Free Taming Charlotte by Linda Lael Miller Page B

tongue, feeling the release of some warm fluid deep within when he satisfied her. It was still dark when she awakened with a start, sitting bolt upright on the couch, breathing as hard as if she’d been running.
    The soft, desperate sounds of passion she had heard in her dreams continued in the fragrant stillness. The noise culminated in a series of sighs that seemed to catch on one another, and Charlotte’s cheeks burned as she realized what was happening.
    She closed her eyes tightly and fell back on the couch, wondering how she could have lived twenty-three years and learned so little about the world in all that time.
    Within three days, the
Enchantress
dropped anchor off the coast of Spain. Patrick was in the worst mood he could remember. Under other circumstances, he would have gone straight to his favorite brothel and satisfied all the yearnings Charlotte had so innocently aroused in him, but for some reason, his conscience wouldn’t allow that.
    Thus, he suffered, and so did everyone else who came within the broad range of his temper.
    He sold the spices and silks he’d brought from Riz, and bought shipments of lace and wine to carry to Turkey. He could think of nothing and no one but Charlotte, and how badly he needed to bury himself in her and end the terrible tension of wanting her so much. Because of his preoccupation with a young woman who refused him her last name and yet rode his mouth in ecstasy, Patrick was not as careful as he should have been.
    He’d had words with Cochran, the first mate, when his friend told him his nature had turned foul and he ought to take himself upstairs and let a whore work it out of him. Patrick had been furious, and he’d sent the others, Cochran included, summarily back to the ship.
    He was jumped from behind as he left the shoddy waterfront tavern at a late hour, his loins still aching, hismind distracted by frustration. He felt the blade of a knife brush against his throat and turned sober between that moment and the one that followed.
    Patrick brought one bootheel down hard on the instep of his attacker, making the other man scream in pain, but there were others, and they seemed to come at him from every direction. He had clutched one by the shirt collar and drawn his fist back for the kind of punch that loosens a man’s teeth when he recognized his own cook.
    “Damnation, Cap’n!” the man bellowed. “It’s them you’re supposed to fight! We’re on your side!”
    His friends had disobeyed his orders and stayed, then, he thought, turning his full attention to the battle at hand. He sensed Cochran and the others around him, saw only strangers through the red haze of fury that shifted and shimmered in front of his eyes.
    Patrick had no way of knowing how long the fight raged; it might have been fifteen minutes, or two hours. When it was over, he crouched beside a supine body and wrenched the man upright.
    “Who are you?” he demanded.
    The man’s eyes rounded, then drifted shut in a swoon. Patrick threw him roughly back to the ground and found another wayward soul to question.
    This one babbled in rapid dialect, but Patrick deciphered enough of it to know that these were Raheem’s men, and he said as much to Billy Bates, one of his sailors.
    “Filthy lot they are, too,” Billy said, dusting his hands off on his own none-too-clean garments.
    Patrick hauled the frightened Arab to his feet and slammed his hard against the tavern wall. “Take me to Raheem,” he said, in the dialect. “Now!”
    The other man shook his head, his dark eyes full of fear and defiance. “He’ll kill me,” he said. “I would rather die here in the street than suffer Raheem’s punishment.”
    Tightening his grip on the man’s shirtfront, Patrick lifted him to his tiptoes and bounced him off the wall again. “Tell him I said he’s a coward,” he rasped. “You tell him thatPatrick Trevarren, captain of the
Enchantress,
called him a yellow-gutted sewer rat.”
    The Arab nodded