Kit Black Read online

  I think we knew it would happen the moment our eyes met. I turned and I started to cry, then found myself locked in his arms.

  “Don’t do this. Don’t cry,” he said against my hair. “I came here to berate you for your coldness. I came here to beg you to come with me. I know you will not.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I love you. You must know that.” He kissed my eyelids, caught a tear on his tongue.

  “I love you, too. I have loved you since that first day. I will never love anyone but you.” I pulled his face to mine. He gave me his mouth. The kiss was not fiery as it had been that night at his grand home in Paris, but it was achingly erotic and full of passion. It seemed that it would never end, that we could not get enough of each other. A good-bye kiss from two souls who could not bear to say good-bye. A kiss borne of loss and longing.

  “Let me stay, Kita. One night, and then I promise I will go home and never contact you again. But if you ever need me, I swear I’ll come to you. I swear it.”

  I nodded and led him by the hand to my room.

  We said little about his leaving after that. I carefully stripped him of his clothes, taking great care not to hurt his barely healed scars. He divested me of mine, carefully pulling off my boots; the ones he had given me, still polished and fine. He left my billowy shirt on, open and gauzy, my breasts and the rest of me displayed in a way so lascivious that made me want to tug the panels closed.

  “For me,” he said softly, stilling my hands. “I love the way you look. Just looking at your body makes me want to go mad.”

  I bit my lip and tried not to moan at the way he looked at me, his eyes half closed, his mouth, the exact pink of a conch shell, slightly parted, his breath coming in gasps.

  We fell to the satin coverlet and just looked at each other, smiling. I tried to memorize his face, every nuance of it. I tried to imagine him as he would be in years to come with white at his temples and more laugh lines around his eyes. I touched his cheek, his dear smooth cheek, and smiled. How I would miss that. Seeing him grow old.

  He opened my shirt and kissed my breasts, his tongue hot and wet and ravenous. How was I going to give him back? How will I ever find anything like this again? How could I want to? I drank in the love I saw written on his handsome features, reading the truth of his words in his dilated pupils. I believed him. I swallowed my tears. Oh, I loved him so much.

  He traced the whole length of my body with his tongue until he reached my navel. He then licked me there with abandon. I responded by arching my hips closer against his face. He traced his way upward with wet kisses on my stomach, my breasts, my throat.

  “Tu es tellement belle, Kita”, he murmured lost in the sensation. “Don’t you know how beautiful you are?” he whispered hoarsely in my ear.

  “The way you love me makes me feel beautiful,” I confessed with a sigh.

  He growled in response. “Then let me show you how beautiful you are.”

  I had missed him so much. We had only been together once, but my body remembered with aching expectation how he felt. I had forced my mind to ignore my body’s memories for years, but now it was coming back to me full force. I knew he was holding back, wanting to make slow and tender love to me, so that it could last forever. But all his resolve dissolved at my next words.

  “Let go, Armand,” I urged him.

  With that, he surrendered completely. “Oui,” he vowed. He lowered his body on mine until he covered me completely.

  I opened my thighs wider and wrapped my arms around his back possessively. We were rocking against each other, pressing our needs against one another, only increasing our desire.

  “Ask me,” he demanded breathlessly.

  I refocused on his face. His pupils were so dilated there was only a thin circle of green around them. I swallowed heavily. “Touch me.”

  This was all it took. His thumb began to trace lazy lines on the center of my need, his fingers slowly caressing my entrance. I forgot to breathe for a second, and my hips lifted from the mattress to urge him to continue. He plunged two fingers in me and stroked languorously, his thumb increasing its rhythm at the same time. I bucked under him, so close to the edge.

  “Armand…” I moaned.

  He gradually slowed the caress of his hand, obviously not ready to let me go over yet. “No…” I protested, fidgeting under him to increase the pressure again. I was so close I ached. What was he trying to do, kill me from frustration?

  His other hand moved to capture both my wrists when I tried to reach for his manhood. He placed my hands above my head and pinned me to the bed more strongly.

  “Armand!” I begged frustrated.

  “Not yet,” he warned.

  I groaned at the sight of the slight smile curving his lips. He tempted me further by rubbing his heated length against my thigh. The weight of his body on mine was far from uncomfortable. I felt surrounded, protected in a strange way. His nipples were pressed on my skin, my own breasts crushed by his chest. Even the tight grip on my wrists was pleasurable. And his hand…too slow for my taste, but his fingers were still inside me, and his thumb was making me burn with expectation. I clasped my inner depths on his fingers to spur him, but he didn’t move faster. Only his lips curved upward in a knowing smile.

  I bit my bottom lip. Since my head was the only part of my body that I could still move freely, I settled for a torture of my own. I traced his annoying smile with the tip of my tongue, before nipping at his lips. When he moved to kiss me, I turned my head and licked his shoulder before grazing my teeth on the delicate skin there. I left a wet kiss where his shoulder and his neck met, and he moaned.

  “More,” he requested hoarsely.

  “You first.”

  His thumb started caressing me relentlessly, and he added a third finger to the two stroking in me. I bucked against them, biting my lip to suppress a scream.

  “Yes, Kita,” he urged me. “Feel me…feel us.”

  His rhythm doubled. My eyes closed, waiting for the incoming cataclysm. Suddenly, everything went faster, deeper. He nipped my throat, and pinched my nipple, his fingers touching an incredibly aroused inner spot all at once. I didn’t know which movement triggered my explosion. He growled and relished on the violent quivers of my whole body, stealing my breath away in a passionate kiss.

  My inner depths were clasping rhythmically on his fingers, bringing them deeper and deeper. My body glistened with sweet sweat as I tried to remember how to breathe. The waves of pleasure were still crashing on me when I felt his fingers slowly retreat from my core. I moaned under his lips, but was unable to do something about it. Lost in sensation, I partially registered that his mouth was leaving my lips to trail down my body. From the heights he had taken me, I was only half-aware of the brush of his tongue between my breasts, of his long eyelashes tickling my belly, of his hair caressing my inner thighs. But when the tip of his tongue wet my still quivering core, the beautiful realization of what he was doing hit me. I opened my eyes and lifted my head from the pillow to find him knelt between my legs. His mouth opened, and he licked his lips in expectation, his hands parting my thighs for his upcoming assault.

  “Oh, God,” I muttered.

  The last thing I saw was his smile, the first thing I felt was his heated breath. After that, I was not sure of what he was doing to my body. I only knew I was back in heaven, my release spreading over me again like hot, sweet waves.

  He slowly disentangled himself from me and covered my still trembling body. He looked down at me for a moment, then with a sudden move, he sank himself into my body. I could feel his heart hammer against my breasts. I was afraid I’d cause him pain, but he told me he did not care. He was beyond that. Beyond everything.

  Once, I told myself. Once cannot hurt. Sandrine would never know. She owed me this much for bringing Armand back to her.

  I wrapped my legs around his hips, crossing my ankles against his buttocks, and he slid deeper into me. He growled like an animal in reactio
n and lost all control. His first thrust made me burn for more, the second made me melt, with the third I forgot who and where I was. The rhythm of his thrusts increased, and he drove into me sharply, ramming against my core. My panting turned to moans, my moans to cries. His palms slid to my hips and he used them to pull himself deeper within me. I screamed and clasped my inner depths around him in reaction to his passionate demands.

  “Kita, oui!”

  I opened my mouth, but was unable to utter his name as my quivering began yet again.

  “Say my name, Kita,” he ordered throatily as he shifted his weight by gripping my shoulders to ram more roughly at my core.

  “Armand…my love…main…” I said with rasp voice, my arms possessively wrapping around his back.

  “Yours…”

  And with that, we exploded. Together.

  When I woke the next morning, he was gone. I ran like a mad woman to the docks, wanting to stop him. Thinking for a moment that I could give up my values, that perhaps I could share him, be his whore, whatever he wished.

  Jean’s ship was just a speck in the distance. I watched heartsick, whispering his name until it disappeared over the horizon.

  Chapter 5

  I thought that nothing could stop my life at sea. I was wrong. I put the life of a lady buccaneer behind me the day I fainted on the deck.

  As Roger so succinctly put it, “We can’t have a pregnant Captain.”

  The first thing I did was swear Jean to secrecy. His eyes almost popped out of their orbits when he saw me big with child. He agreed, and soon after, he disappeared to an unknown destination. Terry took over The Dark Jewel, turning it into a successful merchant ship. He married a Spanish woman that same year.

  Roger and I settled in Ajaccio. It was his wish to open a bookstore. It sounded boring to me at first, but then I came to love the musty shop and the piles of books though which my eight-month-old daughter would climb and hide. She was ready to walk, and chewing on everything.

  She was so much like her papa, my little Armandine. Alternately demanding, sweet, charming, and beautiful, with his russet tinged brown hair and his long lashed green eyes. Looking at her made my heart turn over.

  Roger had been ill one Saturday morning, nursing a cold and a sore leg. Armandine had finally fallen asleep in her cradle, her thumb in her mouth, exhausted from keeping her mama running after her.

  A woman and a little boy came into the shop, but stopped short at the sight of the cradle.

  I looked up and smiled. “No need to be quiet, nothing wakes her.”

  The little boy grinned at me. I guessed him to be five or so. There was something endearingly familiar about him.

  “I am looking for books on dogs. Mon père says I might have a dog of my own some day.”

  “He is obsessed,” the woman sighed.

  I showed him the few I had. “They’re not that good, but if you can return tomorrow, I know where I might get a good one.”

  “You have to speak directly into the boy’s ear, ma’am,” The woman said. “He has lost some hearing due to red measles.” She leaned toward me. “Lost his mother at the time, too. She did not recover.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, my heart breaking for the little boy. “Can I bring the books to you tomorrow?”

  The boy grinned, showing several gaps where his teeth had fallen out.

  “We’ll be leaving for home Tuesday, ma’am.” The woman gave me the address. “That’s most kind of you.”

  ***

  I found the books, several large volumes. Roger was still ill, so I closed the shop and set out for the address in the French Quarter, Armandine sharing her basket with the books. A butler answered the door. I told him my reason for being there.

  “I know nothing of it, and that the master is too busy to be disturbed with such a trivial matter,” he said in an imperious manner only butlers can achieve.

  His tone set Armandine to howling. She was wet and starving, anyway.

  “May I please sit down here and nurse her while you go and ask your master if he will see me?” I had no intention of leaving the expensive books.

  “You certainly can not.”

  “What is your name?” I drew myself up to my imposing height.

  “George.”

  “Well, George, I plan to do it anyway.” I sat down and began to release the buttons of my bodice.

  He raced off.

  I tucked Armandine under my shawl, smiling down at her as she voraciously attacked her mid-morning repast. I had to be careful. The little devil would often bite me with her new teeth, smiling quite sweetly afterward.

  “Ah, my sweet one, you’ve never had your meal in such a fine establishment.” She looked at me with serious eyes.

  Someone was standing there looking at us. He was not saying anything, just staring. George was a bit of an old pervert.

  Without looking up I said, “Unless you want a kick in the backside, my good man, best leave my child and me to our business.”

  “And why doesn’t that surprise me, coming from you, Kit Black?”

  I lifted my eyes and met a pair the exact same hue as that of our daughter. He came to me, pushing the lace of my shawl aside. Armandine pulled back from my breast, looked at him and smiled, her chubby fist reaching out to him. He touched her cheek with a shaking finger.

  “I looked for you. Everywhere. I couldn’t find Jean. They burned his villa. Did you know?”

  “Yes. He’s disappeared. Rumor has it that he’s dead.”

  He nodded. “You’re the lady from the bookstore. Yves couldn’t stop talking about the lady with the yellow hair that was bringing him a book about dogs. I didn’t even think that it might be you.”

  “I know about Sandrine.”

  “She died before I got home. And Yves, I came so close to losing him, too.”

  “I’m glad he’s fine now.”

  He caressed my hair. “I thought I would have to wonder the earth to find you, and God throws you into my lap. Both of you. Mon Dieu, she is so beautiful.” There were tears in his eyes. “Our daughter.”

  “Yes, she is. And so very much like her father.”

  Epilogue

  I write these words on a fine ship heading for France. My stomach is queasy, because I am expecting our third child. My husband is at the helm, teaching our son, Yves, how to steer. I am happy, happier than I ever thought a girl like me could ever be. Armand’s love and the love of our children is all that I will ever need.

  Armand allows Yves to take over and walks to me. He smiles at me, the same smile that I fell in love with so many years ago that morning in Ajaccio when I exchanged my “sister” for a pair of boots and a sword. He is exactly as he was then, give or take a few scars, far too beautiful for a mere mortal.

  “Mon,” he whispers to me, fierce love in his green eyes. “Toujours.”

  I entangle my fingers with his. “Always. Yours…always.”

  The End