her with a hairbrush because she was only a little girl and such behavior was not unexpected, as far as she was concerned.

“I want you to put the toes of your left foot on the floor.” How had the tone of his voice changed so quickly from chiding to something even more sinister? It was like rich velvet flooding her ears and insinuating itself into her brain, but still just deep and hoarse enough to elicit a response she had never given anyone in her life: her nipples hardened to unbearably throbbing peaks beneath her clothes, and she was appalled to find that she desperately wanted to rub the ache out of them although she knew that that was an absolutely unacceptable desire. She was ashamed of herself for ever harboring such a lewd, shameful thought. She had become so lost in her own troubling reactions to him that she had neglected to obey him, and immediately suffered the consequence of having done so. That horrid palm of his began cracking down on her already sensitized rear and continued to do so until that small foot tentatively found its way to the floor. With her skirts above her head, though, that position left her quite thoroughly exposed to him, and she found herself entirely unable to keep them where he wanted them. She couldn‟t let him see her...her privates. She couldn‟t! It just wasn‟t to be contemplated! But Anjel wasn‟t to be denied, or worse than that, disobeyed. On this ship, his word was law and he wasn‟t about to let this little slip of a girl get away with defying him. So he reached for and unbuckled his thick leather belt, then slipping it easily out of its loops, folding it in half with practiced ease and keeping careful hold on the buckle. If he could keep himself from scarring that perfect skin, she‟d be worth much more in the marketplace. But considering how obstinate she was being, he wasn‟t at all sure he was going to be able to manage that. Somehow, this little chit set him off quicker than anyone he‟d ever met. He was usually a favorite of the ladies in every port, so much so that his men routinely begged him not to leave the ship until they‟d had first crack at the women, because as soon as he appeared they were drawn to him like flies to honey. Anjel was a big man but that only seemed to attract nearly every female he‟d encountered – young and old – to his side. It didn‟t hurt that he was nearly always of a mind to treat even the lowliest around him with respect, especially those of the fairer sex. He‟d gotten his dark good looks directly from his father, who had been a well known rake in his own day. Although he was in his mid thirties, he still had a full head of midnight black hair – so black it almost looked blue in spots. His high forehead bespoke of his intelligence, and there were well defined brows over strikingly blue eyes. His time on board in the glaring sun had ensured that his already swarthy skin had darkened just that much more. And, true to his trade, there was a small, no doubt solid, gold hoop through one of his earlobes. The fact that he was one step shy of muscle bound hadn‟t hurt him much, either, with the female of the species or in his chosen profession. Men weren‟t eager to follow a physically weak man, and there was no question on his ship that he could beat the hell out of any man on it – even his first mate, who wasn‟t very dissimilar to him in stature or build, but the exact opposite of him in coloring. But it wasn‟t just his stature that kept his men loyal. It was the potent combination of success and integrity. When a man signed on to the Devil‟s Pursuit, they knew they were going to work themselves half to death

before they returned home, but when they set foot back on familiar soil, they would barely be able to walk for the riches in their purse. Nor was he afraid to turn his hand to any job that needed doing, and was the first man across when they overtook another ship, and the last man to stand down when the fighting was done. Because he‟d worked his way up in the ranks, he knew how each job onboard should be done. He had his hand or his eyes on everyone at all times, and half– assed jobs were not tolerated. The ship was kept in pristine working order by his command and he worked his crew nearly into the ground. But at the same time, he saw to it that they started out the voyage well provisioned, so that the men each had more than enough rations of food – and drink – before they ever set their sights on another ship, from which they would commandeer any and all provisions they had, too, adding them to their already well stocked larder. Their Captain also wasn‟t one of those that liked ordering his men around for the fun of it, either. When he gave a command, it was a sound one, not that he wasn‟t a stickler for obedience regardless of what the men though of his orders. He was, and quick to the whip, too, which, on occasion, he wielded to great effect himself rather than delegating the job to someone else as a lot of captains might. He knew each of the sailors that had signed on by name – most of them had been with him for years and that in and of itself was a compliment to how well the ship ran under his command. Sailors were a fickle lot – pirate seamen the most among all of them. It was a bone wearying, deadly life, and if they sensed anything untoward going on with their Captain, they would mutiny and kill him outright, then hoist someone else to that lofty – but distinctly tentative – position. But there had never been any hint of any kind of revolt on the Devil‟s Pursuit. As a result of this unusual combination of traits, he lost fewer men to desertion than any other captain – pirate or not. His men would follow him into the gates of Hell, and they had on more than one occasion, and he had led the majority of them out of it to safety by his own wits and skill. But there seemed to be one person on board his ship that was much less than inclined to obey him, and he was determined to bring her to heel using any method he could. He didn‟t usually resort to his belt with a female – hell, he‟d rarely had to punish any female he fancied unless that was what they wanted, and he knew some of them did favor that kind of treatment. Since it tickled his fancy too, he was only more than happy to oblige. He had to admit, spanking her had brought him to such aching attention that he was hard pressed to forget the unbending spike in his pants that was digging into her soft belly, even when he brought the leather down across her nates for the first time, watching the stripe he‟d created flush a bright red and then fade just slightly into a deeper, more mottled one. Anjel knew from the sound of her muffled screams that he‟d gotten her attention, and he looked down to see that her toes were where he‟d told her they needed to be in the first place. But the little brat had seen fit to defy him, and even though she‟d rectified her behavior after her first taste of his belt across her backside, he wasn‟t about to let her get away with ignoring his commands whenever she chose to. That would never do in their relationship, such as it was, but even more so on this ship. He might well have to order

her to do something that would save her life, and he didn‟t want her taking the time to debate whether or not he was right. He wanted her to do as she was told immediately, without so much as a thought about whether or not she wanted to comply. And so he continued to lather those enticingly upturned curves, surprising himself at just how much he enjoyed hearing each well suppressed squeak and squall she uttered as he seared her flesh with his well worn belt. For her part, Cassie was completely undone by the fact that there was nothing she could do – absolutely nothing – to stop the rhythmic fall of that horrible strap. She just had to endure it, somehow, because there certainly wasn‟t going to be any mercy shown by this ruthless, brutal pirate. Regardless, though, each new, obscenely loud crack across her fanny sent her into jerky spasms of belated attempts to avoid the inevitable, but she never succeeded in deflecting even a single one of them. She was forced to experience the height of his displeasure as he reduced her to a bawling, hiccoughing mass of thoroughly dominated femininity. When he finally laid the belt down next to him – well within reach should it be needed again – Anjel noted that her toes were firmly planted on the floor where they should have been in the first place, and that that opened her secrets up very nicely for his eager exploration, just as he had intended. He rearranged her skirts, which had slunk further down her backside than he preferred while she had danced beneath his disciplinary attentions, but soon his hand lay on the delicate ankle closest to him, following the natural line of the inside of her leg with excruciating slowness, taking the time to fondle a well turned calf, then the oft ignored back of her knee, and even further, until his hand claimed what it had sought all along. Warm and fully ripe it was, too, he was pleasantly surprised to note. She had begun singing much the same song at these attentions as she had when he was striping her bottom, although she was quite a bit hoarser now from its effects. Anjel kept an eagle eye on her toes, making sure that, in her haste to protest the liberties he was taking she didn‟t forget herself and make a move that he would give her plenty of cause to regret. But she did manage, somehow, through the shades of severe embarrassment, to keep her toes where he‟d ordered her to, for a few minutes, anyway. Cassie found it absolutely impossible to even process what was happening to her, and all she could think of doing – despite the vicious throbbing and stinging she felt all over her bottom and the backs of her legs, almost as if he hadn‟t just stopped the descent of the belt – was dislodging that impertinent hand as it claimed her where no man had before. But in her efforts those toes left the floor for only the barest of seconds before she immediately returned them to where he commanded they be, but not nearly quick enough to escape his notice. Instead of reaching for the belt, though, Anjel simply brought the not inconsiderable flat of his hand down on the fleshiest crest of her butt, five solid, determined times in a row, saying in a scolding tone of voice that was more normally reserved for a recalcitrant child and that had Cassie blushing even more furiously than she was at the presence of his hand between her legs, “You know better than that.” Her indignant but muffled wail was lost in translation, not that he paid one whit of attention anyway. He simply continued to rudely molest her, and she dare not move during it, lest she earn another round of swats – or worse. Cassie wasn‟t at all sure she

could endure even the feel of her soft bloomers against her bottom now, much less more of his stern corrections. Anjel was surprised at how fervently she was protesting his advances. Granted, he had just given her more than enough cause not to be very happy with him, but she was pitching a fit as if she had her virginity to protect, which was highly doubtful. And he was even more certain that she was simply a very good actress when he deliberately slipped his middle finger between those warm, plump lips to find it immediately bathed in her juices, so much so that he couldn‟t control his own groan. He had had precious few experiences with women whose mouths said, “No, no” as they were being taken to task by his firm discipline but whose bodies betrayed them in the end, and he was always amazed and grateful when he came upon one. Although his mother had seen to it that he was brought up a gentleman – and he himself had taken it a step further in that he tended to treat every woman he met as if she was a high born lady – and he would never subject any lady to his fists as he knew some men did, he was also unable to deny the fact that he found taking a female over his lap and blistering her bottom to be unbearably exciting. Everything about it called to his very maleness, and he even enjoyed the inevitable comforting that he knew would follow afterwards. This little baggage, however, hadn‟t really had the chance to see any side of him but the disciplinary one, so far. Considering that he hadn‟t expected to alert anyone to their presence once they came ashore, and was inestimably angry at himself for letting her get to the point that she could ring that bell – even if it was only once – thus endangering his life and the lives of his men, he had to admit that deciding to kidnap the chit might not have been the smartest of moves – especially since seamen were notoriously superstitious and the presence of a woman onboard ship was seen as a portent of bad things to come. While he‟d watched her sleeping, he‟d engaged in a bit of debate within himself, between his baser instincts and his better nature, but this had sealed her fate and his. After discovering the secret of her treasures, he knew there was no way he was going to be able to let her go. Rory might not be too happy to hear it, since as a second son he was always looking for ways to make a pound or two, but the Turks were going to have to do without this one. She was his. He snorted softly to himself. As if there had really ever been any doubt, especially from the moment he saw those layers of burnished gold hair. “Well, what have we here? It seems that someone has been protesting entirely too much about her spankings, especially considering how much the rest of you seemed to have enjoyed it.” Enjoy it? Was he out of his mind? She hadn‟t enjoyed even the slightest bit of it! How could she? She would swear she could still hear the sounds of sizzling flesh from her behind! Knowing that her protests would get her nowhere, and bound as she was to obey him or feel more of his horrible belt – or even nearly as bad, his palm – on her upturned backside, Cassie didn‟t think she could produce any more tears, yet still they came. She couldn‟t help but castigate herself about how could she have been so stupid as to have left

the protection of the house and decided to wander, alone and in the darkest of night, around on an island she didn‟t know? But her thoughts – even of protest – came crashing down around her the moment that bold fingertip of his found a portion of her anatomy that she had barely known existed, and claimed it for his own, using her own slickness to its best advantage against her, rubbing incessantly and slowly dragging its rough surface around and over the top of a spot she‟d never touched herself, much less allowed anyone else to. And it was making her at least as crazy as she‟d thought he was. The way that finger danced over the raw nerve it had discovered had her wanting to move even more desperately than she had when that hand was dead set on blistering every bit of her. It made her feel as if every inch of her skin had shrunk in around her, as if she was going to burst somehow but she had no idea how – or why – and the feeling just kept getting worse. And not really worse – although she would have preferred that he leave her alone – because it felt better than almost anything else she‟d ever experienced in her life, and she was horrified to realize that she really didn‟t want him to leave her alone, not now. Not until she discovered what these strange, unsettling, insanely pleasurable sensations led to. She was struggling frantically in the wake of his teasing, and he knew immediately what he had on his hands: a professional who had never experienced the full pleasure of her womanhood. Unfortunately, it wasn‟t an unusual situation. Anjel adored women, and had learned how to be a good, attentive lover from some of his mother‟s friends, a fact that he was very careful never to let his innocent Mama realize. But they had taught him well, and he had, of course, applied his knowledge freely, not censuring himself or changing his style because he was lying with a woman who had sex for a living. Nowadays his reputation preceded him, and he couldn‟t get most of them to take any money when he finally bid them a long, luxurious adieu, although he always managed to hide a generous amount somewhere in their room...or in some cases, on their person. Perhaps past abuse had prompted her to demure so stridently, and lack of knowledge of just what delights awaited her at his hands would be more than enough to have put up such a valiant struggle trying to keep him from delving into that most private garden. As he nonetheless continued to stroke her there – where she was most a woman – he also leaned down on impulse and kissed that lovely seared posterior of hers, unable to keep himself from doing so. He wasn‟t kissing it better under any circumstances, but rather branding her even more fully as his own than he already had. When he could tell by the way she was panting and moaning that she was very close to her own end, he stopped and pulled her skirts back down, then deposited her gently – on her back – on the bed. He reached for the strip of fine linen he‟d created last night and tied her legs well together again, envisioning how much she must ache for a release she really had no idea about, and went to retrieve her bloomers. But instead of staying where he had put her as he expected her to do, the determined little cuss had managed to lever herself up and onto her feet, and was in the process of trying to hop across the floor while he‟d had his back turned to her. She had only gotten about two hops away from the bed, but he was still amazed at her determination to be rid of him. Apparently she had no idea of what awaited her if she

made it outside that door, either, so he scooped her up into his arms long enough to deposit her back on the bed. Seeing that she was lying on arms that were tied behind her back, and knowing from personal experience just how uncomfortable that position could be, he rolled her away from him and loosed her arms, intending to rearrange them so that they were – conveniently – bound to the bedposts, instead, which he determined would be at least somewhat more comfortable, despite the fact that that would force her to put her backside in more contact with the bedclothes, but he hoped that uncomfortable reminder might help her keep her station in mind for their next encounter. He couldn‟t be spending all of his time looking after her. He had a ship to run. But he had no sooner freed one of her hands when she used it to clout him surprisingly hard on the ear as she quickly released her other one and began to roll and scrunch herself towards the end of the bed. “Bloody hell, get back here!” Trying to grab her and hold his ear wasn‟t working, so the ear was quickly forsaken. With her hands free, she was even more of a termagant, a veritable whirling dervish of frustrated femininity. He ended up hauling her back to the general area he wanted her in on the bed then just lying over her midsection and letting her beat futilely away on his broad back while he lashed first one wrist to a post and then, after getting up to reposition himself, giving the other the same treatment. Breathing heavily, he ran a hand through his hair, listening to what he was sure was a long list of curses she was busily heaping upon his head. “I was going to put your bloomers back on for you, but I think that that tantrum lost you the privilege entirely. You‟ll be lucky if I allow you to wear them ever again, missy.” In a fit of pique, he decided to rearrange her legs in a manner that was sure to cause her the most embarrassment, lacing them to holes he‟d placed himself in the frame of the bed, arranging her so that her skirts lay back over her stomach and breasts, pretty much obscuring her view of anything but them, with her legs bent and kept in place well back and up. She looked as if she was ready to give birth, but her flat tummy belied that notion entirely. Instead she was fit for what he intended to do to her next as he found himself entirely unable to keep from touching the downy triangle between her legs. She flinched away from him as best she could, but it was a token measure since she couldn‟t go anywhere. As he fondled her casually, listening to her piteous weeping, he said harshly, “Before you‟re in such an all fired hurry to get out of my cabin, you might well think about the consequences. There are nigh on to fifty men on the other side of that door, and none of them – well, with one possible exception – would treat you even half as well as I have. They‟d already have raped you every way they could think of, and then they would have passed you off to their friends – at a price, of course, that you would never see any of. “That is to say nothing of the fact that I now owe you not only your regularly allotted daily spankings, but also a thorough disciplinary session just based on the fact that you boxed my ear. And I haven‟t even mentioned the fact that you were so quick to scurry off to warn the townspeople of our presence in that safe little harbor behind the Duque‟s mansion. There‟s still that to deal with, too, missy. Don‟t be thinking that I‟ll just forget all about that.

“Especially since you haven‟t given me any reason to in the least,” he pronounced, very carefully disengaging himself from ceaselessly worrying that delicious nub of flesh – the one that called out to him to surround it with his warm, wet mouth. But she‟d done nothing to deserve such fine treatment, and so he left her there, throbbing painfully on both sides of her lower body but for very different reasons, legs sprawled as if invitation to anyone who might wander in. Cassie felt only a bit safer to hear the turn of the key when he left, even if he was locking her in, although the Captain left her there, knowing that she had no idea that he possessed the only key, and without having reassured her that he wasn‟t on par with his men – quite willing to pimp her out for the right price.

Chapter Four Although he hadn‟t literally blindfolded her, he might as well have. Her skirts prevented her from seeing much beyond her own chest. At least if he had seen fit to allow her a little modesty, Cassie might have been able to glean something from the layout or contents of the room that might have helped her escape. But then she considered his words, and acknowledged the truth of them to herself with a gut wrenching sob. She was well and truly trapped. Damned if she did and damned if she didn‟t, and in the worst way for someone of her ilk. She was ruined, and it might as well have been by her own impulsive hand. It seemed that all she‟d done since she‟d met him was either squeal at the top of her lungs or bawl as if she‟d just lost her best friend, but she couldn‟t seem to stop doing either. And to top it all off, all of that almost screaming had dried her throat out to the point that it was nearly as sore as the bottom she was being forced to lie on, and right now she‟d give just about anything to have a big mug of even that swill that he had brought her. Anything to give her parched mouth and throat a little relief. She hadn‟t gotten a whit of sleep, but when she heard the ship‟s bell ring three times, calling the men to dinner, her body went starkly stiff, knowing that that meant she was due yet another session over his lap. She wasn‟t sure whether or not she should be relieved when she heard the key turn in the lock. After all, she couldn‟t really tell who it was that had entered the room, and she damned well knew she couldn‟t possibly allow herself to be happy at his return, anyway, considering how abominably he had treated her and was going to be treating her in the near future, but there also might be the possibility of food and water, which she was finding she craved quite desperately. Eventually, after what seemed like an eon of hearing him – hopefully him, she allowed in the back of her mind – puttering around the room, her skirts were finally removed from in front of her face and she discovered that it was him, and that he had laid out somewhat of a dinner service – primitive as it was – on the small table that was lodged against one wall, although she noticed with alarm that there was only one plate on that table. Surely he intended to feed her something! But before he allowed her to get up to eat, he sat down facing her on the bed. “I thought you might be hungry, so I brought us both some dinner. I‟m going to let you up, but not before I give you the rules that govern your behavior, at least for now.” Rules had never been Cassie‟s strong point, but she managed – barely – not to roll her eyes at him as he continued to speak. “The door is locked from the inside, so even if you did manage to get past me to the door, you can‟t go anywhere.” He seemed to have a change of heart, and then left her long enough to unlock it. “On second thought, if you can get by me, you‟re welcomed to have at the crew. I‟ve already told you my version of what I think they‟ll do to you, but if you think that you could persuade them to treat you any better, then you‟re welcome to try.” She met his eyes, her own full of tears as usual around him, it seemed, and shook her head very slowly and deliberately back and forth.

“Good. Then I‟ll take it you will keep firmly in mind that I am the only thing standing between them and you.” She nodded with duly noted reluctance. “I‟m going to remove your gag, but you are to speak only when spoken to. I don‟t want to hear a lot of nonsense begging from you, and I certainly won‟t tolerate any screaming or carrying on, either.” He saw the wild, frightened look in her eyes, and considered that her fear might be his best ally, as well as hers. “Screams and cries only excite the crew, anyway,” he added pointedly as he reached behind her head to remove the gag, then unbound her ankles and helped her stretch her legs out. He hadn‟t left her for very long, but being yanked wide apart like that and hoisted up quite unnaturally might well have caused her cramping, and at the very least it would have left her sore and stiff. With her wrists still bound to posts on either side of her head, he reached under her skirts to massage the screaming muscles on the insides of her thighs, listening to the way she alternately sighed in pure bliss then, as if she‟d come to her senses for a moment, tried to jerk her limb away from him, not that he allowed it, taking several moments to wallop those tender insides very hard with the flat of his hand. She didn‟t make any further attempts to move them, and he could see how hard she was trying to suppress her sensual pleasure at his ministrations. He grinned at the fact that she was having much more success at that than she did when his fingers were buried in her quim. Then he reached up to free her hands, surprising her by using her far wrist to pull her over onto her stomach. Cassie looked back at him in alarm. “Had you already forgotten that I promised to spank you before every meal and again at bedtime today?” he asked, the flat of his hand already biting into her, her sensitivity already at an excruciating pitch before he‟d delivered even three hefty swats to her behind. She had a horrible time trying to suppress the moans and out and out screams she wanted to let loose at the atrocious tattoo he was beating out on her bum, but she recalled vividly what he had said – and done – in regards to the crew and how they enjoyed a woman‟s distress filled cries, so instead she reached for one of the pillows to scream into, and that only seemed to incite him further. Both of them were thoroughly exhausted by the time he stopped, and her bottom was horribly mottled red and nearly purple in some spots from the results of the multiple spankings he had delivered today. And, according to him, she could look forward to more of the same for the foreseeable future. “All right, then, let‟s get some food into you.” Cassie allowed herself to be guided to the table, but instead of him pulling out her chair as she expected, he tugged his own out then pulled her into a seated position perched precariously on his knee, facing him. He‟d even gone so far as to make sure that her skirts were draped around his leg, so that she had no choice but to press her bareness against the rough material of his pants, feeling every movement of her own – as well as his – right directly on that spot he‟d insisted on worrying into almost painful sensitivity. Cassie was surprised and horrified to realize just how quickly – even after a very thorough punishment – that part of her awakened again to almost the same fever pitch she had been at when he‟d left her bound and splayed on the bed. And try as she might, she

couldn‟t seem to ignore it. There seemed to be a curious – and alarming – mixture within her body of the pleasure she was feeling from the hard length of him beneath her spread legs and the stingy ache of her backside which her body reminded her of, too, with every little movement. He served himself generously from the platter of ham, cheese, and coarse white bread, laying a veritable spread on the plate in front of them, then pouring a primitive mug of ale and a beautiful silver tankard of what she recognize by the smell as rum. But before he allowed either of them to eat one morsel, though, he startled her by grabbing the collar of her dress and ripping it violently down the front, then did the same with the chemise beneath, rendering her almost as naked on top as she was beneath her skirts. Cassie‟s hand came up to stop him automatically, but hovered there indecisively when he caught her eye with a warning look. He kissed her bright, rosy cheeks almost tenderly while ordering in a hoarse, stern tone that belied that tenderness as a figment of her imagination, “Clasp your hands in your lap and don‟t move them again or you‟ll think the rest of today‟s attentions were merely love pats.” She sucked in her breath at that pronouncement and did exactly as she was told. Tears welled up and overflowed down her bright cheeks, but she didn‟t want him to see them, so she kept her head down, her hair falling like a curtain between them before he used his big fingers to brush it back. Anjel could see the dark splotches of her tears on his pants, but decided not to make anything of it. The sooner she accepted her fate, the easier it would be for her. He presented a good sized piece of sharp cheddar to her, and she dutifully opened her mouth. “What‟s your name?” he asked quietly. He was pleasantly surprised when she waited until she‟d swallowed before she answered him. Manners like that were rare in common women. “Cassandra Solange Con– ” “That‟s enough, Cassie. My name is Anjel, but you are to refer to me as Sir, when you‟re given permission to speak.” He didn‟t really care to know much beyond her first name. He was certainly never going to meet her father, not that he was particularly worried about the idea that the gentleman would call him out in a duel over his daughter‟s honor even if he did. The idea was absolutely preposterous. Her head tipped down again and he could hear her snuffling through her hair until he lifted her chin with his finger. “Am I that unpleasant to look at?” he asked teasingly. Unfortunately, he was not. It would have been much easier to hate an ogre, but although he acted the part, he didn‟t look it in the least. The truth was that she found him too damned good looking, but she wasn‟t about to let him know that. Even in these dire straits, Cassie couldn‟t let the opportunity to prick his ego a bit go by without comment. “I suppose not, if one likes an unprincipled, lawless man who preys upon innocent women, Sir.” She saw his jaw clamp shut, and even this early in their relationship she was learning that that was not a good sign. “I was asking for your assessment of my looks, not my character.”

“And are you so lacking in self–confidence that you would ask your captive to give her opinion and also expect her to say anything but exactly what you want to hear for fear of physical reprisal, Sir?” Damned the woman for the shrew that she was! She even managed to make the name “sir” sound like an insult! She had one of the sharpest tongues he‟d ever encountered. Few people on this Earth would address him so, and she was the lowest of the low, and therefore, supposedly, if she had half a mind, the least likely of all of them to want to stir his ire. Especially considering the already dreadful condition of her backside. After offering her several more slices of both ham and cheese, as well as a couple good bites of well buttered bread, and ale she swallowed gratefully this time, although not without a grimace, he asked, “Where are you from? Your accent certainly isn‟t that of a San Miguel native.” “I‟m from England. Holtshire, to be specific, Sir.” “Isn‟t that fairly far up north, near the border?” “Yes, it is, Sir.” She wasn‟t sure whether she should be pushing to tell him the truth about who she was – an Earl‟s daughter – or if that information was more likely to get her killed outright or ransomed and then killed or something of that alarming sort. He certainly looked Spanish, and Spain was no friend of the English, in any matter, although his speech was extremely cultured and he spoke with no trace of a Spanish accent. He was a puzzle, but not one she was much interested in solving. He was becoming intrigued, wanting to find out more about her background, but just then they were rudely interrupted when Rory burst through the door with what was apparently such a hot commodity in his hands that he then proceeded to place directly in front of him while Cassie spent the entire time trying to hold the four pieces of clothing she‟d been left with in the front together, lest he – or anyone else – see more than she would prefer. But that just got the backs of her hands slapped and a warning look that had her dropping her hands and her eyes to her lap. “Cook made a pudding for you out of the berries we found on that last place we...uh... explored.” He meant “raided” but didn‟t want to say it in front of Anjel‟s guest. “Thank you, but you needn‟t have hand delivered it, you know,” Anjel commented wryly, under absolutely no illusions as to why Rory had suddenly appeared at his door bearing gifts. And if he elbowed his Captain any harder while ogling Cassie as if she were the dessert he much preferred to any sweet, he was going to find himself flat on the floor with several teeth missing in short order. Anjel sighed, but complied with Rory‟s unspoken request. “Robert Alexander Charles Louis Ashcroft, son of the Earl of Ashcroft, First Mate of the Devil‟s Pursuits, meet Cassandra Solange, etc, etc, late of San Miguel but born in Holtshire, England.” Anjel had to give it to him. When Rory committed, he committed all the way. His only somewhat younger friend straightened to attention, then executed a bow worthy of an audience with a Queen, much less a small town trollop, taking her extended hand and making an elaborate show of kissing the back of it. At least his extravagant manner had her lifting her head, but it usually set most common women blushing and giggling like schoolgirls, but Cassie merely nodded and

seemed to accept it as her due, not even gracing the handsome blonde with a shadow of a smile. Anjel, in this instance, found himself rooting for Cassie and her distinctly cool demeanor. “I think you‟ve been put in your place, Rory. She‟s the first woman I‟ve ever seen – highborn or low – who managed to remain entirely unmoved by your show of outrageous manners. Aren‟t they usually groveling at your feet by now, begging for your favors?” For her part, Cassie found the beautiful blonde very attractive and his lighter, happier manner quite soothing, especially in comparison to his friend‟s brooding and brutal tendencies. But she wasn‟t managing very well at handling the one she seemed stuck with, and she had no interest in trying to entice another of these strange pirates to her side, despite how angelic this one looked – and acted – in comparison. Although she didn‟t completely dismiss the idea of perhaps doing something to get on his good side so that perhaps he might be of assistance in getting away from the Captain. Rory‟s blazing smile remained undimmed. “No doubt she‟s intimidated by you and your oafish manners.” He flopped down in the other seat at the table without having been invited. “Do join us, Rory,” Anjel murmured sarcastically. “Thank you. I believe I will.” He began to serve up the pudding, hot and soft, rife with berries of an indeterminate origin. “Pudding?” he asked. “I think I‟ll pass,” Anjel answered. Rory looked at Cassie‟s back questioningly, then back at him. “So will she.” “All the more for me, then,” Rory gloated, digging into an enormous portion. “Why don‟t you go back to bed, Cassie, and make yourself comfortable? I have a few things I want to discuss with my first mate.” Cassie gratefully slipped off his knee, then turned to his friend, dropping into a beautiful curtsey in front of him – paying no account to the fact that doing so also presented the thoroughly startled man with a view of her beautifully – if primitively – framed bosom and saying with only the slightest touch of sarcasm herself, “It was very nice to meet you, Mr. Ashcroft.” She wasn‟t sure what the proper term of address was; if she should call him First Mate Ashcroft, or Sir or what. Rory snapped to his feet in front of her, assisting her up as he replied in all sincerity, “The pleasure was entirely mine, Miss Cassandra.” Anjel had had just about enough of their mutual admiration society. “Bed, Cassie. Before I change my mind about whether or not I should reprimand you in front of my friend.” She fairly sprinted to the relative safety of his huge bed – wishing desperately that she had another less revealing outfit to change into, but she had no idea where her bag had ended up – while the men continued to speak, sotto voce. Even though she pricked up her ears and did her best to listen in on their conversation, she was only able to pick out a very few words, none of which seemed to mean anything when she strung them together in her mind. Soon – much too soon as far as Cassie was concerned – Rory got up to leave, hesitating a moment at the door and looking past his friend to the bed, as if he would say something more to her but loyalty – and perhaps not a small amount of fear for his physical safety – prevented him from doing so. But then he seemed to remember all of a

sudden that he was carrying what remained of the dessert in a hot pot and dashed out the door without another glance at either of them. Cassie was doing her level best to ignore the fact that they were now alone in the Captain‟s quarters again, and she was getting a sense of just exactly what that would mean to her, and she didn‟t like it one bit. She feigned sleep, lying on her side, of course – not interested in the least in letting her weight rest on her poor abused backside – but she kept one eye slitted opened enough that she could see him lock the door from the inside, then replace the key back where it belonged – on the long gold chain he kept about his neck. She wondered why he locked the door sometimes but didn‟t others. Was his crew really that untrustworthy, or was he going to go to sleep and he didn‟t trust her not to try to escape as he slumbered? Smart man on both counts, she reckoned. Finally, after a few more short stops about the room, he stood at the end of the bed, saying in that impossibly deep voice, “I know you‟re not asleep, Cassie. Take your clothes off.” Just like that he ordered her to assume a state she hadn‟t been in except to bathe since she was a toddler. A state that she had been taught was shameful and inherently wicked, and yet he expected that with just a snap of his fingers she was going jump to do his bidding. And with good reason, considering how much she already knew about how the fact that she never wanted to give him cause to punish her again, although it didn‟t seem that it took any cause at all, since he‟d declared she was going to be spanked at certain times whether she wanted it or not. So with a loud, resigned sigh, she sat up, just about as slowly as she was physically able to, and put her hands to her throat, slipping first one arm then the other out of the rip at the top of her dress with excruciating care, as if it was made out of a material that might dissolve if she moved too quickly. Anjel was already nude, but some kind of unusual, gentlemanly urge was bidding him to don a nightshirt, which he never wore, and which would have to go hunting through his chest of clothes to find, so he pushed those thoughts to one side. Nightshirts were a waste of material as far as he was concerned, especially since he would have taken it off as soon as he got into bed. So he returned to stand at the end of the bed to find that she had just barely managed to slip her other arm out of its sleeve. She apparently had no idea just how completely she was wearing on his patience, but he was of a mind to help her find out. Anjel walked up to where she was sitting on the edge of the bed and proceeded to rip the dress entirely, all the way down the front. Then he reached for her chemise, but her hands covered his as she heard herself being reduced to begging, “No, please, I‟ll get out of it right away, Sir.” She couldn‟t countenance the idea of having to sit around here entirely naked all day. It just didn‟t bear thinking of. “See that you do,” came the clipped reply. He took exactly one step back and crossed his arms over his chest, staring down at her, waiting for her to comply with the order that, as far as he was concerned, should already have been long behind them. “And I don‟t want to hear another word out of you.” Cassie stood, letting the remnants of her dress fall to the floor, then allowing the chemise to do the same. Without her bloomers, she found herself standing in front of him completely naked, and entirely unable to suppress the urge to cover herself with her

hands and arms as best she could. It was then that she realized that she was shaking all over, that the hand that was splayed over her left breast and the one that was doing its level best to keep her womanhood from his demanding gaze were trembling, and not slightly but quite violently. “Put your hands at your sides, Cassie,” he said, so softly that it could almost be misinterpreted as tender, “and don‟t move them again until I give you permission.” Although she was doing her best to obey him as tears splashed down onto her upturned breasts, her limbs seemed to have a bit of a mind of their own, and as soon a she got them where she knew he wanted them, they would creep back immediately.

Chapter Five Anjel took a step forward, closing the distance between them and insinuating himself tightly up against her, his hand spread wide over her burning bottom, keeping her in place, giving those naughty hands nowhere to go to protect her as he lay his body up against hers. It felt wonderful to him to let his turgid manhood nestle against her soft belly, but it surprised him to no end that he couldn‟t keep his head from dipping to take a first almost tentative suckle at her left nipple, then her right, switching back and forth between them as if he couldn‟t decide which was sweeter. Cassie looked down at the dark, devil‟s head where it lay against her breast, doing her best to fight the rise of unfamiliar ecstasy that rose with every aching tug of his lips on her already upstanding nipples. It was almost enough to help her to stop trembling, and indeed, concentrating on the unbearable sensations he was creating within her did slow her shaking quite considerably. Anjel looked up as soon as he felt her relaxing some, catching the back of her head in his big palm as he held it still for his kiss. It was a softer, more tentative one than he had intended at first, but he found himself softening slightly towards her in the face of her stark fear. That wasn‟t quite what he had been aiming for. He wanted her to obey him, and he knew that a certain amount of concern about reprisal was necessary for obedience in her just as it was in his crew. But he hadn‟t intended on making her quite so fearful. She had been quaking like a virgin with her first man, and that couldn‟t be right. Anjel kept his eyes locked with hers as his lips descended to hers for the first time, hoping to make it a less aggressive, gentler kiss, but as soon as his lips met hers, he nearly lost all control. What was it about this woman that sent his libido skyrocketing even more than it already was? It seemed he just had to be in her presence and he was alarmingly close to being unmanned on the spot, and kissing her...he never wanted to stop. No woman had ever excited him so, on so many levels. He found her shy reticence in regards to pursuits of the flesh to be quite refreshing, considering her profession, and she had an indomitable spirit, as attested to by the number of times he had already had to discipline her. She seemed well spoken – what little he‟d heard from her, anyway – and very well mannered. Perhaps she had been trained to be more of a courtesan than a common whore. That made sense. It would explain a lot of the intriguing puzzles of her behavior, her speech and the quality of her clothes. Regardless, Anjel found he was less able to control himself, less patient with her very tentative responses to his more amorous forays. Her mouth was still closed beneath his, and he wasn‟t about to put up with that much longer. Instead he slanted his mouth across hers, leveraging hers open, then slipping his eager tongue between her lips to coax her own into heated play. As he kissed her, his free hand roamed up the generous curve of her hip, dipping in to the natural curve of her waist to follow the bones of her ribcage to its own reward; her more than ample breast nearly overflowing even his large palm as his forefinger and thumb began twirling a nipple that he was incredibly gratified to find was already hard

and he only encouraged to become just that much harder with his almost too rough plucking and intermittent gentle twisting. Cassie could barely breathe, especially with his mouth claiming her own so aggressively. And his hand at her breast! She desperately wanted to push it away, but knew that doing so would probably only serve to earn her another trip across his lap, and she was finding that, to her dismay, she was more than cowardly enough that she would do nearly anything to avoid that fate. But what was worse was that she quickly realized she had allowed herself the freedom to get to the point where she didn‟t want him to stop! In fact, she found her back arching to press herself even more tightly up against him, to encourage that hand to do with her what it would, but to please keep plucking at that sensitive tip, regardless of whatever else he did. The ache he was creating in her wasn‟t capable of simply existing within that tender bud, though, and it had already made its way to the very spot he had forced her to discover the truth of earlier, rekindling the same strange longing that had her wishing she could clamp her legs shut, but he had skillfully managed to place one broad, bare thigh between hers, denying her that avenue of relief as he continued to flick and rub and torture her nipple. But soon he bent her further back of his own accord, over a strong arm across her back, forcing her to present and display both of her glorious breasts to him, as if beseeching him to do with them what he would. But Anjel had found that what got him hotter than simply pursuing his own pleasures was encouraging hers. He knew she had no idea just how loudly she was responding to him, or he had a very good idea that she would have done anything she could to repress it, the contrary chit. He decided to concentrate on her, tightening that arm another notch around her waist and forcing her to thrust herself into even more prominence while he claimed one nipple as a delightful mouthful and continued to worry the other as incessantly as he had begun, feeling himself awash in her mewls and groans, bathing him in her reluctant cries of the pleasure he was forcing her to experience. Suddenly, it was no longer enough to stand with her and address one beautiful inch of her at a time. Anjel reached down and lifted her onto the bed, bearing her down onto the luxuriously thick mattress and chronicling her descent with his more than eager lips and hands, claiming every naked part of her he could reach, leaving wet trails from breast to breast and goose flesh wherever his curious fingers cared to dally. Just in case she got a disobedient notion into her head, which he had already learned wasn‟t at all an impossibility, he murmured as he nibbled teasingly at a firm breast, “Keep your hands at your sides, Cassie. You don‟t want to add any more to the spanking you‟re going to receive before I let you go to sleep, now, do you?” Her guttural groan was his answer. She had wholeheartedly hoped that he would forget about that, but she guessed she shouldn‟t have gotten her hopes up. This man never seemed to forget anything that had to do with humiliating her, and he was used to an instant obedience that was anathema to her character. He certainly knew how to make her regret that character flaw and conjure an exquisite stinging in her backside, but right now she was just as concerned about how easily he had managed to bring her to her knees with a bliss so strong it was almost more frightening than the man who brought it to her. Cassie didn‟t know what to do with it

any more than she knew how to handle the absolute devastation of being punished by him. The feelings were uncomfortably close in nature, and she felt powerless to handle either of them. And she wasn‟t at all sure which was worse. Dealing with a sore, swollen bottom that was created in a manner guaranteed to make her feel embarrassingly like a naughty child, or being subjected to this overwhelming, undeniable ecstasy that seemed to radiate from any lascivious, heretofore private part of her helpless body that he decided to explore, reducing her in a humiliatingly short amount of time to a common tramp who craved that kind of attention from him. Indeed, she was self aware enough to realize that despite any protests she might have lodged – however nonverbally – that if she were allowed to speak, she might well not have been able to prevent herself from begging him to continue his sensuous exploration of every possible nook and cranny of her person. As it was, all she could do was moan and writhe, and not even in a manner that conveyed any modicum of protest, but with an alarming amount of encouragement in her tone. She couldn‟t prevent herself from arching her breasts into the fingers that tugged determinedly at her already aching nipples, nor could she stop herself from kissing him as he had taught her just a few minutes earlier, welcoming his deeply probing tongue and daring to meet it – however tentatively – with her own. Anjel found himself getting an inordinate amount of enjoyment from watching her blossom beneath him, hearing and seeing her give way to his will and the ecstasy he knew was building inside her. He could no longer keep himself from drawing her tight to his side, holding her virtually immobile as he kissed her, hoping to prevent any affronted outburst as he allowed his hand to trail down from where it had cupped her jaw, along the delicate column of her neck, across collarbones that were too visible for his tastes, then over the damp, swollen tip of each breast to center itself on its journey down over her flat tummy, culminating at his ultimate goal as that big paw forced her to accept its presence in the very place she least wanted it to be – cupping the red gold curls between her legs as if he owned them. And he was quite sure that he did. “Open your legs, Cassie,” he ordered huskily against her lips. She was again letting him know in the only way he would allow that she was supremely unhappy at his audacity, struggling slightly within his hold and screeching as best she could behind his mouth. But she had learned not to delay her response – at least not as much as he knew she wanted to. Her legs began to part immediately, if slowly, and he eagerly claimed every new inch of her as his, even more so, he bet than she ever had herself, if her reluctance was any gage, and he was beginning to think it might well be. Was she a pampered virgin slave? Perhaps of someone who had much the same designs in mind for her future as Rory had had? He didn‟t know, and he didn‟t care. She would never be any but his now, he vowed. He wanted – demanded – to know every inch of her, to teach her the pleasures of the flesh himself, and he would settle for nothing less. There it was, he thought as his big broad middle finger sought and found the undeniable evidence of her own desires. Even with a bottom that was burning as badly as hers must be – if the evidence of her moans when he had set her down on the bed few minutes ago – and the threat – nay, promise – of another crisp spanking before all was

said and done this evening – or perhaps more accurately because of it – to say nothing of his intimate exploration and invasion of her most sacred, womanly parts, she was still able to gift him with her dewy nectar, fairly drowning him in it until he had wet his finger most thoroughly and brought his treasure to the place he knew she would appreciate it the most. That first self confident stroke of his well slickened digit over that not so tiny any more bump had her arching up from the mattress, nearly grinding herself against him in the heat of her response, making him chuckle softly at her eagerness which unfortunately seemed to break the spell he‟d conjured for her. Cassie swallowed hard as tears dribbled out of the corner of her eyes at how far she had fallen in so short a time. It was only with supreme effort that she managed to keep her arms at her sides. Her hands literally ached to cup him where he was, silently encouraging – begging – him to continue those teasing traces around that spot only he seemed to know she possessed. She was afraid to think of just what depraved heights she could be driven to in this manner, but there was little in her mind beyond the desperate thought that she could not allow him to stop. Of course, as soon as she realized that that was her worst fear at that particular moment, he did stop, leaving his hand in place right where it was as he gazed down at her, whispering, “Touch me.” She brought her hand up from between them, almost afraid to do as he said, not knowing exactly where it would be considered, in this situation, proper to put it. He was as naked as she was, and finally decided to cup his cheek, much as he had before his hands began wandering. Anjel smiled, chuckling softly. “You‟ll have to be braver than that, Cassie.” She met his eyes and opened her mouth to reply to him, but closed it again, her eyes slipping away from his, remembering his rule. “What were you going to say?” “That I‟m not feeling very brave at the moment, Sir.” There was mischief in his eyes when he teased, “Well, unlike one of us, I don‟t bite.” She smiled then, the first time he‟d seen her really smile, and it was blindingly beautiful, and managed to tug at heartstrings he would have sworn he didn‟t own. But her hand hadn‟t moved an inch despite his encouragement, so he captured her wrists – not roughly or angrily – and slowly moved them down to his chest, and was nearly unmanned by the sound of her quickly indrawn breath in reaction as her small fingertips settled into the light covering of black hair there, then spread out and seemed to luxuriate in the very feel of him. Cassie was thinking that it was no wonder he could heft her around like he did, and hold her tight enough with so little effort that she couldn‟t move. She could feel the leashed power of the muscles beneath his skin. His chest was frighteningly close to massive and touching him seemed to be sending bolts of lightning to that intimate area he held so closely. Her fingers seemed to want to roam of their own accord, and when they encountered a raised ridge of puckered skin, she looked up at him questioningly. “Sword fight,” he supplied matter–of–factly. And then she discovered another.

“Knife fight.” “Gun shot.” “Knife fight.” The last one she found before she stopped cataloging all of his scars was a long line that looked uncomfortably like a burn, and she was amazed to see him turn bright red when she looked at him with curiosity in her eyes. “That one...well, that one was the result of a misunderstanding between myself and a...lady friend of mine. She took a hot poker to my ass and missed.” But she did leave a good sized remembrance of herself on his side, instead. Sick of having her ferreting out all of his flaws – especially when he could find none on her fair skin and also because as far as he was concerned if they got close enough to leave a scar, then he‟d done something very wrong during the battle and he wasn‟t very fond of being reminded about his mistakes – he brought those wandering fingertips right to where he‟d intended they go in the first place – his nipples. Surprised to find that he would enjoy that as much as she had, Cassie nevertheless began to touch and flick and rub him at least as eagerly as he had her. Not with quite as much skill, but with a surprising amount of raw talent, goosed on in very much the same way as he was by her, following the sounds of his caught breaths and long, low growls. Unfortunately, as much as Anjel would have loved to allow her to indulge herself more fully in that particular pursuit, he knew he wasn‟t going to be able to last very long – if at all, he realized suddenly. When he moved, it was so lightening fast for such a big man that she was startled out of her reverie. She had been very thoroughly enjoying herself, teasing and tempting him and learning what it was to touch him. Suddenly they were no longer on their sides. She found herself pressed flat on her back, her bottom squashed uncomfortably into the bed as he positioned himself carefully between her parted legs, his sheer size forcing them almost painfully wide. He can‟t keep himself from slipping just slightly inside her, his cock overeager to be buried within her woman‟s warmth, and it was only then that he felt that small barrier that really shouldn‟t – definitely should not – have been there. But there was no hope for it once he got a taste of her sweet, unbearably tight innocence. It was all he could do to reach down and slip his arms behind her knees, forcing her to open herself even further to his invasion and literally suspending her in mid air so he could mount her with as little interference from her as possible. His voice a desperate, guttural thing, with desire sharpening its claws on his back, he ground out, “It‟s going to hurt a bit. Just . . .” he had been going to say, “Try to relax,” but then he realized just how stupid it would be to say that to her and changed his mind. “It won‟t hurt for long, I promise. Just don‟t fight me. It will only make it harder on yours – ” Whether or not she was ready, he was; he could hold himself back no longer. Anjel tried to console himself with the fact that she was most definitely ready, even if she didn‟t realize it herself, based on the copious amount of lubrication she was naturally producing. And although he did his level best not to ramrod himself into her, the reality was that it wasn‟t much better than that. He was much too far gone. If he had known how completely chaste she was, he could have made things better for her – much better – but it was too late now.

As he wasn‟t able to take the time with her that he would have preferred in this situation, Anjel decided that the best thing to do was to get it over with in one swift movement, rather than prolonging her pain. So he made sure that he was as well positioned as he could be, and, with a quick glance up to see how she was begging him not to hurt her with her eyes and biting her lip till he could see blood, he plunged inside her, to the hilt, all at once. He heard her tiny, strangled scream and saw her press the back of her hand to her mouth to suppress any further expression of how he was making her burn and stretch inside somehow, in an action she was no doubt entirely unfamiliar with and thoroughly degraded by. It was one of the few times in his life that he had cursed the virulent strength of his libido, but his body didn‟t much care that she was crying, or that he‟d probably never forget the soul ripping look on her face until she closed her eyes, as if doing so could blot him and what he was doing to her out of her life forever, and it bade him continue on the few embarrassingly short strokes necessary to send him into spasms of pure delight that he nonetheless cursed vilely – and silently – throughout. When he had drained himself within her, and although the only thing he wanted to do at that moment was collapse in a heap beside her, he instead dislodged himself from her almost immediately and vaulted across the room to find a cloth, which he wet with some of his precious fresh water, grabbed a jar of ointment from his dresser and brought both items back to find that she had rolled away from him to the point on the bed that was the furthest she could manage and still stay in it. But she hadn‟t run, he noted. Hadn‟t bolted for the door. Instead she chose to cling to the edge of the bed and rock while piteous sobs leaked out despite the fact that he knew she was doing her level best to suppress them. He reached over and dislodged each of her fingers individually, which ratcheted up the sounds of her wails considerably, but he was resolute. He brought her back to the middle of the bed where she tried to remain curled in a mass of inconsolable misery, but he wouldn‟t allow it. Anjel forced her legs down, so that she was lying flat, threatening her with a spanking when they shot right back up again, watching her slowly bend to his will as they straightened out again. Then he began prying them apart, which had her sitting up as best she could, begging him not to touch her there again. Although he knew that she would probably quite heartily disagree with him on this point, it was not in his nature to be truly sadistic, beyond delivering punishments that he considered necessary, usually to women who were self confessed lovers of such things. He had done his best in his life not to use intercourse as a weapon against the fairer sex. His early experiences with his mother‟s friends had taught him better than that, and it made his gut hurt to hear her beg him so plaintively, when the situation could have had such a different ending if he hadn‟t been so greedy for her and had coaxed a little more information from her, or even had just taken the time to do a more thorough exploration of that luscious body of hers. But he had let his baser side rule him, and this was the result. She was near to hysterical, and all he wanted to do was help her feel better, and then go and get mightily hammered for the next month or so. With a grimace he realized that the first thing on his list was doubtful, and the second was definitely not going to happen. Talking to her didn‟t seem to be much of a possibility; she was too terrified, so he resorted to that which he seemed to have used a lot on her in their short acquaintance:

raw force. He threw himself across her body and used his arms to force her legs open, quickly moving himself into a position that wouldn‟t allow her to close them again around him. “Pleeeeeaaaasssee no!” she wailed on a gut wrenching sob. But Anjel ignored her in favor of doing something for her that he knew would soothe the hurt she was feeling – at least the physical portion of it, anyway – using the cloth to clean up the unmistakable signs of her virginity and his brutality, his jaw clenched. Then he dug three fingers into the jar of salve he‟d brought with him, and proceeded to hold her nether lips open with one set of fingers while the other applied the balm.

Chapter Six As mortified as she was – and that was plenty mortified – Cassie had to admit that whatever it was that he was using on her was definitely helping. The soreness went away almost immediately, at least until he slipped one bold finger inside her in order to soothe there, too. That made her start and tense which only made what he was doing hurt more. “Relax, Cassie. Stop clenching; I bet it hurts, and anyway, it‟s not going to stop me from doing what I‟m going to do, so you might as well help yourself begin to heal and let me help you by trying to relax some.” He could feel just how tense she was, fit to snap his finger right off. But he kept speaking in a soft, quiet tone – as if he were soothing a fractious filly – until he could feel her muscles give way, if only from sheer exhaustion. “Good girl,” he praised, continuing with his ministrations, making sure he generously coated every bit of her with that healing salve. Once he‟d tucked it away again and rejoined her on the bed, noting that she hadn‟t even moved away this time, although she had closed her legs modestly, he sat down at the head of the bed and reached to pull her into an already horribly familiar position over his lap. Dear God, he had said he was going to spank her before she went to sleep, but she hadn‟t realized that he had meant that he was going to do it even after how he‟d already hurt her this evening! But before she could raise any sort of protest – even knowing that that would probably land her in even more trouble – Anjel adjusted her position slightly, so that her legs were well apart, and smacked the sensitive insides of her thighs smartly when she tried to close them again immediately. “Unless you‟d like an increase in your chastisement tomorrow– where you‟re spanked at every meal instead of just at bedtime – then I suggest you leave your legs well spread, Cassie my dear.” And then he kept swatting her on that tender, heretofore untouched flesh, until she had splayed herself most obscenely for his amusement, her legs bend at the knees, bottom stuck up and out, her privates on display for all and sundry to see. “Good girl. Don‟t move a muscle.” He had conveniently left his fingers right where they were the last time he delivered a crisp smack to the insides of her thighs, so that they were already inches shy of their real target. “Let me make sure that that I got that lotion right where you needed it most, shall we?” Cassie wanted to scream at him to leave her alone, although she was discovering that she was a depressing sight braver in her head than she was in reality. And the bald truth was that she didn‟t know how she was going to endure another one of his spankings. Just the thought made her want to dissolve into tears right then and there. But she did her best to be strong and not show weakness. She‟d read somewhere that it was dangerous to show weakness in front of a wild animal, and this pirate Captain Anjel – which was a misnomer if she‟d ever heard one – was about the closest she‟d ever gotten to one. But it turned out that punishment was only half of what she was going to have to endure this time. That finger – except when it occasionally slipped down to dip itself into her natural lubricant – never caused her one bit of pain, and even then he seemed to be taking

great care to cause as little discomfort to her as possible. In fact, it was just the opposite. Within a humiliatingly short amount of time, he had reduced her to literally dancing on the end of that finger as it proved a most intimate master of parts previously unknown to her, creating an area of white hot pleasure anywhere it touched, making her ache and long for something that she wasn‟t even sure existed. There was the distinct possibility – as far as she knew – that she would have to go through the rest of her life in this quandary of bliss. But then he showed her the counterpoint to that. Not the solution, but the counterpoint, when his unoccupied hand – his less dexterous one, but not so‟s she‟d notice – landed on her bottom with a force that left an imprint of his big hand on her bottom – in white relief on skin that had already been well toasted a deep, angry shade of red. That jarred Cassie out of her ecstatic reverie and back into the present, and the fact that she was, after all, over his lap, and very little good – as far as she could tell – ever came from that – case in point. He did manage to surprise her, though, because unlike her previous punishments, he established – almost calculatedly, it seemed – no discernable rhythm to the forceful swats he delivered to her behind. She never had any idea when one was going to land, and he very successfully managed to completely occupy her mind and flood her body with unfathomable pleasure by wiggling and rubbing and flicking that middle finger – and soon his index finger, also – over that vulnerable little spot of hers. That was until the exact second when his palm came in contact with her butt again. And then she found herself inundated with much less pleasurable sensations that pulled her away from the sensual web he was constructing, making her mind automatically tamp down her body‟s headlong response and causing a natural delay in her journey towards the ultimate fulfillment. But then he began very skillfully mingling the two and succeeded much more so than she would have preferred at blurring the lines between pain and pleasure, so much so that, near the end, she was so mindless and lost about which way to turn that she found herself moaning in exactly the same way, whether she was being spanked or stroked. And when Anjel heard that, he knew he had won. He continued to do exactly what he‟d begun doing, although he did increase the speed in both areas of her body that he knew were now quite fully under his control. Still no discernable pattern to the tremendous swats, but they came much more quickly as his fingers delved down – one last time, he thought, if he was judging the quality of her moans correctly. His fingers bathed in her slick juices as they ventured back up and settled right where he knew she most wanted them to. Because he knew she was close, he slowed down the speed of his fingers slightly, making her wait just that much longer for her culmination simply by the judicious application of his hand to her flaming seat. But it was getting rapidly to the point where she was going to fly well beyond any control he could exert over her, although he dragged it out as long as he could. Eventually, though, he could hear the groan begin at the back of her throat, and then he left off spanking her but continued to swish his fingers up and over that tightly swollen nub, showing no mercy and literally flinging her into her very first orgasm.

She bucked and writhed and did her best to get away from him, despite the searing ecstasy that was flowing throughout her body, radiating from exactly that point where he was furiously rubbing her, but although he couldn‟t control some aspects of her flight to paradise, he could assure that he had unlimited access to her, and one well placed leg kept her from being able to move enough to dislodge him until he felt she had a full measure of her woman‟s pleasure. Within his strong embrace as he arranged her up against him under the light sheet, Cassie was panting and heaving and moaning and doing all of the things her mother had impressed upon her that young ladies do not do, most especially in front of members of the opposite sex. Yet he had so clearly driven her to this point – to this...whatever it was where her mind and her body flew away with any shred of intelligence she ever owned and she became no better than the wild animal she had been comparing him to in her mind not five minutes ago. Her lower body throbbed, and it was only partly because of the spanking she‟d received. In fact, her butt hurt very little in comparison to the front of her where his hand had been. Despite what had felt like some sort of resolution to all of those white hot feelings he had conjured within her, it felt...heavy and inconsolably achy, although whatever ecstatic spasms he had driven her to had taken some of the edge off. But not all, she was dismayed to realize when she noticed that her hands had wandered down to hover just above her privates of their own accord, as if they needed to soothe that strange feeling themselves although the idea was entirely preposterous. A lady never touched herself down there except for reasons of personal cleanliness. Unfortunately, the Captain had followed her line of sight until he realized the same thing she had – that she was about to take over his job herself. But she immediately found herself wrapped tightly up against him, his arms holding hers in place at her sides. “None of that, Cassie. You had better never let me find you touching yourself, girl, or you‟ll learn what regret really means.” As if she wasn‟t already an unbecoming red all over already from the deeply embarrassing things that he insisted on doing to her, and having her do to him, that remark still succeeded in deepening her blush. But Anjel wasn‟t willing to let her get away with just a nod on something he considered important. He wanted to hear her accept his command out loud, believing it would help her obey. “Repeat the rule I just gave you.” Cassie was certain she was going to die of shame before she was even able to begin that sentence, but his two big hands on her flaming butt helped urge her on. “I‟m not to...to...touch m–myself, Sir,” she whispered, barely intelligible, and received a chastising swat because of it that she was mortified to realize made her lower body clench with nearly the same level of sensual enjoyment as she had had during that long culmination of ecstatic spasms. “Speak up, girl,” he warned. “I– I‟m not to t–touch m–myself, Sir,” she said, more loudly but to his sternum. Another crack against her defenseless bottom, and the same disturbing response from her body. “Look me in the eye, Cassandra, and tell me what your newest rule is. And don‟t make me ask you again.”

Biting her lip, but deeply afraid not to obey him, her eyes crept to those warm but cruel blue ones as she said very clearly, and without hesitation. “I‟m not to touch myself, Sir.” “Good girl.” He kissed her forehead and cuddled her even closer. “You‟re a very special girl, you know. Not many women have the ability to enjoy a good, thorough chastisement the way you do. It‟s a very special talent, indeed.” He couldn‟t fathom the stricken look she adopted upon hearing those words, and worse yet, why she immediately began to keen as if he had taken the whip he used on the men to her backside, not that the idea hadn‟t occurred to him, particularly when she was being especially irksome. But Cassie was horrified at the pronouncement that he had just made about her character, and how she knew her body supported his theory. It made her sound as if she was just like her mother – apt to give herself to a man – any man, if her mother‟s recent choice was taken into consideration – and deliberately put herself into a situation where she was going to be physically chastised for the carnal pleasure of it. She absolutely refused to be that way. And yet he had just proven that she was exactly like that. He had added yet another layer of considerable discomfort to her bottom – when it was already in tatters, as far as she was concerned – and had made her enjoy it most thoroughly. Indeed, he had gotten her to the point where an extremely painful smack to her behind elicited the same response as if his finger was still stroking that strange spot he‟d found on her body, that was, as far as she knew, the main source of carnal delights. But apparently not the only one, for her. Unable to deal with what she‟d discovered about herself and feeling utterly defeated for the first time since she‟d been taken captive, Cassie surrendered completely, allowing her body to go limp. She didn‟t care if he spanked her again, she didn‟t care if he killed her right now, if the truth be told, regardless of how sinful the thought was. She just couldn‟t cope. Anjel felt her go limp against him, and took it as a sign of exhaustion, which was completely understandable, considering the circumstances. “Now you‟ve had an eventful couple of days,” he whispered, pressing his lips to her forehead in an oddly tender act, “and I think you best get some sleep.” Cassie‟s mind was as blank as she could make it, but she would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that, after what had just happened to her – and had been happening all day – that there was no way she was going to fall asleep. But she was snoring delicately in his arms within a matter of minutes. *** The Captain kept her cloistered in his quarters, where the only other person she saw for nearly a week was Rory, and him only occasionally. Not enough to – as she had originally hoped – try to persuade him somehow to assist her in escaping, especially since the two of them were always thick as thieves, obviously long and close good friends. Dammit. Luckily for her, he did – as he‟d said before – have a ship to run, and it occupied a fair amount of his time. Not that she got off scot free by any stretch of the imagination,

unfortunately. Although he had said that she would only be spanked at bedtime that turned out to be too much to hope for. He spanked her any time she‟d done anything he didn‟t want her to do, or – especially – if she took too much time in obeying an order. Although she would have thought he might have eased up on her some over the past week or so, her bottom was never not a vivid shade of red due to his frequent ministrations, but he would have said that if she had behaved herself, she wouldn‟t have found herself over his lap quite so often. And he molested her more often than he disciplined her. Cassie wasn‟t at all sure what to make of this, and she wanted to hate every minute of the time his hands spent roaming possessively over her body. But she couldn‟t. He seemed to be able to coax her flesh to do his bidding with very little effort on his part, as if her body recognized him as its master in a way that she abhorred but she knew he preferred. He was quite restrained, though, when it came to her recovery from innocence, for which she was both surprised and grateful. He hadn‟t required her to participate in that strange ritual where he invaded her body with his, although that hadn‟t kept him from fondling her at every possible turn, and requiring her to do the same to him. One such lesson found her naked on his lap – as he preferred her to be when he was in residence – while he sat equally nude beneath her. Only he hadn‟t allowed her to face him this time. Instead, he had arranged a full length mirror – of surprisingly good quality, she had noted absently at the time, calculating the cost for such an item to be quite enormous – directly in front of them. And once he regained his seat, he arranged her over him in the manner he found most pleasing, her back to his front, with each of her thighs draped over a huge arm of his big comfy chair, whose broad arms forced her to display herself even more widely than she might. Then he put her hands on those arms, too, but well back, giving her strict instructions that she was not to move her hands from the spots where he had placed them. At first, Cassie did the only thing she could do to relieve herself of the mortifying sight of herself on such obscene display to both of them and had turned her head away while squeezing her eyes shut, appalled at the idea of watching him molest her. But of course he couldn‟t allow that. In fact, he had ordered her to meet his eyes in the mirror until he told her otherwise. And she soon found, to her complete dismay and humiliation, that the deep ache he was able to conjure within her at a moment‟s whim surged double and triple fold when she was forced to watch those shameful things being done to herself, to watch his big, dark hands coming up from behind her to capture each breast, squeezing each generous globe once, very hard, until she cried out, then pseudo soothing her by pinching and twisting the pebble hard buds at their crests. Anjel had quickly found that although she enjoyed a lighter, more delicate and teasing touch on her nipples, what really had her writhing was a somewhat harsher treatment, with only occasional feather light caresses after he had set those buds to throbbing. And as a reward for his careful and quick study of her likes and dislikes in bed sport, she arched and moaned as if at his command as he made those swollen bits hurt just shy of very painfully. “That‟s what you like, isn‟t it, Cassie? When I pinch them hard?”

Although her eyes closed for a second longer than usual, she opened them again obediently and met his eyes in the mirror as she answered, through heaving breaths, “Yes, Sir,” having learned from very painful experience that he expected immediate answers to even such intimate questions. She was quite sure that her bottom was always going to wear the marks from that lesson, as he had used a quirt styled implement during that particular recent correction that she was quite sure had flayed the flesh from her bones and left terrible, terrible scars. But the truth was that he was skillful enough with that instrument to impart the worst pain imaginable, but still leave her flesh if not untouched, then definitely without any permanent scars. Although they weren‟t in a position to kiss deeply, as was his preference, his mouth was far from idle, licking and kissing its way up and down her slim, graceful neck, reaching for and finding the tip of her earlobe and razing it with the very edges of his teeth, as he did to her nipples quite often. He correctly suspected that the results would be much the same, and wasn‟t disappointed by the way he heard her breath sizzle in through her clenched teeth. When he had her right on the verge of an orgasm merely by playing with her breasts – something that Anjel vowed to himself that he would attempt with her later, when his need for her had cooled somewhat, although he wasn‟t at all sure when that would be since his desire for her only seemed to be mounting exponentially – he brought his palms down harshly on those exquisitely sensitized globes, careful to make sure that her nipples caught a significant amount of the slaps, making her try to arch herself away from him, but there was nowhere to go, trapped as she was by his cruel hands in the front and the unyielding wall of muscle right behind her. “Settle down, Cassie,” he whispered. “We‟ve only just begun.” When he moved his hands, she could see as well as feel the imprint of his hand on what had been her stark white flesh. She was made to endure a set of five more smacks, each one harder and more devastating than the last, until, finally, she saw him wet the thumb and forefinger of each hand and, as surely as she had had to watch herself screaming and writhing with each firm swat landed squarely on her breasts, she watched him bring all of his skill to bear in not reversing but adding several dichotomous levels of aching pleasure by gently rolling and plucking her abused nipples until her moans of pain and outrage changed to those of unmitigated desire. He watched her body squirm and twist uncontrollably from his gentle teasing just as surely as it had to the unexpected punishment. And then he had begun the cycle again, just as mercilessly, whether he was spanking her breasts or soothing her into a frenzy, until at last he clamped a strong arm around her waist, holding her in place as his right hand delved down in front of her to bury itself in the burnished curls he found, which he made a mental note that he needed to relieve her of at some point in the near future. He preferred his women completely bare. Like the Turks, he would have her entirely denuded of all hair except that which adorned her head, but there was no one in Europe that he knew of who was quite as expert at doing that as the they were. When he again took possession of her privates, delving deep between those obscenely exposed folds, he found exactly what he had been looking for: she was as wet now as she had always been when he finished even the most stringent disciplinary

session. In fact, the quirt had left her positively dripping, and she was much akin to that right now. It brought a smile to his face, one that looked to the panting, moaning, thoroughly out of control Cassie to be one of purely evil intent, so much so that she did her level best to avoid his hand, which only garnered her two sharp swats to her tender inner thighs to correct her naughty avoidance behavior. This time, though, unlike the past few days, when he leaned down to capture some of her nectar, he didn‟t just do it quickly. Instead he seemed to be testing her, gently inserting his big finger just slightly past her opening and watching her intently in the mirror for any signs of discomfort. But there was none. In fact, it was the exact opposite. His first tentative invasion had her issuing a long, low moan that encouraged him to press himself even further inside her. Her breaths were coming in fast, hard pants. Anjel halted his advance immediately. “Am I hurting you?” If she had thought about it quickly enough, Cassie should have said, “Yes, yes, I‟m in terrible pain,” in order to discourage him from any further exploration there. But she was – basically – a truthful person, and her first response came out before she had a chance to reconsider it. “Nooooooooo.” It was when she heard his soft, almost indulgent chuckle from behind her that she realized she should have been much more careful in choosing her reply. But it was too late now. To say nothing of the fact that she had a feeling that lying to him was not a very good idea. She wasn‟t sure how he‟d find out that she was lying about something like that, but she figured he‟d find a way and make her pay for having done so by striping her bottom something fierce. Anjel was surprised to find himself with a lovely dilemma on his hands – quite literally. He couldn‟t decide whether he should bring her to a glorious orgasm right there, in front of the mirror where they could both watch, or whether, having discovered that she was recovered, he should bring her to his comfortable bed and do to her what he had wanted to do for some time. And the wanting won out. Cassie soon found herself being carried across the small room, and set down with her bottom at the very edge of the bed, her legs well spread, but pillows placed beneath them for her comfort. Then he did something that had her curiosity peaked: he knelt in front of her, as if he was bowing before her, or was going to propose, and both, of course, were preposterous ideas. But when he leaned forward to latch those full, warm lips over her most tender spot, she thought the very idea of what he was actually doing to her to be quite preposterous, too, and more than a little shameful, so much so that she began to try to scoot out from under his mouth, only to be immediately flipped over and swatted with the nearest thing he found, which happened to be his solid oak hairbrush. It wasn‟t all that big, but in his capable hand it packed quite a wallop, if her wails were anything to judge by. “How many times do I have to tell you that once I put you into a position, Miss Cassie, you are to stay in that position until you are given permission to move?” he asked, and she had learned that he expected and answer, too. “I– I‟m s–sorry, Sir!” she moaned, her bottom dancing violently as far back and forth as his hold on her allowed, which wasn‟t much. Certainly not enough to give her any relief from the smacking of that strict implement down on flesh that was always in a

constant state of real discomfort – especially since the last time he had chastised her he had used that awful quirt, and she could feel how the oval head of that brush rained splotch after stinging splotch of fire down over the ridges that still remained from her first taste of the lash. “Sorry won‟t keep you from getting your hide tanned just like you are now, young lady. Strict obedience is your only hope to avoid some of the spankings you‟re receiving with alarming regularity. Am I making myself perfectly clear?” She had heard that expression recently – and she remembered exactly where with an agonized shout. Her stepfather had used exactly that phrase when she had interrupted him disciplining her mother in much the same way she was now being punished!

Chapter Seven Fairly wailing now, from the mental anguish of what she‟d just remembered as well as the physical agony of having her rear end seared by that brush, Cassie began to cry even more uncontrollably than she had before. At that, Anjel placed the brush back on his dresser, close at hand, then turned her back over and rearranged her legs, eagerly reclaiming his position on his knees before her. There was very little more that he enjoyed about making love to a woman than reveling in the true taste of her. Some women demurred and declined – for what reasons he would never understand. But Cassie had no choice in the matter, and he applied himself to the font of her pleasure with somewhat less than delicate greed. As much as she wanted to be able to simply stop responding to him, and as hard as she had tried to do just that, she could not achieve her goal. Even in the deep despair she was feeling right, he always managed to push past her resistance to an even greater height than he had ever brought her to before. Somehow he knew her and her responses to him frighteningly well, and there was absolutely no way that Cassie could ignore his actions. Those firm, soft lips captured the heart of her womanhood and held it there, drenched in his heat and lovingly laved over and over again by that broad, flat tongue of his. Or worse, even, flicked endlessly around and over that tasty morsel, as he adjusted his technique to the verbal and nonverbal cues he didn‟t even think she realized she was betraying to him. At one point, he reached beneath her and squeezed a still hot to the touch cheek, making her arch herself even further into his mouth, trying futilely to avoid the sting of his painful touch and landing herself firmly against the fiery lash of his tongue. But when he simultaneously reached up to begin torturing her nipples, each in turn, and also slipped one big finger inside her, she completely lost her mind. There was no shame, there was no worry, there was nothing in her world but his dark head as it bent between her legs, driving her towards that raw release that she had begun craving as surely as she craved food to eat. And this time, one of the few times, he didn‟t make her wait for it. He didn‟t tease, he didn‟t torture. He simply set himself to that goal and forced her over the edge, fucking her gently with his finger, squeezing and rolling each nipple painfully as he came to it, but mostly not allowing her one millisecond of respite from the strident attentions of his lips and tongue. And when she came, it was with a full–throated, all out scream fit to shake the very timbers that kept them afloat. Anjel managed to extricate himself from her, however reluctantly, wearing a grin so broad it hurt his face as he stood and curled his arms under her thighs, pulling her towards him and setting himself at her entrance and slowly entered her, keeping his hold on her thighs lest she should take it into her head to try to move away. Cassie, however, was well beyond that. She knew, somewhere, somehow, outside of the haze that had descended within her own mind that she should have been protesting what he was doing to her, but she couldn‟t find the will to do it. Especially since – unlike the previous instance – every bit of his advance within her stretched her wide in an

unbearably pleasant manner that had her blushing almost as fiercely as she had when he had first taken her into his mouth. All she could seem to do was to groan and mewl as he pressed himself within her, forcing her to accept his presence within her body, only this time she was startled to find that she wanted more rather than less of him. She wanted to clasp him to her rather than push him away, and when he lodged himself fully within her to the hilt, then pumped forward just slightly to assure himself of it, she emitted a long, low groan that she would have wished had come from anyone‟s lips but her own for its raw, guttural tone. At one point, she even lost her head enough that she tried to sit up, tried to bring him down to her so that she could clasp her arms around him, but he pushed her back down with two sharp swats to her breasts. “No, Cassie. You are not in control here. I want to take you like this, so that I can watch you closely as I do so.” And he did. He drank in every movement she made, every frustrated cry she gave as he began to pump in and out of her, gently at first and then, by the end, quite forcefully, plunging himself again and again into that sweet heart of her, elated to no end to have her climax again, clenching herself around him even more tightly than she already – naturally – was, until her contractions drove him to lose his own pinnacle on the world, and he ground himself into her as he spent himself, figuratively and literally. Afterwards, he gathered her to him, disturbed to realize that she was sobbing again, inconsolably, as she had several times before. No threats of punishment nor even gentle coaxing would get her to confide in him just what it was that caused her such abject sorrow, and he was becoming resigned to merely holding her through it until she fell asleep, but it was not a solution he favored. Every time he took her; every time he imposed his sexual desires onto her and then refused to allow her own to be hidden safely away from him, but most especially every time he used pain to bring her the utmost in pleasure, all Cassie could think about was how she had become so much like her mother, and the thought made her impossibly sad, both because she didn‟t want to be like this – like her – in that, and because, despite how they had parted, she missed her mother terribly. And she didn‟t think she could expect a pirate to understand any of that, so she kept her secrets locked well away from him, still praying – vowing – that she would find some method of escaping him and all of the depravities he had visited upon her.

His duties did take him out of the cabin regularly, which was important to her because she spent that time as close to happy as she could get in this situation, behind a locked door, reading very quickly through the good sized library of books she‟d discovered in a built in bookcase that was cleverly hidden behind a wall tapestry. She became so engrossed in one of his books, curled up in the only comfortable chair in the room – the big overstuffed Captain sized one that fairly swallowed her up when she sat in it by herself and smelled disturbingly of his bay rum aftershave – that she didn‟t hear the key in the lock nor his steps to her side until he cleared his throat loudly and she nearly threw the book at him in what she was sure was going to be a self defense maneuver. “Oh my word, you startled me,” she said upon realizing that it was him.

Anjel reached down to pick up the book. “Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson.” “Yes. An interesting literary choice for a pirate, I must say,” she ventured sarcastically. “I appreciate irony,” he replied almost off hand. “You read?” he asked, somewhat incredulously and belatedly. “Yes, Sir.” As if he didn‟t quite believe her, he opened the book and handed it to her. “Read that.” She read the passage that he had pointed to, flawlessly, although allowing a hint of sarcasm in her voice. Cassie continued to look into his eyes after she passed the book back to him. He was in a strange, unpredictable mood, questioning her about her ability to read for no apparent reason, as if he were suddenly more suspicious of her than he had been since he‟d brought her on board. And, it turned out, with good reason. She hadn‟t simply awakened the second day of her captivity here and settled into reading like a lump. At first, she had spent every second that he wasn‟t with her scouring the place for a way out – any way out – a secret passage or a porthole – anything. She did find several portholes along the top of the cabin just below the room that let in light, but they were all several feet taller than she was and she had no hope of opening them even once she‟d exhausted herself dragging his huge chair over beneath it to boost her up so that she could reach them. She simply didn‟t have the strength. They seemed to be sealed shut, and there was no moving them without assistance, which she heartily doubted anyone aboard would grant her. There was no other means of escape apparently. Just him and his blasted key, with which he locked her in each time he left the room. Now she was stuck on the idea that she needed to find some way to relieve him of that key – once they were in a port somewhere, of course, and the ship had presumably become largely emptied by the crew who were off on shore leave, or whatever the correct nautical term was for going into town and getting stinking drunk. That had been the entirety of her experience with sailors in the short time that she had spent on San Miguel. But she had decided, during the course of the past few days, that she wanted to tell him as little about herself as possible, especially since the person she had been when she set foot on this ship was no longer who she was at all. Cassandra Solange Constance Mary Winthrop–Sutton, the daughter of the ninth Earl of Sutton, had been long since buried under the weight of her own mortification. There was virtually no way for her to go back to the life she had led – even on the Duque‟s remote island. Once she stepped off this ship again – and she was bound and determined to do that – she would become, out of necessity, someone else. She wasn‟t exactly sure yet just who, but she‟d work that out when the opportunity presented itself. “How did you learn to read?” “I was taught, Sir.” “By whom?” Although she was doing her best to maintain her anonymity, she also tried to stick to the truth as much as possible, so as to have fewer lies to deal with. “Tutors, Sir.” Anjel grunted in reply as he ousted her from his seat, only to haul her back onto his lap. She was an enigma, this one, and he hated puzzles. Although she answered the

questions he asked her about herself without hesitation, he had a strong sense that she was holding a lot back, and that, in and of itself, was very contrary to his own experience of women. Most of the females he‟d had any kind of knowledge of were more likely to the ears off him and anyone else within shouting range, but not Cassie. She was almost eerily quiet and surprisingly self contained. And she read for pleasure. How interesting. He knew more highborn ladies than not who detested reading. Oh they had been educated, but they used only what they needed to get by. Their lives were filled with fashion, food, and flowers, it seemed, and not much else. “What did you think of it?” he asked, busily divesting her of the ruined shift and dress she donned every time he left. “What?” “The story.” He tugged down the top of the garments she had managed to fix only slightly one day, when she had begged him for a needle and thread to do just that. Now they were sewn together only in an obscenely small line down the middle that gave her only the slightest modicum of comfort at being at least somewhat covered while he was gone, although he almost always divested her of them as soon as he came into the room. But this time he only worked them down just enough to capture her elbows tightly against her body, so that she couldn‟t move her arms, leaving those beautiful breasts of hers entirely open to his delectation. Cassandra snorted in a most unladylike fashion, causing him to divert his eyes from the way his hands were about to lay claim to her charms to meet her clear hazel eyes instead with an inquisitive look that prompted her to expound on her rude exclamation. “It was all right. Definitely not my experience of pirates, however, Sir.” Occasionally her inflection when she called him that was deliberately snide, but she had obviously forgotten where she was. The fingers that had been almost gently tugging at nipples that he was glad to see were nearly always peaked and eager for him, began to pinch them terribly hard while twisting at the same time. With those tender buds in his cruel hands and her arms bound to her sides by her own dress, there was precious little she could do to alleviate the pain he was causing. Panting heavily at the discomfort he was causing, she tried to be proactive to get him to stop hurting her. “I‟m sorry, Sir,” she offered, her voice breathy and thin. Those fingers closed even tighter, making tears stream down her cheeks as he watched her with an alarmingly detached air. “And what are you sorry about, little Cassie?” Sitting like this with him, splayed wide over his legs, the ruined dress revealing much more of her body than it concealed, so that she might as well have been completely naked, the chair more than four times her size easily and him at least two, and usually having been chastised in the most childish of ways multiple times before she ended up here did make her feel quite small, physically and emotionally. “My less than respectful tone, Sir.” No inflection, no sarcasm at all, and said with her eyes staunchly focused on his. “As well you should be. Fetch me my belt.” It was on the tip of her tongue to try to protest – or more smartly, try to talk him out of it somehow, but the look on his face did not welcome negotiation of any sort. Anjel rose and took one of the straight backed dining chairs and put it in the middle of the

room. When she had handed him the thick leather instrument, he put his hand on the back of her head and guided her over the back of the chair. “Take a hold of the seat. You‟re going to need it to remind you not to reach back,” he said, his tone frighteningly devoid of expression. The captain positioned himself behind her and to one side, fiddling with the belt until he got it into the shape he wanted it – buckle well in his palm and most of the rest of it wrapped around his big fist, but a good eight inches or so left with which to kiss her bottom. “Fifty strokes, Cassie. I‟m sick of hearing that insulting undertone in your voice. I will not have it.” Her feet began to dance just at the thought of him bringing that horrible thing down on her backside, even just once! It was one of her least favorite implements – not that she really had a favorite. All of them were pretty horrid, especially in his more than capable hands, but some were worse than others, and this was one of the worst, right up there just below the quirt, in her estimation. “And you‟re going to count them, every one, loud and clear, and say please with each number. And if you‟re too slow in the count, I‟m just going to start blistering away until you come to your senses and begin the count again.” Anjel moved towards her head, lifting her chin almost gently with his finger, so that she had to meet his eyes. “And you don‟t want to even consider what will happen if you lose count all together, believe me.” When he‟d reclaimed his former stance, well positioned as he was to deliver good, hard strokes, he said but one word. “Begin.” There were few instances when Cassie truly had a bone deep reluctance to say something, but this was definitely one of those. She did not want to begin the count, but feared his retribution even more if she didn‟t. “One, please, Sir.” If she could have fallen to the floor she would have, but there was no place for her to go. The chair caught her at her upper midsection, and she was holding so tightly to the seat that she couldn‟t feel her fingers. But she most certainly could feel her bum once that leather kissed it and set her to howling. She couldn‟t really let her anguish out, though, because she had to ask for the next stroke before he decided she had taken too long to do so. “Two, please, Sir.” That one caught the descending swell of her cheeks, delivered almost as an uppercut expressly so it would land in exactly that area. Tears were already rolling down her cheek and onto the seat below her face. “Three, please, Sir.” He was relentless. “You‟ll have to ask louder than that, Cassie, to avoid a second stroke.” Anjel placed two in a row in exactly the same spot, making her dance in place and give such a mournful cry that it was fit almost to crack his own impenetrable façade. But not quite. In all, he gave her more like sixty–five strokes, considering that her voice quickly became hoarse from her cries and therefore she was given two in a row many times because she wasn‟t asking loudly enough for his tastes.

And then there were the times that she took too long to ask, by his standard – whatever that was – and found herself on the receiving end of a flurry of vicious snaps that had her trying to cringe away from them as best she could while crying out the count at the same time through her tears. When he was through with her, he threw her onto the bed and mounted her, amazed as always to find her more than ready for him, and took her for the first time entirely for his own pleasure, trapping her wrists at her head and heaving himself into her, fucking her as hard and fast as he could, although it always seemed to him to be an alarmingly short amount of time, although, thankfully for his ego, that wasn‟t something she would know to note. Just as he cried out and lost himself within her, there came a sharp rap at the door. “It‟s Tommy, Sir. Swearengen in the crow‟s nest spied a ship.” He was up and off her in a second, pulling up the pants he hadn‟t even bothered to remove and out the door practically before she knew what was happening. But she did know one thing: in his haste to leave, he had not locked the door.

Chapter Eight The first thing Cassie did when she realized that pertinent fact was get up and try to repair her dress – again – as best she could. It wasn‟t really proper in the least, even when she finished with it, but it was the best she could do with what little she had. Then she looked around for something to use as a weapon, seeing and then immediately dismissing his hairbrush. She wasn‟t going to be able to spank her way to safety. The only thing she could find was an old, dull knife in the top drawer of his dresser, but she tucked it into her chemise anyway. Something was better than nothing, and she had no idea what or who she was going to encounter when she went topside. Hell, she wasn‟t even sure how to get topside, but she was going to make it there if it killed her, and it just might. The waiting was the worst thing, though. She couldn‟t follow right out behind him; she‟d end up right back where she was. So she had to wait for a while, until she thought he‟d had sufficient time not to have been standing right outside the door ready to trap her in some elaborate ruse meant to earn her another lengthy punishment. But she could tell that something was definitely going on; she could hear the shouts from above, as well as multiple feet tromping loudly up and down stairs. When the tromping stopped, Cassie figured she might be more alone down here that usual, with everyone up top fighting to get aboard whatever hapless ship they had come across. She opened the door a sliver and peeked out, seeing that the hallway was completely empty. Cassie scurried out, closing the door carefully behind her so no one looking casually down here would see that it was open and send up an alarm. She saw a ladder at the end of the hallway, and put her foot on the bottom rung, but no sooner had she done that then she heard – and felt – several massive explosions in a row that knocked her back down onto her bottom. She got up as soon as the massive booms stopped and hauled herself up the ladder in record time, not wanting to be caught midway again when another big explosion happened. Once she was on deck, every sense she owned was violently assailed. There were deafening explosions to the left, right and front of her, the smell of gunpowder and death thick in her nostrils, and so much blood on the decks that her cheap shoes squished wetly with every tentative step she took. She could see that to one side there was another huge ship, at least the size of this one or even bigger, and it was what she – a landlubber – would have estimated to be dangerously close to them. But she also saw that the closeness was actually a good thing – if one was on the pirates‟ side – because it allowed them to throw their grappling hooks and extend their gangplanks to the other ship to aid in boarding her, although Cassie could also hear the screams above her, as men with knives in their mouths who were also simply swinging across – from this ship and, she noted with alarm, from the other – on ropes. The gangplanks looked like a possibility at first, that was at least until she saw several men pushed, shot or just plain clumsily fall from them, and that didn‟t include those who had them pulled right out from under them so that they dropped into what was surely shark infested waters below.

And as she looked up at those crazy men flying above her on nothing but a thread of rope, a spot of red, white and blue caught her eye, and she saw the Union Jack flying high and proud – on the other ship. She found herself drawn towards it like a lodestone, until she was clinging to the side of the ship, trying to scream across the way at the men who were fighting for their lives and paying absolutely no attention to her, no matter how she jumped and waved and cried, completely ignoring the sounds of gunfire and blasts of cannon flying all around her. Nor did she acknowledge the clanking of sword against sword as the battled raged on right next to her, as well as in front of her. When she realized that nothing was going to help her achieve her goal, she began to cry while she berated herself for having done so, and turned away from the sight only to have her eyes land on the bodies of several British soldiers who were lying dead and wounded all over the deck – along with, of course, several pirates. Her first thought was that she should try to talk to one of the British men, but the first three she tried were already dead, and the rest were unconscious or unable to speak. She was rapidly beginning to think that she needed to do something to help the injured men rather than worrying about her own, seemingly hopeless situation. She wasn‟t in imminent danger of dying, unlike everyone around her seemed to be. The last man she found in a British uniform died in her arms once she rolled him over, and considering the condition he was in, that was a blessing. The deck was littered with other men groaning and alternately crying for their mothers and cursing the British who had done this to them, looking for any kind of help they could get, the majority of whom seemed to be no older than she was. And no one seemed to be assisting them in the least. Still without any regard for her own safety, she dashed below decks and gathered everything in her arms that she could find that she thought might be of assistance and dashed back up, stopping at the first wounded man she found and reaching beneath her skirt to her slip, cutting and tearing it into bandaged sized strips. At first she was shy about lifting her skirts in front of a strange man, but then she realized that he was hardly in a position to be trying to see under her skirts. In fact the man was embarrassingly grateful for what little she could do, taking her hand before she left to move on to the next one and pressing a frankly revolting, bloody kiss on the back of it, blessing her repeatedly for her attentions. Cassie nodded and detached herself so that she could work on the next man. Some were just in need of bandaging, some were in need of splints which she found herself fashioning from whatever was handy, others were beyond hope but still alive and conscious. She stayed with those men as long as she could, seeing several of them off to their reward – or whatever such men thought there was in the afterlife – praying over and with others. She treated everyone she encountered, without thought to which side of the war they were on, discovering two British soldiers whom she had either missed or had fallen after she had arrived. They were both conscious, but were bad off enough that she didn‟t think they would remember what she‟d told them, and by the time she encountered a third she didn‟t even bother to try to explain her situation, she simply treated him as best she could and moved on. It was an Englishman from Liverpool that she was hovering over when she felt a shadow fall over her, realizing with a start that all was quiet and the battle must‟ve ended.

She had no idea who won until she felt herself yanked rudely into a standing position by her upper arm then mashed uncomfortably up against the Captain. And if the look in his eyes was anything to judge by, he was not at all happy. “Take this prisoner to the brig.” He kicked carelessly at the young man‟s leg. “Rabby, you and Mercer get the decks cleaned immediately.” She could barely recognize his voice. It seemed several octaves deeper and a whole lot louder when he was commanding his men. “I want everything ship–shape in minutes, men, because there‟s going to be a flogging.” What little chatter that had sprung up in the aftermath of the battle died down immediately at that pronouncement, and everyone scrambled to do his bidding. Cassie was hauled unceremoniously back down to the cabin from whence she‟d come, only to be thrown into it, followed closely by him as if he were a bloodhound on her scent. “How did you get out of my cabin?” he demanded, his nose practically butting up against hers as he bore down on her like the wrath of God. Cassie did her best to remain neutral, recognizing that showing him any kind of emotion would be like waving a red flag in front of a bull. “You left it open.” “I –” he began, set to explode all over her at the way she had carelessly risked her own safety. Then he quickly thought back to an hour or so before, when he had had to quickly take his leave of her. Damned if he hadn‟t left it open. “Regardless, there was a bloody war going on up there! Whatever could have possessed you to set foot on deck?” he asked, already knowing the answer for himself but singularly unable to prevent himself from asking the question, wishing there could be a different reply. And he had to admire her. She wasn‟t cringing, she wasn‟t backing down, and she didn‟t try to tell him a watered down version of the truth. “I was hoping I could find someone on the other side that would help me escape.” He had heard her screaming to the men on the British ship, obviously desperate to get someone to notice her. Anjel hadn‟t been able to catch the specifics or even get to her, since he was trying to keep himself from being killed at the time, but he‟d known as soon as he‟d seen her on deck what she was trying to do. She had been a terrible distraction while he was fighting, but he tried to keep an eye on her – not really for her since there was little he could do to help her one way or the other – while dealing with several extremely skilled swordsmen on the other side who would have been delighted to see him dead. He‟d seen her methodically go to each of the fallen Brits, seen her shoulders fall when she found what she thought was the last of her compatriots, and then watched her disappear below decks with a relieved sigh, only to feel his already incensed anger rise to epic proportions when she appeared again a few minutes later and began to minister to the first man she came to, which happened to be Little Sammy Hobart. Before he was able to make it back onto his own ship, she‟d worked her way through the ones she could help – his crew and the Brits alike, doing what little she could. The Doc, who was none the less one of his best swordsmen, had begun following along after her as soon as the fighting had stopped, and Anjel had already told the man to come to him with his assessment of what she had done as soon as he could. Although he usually calmed down pretty quickly following a fight, as he stood in his cabin and looked her in the eye, the blood – fueled by rage – still barreled through his

body at record speed, and he was amazed to find himself rock hard just from looking at her, or perhaps from the flood of heart–stopping relief he felt in realizing that she was all right. But he was not. He wasn‟t hurt or injured in any way, but his mind was about to explode at what he knew he was going to have to do to her in a few minutes. As altruistic as her intentions might have been – eventually, when she realized that she wasn‟t going to get any further in her plans for escape – in helping all of those men, one fact remained: she had aided and abetted about thirteen of the enemy. Some had survived, some hadn‟t. But he couldn‟t just ignore her behavior. If any other person on this ship had assisted a member of the crew of the ship they had just fought, it would be considered a traitorous act. And in all likelihood, he would lose his life for his efforts. Some ships were run in a more democratic fashion. He had been aboard several such vessels himself while working his way through the ranks, but he found their crews to be less cohesive and in general believed that they were pretty badly run. A ship – like a woman – needed a firm, undisputed master who consistently applied correction to those who broke the rules. He set the rules. He issued the punishments, or, at least, issued the orders for them. He only occasionally actually carried them out himself. But there was no voting about anything. His ship was not and never would be a democracy, for anyone on board, including Miss Cassie. In this case he would definitely be administering the punishment himself. And as much as he wanted not to have to do so in front of his crew, they had as much of a right to see justice done to her as they did to any other person on this ship, especially since what she had done could have cost any one of them – or all of them – their lives. Before he could take her to task for what she had done, though, he heard the Doc at the door, and he didn‟t really think he wanted to hear what he was going to say as he stepped outside into the cramped hallway. “The truth is, Cap‟n, that she helped everyone she could almost as well as I could. She made them comfortable, dressed their wounds, and comforted the dying...I can‟t see any instances where she hurt more than she helped. In fact, she saved several of your men‟s lives.” “Thanks, Bones.” The older man turned reluctantly away from him at his clipped response, and he could hear the captain slam the door shut behind him as he returned to the deck and the last of his waiting patients. In his cabin, Anjel ran his hand through his sweaty hair. “Do you even know what you‟ve done, Cassie?” She looked at him, obviously puzzled by his question, but very disturbed at his demeanor and growing somewhat frightened for herself. “I know I tried to escape, and you can‟t be too happy about that, but you couldn‟t have thought I wouldn‟t avail myself of the opportunity to try to get away from you.” She snorted indelicately, but caught herself and cut it off, trying to remain more neutral, although her next sentence belied that effort, too. “I mean, Captain, Sir, that I think I would give my life not to be raped by you ever again.”

He jerked back from her as if she had hauled off and slapped him squarely across the face, his expression dark and foreboding, and Cassie wondered if she was going to get herself punched for her candor. Instead, she watched the muscle in his jaw jumping furiously as he took a step towards her, returning, “I would think that one could hardly call it rape, especially considering how the entire ship rang with the sounds of your pleasure every time I brought you to it.” All of the color drained from Cassie‟s face. She had never thought of how loud she was being, and on top of that she realized – if everyone heard her when he fondled and misused her, then they could also hear when he disciplined her, and she wasn‟t sure which was worse! She would never be able to face any of them ever again. But just then they both heard a high pitched whistle. Cassie had no idea what the tones meant, but he did, of course, and seconds later she was being hauled back up to the deck behind him – bright faced and mortified by what they all must know about her; the Captain wasn‟t taking that into consideration in the least. The men were assembled on the main deck, in front of the mast, in loose lines. Cassie hadn‟t had the chance to get much of a look at it while she was up there, but she was pretty sure that the quirt he‟d used on her before hadn‟t been hanging off of the mast, as it was now. She recognized some of the men, who smiled and shuffled in an embarrassed manner when she nodded to them. Rory was there, but he looked pained and didn‟t return her slight smile. The Captain was looking fit to bust that she‟d acknowledge any of them, but then, keeping a tight arm around her as if he thought she might bolt for some reason, he turned his attention to the matter at hand and cleared his throat, saying, “All of you did extremely well, men, and in the face of an overwhelming enemy. The bounty from the HMS Insuperable will make your purses considerably fatter at the end of the voyage, and cook tells me that there‟s even some beef that several men were able to liberate from its larders before it went down, so there will be meat in everyone‟s stew tonight, as well as a double ration of ale.” He was given three cheers for his generosity, but he calmed their exuberance quickly afterwards. “Your brave efforts are the reason why I have assembled you. One person on board – although she isn‟t exactly a part of the crew – is known to have given aid and comfort to the enemy – to the very men who were trying to kill you.” There were a few boos in response to his revelation, but surprisingly few. And then one lone, shy voice was heard out of the crowd. “But Captain, Sir, the miss helped me – got my arm set by wrapping parts of her underskirt around two pieces of wood from where a cannonball landed on the quarterdeck, she did. The Doc says it‟s going to be right as rain in a few weeks.” Midshipman Ellis wasn‟t the type to speak up for nothing. He was a good lad, kept his head down, and did what the hell he was told to do with little complaint. Anjel opened his mouth, but not before he was interrupted by yet another crewman, a swabby this time, by the name of Smitty, who had come aboard the ship not more than a year ago, who echoed his shipmate‟s comments about what a help the “little miss” had been to him about the gunshot that had ripped through and through the upper flesh of his arm. And before their Captain could say another word, he was fairly assailed by members of the crew who had been assisted by the female at his side, if not directly then

they confessed to being comforted merely by the presence of someone who was so selflessly giving of herself, without any thought to her own danger. “She was dodgin‟ and weavin‟ like a pickpocket in Leicester Square with a bobby after „im,” one of the men said, and Anjel was treated to a chorus of how angelic and brave the men felt she had been. Even Rory joined in, having apparently been keeping an eye on her himself, just like Anjel had been, equally as unable to do anything to assist, but trying to keep track of where she was and not get himself killed at the same time. But Anjel wasn‟t going to back down. “And what if, lads, this little lady,” and his tone conveyed that her status as such was deeply in question, “had treated a man who got up and sliced two or three or four of you down in your prime before some one of us was able to get to him? Or, worse than that, if he had managed to turn the tide? Where would we be now – rotting at the bottom of the ocean or in an English brig, which isn‟t all that different, especially when there‟s a noose waiting for you at the end of your voyage, gentlemen.” Some of the men nodded, but the majority remained unconvinced – not that he needed their consent, anyway. Aiding and abetting was bad enough in and of itself, but then there was the matter of her escape, the fact that she had bitten him back when he had first abducted her...True, he had already made her pay – in spades – for some of the misbehaviors on the list he was compiling in his own mind, but Anjel still couldn‟t just ignore the fact that she had helped the people who were trying to kill them – even if his men apparently could. So without further conversation, Anjel turned and guided Cassie over to the mast, where he had already had one of the men lower the cross beam enough that he could bind her wrists to it. Cassie was deep in denial about what was about to happen to her, and she didn‟t put up any kind of resistance at all when he bound her arms above her head, and well out to the side, where they would be of no use to her at all. Then he bound her ankles together and also to the mast, as well as looping a strong band of leather around her waist. By the time he was finished, she couldn‟t move a muscle. To her horror, the next thing he did was to lean down and pull up her skirts, being sure to catch the hem of what remained of her petticoats and gather all of that material up to tuck it into the leather band around her waist until her entire backside was exposed to anyone who cared to see it. The men were strangely silent, though. Not a catcall or a hoot from any of them. In fact, as he took the quirt into his hand, he was amazed to look behind him and see that nearly three fifths of the men had turned their backs to the proceedings. They hadn‟t set foot to leave, because they knew that would mean trouble from him. But more and more of them were executing about faces worthy of the trained soldiers on the ship they had just defeated, until nearly all of them – except Bedlam Bill, who was certifiably crazy – and Rousseau, a Frenchman he knew favored whips all too well – so well, in fact, that he was banned from most of the whorehouses they frequented. With a deep sigh and a feeling of trepidation he could do nothing to shake, Anjel nonetheless drew back his arm and landed the first of many wicked strokes across that delicate bottom of hers, hearing several of his men whimper at the sharp sound of thin

leather connecting with shrinking flesh, instead of the intended victim, who somehow managed to stay silent despite the fact that he could see the livid red wheal he‟d left before he drew his arm back for the second stripe.

Chapter Nine Anjel had no idea how she managed to endure the lashing he was giving her. She gave barely so much as a peep. She was crying and snuffling, but not one scream had passed her lips, and barely even any moans or groans. He knew he wanted to cry out himself every time the lash kissed that delicate skin. Her bottom was a mass of livid red wheals, and he could barely stand what he was doing to her himself, especially considering how she had so selflessly helped his men, but he felt that a point needed to be made, and he was going to make it. Finally, on he didn‟t even know what stroke, she collapsed against her bonds, not sagging much because he had tied her so tightly but he could see that she had fainted and he was damned glad of it. It gave him an excuse to end this blasted ordeal. But when he reached for the straps around her wrists, he found Rory there before him, and Smitty already working at her ankles. “Hey, Cap‟n, look, she‟s bleeding!” he shouted, noticing a small pool of blood at her feet. With a roar Anjel pushed the other men away from her and swung her up into his arms, ordering, “Doc, meet me in my cabin,” over his shoulder as he descended to his quarters, putting her on her back on the bed since she was unconscious anyway. Within seconds he had every stitch of what there was of her clothing off her, looking for where she might be bleeding from, and he found it easily. There was a moderately deep crease across the bottom side of her ribcage and it was oozing slowly. The blood had been running in a sluggish stream down the side of her right thigh. When the doctor arrived several minutes later, Anjel hovered around her protectively, paying more attention to what he said about how he was going to treat Cassie than he ever had about how he was going to treat his own myriad wounds. The foremost concern was, of course, infection, and there were really very few things they could do to prevent it. The problem was that whatever it was – probably a musket ball – that had torn that chunk out of her was probably not the cleanest thing to begin with. They could clean her up as carefully as possible, but there was a good possibility that the infection had already started to set in. And once it did, there was precious little they could do but hope and pray. And that was exactly what Anjel ended up doing. By the end of day three, she was burning up with fever, and hadn‟t been conscious since she‟d been lashed at the mast. He had already turned over nearly all his duties to Rory, who had headed the ship, on his orders, back towards San Miguel, where he knew his uncle had an excellent physician – not that there was much more that he could do for her, necessarily, than they were already doing, but Anjel wanted to assure himself that he had gotten the best treatment he could for her. Unfortunately, the chances were quite good that she‟d be long gone before they got there, but he had to hold on to something positive and that was it. He bathed her with cool water and hovered over her night and day, spooning a special broth Cook had made for her down her throat when he could, massaging her and tending to the mess he‟d made of her bottom, trying to keep her as comfortable as possible and assisting Bones with all of the procedures he came up with to try to save her

– draining the abscess, packing it with clean bandages to wick the infected matter out of the area, hot compresses to assist in doing the same and even helping him sew her up. She was going to have a scar fit to match any of his on that beautiful body of hers, and it was no one‟s fault but his own. In all of these hours mostly alone with her, sitting in his huge chair by her side, or holding her next to him on the bed, Anjel had taken stock of just what it was that he had put her through, and peasant or whore or highborn courtesan – whatever she had been before he had taken her – he realized that it had not been his right to kidnap her, regardless of the potential threat against his men if she had managed to alert the townspeople. When she awoke – if she awoke, he corrected with a lump in his throat the size of a barrel of ale – he was going to do his level best to make it up to her. He‟d set her up in her own house wherever she wanted to be – on any continent – and take care of her financially for the rest of her life, as penance. And, more than that, he‟d leave her the hell alone, if that was what she chose. He could hardly blame her if she never wanted to set eyes on him again, and if that was her wish, then all he could do was his level best to fulfill it. He wished he thought that she would agree to have him in her life – as her lover and more – but he couldn‟t imagine that she would after what he‟d forced her to endure. And then he heard something that compounded his remorse a thousand fold. She had been hallucinating from the moment her fever had begun to spike, but the words she shrieked and the visions she seemed to be having weren‟t anything of any importance – a missing kitten, apparently, that she was trying to coax to her in a voice much higher pitched than her normal one, as if she had drifted back into her childhood. And once, when he had joined her to get a few hours of sleep, gathering her tight up against his side, she had asked him, clear as a bell in a rather plaintive tone, to tell her a story, a request which he found surprisingly endearing. But as her fever climbed, her imaginings seemed to become more and more based in actual, specific life events, and not happy ones, apparently, either. She became very agitated in the middle of one night, obviously dreaming about something that had happened that had caused her great anguish. She was so restless that Anjel couldn‟t get any sleep himself, so he rose and lit a candle, watching her as she struggled against some unseen demon, then called out several times to her father with such pleading in her voice that he got back into bed to hold her as she sobbed, although she was so feverish that she had few actual tears to shed. Somehow he gleaned from those ramblings that her grief was caused by the recent loss of her father, at least recently enough that the grief was apparently quite fresh in her mind. He tried to soothe her as best he could, although she wasn‟t having much of it, because as soon as she recovered from her sobs, she became equally as angry at her mother about something. She kept repeating, “Mama, no!” over and over again and crying fit to break his heart, and then he heard something from those parched lips that had the hair on the back of his neck standing up. “Duque Gregorio!” She fairly screamed his name as she reached a peak of agitation that had Anjel holding her with arms that were more than faintly shaking at what he‟d heard. Duque Gregorio de la Fuente, the governor of San Miguel, was his uncle. Because his father had died early in his young life, they had always been close for a

nephew and uncle, and he could remember coming down to San Miguel occasionally as a child and having the time of his life because his uncle wasn‟t nearly as hawk–eyed about his behavior – as the first born son – as his mother was, and he thoroughly enjoyed the freedom he was given to roam the island at will. Gregorio‟s somewhat precipitous marriage to someone he‟d just barely met was why Anjel had set a course for the island in the first place – he wanted to meet this woman that his heretofore confirmed bachelor uncle had married. But how had Cassie come to know his name? Was there more than one Duque Gregorio in the world, he wondered, doing his best to hope against hope that she didn‟t mean his uncle, but as he had captured her on San Miguel, he knew it was beyond hope to think that there was anyone else on that island by that title. Anjel left her in as comfortable a position as he could manage for her, and went to his desk, rifling through the last few letters he‟d received from the older man, although they were several months old. He did mention in a few of them that he had met a wonderful woman – a Lady who had lost her beloved husband to the cholera epidemic that had ripped through England over the winter. As the letters drew closer to the current date, he had written that he intended to marry this paragon, and vaguely mentioned that she had an eligible daughter but didn‟t go into any further detail about them, except to mention that his intended was of exquisite beauty but that her daughter easily surpassed her. Anjel had laughed when he‟d first read this letter, knowing that that comment was expressly included to try to tempt him into visiting. Although his uncle wouldn‟t have expected Anjel to attend the wedding, since he was privy to and a partner in Anjel‟s less than honorable pursuits, he knew there would always be a room waiting for him at the Governor‟s mansion. It was then that he remembered that, when he had first taken her aboard, she had had a bag with her, and he hadn‟t bothered to pay much attention to what had happened to it. Perhaps it would provide some clue as to her identity, since she was unable. He quickly summoned Rory to his side and asked him if he knew what had happened to it. Anjel didn‟t explain exactly why it was that he was only looking for it just now, but he knew that Rory would assume that it was to see if there was any way to identify her better if the worst they all feared actually came to pass. As it happened, Doc had been given first crack at its contents, in case it had contained any useful medicines, and it did look somewhat like the kind of bag he might carry if he was practicing on land. And, luckily, when he found it just contained some clothing and a few personal mementos, he hadn‟t thrown it overboard or even passed it on through the ship, but had tucked it into one of the cupboards he had at his disposal in the tiny dispensary, and Rory was able to retrieve it with relative ease and bring it to the captain, who descended on it as if it held the secret to life, and it might well indeed. Rory backed quietly out of the room after glancing at where Cassie lay immobile on the bed, seeing that Anjel was in no mood for company of any kind. When he finally slumped back in his chair, Anjel took a hold of Cassie‟s pale hand and saw his own tears fall onto the back it. Several of the things in the little kit she‟d had – perhaps she was running away for some reason but he couldn‟t be sure – were letters from her father, the Earl, on his personal stationery, which showed his crest. There was no doubt about it, even if she wasn‟t somehow involved with the woman Duque Gregorio was probably already married to, she was the daughter of an

Earl, and just about as far from the type of woman he had been trying to paint her as all along as a beggar was from a Prince. Anjel ran his hand through his hair. What a mess he had gotten them both into, and all because of his impetuousness, and the fact that he‟d wanted her on sight. That beautiful hair of hers had shone like a beacon in the dim moon and torchlight, and he had had to have her, consequences be damned. In fact, he had arrogantly assumed, as he was wont to do, that there wouldn‟t be any consequences – at least not for him, anyway. The picture that he was piecing together had him even more horrified at his own behavior than he already had been, and he didn‟t want to think about what would happen if what he suspected were true. And he was relatively sure that it was: he had kidnapped the daughter of a British earl, the woman who had only recently become his uncle‟s stepdaughter. Why hadn‟t he been more concerned with determining just who it was that he‟d kidnapped that night? If he‟d just stopped for a moment and asked her a few pertinent questions, they would have turned back to the island no matter where in the world they were, but he hadn‟t. He hadn‟t even allowed her, for the majority of her relatively short time with him, to speak to him, especially at first when all of this could have been resolved with relative ease. But no, he had gotten it into his head that she was a wench, a whore – someone he could play with for his own amusement and then dismiss when he inevitably became bored with her. It was one of the most atrocious things he‟d ever done in his life, and he was no angel, despite the name his mother had chosen for him. But he was usually the one who treated his women much, much better than most. Now he had to come to grips with the fact that he was no better than the lowliest seaman who ever raped a strange woman who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time during a raid. Not that it absolved him of his own bad behavior in the least, but he couldn‟t help but wonder just what it was that she had been doing in an old, faded dress, alone on the beach in the middle of the night? San Miguel was a small enough island, but it wasn‟t as if there weren‟t untold numbers of men in residence who would have taken advantage of her if they had come upon her that night. Just as he had. The only difference was that he had kidnapped her and taken her out to sea, away from her mother and his uncle and any hope of rescue. No wonder she‟d braved the battle to try to get the attention of anyone she could on the Insuperable. Although he looked longingly at her in his bed, he didn‟t feel he couldn‟t quite bring himself to join her in it any more. If there was any point in his life when he wanted – no, needed – to get stinking drunk, this was it, but he couldn‟t allow that to happen since he was her primary caregiver, and he wasn‟t at all willing to pass that duty off to anyone, even the doc. And so he stayed with her, as he had been, day and night, doing everything the doc suggested to help her, which was alarmingly little. He‟d only ever really gone through the motions in church, but he had taken to praying fervently for her, not that he thought it was doing any good, unfortunately. Although he knew that the crew waited anxiously for updates, they knew better than to disturb him, but he knew they pestered Rory incessantly for any news about her condition, but that poor man was barely able to find out anything himself, considering he was both the First Mate and the acting Captain. The few times Anjel opened his cabin

door to get a bit of fresh air into his quarters, he always found small gifts for her that he knew the men were leaving there. One of those infrequent times, he caught Wink, one of the oldest men he commanded, leaving a cross in front of his door. He nodded to the man wanly, thanking him for the gift, then Wink mentioned something almost under his breath that somehow rang true with Anjel about how his mother had often treated his fevers – and those of his thirteen brothers and sisters – by bathing them in alcohol. Perhaps he was simply at the end of his rope and willing to try any bit of nonsense just to see some improvement in her instead of just watching her slowly slip away from him without trying everything he could. Anjel called for a big rainwater tub to be emptied – into something else, of course – and then began to fill it will every single stock of liquor he possessed, and then sent out word to his crew that if anyone wanted to help the “brave miss” – as they had come to call her – that they could donate whatever amount they were willing to of their rations of ale or other spirits. The doc was very doubtful as to the success of this operation, but he couldn‟t think that it would be any more detrimental to her than what they had already tried, so he gave it his blessing, and added his treasured bottle of twenty year old Scotch to the effort. He bathed her himself, of course, making sure that he got every part of her wet in the sticky stuff, even that glorious hair, and he was amazed to see that it worked, however slowly, in combination with the things he was already doing. By this time, he knew how the raging fever felt when he put his palm to her forehead like he knew the feel his own cock, and after only a short time in the alcohol soup, he could feel that it had abated somewhat. Progress, but she wasn‟t out of the woods yet. So he took to having two tubs of liquid in his cramped quarters, one full of the fresh rainwater he had originally had poured out of the first container, and then another of the mixture of various spirits he had been able gather from the generous donations of his shipmates. Anjel was careful to release a cautious update, through Rory, that their efforts were helping somewhat – not wanting them to think they would be going without in vain and also wanting to share his elation at the fact that she seemed to be doing a bit better. They reached San Miguel in record time, just as she seemed to be resting much more peacefully than she had since this whole ordeal had begun, and it was he who carried her himself up the back path and into the back entrance to the mansion, through the kitchens and up the back stairs, shouting orders to the servants as he walked, most particularly that they were to send for his uncle‟s doctor. He put her in the first bedroom he came to, set the first maid he found to watch her, charging her with coming to find him if Cassie‟s condition changed drastically in any direction, then set off to find his uncle. Gregorio and his wife were in the drawing room on the first floor, and he burst in at a time when the older man had been trying his best to comfort his wife about the sudden disappearance of her daughter. Both of them had been most chagrined about what she had witnessed between the two of them, and they had intended to set things right with her – or rather her mother had for propriety‟s sake – as soon as they could the next morning. But she was nowhere to be found by then. They had noticed that a small valise of hers and a few items of clothing were missing from her wardrobe but other than that, it was as if she had vanished into thin air, or so it had seemed.

“Why, Anjel, how wonderful to see you, although you‟ve chosen a rather unfortunate time to visit,” his uncle greeted him. “Allow me to introduce you to my wife.” “The former Lady Sutton?” Anjel filled in, taking the startled woman‟s hand and kissing the back as he executed a perfect bow, despite the fact that he hadn‟t bothered to change his clothes for this meeting and he probably fit the bill of a pirate pretty perfectly at first glance. “Why, yes,” she answered. “My husband died this past winter. Do I know you, sir?” Anjel took a deep breath. “No, but I believe I know your daughter, Cassandra?” Luckily, Gregorio was at her side when she swooned, carrying her to a beautiful gold and red couch to allow her to stretch out. The Don patted her wrists and sent a servant for wine to help revive his wife, who brought herself out of her faint and fairly clutched at Anjel‟s shirt. “Do you have news of my daughter? Have you seen her? Please tell me what you know about her!” she begged. “Is she about this high?” he asked, indicating that the top of her head would be about at his mid chest. They both nodded their heads. “With long, red gold hair?” The Don got up and hurried over to his wife‟s desk, bringing back with him a small portrait in a gilt frame. “This is Cassie from two years ago.” Now it was Anjel‟s turn to feel as if someone had knocked the wind out of him. “Yes, that‟s Cassie.” “Where is she? What do you know about her? How – ” Anjel took his new aunt‟s hand in his. “She‟s in one of the guest bedrooms upstairs.” Lysette made as if to get up, but both men barely managed to keep her in place, Gregorio because he was worried she might faint again and Anjel because he wanted to prepare her for the fact that her daughter was still very, very sick. So he told her the barest bones of the story that he could, focusing on the end of it and mentioning very little about how she had gotten onto his ship in the first place, but saying that she had taken a gunshot wound to her side and that the wound had become badly infected, but that she was doing somewhat better now. The Don refused to allow his wife to walk to the room where her daughter was ensconced and carried her in his arms all the way there without so much as a faltered step at the added weight. He was almost as strong of an ox as his nephew was, despite his age. Anjel stayed with the three of them, and then with the doctor, too, giving him as much information as he could about her condition and how he had been treating it, then backed out of the room as her mother took over responsibility for her care, knowing that she couldn‟t be in better hands. But before he could turn to go back to the ship, his uncle exited the room just after him and caught him before he was two steps down the hall, and he allowed himself to be bullied into the room that his uncle used as a study. It was lined with floor to ceiling books on every possible subject and had been one of his favorite places when he made his occasional visits. It was his uncle who had fostered his love of many things that were of particular interest to him – books and the sea, as well as beautiful women, which were only three of a long list.

“You‟re not going to get away that easily, Anjel. I know that what you told Lysette about what happened to Cassie, but I want to hear all the pertinent details that you very carefully left out.” His uncle knew him entirely too well, and Anjel knew that he wasn‟t going to set foot out of this room until he‟d satisfied the other man‟s curiosity complete. So he started at the point when he had seen Cassie turn away from where he and his usual boarding party were just coming ashore, that hair flashing in and out of view in the moonlight as she scrambled up the path, then becoming more completely revealed as they lit their torches. But he wasn‟t the only one who did the talking. Anjel was very happy to have been filled in on what was probably her motivation for trying to run away that night. He certainly could understand how upset she‟d be about what she had seen. “You realize you‟re going to have to marry her.” He shot his uncle a look, which the older man mistook as a reluctance to marry in general, which he certainly understood, but he was motivated by something entirely different from what his uncle knew. “It‟s not so bad. I know you were hoping to follow in my footsteps and stay unmarried all your life, but it has its compensations, believe me. I couldn‟t be happier with Lysette, and I‟m sure that you and Cassie will be much the same.” The look he gave the other man was downright incredulous. “Did you not hear what I just told you about how I treated her? I can‟t imagine how she‟ll feel about having to marry me, and I surely don‟t think she should be saddled with the likes of me for the rest of her life. She detests me, and I can‟t find any reason why she shouldn‟t.” Gregorio sighed. “Believe me, many marriages have had much worse beginnings than yours. We‟ll fiddle with the date a bit, just in case she‟s with child –” Stark fear crossed Anjel‟s face. “Ah, hadn‟t thought about that, now, had you?” “No. She‟s been so ill . . .” “Well, you never know. And you wouldn‟t want a son of yours to be born a bastard, now would you? And – for all your altruism – would you really want to leave her a fallen woman, knowing that no other man of any stature would have her now that you‟ve sullied her?” He banged his glass of port down onto his desk and answered for his nephew. “Of course you wouldn‟t. In fact, the right thing to do is to get you two married as soon as we can. I‟m the governor, and I can perform the ceremony right now.” He was already halfway to the door, while Anjel stayed right where he was, taking a large swig of that fine vintage. “Anjel. That was not a request,” Duque Gregorio snapped. “Regardless of how you feel about how you treated her, the most honorable thing you could do for her now is to give her your name. That way, if the unthinkable happens, she dies the wife that she deserves to be. And if she lives, well, then, my friend, it‟s about time your pirating days were at an end, anyway. You need to settle down and produce an heir. After all, some day – decades from now, of course – it is you who will inherit my title.” Anjel hadn‟t been reluctant to agree to the Duque‟s suggestion because he didn‟t want to marry Cassie. He had been reluctant to agree because he couldn‟t think that Cassie would choose to marry him. He was quite sure that, once she recovered, the only

thing she would want to see would be his back – preferably with a large knife sticking out of it and him gasping his last breath. At least that would be how he would feel if the situation were reversed. But his uncle was right. He drained the last of the port from his glass and joined the older man at the door, saying, “You‟re quite right, Uncle. I want to do whatever is best for Cassie.” *** A month later... “Cassie! Didn‟t I tell you that you shouldn‟t be riding! It‟s too soon after your illness for you to be so active.” Blast it all! He had caught her at the stables again – her husband. It was such a strange thing to think that she was married, and even stranger still to think that it was to Anjel. She absently twirled the heavy gold ring she‟d awakened to find on her forth finger. And she didn‟t remember one bit of their wedding ceremony, either, since it had been conducted – without her consent – while she was still unconscious and in the throes of that horrible fever. When she‟d awakened, nearly a week after he‟d brought her back to the island, his face was the first thing she saw, and her mother‟s was the second, just slightly afterwards, which was good because she flew into a near panic when she set eyes on Anjel‟s face. It had taken her mother a long while to get her to settle down afterwards, which luckily she didn‟t ask any questions about and just put it down to her illness. She hadn‟t seen it, herself, but later, when she was more recovered, her mother had tried to describe to her the look that had come over her husband when she reacted to him the way she did. “He looked – devastated, I guess, is the best way to put it, Cassie. As if someone had pulled the rug out from him. The way I probably did when your father died in my arms.” She smiled and continued, “I‟ve told you that he spent all of the time after he discovered you had been shot with you – he was your only nursemaid, he told me, not that he was complaining at all. What he devised to bring down your fever was a stroke of genius. And as soon as he realized who you were, he brought you right home to us.” Cassie merely nodded. She‟d heard all of this before; her mother had started in early with a pro–Anjel campaign, probably terrified that her daughter was going to do something crazy that would drive him away before she had a grandchild. Her mother singing his praises were some of the first words she had heard once she regained consciousness, but Cassie had come to realize that her mother only really knew part of the story – whatever thoroughly sterilized version of it that the men had decided to spoon feed her, she assumed. Lysette cleared her throat. Her daughter was still weak, but well on the road to recovery. They were on lounge chairs that Gregorio had thoughtfully set up in the gardens, so they could enjoy the warm, fresh sea air. She knew that what the men had told her about what had happened between her daughter and Gregorio‟s nephew was a bag of horseshit, as her late husband might have said, but it seemed to ease their minds to think that she believed every word they‟d told

her. But she‟d known from the pure fright on her daughter‟s face when she‟d awakened to her husband leaning over her that much more had gone on than she even wanted to know. But the two of them were bound together now, and she wanted to do what she could to help her daughter come to terms with her new life and be as happy as she could with her new husband. She felt strongly that they both needed to put behind them whatever it was that had happened between them on the ship and move forward with their lives. “I know that what you saw between Gregorio and me sent you running away from us, and I will never forgive myself for being the catalyst that launched you on your...misadventure. But I want you to know how glad I am to have you back, and that I‟ll do anything I can to help you and Anjel have as happy a life as Gregorio and I do.” Feeling extremely uncomfortable with the subject matter, Cassie had smiled wanly, saying, “Thank you, Mother. We appreciate that you and Gregorio have offered us rooms in the mansion. You two have been wonderful.” “I have wanted to talk to you since that night, Cassie, and now that you‟re a married woman, well, I hope you can understand somewhat and put into perspective what it was that you saw on that awful night.” Blushing at least as furiously as Anjel used to delight in making her, Cassie‟s answer was decidedly strangled by her embarrassment. “Yes, Mama.” “Because we do love each other so very deeply. I don‟t want you to doubt that. Gregorio has made me nearly as happy as your father did all those years, and I am so blessed to have found him, and I don‟t want you worrying that he‟s abusive or that he beats me.” It was Cassie‟s turn to clear her throat nervously. “I understand, Mama. I do. Much more so than I prefer to talk about, really.” That was about far as Cassie was willing to discuss with her mother about either matter – the fact that Gregorio disciplined Lysette or that Anjel had done the same thing to her. Lysette leaned over and patted Cassie‟s hand. “Thank you, dear. I appreciate your understanding.” And now here was her husband, standing directly in front of her, blocking out nearly the entirety of her line of sight except for him, looking for all he was worth as if he wanted to practice some of that same type of discipline around which she and her mother had skirted so delicately right this very moment, although he hadn‟t so much as touched her – in any intimate way – since she‟d gotten sick. Come to think of it, she did remember that he had said something about how he thought that riding was too strenuous for her to take back up until she was more fully recovered, but she had much preferred to consider what he‟d said to be a suggestion rather than an order, and so when she awoke this morning and saw that it was yet another gorgeous day, she decided that she wanted to go for a ride. “Yes, I believe you did say something to me about that a few days ago,” she answered, her tone carefully bland. “But I asked the doctor at his last visit and he said that if I was feeling strong enough, and I am, that it would be fine as long as I stopped when I got tired.” That was apparently not the answer Anjel wanted to hear, and she could see him clench his jaws in anger. Even after all these weeks without him having laid a hand on

her, the sight made her take a small step back from him, despite the fact that she was inwardly cursing her own cowardice. Although he didn‟t like the fear he saw in her eyes, he nonetheless took a step closer to her, bringing her in full contact with his achingly ready body. There hadn‟t been a minute in the past four weeks that he hadn‟t wanted her with everything that was in him, but he had vowed to himself that he would stay away from her. Anjel had turned over her care to her mother and his uncle‟s doctor, although he often stole into her room at night to watch over her for long moments, as if he needed to reassure himself that she was still getting better. But he was careful never to let her see him doing that. He visited her like clockwork once a day, for a somewhat stiffly polite tea, and that was the extent of his interaction with her. But he‟d never missed an opportunity to catch a glimpse of her once she began venturing out of her room, and he made sure that she had everything she needed or wanted, gleaning that information from long conversations with Lysette, whom he had come to adore almost as much as his uncle did. And almost as much as he had come to adore Cassie, although he was prepared never to let her see it. He felt unworthy around her, and it was a feeling he was completely unfamiliar with. He wasn‟t at all sure what he should say to her or do with her – beyond what his baser instincts continued to demand he do, every second of every day. But he had – thus far – refused to assert his husbandly rights, nor had he taken up the firm disciplinary stance he had maintained with her on the ship, using her illness as an excuse to avoid both intimate behaviors. Yet every night, alone in his room, his body tortured him in his dreams with thoughts of what he wanted to do to and with her, so much so that he rarely slept well any more, and his temper was much the worse for it. His uncle thought he was crazy to have so much guilt about what he had done, especially since, in the older man‟s eyes, he had made full restitution by marrying her, and she was now his to do with as he pleased – short of taking his fists to her, of course. But Anjel wasn‟t at all sure that that bill would ever be paid in full, and he was having a difficult time picturing himself as a husband to her, considering what had already transpired between them. His uncle knew of his predilections; they had been discussing the subject since Anjel had become a man, since it was Gregorio‟s bent, also. And that was another count on which he couldn‟t understand his nephew‟s thinking: Cassie was his wife. He was supposed to keep her in check, and provide the necessary motivation for good behavior. Gregorio was of a mind that wives needed consistent discipline, even if they hadn‟t put a foot wrong. He confided that he spanked Lysette at least once a week, even if she hadn‟t done anything he considered worthy of a spanking. He believed that knowing there would always be a spanking coming regularly reduced the number of individual disciplinary sessions she earned during the week, because she knew she was going to be paddled good and hard even if she behaved perfectly, and didn‟t want to add to it. Suddenly, though, Anjel could stand it no longer, and reached out to take Cassie‟s hand. He kept the length of his strides short in deference to her condition, but, damn and blast, if she was healthy enough to ride, then she was healthy enough to learn to obey her husband when he told her not to ride. He didn‟t give a tinker‟s damn what the doctor said.

Although she pulled and tugged as discreetly as she could, Cassie quickly discovered that she could not reclaim her hand from his. She even tried to just slip out of her riding glove, but that hadn‟t worked either; he merely grabbed a hold of her elbow instead. She began to suspect that even an out and out tantrum wouldn‟t do it. If she knew him – and she did, unfortunately – if she tried to throw herself on the ground screaming like a child, he would simply lean down, pick her up and throw her over his shoulder, without so much as missing a step, too, she‟d bet. Not that she was going to humiliate herself by doing anything so childish, whatever the provocation. He had to let go of her sometime, didn‟t he? But she would have done better remembering just how crafty he could be. Anjel had an idea that her complacency would evaporate the moment they were in her room, so as soon as they were behind that closed door, he lifted her into his arms, strode to her vanity to pick up the beautiful mahogany hairbrush he‟d seen there when he‟d visited her early on in her convalescence, and brought it with them to the edge of her bed, where he sat down and draped her over his thighs in exactly the position in which he wanted her. Cassie, of course, immediately attempted to get up, but found herself more than amply pinned down by the simple act of him putting his left arm – with uncomfortable familiarity – across the small of her back, curving his fingers around her hip to add even more stability to his hold and discourage other routes of escape. Her skirts were unceremoniously lifted onto her back, then quickly tamped down by his arm again, and after he‟d divested her of her under things, one big tree trunk leg found its way over the both of hers, easily waylaying any kicking she might have thought she was going to do. And he didn‟t wait to see how she was going to react to all of this, either. He would, of course, keep an eye on her for any concerns involving her recent illness, but he didn‟t think that there would be any since she claimed to be so fully recovered. Anjel started right in with the flat of his hand first, lecturing her in much the same manner as he had aboard ship, finding that – even though their roles had changed somewhat – the tone and cadence were much the same. “I think that I have been much more than patient in waiting for you to feel better before I expected you to assume the role of my wife, but that, my dear, is at an end. Your end, as you might have guessed.” Her brush was bigger than the one he had used on her before and heavier, and it made quite an impact when he switched to it – not that his hand hadn‟t already. Their rooms were in a wing of the house that his uncle never used, and there was absolutely no possibility that anyone would overhear them. Luckily for Cassie, because he didn‟t intend to skimp on his husbandly duties any longer, and he was rapidly decided that he liked the idea of using her own hairbrush on her. He was thinking that it might well become her weekly punishment implement, but he wasn‟t quite sure yet whether he was willing to commit to that. More research needed to be done before the best selection was made. And he intended to do a lot of very thorough research. “When I tell you that I don‟t think you should be doing something – like horseback riding, or eating so many bon bons –” Her mother had brought her a large box of confections back from town, and she had quite overindulged in them, setting herself back a day or two with a terrible stomach ache, “then I expect you will obey me, just as I expected you to obey me when we were at sea. And the consequences will be the same if

you decide not to. You‟re going to be sitting very carefully whenever you disobey me, Cassie, I can promise you that, and I‟m going to take a page from my uncle‟s book and tell you that you‟re going to get a spanking just like this – or maybe more so – once a week on Saturday nights, just before bedtime.” Cassie wasn‟t just moaning and crying – she was howling, because of the unyielding wooden implement that was tearing up her bottom but also in frustration from having him lay down the law to her so emphatically. At least when they had been on his ship, she had had a chance at escaping the implementation of his brand of strict discipline. But now she was married to him, and the law agreed that he could do pretty much anything he wanted to her. There was nowhere to run away to – her mother and stepfather would return her immediately right back to her husband, as would any of the townspeople, and she had less than no interest in setting sail again under any circumstances. She was well and truly trapped, with a man who thoroughly enjoyed taking her to task for the least possible reason. Anjel didn‟t let up until he could see that she had surrendered totally to him. That took a while and he understood why. He could hear the anger in her cries, and knew how frustrated she felt. But he intended to be the authority in his marriage, and he wanted absolutely no doubt in her mind about that. So he continued to bring the back of that hairbrush down on her cringing backside until he thought she had learned the first of what he was sure was going to be a multitude of very important lessons during the course of their marriage. Once he had finished, he did as was his habit and kept the brush easily accessible, in case the miscreant decided to rebel later on, and then he followed his instincts and undressed her down to her milky white skin, noting that she no longer had even so much as a bandage over the wound on her side. He had been right; she was going to have a scar, but Bones was a skilled surgeon, and he had done a very good sewing job on her, despite how rough it looked now. It wasn‟t anywhere near as bad as it could have been, and he had to admit he considered it a badge of honor. His beautiful wife was still sobbing, not really paying much attention to what he was doing, but she stopped when she realized that he had pressed his mouth over her wound. “What are you doing?” she asked in a watery tone, surprised and curious at his actions. Anjel settled himself on top of her, insinuating himself between her legs and nuzzling his way up to her neck. “I was trying to kiss it better. I tried it the night you were shot, too, but it didn‟t help much, I‟m sorry to say.” That he had even tried had her heart melting towards him. It was insisting on doing that no matter how often her mind brought up all of the injustices he had done to her. It didn‟t help that her mother kept listing all of his positive attributes, and any good thing she had heard he had done for her while she was sick, so much so that she wanted to scream at her mother to shut up about Anjel, but she didn‟t. She was horrified to realize that she didn‟t because she wanted to know everything about him that she could. She had taken to talking to her new stepfather about him whenever he visited her, which was more frequently, she was unhappy to say, than her husband did, by far. She had long since apologized for the bratty attitude she had had

towards him at first, and had now completely changed her thinking about him, partly because she could see just how happy her mother was. Gregorio was only too happy to regale his lovely stepdaughter with tales of Anjel‟s misspent youth as she recovered, and even now they had a standing date for breakfast in the morning, as the two of them were early risers, unlike their spouses. Finally, Anjel cupped her face with his hands, saying in a low, serious tone, “I know you wouldn‟t have married me if you‟d known it was happening, Cassie. But it really was the best course of action. What if you had been pregnant?” Cassie nodded with what Anjel regarded as depressing reluctance. “I understand, and I appreciate that you did so.” When she said it out loud, she realized that she meant it. “A lot of men wouldn‟t have, regardless of whom you discovered me to be.” “I will always regret how badly I treated you when we first met, Cassie, but, if you‟ll let me, I‟ll spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to you, I promise.” She snorted. “And you call taking me over your lap like you just did making it up to me?” He had the grace to flush. “Well, I am your husband, and I do expect you to obey me. I can‟t think that you‟re surprised by that notion.” Caught by a sudden, impish notion, she said, “Aye, aye, Cap‟n.” Her terrible imitation of a seaman had him issuing a giggle that was entirely too high pitched for a man of his size, and the thought of it coming from him had her laughing, too. “You should really salute when you say that, you know, but I‟d much prefer it if you‟d kiss me.” She looked pleasantly surprised, and did as he asked. Not a short peck, either, which he had been prepared to chide her about, but a full blown lovers‟ kiss. When she finally drew her lips away from his, he was darned near incoherent. “I think I love you,” he confessed, only half in jest. Cassie wrapped her arms around him. “I think I could learn to love you, as long as I was able to sweep all of the implements and potential implements out of the house.” He held his hand up in front of her, saying softly, “This is all the implement I need, Cassie.” She frowned, but he startled her out of it with a request. “Say my name.” “What?” “Say my name. I don‟t think I‟ve ever heard you say it, and it‟s not too much to ask, is it?” “Anjel,” she said, giving it the correct Spanish pronunciation. “Again, my Cassie,” he commanded, but ruined it by covering her lips with his, his hands busily exploring the places he knew she loved to be touched the most. “Anjel.” A little higher now, and much more breathless. “Again . . .”

The End

Blushing Publications thanks you whole-heartedly for your purchase with us! There are plenty more stories such as the one you‟ve purchased from Blushing Books! Visit our online store to view our might selection! http://www.blushingbooks.com This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.