Heart's Safe Passage (16 page)

Mrs. Torren lay half propped up on her bunk, one baby in her arms, the other in the arms of the new nursemaid. Both infants were, for the moment, quiet.

“I’d like to examine you to make sure all is well,” Phoebe said by way of greeting.

“I can’t thank you enough for sending this girl along.” Mrs. Torren glanced at the maid. “She had the baby quiet in a moment.”

“I like babies.” The maid glowed as though she were the new mother.

“You should have brought a maid along with you. Or perhaps a midwife. There are women who will hire themselves out, you know.”

But of course the young woman didn’t know or couldn’t have done so, or she might have taken the necessary steps to have company and help ready.

Phoebe began to examine the young mother, who wasn’t in the least embarrassed by the intimacy with another female in the room. The babies continued to sleep. Phoebe began to gnaw her lower lip as she contemplated her own words and disliked them heartily.

Certain all was well—with the new mother at any rate—she bade mother and maid good night. “I’ll return in the morning.”

If Rafe Docherty let her off the
Davina
again. If she could bear to be near him long enough to ask.

Bear to be? No, she liked being with him.
Risk
being with him was more the truth.

Seeing him standing in the glow of a lantern, his hair burnished crimson satin in the flickering light, his face a silhouette of strong bones and smooth planes, she accepted she had two reasons to get away from the privateer as fast and as far as possible—she hated being at sea, and she was losing her heart to him.

And as much as she wanted away so badly she contemplated the idea of jumping overboard and swimming for the American diplomatic vessel, she had one major reason to remain within the danger Rafe Docherty could prove to her heart, her soul. She couldn’t leave Belinda, a patient, to inexperienced sailors. Doing so went against every vow she’d taken when Tabitha accepted her as an apprentice and Phoebe moved into her home to be at hand whenever someone needed the midwife.

Phoebe stepped onto the deck and held her hands out to Rafe. “I’m ready to return.”

“Are you now?” He didn’t take her hands but stood with his fingers stuffed into the pockets of his breeches. “I do not think you ken what you are accepting. I will not—I cannot—give you the freedom of the brig after you tried to run to my enemy.”

“I didn’t know he was your enemy.” Phoebe spoke each word with care to keep the panic edge from her tone. But panic clenched at her middle at the notion of confinement in the cabin, Belinda’s whining, the stale air. The sickness.

She clutched at the folds of her skirt. “You don’t need to make me a prisoner, Captain. I—” she swallowed against dryness in her throat—“I give you my word I won’t run away again.”

9

James Brock had eluded Rafe again. As he waited for Phoebe aboard the merchantman, he watched the activity aboard the American schooner. Too much activity for an evening in harbor. They were sailing on the outgoing tide, and because of the flag of truce, Rafe could do nothing about it.

“Coward.” He spat over the rail of his own vessel two hours later as the sails of the schooner caught the wind and bellied out, sending the graceful craft skimming into the Atlantic. “You will not face your crimes.”

Though he might try again to kill Rafe in cold blood. Or rather have one of his henchmen kill the man who could expose him for what he was—a liar, a cheat, a thief, a murderer. He’d tried before, in the early days after Rafe escaped the Barbary pirates with Mel and a rage so deep it still burned in his gut, burned so hot it dried any tears he might have shed for his wife.

It blazed again now, roared inside him until he feared his hands would rip the taffrail from the deck. He shook with it, with his inability to give chase and bring the man down once and for all.

But he wasn’t going to lose Phoebe.

He caught a whiff of her delicate jasmine scent, soap from the merchantman, before he heard the whisper of her slippers and skirt on the deck blend with the sigh of rippling wavelets against the brig’s hull. With all his will, he managed not to turn around and draw her to him and kiss her again. For those few minutes on the docks, he’d forgotten Brock and hatred and even Davina. With the fire of rage now ablaze afresh, the temptation to seek solace from the beautiful widow tightened every nerve in his body.

He would not disrespect her that way.

But she’d promised to stay. And now she’d come to him. For the past two hours she’d been below, soothing Belinda’s histrionics over being left behind all day and knowing nothing of what was afoot. Now Phoebe glided up beside him within touching distance.

He continued to grip the taffrail so he didn’t touch her. “’Tis late for you to be up and about. Should you not be in your bed?”

“When there’s a caged lion pacing overhead?” She smiled at him in the blend of silvery moonlight and golden binnacle lantern glow. “I couldn’t stay away.”

“A braw lady to approach a lion in his lair.” He allowed himself the luxury of one ghost of a touch on her face, the merest hint of his fingertips skimming across the curve of her cheekbone.

No more. No more. In harbor, no helmsman stood at the wheel to force him to propriety. The nearest watch stood halfway down the main deck and out of sight.

“And I’ve not paced this half hour or more,” he added with the merest hint of a smile.

She’d been drawn to him as he wanted her to be, connected to his spirit because of those moments of contact on the wharf, those seconds of admitting their attraction to one another. Attraction without love or even liking and respect on her side. Something purely carnal and therefore wrong with a good woman like her.

Completely wrong regardless of the woman,
a faint voice from his past reminded him—a past whose teachings he’d set aside for the sake of destroying James Brock.

She laid her hand over the cheek he’d caressed. “Nor have you spoken to me since I promised not to run off again.”

“Perhaps I do not want you to change your mind. And if I do not speak with you, you cannot tell me otherwise.”

“Do you think I’m that fickle?”

He quirked up one side of his mouth. “You’re a female, no?”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

He laughed. Doing so felt like a rusty chain drawing the sound from the deep well of his chest. Yet once the sound spilled past his lips, breathing grew easier and he could speak truth to her. “I ken you have questions I do not care to answer.”

“Don’t you think I deserve answers?” She gestured toward the town, still bright with torches and lanterns and raucous with music and mirth. “He was chasing me with a pistol and a club.”

“Only because you chose to be with me.”

“And if I hadn’t, you’d likely be dead now.”

“You have no faith in my ability to fight.” He tried to smile, to make light of her statement.

She pursed her lips. Instead of the tightness making them thinner, it emphasized their fullness, their ripe strawberry pinkness.

He turned his back to the rail and grasped it with both hands hard enough that a splinter drove into his palm. He welcomed the pain. “Aye, I ken you hear the talk aboard—I’ve lost my will to fight. I have. I never set out to become a fighting man. On the contrary—” He shook his head, erasing the memory of a life to which he could never return. “I found a way to draw out the man who has eluded me for nine years. ’Tis all I wish to fight. No more French merchantmen and certainly not Americans. I do not need more plunder. I need only to see James Brock at my feet, as his actions—” He broke off again. “Nay, lass, I will say no more.”

“Then this will be a long night.” She stood in front of him, the lantern light behind her creating a golden nimbus of her hair, an angel’s halo. “I’m not going anywhere until I have more answers than that.”

“You will grow mighty weary.”

She folded her arms across her chest.

“I’ll take you and Mrs. Chapman and Mel ashore tomorrow. Any danger has sailed.”

“Can you be certain of that? He might have left his men behind.”

“Perhaps. I’ll have Jordy go ahead and make certain, but I doot he has. ’Tis a hostile place for a lone American.”

“But two American ladies are safe?”

“Aye, with me you will be. The market is fine with goods—”

She shot out her hands and grasped his shoulders. “I may be a Carter by birth and a Lee by marriage, but I am no flibbertigibbet of a female more interested in fripperies than a man’s life.” Her voice dropped. Her eyes sought and held his. “Yours, for example.”

“My life is doomed to the pit. Do not fash—um, concern yourself over it.”

He worried himself over how he would manage not to kiss her again in the next half a minute if she didn’t move away from him. It would work to distract her, perhaps even drive her into hiding.

And would cheapen her.

He tore his gaze away and stared past her to the line of foam creaming against the mouth of the harbor, and the vast, black ocean beyond. Once again his enemy had vanished into that endless sea. But not forever. James Brock couldn’t run forever or hide beneath a flag of truce like a child hiding under his mother’s apron.

“No one’s life is doomed to the pit until it’s over. Jesus is always ready to receive you if you—”

He laid a finger across her lips. “No more. I grew up in the kirk. I ken all the right words and actions, how to repent and save my soul from condemnation forever. But any desire to give my life over to God died with my wife on the deck of a Barbary pirate’s boat. She died screaming for God to save her, but He did not. Instead, He’s allowed James Brock to prosper when ’tis his fault Davina died with a knife across her throat. But not before they used her while they forced me to watch. All because James Brock did not keep his word, because he took every farthing my family possessed and lined his own pockets. And you want to talk to me about Jesus ready to accept me if only I—what? Repent of my sins? Give up my desire for revenge? Let a murderer go? Nay, lass, you can keep your God.” Not until he ran out of words and the quiet of the brig settled around them did he hear the savagery of his tone, a savagery cultivated in nine years of nightmares and pain, in blood and the burning pain of hatred.

Phoebe had heard it, though. She’d understood his words and possibly more. Tears spilled down her cheeks in silent, silver ribbons. Her lips moved, but she said nothing. Her fingers flexed on his shoulders, and she laid her head against his chest. She wrapped her arms around him and held him.

No one had held him in comfort since his mother had also died beneath the relentless Mediterranean sun. His chest tightened. His throat thickened. The urge to hold Phoebe close, bury his face in her hair, and weep as she did sent barely suppressed shudders running through him.

He remained motionless. He wouldn’t weep as she did, silently, gracefully. He would weep like a mountain cat deprived of her prey—with soul-deep, howling anguish. He must hold on to his pain. Without it, he knew nothing.

But he let her continue to hold him until her tears dried and her breathing grew steady. He couldn’t have pushed her away had his life depended on it. She was too soft, too warm, too kind—everything he could not allow himself to have and yet longed for with every particle of his being.

“So you ken the truth now.” His voice was rough, but not with anger this time. “’Tis not a tale for a lady’s ears.”

“Even the simplified version I suspect you gave me.” She released him, leaving him cold. “It was worse, wasn’t it?”

“I do not wish to say. You’re a lady—”

“I’m a midwife. Birth is untidy and sometimes worse than usual. I watched a woman die before my eyes, with hemorrhaging we couldn’t stop.” She looked away, blinking. “And still what your wife suffered was worse. That woman was in her bed with her husband holding one hand and her mother holding the other.”

“Davina’s father remained in Edinburgh, but my mith-er—” The break in his voice left him speechless for a full minute. He took in more than one ragged breath before he could continue. “She was with Davina.”

Phoebe’s eyes widened. She gasped.

“And my father they made a toy of like a cat does a mouse.” He couldn’t stop now. The sluice gate had opened and the floodwaters descended. “James Brock was to pay a ransom for us. He was a diplomat for the Americans. They would not pay ransoms to pirates, and my own country was taking too long, but I got the money together. I took every pound, shilling, and pence my family had earned and saved for years of hard work and took it to Brock, but he sold me out. Me with my three-year-old daughter just trying to get our loved ones free ended up on the pirate’s boat instead of Brock’s. Brock expected them to kill me too, while he ran off with the money and my vessel. But they set Mel and me ashore on Naples after—after they’d killed my parents and wife. And you want me to repent instead of seeing this man receive justice?”

She clasped her hands before her and once again looked him in the eyes. “Yes.”

“Ah, you dear, innocent lady. We’ll see if your faith is ever sorely tested, if you feel the same.”

“God doesn’t test us beyond what we can endure.”

“’Tis a falsehood, that. I am a living testimony to say my faith died on the deck of that boat.”

“A true faith—”

“Hush now.” He stopped her words with his lips this time, a swift brush of contact. “Go to your bed. I have no more patience for talk of true faith. My thoughts are straying elsewhere to how a man achieves forgetfulness.”

He didn’t wait for her to respond. He stepped around her and strode off to the main hatch. He would sleep belowdecks with most of the crew and let Jordy have his cabin back—a mere bulkhead from the ladies. Rafe needed rest.

Five minutes in his hammock told him he wouldn’t get it. Even those brief words to Phoebe conjured the images, the sounds, even the essence of tar and sea, sweat and blood, and worse, so much worse. Every time he closed his eyes, Davina’s sweet face swam behind his lids. She’d cried out for him to save her at first. Then she gave up on her husband and called on God, begged Him to take her, to forgive her. There, beneath the laughing, taunting corsairs, she had told Rafe she loved him.