"Mmm ..." emitted the naked man, unconscious by the fire. A sort of hoarse complaint or grunt, she could not tell which demons might assail him in his sleep.
Raquel knew he would look for her until he found her. Rough diamonds are not mere little stones that are misplaced and forgotten. Finding them, when she was dethroning the boat that had recently arrived at Ponta Delgada, she had felt that things would not go smoothly.
When he had found her, emerging as a ghost behind her, only her reflexes had saved her, only the inside of her forearm had been cut by the curved blade of the assailant, over almost its entire length, through the leather of her garment.
Before she could disappear into the black waters by jumping overboard, when she hit him with her whole body to make him fall before he could hit again, besides his tanned skin covered with a beard and the deep scar that barred his left eye, she saw black marks on the base of his neck. They reminded her of the tribal designs of warriors and sorcerers on their body, in New Caledonia or in Africa.
She knew then that she would see him again.
He had swam at dusk until the creek the next day, guided by whatever witchcraft he might have known, and found her lair; a deep natural crevice dug into the rock over time by the tides, lined with smooth stones and sand strewn with pieces of branches that strong winds tore from the trees planted at the top of the cliff, and in which she hid with her booty after a theft a little too daring, the time to be forgotten.
It was when he was exploring the place, apparently inhabited by the still smoking embers, the clothes lying around, the containers and other jars that piled up along the walls, that she had put him to sleep, injecting him in the neck with a sting dipped into a poison of her composition, sneaking behind him under cover of the roar of a wave against the rocks.
"Mm ... Aaargh," he grumbled loudly again, wiggling his head and blinking.
The moment he remembered where he was supposed to be, he straightened, carrying his hand to the base of his neck where he had been stung, and looked around him briskly, until he set his eyes on her.
Curled up against a wall, only lit by the fire that separated them, she watched him with curiosity, her head resting against her legs, which she held back with her arms, folded against her chest. A mass of messy brown hair fell on both sides of her face, on her knees and along her bare legs. Around her ankles the skin was streaked, smoother and slightly shiny, like scars. A long, dark stain lay gently on the bottom of the gray fabric of the garment that hung from one of her arms.
"... Why am I naked?" He asked in a rocky voice, his distrustful gaze wavering between her and the wide traces of dried blood that covered his chest and thighs.
Her eyes fixed an indistinct point in front of her for a few moments. She was thinking back to those marks on his skin that she had run through with her eyes and hands, all over his body as the evening got darker, taking off the clothes that hid them and spreading the blood along the way which was oozing from her arm wound.
The face laid on his skin, she had redrawn the contours, gently passing her fingers on his chest and his belly, down on the groin, near his sex, and then on the legs, following also the motives of ink and scarifications on his arms and on his back. She still could feel the roughness of his skin and scars on her cheek, the firmness of the muscles under the flesh and then, the finer and smoother texture, as burnt, of the tattoos under the pulp of her fingers.
He smelled of sea, sand and powder. In this man, everything exhaled strength and danger, for others and for himself, just as his face, hard and marked, despite its undeniable beauty. The fire that burned beside them, casting their waving shadows on the wall, did not match the heat that emanated from him and almost consumed her if she had not voluntarily put an end to her exploration.
"I wanted to see ..." she answered in a low voice, after the shiver on her skin had gone, her face still half hidden behind her knees, "... I've never seen anyone like you." In her murmur, James Delaney perceived a foreign accent; similar to that of the Portuguese inhabiting the Azores Islands, but her phrasing was impeccable unlike the latter.
"Like me ..." he grumbled.
"A white warrior" she whispered, barely perceptible behind the crackling wood in the flames.
James stared at her for a moment, trying to guess her intentions. In appearance she looked like a fragile little thing in that position, with her low voice and her big innocent eyes, but she had managed to get the upper hand on him twice already.
"Why didn't you kill me?" he questioned, pulling his cross-legged legs and resting his arms on his knees, exposing his body without the slightest modesty.
She raised her head, revealing a slight smirk and fine smooth features, though less juvenile than he would have thought.
"You seemed to me more interesting alive ... and whole." She said, narrowing her eyes.
"Mm ... the only thing that interests me here are my diamonds." He said with fake disdain.
"There is nothing like that here, only stones ..." she said as she got up. James found that she had no other clothing than a simple shirt too big for her, which fell to her thighs and hung on her arms; his shirt.
Her tapered legs bore other marks in addition to those on her ankles, still scars but which formed a design on the top of her knees, a series of parallel lines like tribal marks engraved on the skin. She went to a pot along the wall and then, after searching inside, threw what she had just taken in the direction of James who seized it on the fly, "...and flesh."
He inspected the object; a piece of dried meat, before ostensibly throwing it into the fire.
"Give me back my things." He growled.
"All right, but before you have to fix what you did to me." She said, lifting the shirt sleeve up to her elbow, exposing the long bloody wound that was spilling over the fabric.
"Here" she added, without waiting for an answer, throwing him a small box containing wire, a small pair of scissors and a curved needle that some doctor had been imprudent enough to leave within reach during his stay. "I'd do it myself, but ... it's my bad hand," she said, waving her left hand in front of her.
"That's all I want. Then you can get what you want." She affirmed after a few seconds of silence.
She was bold, and it was impossible for him to know if she was trustworthy. But there did not seem to be any way to escape so easily from the place and she could have hidden the diamonds anywhere. He had little choice for the moment, if not to force her physically but she had aroused his curiosity, he had never crossed a white savage either.
After a few minutes staring at her suspiciously, he gave a brief grunt. According to his expression, annoyed and resigned at once, she took it for a yes. She picked up a leather bottle on the floor before coming closer and sitting cross-legged in front of him, putting their knees in contact.
Opening the container while James was busy threading through the eye of the needle with a scowl, she took a long sip before stretching her injured arm and placing it on their joined knees, shedding blood in passing, still flowing from the cut. The back of her hand brushed James' ribs that flinched slightly at the touch.
James looked up at her, his eyes narrowed as he nodded slightly, realizing how he must have been covered with blood during his unconsciousness. She replied with a smirk, ostentatiously provocative, before leaning the gourd over her arm and pouring a little on his wound.
She gave a sort of faint, taking long breaths when the clear liquid touched the open wound, diluting the blood that escaped and dripping on their legs. At the smell, James knew it was rum. "I do not propose to you, I would not want you to miss me" she said, bringing the gourd back to her mouth.
At this remark he sneered softly. "I've never reattached before, with or without rum the result will be the same, it will not be pretty."
"Do your worst, warrior, you are everything I have for now." she replied with a smile.
James grabbed her wrist and held her arm firmly against him. Lowering his face, he aimed at the end of the cut and gently inserted the needle into the flesh. He heard her hold her breath. Then he pushed the needle under the skin, forming an arc until the end came out the other side of the slot. She still did not breathe.
After that, he pulled in a slow and continuous motion, raising the needle above the arm, watching the thread progress and slowly staining inside the bloody wound, until reaching the end that he retained by a pressure of his thumb against the skin. The edges of the wound curled in line with the movement of the stretched thread, and Raquel let out a guttural throaty sigh.
James looked up at her. Her face turned to her bruised arm, her eyes scrutinizing the slightest movement that the fingers of James made; she expressed a mixture of pain and delight, biting her lower lip, her chest rising regularly to the rhythm of her deep breaths.
She seemed to enjoy more than apprehending the pain, and the feverish glare she gave him, James could not ignore the sudden contracture in his lower abdomen, feeling his cock stiffen between his legs.
"You're doing well ..." she lustfully sighed. "What is your name?"
To divert his attention, and hers, with small talk suddenly seemed to him a good idea. He might be able to shake off the idea that what they were doing was actually a kind of vicious foreplay.
"James Delaney," he replied a little hurriedly, before cutting the thread, leaving the cut edges of the skin back to their position. "What is yours?"
She watched him carefully bend the ends of the wire with the chisel to tie them over the slot, bringing the reddish edges closer to the cut until they touched and folded inward. Satisfied, she replied "Raquel Navalheiros", voluntarily pronouncing her name in Portuguese.
"You're from here?" He continued.
"No, from the mainland," she replied before drinking another swig of rum, referring to Portugal. "And you're an Englishman, aren't you? You made a long detour on the way, it seems ... " she said, pointing the marks on his chest with her head.
"Yes ... I was in Africa ..." he said, suddenly absent. "I have business to settle, back in the country." He added finally, more somberly.
"I would have guessed. The kind of pebbles that you carry around can come only from there…just like these brands, by the way."
"And how would you know that?" he retorted, suddenly slightly aggressive.
"Keep going and I'll tell you," she said slowly with a smirk, waving her arm still held firmly in his hand.
He gave her a suspicious look before settling down to plant the needle in the flesh again, less softly than the first time. This time she snatched a sonorous deep whine, but she did not blame him, still captivated by the operation he was performing, not formulating a word until he finished the knot.
Stopping a second time, James looked at her again, his erection now gone, supplanted by the mistrust she had aroused. She seemed to know too much about his whereabouts for his liking. She looked at him with a sincerely interrogative air.
"Answer and I'm going on" he ordered. She looked at him suddenly with the same delight in her eyes as when she was watching the seam on her skin.
"You know how to talk to women, James Delaney ..." she said, moistening her lips.