Merline Lovelace (10 page)

“Aye, they will,” Jamie replied. “But we’ll give them a good fight before we—”

Suddenly, an ear-cracking roar split the night. Every man in the longboat jumped as tongues of fire spit from the starboard side of the
Phoenix.
Shot whistled over their heads. In a rapid, thundering sequence, cannon after cannon boomed. Several small sampans exploded into kindling.

“Good shooting, Liam,” Jamie said with savage satisfaction. His ears ringing from the cannon and the shouts of his men, he twisted to make a quick check on his crew.

“Did anyone take a hit from the Chinese?”

“The African, Capt’n. A shot took him full in the face. He be dead.”

Nodding grimly, Jamie reached for The Reverend Mr. Abernathy. The back of his frock coat was wet with seawater and blood. Jamie pulled him up gently and turned him over. Cradling him against one thigh, he looked down into gaunt, pain-ravaged features.

The missionary’s lips pulled back in a grimace. “I fear I be…dead, too.”

“Not yet. Hold on, man. We’ll get the ball out of your back.”

“It’s…in too deep.”

From the bloody froth that bubbled at the corners of Abernathy’s mouth with each whispered word, Jamie knew the reverend had guessed right. His end was fast approaching.

“Straithe.” A bony hand lifted to clutch at Jamie, fell back.

“Don’t move. Save your strength.”

“My children. They…must go home…to England.”

Jamie bit back the comment that it was a bit late to be worrying about his family. The man should have thought about their welfare before he’d gone racketing off.

“Take them…home.”

“I’m not in the business of hauling passengers. Save your strength, and you can see to their travel arrangements yourself.”

“You must…”

Abernathy’s faint whisper was lost in the clatter of oars being shipped. Jamie whipped his head around. The
Phoenix
loomed only yards away. Sarah stood among the crew crowding the rail. Her hair streamed like a cloud of darkness on the night breeze as she watched the longboat pull alongside. At that moment, Jamie would have laid odds that she’d not receive her father’s blessing before he died.

He would have lost his bet. With grim tenacity, Abernathy clung to life. The agony of being slung over Jamie’s shoulder and carried aboard must have been horrific, but air still rattled in the older man’s chest when they gained the deck. While Burke got the crew scrambling to raise both anchor and sails, the captain knelt and lowered his burden to the boards.

“Papa!” White-faced, Sarah dropped to her knees beside him. “How are you hurt?”

Jamie answered when the missionary could not. “He took a bullet in the back.”

“Oh, dear Lord! We must get him to the surgery at once!”

Frantic, she reached for her parent’s arm. Abernathy gave a long, low groan, and Jamie stilled her with a hard hand on her wrist.

“He’s done for, Sarah.”

“No! No, he cannot die!” She tried to pull free of his bruising hold. “I will not let him!”

“I think he held on this long only to see you.”

His quiet comment cut through her rising panic like a blade. Stricken, she stared at her father. Jamie released her wrist, and she sank down on her heels.

“Oh, Papa,” she cried softly.

The deck began to rise and fall as the
Phoenix
caught the breeze. Jamie threw a quick glance at the sails and saw that Burke had the ship in good trim. A choking whisper snapped his gaze back to the missionary.

“Don’t despair, daughter. I see the…light of the Lord.”

Tears streaming down her cheeks, Sarah nodded.

“He calls to me,” her father rasped. “I hear Him. And…your mama.”

Each painful breath brought more bloody bubbles to the reverend’s lips. Tenderly, his daughter wiped the red froth away with her sleeve.

“God keep you, child, and Harry and Abi…”

A low, choking gurgle drowned the rest of his blessing.
Her throat working convulsively, Sarah returned his benediction.

“And you, Father.”

The terrible rattling stilled, and Jamie thought the missionary had breathed his last. Then his lids fluttered open. With a great effort of will, he turned his gaze on Jamie.

“I give my family…into your care.”

“No!” Sarah clutched her father’s hand in both of hers. “You needn’t worry about us, Papa. I’ll see to the boys, and to Abigail.”

“Take them home,” Abernathy rasped to Jamie. “To England.” His lids wavered, drooped. “And take…my daughter…to wife.”

Sarah went rigid with shock.

“Are you daft?” Jamie bit out. “You know who I am.”

“I know…who you were.”

“You’d give a daughter to a man of my ilk?”

The missionary’s slack facial muscles arranged themselves in something that might have been a smile.

“She will…save you.”

Jamie didn’t want particularly to be saved. Nor, in his present circumstances, did he have any desire or use for a wife. He couldn’t believe Abernathy would put his family in the hands of a stranger, but recognized that the missionary had no choice. There was no one else at hand to give the charge to. For all his reluctance, Jamie couldn’t refuse a dying man’s request.

“I’ll take them home, if it will ease your passing,” he conceded brusquely, “but I…”

“Shh!” Sarah stilled him urgently. “Papa’s trying to say something.”

Clutching her father’s hand to her breast, she leaned closer. A faint whisper drifted from the missionary’s lips.

“Bless you…child.”

The Reverend Mr. Abernathy gave another rattling sigh. His lids fluttered down once more, and he passed into the hands of his Lord.

Sarah went still. For long moments, she didn’t move, didn’t speak. Slowly, so slowly, she brought her father’s hand up to her lips and kissed it tenderly. Eyes closed, she began to rock back and forth.

Without thinking, Jamie reached to take her in his arms. Her low chanting stopped him before his hands touched her. She didn’t want or need his comfort.

He left her to her papa and her prayers.

It was some time before the familiar rattle and creak of a ship getting under way penetrated Sarah’s pain. She felt the deck heave under her. Heard the sails snap as they caught the wind. For a few, frightening moments, panic rushed through her. She felt as though she, like the
Phoenix,
had slipped free of her anchor and now sailed a vast, uncharted sea.

She lifted her head, her heart fluttering with fear. How would she provide for Abigail and the boys? Where would they make their home? Dear Lord above, how in the world would she manage?

Her gaze lighted on the captain, standing with legs spread and feet planted against the roll of his ship. The practicality that was as natural to Sarah as breathing reasserted itself. She dismissed the ridiculous notion that Straithe would in any way assume
responsibility for her family. That burden was hers, and hers alone.

She would manage.

As she’d always managed.

Gently, she crossed her father’s hands over his chest and said a quiet, final farewell. With John Hardesty’s assistance, she prepared him for burial, as she’d prepared her mother and many of her father’s parishioners. Her hands trembling, she helped stitch his canvas shroud.

At first light, the captain committed the bodies of the reverend and the African to the deep. The simple, elemental ceremony moved Sarah, as did the timeless sailor’s prayer Straithe repeated for each man. She could only hope that Okunah, like her father, had found a final, calm harbor.

She stood at the rail after the crew murmured awkward offers of condolence and dispersed. Above, gulls swooped and cawed. The rising sun brought a luminescence to the turquoise waters. The
Phoenix
cut through the swells and left only a churning white wake to mark its progress. All too soon, even that disappeared.

She felt rather than saw Straithe’s solid form at her side. For a weak, foolish moment, she wanted nothing more than to lean back and let his strength envelop her. She resisted the urge, but she took a strange comfort from his presence. They stood together, unspeaking, and for a heartbeat or two, Sarah’s pain eased.

Only for a heartbeat or two. Sighing, she turned to make her way to her cabin. She wanted privacy to grieve, and pray, and plan.

Straithe stepped aside, allowing her passage. “We’ll speak later, Sarah. When you’re ready.”

She nodded and went below. She could only be grateful that the captain understood her need.

The very next evening, the same man who’d earned her gratitude for his forbearance shocked her out of her grief and roused her to utter, implacable fury.

“D
on’t be absurd!”

Sarah softened her involuntary exclamation with an attempt at a smile.

“Of course I don’t expect you to take me and my family to England. You cannot wish to saddle yourself with more unwanted, troublesome passengers.”

“No,” Straithe replied with blunt honesty. “I don’t.”

Leaning back in his chair, he clasped a pewter goblet filled with Spanish port and regarded her across the mahogany mess table. The remains of the evening meal littered the broad surface between them. With Okunah’s death, John Hardesty had been pressed into service as cook. Although Sarah hadn’t eaten in almost thirty hours, a single taste of the grayish mess he’d stewed up had destroyed her appetite for anything except dry ship’s biscuits.

Straithe’s announcement that he’d charted a course straight back to Macao to pick up her brother and sister had killed even that meager desire for sustenance!

Driven by desperation, Sarah had stowed away aboard a smuggler’s ship to go in search of her missing
parent. In the weeks since, she’d lived through an attack by pirates, witnessed a riotous free-for-all, and watched a desperate escape from a vengeful mob under covering fire. She would not, could not, expose her younger siblings to the same dangerous situations.

During the long, painful hours since her father’s body had splashed into the green waters, she’d formulated a plan of sorts. When she returned to Macao, she would throw herself on the mercy of the chief factor of the British East India House. Lord Blair was a bit pompous at times, but kindhearted. He would arrange passage for the Abernathys on an East Indiaman. Once in England, they would seek out their relatives on Mama’s side of the family. The Morevilles had never quite forgiven Mama for turning down an earl to marry a penniless curate, but Sarah was confident her second cousin, the current Lord Moreville, would give his kin shelter until more permanent arrangements were made.

First, however, she must disabuse Straithe of this notion that he should concern himself any further with her or her family.

She gathered her words, measuring the man across from her while she did. The gently swaying ship’s lantern painted him in soft light. Clad in black boots, tight-knit fawn breeches, and a white linen shirt that bloused at the sleeve and gaped loosely at the neck, he showed few characteristics of the gentleman and many of the freebooting sea captain at home in his mess.

It was to the sea captain that Sarah now appealed.

“You shall always have my gratitude for going to Dong-Lo in search of my father,” she began with genuine sincerity, “but I assure you, I don’t expect you
to assume responsibility for my family. Nor do I wish it.”

“Whether you wish it or not is beside the point. Your father laid the charge on me.”

“That was done under duress.”

“However it was done, I accepted it.”

“My father…”

She stopped abruptly, swamped by a wave of aching hurt. A day and a night and another long, healing day had taken the searing edge from her grief, but the mere thought of her father’s death still closed her throat. Curling her fingers in her lap, Sarah tried again.

“My father had suffered a grievous wound when he laid that charge on you. He was in pain, and not thinking clearly.”

Straithe made no answer to that. He didn’t need to. His expression said plainly that, in his considered opinion, The Reverend Mr. Abernathy had lacked the ability to think clearly, with or without pain.

Sarah stiffened. In her hours of grieving, she’d recalled the uncritical, unceasing love her father had bestowed upon his family. Memories had flooded through her of the hours he’d spent teaching his children their letters, of picnics the Abernathys had enjoyed before Mama’s death, of shared laughter and solemn prayer. Those memories hadn’t blinded Sarah to her papa’s faults, including his increasing fanaticism in recent years. Still, she refused to tolerate any criticism of the reverend, even unspoken, by an outsider.
Particularly
by an outsider such as James Kerrick, whose own past didn’t bear very close scrutiny.

“Come, captain. We can be frank with each other. You don’t want to be bothered with us any more than I wish to be more of a burden on you. No one heard
your exchange with my father but me. We can forget it ever occurred.”

She saw at once she’d said the wrong thing. Straithe’s blue eyes narrowed. His shoulders shifted under the white linen shirt. Although he didn’t alter his relaxed position, Sarah had the uneasy sense of a tiger coiling its muscles.

“That’s the second time you’ve implied I don’t hold to my word.”

“I didn’t intend insult.”

“Did you not?”

“No!”

For a few moments a tense silence filled the mess, broken only by the creak of timbers and the faint rush of water past the hull. During the uncomfortable pause, Sarah berated herself. She’d forgotten the captain’s private, if somewhat convoluted code of honor. He might engage in smuggling, consort with concubines, and thumb his nose at polite society, but he’d hold to his blasted promise once given.

This was one promise Sarah didn’t intend for him to keep. If she was to protect Abigail’s chances for an advantageous marriage and ensure the boys’ futures, she couldn’t allow the Abernathys to arrive in England under the aegis of a notorious smuggler and libertine.

“We don’t need to trouble you for your assistance,” she explained, trying to recover lost ground. “I’ll ask Lord Blair to give us passage home on an East Indiaman. I’m sure he’ll oblige.”

She’d thought that would appease him. It didn’t. If anything, his jaw took on a harder line. He swirled the ruby-red port in his goblet for a moment, then lifted his eyes and pinned her with a look that cut through all polite pretenses.

“I understand. You don’t wish your brother and sister to sail aboard a ship engaged in smuggling furs and sandalwood.”

He hit so close to the mark that a heated flush crept into her cheeks. Incurably honest, she could only cede his point. “No, I don’t.”

“Yet you’d take them home aboard a ship crammed full of tea chests bought with opium.”

That stung. Unfortunately, it was also unanswerable.

While the woman across from him fumbled for a response, Jamie set aside his wine and rose. He didn’t like the charge Abernathy had laid on him any more than the man’s daughter did. He liked even less the way she’d thrown his promise back in his face.

He’d expected that, however. Having come to know the prickly female who had usurped his cabin and disrupted his ship, he’d anticipated her flat rejection of his offer to fulfill his grudgingly given promise. What he hadn’t anticipated was this damnable need to banish the shadows in her eyes.

Throughout yesterday and today, he’d respected her privacy. As the coast of Fukien had fallen astern and the
Phoenix
cut through turquoise waters, he’d waited for her to emerge from the cabin, to make the first move to speak of the matters that lay between them. When she’d finally come above decks this afternoon and reclaimed her bench in the lee of the aft cabin, his gut had twisted at the wan face she held up to the sun. He’d found himself as anxious to comfort her as leathery John Hardesty, who brought her tea and biscuits. As hesitant to intrude as Henry Fulks, the ship’s boy, who shyly offered to rig a screen to protect her from the salt spray. And just as discomfited as Liam
Burke, who remarked on the blue smudges under Miss Sarah’s eyes.

The smudges were still there, but the shadows retreated as she eased out of her chair and rose as well, determined to have her way on this matter of her transportation back to England.

Jamie was equally determined. He had little left to him but his ship and the strength of his word, such as it was.

“I told your father I would take you home and I will.”

A flush of annoyance chased the pallor from her cheeks. In her borrowed white shirt, embroidered vest, and baggy blue cotton pants, she should have looked like a piece of flotsam washed ashore. Instead, she commanded a dignity that tugged at his heart. Squaring her shoulders in a way he’d come to recognize all too well, she lifted her chin.

“We shall see, Captain.”

“Indeed, we shall.”

He moved closer, so close that her eyes flashed a warning. Satisfaction coursed through him, along with a baser emotion he didn’t dwell on at the moment. In his own clumsy way, he’d lifted Sarah from her grief. The woman before him was ready to do battle. Spoiling for a fight, in fact, as though she needed a release for the emotions she’d bottled up within. He could give her that, at least.

“We’re crowding on all sail and making straight for Macao,” he said bluntly. “When word of the incident at Dong-Lo reaches the Emperor, he’ll put such a price on my head and that of the crew that every port official in China will be hot after us.”

Jamie suspected that the Chinese wouldn’t be the
only ones up in arms over the Dong-Lo incident. In his anger, the Emperor might well threaten to expel all barbarians from the Celestial Kingdom. The British East India Company would do anything to prevent such a disaster, including, Jamie was sure, turning the perpetrator over to the Chinese authorities.

“Our only hope is to slip in and out of Macao before news of Dong-Lo reaches the officials there.”

“You don’t need to slip in
or
out of Macao,” Sarah pointed out. “You can put me ashore at Hong Kong with Second Harvest. We’ll take a junk across the bay to Macao. You can make your escape, and no one need ever know that I was with you, or that my father laid such an unconscionable burden on your shoulders!”

“Dammit, I’ll know!”

She blinked at his sharp retort, but stood her ground. “I’m sorry if I offend you, but I have to speak honestly. It would destroy Abigail’s chance of entering into a respectable marriage if she arrived in England under the protection of a…a…”

“A rake?” he supplied. “A seducer of innocent women and other men’s wives?”

“Since you put it so plainly, yes.”

Jamie hooked his hands in his belt. When Miss Sarah fired a fusillade, she didn’t spare the shot. Well, it was time to spike her guns.

“What if Abigail arrived in England under the protection of her husband?”

“That would be all well and good if she had one. She does not, however.”

“She could wed a much-reformed Viscount Straithe.”

“What?”

Jamie couldn’t help but smile at her openmouthed
astonishment. “Surely you haven’t forgotten that your father offered me his daughter as compensation for my troubles? He did not, however, specify which daughter.”

The color ebbed from her cheeks, then rushed back with a vengeance.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” she snapped. “You’ve no more wish to take either Abigail or me to wife than we have to take you to husband!”

She looked so stiff and prim and disapproving, with her mouth pursed and her eyes filled with distaste that Jamie’s smile took on a mocking edge.

“No, I don’t. But your father has left us all at
point non plus.
I can’t fulfill my promise to get you and your sister safely home to England if I destroy your reputations in the process. The only solution is for one of the estimable Misses Abernathy to…how did the good reverend put it?…save me. To redeem me, as it were, so I can reclaim my place in the polite world and offer you all the protection of my name.”

Jamie had no intention of being saved. Nor did he intend to destroy the good name of either Sarah or her sister. But he didn’t mind letting the elder Miss Abernathy stew about his outrageous proposition for a while. Driven as much by the disdain in her eyes as by the deviltry that had gotten him into trouble too many times to count, he dug the spur in a bit deeper.

“You’ve already shown that you enjoy my kisses, Sarah. Perhaps you should convince me that you’d enjoy the other intimacies that come with marriage?” He propped a hand against the bulkhead, just inches from her wildly curling hair. “Just to help facilitate my choice of sisters, you understand.”

For all his lightning reflexes, honed by years of living
on the edge of danger, Jamie didn’t see the blow coming. Her palm hit his cheek with a resounding smack.

“You, sir, are despicable!”

He stepped back, rubbing his cheek. Hellfire, the woman packed a punch. He’d have to remember that in the weeks ahead.

“Aye, sweetheart, I am. But I’m also the man your father chose to give his daughter to.
One
of his daughters to. You’d better learn to curb your hoydenish ways if you want me to choose you.”

“Want you to choose…?” She sputtered in outrage. “Why, you…you coxcomb! You poltroon! You pisseyed piece of shark bait!”

From the startled expression on her face, she was as surprised as Jamie to hear one of the crew’s favorite expressions spill from her lips. The color in her cheeks deepened to brick, but she refused to look away.

Jamie could barely keep his face straight and his hands off her. Everything in him urged him to stoke the fire that simmered under her prim exterior, to pull her into his arms and kiss her senseless. Instead, he pursed his lips in imitation of her earlier disapproval.

“I can see I’d better have a talk with my crew before Abigail and the boy come aboard. I don’t want to land in England with a wife who salts her speech like a sailor.”

“You won’t not land in England with any sort of a wife,” she swore furiously. “Not if I have anything to say in the matter!”

Jamie couldn’t help himself. Brushing a knuckle down her heated cheek, he planted a last barb. “You have a great deal to say in the matter, I assure you.
Show yourself willing, sweet Sarah, and I’ll choose you.”

With a sound that was somewhere between a hiss and a snarl, she shoved his arm away and swept out of the mess. The door to his cabin slammed shut a moment later.

Hooking his thumbs in his belt once again, Jamie stared after her. Well, he’d accomplished his main objective. He’d banished the shadows from Sarah’s eyes. In the process, he’d also ignited the fire she hid so well from the rest of the world.

Now he had to find a way to keep from stoking that fire to full heat during the long weeks ahead.