**Author's note: Thanks for the encouragement, to everyone who reviewed… even though some of it was forceful, it was motivating, to say the least.  I hope what follows lives up to your expectations.**

            She tentatively reached out a hand, eyes already on the skin she so desperately wanted to touch.  Spreading her palm flat, Amelia slipped her hand inside Jack's shirt, sliding her palm over the hot, smooth skin above his heart.

            He took in a short breath as though pained and laid his hand over hers, his eyes hooded.  "I've a bit of a demand, love.  If you start nattering about propriety at any point during this night's proceeding, I will toss you overboard."

            "I think this falls under something you didn't mention at all," Amelia said, fascinated with the race of his heart under her searching fingers.  "Inappropriately inappropriate."  She leaned down and kissed his hand that trapped her to him, catching the salt of the sea and the other flavors of his skin.  She was hesitant in her ministrations, though, moving her lips from his hand to his throat.  Every few seconds she would glance up at him to see his face, to find approval.  If there was anything Amelia hated, it was being ignorant. 

            She wanted to learn quickly and learn well.

            Tugging at his shirt, impatient with the obstruction, she finally managed to pull it over his head, her eyes fastened solidly on his torso.  She traced her fingertips over the whorls and lines of dark hair smattered over it, letting her hand follow the path down his lean stomach and to his waistband. 

            She could feel his heart racing, hear his breath catching, and marveled at the power of it.  What must it take to make a man so powerful tremble?  A man so cockily unafraid of everything?

            "Cowper shows only a few fundamental differences between men and women," she said, referring to her amateur studies into human anatomy.

            "I hardly think now's the time to lecture, love," Jack said in a strangled voice, straining against action, against grabbing her and doing everything that was racing through his mind.  He'd told her to touch at her will, and though it was enjoyable enough, it was going to the death of him.  He estimated it would only be a matter of minutes before the last drop of blood drained from his head into his lap and he died.

            Ignoring his protests, intent on her lesson, Amelia continued speaking.  "A difference here," she said, lowering her lips to his chest and pressing a kiss to his flat nipple.  "And here."  She was more apprehensive about this next move, her lips caught between her teeth.

            Anticipating her with a half-grin on his face, Jack caught her hand in his and urged it below his waist, though it cost him a great deal.  He was going to finish before he started, like an idiot boy, if she kept talking and touching.

            The color rose in her cheeks immediately as she pressed her palm against his arousal, feeling the heat searing through his clothing, the hardness straining against cloth.  "That," she managed in a stuttering voice, "Wasn't quite clear in the book."

            Unable to hold any longer, Jack put a hand to her back and dragged her to him, her hand still trapped between them as he lowered his head to the gaping neckline of her gown.  Beyond seduction, beyond silver-tongued words and playful innuendo, he closed his teeth over her collarbone, gasping when her hips drove up sharply.  "Found something to your taste, did I, love?" he asked in a mutter before sliding his tongue under the laced edge of the bodice and between her breasts.

            It felt, she thought wildly, as though every bit of heat in her was centered between her thighs, the muscles in her legs weak and shaking as he raised his hand to apply those long, clever fingers to her breasts.

            She latched a hand in his hair reflexively, feeling the ropes of it twine around her fingers.  One of his many ornaments dug into her palm, but the pain felt miles away, inconsequential compared to the heat flooding through her.  She pressed her other hand against his erection, closing her fingers around the weight of him. 

            Cursing, wide-eyed, Jack tore his mouth away from her and began removing what remained of his clothing.

            Smart girl that she was, she didn't need him to ask her to do the same.

            She'd thought he was beautiful, and she wasn't about to change her mind now that he was unclothed before her.  Covering her own nudity with one of the many lavish covers on his bed, she let her eyes travel the length of his body, the slim hips, the long muscles of his thighs, and she wondered how, precisely, a man got so tanned all over.

            Her wide-eyed assessment was cut short when he tugged the cover away from her, silencing her protests by nipping at her bottom lip with his teeth. 

            "I stopped at thirty-two," he said, lowering his mouth to each of her breasts in turn and stifling a groan as she writhed beneath him.  "But I see now there are just too many to count." 

            She supposed she shouldn't have been surprised he'd be able to talk, even in the midst of something so monumental. 

            "Jack," she gasped desperately, unable to form any other words.  She could feel him pressed against her thigh, but he wasn't moving anything but that ever-busy mouth.  Trying to relieve the heat, knowing what needed to happen, she tried to lever herself up to him.

            "Blasted woman thinks she has to have the run of everything," Jack said, raising his head and looking in her eyes.  "You'll have to trust me on this, love, I know what I'm doing."

            "You're killing me, is what you're doing," she said between gasps, tightening her fingers in his hair and making him wince.

            Sliding one hand gently beneath her head, he lowered his mouth once more.  This time, though, he slid his hand down her slickened body, trailing his fingers over the swell of her hip just before cupping his hand around her and sliding one finger into her heat and over the center of her.

            She surprised him.  Instead of screaming as the tide rolled through her, she arched up and rode through it silently, closing her eyes.  As it crested and ebbed, her eyes burst open and her breath came in great gasps. 

            Already, though, the tension was mounting again.  She kept one hand anchored in his hair and the other fisted in the fabric beneath her, her knuckles white from the strain.

            Jack kept his hand under her head, moving the other to slide possessively down the back of her thigh, lifting it slightly and bending her knee.  "Steady now, love," he whispered, his voice thick. 

            She nodded, her body still moving with the rocking within her.  She nodded, knowing it would hurt some, but more than ready for it.

            He entered her slowly, exercising the self-control he rarely called upon as she closed tightly around him.  He planned on slow, planned on sinuous.

            His plans were cast aside when she started making the little noises that had started driving him mad in the first place, panting gasps and moans that struck straight to the center of his brain.  She moved beneath him even as he tried to stay still, and he was soon lost in the insistent rhythm that seemed to come naturally between them.

            As she crashed for the second time, she formed his name with her lips, nearly inaudible.  Clenching his jaw, Jack looked in the warmed honey eyes and wordlessly let himself go.

~~~

            She should have felt guilty, Amelia reckoned, or at least ashamed.  But she simply felt satisfied, if a bit sinful, as Jack loosed his fingers from her leg and eased himself to her side.  As he withdrew from her, she winced a bit.  Soreness was already starting to set in.

            "Well, then, I'd say it must have been either amazingly amazing or terribly terrible to have silenced Amelia Hamilton so effectively," he said easily, but he'd seen her wince.  Pain enough she'd had already, and though the pain he'd given her was unavoidable, he couldn't help but feel a bit chagrined.

            What was she supposed to say?  That tenderness had been a rarity in her life, that she was grateful?  That she didn't want to move?  "The former," she said quietly.  

            Only a fool could lie next to a beautiful woman without touching her.  Jack propped himself on his elbow, running his hand down the length of her side, from throat to hip.  "You've hardly eaten," he stated. 

            "I'm sorry," she said, unable to keep the bite out of her voice.  "I'll fodder myself, if 'tis your pleasure, then."

            Laughing, he swung both legs over the side of the bed and looked over his shoulder at her.  "It's more my pleasure, milady, to hear you prepare to descend upon me like a pack of screeching Harpies."  Turning his back to her, unabashed in his nudity, he took a flask of water from the small, hewn table in the corner and wet a handkerchief with it.  He'd drawn her blood and didn't intend to leave it marking her. 

            When he turned to hand the cloth to her, however, he stopped.

            Amelia held his book, the only part of Johnny Sparrow left, turning it over in her hands. 

            "I wanted to ask you about this… days ago, after you locked me in here."  She kept her eyes on his, waiting for the anger, the disappointment, but instead he just stared at her, wet handkerchief poised in his hand.  He looked amused, but not surprised.  "I looked through your things," she confessed. 

            "I know," he retorted, crossing to the bed.  "Just a tip from a marauder to a maiden, love, when you sort through a man's things, lest you want him to know, you should be very particular about where you replace things."  He tossed her the rag as he sat on the bed, watching her carefully.  "Though I've a confession of my own, I would have known anyway."  He squinted one eye and tapped on his head.  "I'm terribly clever."  She sat down the book but held the cloth as though unsure of what to do with it.

            "Could you…"  Humiliation coloring her cheeks, she gestured for him to turn around.

            Rolling his eyes, he did as he was asked, grabbing the book as he did so.  It was so easy to hear his father's voice then, to remember opening the brown paper the book had been wrapped in, to feel the "thank you" to his father perched on his lips.

            She was the only one who knew, the only one he'd told, and so as Jack Sparrow held his past in his hands, he prepared to tell the rest of it to the only woman he'd ever watched awaken.