Free The Captain's Caress by Leigh Greenwood

before she abandoned herself to the equally delicious feeling that something wonderful had happened. Then her eyes fell on the trunks piled against the wall and memory flooded back, bringing with it bitter shame.
    Summer sat up with a jerk. She could barely accept the actuality of her deflowering, and she was incapable of facing Brent. She quickly scanned the room, but he had disappeared.
    The soreness in her loins confirmed last night’s events, and Summer dropped her face into her hands and then uttered a small groan as the full enormity of her humiliation sank in. There was no turning back now; her life would never be the same.
    But hadn’t it changed already? Was she any more adrift now than when her father had forced her to marry a stranger and go thousands of miles from her home? If the earl was as cruel as Brent had said, would she be any better off as his wife? Would he care what happened to her now?
    It was useless to cry or smash her few belongings, yet Summer longed to hurt something as much as she had been hurt. A huge ache expanded like a bubble to fill her chest; it threatened to explode and take her last shred of self-control with it. She had been exploited by a father who should have loved and protected her, had been left to the mercy of pirates by a husband who should have treated her as his most precious possession, and she was now on her own. Her situation was much too desperate for tears; crying was only for people who could dry their eyes and find that everything was all right.
    She stood up with a sigh of grim resignation. What was done was done; now she had to concentrate on what to do next. It was going to be impossible to avoid the consequences of the past night, but she promised herself that Brent would pay dearly for what he had done.
    Yet a nagging voice inside her kept saying that she was almost as much to blame as he, that she had accepted him, that she had been a willing participant. Summer didn’t want to listen to this voice, didn’t want to acknowledge anything about last night except her pain and humiliation; but she knew she was going to have to admit her own responsibility for what had happened someday. Not now, however. Terrible things had happened to her in the last few weeks, and she needed to blame everything on Brent just to keep her sanity.
    With dawdling steps Summer walked over to the washstand; there was still some water in the pitcher. When she had washed her face and carefully removed every trace of last night’s tears, she turned her attention to her bloodstained thighs. Refusing to think of how the blood came to be there, she resolutely finished bathing herself, then turned a pair of expressionless eyes toward the mirror.
    As her gaze focused on her naked body, she wondered at its power to attract two such different men as the earl and the captain. Surely there should be something she could see, but Summer found nothing that hadn’t been the same for weeks and months, even years. With a fatalistic shrug she picked up her discarded nightgown and folded it into a small square. “I didn’t get much chance to use that,” she said savagely as she tossed the garment into a drawer and slammed it shut.
    She was in no hurry to dress; she had no place to go, nothing to do, and no one to see. Yet she unconsciously took extra care with details she had formerly given scant attention. A lock of hair wouldn’t behave as it should, and she spent additional minutes coaxing it into place. She didn’t like the line of her lashes, the color of her cheeks didn’t seem quite right, and weren’t her lips a little too pale? For the first time she wished she could add a little color to her skin. She gave her face a last critical look, then turned to the problem of choosing a dress.
    Summer didn’t own a single dress that she hadn’t already worn so many times she was ashamed to put it on again, so she turned hopefully to the dazzling wardrobe that the earl had sent as a wedding gift, but