She shut the door behind her over-hard. “Good evening, Captain Wargate.”
“Isaac,” he drawled without opening his eyes. “And a good evening to you as well, Coral.”
She strolled toward him, dropping her wrap on the bed as she passed it. His mere presence was an irritation, a prickling beneath her skin. What did he want with her? What game was he playing?
“A gentleman would rise on the entrance of a lady,” she said, sharper than she’d meant, but then he was wearing away the shell of her artifice. “Oh, but I forgot, I’m not a lady am I?” She was by the dresser now and she twitched the mirror slightly to the left. “I’m a whore—a very, very high priced whore. And yet you merely sit there and talk to me. Or play draughts. What kind of man wants to talk to a whore?” She flicked too jerkily at the miniature and it fell to the floor with a clatter. She stared at it, blinking angrily. Damn it! Why couldn’t she control her mouth with him?
From behind her he sighed. “Come sit down, Coral.”
She turned to him, folding her arms. “Why should I?”
His wide mouth curved into a surprisingly sweet smile, lighting his hawkish eyes and pressing a dimple into one hard cheek. He looked almost boyish. She did not want to be attracted to this man. “Because I bought some meat pies for our supper.”
He bent and picked up a cloth bag from his feet and took out a wrapped bundle. The moment he unfolded the bundle, the aroma of hot meat pies filled the room, making her inhale deeply in appreciation.
She came to the table with ill grace. “Why?”
“Why what?” he murmured without looking up from the task of placing the pies on two plates.
“Why bring me dinner?” She was honestly confused. She didn’t know what this man wanted at all and the oddity of it kept her off balance.
“Because I’m hungry?” He produced a bottle of wine and poured two glasses.
“I told you, I don’t drink with customers,” she said as she sat.
He pushed the wineglass toward her without speaking, only his black eyes gave ironic challenge.
She picked up the glass and took a sip defiantly.
A corner of his mouth twitched before he picked up his meat pie and bit into it. He closed his eyes for a moment, a look of near rapture crossing his face.
Coral felt her mouth go dry. What would it be like to be the cause of such bliss? To drive this man—Isaac—to rapture?
He opened his eyes and smiled at her, swallowing, his tanned throat working. “You have no idea how tasty a meat pie is after months at sea.”
There were any number of ribald comments she could make to that, but simple curiosity won out. “Tell me.”
“We start out with fresh meat and provisions, of course.” He took a sip of his wine. “But they never last long. Then we’re down to mealy biscuits mostly until we make port again. Funny how each man takes it. Most simply soldier on, try not to think of better victuals.”
“Most?” She poked at her pie with a fork. He’d set two out, though he was eating his own pie with his fingers.
He grunted. “I once had a first mate, name of Jones. He would talk on and on about food. Dishes his mother made. Favorite meals he’d had. The last meal he’d eaten while on shore. He could wax eloquent about a joint of beef until you fair tasted the meat on your tongue.”
Coral raised her eyebrows, smiling in spite of herself. “And how did your other sailors take this?”
“Not always well.” He chuckled. “I once had to confine two sailors to the brig. I was afraid they’d murder Jones in his sleep.”
She laughed, the soft sound surprising her. She looked down at her meat pie and took a bite. It was delicious, the gravy savory, the thick chunks of meat tender. “Jones is no longer your first mate?”
He didn’t answer and she looked up. Isaac had stopped eating and was staring blindly down at the table.
“Isaac?”
He inhaled and glanced at her, his eyes empty. “No, Jones is no longer my first mate.”
She made a practice of leading men on and then turning away. Of never asking too deep a question. Of never becoming involved.
But not tonight. “What happened to him?”
His brows knit as he stared down at his half-eaten meat pie. “We were in battle. A cannon blast caught him on the right arm, just below the shoulder. It wasn’t a single ball, but shrapnel—bits of sharp iron. His arm…” He swallowed, reaching for his wineglass, but he merely fingered the stem. “His arm was destroyed. The sawbones tried to make a clean amputation, but the wound was very near the shoulder, and it wouldn’t stop bleeding. We buried Jones at sea the next morning.”
She bit her lip. For some reason the very stoicism of his recital made it all the more heart-wrenching. “I’m sorry.”
He didn’t seem to hear her. “It’s strange. Sometimes the most ordinary of men, the ones small in stature, the ones not outstanding in intelligence or good humor, show the most extraordinary courage. He was awake the entire time, Jones was. All that night with the screams of the other wounded around him he merely lay there, his face white, a small smile on his lips. After the sawbones cut into him, carved away the bits of flesh that hung from his shoulder; after he said he could do no more, Jones looked at him and thanked him. And when I went to talk to him just before dawn, Jones tried to salute and told me it’d been an honor to serve with me.”
She looked at him helplessly. She knew how to give a man immeasurable pleasure, how to tease and flirt, how to bring a man so close to the brink he literally begged to be released, and yet she did not know how to comfort this one man.
“Isaac,” she whispered.
He blinked and looked up. “Forgive me. This is not nice conversation for a supper table.”
She felt a spurt of unaccountable anger and blurted, “But this is what I want to talk about. I want to know about you, about your ship and about your men. I want to know you, Isaac.”
Her rash words hung there in the air between them. She couldn’t take them back, couldn’t pretend she hadn’t said them, so she stared at him defiantly. For a moment he didn’t move.
Then he leaned a little forward. “Take off your mask, Coral.”
She couldn’t. She simply couldn’t. If she removed her mask, he’d see what lay beneath, he’d see everything she wanted to keep hidden. He’d see her. But oddly, her hands were moving of their own volition, pulling free the ribbons at the back of her head. She laid her golden mask on the table.
And looked at him.
Chapter 6
Now one day a soldier came home from war to the village where he’d been born. And after he’d greeted his mother and father, his sisters, and his old grandmother, he looked around and exclaimed, “But where is Tom, my younger brother? Will he not come and bid me welcome home?”
At this his family sighed and looked at their toes until the grandmother spoke for them all. “Alas! Poor Tom has been enchanted by the Ice Princess and we’ve never seen him since.”
“Tut!” said the soldier to that. “Then I shall have to bring him home again.”…
—from The Ice Princess
When Isaac arrived the next night, Coral was sitting at the table, as regal as a queen. She was also wearing the golden mask. He waited until her maid curtsied and left the room, and then he stalked toward her.
“Remove it, please.”
She hesitated, but he stared at her in command. On this matter he would brook no retreat. Still, he must’ve unconsciously held his breath as she raised trembling fingers to undo the ties at the back of her head, for he exhaled as her mask fell and once again was caught by surprise.
It wasn’t her beauty that was the surprise. He’d known, even before he’d seen her face last night—by the way she moved, by her confidence around men, by the fact that she’d been very, very successful at her profession—that Coral Smythe was a beautiful woman. No, what took his breath away was her youth.
The Aphrodite of Aphrodite’s Grotto c
ouldn’t be more than one and twenty.
Her complexion was fine and so pale it was nearly translucent, her lips were thin with a long sensuous curve to the slightly wider upper one. Her nose straight and thin and delicate. And those eyes. Seen as they should be, with her entire face revealed, they were mesmerizing. Cat-green and tilted at the corners as if some exotic ancestor had left their imprint on her countenance. She was fragile and brave and beautiful.
And she was much too young.
Last night she’d requested—nay, demanded—he leave after she’d revealed herself to him. Last night he’d known her—and his—emotions were too close to the surface. Last night he’d bowed to her near-hysterical entreaty and quickly withdrawn from her presence.
Tonight he stood firm and asked the question he suddenly knew he had to know.
“How did you come to be here?” His voice emerged rougher than he’d meant and he watched as her expression blanked. One slim hand reached for the golden mask lying on the table before her, while the other flew to her right eye, as if to shield it.
“Dammit, don’t.” He pulled out the other chair from the table and sat, reaching across the table and catching the hand that held the golden mask. “I’m sorry.”
She was silent, her back ramrod straight, but her gaze fixed on the table. She’d frozen at his touch, and he saw now that her hand hid a slight deformity on her right eye. The lid of that eye drooped a little lower than the left and a small white scar ran through the eyebrow.
Isaac took a breath and tugged gently on the hand he held. “Don’t hide yourself again.”
Her breath trembled.
“Please.” He fought to keep his voice low, soothing. “I was merely surprised by your youth last night and again today.”
That prompted a harsh laugh from her. “I’m four and twenty. How old did you think me, Captain?”
“Isaac,” he chided absently. “I don’t know. I know only that I thought you’d been a madam, had been doing… this”—he waved a hand vaguely—”for years.”
“You mean whoring myself,” she said. The words should’ve been defiant—before the game of loo, the Aphrodite he’d known had taken every opportunity to flaunt her profession especially, it had seemed, to him.
But this was Coral now, not Aphrodite, and her words were soft and a little sad.
“I have been whoring myself for years. I had to when I first started. It was the only way to make enough money to feed myself and…”
She paused and for a moment he thought she wouldn’t continue. Who was the other person she’d protected and provided for? A mother? Dear God, a child?
He leaned forward. “Tell me.”
Her fingers tightened about his hand almost painfully. “My elder sister took care of me when I was small. Both our parents were dead. She worked as a maid—a good position—but when her employer let her go without reference she could find no other work.”
She’d been staring at the table top, but now Coral raised those extraordinary green eyes to him. “She could’ve abandoned me. She could have sold me to a whoremonger or as an indentured servant. Instead she walked the streets of London so that we both might have food to eat. For years she did this. But when I grew old enough, after men started to notice me as well…”
She stopped and he could see in her haunted eyes what she’d done.
But he needed to hear her say it aloud. “What did you do?”
She lifted her chin. “I found the fanciest bawdy house I could and made a deal with the madam—she would sell my virginity to the highest bidder and I’d keep one fourth of the money.”
He felt the tension in his muscles, almost painful across his chest and arms. He wanted to leap from his chair. To throw furniture and bellow. To smash in the face of that madam and the man who’d bought Coral and every other man or woman who’d used her in her life.
Instead he closed his eyes to keep his temper inside. “Did you work at the brothel after that?”
“For a while.” Her voice was bleak. “I made more money at the brothel than my sister did on the streets. But then I found myself a protector.”
He looked at her, hoping that her “protector” had been a kind man, but knowing that was unlikely.
She stared at the table. “I was with him for almost a year before another man, a wealthy merchant, offered to keep me. In all I had five different protectors, each one more important and richer than the last, and I was able to tell my sister she need not walk the streets of London anymore. That she could retire from that life because I now had enough money to support us both.”
She sounded proud, and he could understand now why she might be. “Why did you decide to come to Aphrodite’s Grotto?”
He watched as her fingers brushed over the scar in her right eyebrow. “My last protector was a very jealous man. A woman—a rival of mine—told him I was seeing other men. He…” Her voice trailed away for a moment, and then she straightened and looked him in the eye defiantly. “He beat me. Quite badly, in fact. I thought he might kill me. After that I came to Aphrodite’s Grotto. I’d rather be with a different man each night than let myself be under the power of one man.”
He swallowed, beating down rage at the unknown man who had hurt her so. “And now?”
She attempted to withdraw her fingers, but he held tight. Damned if he’d let her retreat. “Now? Now I am the Aphrodite of the most infamous brothel in London, sir. What else do you think? “
He was in no mood for her teasing. “Do you whore yourself now?”
Her elegant head reared back and an ugly sneer twisted her lips. “Of course I—”
He shook their joined hands. “Cut line, Coral. Tell me the truth.”
Something vulnerable flashed behind her eyes and he wondered if she’d dare tell him the truth.
Then she sighed, the sound weary and lost. “I haven’t entertained a man in two years. I haven’t had to—I am the Aphrodite.”
“Except for me,” he reminded her.
“Is that what I’m doing with you?” she cocked her head, a sad whimsical smile on her face. “Am I truly entertaining you?”
“I enjoy my time with you,” he said carefully. This was new ground, fragile and uncertain. He didn’t want to make a false move. Didn’t want to destroy this new journey. “I like talking with you, like sitting here with you. In that way I am entertained. Whether or not I am like your customers in other ways as well, I don’t know. I hope not. I hope this is something different and new for you, but I think that is for you to decide.”
She stood, gently disentangling their hands, and came around the table to stand before him. He moved his chair so that he faced her.
“You are different.” She lifted a hand to delicately trace his hairline.
He closed his eyes, feeling her fingers tremble against his skin.
“For whatever reason,” she said softly, “when you are with me, you are simply Isaac and I am Coral.”
And he felt her lips against his. Lightly, no more than the brush of a moth’s wings. Her breath fanned against his mouth, hesitant and sweet. He curled his hands about the chair’s seat, fearful of grabbing her. Fearful of breaking this fragile bond. She grew bolder, pressing her lips, still close-mouthed to his. He opened his lips slowly, savoring her, not wanting to frighten her. He licked across her mouth and tasted wine and woman. His pulse beat heavy in his body. He wanted to take her into his lap, to open her dress and feel all that smooth, pale skin.
But when she drew back he made no move to stop her.
He opened his eyes and looked at her, Coral Smythe, this mysterious woman he seemed to know so well now, and asked the only thing he could.
“What now?”
Chapter 7
So the soldier set off for the home of the Ice Princess. He journeyed through forests and mountains, tundra and bare ice, tramping along with a bag over his shoulder and worn boots upon his feet. He was attacked by lions, chased by bandits, and spent the night with more than
one wise hermit. And as he neared the Ice Princess’ palace he began to hear her song, high and sweet, and so very, very lonely…
—from The Ice Princess
Coral glanced into the mirror and smoothed her already perfect coiffure. She’d waited on innumerable men in her career, but for some reason, the wait tonight for Isaac was making her as nervous as a cat strolling through a pack of dogs.
She let her hands fall on a sigh of frustration. Oh, why not admit the truth? Isaac wasn’t like all the other men she’d lured and ensnared over the years. Isaac was important.
Which was perhaps why she’d cut short their tête-à-tête last night in an uncharacteristic fluster. She just didn’t know what to make of the man. How to act, how to present herself. He seemed to see right through her usual wiles—damn him. He made her feel wretchedly gauche, and at the same time the mere sight of him caused her heart to jump and skitter, made her lips curve in a silly smile.
Good Lord, she was turning into a ninny.
A discreet knock came at her door and she whirled, that idiot smile attacking her face. She fought it back fiercely, took a deep breath, and glided across the room to open the door. The sight of Isaac’s grave, handsome face was like a physical blow. He wore his naval uniform—crisp white, dark blue, black, and gold—and his black hair was pulled back into a severe queue. Her heart started skittering, whether she willed it or no, a tempo that increased, keeping time with her mounting excitement. She wanted to muss his uniform, take apart that tight queue and run her fingers through his hair. And why not? Wasn’t that the inevitable conclusion to this game they played? Why not simply accept fate?
The only problem would be to keep herself intact as she gave into her urges. She knew she trembled on the edge of an abyss, and if she fell… well, there would be no climbing out of that particular pit. But she pushed that thought aside as she stood back to let him in. She’d bedded many men in her lifetime. He was just one more.