His eyes narrowed on hers. “Like hell you aren’t.”
“I’m not.”
“Don’t try to bluff me, Delta. Nor yourself. A woman like you doesn’t make lov—ah, do what we did today without expecting a commitment.”
“Then I’m different.” She studied him with a deeply sensual look. “We’re different. You said it, too. There’s something between us that’s … that’s unusual, mystical, even.”
“I don’t believe in such stuff.”
“Neither do I, but it’s there. And it won’t go away unless we talk about it.”
“Then talk,” he responded in clipped tones. “I have nothing to say.”
Suddenly a loud thud, accompanied by the sound of scurrying feet came from around the corner by the sternwheel. As if she had rehearsed the entire operation, Brett thought later, Delta grabbed his hand, dragged him across the deck, unlocked her door, and drew him inside her cabin.
Leaning back against the door, she relocked it. Her breath came in gasps. “That could have been Nat.”
Her concern did more to unravel his determination than even her kiss had earlier. “You don’t understand,” he barked. “Pierre is my bodyguard. He won’t let that prissy actor get near me—or you.” He reached for the door handle. “I have to be going.”
“Please,” she said quickly. “I must talk to you. I can explain … well, not explain what has happened between us, but I can shed some light on it.”
He gritted his teeth. “I don’t want to hear, Delta.”
“But—?”
“You say you don’t want a commitment, well, that’s exactly what you’re asking for. And you can’t get it, not from me. You don’t even know me. You don’t know anything about me. Yesterday you were terrified every time you looked into my eyes. Today we made love.” His words ran out and he took a deep breath. “You should have stayed frightened.”
“I know you.” Her soft voice slashed guilt through him. “Don’t you remember when we first saw each other? At lunch, across the dining room. Well, I recognized you.”
His hand dropped from the door handle, falling slack by his side. He recalled the incident. How could he forget it? He’d even told Pierre and Gabriel how he was certain she had recognized him.
While he stood silently trying to sort his carnal emotions for this woman from his fears of whom she might be, of what she might know about him, she traipsed around the room lighting the lamps. Slowly the room took on a golden glow.
“Sit here.” She indicated one of the two beds. “It’s Mama Rachael’s bed.” She grinned, a wan, worried sort of grin. “Don’t worry, I won’t seduce you.”
His eyes held hers for an instant before guilt forced him to turn away. “I did the seducing, Delta. Don’t go thinking otherwise. I controlled that situation. You didn’t have a choice.”
Glancing at her, he watched her flush at his words and felt his body react, realizing that her mental images must surely match his own in every provocative detail. “I’ve already apologized,” he added.
“Do you want something to drink?” she asked. “Captain Kaney provided us with a well-stocked bar, although,”—she glanced at him with a shy grin—“I doubt he included spirits for gentlemen.”
Brett tried to smile, but he kept recalling how they had exchanged such a conversation by the river, and what he had replied, thinking what he would like to reply now. He knew what he wanted, and it wasn’t a drink.
“A glass of sherry, then,” he agreed.
Once she handed him the glass and poured one for herself, she sat on the opposite end of the bed facing him. She looked at him so solemnly he could read her hesitancy.
“You recognized me,” he prompted. “So, who am I?”
She pursed her lips, released them, and said, “Will you promise to hear me out before you decide I’ve lost my mind?”
“I promise,” he replied, but his brain was busy trying to decide how he would cope with her knowing the truth, the whole truth. How the hell had she learned it? She had certainly known it earlier today when she gave him the greatest gift she would ever give a man, and she had given it and enjoyed it. And she had lost her fear of him.
“Remember when I said folks were calling you a pirate?”
He nodded, striving to concentrate on her words and not on their consequences. When she finished, would she throw him out the door? That’s where he belonged, out … out of her life.
She gulped a swallow of sherry, coughed, then dabbed at her lips with the back of her hand. “Well, I had thought that, even before I heard others make the claim. Several months ago I began having strange dreams, nightmares. They weren’t really nightmares while they were going on, they were dreams but they were so real I actually experienced—I mean, until this afternoon I thought I had experienced—”
“Delta, slow down. Start over. Your dreams or nightmares, what were they about?”
She looked at him, resolute, he could tell. “About the pirates Calico Jack and Anne Bonny.”
Growing more leery, Brett recalled her claim that he looked like Calico Jack. “What about the pirates? What do they do in your dreams?”
“They make love,” she responded.
He chuckled softly, relieved at her answer. “What’s so bad about that?”
“Nothing, except—” She paused.
He watched her take another swallow of sherry before she continued.
“Calico Jack was hanged, and Anne Bonny disappeared. But that isn’t all. When I came on board this showboat, my dreams started changing. Do you remember that first night when I surprised you and your friends by the paddlewheel and you—you kissed me?”
He drew a sharp breath at the reminder. “Oui.”
“That’s why I was on deck … dressed like that. I had awakened from another nightmare, and it was so terrifying I had to get some air. The pirates hadn’t made love in that dream, they had just kissed, and she had … she had run her fingers over his lips, and it was all the same as between us, except the kiss in my dream was soft and gentle and not rough and cruel—”
“Delta, don’t.”
She drained her sherry glass. He watched her grip the stem in such a tight fist he feared the crystal might crack. He wanted to take it from her, but resisted. “What else?”
“The night before we arrived here in Memphis I dreamed about Calico Jack’s death. The pirate ship had been tricked into boarding a government vessel that was full of soldiers. Calico Jack and Anne Bonny had been betrayed by a government agent on board their own ship, and Anne was forced to watch him walk the plank.”
Brett frowned, trying to remember how the story went. “It could have happened that way, I suppose, but as I recall Calico Jack was hanged on the island of Jamaica.”
“I know. They’re my ancestors. But in my dreams things are different. Do you remember standing beside me while we moored here in Memphis?”
He wanted to tell her he would remember every single time he had stood beside her, lain beside her, loved her, probably for the rest of his life. But he didn’t. “Oui.”
“The instant I saw my cousin Cameron and told you about him being a Pinkerton agent, I knew the truth. When I turned around to invite you to spend the day with us, you had disappeared.”
He held her gaze for several lengthy seconds. “Then it was my loss.”
“You don’t understand, Brett. My dreams are a warning. My ancestors are warning me that someone needs help. Someone is in danger. Another thing—this afternoon by the river when you said that … uh, when you were so horrified at the thought that I might have …”
Her stumbling words begged for his help. Her cheeks flamed in the candlelight and he knew what she was trying to say, but he was unable to help her.
He tried to stop her. “Don’t Delta—”
“When you worried that I might have conceived your child,” she continued in a rush of words, “one part of the nightmare, the part that never changes, flashed through my mind. My dreams al
l end the same way—with a baby crying.”
The sherry glass, from which he had drunk little, slipped from Brett’s fingers. He watched the amber liquid spread in a widening circle over the green damask bedspread.
His eyes found Delta’s. The agony on her face pierced straight to his heart. He looked away.
“What does it mean, Brett?”
Like a wounded animal, his heart struggled so hard it seemed to get lodged in his throat. Withdrawing his handkerchief from an inside pocket, he stabbed at the spilled sherry. “You tell me.”
“You’re the one in danger, Brett. I know it. For months I’ve been tormented by the knowledge that someone needed my help. Someone, someplace needed me. It’s been driving me mad. That’s why I came on this trip. Ginny and Hollis, my sister and brother-in-law in St. Louis, they thought a change of scenery would rid me of the dreams. But it didn’t. Instead the dreams changed. Everything’s clear now. You’re the one in danger, Brett.”
Fear and guilt boiled inside him like bile. He jumped to his feet, intending to deny any connection and rush from the room. “Why me?” he stormed, finding himself bending over her, his knees touching hers as they jutted from the side of the bed.
“Why me?” he repeated, harsh and demanding, close to her face.
Melancholy filled her eyes, searing him with a deep sense of sadness, made heavier by the tears that threatened to roll down her cheeks at any moment.
“Because you’re the pirate in my dreams,” she said.
“I’m not. Your dreams are about Calico Jack. He lived over a hundred years ago.”
“You are. I can’t explain it, but it’s true. You even swear alike. God’s bones—that’s what Calico Jack says in my dreams.”
“Because you heard me say it first,” he countered.
“He said it first. Months ago. You are the pirate in my dreams.”
“That’s crazy,” he muttered, after clearing his throat to be able to utter a sound.
She reached to trace his lips, eliciting a shudder at the intimacy, at the reminder of all the other times she had performed this simple gesture.
“You are,” she whispered. “You’re identical to him—” her eyes left his briefly to scan his body, then she looked him full in the face again, “—in every detail.”
And that simple statement, so explicit in the images it evoked, was his undoing. His lips covered hers, crushing, devouring, and the next thing he knew he lay wrapped in her arms, skin to skin, his head nestled between the soft, luscious mounds of her naked breasts.
The farthest he got from her the rest of the night was when they moved to the other bed to escape the spilled sherry. Perhaps it was the darkened room, but as the night wore on she lost more and more of her modesty.
Once she told him, “I thought this afternoon was the best anything could ever be, but every time gets better.”
He chuckled. “It’s having a soft bed beneath you instead of the cold, hard ground.”
“No,” she mumbled, “it’s having you … inside me.” The last words escaped on a ragged breath of air while she lifted her hips in answer to his bold thrusts, drawing forth his seeds in a great trembling surge of passion.
Afterwards they clung together, damp and exhausted. Her womanly scent mingled with the faintest hint of violets in the close room, surrounding him as in a womb of her own making.
He knew he should feel guilty, but her joy prevented such a thing. He knew he should feel trapped, like a fly in a spider’s web, but he didn’t. And here in her arms, with her body curled into his like a cobbler’s last that had been molded to fit his form and no other, he wasn’t even able to question his contentment.
“Brett?” she called once, rousing him from where he had dozed with the tip of her breast in his mouth. Stirring, like a babe he began to suckle, then as though to assure her he was instead a lover, he rolled her nipple between his teeth. She squirmed, nuzzling the soft hair at the base of her abdomen into his.
“Ready for more?” he teased.
She wriggled against him. “Are you?”
“I think we can manage once more before sunup, at which time, m’moiselle, I will leave you to dress for breakfast.”
“Breakfast?”
“Have you ever watched the sunrise on the Mississippi?”
She shook her head, teasing her curls across his face.
“Then this morning you will,” he promised. “A spectacular end to a perfect night.” He kissed her. “Or beginning to a perfect day.”
“Or both,” she whispered into his lips.
Later when he started to leave, she pulled him to her and asked a question he suspected had been bothering her for some time.
“Do you think I’m demented? About the dreams, I mean?”
Cupping her breasts, one in each palm, he bent and kissed each in turn, then he kissed her lips. “No, chère…But there must be other explanations. Perhaps your family has spoken too often of the pirates. Perhaps the pirates represent other troubles you have. Who knows what goes on inside the mind while it is asleep?”
“But you don’t think I’m mad?”
He kissed her again. “No. If it will make you feel better, I’ve had dreams of my own to worry over lately. That’s the reason I’m headed back to the bayou. I’ve been seeing a hazy image of a blue-eyed woman in my dreams. I’ve never been able to make out the woman’s face, but I finally decided it must be my mother calling me home.”
“Calling you home?”
He laughed. “I told you I don’t put stock in things like that, and I don’t. The truth is, though, that my mother is a traiteur. Some folks even call her a witch.”
Delta gasped.
Again, he chuckled. “She treats people with herbs from the bayou and potions she brews herself. She claims to have psychic powers, but I’ve never seen her use them. I didn’t mean she was actually calling me. I haven’t seen her in ten years, and well, I’m going home to see if she’s all right.”
Delta thought about this while she dressed. At least, he didn’t think she was demented, but she could tell he didn’t intend to spend much time worrying over his own safety, either.
She dressed in another gown Mama Rachael had copied from Harper’s Bazaar. This one, a mandarin yellow princesse dress, was overlaid with a sleeveless polonaise that fit like a second dress, dipping to the top of the skirt’s flounce and lacing in great crisscrosses from the top of her bosom to the bottom of the skirt with a heavy white silk cord. According to the magazine, the garment was designed for the seashore, which led Mama Rachael to claim it would be appropriate for a promenade on board a steamship on the Mississippi River.
Or for a sunrise breakfast with the pirate in her dreams, Delta thought, giddy from her night with Brett. When she reached the outdoor dining area off the paddlewheel lounge, Brett’s perusal fairly set her skin on fire.
“More of your trousseau?”
She laughed.
With his hand resting intimately at the small of her back, Brett ushered her to a table near the rail. The Mississippi River flowed ahead of them, and to one side, the docks of Memphis. Roustabouts worked around the wharf, rolling giant coils of rope, hauling crates of food on board. Chanting an ancient song whose words were lost in its steady rhythm, they prepared the steamship to embark downriver within the hour.
“The best seat in the house, m’moiselle,” Brett announced, holding her chair. “I’ve ordered breakfast.”
“Thank you, m’sieur,” she laughed.
The waiter brought a silver coffee urn and filled their cups. She studied Brett so intently that he finally turned away with a wink, focusing his attention on the brightening sky.
“I invited you here to watch the sunrise.”
She started to tell him she’d much prefer to watch him, but decided against it. She was determined not to break one promise she had made the night before—she would do nothing to cause him to think she needed a commitment. She wasn’t fool enough to think this relati
onship could last. She must be prepared to take what she could get and not be heartbroken when it was over.
And she must find a way to protect him. Regardless of his opinion of her dreams, she was certain he was in danger.
They were the only two diners on deck at the moment and the hush of morning rested around them. The deep, melodic chant of the roustabouts sounded as an honor guard to the majestic sun on its rise above the horizon.
“Next time we’ll get here earlier,” Brett said, his eyes still on the river. Like a golden ball the sun moved higher and higher in rhythm to the roustabouts’ chant. “Tomorrow morning when the boat is steamin’ down the river, we’ll come before dawn. It’ll take your breath away.”
“It already does,” she whispered, knowing she spoke of the man by her side as much as of the sky, streaked with pink and gold. Sunlight skimmed the glass-smooth surface of the river, highlighting the reflections of trees and shoreline as with an artist’s brush.
The waiter returned carrying steaming platters of eggs, beefsteak, grits, and biscuits and jams.
“I’m famished,” she said, spreading the starched white napkin across her lap.
Brett tossed her a teasing grin. “You should be, after all the work you put in last night.”
She felt a blush creep up her neck and knew she must glow like the rising sun. “Shame on you.”
“Shame on you,” he laughed. “No, I didn’t mean that.” His eyes held hers with an intense, passionate expression that turned her to jelly. “You were magnificent.”
Her cheeks burned. She wanted to cover her face. But more than that, she wanted to kiss him. So all she did was stare.
“If you don’t stop looking at me like that, chère, we’ll miss the sunrise.”
She had just considered telling him she wouldn’t mind missing the sunrise, when she saw his face stiffen. They were seated with his chair facing slightly toward the docks, hers toward the far bank of the river.
She turned to see what had caught his eye.
“Oh,” was all she could manage, seeing Mama Rachael and Cameron stride toward the gangplank.
“Your cousin, the Pinkerton?”
Sunrise Surrender--Jarrett Family Sagas--Book Three Page 15
