Wrecked

by Deanna Wadsworth

  “He can’t stop it any more than your mother could’ve. Call it a curse or old gypsy magic. I’m tired of pretending it isn’t real.”

  Nervously, he looked over his shoulder, fearing someone in the restaurant had overheard. “Gypsy magic? Why are you talking crazy?”

  Richard opened his mouth, but the pretty blonde returned, carrying a tray laden with loaves of bread, cold chicken, and a bit of salted sand-fish and cheese. Paired with dark ale, the lunch should’ve roused Cole’s appetite, but unwelcome conversation ruined it. After a shy smile he barely managed to return, the girl left.

  “What do you know about the Chambers’s side of the family?” Richard began as he heaped his plate.

  Cole followed suit, though he doubted he would enjoy the meal with the knot in his gut. “Not much.”

  Richard chewed thoughtfully on a hunk of crusty bread. “My great-great-grandfather, Phillip Chambers III, was actually a slave trader turned pirate. Did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t. And I could’ve lived plenty happy not knowing.” It was bad enough bastards like those Englishmen thought all wreckers were pirates. Having an actual pirate on the family tree was like a boot in the ass.

  After brushing crumbs from his hands, Richard reached into his jacket and removed a leather-bound book, then slid it across the table toward Cole. “That’s his journal. There are some very interesting entries about a Romani slave he bought named Vadoma, a gypsy woman with raven black hair and hazel eyes.” He winked from his own pair.

  Unamused, Cole picked up the journal. A quick flip of its pages showed faded writing and sketches of sea life—each drawing as masterful as those of his brother’s. He dropped it onto the table, its very existence unsettling him. “All right, so our pirate grandfather married a gypsy. That ain’t so strange.”

  “He never married her,” Richard said casually. “His journal is filled with accounts of how Vadoma predicted storms and sickness on board. Even which vessels they should attack. She used to wake up with visions and dreams too. Screaming so much that the entire crew feared her.”

  Cole nearly choked on the fish he’d bitten into.

  “You see the similarities, then?” Richard said, leafing through the journal. “After several years at sea, she bore him a son, Stefan. They gave up piracy and built a small estate in Bahama. When an old enemy drove a knife through Phillip’s heart, Vadoma raised Stefan on her own, teaching him the ways of her Roma people. Stefan didn’t have the sight. It’s rare, but not unheard of, for sons to inherit it. Vadoma taught my Gran how to use her sight. My father hated his mother’s old superstitious ways and ran away from her as soon as he was old enough. I remember him calling her crazy. He never allowed me or your mother to be around her.”

  “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” Cole downed a hefty swallow of ale, needing the drink to clear his head.

  “If it’s so stupid, why are your hands shaking?”

  He cursed Richard’s observant ways and bunched his fists, trying to quell his rising frustration.

  “Your dad was just like my own. He thought all of this”—Richard waved the journal around—“was foolishness. He’d rather believe that Mira suffered from hysteria than admit the truth. I used to think the same way, so when your dad didn’t want you boys to know, I agreed.”

  “I don’t have time for this. My mind should be on our case.”

  Richard waved his hand dismissively. “Court cases come and go. Blood is forever. You need to take care not to fail your brother the way I failed to take care of my sister.”

  “W-what?”

  “Mira was never strong emotionally. She was always fragile. When our parents died of cholera, we were sent to live with Gran in Bahama. She knew Mira had the sight, and when she tried to teach her the old ways, I became furious. So I stole some money and fled with your mother back to the Americas.”

  “Good for you,” Cole said, caught up in the tale. “It was the right thing to do, run away from that.”

  Uncle Richard looked sad, deep lines cutting into his sun-weathered face. “No, I don’t believe so. It was just the two of us when Mira started having visions. She warned me not to go out to sea once and a terrible storm came, almost wrecking the ship I should’ve been on. Or she’d wake from a terrible dream of a woman dying in childbirth, only to hear news the next day of the very same thing. Like your father, at first I called the doctors. But it soon became apparent that the drugs they gave her were merely a bandage. Nothing stopped her visions or the madness that came with them, borne of some imagined responsibility to warn people or try and stop what she saw. I thought when she married your father, things would calm down. I remember Gran telling her she needed something to focus on, something to link her mind to this world so the otherworld wouldn’t claim her mind.”

  “The otherworld?” Cole repeated, laughing aloud. He could hardly believe his uncle was saying all of this!

  “It was what Gran called it,” he said unapologetically. “I thought a family would keep Mira grounded in this world, and for a while it did. But when her visions got stronger after Rief was born, nothing would calm her. That’s why she always sent you to friends. She didn’t want you to see her like that.”

  “She never sent Rief away,” he muttered.

  What he wouldn’t have given to see the look of pride and love Mother bestowed on her youngest child when he showed her another masterful drawing. To be the recipient of her smile, or a tender kiss on the head. But no! She’d never shown any interest in Cole, leaving him for weeks at a time with old Mrs. Jones when Dad went on patrol. When he’d gotten old enough, at least he’d been able to escape her neglect by going to sea with Dad.

  Richard gazed at him with pity. “Every time I looked at her, I could tell how alone she was, and there wasn’t anything I could do to help.”

  “She wasn’t alone,” Cole argued, the implication stinging him. “She had us.”

  Richard lowered his voice and leveled a hard gaze on Cole. “You remember the way she used to wake, screaming like a demon, don’t you?”

  Cole looked away, refusing to voice anything to further validate this preposterous story. Nothing could make him forget how his mother woke in fits—that’s what Dad and the doctors called them, not visions. She’d only wanted Rief to comfort her. Those nights had frightened him to his bones, hurting his heart almost as badly as how much more she’d loved his brother. But it was too late to dwell on it. She had been a very sick woman who took her own life and no amount of childish wishing could fix the past. To have Uncle Richard dredge up those old feelings with what sounded like a tale a drunken sailor might tell in a pub, was like rubbing salt into old wounds best left forgotten.

  “This is all a bunch of nonsense.” Cole wrapped both hands around his mug to stop them from trembling. “Mother was sick, the doctors—”

  “Were wrong,” Richard talked over him. “She was troubled, but not for the reasons any doctors were willing to admit.”

  “I never took you for a superstitious fool, Uncle. Gypsy magic? The otherworld? This is foolishness. Mother was insane, plain and simple. It hurts me to say it aloud, but you know it’s true. She wasn’t some fortuneteller. All that superstitious nonsense is just a story. Dad raised us to believe a man makes his own way. His actions are his own doing. There ain’t no outside forces making things happen.”

  “A sailor who can see the sail moving, yet refuses to believe in wind,” he said, with a mirthless chuckle. “Such beautiful irony.”

  “Don’t you weave words to me and pretend to be Plato or some such. That ain’t the same as this.” He punctuated his last word by jabbing his finger at the journal.

  “Isn’t it? You were a man when your mother died, but you blindly believe the stories your father concocted, that she was just sick and had a nervous condition. Well, no medicine ever helped her, so when things got worse, I went back to Gran looking for help. Unfortunately, the old woman had died. But I found that journal among
her things. When I returned, I showed your father, hoping we could use it to help Mira, but your father refused to talk about it. Refused to admit anything was strange about his wife’s nightmares. And then Rief started to show signs of the sight. He drew the hurricane for weeks before it happened, remember?”

  “No, those were just more nasty pictures. He’s always drawing things no decent person wants to look at.”

  “Are you going to be a fool like your father?” Richard demanded. “He was so ashamed of his own wife and son, so stubborn, that he let them both slip away.”

  Furious, Cole pointed a finger in his face. “Don’t you dare piss on my father’s memory.”

  His uncle gently but firmly pushed his hand away. “You’re a thirty-year-old man, Cole. It’s time to stop putting your father on a pedestal. Admitting a dead man had his faults isn’t disrespect. Refusing to learn from his mistakes would really be pissing on his memory.”

  “He was a good man,” he growled, more than aware of several sets of eyes watching their heated exchange. He forced a deep breath, not comfortable with causing a scene.

  “He was a better father to you than to Rief. All that boy ever wanted was your father’s approval. Hell, he even learned to dive like a common Negro, just to impress him.”

  “Dad was good to both of us, to hell with what you think.”

  Richard shook his head and scoffed, not as intimidated as Cole would’ve liked. “You can be angry with me, but I knew your father longer than you did. He was honest and hardworking, but he wasn’t a saint. He was an ignorant man scared to death of his own wife and son, and so afraid others might find out they were special, he pretended none of it was real.”

  “You best watch what you say,” Cole warned from between gritted teeth. He’d never hit his uncle, but the powerful urge to do so consumed him.

  “And you better listen to what I’m saying. Your father did Rief a great disservice, refusing to allow me to tell him about this after Mira died.” He tossed the journal onto the table, making Cole jump. “Well, he’s dead and I’m done respecting his foolish wishes. Unless you want to lose the only family you have left, you better not make the same mistakes your stubborn old man did. You can’t keep ignoring your brother and allowing him to live like an outcast.”

  “Rief doesn’t exactly endear himself to anyone.” Cole sniffed in disgust. “He draws sick things that frighten people just for sport. Dad asked him to stop that art nonsense, but Rief refused. He needs to be stopped.”

  Richard glared at him. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told your father. You can’t take Rief’s art from him.”

  “Rief has never cared who he hurt, and you want me to let him get away with it because of a stupid story about gypsies? Maybe you’re the one who’s gone mad,” he growled, sick to death of the way his uncle always took Rief’s side. Cole was the one who did all the work, yet no one seemed to care.

  “Believe the past I’ve seen, or don’t. I’m not going to fight with you, but I fear your brother is headed down the same path of madness as your mother. I used to think his art kept him grounded, but since your father’s death, I’m not so sure. He’s becoming more and more reticent, private. He locks himself away from people just like Mira did before the end. I’m afraid if we don’t help him, he’ll be lost too.”

  “You can’t help someone who doesn’t care.”

  Richard shook his head. “You don’t want to fail Rief the way your father and I failed your mother. The guilt just gets harder to live with as time goes on. I love you two boys as if you came from my own loins. I don’t want you to experience what I’m still going through. Do you want him to end up like your mother?”

  The fierce whisper and the watering in his uncle’s eyes were more than he could handle.

  Abruptly, Cole stood. “Thanks for lunch, but I have to go.”

  Richard flinched but quickly composed himself. He held out the journal written by a forgotten pirate with a gypsy mistress. “Please?”

  Cole ran his fingers over the back of his head again. Before he changed his mind, he snatched the book from his uncle’s hand.

  Chapter Ten

  “I was taught to believe that this class of men were an unprincipled set of beings. On the contrary I find them to be decent men of good common sense.”

  —letter from Key West from an unknown correspondent, 1827

  “Thank God, you’re finally here!”

  Before Mathew saw it coming, Rief seized him in a fierce hug.

  “Rief!” he hissed, struggling out of his arms and grabbing onto his hat before it toppled down the stairs. As happy as he was to see Rief, a passionate embrace for anyone in the waterfront below to see was extremely dangerous. “Perhaps we should go inside?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Recalling himself, Rief stepped back fast, keeping a hold of Mathew’s hand and pulling him over the threshold.

  Once shut inside, darkness shrouded them, and Mathew was bodily pressed against the door. A mouth sought his, kissing his cheeks and nose as it fought its way to the prize. Mathew groaned when their lips finally met in a wild, uncontrolled kiss. So intimately pressed together, the hard steely lines of Rief’s body fit perfectly against his. He could barely catch his breath from the attack, the kiss so much hungrier than any that had come before.

  When he pulled his mouth away, gasping for air, Rief continued to press kisses against his throat. “I’m so glad you’re finally here,” he whispered, his hands moving all over him and face buried in Mathew’s neck. “I needed you. I needed you so bad after the fire....”

  “Fire?” he repeated. “What are you talking about?”

  He stilled and the tight grip on Mathew’s coat flexed. “Never mind that. Everything’s better now that you’re here.” Smoothing his lapels, Rief stepped away. “Would you like a drink?”

  Adjusting his semihard cock, he laughed. “After such a welcome, I think I need a cold bath.”

  An answering chuckle echoed in the darkness, followed by the scraping sound of a match. Golden light blinded him for a moment. When his eyed adjusted, the candlelight warmed the room with a seductive glow and revealed Rief filling two glasses in the kitchen.

  Removing his hat, Mathew smoothed down his hair, wondering about the cause of that panicked kiss. Rief had seemed so frantic, almost scared. He wanted to ask what fire he’d been talking about, but Rief appeared quite calm now.

  “You look very nice,” Rief said.

  “Thank you.” He beamed, pleased that Rief noticed. He had spent a great time on his toilette, right down to choosing his finest silk underthings. He’d hoped donning his best clothing would give him courage to be like the man Rief had painted. The bespoke frock coat of woven burgundy silk might be too formal, but Mathew had brimmed with confidence the moment he slid it on. The customized fit complimented his slight frame, making him look athletic and muscular. Well, at least he’d fancied it did until Maggie told him his attire was over the top, lecturing him on appropriate fashion for dinner.

  Rief held out a glass as he joined him. “Here ya go.”

  “Thank you.” Though a drink would settle his nerves, he didn’t want it to dull his senses, so he sipped cautiously.

  “How was your day?”

  He dropped his top hat on the table with a sigh. “Fine, other than Maggie going on about....” his voice trailed off when he saw Rief stiffen. “Oh, um, perhaps we should not discuss my fiancée, in light of....”

  “Yeah, that might be a good idea.”

  Awkward, Mathew took a hefty swallow of rum, the burn working into his gullet. Before he realized it, the drink had vanished. He helped himself to another, and then wandered toward the studio. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to look at the painting again?”

  “Sure.”

  He had been unable to stop thinking about the authority he’d seen in the eyes of that image.

  The erotic, powerful version of Mathew crooking his finger, enticing a man toward him, still sat on the easel. The
wet sculpted muscles, the arousal hidden beneath the water, the coy smirk—all of it just as alluring as before.

  Warmth simmered inside him and he pulled on his collar with a finger, hoping some of the heat would escape. “Is it wrong that this stirs things in me even though it’s supposed to be me?”

  “No, it stirs things in me.”

  The air was charged with anticipation, ripe with desire and nerves. He fancied Rief was waiting for him to make the next move. Though he had pushed Mathew into action during their previous encounters, he knew somehow—instinct perhaps?—if anything physical were to commence, Mathew would have to start it. That frantic kiss at the door left him with the notion Rief had needed him in some way. Like he needed comfort and support. Reassurance even.

  And he needed it from Mathew.

  Studying the painting, Mathew knew if he were real, he would know how to proceed. He would know how to soothe Rief, give him what he needed both physically and emotionally. His doppelganger held the power to seduce, and had a courage the real Mathew only hoped to possess.

  Then again, he was starting an illicit love affair with a man, the very thing he’d been terrified to do all his life.

  That was rather courageous, wasn’t it?

  Confidence swelled his chest, and he smiled into his glass. Though he’d been in emotional tumult last night, no compunctions need hold him back now. Self-assurance didn’t come from tailor-made clothing, rather it came from within. And the man standing on the other side of this room needed him. Nothing else mattered.

  So what are you waiting for?

  With one more glance at the artwork, Mathew placed his glass next to the brushes and paint palette beside the easel. Taking a deep breath, he smiled at Rief. “So here we are.”

  Nodding, Rief licked his lower lips in answer.

  A shudder snaked down his spine and the vision of those very masculine lips wrapped around his cock, pleasuring him until he filled Rief’s mouth with his seed assaulted him. Dear God, would he allow such a thing?