A while later, she took a deep, shuddering breath. James straightened, seemingly reluctantly, and turned away. His back was to her, so she savored the curve of his buttocks and the thick muscled weight of his thigh. And the fact that he was shaking slightly.
By the time he turned around again, he clearly had himself in check.
“Well,” he said genially, “how about a piece of chicken?”
Theo eyed the wine bottle and thought about how satisfying it would be to knock him on the side of the head with it and chase away that maddeningly amiable expression. Instead, she did something that was as foreign to her character as throwing a ruby overboard would be to a pirate.
She reached over, grabbed the bottle, and brought it to her mouth. The wine was wonderful. It tasted of peaches and summer and the sharp smell of crushed flowers.
It was probably the best wine she’d ever had in her life. She had lost her grip on the sheet during their kiss, and when she lay back, she felt her breasts slip free. She didn’t bother to pull the sheet back up. Instead, she lolled against the pillows and took another swallow of the ambrosial wine. With her eyes closed.
For once, she didn’t have to watch her guests, waiting to see if the vintage would be pleasurably received. She didn’t have to analyze the flavor to ascertain whether it agreed with the course before them.
Instead, she drank for no other reason than delight. The cold wine slid down her throat as if it had been pressed from fallen stars.
Thirty
James had experienced pain, of course, but he couldn’t remember ever being in as much agony as he was at this moment. Theo was lolling back against a mound of pillows, her gorgeous, pink-tipped breasts beckoning to him like the finest sweetmeats heaven could offer, and he had to stay on his side of the bed. He had to.
This was a siege, a long-term battle. He made himself think about how long it had taken to put on those damned sheets; his desire cooled an infinitesimal amount. Though, of course, his cock-stand was going nowhere, and his balls would probably fall off by tomorrow morning.
After a while he reached over and pulled the bottle away from her. Her eyes were a bit glazed. He suspected that she hadn’t had more than a sip of wine in years. If that much.
“Chicken,” he said, pushing a piece into her hand. “Eat this.”
Watching her lush lips close around the chicken leg like a sailor gulping fresh water after months at sea, he reached down and gave himself a hard flick. The flare of pain at least kept his self-control somewhere within grasp.
“Doesn’t it hurt to do that?” she asked. She was ogling him from top to bottom, and he made sure he was lying on one side, like one of those decadent Romans in a bath. He felt like an idiot, but if she liked what she saw, it was worth it.
She would find her desire again. He knew she would find her desire. It couldn’t have permanently disappeared, not the huge well of sweetness and joy that had filled both of them when they made love years ago.
“Not really,” he replied.
“Tell me more about being a pirate,” Theo said. Chicken leg demolished, she now reached for a ham tartlet.
James swallowed hard. He had to stop thinking about her breasts and the color of her lips and how unbearably desirable she was with her hair slicked back like that, all cheekbones, plump mouth, and silky eyelashes.
“I told you I was never was a pirate,” he said, almost apologetically. “That’s why I’m not worried about an arrest. When we recovered items from royal treasuries, we gave them back, and in so doing were granted documents which permitted us to fly Spanish, Dutch, and Sicilian flags.”
“Isn’t it twice as dangerous to attack hardened pirates?” She had finished the ham tart and was making progress on another. He’d forgotten what an appetite she had: the way she was able to eat a grown man under the table and not gain an ounce.
“It was rather like being a member of the navy.” He dragged his eyes away from her glossy lips. “Once we identified the target, generally because they made themselves known by putting up the skull and crossbones, we took them down.”
“A navy of two ships,” Theo said musingly. “What were the most difficult ships to defeat?”
“Slave ships,” he said without hesitation.
“Slave ships? Pirates are slave dealers?” Her mouth formed a perfect circle.
This was never going to work. Sooner or later he’d find himself begging her to do that thing she never wanted to do again.
“Pirates take over slave ships,” he said, taking a deep breath. “Because the booty is human, they don’t simply transfer the slaves to their own ship. Instead they transfer some crew over to the slave ship, who sail it to a port where the cargo can be converted into cash. We attacked any vessel we could identify as a known slave ship, pirate or no.”
Theo’s mouth was a thin, hard line now, and she put down her half-eaten tart. “Absolutely reprehensible. Revolting. I hate the whole business. It’s a crime that so many countries have hesitated to follow England in abolishing the trade.”
“I agree.”
Her eyes lit with amusement. “I’m glad to hear that, because the Duke of Ashbrook, or rather his estate, has supported efforts to make the owning of slaves illegal, not just trading in them. Sad to say, it has cost us hundreds of pounds in bribes.”
James nodded. But there was something he had been wanting to say. “Theo”—he used that name deliberately—“I can see how well you’ve run this household. But can you tell me how in God’s name you managed to get that sorry excuse for an estate to the point where we could spare hundreds of pounds even for the best of all causes?”
“I began with the weavers,” she said, smiling. “Do you remember that I had the idea of asking them to reproduce cloth from the Renaissance, the old figured fabrics that are so hard to find these days?”
“Yes, but as I recall Reede was unsure that the looms would be able to create such complicated patterns.”
“One of the first things I did was let Reede go,” Theo said, without apology. “And it was only partially because of that mess with your father and my dowry. He simply didn’t have the guts for it, James. He didn’t.”
“What kind of guts do you mean?”
“We had to take risks in the beginning.” Theo picked up her tart again, and began telling him the story of how she discovered that the weavers at Ryburn Weavers were all women, but the managers were all men. “I was always having to talk to the weavers about colors, you understand, James. Florentine blue is a very hard color to achieve, for example. If we wanted to create proper copies of Medici fabrics, we had to create it. Reede couldn’t stomach it.”
“Couldn’t stomach what?”
“I finally let the men go,” Theo said, a spark of mischief in her eyes. “Instead, I put one of the weavers, a redoubtable woman by the name of Mrs. Alcorn, in charge. It was one of the smartest things I ever did, but it nearly gave Reede apoplexy.”
“What was so wonderful about Mrs. Alcorn?”
“Well, for one thing, she arranged for a loom to be smuggled from Lyons.”
“Smuggled?”
“We were unable to make shot silk. It turned out she had a cousin, who had a friend, who had a French brother . . . before I knew it, we had just the right loom.”