prevent what was about to happen. It slithered over her sweet body—touching, stroking,
tweaking—and then arched down to the apex of her thighs. It spread its fibrous suckers over her
fiery curls then dipped between her legs.
She cried out for just a second as that evil thing impaled her, sliding deep inside her helpless
body but then her cry became a moan of pleasure and she smiled, her eyes closing to the rapture
the demonic shaft brought. Her hips undulated, arched up to meet each thrust.
Held in the unbreakable hold coiled around him, he could do nothing save watch his lady
being ravished by the twisted tree. It had lowered branches to her breasts and was caressing her
as it thrust its taproot in and out of her silken body.
“Mine,” the tree growled, and sap shot forth to spread deep inside.
Alsandair sat up so quickly he almost fell off the rock and had to scramble to keep
himself from doing so. His heart was pounding so loudly he could barely breathe.
Overhead the sky was filled with bright flashes of light as a gale approached. The first
cold drops of rain hit him like shards of glass and then a peal of lightning shot across
the heavens in a deafening shriek.
“Sandair!” he heard Kyle shout. “Get your ass down from there before you are
toasted to a crisp!”
The lightning was streaking across the night sky, its pulses hurting the eye.
“Sandair!”
“All right,” Alsandair shouted back. He scrambled down the rock just a second
before a bolt of lighting speared the exact spot where he’d been lying.
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* * * * *
It was his moans that woke her and not the rumble of the coming storm. He was
breathing heavily and she knew he was trapped in some hellish dream that chased him
through its night-darkened corridor.
“Don’t!” he whimpered, and jerked against her.
He was sweating and his flesh was slick against hers. His head whipped back and
forth on his pillow and she had to pull back to keep him from hitting her.
“Andre?” she questioned, risking waking him for his arms had become
uncomfortably tight bands lashing her to him. She gently shook him and called his
name again.
He lashed out with one leg, kicking at the cover as though it were holding him
down. He moaned again like a trapped animal.
“Andre,” she said, her voice a bit louder and firmer. “Wake up.”
She flinched as his hands shot up to the spindles of the elaborately carved
headboard and grabbed hold of them much as a drowning man scrambles for a plank of
floating wood. His entire body tensed and he cried out, lost in whatever nightmare had
claimed him.
Rylee had slept with Alsandair enough to know how powerful a man’s bad dreams
could be. She slid quickly from the bed as he kicked at the cover, thrashing upon the
bed in the throes of whatever frightful visions were visiting him.
“Don’t!” he said again. “Don’t!”
He kicked the covers aside and lay there in the nude, his powerful body heaving as
he dragged in breath after breath of raspy air. He let go of the headboard and twisted to
his side to lay curled like a small boy, whimpering as the storm outside grew in volume.
One particularly loud screech of lightning brought him up in the bed, his eyes wide
and staring, and his entire body trembling. Even his dark hair quivered as he sat there.
“Andre?” she asked quietly, drawing his glazed eyes to her.
For a moment he didn’t seem to recognize her but then he let out a long, ragged
breath and closed his eyes, putting up a shaking hand to wipe at the sweat covering his
face.
“I am sorry I woke you, bébé,” he said, his voice strained and husky.
She moved over to the bed and sat down cautiously. There was something so
vulnerable in his voice, in the way he looked that she could overlook his nudity.
“Do you want to talk about your dream?” she asked. Alsandair always did.
He shook his head. “‘Twas no dream, precious,” he said, his voice as ragged as his
breath. “That was hell.”
She watched him swing his legs from the bed and walk over to a table on which
stood the lamp. He turned up the flame until the room was much lighter, chasing away
whatever demons had invaded his dreams. Then he went over to his desk where there
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was a pitcher of water and two tin cups. With shaky hands he poured himself a cup and
downed the entire contents without taking a breath. He filled it again then turned to
her, holding up the cup.
“No,” she said. She was trying not to look at his body but the sight of him was like
a magnet and her eyes the iron filings sliding toward it.
He was powerfully built with long, muscled legs, lean hips, flat belly, trim waist
and a broad chest any woman could lovingly stroke ‘til her dying day. His arms were
heavily muscled as though he were no stranger to hard work. That part of him that kept
drawing her attention back to it was long, thick and very prominent between his legs.
She had to tear her eyes from the sight of it dangling at his thighs.
He drained the cup of water then came back to the bed, sat down on the edge with
his back to her and stared out the windows at the rain that was now falling beyond the
deep veranda.
A boom of thunder shook the house and Rylee gasped.
“Do storms bother you?” he asked.
“Aye,” she admitted. “They do.”
He bent over to retrieve his britches from the floor where he had stepped out of
them. Getting up, he dragged them on then turned to stretch out in the bed, one arm
flung over his eyes.
“Do you need me to hold you?” he asked.
She started to say she didn’t but realized he needed her beside him more than she
needed to be held at that moment.
“Aye,” she said, and moved over in the bed until she was next to him.
He lifted his free arm and she lay down in the shelter of his embrace, her head on
his shoulder.
They lay like that as the storm crashed over the house for nearly half an hour before
moving on into the jungle, leaving in its wake a freshening breeze that made it
necessary for him to reach for the covers to pull them up.
“Have you had that dream before?” she asked quietly.
“Many, many times,” he admitted.
She had thought as much. There was a dream Alsandair had that plagued him more
than the others.
“Have you told anyone about it?”
“Never.”
She said nothing until the storm was nothing more than a low rumble in the
distance. “I am told,” she said, “I am a good listener.”
“Does he have bad dreams?”
“Aye.”
“And do you comfort him, precious?”
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“I try to.”
His hand was smoothing up and down her arm as he held her. She didn’t think he
was going to tell her about the nightmare, but when he began to speak, she soon
learned the dream had been more memory than the fabrication of his mind.
“My brother Louis left home when I was five,” he said. “He was fifteen years older
than me and was tired of the poverty in which we lived, the hard work we were forced
to do just to stay alive, our father’s drinking and the beatings we both got when Papa
was three sheets to the wind.”
“Where was your mother?” she asked.
“She died when I was born. It was one of the reasons my father and brother hated
me so badly. They blamed me for her death. To this day I will find Louis looking at me
as though he could kill me and I know he is remembering our mother.”
“How could they have blamed you for her dying?” she asked. “You did not ask to
be brought into this world.”
“No, but I doubt either of them looked at it in that way,” he said. “They needed
someone to blame and that someone was me.”
Rylee wasn’t even aware she was stroking his chest with sympathy. “Was it worse
for you after he left?”
He shrugged. “Papa was rarely there, only coming home to sleep off a drunk. When
he wasn’t plying his trade as a wheelwright, he spent most of his time in the local
tavern drinking or gambling away what money he’d earned.”
“Who took care of you?” she asked.
“No one,” he said softly. “I was left to fend for myself. He brought food home when
he thought of it but there were many nights I went to bed hungry. He’d have had a
meal in town and never once considered I hadn’t eaten. Once a week I’d find a basket of
food out in the barn and know one of the neighbors had left it there for me. I had
enough sense to hide it from Papa else he would have eaten it himself.”
“And no one told the authorities?” she demanded.
“People feared my father,” he said. “There had been rumors he’d killed men who
had angered him and I don’t doubt that for a moment. He was a mean son of a bitch.”
Rylee’s tender heart ached for him. “Someone should have taken you away from
him.”
“Someone did,” he said.
He was quiet for so long after he said that she thought he had fallen asleep but
when she lifted her head, she could see his eyes were open beneath the obstruction of
his arm.
“The winter I turned six, he disappeared for an entire week. That wasn’t unusual
but there had been a blizzard a day or two before and I’d used up all the food and all
the wood in the cabin. I was so cold I could barely walk but I made it out to the barn
and lay down beside the cow to keep warm.”
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“Oh, Andre,” she said, tears gathering in her eyes for that little boy so long ago.
“When he still hadn’t come back the next morning, I put on as many clothes as I
could find. I had to struggle to walk beneath one of Louis’ old wool coats that was
many sizes too big for me but I managed to head into town.” He lowered his arm to
wipe his hand over his face. “It seemed to take hours to reach Lorient. The snow was
deep and had it not been for wagon tracks, I most likely would have wandered off and
died of exposure. As it was, the sun was setting by the time I reached the town. I
stopped the first man I saw and asked if he’d seen my papa. When he asked me what
my father’s name was, I realized I didn’t know. He was just Papa to me.”
“Didn’t you know your surname?” she asked, thinking of Ataa.
He shook his head. “No and to this day I don’t know what it is. Louis stopped
using it when he left home because he was ashamed to be—as he told me—that
bastard’s son. I’ve asked him many times but he won’t tell me so I guess unless I go
back to Lorient I’ll never know.”
“Did you find your father that night?”
“He found me,” he replied. “I was standing in front of an eatery, staring in the
window, my palms against the glass when he grabbed me by the coat and jerked me out
into the street.”
She felt his entire body tense and knew the memory was still raw and painful even
after so many years.
“He was livid,” Andre stated. “He slapped me so hard he split my lip open and
would have done a helluva lot more to me if there hadn’t been people about. As it was,
he dragged me toward one of the taverns. I was sure he intended to beat me senseless
but instead he took me inside and to a man sitting at one of the tables. He thrust me at
the man and asked how much he would pay to have me.”
Rylee put a hand to her mouth, shocked at the turn in the narrative. “He was
offering to sell you to the man?”
“For the night at any rate,” Andre said softly.
Nothing he could have said could have shocked her more. She felt the tears sliding
down her cheeks. Hearing of children being abused in any manner had always upset
her terribly.
“How could a father do something like that to his own child?” she asked, her lips
trembling.
“For the money,” he replied. “He had none and he was thirsty, in bad need of a
drink. He’d broken his hand in a fight and couldn’t work, and with no money coming
in, there was no way for him to buy liquor. He saw a way to remedy that.”
“Did that man…” she couldn’t ask.
“No, bébé,” he said. “But another man had been listening to the conversation and he
spoke up, offering more for me than the first man did.” He let out a long breath. “Papa
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sold me to him for two goldens then turned and walked out of the tavern. I never saw
him again.”
“The man took you from Lorient?”
“His name was Pierre LeClerc and he was the first mate on a merchant ship
captained by a man named Giles Bertrand. He took me to the ship, telling me I was to
be the captain’s cabin boy.”
There had been something in the way Andre said those last two words that made
the hair stand up on Rylee’s arms. “That wasn’t what happened?” she questioned.
“Oh I became his cabin boy, all right,” Andre answered, his tone bitter and filled
with loathing. “In and out of his bunk.”
Hearing that made Rylee’s heart ache for the lost child the pirate had been.
“I tried to fight him,” he said. “Even at that age I knew what he was trying to do to
me was wrong but it was no use. He did what he wanted. I hurt so badly afterwards I
was sure I would die—I wanted to. Blood seemed to be everywhere on the sheets and
he made me clean it up. I could barely stand. Over the next few days if I didn’t please
him exactly as he instructed, he’d punish me in the most degrading ways and it is
memories of that punishment I have nightmares about.”
At some point he had threaded his fingers through hers and was holding her hand
over his heart. He turned to look at the softly glowing lantern.
“If I displeased him, if I didn’t move quickly enough or show enough enthusiasm
for his perversions, he’d have LeClerc throw me into the hold in this special box he’d
had made for punishment.” He shuddered. “It was made of iron and it was cold in the
winter and sweltering in the summer and as dark as the deepest pit. The floor usually
had a few inches of bilge water lining it and when you mixed that with my waste, it was
sheer hell. The damned thing reeked and it was hard to breathe even though there were
holes drilled into the top of the box.”
“You were afraid of the dark,” she said.
“I wasn’t until then, but I developed a fear of it. To this day I can’t sleep in a
completely dark room. I can’t seem to draw breath.”
As she lay there beside him, he told her of brutal punishments at the hands of the
perverted captain who marred his soul. The things he told her disgusted her, made her
sick to her stomach.
“He wanted my flesh as smooth as a girl’s,” he said.
Then he told her of the day he had awakened in the box to a tremendous noise that
shook the ship around him. He related hearing the sounds of fighting and knew the
ship was under attack by pirates.
“I’d been in there for two days and I was sick, running a high fever. I later learned
every crewman on Bertrand’s ship had been put to the sword and an auxiliary crew
from the pirate ship put on to sail it to Wicklaw Cay. No one knew I was in the hold
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and by the time the pirates docked Bertrand’s ship and they found me, I was nearly
dead.”
He went on to explain how the captain of the pirate ship—Maurice DuMont—had
taken a starved, abused child under his wing and into his home where the good captain
and his wife set out to make life bearable for a scrawny, frightened eight-year-old boy.
“I’d been with Bertrand for two years. The only reason I know that is because there
was a notation in the ship’s log about the purchase on December twentieth of a six-year-
old indentured servant to replace a cabin boy who had died. I learned later he’d died
after one of Bertrand’s nights of excess. I can’t tell you when my birthday is but Captain
DuMont’s wife Libby declared it was the day they had found me in the hole—April
twenty-third—and from that day forward, they celebrated that day as being my
birthday.”
It was that year, he went on to tell her, that DuMont’s ship the Flying Pearl had
chanced upon a merchant ship carrying a young circus performer who had stowed
away to escape a situation very similar to the one Andre had survived.
“He was an acrobat, a tightrope walker, a contortionist and if there is anything a
pirate likes better than musicians, singers and dancers, it’s an acrobat. Out of the entire