Samurai Captive Read online

  She shrank back against the carriage box, her fingers clawing at the thatched top. Suddenly, the samurai before her began to shout and brandish their weapons. She saw a white man cut down, and another, and then they came after her.

  Hannah’s screams roused the attention of half the small town.

  “Kill the whore and be done with her!” Masato shouted as Sanada dismounted and darted to the rear of the group.

  Katsu barely heard his friend’s voice, for his own berated him within his mind. Of course this place would affect her. It was where she’d almost died. “Hannah-chan, stop!” he called. She turned to gape in horror at him, her screams still coming. She clutched her throat, and when he reached out to touch her she fell at his feet in a faint.

  The feel of a cool cloth rubbing across her face brought Hannah back to consciousness. “I’m sorry for acting like a…” The words died on her lips when the world came clearly into focus and she saw that some unknown serving woman was tending to her. What an arse she was to think that Sanada-san would stoop so low as to nurse a bloody gaijin, one that he was taking to go whore for him.

  She sat up and dismissed the startled servant girl with an angry wave. “Go on! Get outta here, you!”

  Hannah got to her feet and strode to the door of the small room and down the narrow second floor corridor. If Sanada-san thought he could turn her out to do his bidding, he was sadly mistaken. What a blinkin’ little fool she’d been to not want to leave him. It wasn’t as if he really gave a flying fig about her. He only cared about what she could do for him in and out of the ruddy bedroom.

  He met her at the front entrance of the inn. Planting herself firmly, Hannah put her hands on her hips and pointed. “Look, you. I don’t care if you ‘bought’ me from that ‘ouse in Edo. They had no right sellin’ me, and we both know it. So if you think ‑‑”

  Before she could finish, the tall samurai seized her about the waist and yanked her out the door and toward the side. She tottered backward and fell on her rump when he set her down roughly and drew his sword at a man who charged out of the inn, long knife in hand and murder in his eyes.

  “How dare you protect her! Because of her and her kind, my father died. They shot him when they came to reclaim their dead. She should have been one of them!” The man lunged to the side to try and get at Hannah. Sanada hit his wrist with the flat of his blade, sending the knife flying and the man to his knees in pain.

  Masato appeared, barking orders for the onlookers to go about their business. He picked up the attacker’s knife then hauled the man up by the back of his kimono.

  “Let him go,” Sanada said wearily before resheathing his sword and helping Hannah to her feet. That final kind gesture brought a scowl to Masato’s lips, and he growled out something Hannah didn’t understand. She didn’t need to know the words to know that it didn’t set too well with Sanada-san. “Go back to the room,” he told her.

  With her would-be assassin still giving her murderous looks as he was taken away, Hannah didn’t feel much like arguing just now, so she went.

  After entering the room, she took her skirt and bodice off and laid them across the futon mattress she’d been placed upon earlier. She was kneeling upon the floor, cleaning the dust off the garments from where she’d fallen, when Sanada let himself in.

  “Were you injured?”

  Hannah looked over her shoulder and shook her head.” I’m all right, just wanting to clean up a bit.” She turned back to her task, conscious of his dark stare upon her.

  She didn’t hear him move, but suddenly, he was beside her, his large rough palm sliding along her shoulder, his strong fingers brushing the side of her neck.

  “Don’t,” she said, shrugging his hand away.

  He seized her wrist, pulled her to her feet, and took her mouth in a hard kiss, his lips devouring hers and his tongue thrusting out to capture hers while his hand moved from her hip upward to possessively cup and squeeze her breast.

  Hannah hated the way her body responded and became so hot, so wet with just this simple contact. But most of all Hannah hated the sadness she felt at the thought of leaving him even though she knew she wasn’t very important to him, certainly not in a way that counted.

  She pulled back from the hungry kisses and looked into the glorious, dark eyes of her samurai captor, then fell to her knees and began to slip the swords from his waist. He clamped his hand atop hers, and she looked up. “I ain’t gonna try nothing. I don’t wanna hurt you. I just…I just want you, once more.”

  Though the sound of her foreign words grated on his ears, the sweetness of Hannah-chan’s voice slid over him, tugging away his natural suspicions. He slid his weapons free and set them upon the floor while his little tigress settled back on her heels and looked up at him, her green eyes full of smoldering desire, her large breasts rising and falling with each quick breath she took, her nipples peaked and dusky through the thin fabric of her undergarment.

  He continued to gaze down at her when she undid the complicated knot that fastened the long waist ties of his hakama. He let it fall to the floor, the silk rustling softly as it slid into a pile at his feet. Katsu sucked in his breath when Hannah ran her hands beneath the hem of his kimono to caress the taut muscles of his thighs, then leaned in to press her lips against his growing erection beneath the layers of kimono and fundoshi.

  With the barest hint of a smile, Hannah rose and moved behind him to undo the simple knot of his thin obi, dropping it to join his hakama. She hugged him from behind, her small hands rubbing down the front of him, parting the edges of his kimono. He bit back the groan of pleasure when she smoothed her hands over his confined cock. She kissed his back, then came back to face him, her gaze locked upon his as she knelt before him once more.

  For a woman who insisted she was no whore, Hannah-chan certainly knew how to drive a man to madness with her touches and the way she slid her tongue up and down his still confined cock. A sound escaped Katsu when she licked his thigh and snaked the tip of her hot tongue beneath the edge of his loincloth.

  A delightful shiver ran down his spine when she slipped her thin fingers into the side of the fundoshi and slowly loosened it enough to gently pull his cock free.

  Hannah glanced up at Sanada-san and wanted more than anything to beg him to fuck her, but she knew that would make it all the harder for her foolish heart to let him go. Instead, she turned her attention back to the rigid shaft before her. The thick head of his cock pushed through the skin covering it as he grew harder with each leisurely stroke of her tongue.

  She teased the tiny opening, drawing out the drop of salty fluid that beaded there before planting a kiss upon the tip, and inhaled the samurai’s musky, masculine scent as she slipped her mouth over him, her tongue caressing the thick vein along the underside of his cock. Her cunny was damn near dripping, and she rocked back and forth in time with the sensual pulsing of her inner flesh, remembering how wonderfully wanton she felt the night he had her fuck herself with the scabbard of his dagger.

  She rocked quicker, sucked Sanada harder, until he exploded into her mouth. She swallowed his seed quickly, as if she were able to capture a piece of him and hold it deep within her once he turned her away in Yokohama. But her sad longing didn’t have a chance to take a firm hold, for the samurai gripped her shoulders, pulled her to her feet, and kissed her hard, his right hand tugging up her petticoat, his thick fingers sliding between her thighs to push into her through the open crotch of her underdrawers.

  It didn’t take but a minute of him diddling her before she was coming so hard she had to clutch at his strong shoulders to keep from collapsing. She hated him pulling his hand free, but another wave shot through her when he traced her lips with his wet fingertips then licked his fingers clean.

  Hannah expected him to kiss her, to hold her to…anything with her, but he didn’t. He simply gave her a little nudge then got himself back together and slipped his weapons back into his waistband before turning to the door. “Dress.
We leave in a few minutes.”

  Hannah dressed then went down to the main room of the inn, looking here and there, making sure no one else jumped out at her to take revenge for whatever had happened here after that awful day with Richardson. Sanada-san’s friend approached and bustled her to a small table in a corner where a bowl of rice and a cup of tea waited for her. “Hurry. We’re already late because of you.”

  Neither Sanada-san nor his grouchy friend came to tell Hannah when it was time to go. Instead, they sent one of the lower level samurai in the party to fetch her and see that she was tucked neatly inside the carriage box before setting off.

  All the time Hannah was isolated in the Yoshiwara brothel she’d dreamed of getting away and getting back to the type of civilization she knew. If not London proper then at least Yokohama, but now, her stomach knotted as she looked through the small palanquin window at the gates of the guarded causeway heralding the bustling port.

  It wasn’t so much the fact that she’d be away from the stoic samurai who stirred her in ways no man ever had. It was more ‑‑ a touch of fear maybe that whatever he wanted her to do might end in disaster and death.

  Chapter Seven

  Hannah smiled when she caught sight of the sign that proclaimed the newspaper offices of the Japan Gazette. The sign was so large, so grand, that it damn near overshadowed the building it was tacked onto. She’d seen sturdier looking storage sheds back in Whitechapel.

  Hannah quickly averted her gaze when they passed the newspaper office because she wasn’t in any mood to look at the Japanese meat shop just past it. A queasy feeling took hold of her every time she had to pass the place. Oh, the sight of plucked and seasoned poultry strung up by their necks or monstrous little sea creatures in wood tubs didn’t bother her none, but she just couldn’t stomach the sight of those little skinned monkeys the Japanese bloke who owned the place insisted on hanging whole over his front counter.

  The first time she’d seen them she thought these people were a bunch of ruddy cannibals, and she damn near dove into the bay to make a swim for home and real civilization. Much later, once she managed to befriend his daughter who was trying to learn English, she found out the butcher had a wicked sense of humor and mostly displayed the monkeys to upset the Westerners.

  Well, here we go, Hannah told herself when the traveling party started heading up to the high ground of “the bluff” where the wealthiest merchants built their fine homes.

  “This is madness,” Masato muttered under his breath as they neared the wide clapboard residence of the merchant Burroughs. Clearly, they were expected from the way the gaijin of the area lined up along with armed military closest to the merchant’s house.

  “I know what I’m doing. We will not discuss it further,” Katsu told him in no uncertain terms.

  He and Masato moved ahead of the lower retainers to rein in their horses at the head of the party and to the right of the residence’s decorative iron gates. The carriage bearers brought up the palanquin and set it down, then assisted Hannah-chan in exiting.

  Katsu took a certain amount of satisfaction in the look of surprise upon the white men’s faces when they saw Hannah and especially the fine clothing he’d procured in a gesture of goodwill to show that many in high places valued good relations between themselves and their new foreign neighbors.

  Hannah-chan gave her employer the odd bobbing bow that her women did when meeting their betters. “I’m ever so glad to be back, sir.”

  “You have been replaced,” the moustached Burroughs said flatly. “By a local woman. I have no need of you now.”

  Hannah-chan whipped her head around to give Katsu a questioning look, but he pretended not to notice. Things were exactly as he wished them to be, and he let the Dutch scholar who often gathered information for him act as his interpreter.

  “Sanada-san respectfully wishes you to take this woman as a show of good relations between your people and his master, Prince Narimatsu. As you can see, the woman has been nursed back to health and treated exceptionally well as a favored daughter would be.”

  The interpreter ignored Hannah’s cough and muttered apologies of “Somethin’ in me throat, sorry.”

  Burroughs, however, stood fast. “I do not require her services, especially after she has been in a brothel doing who knows what with half of Edo.”

  “Hey, now!” Hannah broke in. “I didn’t do nothin’ with no one in that place. I didn’t want to be there. I ain’t nobody’s whore.”

  Burroughs cleared his throat. “I can see that they haven’t dampened your spirit, Hannah. However, I simply no longer need your services. You are free to go where you please.”

  Hannah glared back to Katsu, but he refused to acknowledge her.

  “Now, look here,” she said, turning back to her former employer. “I done good work for you, you said so yerself how many times. Who was it that caught the tea merchant trying to fill the bottom of your tin with the cheap stuff when your back was turned? Who was it that found out about them blokes and how they planned to ruin that nice raw silk shipment of yours with sand after you paid the top price for it? And who exactly knows which clerk at Freeman’s to sweet talk into getting that mustard and French capers you so enjoyed last Christmas?”

  Burroughs smoothed down the edges of his moustache. “You do have your sterling qualities, Hannah dear, however ‑‑”

  “I’ll take her on, Georgie.”

  A sandy-haired man who’d been watching from the upper window of his own home across the way swaggered past Katsu and Masato to address the stoic Burroughs.

  “I can afford to hire on a housekeeper now, and I do believe that your Hannah is just the one for me. I don’t quite trust the natives who run some of the shops.”

  Hannah tried not to roll her eyes. Oh, God, not Gabriel “Grabby” Grayson. She didn’t want any part of working for him. Then again, it didn’t look like she had much choice about it now, especially since Burroughs was in the street chucking her out without so much as a one line character reference.

  She looked back to Sanada-san as the interpreter filled him in, though she wondered what this was all about since his English seemed pretty damned fine. Hey, now, was that a gleam in those dark eyes of his?

  Sanada-san gave the Dutchman a curt nod, removed a small paper-wrapped packet from the sleeve of his haori, and handed it to the interpreter, who stepped up to Hannah and pressed the packet into her palm.

  Hannah narrowed her eyes and gave the man a questioning look. She’d spent enough time with stealthy pickpockets and street card cheats back home in Whitechapel to notice the way he slipped another little paper under the packet just before handing it over. “What’s all this, then?”

  “Oh behalf of Prince Narimatsu, Sanada-san wishes you to accept this small gift of money to replace any belongings of yours that were damaged due to the unfortunate misunderstanding with Mr. Richardson at Namamugi.”

  “Gift of money. Sure,” she said before tucking the packets inside her bodice. She turned to the samurai and gave them a deep curtsey as fine as any the queen herself had ever gotten. “Thank you ever so much for bringing me home and for all of your kindness these past days.”

  Hannah kept her attention upon her samurai as the interpreter repeated what she’d said. Without a word or a look her way, Sanada-san and his friend tugged the reins of their horses and led their entourage away.

  * * * * *

  “This was a complete waste of time and money,” Masato grumbled a short time later when they passed through the city gates and headed their party on to Kanagawa where they’d spend the night. “Do you think that woman will do your bidding now that she’s back with her own kind? How can you be sure she won’t tell that Grayson what your plans are?”

  Katsu let the questions fade away in to the late afternoon breeze until later when he and Masato were in a private room at the Kinmata Inn finishing their evening meal. “Hannah-chan will do as I say because I tell her to. Didn’t Burroughs and Grays
on do exactly as I said they would?”

  Masato snorted and tossed back a cup of warm sake. “You were lucky they happened to do as you hoped they would, that’s all.”

  “It was planning, not luck, and you know it,” Katsu answered before finishing his own drink and waving off the refill Masato began to pour.

  Masato chuckled and slid a little closer to his lifelong friend. He reached out to run his hand along Katsu’s thigh, toying with two wrinkles in the fine silk of the hakama down near the hem. “You had to drop your pants and fuck her one last time before we left Namamugi, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t,” Katsu told him before brushing the touch away. But I wish I had, his heart whispered before he stood and went out to walk the length of the engawa.

  * * * * *

  Hannah had been able to talk Grayson into letting her hurry to the shops before they closed to get herself some clothes to work in since Burroughs had so coldly chucked hers, assuming she’d been killed and dumped in some marsh by the Japanese.

  She bought herself a brand new black dress, white collar and cuffs, and a linen cap and apron to use for serving any high class folk Grayson might cart home. She considered buying some spare tickets from the little playhouse run by the Japanese bloke who dressed up in ladies’ clothes for his little performances. After all, the way folks was gawking at her everywhere she went, she felt that she ought to make a profit from her sudden notoriety.

  They stopped their gossiping as soon as Hannah drew near enough to hear, but she decided that her miraculous escape from a gruesome death was probably taking second place to lurid speculations on just what went on with her at that whorehouse in the Yoshiwara district.