The Captain of All Pleasures (Sutherland Brothers #1)(10)
Author: Kresley Cole

Well, he could occupy himself with liquor all night if he wanted, but she would not let him touch her again. As if to illustrate his matching intention, he poured a generous amount and drained his cut-crystal glass in two long draws.

Inclining the bottle toward her, he halfheartedly offered her some. She couldn’t decide if this was because he didn’t think she’d accept or because he didn’t want to share. She shook her head in answer, the movement making her sway.

Perhaps she should have taken a drink, she thought as a sudden wave of exhaustion washed over her and chilled her. Shivering, she pulled her cloak closer and wrapped her arms around her body.

“You’re cold,” he said. He set down his glass and walked to a cabinet.

“I seem to be,” she confessed. “I become cold very easily.”

Their tones sounded so mundane that she thought of what would happen when reality claimed her. Thinking of tomorrow was like a wet blanket over all the sensations he’d produced in her, and she couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted him to kiss her or if she wanted to fall down where she was and sleep.

He turned from the cabinet and tossed a blanket at her, and though her sore body made it difficult, she awkwardly managed to catch it. Frowning, he looked her over; then, seeming to make a colossal sacrifice, he took it from her. Without a word, he tugged off her damp cloak to wrap the blanket around her, as if she were no more than a doll he was changing.

He looked her up and down, his gaze stopping at her feet. “Since I’ve already started this idiocy ” he muttered gruffly, as he bent to untie and pull off her filthy boots. Obliged to place her hands on his wide, solid shoulders, she had to resist moving her fingers over the firm bunching of his muscles.

When he removed the first boot, his eyes narrowed. He held it up to the lantern, where they both saw that the scuffed brown leather had soaked up splattered blood like a sponge.

“Are you hurt?” he barked as he dropped that one and rushed to remove the other.

“That’s not—that’s not my blood.” Merely thinking about where that blood came from, about the falls and the running enervated her.

His eyebrows rose in amazement, and he studied her face before returning to his task. Nicole felt foolish when he took off her socks, leaving her to furrow her toes in the cabin’s plush rug. But she stood unresisting, knowing she needed his help just now. He strode to his bureau and brought back a pair of thick woolen socks. She hadn’t realized her feet were cold, but when she spied those socks her body cried for them.

He jerked them over her feet, and her eyes closed in blissful comfort. “That feels so good,” she breathed. She opened her eyes and frowned at the sound of her husky, sensual voice. When had she ever sounded like that?

He looked at her curiously, then stood abruptly. As if he needed to explain, he said, “Your feet were like ice.”

Nicole nodded slowly, overwhelmed with fatigue. She took such a deep breath that her head moved with it. Her eyelids opened more sluggishly with each blink.

With something like resignation in his eyes, he placed a huge hand on her lower back and began guiding her to his bed. “Come on. You’re exhausted.”

“Oh. No, I can’t. I couldn’t.”

When she resisted, he said, “I won’t hurt you.”

She focused on his face to tell him she absolutely could not be in his bed, but no words came. Her legs shook. She must have gone soft in the rich surroundings of her last school, because a second later they simply gave out. She sank onto his bed, bewildered by her weakness.

“Will you be all right?”

“Yes. No?” she whispered. “I’m just so tired.”

“The night is catching up with you, so rest for a bit. Then we’ll talk about who those men were,” Sutherland said, his voice neither menacing nor kind as he lightly grasped her shoulder and pushed her down. He squeezed it firmly once, letting her know without words that he wanted her to stay put, before releasing her to walk over to the basin. He brought back a soaked cloth and began washing her scraped hands.

Nicole looked up at him one last time as he brushed at a smudge on her face, trying to decide if she could trust him, knowing she didn’t have much choice. She couldn’t tell anything. His face could have been made of marble for all the emotion it showed. Nicole unwillingly drifted to sleep and dreamed that Sutherland said in disbelief, “Her eyes are blue.”

Derek didn’t make as large a dent in his bottle as he’d intended while he sat and watched over the girl curled in his bed. He’d definitely not predicted his first night with her to be like this. Usually he was impatient to bed a woman and get her gone, but she had been afraid and possibly hurt. Still, he wasn’t resigned to having her sleep here the whole night.

He was, he had to admit, proud that tonight he’d overcome his natural selfishness in order to do something considerate. Why he was being so charitable to a prostitute, he had no idea. It must have been the liquor affecting his brain, because the girl could be prickly and rude, and he certainly did not get involved with women for more than purely physical reasons.

That’s just what he needed to be doing, taking on the troubles of a young prostitute. As if he didn’t have enough weight on his shoulders.

Even more remarkable, he was experiencing the wholly unaccustomed feeling of protectiveness. He wanted to kill the two who’d chased her. She’d put up a good fight, which was most likely why she’d survived. Hell, the little spitfire had actually drawn blood from someone.

The idea that she was a fighter intrigued him, probably because he had let go of so much so easily.

Oddly, she hadn’t behaved like a prostitute. No innuendos gone stale from overuse or practiced pouty smiles. And only minutes after she’d kissed him and made him want her with a surprising ferocity, she’d had to drag her feet back into his cabin. He’d automatically reached for a drink because she’d disconcerted him. A slip of a girl likely a decade younger had made him ill at ease on his own ship.

Derek didn’t know why she didn’t practice her wiles on him, wiles he would have known how to proceed with. This girl had only looked at him with a tilted head and open curiosity, until her eyelids slid over those dark eyes, blue eyes, as she began to fade.

He’d almost experienced relief when she’d passed out. Yet that was crazy. If he understood one thing on this bizarre night, it was that he wanted to sink into her lithe body. Sink into her until she eased the ache her abandoned response had created. Damn, how she’d responded to him.

Turning his mind from that gripping image, he took a long pull of drink. The way things were going now, she’d have to spend the night in his bed. He grimaced at the thought. With him, that just wasn’t done. Had never been done, in fact.

He reached over to shake her awake, but his hand stilled on her shoulder. She lay like the dead, as she had for hours. Her silky skin shone white as porcelain except for the pale lavender rings under the sweep of her lashes. But if he didn’t wake her, where the hell was he supposed to sleep?