Renegades, Rebels, and Rogues

All Shook Up-6

The rest of Eduard’s afternoon was spent storming around the house, raging at the servants who got in his way. Marien was right, of course—she was always right. As long as the original letter existed, their life in Java was in jeopardy. Kicking open the door that led out onto the veranda, Eduard strode the length of the house to lean on the railing and stared out at the horizon. Their land was situated on a higher ridge just outside the small port town of Anjer—through the trees, Eduard had a clear view of the shoreline a few miles away and, beyond that, the constantly churning waters of the ocean. In the center of his line of vision rose the hulking mountain the natives called Krakatao, a grumbling island they believed inhabited by the fiery god Orang Alijeh, the mysterious deity blamed for the earthquakes that shook the land.

A stretch of calm sea separated Krakatao from Java; through the swaying palm trees that hemmed in Eduard’s home, the waves winked golden with the setting sun. Anjer existed as only thatched roofs or clay shingles, bobbing masts of the ships in port, and thin wisps of smoke that curled to disappear like ghosts into the evening air. Closer to home, a few sturdy men worked in the last of the sunlight, harvesting cloves. Eduard watched their repetitive motions—they were his men, in his fields. This was his land now, his spice crop…

And his headache, most days, if he were honest.

He wasn’t a businessman by nature—in Holland, he was the second son of a gentleman, used to being waited on by servants who snickered when his wandering hands strayed to their breeches. Then his father had died, and his older brother tired of Eduard’s indiscretions. A small part of Eduard wondered if his brother hadn’t been the one to put the stable hand up to pressing charges, because Lord knew the boy had been all too willing in the hay. Even a hasty marriage couldn’t save his name. Though it had pained him to do it, he’d asked Marien to beg his brother for passage to the colonies of the South Pacific in the hopes of beginning all over again.

Little had he known the dark men from the heart of the island would enflame his senses and set his blood afire with lust.

Reza.

When they first met, Eduard knew seducing the young man would be easy. Though well traveled, Reza still had about him a naiveté that excited Eduard, a tentative touch here, a hesitation there, that spoke to his inexperience in the art of love and gave Eduard’s libido an egotistical boost. It was he who had taught the crewman where to kiss, where to touch, how to elicit the right response when they moved together. It seemed only fitting that the young man would return after all this time, hungry for more.

I’ve missed him, too.

The thought startled Eduard, but it came to him unbidden and he knew it to be true. He had missed Reza—the man had been his first, in a way—the first native he bedded. It was Reza’s dark skin he’d fallen in love with, the whorls of kinked black hair fisted at Reza’s crotch and covering his scalp, the irises the color of melted cocoa pooled in the whites of his eyes. The full lips, the low-hanging ballocks, the thick c**k whose base Eduard could barely encircle with both hands. The light tan flesh on Reza’s palms and the soles of his feet, the almost ebony tip of his d**k. Everything Eduard loved about the men of Java, he first found at sea, in Reza.

Perhaps he’d been searching for that ever since.

How many men had he been with since he’d come ashore, men he’d loved and left, men he’d felt unsatisfied with because their coloring was too pale, their lips too thin, their eyes too light? In his mind, he held each to an ideal they could never attain, and if Eduard closed his eyes to see that perfect man before him, wasn’t it Reza who swam into focus?

Maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t the end of his world after all. Maybe Reza’s return was the beginning of something for which Eduard had searched far too long.

He needed to retrieve that letter, if only to satisfy his wife. But what would happen then? What did he want to happen?

The thought of lying in Reza’s arms again, of tasting his kisses and feeling him move within him, made Eduard’s hands tremble. He had to clutch the railing to steady them and, even then, they continued to shake like the earth had hours before during the quake.