Teresa Medeiros (12 page)

Anger stiffened Emily’s spine. She forced her frantic hiccups into slow, deep breaths. Damn Justin. Damn them all. She’d never met fate gracefully, and she wasn’t about to start now. A beam of sunlight caressed the sleek stock of the rifle hanging over the door.

She dragged herself over the rum barrel and climbed on top of it. It teetered beneath her weight as she drew the rifle from its hook. She’d never held a gun before. Running her hand over the cool barrel gave her a heady sense of power.

Her gaze darted between the door and the window. She had little advantage except the element of surprise. If the natives had surrounded the hut, she was done for.

She tiptoed across the hut and poked her head out the window. Bushy fronds waved in the breeze. She might be able to slip out undetected and run for the beach. But what glory was there in running to Justin’s arms, screaming like a hysterical chicken? Wouldn’t he be far more impressed if she captured an entire band of hostile marauders alone? If she proved she could look after herself, he might grant her the freedom to roam the beach undisturbed.

Emboldened by that thought, she heaved herself out the window and slunk toward the front of the hut, the rifle
cradled awkwardly in the crook of her arm. Sheltered by a fat bush, she peeped around the corner.

The savages’ attention was focused on the door. The one who had threatened her with his club had melted back into the crowd. They jabbered among themselves in low musical cadences. Almost every man carried some sort of weapon, except for two who bore an iron pot between them. Emily flared her nostrils indignantly. The arrogant wretches, she thought. What were they going to do? Boil her on her own doorstep?

Her finger curled around the cold trigger. Before she could move, a burly warrior wearing dangling jade ear pendants had a heated exchange with an older man whose shock of white hair contrasted sharply with the green furrows dug into his wizened skin. The muscled cannibal made a dismissive gesture toward the door. They argued briefly, then the old man demurred, baring his yellowed teeth in a smile that conveyed respect without obeisance.

As they turned toward the hill, Emily plunged out of the bush, waving the rifle wildly. A vine tangled around her foot.

The Maori gaped at her as she came to a hopping halt. She realized how ridiculously pathetic she must look. Bracing the stock of the rifle against her shoulder, she swaggered forward. The natives rewarded her with several nervous glances toward the weapon.

“Don’t take another step,” she barked. “I know how to use this thing.”

At least she knew which end to point at them. The gun was definitely inspiring more fear than Penfeld’s feather duster.

The tall warrior crossed his arms over his chest and glared down his nose at her. His broad nostrils flared with contempt, but the older man lay a restraining hand on his arm and made frantic signs in the air. The men holding the pot dropped it in the sand. Several of the natives covered their eyes and made whistling sounds through their
teeth. The whites of their eyes swelled with fear. Emily bit back a giggle, finding it all rather gratifying. But when the old man flattened his knuckles against his skull and wiggled his fingers like snakes, obviously indicating the state of her hair, she was less than amused.

The massive warrior took a menacing step toward her.

She swung the rifle in a dangerous arc. “Halt, you carnivorous fellow. You won’t be putting me in your pot today. Down on your bellies! All of you.”

Her command might have eluded them, but they understood the language of the rifle as she swept it across the sand. They flopped to their bellies like beached fish. The muscular warrior was the last to fall. His growling snarl made the hair on Emily’s nape tingle.

An awkward silence descended over the clearing, broken only by the cheerful chirp of a cricket. Emily chewed on her lower lip. Now that she’d captured the cannibals, she hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with them. She searched the cloudless sky, wondering how long it would be before Justin returned. She considered firing a shot in the air, then realized she’d never checked to see if the rifle was loaded. A hollow click at an inopportune moment might see her well on her way to martyrdom.

She knew of only one sure way to get Justin’s attention. Ignoring his grunt of protest, she rested her foot on the curve of the warrior’s back in what she hoped was a noble pose, threw back her head, and screamed at the top of her lungs.

Chapter 7
 

T
he scream echoed across the amber hills. The hoe slipped from Justin’s hands, smashing his toes. The pain was only a nagging reflection of a sharper agony as he whipped his head around.

“Good Lord, sir, what manner of hellish creature could have—”

Before Penfeld could finish, Justin was gone, his path marked by a wild crashing through the dense brush.

Justin could not have explained how he knew the unearthly cry had come from Emily, only that the timbre of her voice had somehow become as familiar to him as his own. An icy sweat broke out on his body as he careened down a hill, scraping his back on the serrated trunk of a totara tree. Ferny boughs whipped his face, blinding him, but still he pressed on, driven by the stark terror that by his absence he had allowed something terrible to happen to her. Time spilled back to the night when he had rushed to another beach, clutching Nicky’s bloody coat like a
talisman against the darkness, only to arrive a moment too late.

He tripped over a trailing creeper and went sprawling. His cheek struck the warm, rich earth with a thud. He shook damp tendrils of hair from his eyes and flung himself to his feet, catching a tantalizing glimpse of wicker through the trees. He hurtled into the clearing and stumbled to a halt, his heart slamming against his ribs, his breath dragged from his lungs in raw rasps.

Emily favored him with her sweetest smile. “What took you so long? I thought you’d never come.”

Nothing could have prepared Justin for the sight of Emily holding court over a throng of prostrate Maori warriors like some triumphant Amazon queen. She cradled the rifle in her arms. Her little foot rested daintily on the spine of one of the largest and most irate warriors Justin had ever seen. Even his ears were pink with fury.

Justin doubled over, flattening his palms on his knees, before she could begin to guess at the depth or bitter sweetness of his relief. Its intensity terrified him. He took a deep breath as a hard-edged fury born of thwarted fear flooded his veins.

He jerked his head up. “What in the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”

Emily recoiled. Why didn’t Justin look more pleased with her? She shrugged. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Capturing cannibals.”

Contempt iced his voice. “You, my dear, have just captured our neighboring tribe of Maori. A tribe, I might mention, that has been quite friendly to me, at least before they made
your
acquaintance.”

“I don’t understand,” she said faintly. The rifle slipped a notch in her hands. “That horrid creature waved his club at me. They were all armed. They even brought their own pot. I only assumed—”

“That ‘horrid creature’ was performing the
te wero
, a ceremonial dance to welcome you to his country.” Justin
picked his way over several inert Maori and grabbed a long-handled tool topped by an innocuous blade. “What were they going to do? Hoe you to death?” He pulled an orangy-brown object out of the overturned pot and waved it at her. “A
kumara
. Sweet potatoes. Their gift to you.”

“Oh, dear.” Emily mopped her brow, feeling suddenly sicker than she had before.

Justin glided toward her with such lethal grace that she started to point the rifle at him. He plucked the weapon out of her arms, handling it with two fingers as if it were a deadly serpent, and tossed it in the sand.

“I’d like to introduce you to Witi Ahamera, their
ariki
, their chief.”

She squared her chin, mustering her fading pluck. “I’d like to meet him, too. I’ve got a few things to say about his tribe running about, terrorizing unsuspecting young Englishwomen.”

“You’re standing on him.”

A brilliant heat flooded her cheeks. She followed Justin’s mocking gaze down her calf to the foot braced against the bronze muscles of the Maori warrior. Her toes twitched nervously.

She looked to Justin for help, hoping he’d provide a graceful dismount, but he only smirked at her.

“Well, so I am,” she said. “Who would have thought it?” She hopped off the man and tugged at his arm. He rose slowly, towering over her. She reached above her head to brush sand from his chest, avoiding his stony glare. “If Mr. Witi would have bothered to tell me he was the chief, I’d never have trod upon him in such a thoughtless manner.”

Biting off what sounded like a distinctly Anglo-Saxon oath, the chief shoved her hand away. She shrank against Justin without realizing it. His arm slipped around her waist, molding her to his lean frame. She felt as if she’d flopped literally from stew pot to fire.

Taking their cue from their chief, the natives rose,
shaking sand out of their raw flax skirts. An admiring murmur of “Pakeha, Pakeha” rose from their ranks. Emily looked around, but could see nothing or no one who might inspire such deference.

The chief jutted out his hand. All murmuring ceased. A fierce intelligence burned in his bright, dark eyes. His nostrils flared as he pointed at Emily and bit off a string of guttural words that made her thankful she did not understand Maori.

She pressed herself to Justin, basking in his strength. “What is he saying?” she whispered.

His lips touched her ear. “You have offended his
mana
.”

“His mama?”

Justin gave her a hard squeeze. “His
mana
. His honor. His pride.
Mana
is all-important to the Maori. Every slight, real or imagined, demands retribution. He wants to declare war on you.”

She squirmed. “Why, that overgrown, jade-headed bully! Where’s my rifle? Of all the arrogant, ridiculous—”

Justin clapped his hand over her mouth. The chief punctuated his newest accusation by leaning forward and poking her in the chest. She gulped.

“Cease!” Oddly enough, Justin’s soft-spoken command stilled the irate warrior in mid-poke and threw an unnatural hush over his men.

Justin kept one hand firmly anchored over Emily’s mouth, but his other hand took eloquent wing as Maori words spilled from his lips like song. Emily felt her body relax, lulled by the velvety timbre of his voice, hypnotized by the graceful flight of his fingers in the air. The natives hung on every word. Even the chief cocked his head in reluctant attention. Justin’s hand slid from her lips and cupped her chin, tilting her face up for their regard.

Several of the men hopped back in fear, making signs in the air. A dreamy assurance melted through Emily’s veins. He must be warning them never to trouble her
again, telling them that she belonged only to him and he would protect her even at the cost of his own life.

The chief made a disgusted gesture toward the white-haired man. He nodded and they climbed the hill, leading their men into the brush and leaving her and Justin alone in the clearing.

Justin released her. Emily locked her knees, fearful she might melt into a besotted puddle at his feet.

She grabbed his arm. “Thank you, Justin.”

He shook her hand off, his lips twisted in scathing dismissal. “Don’t mention it. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to meet with them as I’d planned to do before they were ambushed by Emily Scarlet, the jungle princess.”

He started up the hill, brushing dirt off his dungarees with a disgusted motion. Emily’s hands clenched into fists.

“What did you tell them?” she cried, refusing to be daunted by the note of desperation in her voice. She had to hear him say he cared. She’d waited to hear the words for almost half her life.

He picked his way over a thorny bush without slowing his pace. “I told them you were crazy. That you’d escaped from Bedlam and stowed away on a banana boat before the attendants could catch you.”

He topped the crest of the hill. “I told them insanity ran rampant in your family and one of your ancestors thought he was a kiwi bird and tried to leap from the London Tower, not realizing, of course, that kiwis don’t fly.”

Emily suddenly knew what it meant to be blinded by rage. Or at least by the glint of the sun off a rifle barrel. She snatched the gun, cocked it, and aimed it at the tree nearest Justin that she thought she might hit without blowing his head off. She didn’t want to maim him, just scare the hell out of him.

She squeezed the trigger. The lifeless click seemed to reverberate for miles.

Justin froze, his back rigid. As he came scrambling
down the hill at twice the pace he’d climbed it, Emily tried to shove the rifle behind her skirt. It was a very poor fit indeed.

His eyes blazed as he reached around her and snatched the weapon. He leaned forward until his nose touched hers. “If you think I’d leave you alone with a loaded gun, you’re loonier than they think you are.”