Master of Seduction by Kinley MacGregor Page A

and—”
    Impulsively, she placed her fingertip to his lips to silence him before he made his boast once more. “Shall we make this more interesting?” she asked, thinking that an added incentive might be just what she needed to keep both of them at bay. “How about a wager?”
    He took her hand in his and lightly stroked the small buttons at her wrist. “A wager? I thought women profaned wagers.”
    Lorelei resisted the urge to close her eyes and savor the gentleness of his touch, which was sending out waves and waves of pleasure to her. “And men adore them.”
    “Well then, let’s hear this wager of yours.”
    She dropped her gaze to his well-manicured thumb, which was now tracing small circles in her palm. His dark tan stood out sharply from the white kidskin and she noted a pale scar that ran along the top of his knuckles. “Should I win and you fall in love with me, you will cease being a pirate.”
    He dropped her hand with a short laugh. “That’s hardly fair.”
    Looking up, she locked gazes. “Wagers seldom are.”
    “Very well, I agree.” He thoughtfully stroked his chin as if considering something of great import. When he finally looked back at her, she had an eerie chill of premonition. “Now for your consequences. If I win, you will refuse to marry Justin.”
    She frowned at his request and at the underlying tone she caught in his voice. “Why does my engagement to Justin bother you so?”
    His face stoic, he answered rather snidely. “It doesn’t bother me at all.”
    “Doesn’t it?”
    He veiled his gaze. “It’s simply a wager, Lorelei. You asked for something preposterous and I asked for something preposterous in return.”
    “If you say so,” she said, but still she had a sense that there was more to it than he let on.
    “I do.” And with that he took himself off to his end of the table.
    Once he was seated and had his linen napkin folded properly in his lap, he rang a small brass bell and two of his crewmen appeared to serve them. The pirates had attempted to dress themselves up in navy jackets and breeches, but one of them still wore a red bandana about his head and large gold hoops in his ears. The other was a bald man of about twenty with a rugged look to his face and two missing front teeth.
    “Would ya be liking some rum sauce for the chicken, Captain?” the bald man asked in a thick Cockney accent.
    “It’s duck, Kirk. And yes, thank you, I would like some sauce for it.”
    Kirk scraped the ladle across the bottom of the dish, raising the hair on the back of Lorelei’s neck. He dumped the sauce over the captain’s food, then smacked it twice with the ladle for good measure. “Duck, chicken, don’t see much difference meself. It’s all for the gullet in the end. Why, when I was a lad, we was lucky to have cabbage soup, much less anything as fancy as all this here.”
    “The captain don’t care to hear your woes,” the other sailor inserted. “Blimey, Kirk, can’t you see the man is trying to impress the lady, and here you go off about cabbage soup and gullets. Where’s your mind, man? Use it for something other than—”
    “Tommy,” the captain interrupted. “Kirk, we thank you for your service, but I believe silence might be in your best interest.”
    “Ach, now ya done gone and done it,” Kirk muttered as he dumped more sauce over Lorelei’s duck. “We’ll be swabbing the decks tomorrow for sure.”
    “Me?” Tommy asked in a huff as he poured the wine in Lorelei’s cup. “I wasn’t the one—”
    “That will be enough, men.”
    The two sailors glared at each other while they finished their various duties.
    Lorelei waited patiently while they were served. The captain appeared as grand and noble as the highest, most well-born dignitary she’d ever seen, and she began to wonder if he’d been honest with her about his background. Surely the types of people one typically found in a bordello hadn’t possessed the refinement of breeding the pirate