"Now behave yerself," Black growled. He untied her hands from behind her and rubbed the raw spots a moment. Freedom! Her first instinct was to struggle, but she quelled it. He'd only tie her again. She'd wait 'til he left, then she'd remove that awful sack from her head and figure out where she was.

He took her hand and snapped it into a cold, steel bracelet.

"What is that? What are you doing?" Her arm suddenly stretched out against her will, pulled by the bracelet around her wrist. She reached for it with her other hand, but he slapped it away.

"Now, don't be starting any of that. I'd have ye alive and possessing all yer parts when I ride ye."

She panicked. He took her other wrist, and she yanked it out of his hands and pushed away from him as hard as she could. She scrabbled backward over the lumpy mattress, but he grabbed a hold of her wrist and dragged her back toward him, then snapped the second shackle onto it. Both her arms rose up to shoulder height as he drew upon something, a chain, clinking and rattling upon itself, and secured it somehow that she couldn't see. Bedposts?

She tugged, sitting up on her knees on the smelly straw mattress, with her arms outstretched to her sides, but to no avail. He'd cross-tied her as surely as a horse in a stall.

"Let me go," she said, trying to steady the quaver in her voice. "I've done nothing to you."

"Not yet," he said. "After ye do, an' I like it well enough, then we'll see." He gave the tie on her arm a tug to test its hold. "If not, maybe Davy Jones hisself will have better luck with ye." He laughed roughly, his voice coarse and unforgiving. "Now quiet yerself, before I gag ye. There's only one sound I like to hear from a woman, and it ain't her naggin'."

"Please. I can pay you. Whatever it is that you gave that man to bring me here, I can pay you double. Triple! You can buy three women with that! That's certainly a fair bargain, is it not?"

"Aye, if it were gold I be after."

Something touched her arm—his finger? It ran up to her shoulder, then down to circle the décolletage of her gown. It lingered over the soft skin just above her cleavage, toyed with the lace edging, rasped against her skin. He grabbed her embroidered fichu and pulled the ends out of the front of her dress, then unwound it from around her neck, leaving her neckline exposed.

"I've got me plenty of gold," he said. The lace end of the scarf grazed across the exposed décolletage. "What I want is warm, willing womanflesh heaving beneath me bones."