Eve noted the slightest curl of his lips, and the faint smile sent her heart pitter-pattering in her chest. "You had love and affection in your childhood," she said. "I wish all my patients could say the same. With love as a foundation, most people can make a decent life. It gives them strength to avoid temptations and wrong roads. It gives them a reserve to draw upon in times of trouble."
He nodded. "We did have love—and wealth and a general gaiety of life. Until the betrayal."
"What happened?"
"My father invested with a distant relative. The venture failed, and we lost almost everything. To recoup his losses, my father gambled at a very high-stakes game at a party thrown by that same relative. Needless to say, my father lost the rest of our fortune. He retained his title, but the baronial estates were unentailed and therefore forfeit. We were left with a small cottage located on the coast of Ireland. Our distant relative, who'd won everything, moved into our ancestral home, and my father never seemed to regain his balance. Not long after, he began to drink."
"I'm so sorry, Adam." Eve touched his arm, her concern clear in her blue eyes. "What of your brother and mother?"
"My brother died six months after our move. My father had been drinking heavily and took him out sailing. The boat capsized and my brother drowned. My father became very ill. He blamed himself and died a scant two weeks later. My mother followed a little over a year from then, with inflammation of the lungs. I've always believed that it was due to our reduced circumstances, and the loss of my father and her youngest child."
The flickering light cast half shadows upon his face, yet Eve recognized courage when she saw it. Yes, courage. This man had dropped his barriers enough for her to see beneath his bold and droll exterior to a sensitive, kind, and wounded soul beneath. It was a view, she instinctively knew, that Adam kept hidden from others. Yet he had revealed it to her, which meant more than a hundred flowery compliments.
"I'm so very sorry for your tragedies," she said. "Life is never quite what we expect, is it? We hope for rainbows and merry memories, but we end up with stormy skies, sad inclinations, and, if we're lucky, we have only a trickle of hope left to begin again. I hate to think of you left alone at such a tender age."
Eve's sincere response and compassion caressed Adam's lonely heart. It also eased the long-buried ache. Placing his hand over hers, he stared into her lovely pale face, and the rustle of past ghosts seemed to fade like dust in the wind. "And yours, my sweet? What was childhood like on a pirate ship? Merry, scary, or rather bawdy?" He hoped to lighten the somber mood in the coach.
"All three and more," Eve answered. "There was freedom, yet no room to explore it. So much water surrounds you, and yet there were times when the freshwater was so low that we went without bathing for weeks on end. I climbed ropes instead of trees. My playmates were a scurvy lot—Peg Leg Peggins, who taught me to dance, and One-eyed Jack, who made me a doll out of rope. And I wore breeches and practiced with cutlasses. I saw whales in the Atlantic with their blowholes spouting, and pink dolphins off the coast of Asia—along with a mermaid or two."
"Did you play pirate?" he asked mischievously.
She laughed. "I imagined tea parties at the queen's, and I played doctor. I doctored cut fingers and sword wounds, and treated rum poisoning. Why, I even tried to fix Peggins a new leg! Unfortunately, a shark ate that one as well. When I dressed up and decked myself out, I had the help of my mother's treasure chest. I did so at least once a week. My father thought me quite unnatural."
"Though I do admire your father, at times he can be thickheaded," Adam remarked gallantly, placing a kiss upon her wrist.
"You don't find me a bit unusual?" Eve tried to ignore the heated tingle beginning in her belly.
"Is this a trick question?" Before she could reply, he leaned over the carriage seat and began to kiss her eyelids, lingeringly and with soft adoration. He placed feathery kisses across her lips. As she clasped her arms about his neck, he moved his mouth to hers. His arms tightened possessively about her. She was absolutely perfect.
Closing her eyes, Eve felt as if a hurricane had swept her away. Her body came alive, responding to Adam's passion; she was tingling and quaking all over. Her toes curled at the heat shooting through her, making her grind restlessly against the soft cushions of the carriage and his hard body. Her fingers eagerly roamed his chest, delving into his jacket and beneath his white shirt, and she gloried in the feel of his chest's strong muscles and its mat of crisp short hair. Lower, she felt the hard bulge in his trousers.
Pure heat shot through Adam, and his caresses became more desperate. He trailed tiny kisses along Eve's throat, wanting to eat her alive. His arousal throbbed in his breeches.
In the blink of an eye he'd urged her back against the cushions. With an expertise born of years of experience, he released her breasts from their confinement. His breath rasping, he managed to relieve Eve of her gown to her waist. As her chest was revealed, his body burned. Her nipples were erect and reminded him of hard, dark garnets. The most wonderful treasures ever.
Catching his breath, Adam groaned. Eve was some pagan goddess come to life. His pagan goddess. And he wanted to worship.
Exercising strict control, he forced himself to move slowly when all he wanted to do was ravish her on the spot. "How beautiful you are. So lovely, so divine." He bent to lick and suck her breasts. They were so very soft, and he nipped at them lightly, listening to her soft moan. "The great treasure of Bluebeard revealed."
Pressing her even farther back upon the carriage seat, he slid his fingers under her gown, caressing the white flesh of her thighs. She gasped loudly. The breathy sound stirred his already overheated senses as nothing else could, and his nostrils flared as he breathed in the scent of her arousal. She was all hot female and silky skin. His blood was racing, and his heartbeat quick. He felt more alive than he ever had. This was the grandest adventure of his lifetime.
It was several minutes before Eve's rational mind offered protest. Her wits had gone a-begging, disarmed by his masterful seduction. But… "No, Adam. We shouldn't be doing this," she protested weakly. He made her feel so wicked, so desirable, as if her skin were on fire. Her breasts ached, and the place between her thighs was burning. Embarrassingly, she could feel wetness there, as if her womb were weeping for something that only Adam could provide.
His arousal pressed against her hip, and she moaned again. His effect on her was devastating, like a typhoon in the tropics—and she was now about as wet as one. That last thought had her nails sinking into his shoulders.
"This is wrong. I'm an unmarried—well, married in a way—but a virgin. Our wedded life is a fantasy. A fantasy growing on me, but a fantasy nonetheless. Besides, we can't make love in a carriage. It's so unladylike."
Adam argued by kissing her nipples. Then he said, "Making love in carriages is all the rage. Why, a duchess I once knew—" He fell silent as her eyes popped open and she hit him on the arm.
"I don't need to hear of your past conquests!"
"Of course not, my love. But I swear on my sainted grandmother's grave that none of them compare to you. And I haven't even gotten you to bed yet. See what a little temptress you are?"
"Adam, you're not stopping," she remarked. "I can feel your hands." His fingers had skimmed the tops of her thighs and pressed into the slit in her lace drawers. The spot he touched was virgin, and the sensations shocking and yet seductively wondrous. "Oh… oh… oh, Adam."
"My love, my sweet. I adore you," he whispered, kissing his way across her flushed and heaving chest. His fingers were as busy, playing lovingly between her legs.