Fortune Trilogy 1 - Fortune's Mistress (12 page)

He bent and kissed the crown of her head, then pulled free and moved away, the tension in his shoulders telling her that he was uneasy with this unaccustomed show of sentiment.

A ripple of pride washed through Lacy as she watched him turn toward the stern and stand motionless, staring off into the sunrise. Naked, dirty, and bloodstained, James Black was the equal of any man she’d ever seen, highborn or rogue. He carried himself like a prince, and he was as courageous as a cornered badger. She moistened her lips and sighed, trying to remember that she couldn’t let herself fall in love with this black-eyed devil. He’d break her heart, if she let him. Shatter her heart and soul ... and never look back.

Lacy straightened her shoulders and let the weariness fall away. There were things that needed doing, and she was never one to put off hard tasks. The sun was up far enough now for her to see the pirate’s open sloop lying at anchor a few hundred feet away. “That’s what they came on,” she said.

“Looks like it,” he replied.

The boat was a sorry-looking craft with one ragged sail and a leaking hull. Lacy went forward and stood on the raised cabin to get a better look.

She caught her breath, not daring to believe what she’d heard.

“Harry! Harry!” she cried. There, clinging upside down to the anchor line, was the tomcat, wet and pitiful-looking. “Poor Harry.” She ran to the bowsprit and began to pull in the rope, hand over hand. When the cat was close enough to reach, she grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him to safety. “Poor thing,” she crooned.

Harry allowed himself to be fussed over for thirty seconds, then wiggled free and shook himself. With a final meow, he dropped on his haunches and began to lick his fur dry.

“Look, Harry’s safe,” Lacy said to James.

He shook his head and peered down into the cuddy at the dead bodies. “Couldn’t you have gotten those two up on deck before you killed them?” he asked wryly. “Now, I’ve got to carry them back up.”

“Next time, I’ll try to remember that.”

 

They anchored that moonlit night on the western side of a tiny island with a white sand beach and swaying palms. They’d sailed hard all that day, trying to put as many miles between them and the scene of the attack as possible. They’d bathed away the blood from their bodies and scrubbed the boards of the
Silkie
spotless. Now, Lacy decided, she must erase the stains of violence from her memory.

James stripped off his shirt and breeches and carried Lacy ashore. She was wearing nothing but the shift he had bought for her in the Canaries, soaked clean with salt water and bleached as white as snow by the hot, tropical sun.

Lacy’s mood was strangely pensive. She’d spoken little to James all day. Between them, an air of tension had developed since the moments of closeness after the battle. It was an uneasiness so taut that she was hesitant to disturb it with mundane conversation. She knew that James had sensed the agitation too, and he had gone out of his way to avoid touching her ... as though such a casual intimacy would ignite a blazing conflagration that neither of them could put out.

Now, she was in James’s arms with her breasts pressed tightly against his muscular chest. She could feel the warmth of his body through the thin linen of her garment, and she wondered if he could feel the rapid beating of her heart. She looked up at his rugged face in the moonlight. Most of his features were in shadow, but the water reflected the lunar glow in his dark eyes.

The scents and sounds of this island paradise filled her with a dreamy languidness. The ocean breeze playing through the leaves of the trees, the keen smells of unfamiliar flowers and foliage, the rhythmic swish of waves against the shore, all lent a dreamlike quality to the evening. Even the manner in which day gave over to night in the Caribbean seemed magical to her. One moment it was bright, and the next moment darkness descended like a cloak over the aqua water and the enchanted islands.

James stopped and lowered her to the warm sand. Trembling with anticipation, she opened her eyes wide and held up her arms to him. He didn’t hesitate. Whispering her name, he bent down his head and kissed her.

His mouth was a flame. It scorched her flesh and set the glowing coals she’d kept banked through the day flaring into white-hot desire. She moaned deep in her throat and arched her aching body against his. Her nails raked his skin as his hot, thrusting tongue filled her with intense yearning.

His hands stroked her body, pushing her shift up over her hips and bare midriff, lifting it still higher so that he could tease her hardened nipples with his velvet tongue. He slipped it off over her head and tossed it onto the beach, and she lay naked in the moonlight before him.

As proud and as naked as he was.

“Lacy.”

Her name was a caress on his lips, as natural as the warm, soft waves that washed over her feet and ankles to bathe her calves to the knees.

“James.” His face glowed with a pearly luminosity in the tropical moonlight. With her fingertips, she could feel the rippling of his sleek muscles under his bronzed, silken skin, and the promise of his strength and virility thrilled her.

He knelt beside her, lightly tracing the contours of her belly and hips with the palms of his hands. Cupping her left breast in his warm hand, he leaned forward to take the nipple gently between his lips and suckle it until she squirmed with ecstasy. “You are so beautiful, Lacy,” he murmured. “So beautiful.”

His damp, sweet kisses trailed a path to her navel and then back up to her right breast with tantalizing slowness. He took that swollen nipple in his mouth and she groaned with pleasure, letting her hand stray to touch the source of his own ardor.

James drew in his breath sharply as she stroked the length of him with feather-light, inquisitive fingers. “Witch,” he groaned.

Her exploration continued, and she marveled at the throbbing power of his enormous shaft. He strained against her hand, whispering provocative suggestions into her ear. She laughed and rose to her knees, pushing him back against the sand.

He tasted of salt.

“Lacy.” He gasped her name as his fingers dug into the damp sand.

“Shall I do this?”

“Oh, God.”

“And this?”

“Woman . . .” He trembled beneath her touch.

“Who are you really?”

“You’d use torture on a man?”

She caressed the base of his tumescent rod with her lips, then brushed his damp skin with the tip of her tongue. “Who are you, James?”

She felt him tense before he lunged at her. Laughing, she sprang away and ran splashing into the surf. He caught her before she had gone two arms’ lengths. His mouth covered hers as he half-lifted her out of the water and pulled her down against him.

He filled her with one deep, driving thrust. She cried out his name over the dark water as she locked her ankles around his waist and met him stroke for stroke. Tremors of rapture flowed upward from her loins, seeping through flesh and bone, and making her feel as though the earth had fallen away and left them floating on a sweet cloud of utter joy.

Still, James did not stop. He drove his impassioned love into her over and over again until her desire quickened once more, hotter and wilder than the first time. His cries blended with hers as they reached the edge together and knew complete and perfect release.

Slowly, breathlessly, soaked with sweat, James sank into the waist-deep water, still holding her ... holding her as though she was the most precious thing in the world to him. “I do love you,” he whispered hoarsely. “I love you more than any living thing I’ve ever known.” He kissed her tenderly. “More than I’ll ever love anyone again.”

She did not speak. She sighed and held him tightly against her breast, holding the precious moment as long as she could, and locking it away in the depths of her heart to comfort her in the lonely nights she knew would come.

S
ix days and several hundred miles later, Lacy stood on the deck of the
Silkie
and gazed at a small green island. By her reckoning, it was somewhere around the middle of December, and this was the piece of land they’d sailed thousands of miles across open ocean to reach.

Sheer limestone cliffs rose out of the sea, the rugged surface gouged by a millennium of wind and water. Here and there, a hardy tree clung stubbornly to the rock, but for the most part, the expanse of stone gleamed raw-white in the bright sunlight. Beyond the rim, verdant jungle ran uphill over jagged terrain to twin mountaintops. The peaks were bare, but the rest of what she could see was a tumble of palm trees and craggy outcrops.

“There’s a narrow beach on the western side,” James explained. “We can make our camp there. The island’s uninhabited, or at least it was when I was last here. Hundreds of years ago, it was some kind of a holy place for the Arawak Indians, but they’re mostly dead now, and no one else will live here. The land’s too rough for sugarcane, and the blackamoors and the Indians won’t set foot on the place. They claim it’s haunted.”

“Can we find fresh water there?” she asked, still staring at the tiny, exotic paradise. Flocks of seabirds circled overhead crying and squawking, and fish leaped out of the cerulean water. The greens of the forest were so many and vivid that they almost hurt her eyes.

“As much as you want. There’s a waterfall and a deep pool at the foot of it. The source of the water is up there.” He pointed at the mountain peaks. “It’s cold and clear, the sweetest I’ve ever tasted.”

“You’re certain the treasure’s buried on Arawak Island?” She tore her gaze away from the limestone cliffs and looked at James. “Ye’d best know exactly where it’s hidden. We could spend a lifetime digging there and not find it.”

James pursed his lips and looked slightly embarrassed. “The treasure’s not exactly on the island,” he said.

Lacy’s cinnamon-brown eyes darkened in anger. “Where—exactly—is it?” Her lips thinned in a hard line, and she tensed, tightly knotted fists resting on her hips in a defiant stance. “Where’s the treasure, James?”

He took a deep breath and pointed to the surface of the water. “Down there. Morgan learned we’d stolen some of the gold he’d meant to keep for himself and he sent a British man-of-war after us. It blew a hole you could drive an ox through in the
Miranda’
s port side. She went down in just minutes and took most of the crew with her. The treasure’s still in the captain’s cabin, and I expect it’s resting on the sea floor.”

Blanching so white that her freckles stood out, Lacy swung a balled fist at him. “Ye lied to me! Ye swore the treasure was on Arawak. We can just go and dig it up, ye said!” She struck him hard in the chest, her Cornwall accent thickening in her rage.

He caught her wrists and held her struggling at arm’s length. “No, I didn’t. You assumed it was on Arawak. It’s here, all right. We just have to dive down and pick it up.” .

“Ye bloody dog-swivin’ liar!” Her bare foot connected with his knee. “Ye lied to me!”

“Stop it!” he demanded, shaking her roughly. “Stop this.”

She was breathing hard, trembling with the urge to hit him so solidly that his brains would ring until Easter. “Damn ye to a cold hell!” she spat. “Ye tricked me, ye worthless blackguard! Ye knew I thought the gold was where we could put our hands on it.”

“And we can,” he said, cautiously releasing his tight hold on her wrists. “We can. If it was on land, don’t you think someone else would have gotten to it by now? Down there ...” He gestured toward the sea. “Down there it’s safe.”

“How deep?”

A muscle worked along his jawline. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “But you can see how close we are to the cliffs. It can’t be more than—”

“Where are the masts?” she interrupted. “If the ship lies below us, where are the masts? This water is clear enough to see—”

“The masts were blown away. It was night. We fought a running battle with the man-of-war along the coast here.” He indicated a point of rock jutting out into the sea. “There’s a reef there. We missed it, but—”

“Ye fought a running battle,” she mimicked. “Certain ye did. And your father’s the bloody king of Spain. If a man-of-war was after ye, ye ran like scared dogs.”

He shrugged and grinned. “Well, maybe it was more running than fighting. But we went down here, off the cliffs. It was a full moon. I know this place, Lacy. I’ll remember it as long as I draw breath.”

She swore softly and went to fetch the lead line. “We’ll see how deep this ship of yours lies—if there ever was a ship,” she muttered, glowering at him.

How could she have been such a fool? she mused as she lowered the weight over the side. She’d believed a stranger’s story of priceless treasure and she’d risked everything to get it. She’d fallen for his silken words. Lain with him like a common whore! Nearly lost her heart to him! And for what? More lies. More tall tales.

Her hands were trembling with anger and disappointment as she dropped the line, hand over hand. The marks on the rope stood out, black against the clear blue water. Twenty feet, thirty, forty, fifty. God in heaven! She could still see most of the rope. Sixty feet.

Lacy gripped the thick hemp between her hands and raised her eyes to meet his worried gaze. “Sixty-five feet,” she murmured. “Not deep. No, not deep. Seventy.”

At seventy-three feet the lead struck bottom. Lacy caught her lower lip between her teeth and wondered if even she could dive so deep.

James was stripping of his shirt. “I’ll go down and take a look around,” he said. “I’m a strong swimmer. There’s bound to be sign of the
Miranda.
If not here, at least nearby.”

“You’re a diver, then?” she asked cynically. “Ye’ve dived these depths before?”

“No,” he admitted, pulling down his breeches, “but my wind’s good. If I find the
Miranda,
I’ll find a way to get that gold up. You can be certain of that.”

“Seventy-three feet,” she said. “I’d like to see the man who can go that deep and come back up.” An icy chill ran down her spine. Seventy-three feet. At home in Cornwall, she’d been surer of herself in salt water than on land. But seventy-three feet? She shook her head as James dived over the side. “You’ll never do it,” she whispered into the wind. “Never.”

 

Lacy’s urgent denial drifted high over the blue water to the British Island of Jamaica. There, on a sugar plantation, her thoughts came to a man who had waited and watched for her for days beyond counting. And when Lacy’s words did come, they were so faint that Kutii wondered if he had dreamed them.

For weeks, the cool winds from the Jamaican mountains had failed to blow, and the plantation sweltered under unaccustomed December heat. Still, the stagnant air was thick with the scent of ginger lilies and cedar, and the ever-present sickly-sweet smell of boiling sugar. In the fields, gangs of black slaves chanted as they toiled relentlessly in the merciless sun while bare-breasted women fed the flames beneath the huge copper kettles.

Half-grown boys carried the cut cane to the mill in bundles where a thin, aging blackamoor with missing fingers fed the cane into the crusher. The power for the mill was provided by a single slave, a tall, blindfolded Indian with a scarred back and long, tangled blue-black hair—the man who was awaiting Lacy’s coming.

Hour after hour, day after day, the Indian Kutii plodded in a circle, pushing the monstrous stone wheel with sinewy arms, wearing a track into the hard-packed clay floor with his bare callused feet.

“Schweinhund!”
The German overseer Dieterich cracked a crocodile-hide whip over the Indian’s head, letting the lead tip flick in warning against his neck. “Throw your shoulders into it,” Dieterich bellowed. “Push.”

Kutii let the German’s tirade wash over him like smoke from the boiling kettles. The blows of the cruel whip no longer caused him pain. Kutii’s muscular legs rose and fell, his shoulders flexed against the log that activated the sugar wheel, his fingers opened and closed. All those things his physical body did automatically. His mind soared like a condor, high above the mountains, seeking the flame-haired white woman his spirit messengers had told him must come.

In Incan lore there was a tale, told father to son for time out of time ... a wondrous story of a star traveler. This woman—and woman she was—was not like any mortal female. She was beautiful to look at—so beautiful that any man who laid eyes on her would never forget her. Her skin was as white as snow on the sacred peak of Acomani Mountain, her hair was fiery red-gold as sunrise over Machu Picchu, and her eyes were the rich brown of the Island of the Sun that rose out of Lake Titicaca.

This star traveler had many marvelous powers. She could swim under the sea and speak to the fish and the dolphins; she could fly; and she could heal a man’s wounds by touching them. But the greatest of all her attributes was that she had the ability to look into the future and see what would come to pass. On her distant star, all women possessed this gift, but here in the land of the Incas, it was a special power—so special that the Incan emperor wanted the secret for himself.

So the legend went, this evil emperor had the star woman imprisoned in a deep mountain cave where no sunlight could ever fall. The beautiful woman languished there for a year and a day, but she would not give her power to the emperor. Because she was a child of the heavens and the sun and moon could no longer shine on her face, she sickened and began to die.

One of her guards was a battle-scarred Incan soldier of great courage. He was no longer young, and he had given his whole life to the service of his emperor. But he took pity on the star woman. She reminded him of his only daughter who had died in childbirth. This soldier wrapped the flame-haired woman in a blanket and carried her to the mountaintop. When the sun rose and the first light of dawn fell on her pale cheeks, she opened her eyes and smiled at the soldier. “Someday, I will repay your blood,” she promised. “Someday, a son of your son’s son will be imprisoned in darkness, and I will come to set him free.”

The woman let down her red-gold hair around her like a mantle and flew off into the sky, never to be seen again. When the emperor found that his prisoner had escaped, he burned with anger, and he demanded to know who had betrayed him. The soldier stepped forth out of the ranks and confessed his crime. The emperor ordered the warrior’s head to be cut from his shoulders, and his mutilated body to be strewn on the mountain for vultures to devour. But the soldier went to his death smiling, for he knew he had done the right thing. He knew that all soldiers must die in time, and he remembered the star woman’s promise.

That hardened old soldier had lived and died in a time so long ago that even the memory keepers could not say what year the star woman flew away. But Kutii was of that warrior’s bloodline, and he believed that she would keep her promise and come to save him from this life of bitter slavery.

If she came only to put him to death, that would be all right with him too. He knew that he had failed all those who had put their trust in him. He was unworthy to be called an Incan or even a man. He was less than the dust beneath his hard, horny feet. But he could not take his own life. He must wear these iron chains and take the blows and curses of evil men until she came.

Sometimes, Kutii wondered if he had lost his sanity; other times, he half-believed that he too was immortal. Why, he’d asked himself a thousand times, why did he not die when all around him did?

When the Spanish came to rob the Incan treasure from the cities of the dead, the earth was soaked red with Indian blood. Why hadn’t he died at his post, died with honor, died knowing he had done all that could be asked of a warrior?

Why hadn’t he died on the terrible journey across jungle and mountain trails, when fever and poisonous snakes had killed the other slaves ordered by the Spanish to carry the golden treasure? And why hadn’t he drowned when the English ship called
Miranda
went to the bottom of the sea, taking the treasure and the lives of so many brave white men?

There was no answer.

Kutii only knew that his honor was shattered. He was a walking dead man, without hope of life in this world or the next.

He’d been born into a hereditary family of warriors destined to act as guardians of the Incan gold and of the royal women. His mother was of royal blood, as were his wife and daughter. The males in his family were never considered royal; they were protectors of the bloodline as well as guardians of the treasure.

On the day that traitors had led the Spaniards to the hidden valley in search of the legendary wealth, Kutii had killed many white men. But before his eyes, his wife and mother had been slain, and his only child had been raped and suffocated. The treasure vaults had been laid bare, and Kutii, bound in chains, had been forced to carry away what he was sworn to protect.

Worse yet, his beloved daughter was the last of his line. According to his beliefs, his ancestors would have eternal life only as long as they were remembered and only as long as they had descendants. He lived on, day after day, in agony because he carried the burden of his family’s souls on his shoulders. If he died without issue, without someone to carry on the line, his child’s soul, his mother’s, his wife’s, would all blow away like chaff from the dry cane. As unworthy as he was, he was their only hope of immortality.

“Lazy Indian!” the German cried, opening a bloody trough along Kutii’s back with the whip. “Put your muscle into it. Faster!”

Kutii dug his broken nails into the log and remembered the yellow flower that grew outside his mother’s door. His feet moved on, carrying a dead man’s body, but his spirit searched the high places for a flame-haired star woman.