In the bay below, sunlight gleamed on an eddy of water turned by a flashing oar.
“What you lookin’ at?” asked Patu.
Jack raised one hand to shade his eyes. “That ship that’s just dropped anchor in the harbor.”
“It’s the steamer from Rabaul.”
“Yeah. And why’s it sending a boat to my dock?”
“Did you order something?”
“Through that rat- and cockroach-infested rust bucket?” Jack made a rude noise and frowned against the glare of the sun and the bleary haze of too many nights spent indulging in the pleasures of sin and excess. “What do you think?”
Patu climbed to the top step and peered into the distance. “I think something’s coming, whether you ordered it or not,” he said, suddenly grinning. “Or should I say, someone. A mail-order wife, maybe? Although from the looks of her, I’d say it’s more likely somebody has decided you need your very own missionary to convert you to the ways of the godly and save you from the fires of hell and damnation.”
A terrible pain flashed across Jack’s temple, and he groaned and lowered his head again. “You talk too much, boy. Just go down there and tell her to go away.”
“Not me,” said Patu. “She looks bigger than me. And meaner than you.”
It was a bloody missionary all right, Jack decided, frowning at the woman who sat ramrod straight at the prow of the longboat, her gloved hands gripping the plain handle of an austere parasol, the collar of her ugly, drab-colored gown buttoned up so high around her neck, he wondered it didn’t choke her.
He was standing near the end of his dock, his bare legs straddled wide, his arms crossed at his naked chest, when her boat knocked against the rough wooden planks.
“Kaoha nui,” said the woman, like he was a Polynesian or something.
“G’day,” said Jack, giving her his nastiest smile.
She blinked up at him, her nostrils flaring on a quick, startled breath as she took in the brown, nearly naked, overtly hostile length of him. He had to give her credit: She didn’t miss a beat. “You must be Jack Ryder.” The accent surprised him: crisp, no-nonsense Scots.
“That’s right.” He shifted his hands to his hips and leaned forward. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here, but you can just tell these men to turn around and take you right back where you came from.”
He’d made no move to offer her a hand, so she simply closed her parasol with a snap and clambered unaided up onto the dock with an agility that both surprised him and gave him a quick glimpse of long, slim calves and neat ankles disappearing into sensible, lace-up boots. “I am India McKnight,” she said, carefully shaking out her skirts before she lifted her head and fixed him with a steady stare. “How do you do?”
He’d actually heard of her, although he wasn’t about to tell her that. He’d even read one of her books. In the Footsteps of Montezuma, it was called. It had been written with a wonderfully dry wit and acerbic way of looking at the world that had appealed to him. He remembered finishing it and thinking, Now that’s one Scotswoman I wouldn’t mind meeting.
Just went to prove how wrong a body could be, he thought.
“I’ve come to offer you a business proposition,” she said, when he continued simply to stare at her.
“Not interested.”
“How can you know when you haven’t heard what it is yet?”
Patu had been right, Jack realized. She was bloody tall. She barely had to tip back her head to meet his gaze squarely. A bloody Amazon.
She nodded to the sleek, American-built yacht riding at anchor in the lagoon. “Is that your boat?”
The glint of sunlight off the water hurt his eyes. It wasn’t fair, really, having to deal with this bloody barracuda of a woman and a hangover, both at the same time. He hadn’t even had time to take a bloody leak. He thought about taking one, now, right off the end of the dock. That would surely send Miss Prissfaced McKnight scurrying back to her rusty steamer, where she’d probably sit down and write all about it for her next book. He wouldn’t have expected the thought to give him pause, but it did.
“She’s called the Night Hawk,” Jack said, contenting himself with giving her another of his nasty smiles. “I won her off a couple of Yankee blackbirders in a poker game a few years ago.”
“And are you a blackbirder, Mr. Ryder?”
They were the lowest of the low, blackbirders. They called it recruiting, what they did, stealing young Melanesians and Polynesians and taking them away to work in the fields of Queensland and Fiji and South America, but it was really just another word for slaving. If she’d been a man, he’d probably have punched her one for that. As it was, he took a hasty step forward, then drew up short. “What do you think?”
She kept her gaze steady on his face, her eyes dark and solemn in a way that almost made him regret baiting her. “I think I owe you an apology,” she said after a moment. “I hear you are familiar with the passage through the southern reef off Takaku.”
She so took him by surprise that he answered her without thought. “Familiar enough. Why?”
“I would like to hire you to convey me to the bay below Mount Futapu. If we leave first thing in the morning, we should be there before eleven. That would give me some four or five hours to climb the slopes of the volcano and investigate the so-called Faces of Futapu, and still—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Jack, bringing up both hands to clutch the sides of his aching head. “I’m not conveying you anywhere, lady.”
She gave him a calm, appraising look that took him straight from annoyance all the way to full fury. “You’re concerned about the recent reports of cannibal activity in the area, I suppose,” she said in a self-assured, faintly condescending tone that would have been enough, by itself, to aggravate him. “I can assure you, you will be in no danger. I’m not asking you to accompany me in my ascent of the summit. You may remain safely aboard your yacht in the harbor.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the bloody cannibals,” Jack bellowed. The echo of the shout reverberated in his head, making him groan.
She gave him another of those critical assessments, and this time he’d swear he saw a gleam of amusement sparkling in her clear gray eyes. “From the looks of things, Mr. Ryder, I’d say you have what we call in Scotland a deevil of a haid. Is that why you’re so cranky?”
He walked right up to her, deliberately intimidating her with his big, nearly naked, sweat-sheened, sun-browned body. “I am not cranky, ” he said, enunciating each word softly and carefully as he leaned into her, close enough that his breath stirred an errant, chestnut-colored curl peeking out from her sensible bonnet. “Nor am I some bloody tour guide. I am an antisocial renegade wanted by the British bloody Navy for mayhem and murder, which means you’ve probably far more to fear from me than from any head-hunting black men of Takaku.”
He saw her chest jerk as she sucked in a deep breath, her eyes growing wide with some emotion he couldn’t name as she stared up at him. She was younger than he’d first supposed, he realized, twenty-four or five at the most, with smooth cheeks and fine eyes and the kind of clear-cut features that would probably be called handsome by those who admired that sort of woman. Jack didn’t.
He also saw that she wasn’t half as self-confident as she liked to pretend. Her gaze skittered sideways to the longboat that still bobbed, waiting, beside the dock. She might not be afraid of cannibals, but a naked male chest in close proximity was obviously something else again, and she probably would have gone away then and left him alone if he hadn’t spoiled it all by adding, “Besides, the so-called Faces of Fatapu are a natural formation.”
Too late, he saw the leap of interest in her eyes. “Natural? Are you certain? Because according to my sources—”
“Which sources?” Jack demanded before he could stop himself.
“Dunsberry,” she said, with a little lifting of her head, as if James Dunsberry were the definitive expert on the South Pacific.
“Huh. Dunsberry never got within two hundred miles of Takaku, let alone climbed to the summit of Mount Fatapu. If he had, he’d have known that the Faces are just weirdly folded upthrusts of old lava.”
“You’ve seen them?” Her lips parted on a little gasp of excitement that set him to thinking, for some reason he couldn’t begin to understand, that this was exactly the kind of erotic, breathy noise she made when a man took her.
“Of course I’ve seen them.” Jack stared off into the distance and found himself wishing he were wearing something more confining than a sarong.
“If it’s true, you understand what this means, don’t you?” she said, for all the world as if she were having an esoteric scholarly conversation in some stuffy London drawing room rather than standing at the end of a weathered dock on a flyspeck of an island in the middle of the South Pacific with a half-naked Aussie no-account preoccupied with lascivious thoughts of what she might look like if someone could ever get her out of that ugly, high-collared dress of hers.
“If it’s true,” she was saying, “then it is more important than ever that I go to Takaku and verify what you’re saying. Dunsberry used the Faces of Fatapu as proof of an ancient link between the rock-carving traditions of Laos and Burma, and the statues and marae of the Marshalls and Easter Island. But if he was wrong, if there never was a Polynesian rock-carving presence in Melanesia, then the break is significant.”
“Just wait right there,” said Jack, bringing his bleary gaze and wandering attention back to focus on her animated face. “Where exactly do you think the Polynesians came from?”
“South America.”
She said it with a tightening of her jaw and a steely gaze that defied him to laugh at her. He didn’t laugh. But he did shake his head. “You’re wrong.”
“Am I?” Her tone told him she’d had this argument before. “The Polynesians are concentrated in the eastern islands of the Pacific. The common consensus, of course, is that they were forced to keep moving through the western islands such as New Guinea and the Solomons because of the presence of the head-hunting Melanesians. But what if they’re found predominantly in the western islands because they came from the west? It’s the prevailing direction of the trade winds, isn’t it? Botanists have documented numerous native South American plants throughout the islands: the avocado pear and coconut palm and many others. And if the vegetation could move from east to west, then why not the human inhabitants? I have compared the photographs of the statues of Fatu Hiva with those I have seen myself in the jungles of Central and South America, and the similarities are startling.”
He stared at her through squinted eyes. “You’re writing a bloody book about this, aren’t you?”
A faint, unexpected hint of color touched her cheeks. “As a matter of fact, I am. I’m thinking of calling it From Mandalay to the Cannibal Islands.”
“Huh. Given your argument, one would think you’d have started in the Americas, and called the book From Peru to the Cannibal Islands.”
He was silently laughing at her, and her chest rose and fell with indignation when she realized it. “You made it up, didn’t you? What you said about the Faces of Fatapu? They’re not a natural formation. You just said that so I’d go away and leave you alone.”
Jack let out a soft sigh. “That’s why I said it, all right. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“Prove it.”
He should have told her he didn’t need to prove a bloody thing to her. He should have told her to get the bloody hell away from him and stay away. Instead, he said, “You’re forgetting about the cannibals.”
She shook her head. “You told me you’re not afraid of cannibals.”
“I’m not. But you should be.”
“Because I’m a woman?”
“Women make good eating.”
He said it with a smile, meaning to scare her. Instead, a gleam of interest lit up her eyes. “Really? Have you ever eaten one?”
The question was so unexpected, Jack almost jumped. “Bloody hell. What do you think I am?”
“I heard you lived with cannibals once. For two years.”
“Not here.”
“Where?”
Jack half-turned away, then swung back on her. “Look, you want me to take you to Takaku, or not?”
A flicker of surprise animated her expressive face. She’d make a lousy poker player, Jack thought, watching her suck in a quick, wary breath. “Does this mean you’ll do it?”
He jerked his head toward the tidy little German settlement on the far side of the lagoon. “Have these men take you to a place called the Limerick. The old, one-legged Irishman who runs it looks like a pirate, but he keeps a bungalow hotel you’ll find considerably cleaner than that steamer you just got off. Unless you like rats, of course.”
“Actually, I came to appreciate their presence on the steamer,” she said with a slow smile. “They scared away the cockroaches.”
He found he liked her smile, liked the way it banished that spinsterish pinch of earnestness and hinted at the existence of another side to this woman altogether. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow at first light,” he said gruffly, and took a step back.
He stood and watched as, with the aid of one of the seamen, she clambered down into the waiting longboat. Then she paused, her head falling back and her brows drawing together as she stared up at him. “You will be there, won’t you?”
It was his last chance to get out of it. For one, oddly suspended moment, he was intensely aware of the golden heat of the tropical sun on his bare shoulders and the violent boom of the distant surf and the rocking of the dock beneath his feet. Then he said, “I’ll be there. Now get the hell out of here, would you? I need to pee.”
By Candice Proctor
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
NIGHT IN EDEN
THE BEQUEST
SEPTEMBER MOON
THE LAST KNIGHT
WHISPERS OF HEAVEN
MIDNIGHT CONFESSIONS
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An Ivy Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 2002 by Candice Proctor
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This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming paperback novel Beyond Sunrise by Candice Proctor. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
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