New POTC fic: "What A Woman Can Do"
Title: What A Woman Can Do
For: geekmama
Pairing: J/E, canon mention of others
Rating: R for language and situations
Summary: Elizabeth takes a detour on the trip home from the Isle de Muerte.
Disclaimer: I could make these characters dance to my tune if I owned them, but instead, Disney and Bruckheimer get to play with them. It sucks to be us!
A/N: Written for the raise_the_dead Summer Swagfest 08. Much thanks to beta pir8fancier and to metalkatt and philosophercat for glancing it over, too. (Also a special thanks to mystery writer Claire M. Johnson - wherever she may be in the ether - for the appropriate inspiration of tension and heat in Roux Morgue, which I was reading just prior to sitting down and knocking this out.)
EARLY WARNING SYSTEM: Please do not be afraid of the terms "J/E" and my name appearing simultaneously at the top of the same story. That is not a mushroom cloud you see outside your window. That is not molten lava under your feet. (If the walls are melting, that's only your lack of medication.) Please do not send me the bill for your ruined keyboard.
Norrington’s officers and crew were stiffly polite or respectfully snide to her, depending - she surmised - on what they thought of how much she’d let that scurvy pirate get away with during her brief sojourn in his company on the small island.
Will avoided her. When he had no choice but to cross her path, he would meet her eyes briefly, his back stiff, then he’d look away or move off elsewhere. In all the years she’d longed from a distance - first for a closer friendship from the boy, and then for much more from the burgeoning man - never had she felt such a yawing ache of desire and grief in her young life, since over the last three days of departing the Isle de Muerte for home.
Her father and Norrington, of course, were the two people aboard the Dauntless who wanted to be talking to her, and Elizabeth had no desire to explain herself or events. She knew it was churlish to find excuses to avoid them, but she needed space to think, and the ship was awfully cramped for such things.
She remembered the ship still from eight years ago, when she’d slipped her governess’s and father’s attentions time to time and slunk through the lower decks. She’d flattened herself against walls and into crevices to hide from oncoming crewmen, straining her ears to listen in on conversations not meant for little ears. As much as she’d hated leaving her mother’s family for the Atlantic crossing - the Spencers and the Marches were all she had left of her lost half, after all - she’d soon found the bright side and half-hoped each morning the ship would encounter dread pirates to satisfy her book-spun fantasies.
Elizabeth quirked the corner of her lips in a smile as she recalled her father’s repeated sighs, until she’d finally learned to keep her thoughts to herself like a proper young lady. So now, in the dead of night, she was “properly” pulling the oversized blue officer’s waistcoat up over her slender shoulders, covering the white of her shirt at least and part of her breeches, to be less easy to spot in the dark. She knew she couldn’t go up on deck to think, for there was always someone on watch, and she couldn’t think in here with her father’s small wheezing snore on the other side of the makeshift partition. Norrington’s men had strung up a rope across the width of his cabin and draped a clean sail to give father and daughter a little privacy from one another.
Quietly easing the cabin door open, Elizabeth slipped out, shut it, and moved from spot to spot across the deck as unobtrusively as possible, keeping an eye on the watchman. There wasn’t much attention paid to the deck itself, she noted, probably because an enemy was not likely to simply pop into existence near the mizzenmast.
She found the passage below decks and continued to move silently, past sleeping bodies and odd noises of men, until she’d reached as low as she could go. Nobody was here - it was a very short narrow passageway past iron bars, and when no harrumphs or snores met her, she released the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding in for so many days.
In a few months - probably a year, her calculating mind corrected, to give the old biddies in Port Royal proof she wasn’t trying to cover up a pirate bastard - she would be marrying Commodore James Norrington in a celebration of taste and society and propriety. She would be congratulated on making a smart match, he would be slapped on the back for obtaining such a beautiful young wife with powerful connections, and her father would be soaking up accolades for finding a suitable man to corral his headstrong daughter.
Elizabeth sighed; it wasn’t a fair thought to James, who had always been an honorable and decent man. He was terribly handsome, and if she had a lick of sense, she’d have been fantasizing over him in the middle of the afternoon when she lowered her embroidery and stared off into space. Instead, her thoughts always drifted elsewhere - open skies, open water, open mouth as she kissed another man, not much more than a boy, for whom she would have gladly tossed away all wedding gowns and crystal goblets and debts to rescuers to taste and accompany into the wild blue yonder of the wider world-
A decidedly male cough interrupted her musings, and with some horror, Elizabeth realized she’d been standing in the entry of the passageway, eyes closed, body slightly swaying, hands clasped in front of her. Frowning, she narrowed her eyes and sharpened her gaze, which had thankfully adjusted to the dark while closed.
“Would offer a shilling for your thoughts, darling,” the sloppy drawl informed her, “but I’ve a feelin’ that’d be a severe underpayment.”
She’d ended up down here where Jack was, draped through the bars of his cell, a little up on her left. She couldn’t see his face, but his insouciant frayed cuffs poking out through the cell door were unmistakable. “I just wanted a minute to myself,” she countered. “Trying to sort out all of that with Captain Barbossa and-”
Jack interrupted with a snort. “He’s no more captain than you’re the queen of Siam,” he pronounced, “though you both certainly act like it.”
“And the curse on him and his men,” she finished stubbornly, managing not to grit her teeth.
“That’s inaccurate,” he pronounced.
“Beg pardon?”
“You’re not thinkin’ of any such thing, ripe young strumpet like you. You’re thinkin’ of the shoulders on that Turner stripling, sure as me mum was a Carib native.”
“Was she?” Elizabeth knew how to deflect, having suffered through dozens and tens of tedious repasts with politicians. She stepped closer to the cell, until she and Jack were sizing up one another. Again.
“Can you prove she wasn’t?” He grinned. “Or was?”
“No more than you can prove the contents of my thoughts,” she countered.
His eyes dropped and surveyed her, in blatant interest. Her cheeks flushed, and she verbally flailed. “It occurs to me, Captain Sparrow, that you would not be so readily able to ascribe such thoughts to anyone else unless you were harboring them already.”
Jack appeared neither abashed nor abased. “Pretty face is a pretty face,” he murmured, dropping his eyes again. “Pair of strong legs is even better.”
Wearing breeches for the last week had made her aware anew of the whisper of her stride, like a child discovering their own body parts all in a single afternoon. Men had stared, and she’d mostly liked it - two days ago, she’d turned around to catch Will’s eyes down in the vicinity of her thighs, intent, before he realized he was no longer unobserved.
“You really don’t care what form they come in, then?”
Jack lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Wouldn’t say that.” He was silent a moment. “To what do I owe the grace of your presence, Miss Swann?”
“Did you not hear me? I came down here for some privacy and quiet,” she snapped, trying to change the subject.
“Bollycocks. No maid sneaks ‘way from her father’s eye in the middle of the night to have a philosophical moment.” His black-lined eyes challenged hers. “Why’re you standing here ‘cross from me instead of visiting young Will?”
“I’m simply out for some solitude.”
“So you came down to the brig.”
“I thought this section was empty.” As lies went, it might not send her to hell. Barbossa’s men had been imprisoned in the larger section, divided from this small section by another set of iron bars at the end of the short walkway. If she took several more steps and had a key to get through, she would see them again - but she really didn’t want to. They’d been imprisoned separately from Sparrow, she’d overheard James telling the governor, for his own safety, given their history of betrayal and animosity.
She wasn’t paying sufficient attention, and gasped when Jack’s hand wrapped around her wrist and yanked her closer. “Going to visit one of them?” She opened her mouth and he cut her off. “Plain old blacksmith not enough wallowing in th’ lower classes for you, now?”
“Let go of me,” she hissed, trying to pull her hand away. “Stop talking like that!”
“About your honor?” He eyed her closely.
She set her teeth. “About Will.”
Jack loosened his grip, but instead of holding her wrist, he trailed his finger up over her knuckles, lightly. “I’d advise you to get used to it, if you’re going to be a blacksmith’s bride.”
She dropped her arm and swallowed. “I’m marrying James.” Jack only watched her. “Will’s not interested in me, that way. We’re only friends.” She rubbed her wrist, still warm from Jack’s grip.
To her surprise, he reached for her hand again, this time wrapping his fingers loosely around hers. “I am truly sorry, Lizzie.”
Jack Sparrow’s concern was more alarming than his lecherousness. She tried to pull her hand back, but he tugged it through the bars, pulling her up against them. She remembered how she’d pretended interest to get him drunk enough to pass out and let her do what needed to be done - what he’d been unwilling or too aggrieved to think to do - and how it hadn’t really been so odious to sit with him in the sand, watching the waves roll in and out, and the leaping flickers of the flames warming them.
“I don’t need your ‘sorry,’” she repeated tightly, nostrils flaring in sudden distaste for manners. “I’m not being left to the wolves, Jack; I’m marrying the commodore of the fleet, and I’ll want for nothing.”
“And what do you need?” His voice was like gravel, trickling polished out of a length of silk into the cracks of this new awareness she’d gained in the past few weeks. She watched his tongue flick out to touch his lower lip, and a dangerous thought flashed through her - not for the first time, if she were honest.
“Something a pirate knows nothing about,” she whispered, dropping her voice. “Discretion.”
He shifted, bringing his other arm up to get through a large opening in the bars. Reaching behind her neck, he took away her choice and her denial and tipped his head, and she let him move her until they were kissing, hard and soft and needy. The taste of his mouth was a bit sour, but the stabs and slides of his tongue distracted her, and she learned to breathe through her nose anyway. She belatedly realized, a couple of minutes later, that his other hand had released hers and was inside her man’s shirt, callused thumb circling a nipple as knotty fingers curved to the flesh. ”Blacksmith’s hands; I know they’re rough,” was her only coherent thought. She would’ve protested immediately except that she flexed her fingers and realized they were hooked into the underside of Jack’s sash.
She broke the kiss, about to step back, and the hand on her breast moved quickly, further inside and around her bare back. “Shhh,” he soothed. “Not that bad, is it?”
“It’s- It’s not right.” She struggled without real intent. “It’s disloyal.” Interesting how you didn’t say “improper,” her conscience lazily admonished. “I’m engaged.”
Jack smiled, but it was wise, not merry. “No,” he informed her, “it’s not.” He pressed his hand to her back, about halfway up, roughly where he’d be covering her heart if it were on her chest instead. “This isn’t mine,” he observed, squeezing so that she realized he knew where he was touching after all. “Neither’re all your thoughts.” He kissed her again, slowly, tongue finding hers before he paused. “That’s why you’re here.” She returned his kiss, slowly understanding both him and herself. “Nothin’ not loyal about a maid takin’ her pleasure with a man she’s not in love with … if neither’ve any intent to keep doin’ it ‘til death do they part.”
“Jack-”
“Didn’t I tell you to hush?” His tone was playful, and he brought his hand back around, lightly pinching her breast. “Now, Lizzie … close your eyes, darling.”
Elizabeth complied, sinking against the bars into the kiss, into his hands, both working quickly and far too slowly for her. He didn’t speak, only making a small noise every so often as she writhed or gasped. She tried not to think, not to imagine anything beyond these sensations; the one time she looked up into midnight eyes, they shifted, phased so that two different shades of brown searched hers, flared with desire; it taught her to close up quickly and not examine what was happening too closely. Rough hands touched everything without shedding a scrap of clothing, fingers loosening and stroking and entering. She thought of broad shoulders and jingling baubles and soft brown waves and tattooed arms and soulful young eyes in silent love with her own, and shut those eyes even tighter.
Nothing not loyal about a maid taking her pleasure with a man she’s not in love with … Calluses rubbed her just the right way and she thought she’d faint with the pleasure, surely a hundred times better than her own small fingers, more effective on her in so many ways, and she had to bite her lower lip when the climax crested to keep from saying the wrong name, from crying out her regret at being too … honorable? (That’s a questionable luxury you’re claiming with a pirate’s fingers slick with your own quim, isn’t it?) to abandon the man who’d fulfilled his bargain to save her heart’s rival.
As she caught her breath, Elizabeth dimly realized she ought to reciprocate, but when she blindly dug her fingers further under the sash, Jack pulled his hand back inside the bars, wiped his fingers unceremoniously on said sash, and pushed hers gently away. “I haven’t taken a pity fuck since that wench when I was fourteen,” he pointed out. “You’re hardly gettin’ that distinction after all these years.”
Her eyes were still shut. “Well, that was foolish,” she finally said, feeling she needed to break the silence of harsh breathing.
To her surprise, he laughed aloud, muting it as she opened her eyes in surprise and some offense. “Are you laughing at me?” she demanded before she could think. “After that?”
“Lizzie, love, ‘twas hardly any declaration of vows or a heart’s promise.” He grinned, and she felt herself smiling in return. “Feel better?”
She shook her head - not in negation, but incomprehension at his ability to understand. “Why?”
“I may be a lazy pirate, but after our lengthy acquaintance, you’ve surely surmised ol’ Jack’s not averse to getting his hands dirty when th’ right job requires it.”
She moved back a couple of steps, conscious of the cool air on her heated skin, and ducked her head against her sudden grin, working at the buttons and placket. She wasn’t sure if she ought to be ashamed and forget this, or brazen and act as though she were world-wise enough to expect this kind of treatment and want it. While she struggled to decide, he spoke again. “If Mr. Turner only wishes to be your friend, I’ll give up my wicked ways and join the Franciscans forthwith.” She looked up, feeling more exposed than when he’d had his fingers inside her. He watched her steadily. “He’s a poor courter, but your suitor nonetheless.”
Elizabeth smoothed her clothes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Sparrow.” She angled her body toward the way she’d come, then turned her head to give him a sidelong look. “Only one man has asked my hand.”
He shook his head. “Come this time next week, I’ll either be food for the carrion or chasin’ the horizon,” he informed her. “You don’t strike me as the type t’ let one memory carry her through a lifetime. You will violate your own bond of loyalty, eventually - if you don’t take what you really want while you’re still callow enough to get away with it.”
She moved further away from the cell, toward the steps, trying to think of something clever to say. All that would come out, though, was, “I hope you’re not carrion.”
Jack’s wink and reply was the last thing she remembered when she tried to fall asleep later, thoughts of the unexpected pleasuring jumbled with another unknown tongue and pair of hands. “And I hope you know how to seize the opportune moment.”
For: geekmama
Pairing: J/E, canon mention of others
Rating: R for language and situations
Summary: Elizabeth takes a detour on the trip home from the Isle de Muerte.
Disclaimer: I could make these characters dance to my tune if I owned them, but instead, Disney and Bruckheimer get to play with them. It sucks to be us!
A/N: Written for the raise_the_dead Summer Swagfest 08. Much thanks to beta pir8fancier and to metalkatt and philosophercat for glancing it over, too. (Also a special thanks to mystery writer Claire M. Johnson - wherever she may be in the ether - for the appropriate inspiration of tension and heat in Roux Morgue, which I was reading just prior to sitting down and knocking this out.)
EARLY WARNING SYSTEM: Please do not be afraid of the terms "J/E" and my name appearing simultaneously at the top of the same story. That is not a mushroom cloud you see outside your window. That is not molten lava under your feet. (If the walls are melting, that's only your lack of medication.) Please do not send me the bill for your ruined keyboard.
Norrington’s officers and crew were stiffly polite or respectfully snide to her, depending - she surmised - on what they thought of how much she’d let that scurvy pirate get away with during her brief sojourn in his company on the small island.
Will avoided her. When he had no choice but to cross her path, he would meet her eyes briefly, his back stiff, then he’d look away or move off elsewhere. In all the years she’d longed from a distance - first for a closer friendship from the boy, and then for much more from the burgeoning man - never had she felt such a yawing ache of desire and grief in her young life, since over the last three days of departing the Isle de Muerte for home.
Her father and Norrington, of course, were the two people aboard the Dauntless who wanted to be talking to her, and Elizabeth had no desire to explain herself or events. She knew it was churlish to find excuses to avoid them, but she needed space to think, and the ship was awfully cramped for such things.
She remembered the ship still from eight years ago, when she’d slipped her governess’s and father’s attentions time to time and slunk through the lower decks. She’d flattened herself against walls and into crevices to hide from oncoming crewmen, straining her ears to listen in on conversations not meant for little ears. As much as she’d hated leaving her mother’s family for the Atlantic crossing - the Spencers and the Marches were all she had left of her lost half, after all - she’d soon found the bright side and half-hoped each morning the ship would encounter dread pirates to satisfy her book-spun fantasies.
Elizabeth quirked the corner of her lips in a smile as she recalled her father’s repeated sighs, until she’d finally learned to keep her thoughts to herself like a proper young lady. So now, in the dead of night, she was “properly” pulling the oversized blue officer’s waistcoat up over her slender shoulders, covering the white of her shirt at least and part of her breeches, to be less easy to spot in the dark. She knew she couldn’t go up on deck to think, for there was always someone on watch, and she couldn’t think in here with her father’s small wheezing snore on the other side of the makeshift partition. Norrington’s men had strung up a rope across the width of his cabin and draped a clean sail to give father and daughter a little privacy from one another.
Quietly easing the cabin door open, Elizabeth slipped out, shut it, and moved from spot to spot across the deck as unobtrusively as possible, keeping an eye on the watchman. There wasn’t much attention paid to the deck itself, she noted, probably because an enemy was not likely to simply pop into existence near the mizzenmast.
She found the passage below decks and continued to move silently, past sleeping bodies and odd noises of men, until she’d reached as low as she could go. Nobody was here - it was a very short narrow passageway past iron bars, and when no harrumphs or snores met her, she released the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding in for so many days.
In a few months - probably a year, her calculating mind corrected, to give the old biddies in Port Royal proof she wasn’t trying to cover up a pirate bastard - she would be marrying Commodore James Norrington in a celebration of taste and society and propriety. She would be congratulated on making a smart match, he would be slapped on the back for obtaining such a beautiful young wife with powerful connections, and her father would be soaking up accolades for finding a suitable man to corral his headstrong daughter.
Elizabeth sighed; it wasn’t a fair thought to James, who had always been an honorable and decent man. He was terribly handsome, and if she had a lick of sense, she’d have been fantasizing over him in the middle of the afternoon when she lowered her embroidery and stared off into space. Instead, her thoughts always drifted elsewhere - open skies, open water, open mouth as she kissed another man, not much more than a boy, for whom she would have gladly tossed away all wedding gowns and crystal goblets and debts to rescuers to taste and accompany into the wild blue yonder of the wider world-
A decidedly male cough interrupted her musings, and with some horror, Elizabeth realized she’d been standing in the entry of the passageway, eyes closed, body slightly swaying, hands clasped in front of her. Frowning, she narrowed her eyes and sharpened her gaze, which had thankfully adjusted to the dark while closed.
“Would offer a shilling for your thoughts, darling,” the sloppy drawl informed her, “but I’ve a feelin’ that’d be a severe underpayment.”
She’d ended up down here where Jack was, draped through the bars of his cell, a little up on her left. She couldn’t see his face, but his insouciant frayed cuffs poking out through the cell door were unmistakable. “I just wanted a minute to myself,” she countered. “Trying to sort out all of that with Captain Barbossa and-”
Jack interrupted with a snort. “He’s no more captain than you’re the queen of Siam,” he pronounced, “though you both certainly act like it.”
“And the curse on him and his men,” she finished stubbornly, managing not to grit her teeth.
“That’s inaccurate,” he pronounced.
“Beg pardon?”
“You’re not thinkin’ of any such thing, ripe young strumpet like you. You’re thinkin’ of the shoulders on that Turner stripling, sure as me mum was a Carib native.”
“Was she?” Elizabeth knew how to deflect, having suffered through dozens and tens of tedious repasts with politicians. She stepped closer to the cell, until she and Jack were sizing up one another. Again.
“Can you prove she wasn’t?” He grinned. “Or was?”
“No more than you can prove the contents of my thoughts,” she countered.
His eyes dropped and surveyed her, in blatant interest. Her cheeks flushed, and she verbally flailed. “It occurs to me, Captain Sparrow, that you would not be so readily able to ascribe such thoughts to anyone else unless you were harboring them already.”
Jack appeared neither abashed nor abased. “Pretty face is a pretty face,” he murmured, dropping his eyes again. “Pair of strong legs is even better.”
Wearing breeches for the last week had made her aware anew of the whisper of her stride, like a child discovering their own body parts all in a single afternoon. Men had stared, and she’d mostly liked it - two days ago, she’d turned around to catch Will’s eyes down in the vicinity of her thighs, intent, before he realized he was no longer unobserved.
“You really don’t care what form they come in, then?”
Jack lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Wouldn’t say that.” He was silent a moment. “To what do I owe the grace of your presence, Miss Swann?”
“Did you not hear me? I came down here for some privacy and quiet,” she snapped, trying to change the subject.
“Bollycocks. No maid sneaks ‘way from her father’s eye in the middle of the night to have a philosophical moment.” His black-lined eyes challenged hers. “Why’re you standing here ‘cross from me instead of visiting young Will?”
“I’m simply out for some solitude.”
“So you came down to the brig.”
“I thought this section was empty.” As lies went, it might not send her to hell. Barbossa’s men had been imprisoned in the larger section, divided from this small section by another set of iron bars at the end of the short walkway. If she took several more steps and had a key to get through, she would see them again - but she really didn’t want to. They’d been imprisoned separately from Sparrow, she’d overheard James telling the governor, for his own safety, given their history of betrayal and animosity.
She wasn’t paying sufficient attention, and gasped when Jack’s hand wrapped around her wrist and yanked her closer. “Going to visit one of them?” She opened her mouth and he cut her off. “Plain old blacksmith not enough wallowing in th’ lower classes for you, now?”
“Let go of me,” she hissed, trying to pull her hand away. “Stop talking like that!”
“About your honor?” He eyed her closely.
She set her teeth. “About Will.”
Jack loosened his grip, but instead of holding her wrist, he trailed his finger up over her knuckles, lightly. “I’d advise you to get used to it, if you’re going to be a blacksmith’s bride.”
She dropped her arm and swallowed. “I’m marrying James.” Jack only watched her. “Will’s not interested in me, that way. We’re only friends.” She rubbed her wrist, still warm from Jack’s grip.
To her surprise, he reached for her hand again, this time wrapping his fingers loosely around hers. “I am truly sorry, Lizzie.”
Jack Sparrow’s concern was more alarming than his lecherousness. She tried to pull her hand back, but he tugged it through the bars, pulling her up against them. She remembered how she’d pretended interest to get him drunk enough to pass out and let her do what needed to be done - what he’d been unwilling or too aggrieved to think to do - and how it hadn’t really been so odious to sit with him in the sand, watching the waves roll in and out, and the leaping flickers of the flames warming them.
“I don’t need your ‘sorry,’” she repeated tightly, nostrils flaring in sudden distaste for manners. “I’m not being left to the wolves, Jack; I’m marrying the commodore of the fleet, and I’ll want for nothing.”
“And what do you need?” His voice was like gravel, trickling polished out of a length of silk into the cracks of this new awareness she’d gained in the past few weeks. She watched his tongue flick out to touch his lower lip, and a dangerous thought flashed through her - not for the first time, if she were honest.
“Something a pirate knows nothing about,” she whispered, dropping her voice. “Discretion.”
He shifted, bringing his other arm up to get through a large opening in the bars. Reaching behind her neck, he took away her choice and her denial and tipped his head, and she let him move her until they were kissing, hard and soft and needy. The taste of his mouth was a bit sour, but the stabs and slides of his tongue distracted her, and she learned to breathe through her nose anyway. She belatedly realized, a couple of minutes later, that his other hand had released hers and was inside her man’s shirt, callused thumb circling a nipple as knotty fingers curved to the flesh. ”Blacksmith’s hands; I know they’re rough,” was her only coherent thought. She would’ve protested immediately except that she flexed her fingers and realized they were hooked into the underside of Jack’s sash.
She broke the kiss, about to step back, and the hand on her breast moved quickly, further inside and around her bare back. “Shhh,” he soothed. “Not that bad, is it?”
“It’s- It’s not right.” She struggled without real intent. “It’s disloyal.” Interesting how you didn’t say “improper,” her conscience lazily admonished. “I’m engaged.”
Jack smiled, but it was wise, not merry. “No,” he informed her, “it’s not.” He pressed his hand to her back, about halfway up, roughly where he’d be covering her heart if it were on her chest instead. “This isn’t mine,” he observed, squeezing so that she realized he knew where he was touching after all. “Neither’re all your thoughts.” He kissed her again, slowly, tongue finding hers before he paused. “That’s why you’re here.” She returned his kiss, slowly understanding both him and herself. “Nothin’ not loyal about a maid takin’ her pleasure with a man she’s not in love with … if neither’ve any intent to keep doin’ it ‘til death do they part.”
“Jack-”
“Didn’t I tell you to hush?” His tone was playful, and he brought his hand back around, lightly pinching her breast. “Now, Lizzie … close your eyes, darling.”
Elizabeth complied, sinking against the bars into the kiss, into his hands, both working quickly and far too slowly for her. He didn’t speak, only making a small noise every so often as she writhed or gasped. She tried not to think, not to imagine anything beyond these sensations; the one time she looked up into midnight eyes, they shifted, phased so that two different shades of brown searched hers, flared with desire; it taught her to close up quickly and not examine what was happening too closely. Rough hands touched everything without shedding a scrap of clothing, fingers loosening and stroking and entering. She thought of broad shoulders and jingling baubles and soft brown waves and tattooed arms and soulful young eyes in silent love with her own, and shut those eyes even tighter.
Nothing not loyal about a maid taking her pleasure with a man she’s not in love with … Calluses rubbed her just the right way and she thought she’d faint with the pleasure, surely a hundred times better than her own small fingers, more effective on her in so many ways, and she had to bite her lower lip when the climax crested to keep from saying the wrong name, from crying out her regret at being too … honorable? (That’s a questionable luxury you’re claiming with a pirate’s fingers slick with your own quim, isn’t it?) to abandon the man who’d fulfilled his bargain to save her heart’s rival.
As she caught her breath, Elizabeth dimly realized she ought to reciprocate, but when she blindly dug her fingers further under the sash, Jack pulled his hand back inside the bars, wiped his fingers unceremoniously on said sash, and pushed hers gently away. “I haven’t taken a pity fuck since that wench when I was fourteen,” he pointed out. “You’re hardly gettin’ that distinction after all these years.”
Her eyes were still shut. “Well, that was foolish,” she finally said, feeling she needed to break the silence of harsh breathing.
To her surprise, he laughed aloud, muting it as she opened her eyes in surprise and some offense. “Are you laughing at me?” she demanded before she could think. “After that?”
“Lizzie, love, ‘twas hardly any declaration of vows or a heart’s promise.” He grinned, and she felt herself smiling in return. “Feel better?”
She shook her head - not in negation, but incomprehension at his ability to understand. “Why?”
“I may be a lazy pirate, but after our lengthy acquaintance, you’ve surely surmised ol’ Jack’s not averse to getting his hands dirty when th’ right job requires it.”
She moved back a couple of steps, conscious of the cool air on her heated skin, and ducked her head against her sudden grin, working at the buttons and placket. She wasn’t sure if she ought to be ashamed and forget this, or brazen and act as though she were world-wise enough to expect this kind of treatment and want it. While she struggled to decide, he spoke again. “If Mr. Turner only wishes to be your friend, I’ll give up my wicked ways and join the Franciscans forthwith.” She looked up, feeling more exposed than when he’d had his fingers inside her. He watched her steadily. “He’s a poor courter, but your suitor nonetheless.”
Elizabeth smoothed her clothes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Sparrow.” She angled her body toward the way she’d come, then turned her head to give him a sidelong look. “Only one man has asked my hand.”
He shook his head. “Come this time next week, I’ll either be food for the carrion or chasin’ the horizon,” he informed her. “You don’t strike me as the type t’ let one memory carry her through a lifetime. You will violate your own bond of loyalty, eventually - if you don’t take what you really want while you’re still callow enough to get away with it.”
She moved further away from the cell, toward the steps, trying to think of something clever to say. All that would come out, though, was, “I hope you’re not carrion.”
Jack’s wink and reply was the last thing she remembered when she tried to fall asleep later, thoughts of the unexpected pleasuring jumbled with another unknown tongue and pair of hands. “And I hope you know how to seize the opportune moment.”