NEWS OF A PRETTY YOUNG BIT OF FLUFF WALKING ABOUT the docks unescorted spread like fire through a dry forest. Men who were too drunk to walk somehow managed to drag themselves out of a stupor and stagger in the direction of the young woman. An entire shipload of sailors just in from a three-year voyage grabbed bottles of rum and ran toward where someone said there was a whole passel of women just waiting for them.
Bewildered, trying very hard not to let her fear show, Regan did her best to ignore the ever-increasing crowd of men gathering around her. Some of them, grinning toothlessly and stinking of fish and worse, stuck out filthy, trembling hands to touch the velvet of her dress.
“Ain’t never felt nothin’ so soft,” they whispered.
“Ain’t never had me no lady before.”
“Think ladies do it the same way as whores?”
Faster and faster she began to walk, weaving away from the hands and the bodies placed in her way. No longer did she think of keeping the sea to her back; all she thought of was escape.
The men of the docks seemed to toy with her just as they had the night she’d been wearing her nightgown, but it was when the young, virile, hungry sailors from the ship found her that the relatively gentle games ceased. When the sailors realized there was only one woman and not fifty as they’d been told, they grew angry, and their anger was directed at this one frightened-looking female.
“Here, let me at her. I need more than a feel of her pretty dress,” leered one vigorous young man, reaching out and grabbing the shoulder of Regan’s dress.
The fabric tore all the way to the top of her breast, exposing one fat, soft mound that made the men laugh delightedly. “Please stop,” Regan whispered, backing away from the sailors, only to have three pairs of hands lift her skirt and slip up the back side of her legs.
“She may be little, but there’s a lot of her in the right places.”
“Stop larkin’ about. Let’s have at her.”
Before Regan was aware of what was about to happen to her, just as she seemed to hear Travis’s words about men forcing her to do what they had done together, one of the sailors gave her a firm push, and she fell backward over the men behind her. With one futile effort at a scream, she tried to right herself, but the men under her, scrambling away, held her under an ocean of grabbing, exploring hands. Over her, grinning wildly, were the sailors.
“Now, let’s see what’s under those pretty skirts.”
The man put his hand on her skirt, and Regan kicked him in the face, sending him sprawling. Her arms were pinned above her head by the men behind her, and the second after she kicked her ankles were grabbed, legs pulled wide apart.
“You won’t kick me, missy,” laughed another sailor, grabbing the edge of her skirt.
One second he was above her, smiling at her terror, enjoying her struggles against the hands that held her, and the next he was flying through the air, and grabbing his shoulder, which was quickly reddening. The sound of the shot seemed to come after the sailor flew away.
Two more shots rang across the tops of the men’s heads before they began to react to something besides their vicious sport.
Regan, still held by the men, was first aware of their silence, and when she felt their grip loosening she kicked out, freeing one leg. The next moment an angry, violent Travis stepped over her, and before the men could comprehend what was happening, Travis grabbed arms, necks, belts, whatever was available, and sent sailors and waterfront riffraff flying through the air.
Shaking with fear, Regan lay still as, one by one, every hand was taken from her body. Travis straddled her hips, his back to her, a pistol in each hand. “Anyone else like to try for the lady?” he challenged.
Backing away, looking like the untamed, cowardly scum they were, they muttered at Travis for spoiling their fun, but no one openly opposed the dangerous-looking American.
Sticking the pistols into his belt, Travis turned and looked down at Regan, watched her panting with fear, and quickly noted that most of her clothes were intact. With one swift gesture he bent and threw her over one shoulder like a sack of flour.
The breath nearly leaving her, Regan slammed against the back of him. “Put me down!” she demanded.
Travis gave her buttocks one hard smack, which was fortunately padded by the thick velvet, before nodding to the two other men who still held pistols on the cowering crowd, and started back toward the inn.
One of the sailors, the one Regan had kicked in the eye, yelled after Travis that Yanks certainly knew how to treat women, and the others laughed, glad they’d had no fight with the angry man. The sailor Travis had shot limped away, back toward the inner structures of the waterfront.
Regan didn’t say another word to Travis as she bounced along in the awkward, embarrassing position, and she was glad her long hair hid her face from passersby, especially people at the inn. By the time he’d climbed the stairs and reached the room they’d shared, she was ready to tell him what she thought of his treatment of her, that he was little better than the ruffians on the street.
But her courage left her when Travis slammed her into the bed so hard she dove through a foot of down-filled mattress, striking the rope lacing below. Gasping for air, she surfaced, pushed her hair out of her face, and looked up into Travis’s livid, raging temper.
He didn’t give her a chance to speak. “Do you know how I found you?” he said through clenched teeth, the muscles of his jaw working vigorously, hands on hips. “I hired men to walk the waterfront and to report to me when there was a commotion. I knew if I waited you’d show up, and when you did they’d be all over you.” Leaning forward, he snarled at her, “You lasted longer than I expected. What did you do, hide somewhere?”
Watching her face, he saw that his guess had been correct. He threw up his hands in frustration while taking heavy steps across the room. “What the hell am I going to do with you? I have to keep you locked up to protect you from yourself. Don’t you have any idea at all what the world’s like? I told you what would happen if you left here, but you didn’t believe me. No, instead you had to get yourself nearly raped and possibly killed. The first time I found you, you were being chased by men, and now, through your own fault, it’s happened again. Did you think it would be different the second time?”
Holding the torn top of her dress together, she toyed with the luscious velvet of the skirt. Her mind was working hard to block out what had just happened to her, to make it seem like one of her dreams. “I thought because I was dressed like a lady, they wouldn’t….” she whispered.
“What!” Travis bellowed, then sank into a chair. “I cannot believe anyone could truly, actually think—.” He cut himself off to look at her, so small, probably unaware that she was shivering, a long scrape down the side of her face, and once again he felt possessive about her. “There’s no question about it now. Tomorrow you leave with me for America.”
“No!” she gasped, her head coming up. “I can’t possibly. I must stay in England. This is my home.”
“You want a home where you’re attacked every time you step out the door? You want a repeat of what happened to you today?”
“This isn’t the real England,” she pleaded. “There are beautiful people and places full of love and friendship and….”
“And what?” he asked, hard. “Money? Money is the difference between the filth just outside here and the gentility you seem to adore, the gentility that seems to have kicked out an innocent little thing like you. It looks to me like the lovely people you know are about even with the ones tearing your clothes off a while ago.”
Slowly, great tears began to form in Regan’s eyes, and as she looked up at Travis he saw her sadness. She needed her dreams, she thought, needed to believe in love and beauty, had to have something to make up for all the emptiness in her life.
Not exactly understanding the thoughts going through Regan’s mind, Travis did see her hurt, and her tears made him weak. Instantly, he was beside her on the bed, folding her into his arms, trying his best to shelter her from whatever painful memories haunted her.
“You’ll like America,” he said gently, stroking her hair. “The people are good and honest, and they’ll like you. I’ll introduce you to half of Virginia, and before you know it you’ll have more friends than you know what to do with.”
“Friends?” she whispered, clinging to him, only now beginning to realize how the experience on the waterfront had upset her. There still seemed to be clutching, greedy hands on her body.
“You can’t imagine all the wonderful people in America. I have a little brother, Wesley, who will love you, and of course there’s Clay and Nicole. Nicole is from France and can talk French as fast as lightning.”
“Is she pretty?” Regan sniffed.
“Almost as pretty as you,” he smiled, caressing her hair. “And when I left she was just about to have a baby. It’s probably months old by now. Of course, she’s already got the twins.”
“Twins?”
Travis laughed and held her away from him, wiping away her tears with his fingertips. “Don’t you understand yet that I’m taking you to America, not to punish you or because I like kidnapping little girls, but because I have no choice? There’s nothing else I can do with you.”
His words, meant to calm her and said in Travis’s own special blunt way of calling a problem by its true name, had the opposite effect on Regan. Her uncle and Farrell had said similar things about having to put up with her. She was tired of being a burden to everyone. “Let me up!” she demanded, pushing against him.
“Now what the hell’s the matter?”
Twisting her head, she tried to bite his hand on her shoulder.
Travis pushed her back into the mattress and rubbed his hand. “I don’t understand you at all. I save your life not more than an hour ago, and now I tell you, as kindly as you please, how I have your own best interests at heart, and you get madder’n hell at me. I don’t understand you at all.”
“Understand me!” she gasped, eyes spitting fire. “I wouldn’t have had to run away if you hadn’t been holding me prisoner, and I wouldn’t have needed rescuing if it hadn’t been for you in the first place. In a sense, you saved me from yourself for yourself.”
Bewildered, his mouth falling open, Travis could only gape at her. “Does your mind always work that way? Do you always go down ten different twisted paths before you get to where you want to go?”
“I assume that is an American colloquialism, meant to cover your lack of logic. The fact is that you are holding me prisoner, and I demand to be released,” she said smugly, arms folded, chin tilted away from him.
Travis’s anger faded quickly to laughter, which he tried very hard to suppress. Whatever her understanding of logic was, it was far away from the true meaning of the word. He considered explaining again what would happen if he released her, but since she’d been assaulted twice and it seemed to have made no impression on her, he had no desire to try to explain again. Nor would he try painting a glorious picture of America for her. All he could do was to let her see for herself. He also considered throwing open the door and giving her another chance to try to make it out of the docks, or he could pay for a cab to take her wherever she wanted to go.
At this last thought, something inside him tightened. If he sent her away, he might never see her again, this starry-eyed little vixen who seemed to look at the world through her own special pink haze. The thought of the long sea voyage without her to entertain and delight him made him feel very sad.
“You’re going to America with me,” he said firmly as he ran his hand along her bare shoulder. He’d felt so guilty about seducing her when she was so innocent that he’d forced himself to stay away from her for two nights, but now the near panic he’d felt all day when he couldn’t find her, combined with the seductive image she presented now with her bare shoulder and partially exposed breast, made him forget about logic.
“Do not touch me,” she said haughtily.
“We may disagree about…logic”—he smiled at the word—“but there’s one area where we seem to be in complete agreement.”
Regan really tried to keep herself aloof from Travis’s touch, but the feel of his hand—that wide, warm, sensual palm running along her neck—was impossible to ignore. She wanted to appear unaffected by what had happened to her, wanted him to think she was courageous and brave, but truthfully she wanted to climb into his lap and hide, perhaps crawl into his pocket. When he had stood over her this evening, pistols drawn, she’d never in her life been so glad to see anyone.
Turning her head to one side, his fingers stroked her neck, and she closed her eyes as his other hand went to the opposite side of her neck.
“You’re tired, aren’t you, love?” Travis whispered, the pressure of his hands increasing. “Muscles stiff?”
Her nod was barely perceptible as she felt her body relaxing. She had no idea what he was doing, only that by some magic he seemed to be making her body melt. She closed her eyes, giving herself over to Travis, hardly aware when he slipped off her dress and laid her naked body face down on the bed. The gentle, deep sound of his voice added to this new pleasure she was experiencing.
“When I was a boy,” he said, “I shipped out on a whaler for three years. Terrible experience, but at least there were some interesting stops, such as China, where I learned to do this.”
Wherever he’d learned it, she was grateful. His hands dug into her and sometimes even hurt her, but she soon found that when she relaxed the pain stopped. Fingers massaged along her spine, kneading out the soreness from crouching in the alleyway for hours. Cramps in her legs and calves relaxed, and when he started on her feet new areas of her body sank deeper into the soft mattress. It amazed her that even her arms could be tense, but Travis’s hands loosened knots of tight muscle and made them limp.
Since Regan was too relaxed to move, he turned her over as if she were a heap of rags and began on her front. From the feet up, he rubbed, pummeled, stroked, gouged, caressed every pore of her body. When he reached her face, his thumbs gently touching the muscles in her cheeks, and around her nose, she was near senseless.
Feeling so relaxed, she wasn’t aware of the sensuality of the massage, that the feel of Travis’s strong hands, his eyes on her nude body, had awakened her passion. She felt like a big cat stretching in the sun, every muscle quiet, awaiting the adventures that lay ahead.
When Travis’s hands returned to her thighs, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. A sweet, knowing smile curved her lips as she kept her eyes closed, preferring only to feel, to give her mind over to her senses. The change of pressure in Travis’s hands, perhaps his own lust coming through his fingertips, was subtle, but she understood it.
“Yes, love,” he growled throatily, his breath extraordinarily deep.
He didn’t use his lips or any other part of his body except his hands—those marvelous, big, hard hands that she’d seen used to toss grown men about as if they were weightless. Wide, callused fingers were artfully agile, deliciously provocative as they reexplored the skin they’d just touched.
Regan felt a deep hum inside her, some primitive piece of machinery beginning to work. Arching slightly, rhythmically, she gave herself over to him. “Please,” she whispered, her hands rising up his arms, fingers tracing the muscles. “Please.”
Travis lost no time in obeying her, as he was close to the breaking point. The sheer sensuality of their lovemaking and the beauty of her slim young body had fascinated him, and when he entered her it was slowly, very slowly, never once relinquishing the gentle, ethereal quality of their pleasure.
Regan had learned enough about lovemaking to know to prolong their movement, and she followed his lead as if they were two heavenly bodies joined in a union that would last through eternity. Yet she could not hold off long, and soon she began to breathe quicker and to dig her hands into Travis’s flesh. Within seconds their gentleness turned into ferocity, their hunger equal, greedy, starving.
When at last their passion peaked, Regan cried out and felt tears coming to her eyes at the violence of her release.
For some minutes she lay still, afloat in a sea of nothingness, sated and happy, relaxed and deeply quiet.
Slowly, Travis rolled off her, propped his head on one elbow, and looked down at her. His brown eyes were dark, and she noticed the thickness of his short lashes.
Who is this man? she wondered. Who is this man who makes my body sing to some heavenly music? He didn’t say a word, and she felt she was seeing him for the first time. He held her prisoner, yet he took care of her, acted as if he valued her, and even a few times seemed remorseful about enslaving her. What sort of man could be so gentle and so strong at the same time?
Studying him, she thought how little she knew of him. What thoughts went through his mind, who were the people he loved, and, yes, who loved him? She put her hand to the side of his face, running her fingertips along his cheek. Could this man, who seemed to think the world was his for the taking, ever be made to love? Could a mere woman ever make a slave of this man, hold his strong, pounding heart in her small hands?
She moved her hand to his bare chest, felt his heart under her palm, twined her fingers in the hair on his chest, and then on impulse gave it a sharp pull.
“Stop that, you little imp,” he growled, then kissed her fingers. “I’d think you’d be more grateful after the way I just made you squeal.”
“Grateful!” she gasped, but concealing a smile. “Since when does a slave thank her master?”
Travis refused to take the bait but merely grunted and gathered her to him. He seemed to give no thought to the fact that he twisted her body into an impossible position.
Regan started to protest that she could not possibly sleep entwined about him in such a way, but even as she formed the words they disappeared. Feeling rather like a vine twirled about the trunk of a great oak, her body relaxed, and she drifted into a deep sleep.
