Free Hawkwood and the Kings: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume One) by Paul Kearney

patrol and then slipped away..." She moaned as Hawkwood's fingers worked on her.
    "Murad has been stalking around the palace with a smug grin on his face. I don't like him... Oh, Richard!"
    She lay back on the bed with her legs asprawl and began to touch herself where he had been touching her. Hawkwood watched her with the fascination of the mouse eyeing the cat.
    "Is this not better than the rump of some cabin boy?" she asked.
    Hawkwood became very still, and she smiled teasingly. "Oh come on, Richard. I know what pressures are on you seamen on a long voyage, with never a woman aboard to relieve your... stress. Everyone knows what you get up to. In the hold, perhaps, in a dark corner with the rats skipping round you? Does the boy squeal, Richard, as you take him? My fine Captain, were you even taken yourself by some hairy master's mate when you first began your voyaging?"
    As she saw his face flood with anger she laughed her tinkling laugh and worked ever more busily on herself.
    "Will you deny it to my face? Will you say it's not true? I can read it in your eyes, Richard. Is that why you have been unable to please me on this return? Are you pining after some smooth-chinned boy with lice in his hair?"
    He set his hand about her white throat. His skin looked as dark as leather against hers. As his fingers tightened, hers became busier. Her back arched slightly.
    "Am I not enough for you?" she moaned. "Or am I too much for you?"
    With one swift movement he spun her on her stomach. The blood of fury and shame and arousal was beating a rigid tattoo in his every vein. He set his weight atop her, crushing her into the bed. She cried out, flailing behind her with her arms. He caught the thin wrists and imprisoned them.
    She screamed into the pillow and bit the linen fiercely as he forced inside her. It did not take long. He withdrew, feeling sickened and exultant at the same time.
    She rolled on to her back. Her body was mottled with the rush of blood. Her wrists were red. She bruised so easily, he thought. He could not meet her eyes.
    "Poor Richard. So easily goaded, so easily outraged." She extended a hand and pulled him down beside her.
    He was baffled, confused. "Why do you say such things?"
    She stroked his face. "You are an odd mix, my love. Sometimes as unapproachable as a closed oak door, sometimes all your nerves in the open, to be played on like the strings of a lute."
    "I'm sorry, Jem."
    "Oh, don't be absurd, Richard. Don't you know that you never do anything unless I want you to?"
     
     
    E LSEWHERE IN A BRUSIO, the day passed and the soldiers did not come. The girl Griella, who had been a beast, dressed herself in some of Bardolin's castoff robes and sat at his table looking absurdly young and vulnerable.
    They sipped cellar-cool water and ate bread with olives and a bowl of pistachios, which she loved. The imp stirred restlessly and watched them from its jar; it was almost recovered from its ordeal of the night before.
    Why had they not come? Bardolin did not know; but instead of relieving him, their non-appearance made him more uneasy and this was compounded by the face of the slim young girl sitting across the table from him, swinging her bare feet as she ate.
    She had a peasant face, which was to say it was browned and freckled by hours and days out in the sun. Her hair was cut short and it gave back a bronze tint to the sunlight, as though some smith had hammered it out on his anvil that morning. Her eyes were as brown as the neck of a thrush and her skin where the ingrained dust had been washed off had a tawny bloom. She was not more than fifteen years old.
    Bardolin had helped her wash the clotted blood from her hands and mouth.
    After lunch they sat by the great window in the wall of Bardolin's tower that looked out to the west, down over the city to the sea and the crowded harbour with its tangle of masts. Out on the horizon ships were becalmed by the fallen trade. Their boats were hauling them in, oarstroke