Under the Lash Page 9

  “Fifty strokes, Cassie. I’m sick of hearing that insulting undertone in your voice. I will not have it.”

  Her feet began to dance just at the thought of him bringing that horrible thing down on her backside, even just once! It was one of her least favorite implements – not that she really had a favorite. All of them were pretty horrid, especially in his more than capable hands, but some were worse than others, and this was one of the worst, right up there just below the quirt, in her estimation.

  “And you’re going to count them, every one, loud and clear, and say please with each number. And if you’re too slow in the count, I’m just going to start blistering away until you come to your senses and begin the count again.” Anjel moved towards her head, lifting her chin almost gently with his finger, so that she had to meet his eyes. “And you don’t want to even consider what will happen if you lose count all together, believe me.”

  When he’d reclaimed his former stance, well positioned as he was to deliver good, hard strokes, he said but one word. “Begin.”

  There were few instances when Cassie truly had a bone deep reluctance to say something, but this was definitely one of those. She did not want to begin the count, but feared his retribution even more if she didn’t. “One, please, Sir.”

  If she could have fallen to the floor she would have, but there was no place for her to go. The chair caught her at her upper midsection, and she was holding so tightly to the seat that she couldn’t feel her fingers.

  But she most certainly could feel her bum once that leather kissed it and set her to howling. She couldn’t really let her anguish out, though, because she had to ask for the next stroke before he decided she had taken too long to do so.

  “Two, please, Sir.”

  That one caught the descending swell of her cheeks, delivered almost as an uppercut expressly so it would land in exactly that area. Tears were already rolling down her cheek and onto the seat below her face.

  “Three, please, Sir.”

  He was relentless. “You’ll have to ask louder than that, Cassie, to avoid a second stroke.”

  Anjel placed two in a row in exactly the same spot, making her dance in place and give such a mournful cry that it was fit almost to crack his own impenetrable façade.

  But not quite.

  In all, he gave her more like sixty–five strokes, considering that her voice quickly became hoarse from her cries and therefore she was given two in a row many times because she wasn’t asking loudly enough for his tastes.

  And then there were the times that she took too long to ask, by his standard – whatever that was – and found herself on the receiving end of a flurry of vicious snaps that had her trying to cringe away from them as best she could while crying out the count at the same time through her tears.

  When he was through with her, he threw her onto the bed and mounted her, amazed as always to find her more than ready for him, and took her for the first time entirely for his own pleasure, trapping her wrists at her head and heaving himself into her, fucking her as hard and fast as he could, although it always seemed to him to be an alarmingly short amount of time, although, thankfully for his ego, that wasn’t something she would know to note.

  Just as he cried out and lost himself within her, there came a sharp rap at the door. “It’s Tommy, Sir. Swearengen in the crow’s nest spied a ship.”

  He was up and off her in a second, pulling up the pants he hadn’t even bothered to remove and out the door practically before she knew what was happening.

  But she did know one thing: in his haste to leave, he had not locked the door.

  Chapter Eight

  The first thing Cassie did when she realized that pertinent fact was get up and try to repair her dress – again – as best she could. It wasn’t really proper in the least, even when she finished with it, but it was the best she could do with what little she had.

  Then she looked around for something to use as a weapon, seeing and then immediately dismissing his hairbrush. She wasn’t going to be able to spank her way to safety. The only thing she could find was an old, dull knife in the top drawer of his dresser, but she tucked it into her chemise anyway. Something was better than nothing, and she had no idea what or who she was going to encounter when she went topside.

  Hell, she wasn’t even sure how to get topside, but she was going to make it there if it killed her, and it just might.

  The waiting was the worst thing, though. She couldn’t follow right out behind him; she’d end up right back where she was. So she had to wait for a while, until she thought he’d had sufficient time not to have been standing right outside the door ready to trap her in some elaborate ruse meant to earn her another lengthy punishment. But she could tell that something was definitely going on; she could hear the shouts from above, as well as multiple feet tromping loudly up and down stairs.

  When the tromping stopped, Cassie figured she might be more alone down here that usual, with everyone up top fighting to get aboard whatever hapless ship they had come across. She opened the door a sliver and peeked out, seeing that the hallway was completely empty. Cassie scurried out, closing the door carefully behind her so no one looking casually down here would see that it was open and send up an alarm.

  She saw a ladder at the end of the hallway, and put her foot on the bottom rung, but no sooner had she done that then she heard – and felt – several massive explosions in a row that knocked her back down onto her bottom. She got up as soon as the massive booms stopped and hauled herself up the ladder in record time, not wanting to be caught midway again when another big explosion happened.

  Once she was on deck, every sense she owned was violently assailed. There were deafening explosions to the left, right and front of her, the smell of gunpowder and death thick in her nostrils, and so much blood on the decks that her cheap shoes squished wetly with every tentative step she took.

  She could see that to one side there was another huge ship, at least the size of this one or even bigger, and it was what she – a landlubber – would have estimated to be dangerously close to them. But she also saw that the closeness was actually a good thing – if one was on the pirates’ side – because it allowed them to throw their grappling hooks and extend their gangplanks to the other ship to aid in boarding her, although Cassie could also hear the screams above her, as men with knives in their mouths who were also simply swinging across – from this ship and, she noted with alarm, from the other – on ropes.

  The gangplanks looked like a possibility at first, that was at least until she saw several men pushed, shot or just plain clumsily fall from them, and that didn’t include those who had them pulled right out from under them so that they dropped into what was surely shark infested waters below.

  And as she looked up at those crazy men flying above her on nothing but a thread of rope, a spot of red, white and blue caught her eye, and she saw the Union Jack flying high and proud – on the other ship. She found herself drawn towards it like a lodestone, until she was clinging to the side of the ship, trying to scream across the way at the men who were fighting for their lives and paying absolutely no attention to her, no matter how she jumped and waved and cried, completely ignoring the sounds of gunfire and blasts of cannon flying all around her. Nor did she acknowledge the clanking of sword against sword as the battled raged on right next to her, as well as in front of her.

  When she realized that nothing was going to help her achieve her goal, she began to cry while she berated herself for having done so, and turned away from the sight only to have her eyes land on the bodies of several British soldiers who were lying dead and wounded all over the deck – along with, of course, several pirates.

  Her first thought was that she should try to talk to one of the British men, but the first three she tried were already dead, and the rest were unconscious or unable to speak. She was rapidly beginning to think that she needed to do something to help the injured men rather than worrying about her own, seemingly hopele
ss situation. She wasn’t in imminent danger of dying, unlike everyone around her seemed to be. The last man she found in a British uniform died in her arms once she rolled him over, and considering the condition he was in, that was a blessing.

  The deck was littered with other men groaning and alternately crying for their mothers and cursing the British who had done this to them, looking for any kind of help they could get, the majority of whom seemed to be no older than she was. And no one seemed to be assisting them in the least.

  Still without any regard for her own safety, she dashed below decks and gathered everything in her arms that she could find that she thought might be of assistance and dashed back up, stopping at the first wounded man she found and reaching beneath her skirt to her slip, cutting and tearing it into bandaged sized strips. At first she was shy about lifting her skirts in front of a strange man, but then she realized that he was hardly in a position to be trying to see under her skirts.

  In fact the man was embarrassingly grateful for what little she could do, taking her hand before she left to move on to the next one and pressing a frankly revolting, bloody kiss on the back of it, blessing her repeatedly for her attentions.

  Cassie nodded and detached herself so that she could work on the next man. Some were just in need of bandaging, some were in need of splints which she found herself fashioning from whatever was handy, others were beyond hope but still alive and conscious. She stayed with those men as long as she could, seeing several of them off to their reward – or whatever such men thought there was in the afterlife – praying over and with others. She treated everyone she encountered, without thought to which side of the war they were on, discovering two British soldiers whom she had either missed or had fallen after she had arrived. They were both conscious, but were bad off enough that she didn’t think they would remember what she’d told them, and by the time she encountered a third she didn’t even bother to try to explain her situation, she simply treated him as best she could and moved on.

  It was an Englishman from Liverpool that she was hovering over when she felt a shadow fall over her, realizing with a start that all was quiet and the battle must’ve ended. She had no idea who won until she felt herself yanked rudely into a standing position by her upper arm then mashed uncomfortably up against the Captain.

  And if the look in his eyes was anything to judge by, he was not at all happy.

  “Take this prisoner to the brig.” He kicked carelessly at the young man’s leg. “Rabby, you and Mercer get the decks cleaned immediately.” She could barely recognize his voice. It seemed several octaves deeper and a whole lot louder when he was commanding his men. “I want everything ship–shape in minutes, men, because there’s going to be a flogging.”

  What little chatter that had sprung up in the aftermath of the battle died down immediately at that pronouncement, and everyone scrambled to do his bidding. Cassie was hauled unceremoniously back down to the cabin from whence she’d come, only to be thrown into it, followed closely by him as if he were a bloodhound on her scent.

  “How did you get out of my cabin?” he demanded, his nose practically butting up against hers as he bore down on her like the wrath of God.

  Cassie did her best to remain neutral, recognizing that showing him any kind of emotion would be like waving a red flag in front of a bull. “You left it open.”

  “I –” he began, set to explode all over her at the way she had carelessly risked her own safety. Then he quickly thought back to an hour or so before, when he had had to quickly take his leave of her. Damned if he hadn’t left it open.

  “Regardless, there was a bloody war going on up there! Whatever could have possessed you to set foot on deck?” he asked, already knowing the answer for himself but singularly unable to prevent himself from asking the question, wishing there could be a different reply.

  And he had to admire her. She wasn’t cringing, she wasn’t backing down, and she didn’t try to tell him a watered down version of the truth. “I was hoping I could find someone on the other side that would help me escape.”

  He had heard her screaming to the men on the British ship, obviously desperate to get someone to notice her. Anjel hadn’t been able to catch the specifics or even get to her, since he was trying to keep himself from being killed at the time, but he’d known as soon as he’d seen her on deck what she was trying to do. She had been a terrible distraction while he was fighting, but he tried to keep an eye on her – not really for her since there was little he could do to help her one way or the other – while dealing with several extremely skilled swordsmen on the other side who would have been delighted to see him dead.

  He’d seen her methodically go to each of the fallen Brits, seen her shoulders fall when she found what she thought was the last of her compatriots, and then watched her disappear below decks with a relieved sigh, only to feel his already incensed anger rise to epic proportions when she appeared again a few minutes later and began to minister to the first man she came to, which happened to be Little Sammy Hobart.

  Before he was able to make it back onto his own ship, she’d worked her way through the ones she could help – his crew and the Brits alike, doing what little she could. The Doc, who was none the less one of his best swordsmen, had begun following along after her as soon as the fighting had stopped, and Anjel had already told the man to come to him with his assessment of what she had done as soon as he could.

  Although he usually calmed down pretty quickly following a fight, as he stood in his cabin and looked her in the eye, the blood – fueled by rage – still barreled through his body at record speed, and he was amazed to find himself rock hard just from looking at her, or perhaps from the flood of heart–stopping relief he felt in realizing that she was all right.

  But he was not. He wasn’t hurt or injured in any way, but his mind was about to explode at what he knew he was going to have to do to her in a few minutes. As altruistic as her intentions might have been – eventually, when she realized that she wasn’t going to get any further in her plans for escape – in helping all of those men, one fact remained: she had aided and abetted about thirteen of the enemy. Some had survived, some hadn’t. But he couldn’t just ignore her behavior. If any other person on this ship had assisted a member of the crew of the ship they had just fought, it would be considered a traitorous act.

  And in all likelihood, he would lose his life for his efforts.

  Some ships were run in a more democratic fashion. He had been aboard several such vessels himself while working his way through the ranks, but he found their crews to be less cohesive and in general believed that they were pretty badly run. A ship – like a woman – needed a firm, undisputed master who consistently applied correction to those who broke the rules.

  He set the rules. He issued the punishments, or, at least, issued the orders for them. He only occasionally actually carried them out himself. But there was no voting about anything. His ship was not and never would be a democracy, for anyone on board, including Miss Cassie.

  In this case he would definitely be administering the punishment himself. And as much as he wanted not to have to do so in front of his crew, they had as much of a right to see justice done to her as they did to any other person on this ship, especially since what she had done could have cost any one of them – or all of them – their lives.

  Before he could take her to task for what she had done, though, he heard the Doc at the door, and he didn’t really think he wanted to hear what he was going to say as he stepped outside into the cramped hallway.

  “The truth is, Cap’n, that she helped everyone she could almost as well as I could. She made them comfortable, dressed their wounds, and comforted the dying...I can’t see any instances where she hurt more than she helped. In fact, she saved several of your men’s lives.”

  “Thanks, Bones.” The older man turned reluctantly away from him at his clipped response, and he could hear the captain slam the door shut behind him as he returned to the
deck and the last of his waiting patients.

  In his cabin, Anjel ran his hand through his sweaty hair. “Do you even know what you’ve done, Cassie?”

  She looked at him, obviously puzzled by his question, but very disturbed at his demeanor and growing somewhat frightened for herself. “I know I tried to escape, and you can’t be too happy about that, but you couldn’t have thought I wouldn’t avail myself of the opportunity to try to get away from you.” She snorted indelicately, but caught herself and cut it off, trying to remain more neutral, although her next sentence belied that effort, too. “I mean, Captain, Sir, that I think I would give my life not to be raped by you ever again.”

  He jerked back from her as if she had hauled off and slapped him squarely across the face, his expression dark and foreboding, and Cassie wondered if she was going to get herself punched for her candor.

  Instead, she watched the muscle in his jaw jumping furiously as he took a step towards her, returning, “I would think that one could hardly call it rape, especially considering how the entire ship rang with the sounds of your pleasure every time I brought you to it.”

  All of the color drained from Cassie’s face. She had never thought of how loud she was being, and on top of that she realized – if everyone heard her when he fondled and misused her, then they could also hear when he disciplined her, and she wasn’t sure which was worse! She would never be able to face any of them ever again.

  But just then they both heard a high pitched whistle. Cassie had no idea what the tones meant, but he did, of course, and seconds later she was being hauled back up to the deck behind him – bright faced and mortified by what they all must know about her; the Captain wasn’t taking that into consideration in the least. The men were assembled on the main deck, in front of the mast, in loose lines. Cassie hadn’t had the chance to get much of a look at it while she was up there, but she was pretty sure that the quirt he’d used on her before hadn’t been hanging off of the mast, as it was now.