The Windflower

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Authors: Laura London
Tags: Fiction, General, Erótica, Romance, Historical, Regency
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whether he cared for her so deeply or whether he was worried about how he'd explain things to their father if anything happened to her. Even under the blight of that cynical thought she missed him, and she wasn't likely to see him again, or Sally and Jason either, until Sally's wedding, which would be next June, war permitting.
    Merry had worked and reworked the sketches Carl wanted, and the results had pleased him. She had been able to draw not only the traitor but the man he had been with—the pirate John Farley, whom Rand Morgan had come to the Musket and Muskrat "only to frighten," which, Carl had told her later, had included cutting off the little finger on each of his hands. She had drawn Morgan as well, and the boy called Cat, although not without a lingering, superstitious fear that the act might make them materialize before her. Carl had sent the sketches to the Secretary of the Navy, William Jones, for use at his discretion.
    The only face she could not draw well was that of the blond man who had hidden her from the other pirates. Each sketch she made was wrong in one way or another. No matter how hard she tried to capture them, his tantalizing features remained memorable in their effect on her, elusive in their reproduction. It was difficult to draw such a beautiful face; her hand seemed to rebel against that unnatural perfection. Or perhaps some secret avenue of her mind had closed him off and shut away the sweet pain of remembered passion. It had all become less real to her with the waning of the month; the spying, the seacoast tavern, the pirates, and Devon . Hot and sticky September filtered in, bringing moments when she even asked herself if his kiss had been another fantasy like those her imagination had made for her in the past.
    And as the days of September began to lessen and the night at the seacoast grew further away it became less real as well, gathering to itself the arabesque curlicues of legend. She would play the evening through in her mind like a playwright working on a script, and give it different endings and plot twists: She salvaged her pride with fierce resistance; she resourcefully captured the pirates single-handedly. Then there was the one ending she couldn't acknowledge. It had come to her in a dream of scruples abandoned and fear tossed away, a dream of submission and resultant joy, her senses reeling with the warm, sweet scent of his skin, his golden hair like silk under her fingertips. There was something in the power, the energy, the intelligence of this man that made him different, the way gold is from copper, and diamonds from glass chips. Anything he chose to do, he could have done well; why had he chosen to do it with Rand Morgan? Quick riches had been Carl's guess, for Devon wasn't a man who seemed likely to be content with little. But there, how quickly one could fill with speculation the vacuum of the pirate's background and identity. He was a man who would remain a mystery, and the secret would likely die with him on the blood-slicked deck of a burning ship.
    Life had waxed more complex. Merry would sit by the duck pond in a clump of ferns watching the water beetles scud between the lily pads and think about the secret people she had discovered hiding inside her, the whimpering child who had appeared at her first taste of real terror, and the woman learning desire in the arms of a pirate. Surely she must exorcise them both.
    Her home was safe and as rich in pretty domesticity as it was sterile in challenges to the soul; it was as though she were living in the clean, pink interior of a moon shell. The months passed in fluid order, filled with precious detail and suppressed longing. And Merry tried to let the pleasing minutiae of her days blot the gloss from her newly awakened senses.
    Autumn was warm, wet, and golden; the mosquitoes were intolerable. To repel them, each night until the first frost Merry slept with brown sugar burning on coals in a chafing dish near her bed and

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