by Angel Payne
He crushed her tighter to him, barely holding in a giddy laugh. “Again.”
The skin beneath his ear got hot again.
He pulled away by a few inches, staring at her face, now resting in the crook of his shoulder. An ache invaded his chest and his head. It was the same sensation that had assaulted when she’d wept in his arms on the island. Only this time, he didn’t fight it. He could use this pain. It was empowering. It throbbed a drive into him that he’d never felt before.
He threw his head back and bellowed with all the magnificent strength of that ache. “Dink!”
A line of faces popped into place across the rail above him.
“You idiot! We thought you’d done and—”
“I know, Mister Peabrooke. Now make ready. Cargo coming aboard.”
“Cargo comin’—huh?”
Mast was still too far down on the ladder to hear exactly what followed, but he’d gotten a few rungs higher when a lantern was swung over the rail, followed Dink’s whistle of amazement.
“Blarst me eyes. You got her.”
“You thought I’d be back otherwise?”
He’d never been so happy to see the top rail of the ship. Though he’d confirmed she was breathing, his limp little hellion had refused to wake up during the ascent. Impossible as the admission seemed, Mast found himself wishing for her screaming conscious self again. He’d made a number of pauses to look at her, to feel her, to assure that the increasing warmth to her skin wasn’t a hoax of his exhausted mind. Now the ordeal was almost over.
Correction. It had just begun.
He flipped over the rail into resentment that hung thicker than the lingering mist from the storm. After settling Golden to the deck, praying through every second that an infection hadn’t yet tightened in her lungs, Mast slowly rose. Despite the fatigue that racked every muscle, he looked every man in the eye with respect—and determination.
“Captain.”
Rico was again the first to step forward. Dack was with him, but cowered behind the South American like a calf at its mama’s udder.
“Captain, we’re—uhhh—glad you’re safe ‘n’ all, but—”
The speech, clearly rehearsed, faltered on Rico’s lips. The big sailor’s eyes kept flitting back to Golden, his composure waning as he did so. With every glance, he clearly discovered some new proof of her mortality. The blue tint of her fingertips. Her chattering teeth. The shivers that claimed her as she lay on the soaked deck. “Uh, Captain, it’s like this—”
“Idiot!” Dack shoved Rico away. “You’ve floundered it to hell.” The young man swerved a glare at Mast, his teeth bared. “This is it, Captain.” His voice pitched with his rising hysterics. “You’re a fool. You hear me?” He screwed a fingertip against Mast’s temple. His hand shook as he did. “We don’t want the witch here. She’s trouble. Trouble! Did you stop to think she might have cursed us already? Which hex will she give us, Captain? Scurvy? Plague? Pox? They say your pego can fall off with the pox!”
“For Chrissake,” Mast growled. “Dack—”
But the youth was already charging at Golden, eyes gleaming as bright as the rosary he waved at her. “We cast you away, sea witch! Do you hear me, black tart? Back to the purgatory from whence you spawned!”
“Dack!” The command came bellowing from Rico. Thank God. “Lad, you’ve given to mush!”
Mast grabbed the back of Dack’s shirt and flung him away. “Mush,” he echoed, “better be the explanation of it.” After circling his glare to the remaining crewmen, he thundered, “Look at her! All of you! Here’s your deadly sea witch. I wager she’ll tear the ship to splinters with her blue fingers and toes. That’s a powerful curse spewing from her lips too, aye?”
A round of uncomfortable chuckles answered him.
“Quiet!” Dack dropped to his knees and crawled back over to Golden. “She wakens!”
“She what?” Mast dropped to her other side and leaned over her face. “Golden?” He knew they could all hear the tenderness in his voice. For some reason, he didn’t care.
That magnanimity was damn difficult to maintain the next moment. Dack shoved between he and Golden like an eager mutt. The lad bloody well sniffed her like one, too.
“You hold her, Captain,” he rasped, “and I’ll suck her.”
“You’ll what?”
Dack gave him a trembling smile before looking back to Golden, an eerie glow in his eyes. “We must take her breath from her. Take it before it burns us with its fire.”
The unnatural sheen thickened as the youth pressed closer to her, rubbing her lips with the cross on his necklace. Dack trailed the thing down her neck, toward the dip between her breasts. He continued, his voice husky, “We must draw it out of her. Strip her naked of it…”
Mast’s gut knew what the scrawny shit was about, but couldn’t convince his mind of the truth—until Dack’s lips smashed atop hers and he let go of the rosary in order to crunch that hand around her breast.
The fury was unlike any he’d felt before. It was deep. It was primal. It was frightening.
He hauled Dack up once more, but this time, clutched the whelp by his hair. A slash of distant lightning illuminated Dack’s wild stare and seething lips. It also lit up the stunned stares of his men, confirming his guess that his own features hedged toward demonic.
With a hard growl, he hurled the kid toward Robert and Dinky. “Take him below.” He stopped, dragging in air through his locked teeth. “And make he stays there until he knows the proper way to greet a guest.”
The deck fell into silence. Even the wind seemed to blow with a hushed murmur as they raced out of the storm. He waited as all eyes returned back to him after watching Dink take Dack to the solitary confinement cabin. The tiny space wasn’t a complete hell hole, though for sailors used to having fresh air and sea wind, it could feel like it after a few days.
The faces that turned back to him were full of questions now. And wariness.
“I’m going to get her below now,” he told them, moving back toward Golden.
“Nay!”
They chorused it as they rushed him. He lunged back at them, disgust driving his steps at watching grown men skitter like frenzied mice. Christ. This was the eighteenth century, aye? “Sea witches” belonged to a world that believed the earth was flat and bathing was unholy, a society ruled by wives’ tales and lunatics’ rantings. He thought he’d hired modern, logical men. Clearly, he’d thought wrong.
“Gentlemen,” he declared lowly, “that was not a request.”
Golden wasn’t sure where she’d been sent after the wave killed her. Her journey meandered like a dream, a jumble of all the half-beliefs her life had become.
At first she was certain she was in heaven, the way Mum always taught her. She was eight years old again and nothing was wrong with the world. Peace and contentment filled her. She could even see Mum clearly. Daddy was there, too and they were kissing on the deck of the Gabrielle’s Hope. They were alive and no fire was going to destroy their voyage this time.
Then God turned his back on her, like He had before. She was dancing with Guypa on the great raft holding the sacrifice for Agwe, the god of the waters. They smiled together and there was color, so much color. A conch shell blew as they chorused their praises while offering sweets, wine, pigeons, mutton, and the beautiful seven-tiered cake. Then they threw the sacrifices into the water.
That was where things got strange. She became one of the oblations to Agwe, drifting into the water, away from the chants and the music and into the spirit world. It was peaceful in the fathoms of the sea. So serene and so blue…
Until the fathoms became eyes. Dark-blue eyes that carved away her senses until there was nothing yet everything to feel. Moonstormer, Moonstormer, the master of sin… His face, so rugged and beautiful, took her breath away. He smiled at her, and his murderer’s mark curled in a lethal taunt. He extended a hand to her, his long dark-brown fingers snaking closer, closer…
She knew it for certain the
n.
Not heaven. She was in hell.
She welcomed the blackness that came with the echoes of her scream. Her mind was spared from feeling anything for what must have been a long time, for when sensation returned, she ached all over. Her wrists throbbed especially, and she could feel they were slightly swollen.
Hell hadn’t wanted her, either. The dismal thought made her struggle to return to her sleepy abyss. There, she could forget it all. The running, the storm, the fear…and the monster who’d put her through it all.
She shuddered and squirmed. The Moonstormer. He made her insides twist and her heart fill with rage—at herself as much as him. She’d dreamed of the day she could kill the wretch, instead, she’d let his mouth inside hers, and gotten soft and wet from his touch. Learning his true identity should have turned the recall of that embrace into a hideous experience. It didn’t. Dear gods, it still didn’t.
Great spirits, please let this all be a nightmare. Just let me wake up with the sweet smell of oleanders in the air, the island finches singing at my window, and Papa calling to me for breakfast….
The only voice that called was consciousness. Golden struck out at the enemy, surprised as her arm actually carried the thought through. It came down against a very soft something.
More surprise, but pleasant this time. She opened her eyes despite herself. Rich tapestry pillows lay around her. They smelled like ginger, cinnamon, and other savory spices. Nice. Very nice.
She ran a finger across the amber and dark-brown pattern, discovering that the pillows laid atop a down coverlet in similar hues. The walls around her were paneled with red-tinted wood that gleamed with a recent beeswax polish.
She bolted straight up.
The wall was rocking. And she was rocking with it.
Where on earth—on sea—was she? Who had saved her; cleaned her wounds, bandaged them up, kept her safe and dry?
And…changed her clothes?
She ran a hand across the intricately-stitched flowers of a camisole that was definitely not hers. It was the deepest red she’d ever seen, and of the sheerest, softest fabric.
She swung her legs out of the berth, burning for the answer to every question at once. A wave of dizziness knocked her back to the pillows.
“Ohhhh.” She pulled a pillow against her roiling stomach. “Ohhh hell…”
“Rrrraaack!”
She jerked up again at the sharp sound. Her head cracked against the wall but she barely noticed. Her whole body zinged into battle-ready dread. She lurched to her knees and yanked another pillow to her side, preparing her lungs for a battle cry.
The only thing that attacked was the room itself. Images floated before her eyes in shimmering triplicate. She blinked hard, making out the shapes of a small writing desk, a dark wood dressing screen, and a gently swaying bird cage, with a turquoise and green blob flapping in it.
“Rrrraaack!” the blob screeched at her. After a few more blinks, it solidified into a grinning macaw. “Hello-hello-hello,” it rambled on. “Beautiful goddess. Hello, goddess. Hello.”
Despite the awful way she felt, Golden found herself smiling. The bird’s greeting awakened a deep part of her soul. Suddenly, the rainforest, and home, didn’t seem so far away. “Well hello, pretty one,” she crooned.
“Pretty.” The macaw latched on a familiar word. It bobbed on its perch as it launched into a clearly well-rehearsed repartee. “Pretty damn foolish. Damn fool woman. Damn fool—”
“Caesar!” A door whacked open above. Long legs sheathed in ebony-black breeches descended the small vertical stairway. “You’ll wake the dead, you daff-headed—”
He stopped when he noticed her sitting there. Golden managed a small, shocked cry. The Moonstormer was even more powerful than she remembered, his height conquering the cabin, his dark stare swallowing her whole. His bare chest gleamed with bronzed sea spray. The waves of his dark hair were swept back, as if he’d been flying across the night sky on a run of terror. The same tightly-reined tension ticked beneath the scar on his jaw.
She’d never been to hell at all.
Satan had merely come and found her.
She screamed.
“You beast! You hideous, heartless beast!”
He rolled his eyes, fists now on his bare waist. “Sweeting, we’re not starting this again.”
She almost laughed. He had no bloody idea, did he? Started? She’d show him what she considered “started.”
She flung herself at him with a war cry that would have done Guypa proud, pillows and blankets flying with her. The demon would curse the day he dared to stalk her again!
The Moonstormer’s face, drenched in shock, loomed before her as she struck him. “Christ’s teeth!” he thundered, eyes flashing blue combustion. The next sound out of him was a groaning “ooof!” as they toppled across the desk together.
His body had taken the brunt of the fall. He left behind God’s teeth to invoke a more sensitive part of the Lord’s anatomy before moaning in pain again.
Golden froze amidst the bedclothes atop him. She was shocked and furious with herself at the same time an even sicker feeling twisted her stomach. Her skin prickled.
She’d…she’d hurt him. The realization struck like the end of her first standoff with a wild boar. Just like that time, this was exhilarating then nauseating.
But she’d never hurt a human before.
Hurt? This was the Moonstormer! What the bloody hell did he know of hurt? What did he know of Mummy’s screams in the fire—in the flames he ignited! Had he listened as her mother shouted Golden’s name into the night? Even worse, had he relished the silence afterward? Did he know the agony of the silence as a person’s mother and father sank away forever?
He knew nothing about hurt. Nothing at all!
She exploded again, shrieking and crying. She flailed teeth, fingernails, knees, and elbows into the monster. The dizziness hit her like a gale wind but it didn’t matter. She kept going, tearing at the mounds of bedding next, searching for that disgusting, dark-brown face of his. She was going to laugh in it as she sent his soul to the abyss in which it belonged.
He grunted and she followed the sound. She could feel his legs trying to wrap around hers but she stayed in perpetual motion, squirming free every time he gained a hold. He was going to hell. Now. And she was going to ram him there.
“Would you calm the hell down?”
Mast finally managed to yell it, though it sounded like muffled bilge even to his ears. Because there was a pile of his own bloody bedding on top of him. Blankets and pillows wielded by a barbarian who barely matched half his weight, and had been dragged through a Caribbean squall on the back of a dolphin.
There must have been some approach to laughing at this.
He couldn’t think of one.
One of his arms at last met air. With an enraged snort, he grabbed the first thing he could get his hands on. A silken, perfect mound of a breast. Dear Christ, it really was perfect.
He was pretty damn certain he had her attention now.
She sure as fuck had his.
Are you going to grope her all night like this, Stafford, or behave like the leader of this vessel?
“Lady Golden!” He shouted it through the small tunnel he’d opened in the blanket. “As captain of this vessel, I command you to—aagggh! Goddamnit!”
The barbarian was trying to eat his hand off.
He pulled his arm back but she dug into his wrist like a wolf clinging to beef. He felt the vibrations of her growls—her growls—down the length of his arm and through his crushed chest.
By the pittance of breath left in my body, not another female will desecrate the decks of this ship again.
As for what he was going to do with this one…
Mast gathered what strength he had left and powered it to his legs. He kicked up and out, and they toppled off the desk in a sprawl of limbs and bedding and confusion. He flung the cloth away and sprang into a crouch, expecting anything at this poin
t.
Golden let go of his wrist, her mouth now occupied with a cry of surprise. Then came the cursing, or so Mast supposed; it was in rapid-fire Caribbee and came from a mound of blanket now scurrying away. He watched with one brow arched as the lump fumbled around, as disoriented as a rat under a wet rag. Damn fool woman. She’d pushed her body too far. Not to mention his.
All right, sweeting. Now we play by my rules.
Without a word, he snapped up the down coverlet.
The lump froze.
“Better,” he murmured. He lowered to his knees and started to inch toward her. She really was just a kitten, wasn’t she? Once the scratches and the hisses were done, the trick was simply finding the right way to stroke the little pussy. The rest was purrs and compliance.
He dragged away the silk sheet next. A delectable ivory foot and ankle came into view, but snapped back into the mound. “Aye. That’s it,” he prodded. “You see, hellion? It’s a simple thing. Learn to keep your place, and we’ll get along just fine.”
The blanket rose and fell with her breaths as he inched closer. Its explosion came just as he reached for her. Mast wrestled with the thick wool fabric, unable to see the foot she brought up and landed to the middle of his chest, sending him sprawling backward.
“Go to hell, monster! My place will never be with you!”
Learn her place then get just along fine? With him?
She tore across the cabin, searching better munitions to fire at the arrogant prig. She heaved several quill pens, a rather well-flying flute and to her delight, at least twenty heavy-bound books. From the sounds of his fierce grunts and filthy oaths, she’d made a few dead-on hits, too.
But she couldn’t ignore the dwindling reserves in her body. Sweat trickled her face. She couldn’t discern where her feet ended and the floor began. And everything was horribly blurry.
Clarity returned in a glorious moment of inspiration. With a triumphant smile, she dashed up the steps until she gauged herself at a perfect attack level. She reached to steady herself along the stairwell—
And was suddenly slammed into it, instead.
