Free Swept Away By a Kiss by Katharine Ashe

refused to speak of it too, the coward. And I know of your clever trick with the lamp glass.” He leaned toward her again, seeming to study her face. “I needn’t have bothered, eh? Ah well.” He sighed theatrically and shrugged. “So I am still waiting. Growing giddy with impatience, yet still waiting. Hasten your education, my girl. Perhaps I will invent another adventure to inspire our saint, shall I? We shall see, my beauty.” His fingers slid from her shoulder and curved around her breast with proprietary ease. Willing herself not to shy away where he pressed into skin rubbed raw from the ropes, Valerie set her jaw.
    At dusk, when another unfamiliar sailor admitted the Jesuit to their shared quarters, she no longer felt so resigned. After hours alone to muse upon her plight and grow more anxious imagining the pirate’s next attempt to subjugate her, Valerie’s hope had become firm resolve.
    As Etienne sat and removed the Bible and beads from his cassock, she rehearsed in her mind everything she had planned throughout the afternoon. She didn’t much like the strategy, but it offered her only chance at survival on her terms. If she waited for someone to save her out of the goodness of his heart, she would be aboard this cursed ship forever. And eventually, whether he considered her prepared according to his standards or not, Bebain would take her to his bed. Or kill her.
    She could not employ Zeus’s help. He seemed immovable. In any case, her conscience would not allow it. She would not use a man to secure her freedom who had his stolen while still a child. She had only briefly seen Maximin atop this morning and hadn’t spoken to him. But something about his knowing grin told her he would not fall prey to manipulation. Not sufficiently to risk his life for her, at least.
    No, she could not depend on the crew for her escape.
    That left the priest.
    He called them allies, but Valerie needed more than an ally to help her escape Bebain. She needed a devotee, the kind she had depended upon for countless escapades in her past, using the unstinting loyalty of boys and men so blinded by their lust for beauty and wealth they did not know a thing about who she actually was.
    With her juvenile heart hungry for attention, she had cared about each of them in her own way, admiring them for one thing or another. But she had not loved them, at least not the way they professed their love to her. For two years she suffered over how she had behaved with willful, spoiled disregard for other people’s hearts. In her Boston isolation and grief, she promised she would never use another person that way again.
    Now, however, her desperation swelled to panic. She could lie to Etienne and tell him she felt hopeful. But her skin crawled with terror imagining the pirate captain binding her to his bed the next time, and to his ship the same way he bound the sailors aboard. She saw the blood-caked mainmast and determined that one final time she must have a man’s devotion, someone who would bend to her will no matter what it meant to him.
    She slid her gaze along the length of Etienne’s cassock, across his broad shoulders, to his face. Her breath stilled. He stared at her impassively again, golden eyes diffident. But his jaw was tight with control.
    Valerie knew that look now. And she knew that although this man might have chosen a career in the church, he was not a celibate by nature.
    The night before, he had wanted to touch her, perhaps as much as she wanted him to. His relief when he finished unbinding her told her that. But she would not let him resist any longer. She could not escape Bebain without help. If her fate meant having her body used for a man’s pleasure, she might as well arrange it to her advantage.
    She took a fortifying breath and opened the lid of the sandalwood chest.
    “There are some fine garments here, Etienne. You should look them over.” A gentleman’s linen shirt topped the pile. She caressed it with supple