A Gypsies' Ruse
Big white sail, red sunset
Lobster tail and don't forget
My, my, my - my key lime pie.
Not too tart, not too sweet
My baby loves to watch me eat
Her key lime pie
Her key lime pie.
-Key Lime Pie by Kenny Chesney-
Jack and Gibbs worked to get the ship stocked to the nines, ordering the crew with barrels and crates and livestock of all kinds for the whole of the afternoon. They traded bits of the treasure they'd found for supplies, and made good on past promises with certain merchants for interest. It was decided that a few of the men would stay aboard with their company and drink for the evening and watch after the stock-hold, and that in the morning, as dreadful a decision as it was, they would leave the Cove.
He hadn't wanted to do it, but Jack knew that staying any longer, at least for this trip, would be too much to bear when he finally was able to get away from Eva. She was slowly draining him of all fair thought, and he had to find his stability again, or try to anyway. He'd have her tonight, but anything more worried him.
They left the crew to mingle with the last of the supply of rum and cabbage, and Jack asked Gibbs to join him back at Teague's for dinner, hoping that having his first mate there to add interaction would make Eva's presence easier to deal with. It was a good plan, although he had a feeling it was really just for peace of mind rather than any actual, functioning safety.
Together they strolled through the town and back to Teague's.
"So wot's become o' the little impersonator then, Jack?" Gibbs asked with humor.
"She's learned t' fancy silk again."
The old man laughed heartily. "An' you've not taken advantage o' that, yet?"
"Ah, if a man but had the means t' keep that wild thing in check, mate…"
They joked about Eva for the rest of their walk, Jack warning Gibbs of the very intensity by which she had changed, and that he wouldn't go near her with a pistol even. Everything that spun from his lips was a fabrication to hold his status with his crew, and none of it meant a single thing in the scheme of his desire for her really. He just wasn't ready to be marked as a lost cause for her quite yet.
They made their way inside of the house a few minutes later and were pleasantly welcomed by the scent of burning herbs and spices that filtered around their hungry noses. Gibbs soon disappeared to find Teague, a close and old friend of his, but Jack quickly snatched back the tattering fabric of the kitchen curtain to see Elizabeth and Eva standing over a mess of cooking, jaws dropped at him.
He grinned when he saw Eva get up and come to the curtain.
"Oh, won't ye just make a lovely, little housewife for Mister Bryant."
Elizabeth rolled her eyes, knowing Eva would handle it. And she did.
"Perhaps I will." She grasped the curtains he held and scowled at him. "Thanks to you alone, Jack."
"Just doing my part t' intervene with nature, love."
"As am I this evening. Now if you'll please leave us women be for once in your life…" She shut the curtains in his face, slightly tempted by his twitching mustache and blackened eyes. But she went back to cooking with only spurring thoughts of him, as always.
Jack fell away from the curtain and kitchen wall, wandering off to find Gibbs and his father, but instead he ran into little Jack halfway down the hall. He took his hand and led him away to find the other men in the house, glancing back at the kitchen as he leaned in and whispered to the boy.
"I hope ye know better than t' fall for girls an' their tricks."
Little Jack just smiled up at him with a nod as they swayed together down the hall.
"Good lad."
Between the time that Jack had arrived back at the house and taken his mini protégé off to teach him the finer lessons of life and why the sea is so much more important than women, and the time in which the girls finished cooking, he had downed half a bottle of rum and lost half his mind. A combination that would have been better suited for any other evening but the one Eva had maneuvered against him; with or without his knowledge.
They brought each of the dishes out one by one, lobster and catfish cooked perfectly, all sorts of sweet vegetables and sauces, as well as three or four different bottles of wine. Jack and Teague held their respective seats at the heads of the table, while Gibbs sat to one side of Teague and little Jack to the other, and the girls each took their renewed places on either side of Jack, for all intensive purposes.
Jack couldn't keep his eyes off Eva, even though his plan had been to make his leaving easier. The scent of her jasmine soap filled his nose even more so than any of the food before him, and he had to force himself to breathe it away for concentration. He ate when everyone else did, indulging in the buttery rich lobster that melted against his tongue, and stuffing himself with as much fresh potatoes and greens as was possible. He filled his opposing hunger, the one for Evangeline, by jamming his stomach instead.
Eva and Elizabeth shared quick, unnoticed glances, preparing mentally for the main event to come. They joined the conversation that sparked between Teague and Gibbs about the stocking of the Pearl, but hadn't expected the news that eventually filtered from it.
"Will not your supplies and food spoil waiting on the ship?"
Gibbs turned to answer the girl who had once been Elijah to him, and smiled. "Not in one night, lass. Suppose Jack didn't mention yet, that we're leavin' come dawn."
Eva's eyes widened, moved to Teague's, then onto Elizabeth's who were wide and saddened the same, and finally she shot a single glance to Jack who had his mouth stuffed with catfish.
"No." She replied to Gibbs while still staring at Jack coldly. "He failed to reveal that point."
He swallowed the fish down hard, fearful of her glazed eyes, like the Caribbean sea in the midst of a hurricane. Eva turned away a second later to continue eating, while Gibbs went on about the details of their leave that he knew of.
"We're t' be sailin' south an' then east, cross to Mexico again."
Teague nodded as he watched Eva's face drop low over her face, "Mexico, eh? Treasure t' be had there?"
"No doubt, there's a might bit o' it left, mate."
"Fine pearls off the Mexican coast." He replied again, still focused on Eva's reaction.
Gibbs agreed but it went half unheard. Jack continued eating quietly, but nearly choked when he saw the look in his father's stormy eyes as he looked up from Eva to him. He'd only seen his father's eyes that shade of grey once before, the day his mother died.
But just as suddenly as the table had gone somber, he saw Eva's face flip up from her food and brighten as she gulped down her glass of wine ferociously. The main course of the meal came to a close thereafter, with Gibbs and Teague privately conversing, little Jack fighting imaginary enemies with the last of his peas and carrots, while Eva caught Elizabeth's eyes.
"Should we bring out dessert?" She asked with a wild smirk, one that had renewed her prior sadness.
Nodding with the same quirky smile, Lizzie rose from her chair as Jack watched them with sudden wariness. The two of them cleared the table carefully, letting the men's stomachs settle well enough before finally making it back to the kitchen to work on getting the claimed dessert.
Elizabeth lifted one of the pies, a blackberry one, and eyed Eva as she lifted the second, one of her own secret, family based recipes from the Caribbean islands; key lime. She had explained that it wasn't the pie itself that would prove entertainment for them, but what she had stuck inside of the regular recipe. A single ingredient that when consumed to a hearty proportion, the one she had planned for Jack, would do wonders. Unspeakable wonders.
"You're not going to kill him, are you?" Lizzie asked fearfully.
"Of course not. And if he does die from the effects of it, then his legend will be far more superior than it is even now."
Elizabeth shook her head and moved through the curtain handling the first, harmless pie, with Eva on her heels and a sinister glow on her face. Together they walked back to the dining hall, and while Elizabeth placed the blackberry pie to the end of the table where Teague, Gibbs and her son sat waiting with wide and excited eyes, Eva sauntered toward Jack's end. Their eyes were glued to one another, as he watched her come nearer, his gut jumping in striking, unusual horror, even for him.
She walked around to the back of his chair, letting her arm with the pie drape casually over his right shoulder as she held it up to his nose and let her face tuck neatly around his left shoulder to see.
"And this one…" she purred in his ear as he felt his eyes closing into his head, "…I made especially for you, Jack."
Teague, Gibbs and Elizabeth watched from the other end at the way Eva hung on Jack, and the way the pie seemed to be something unlike the other one, quite obviously. Little Jack was too concerned with covering his mouth in blackberry sauce to care much about any of it.
Eva sat the pie down in front of Jack and carefully cut him a slice. He looked at it, then studied her with vigor as she swept into her chair beside him, staring right back.
"Wot' kind is it?" He finally asked, lifting the fork to the plate.
"Key lime. An ancient recipe of my grandmother's."
He gulped a little, concerned only by the ancient bit. "A gypsy grandmother, perchance?"
Eva rolled her eyes and pushed the plate closer to him.
"Does it honestly matter?"
He hesitated for another moment, glancing from the pie to the pout she drew on her face.
"You're not going to eat the pie I worked so long to make…for you?"
She tangled him up in guilt, well weaved to do its job. Jack let her hook slide into him, "'Course I am."
And with that he let the fork cut down on the pointed end of the slice, and drew up a piece of the white and faint lime colored pie. Elizabeth's eyes focused on the scene from the other end of the table, as he moved the dessert into his mouth, letting a little crème dust his mustache, chewed slightly on the crust and swallowed it with a smile. He couldn't deny it was the best thing, other than rum or Eva, he'd ever tasted.
Eva moved her thumb up toward his mouth, wiping away the dollop of crème and then purposefully sucking it off in front of his face. He held her eyes as he watched her finger slide between her lips, feeling a pang of something deep inside of him, something that obviously wasn't going to cooperate with his mind's effort to remain unburned by Eva on this night. Instead he just gulped as she smiled before him, and filled his mouth with more pie, figuring food to be the only remedy against her advances.
"How did I do?" She asked with another whisper only he could hear.
Jack nodded fiercely, swallowed a bite and replied. "Delicious."
This made her proud, despite the effect she was waiting for, the one that she noticed coming along nicely only minutes later as his brow began to twitch and his lips curled with every new bite of the pie. His eyes faded darker, desperate looking and she grinned with fascination as she glanced back to see Elizabeth's wide eyes the same.
Jack felt odd, but in a way he couldn't explain as being anything more than completely enticed. His stomach began to warm itself from the inside out with every bit of the dessert that tumbled down into it, and the sensation of a rigid stir in him further below caught his attention.
Every time he looked at Eva and saw the deep-sea blue of her eyes shadowing his sight, he felt a rougher pinch in his breeches. At first he thought it was his mind alone, playing mad tricks on him to get her into bed at long last. But tasting the wild lime spice on his tongue and lips, he had the urge to only eat more of it before finally consuming her alone.
His pants grew tighter as he sat there, biting his lip against the unexpected burn and itch of his position, as he twisted his eyes and brow from one end of the table and room to the other. Teague looked at him with a strange eye, but Jack could only respond with a short wave of his hand. Gibbs too noticed something abruptly feral in Jack's eyes, but let it be what he imagined it was, the woman sitting so close to him, whispering in his ear from time to time.
Eva leaned closer in, snaring his black lit eyes in her net.
"Jack," she purred coolly against his fiery skin. "You look tired."
He felt many things, but tire wasn't one of them and he grew instantly suspicious of her untamed grin.
"Hasn't it been a long…hard, day for you?"
The hardness was there, but it merely throbbed at the seam of his pants with the way she spun her words to dizzy him. He felt himself spinning downward, ready to crash into an imaginary mountain or ocean the way she stared at him. He felt his hands grow firm on the edge of the table, ready to make a run for it, from the demons he felt covering him all over.
Eva opened her mouth once more and his grip was reaffirmed to capacity.
"Perhaps you should go and lay d--"
Jack jumped up from his chair in interruption of the request, tumbling backwards as he tripped over it and ran from the dining room to hide his tight pants from the crowd. Eva giggled, watching him stumble around almost half drunk and drawn to minimum control of his body elsewhere, as only she and Elizabeth knew. Little Jack laughed out loud at his Uncle's antics and Teague's brow crossed with the same scene.
"Eva," he stammered in wonder as she thrust her face back. "Ave' ye finally driven me boy to the brink of utter madness?"
She smiled, with a turn of her eyes to Elizabeth first, then back to Teague.
"I have no idea what his problem is."
Eva bit her lip and stood from her chair.
"Maybe I should go and check on him."
Elizabeth shook her head, knowing all too well of what the 'checking' would entail, while Teague waved her off with warning.
"Watch yerself if e's got a pistol with that head o' his."
With a short laugh she took off out of the dining room and down the long hallway. She could hear little Jack's incessant giggling all the way to big Jack's room, and it made her step liven itself into a skip as she fell right in front of the door. She pressed her ear against it for moment to hear the demanding patter of boots across the floor within, grinned to herself, and threw open the door to reveal exactly what she thought. Jack paced around, shaking his head in what looked like pain, until he looked up to see her there and stormed at her.
"You…" he growled, grabbing her waist and pinning her against the slammed door harshly.
She wasn't afraid, but something remotely close to it filled her as she stared up at him. His breath was hot and desperate all over her, as his hands pushed on the door harder beside her head.
"Wot' in damnation did you do t' me woman?!"
Eva said nothing and watched as his mouth watered and moved closer to hers out of both instinct and her cooking skills.
"Tell me what was in that pie, Eva…"
The way he groaned her name at last made her shiver under him, especially so when she felt his body press fully into her, and the tightness of his pants, the uncommonly tough hardness at that, grazed the leg of her dress.
"Limes." She replied innocently, frustrating him even more.
"Damnit, wot' else?"
"Eggs and milk…"
He pressed his forehead to hers, obviously in pain and distress down below, and asked one last time in a low, hushed desperation.
"Wot' did this…" he brushed his hardness further against her as she gasped for air "…t' me?"
She grinned wickedly and wrapped her arms around his waist, leaning up to whisper in his ear.
"Muira puama."
"Huh?"
"It's a plant native to South America. A sexual tonic…"
He growled against the itch he felt when she spoke of such a thing and turned her away from the door to walk her slowly backwards to the bed.
"Fix this now, you gypsy witch woman!"
"But Jack…" she teased, pulling him along by the waist of his pants and bringing her mouth to his "…nothing appears to be broken…" He felt her reach into his pants and draw her hand around the burning, unimaginably tight sizeable flesh. Jack moaned out as he fell breathlessly atop her in the bed.
Together, almost instantly, they slid further onto the mattress and into the mountain of sheets. Eva fumbled to pull away Jack's shirt as he worked with the ties of her short, bohemian dress. His nails dug into the flesh on her exposed thighs from under the skirt, trying to ignore the indescribable throbbing of his cock as he ground it into her.
"Hurry up!" He shouted as she laughed and untied his breeches to pull the swollen, angered shaft out.
Jack sighed heavily and fell harder against her. She gave him a moment to breathe while she traced along all of the twitching muscles and scars she felt on his smooth, burning back. He tried to ignore the way her trailing fingers felt, like a dream he'd had too many times.
"I've gotten my revenge. Now take yours, Jack." She whispered sweetly in his ear.
He drew up on his elbows over top of her, and slowly lifted her dress the rest of the way off. Her skin was like honey against his, melting every bit of exposed flesh that was already on fire. He widened her legs and pressed the head of his absurdly large cock against her wet heat. Eva's eyes rolled back as she bit her lip, expecting it to hurt just by the size of him she'd seen.
He let the pause cover her for moment as he suckled both of her breasts, and then when he felt her thighs press richly against his hips, he thrust long and deep within her, without any warning at all. Eva yelped at the intrusion of thick flesh, all of her natural barriers of pain broken down to nothing but instant pleasure, in a way she'd never experienced before with any man. Her fingers pinched the hard muscles in his arms as he worked his way even farther inside of her, holding her hips slightly off the bed for better entrance. He grunted when he found himself at a comfortable, but still burning fit inside.
"Eva…" he pleaded into her ear as she held him close.
"Jack."
"You're going t' be the death o' me."
She smirked and moved her lips up to whisper back in his ear, "Not tonight, I promise." And then with a buck of her hips higher towards his, he knew what she was after, and what he quite obviously needed done.
He positioned himself a little better and held her waist at the mattress as he slowly moved out to the tip, and then forced himself back within her, twice as hard as the first time. She slid on the bed with him, hooked completely around him, with her bare heels digging into his lower back and her arms weaved firmly through his long dreads.
His body stung as he moved in and out of her, thrusting for what felt like survival and kissing every bit of her exposed neck and breasts and face for the sheer joy of it. The combination of which, was something far more nightmarish than even death had been for him. Her hips rose to meet his every single time he drove inside of her, and it made him feel all the more complete with the burn that tingled from one inch of him to the oversized next.
Eva had never known anything more profound than Jack being inside of her, and it was something she had felt she knew from the moment she first, officially met him. It was like he was inside of her head, marking his territory upon her every desire and wish, and then acting them out along her body. When she begged for him to go faster in her mind, he did. When she thought of how much she wanted him to kiss her, he deepened the pace of his thrusts and held her face to consume her mouth with his scorching lips and tongue.
"Ahh…Jack…"
She panted for him and pulled on his hair, making him move even quicker.
"God Eva…"
He held her closer to him and shut his eyes against the urgency as she squeezed her thighs to his body harder. Jack held the back of her head and felt the rush of blood pumping inside of their bodies as everything began to clench down roughly around his sensitive and still pumping flesh. The more her nails ground into the skin on his arms and back, the closer he felt her coming to the blinking end of it all, and the smoother he made his movements into her.
He ran his fingers through her long hair across the bed, sliding in fluidly over her entire, perfectly formed, damp mold, until he reached down to rub at the throbbing sensation of her clit. Eva gasped desperately against his mouth as he felt her muscles instantly contract and pull his cock as far within her as they could. He felt the discharge of the most glorious heat he'd ever known washing over him. Eva released everything to him, screaming out his name in his ear, holding onto him for dear life as he propelled with a sting against her secret spot. He turned the pad of his thumb over her pulsing bud a time longer to ease her as he went on with his movements.
Jack whispered her name with two more powerful grunts, holding her up against him with the same determination as she clung to him, meeting his own match with relief a moment later. He filled her with his warm, sticky seed as she felt herself drowning in an imaginary ocean and fell back to the mattress under him. Jack too fell after a final groan, half on top of her with his arms spread wide across her body.
They lay there helpless for a few long minutes, catching a proper breathing pattern and reveling in the feel of each other's skin to theirs. Eva counted the cracks in the ceiling as the night slowly crept across it, and Jack found solace with his head turned from hers on the bed, in simply lying with his eyes shut. It wasn't until he felt her trying to wriggle away from under him, that he opened them and quickly flipped his face to hers.
"Done with me already, lass?"
Eva's eyes planted upon his teasingly. "Not unless you're done with me."
He moved to cover her body again, pinning her wrists down to the bed and sweeping his lips across hers as his quickly renewed hardness settled between her legs.
"Does that feel like m'done with ye?"
She shook her head with a low giggle.
"Say the word, an' I'm ready t' go again, darling."
"What's the word, Jack?"
He snatched her mouth in a quick, searing kiss only to draw back and whisper, "Freedom."
Eva smiled against his lips, biting down on the bottom one just to add to the madness already reeling inside of his head, and then released it to wickedly feed his word back to him.
"Freedom, then."
All rational count, of course, was lost in the matter. Jack swore until the end of his days that it was eleven times, while Eva insisted it couldn't have possibly been less than fifteen that first night together. The only thing they came to agree upon when they rested, was that it was the best either of them had known, which was complimentary both ways considering their closely matched histories in the matter.
They lay together backwards, with their heads at the foot of the bed, and their feet and legs tangled toward the headboard. They laughed and kissed for endless hours, making love in between the dozens of stories Jack delighted in telling her, the ones he'd brought all the way back to the Cove, just for her.
He had Eva wrapped up as deeply as he could keep her to him, with a sheet half draped across their midsections alone. Her eyes were turned from his, but it gave him perfect access to the groove of her neck and shoulder, where he made an invisible trail of kisses for what felt like a lifetime rolling by without them. Eva stared ahead, melting her back into an arch against his chest as she watched the stars blinking from between the curtains at the window. Her head was a rush of a million different questions, but she didn't know where to begin.
Luckily, Jack helped her unknowingly.
"So your fit o' vengeance…where did that spurn from I wonder?" He asked as he nibbled at her ear.
She sighed softly and weaved her fingers through his. "It was the result of your suspicious and uncanny knowledge of things."
"Wot' things?"
"Things; matters involving the hearts of cotton merchants."
"Do tell…" he purred with a husky laugh, leaning over to catch a corner spark of her blue eyes in the moonlight, "…what did Sir Bryant reveal to his island pet this afternoon?"
"He made very clear his intentions."
"Which are?"
She grumbled to begin, just hating the thought of the answer alone.
"He has dreamt plans of whisking me away to London, locking me in a fine tower of a house and allowing me to comfort myself with finery and screaming children. Nothing more."
The tone in Eva's voice stopped Jack from smiling at the prior teasing, and instead he let his chin fall to her shoulder as he listened intently to the pain he heard between words.
"He refuses to see to my being at sea, ever, fearing for my life more than he does my unhappiness; and all of this from a man who risks his own life travelling to and fro with sheep's hair for business, every month."
She huffed and pressed her hidden cheek harder onto Jack's arm beneath her, trying to stop the tears that she knew would come if she didn't catch them ahead of time. She felt Jack's body grow softer against hers, but he didn't move or waver from her at all.
"Did e' ask for your hand yet?"
She shook her head with a no, "But he will. Soon. I know it."
"Ye don't ave' to say yes, Eva."
"You sound like Lizzie."
He smirked and kissed her shoulder, "Smart woman, like I know you are. Ye ave' the choice."
"I do, but I've thought about it the whole of the evening, and have come to realize that I risk not only my own values with it."
"Wot' can you mean?"
"I mean…" she began, finally turning over in his arms as he held her cheek in his palm and stroked through her long curls, "…Daniel is a cotton merchant with an established trade here now. Shipwreck has never seen so much gold before, according to your father. If I refuse him, he will see fit to punish this place and its people, I know it. He's a man of the East India Company. I am aware of how they operate, Jack."
He sighed and brushed her cheek as he watched her dwell into pure exhaustion. Jack knew she was right, for he too understood how they operated, and he saw that she had thought about this seriously.
"I wish ye wouldn't discount your hopes for his aspirations of a proper family, though."
"What other choice do I have at this point?"
Of course, he had no answer for her. So she answered for him.
"There isn't one. Besides, you shouldn't worry about something you won't be here to see anyway. You'll be leaving again by morning and all else will be of little concern to the life you lead."
She hit him hard and quick with that one, and curled further into his arms without another word on the matter. Eva rested against him and eventually fell asleep, as deeply as he'd ever seen anyone fall asleep before. With the irony being, that he never shut his eyes the rest of the night. It was impossible to even try accomplishing such a thing, when his head was a mess of silent scheming and desperate thoughts of the girl, a woman who had finally done him in to a point of uncharted return.
