“It would be most agreeable. I thank you again.”
“Well, then.” Drake clapped Dante on the shoulder. “If all seems to be settled to everyone’s satisfaction, I shall wend my way to Captain Spence and see if I cannot persuade him to do me this momentous favor. If you will excuse me…?”
Drake strolled over to where Jonas was holding court. Carleill lingered long enough to discuss the Scout with Dante, but when a summons to go topside interrupted them, he excused himself, leaving Dante with a promise to introduce him properly to the ship and crew at his earliest convenience.
Dante leaned his shoulder on the wall and briefly watched the solid tattoo of rain on the gallery windows. His charming little black swan would not be thrilled at all with the notion of being summarily dismissed, regardless whether it was couched in friendly terms or not. An image of Beau standing on the afterdeck of the Egret, her eyes streaming from the clouds of smoke that rose from the guns, her hands raw and bleeding, her face pale with fear, came to his mind and he knew he would have to find his own way of softening the blow to her pride. He meant what he had said. He wanted her safe in England.
He wanted someone to go home to.
The thought surprised him and he narrowed his eyes against the glare of the lights reflected off the panes of glass. It had been so long since he had even thought of anywhere being home, other than the sea. His gray-cloaked accountants kept reminding him he had several in both England and France, but they had just been cold, gloomy castles in his mind’s eye, full of pomp and ceremony, gilded in the rents his tenants could not afford to pay …
… Echoing with the scornful laughter of his wife throwing the proof of her infidelity in his face. Strange, but he could barely hear it now. And not at all when Beau was with him, whether she was cursing him, fighting with him, or warming his ear with the soft, rushing breaths of ecstasy.
What would Isabeau Spence make of a four-hundred-room French chateau?
The question, and its answer, brought a smile to his lips even as he tried to see past the smear of rain on the windows and find the Egret.
“The cocky bastard,” Victor Bloodstone muttered. “He’s actually grinning at me.”
Horace Lamprey followed his captain’s burning gaze and saw De Tourville standing by the gallery windows, staring into the reflections duplicated in the many panes.
“Blast his miserable soul to hell, why could he not have gone down with his ship?”
“Or before,” Lamprey mused. “I almost had him in Veracruz, would have had him, if that damned Cimaroon wasn’t always in his shadow.”
Bloodstone looked around quickly to see if anyone was within earshot, but those who weren’t discussing Cadiz were hanging off Jonas Spence’s every word.
“And now he knows about the gold. He knows we landed somewhere first and off-loaded most of the bullion before the Queen’s excisemen got their sticky fingers onto it.”
“Maybe that’s what he’s after,” Lamprey suggested. “His share.”
“Dante de Tourville? He’s but a copper groat poorer than God Himself! What does he need with more gold? No, it’s blood he’s after. My blood. And he’ll wait, like a vulture, circling and grinning until he thinks the time is right to strike.”
“Happens, then, we should strike first,” Lamprey said with a sly grin. “’Tis a hellish dark night outside: Sir Francis is even encouraging the captains to have a care as they leave. A man could easily lose his footing, kosh himself on the head, and be over the side before he knew it. Wouldn’t even hear the scream.”
Bloodstone looked into the flat brown eyes of his second and, after a moment of thoughtful contemplation, nodded his compliments.
“I was thinking of leaving, myself, in a few minutes.”
“Aye, sir. It would be best if Sir Francis and the others see you go.”
“And best if they don’t see you at all.”
“Like I said, sir. It’s hellish dark outside. I don’t imagine a man could be seen unless he wanted to be.”
Chapter 24
The rain fell in sheets. Only those who held the watch or those who enjoyed a good drenching in fresh water ventured out from under cover. All but the closest galleons were obscured behind the heavy, steady curtain of rain and then only the faint, watery blots of yellow from their stern lanterns were visible through the downpour.
Beau had retreated to her cabin. Her pistols had become wet and she had removed them hours ago. Her sword was a nuisance, slapping her thigh as she paced, so she had removed it as well. Her boots had become more of a squishing aggravation than they were worth, so when she paced, she paced barefoot.
Dante and Spence had been gone more hours than she cared to think about. Five, to be precise, and while she had no idea how long a council of war took on board a ship, the longer they were away, the more likelihood there was of trouble. Periodically, she went up on deck, thinking she could see more clearly if she stood in the rain rather than trying to peer through it. Twice she had encountered Geoffrey Pitt on the foredeck, his hands raised like visors over his eyes, his hair, clothing, body, soaked to the bone.
There was not much wind and thankfully, no lightning. Only a sodden blanket of clouds overhead and the hailing sound of billions of drops of rain striking the surface of the sea, harsh and unrelenting. Earlier, in the eerie, charged moments before the skies broke open, the Egret—indeed, all of the ships in Drake’s fleet—had had their mastheads and yardarms bathed in the dancing, blue-white currents of Saint Elmo’s Fire. Beau had seen the phenomenon only once before, and she stood in awe like the others, knowing it would have been taken as a good omen by Drake, who would undoubtedly use it to convince his captains their mission was sanctioned by God. Some of the older tars, she knew, regarded it as the touch of the devil, and in this instance, with the Talon lurking out in the darkness somewhere, she was not inclined to disagree.
“You should go below, you will catch your death!”
Beau jumped halfway out of her skin before she recognized Pitt climbing up behind her on the foredeck. It was the third time she had left her cabin and the third time Pitt had greeted her with almost the same warning. He looked half drowned himself. His yellow hair was plastered to his forehead and his clothes clung to his skin in dripping folds.
“It is foolish for both of us to be out here,” he reiterated. “Can you see anything at all.?” she asked, ignoring the comment.
He gazed out into the blankness and shook his head. “We could be drifting into a whale’s mouth and I wouldn’t know it.”
It wasn’t the answer she had wanted to hear. Their own huge lanterns guttered and flickered and sent up enough clouds of hissing steam to turn the light opaque, but some of it glistened off the contours of her face and showed her concern.
“He will be all right,” Pitt assured her. “If he were going to start his own private war, he would have done it by now. We would have heard the alarm bells or seen a sulphur flare … or something. Go below, Beau. I’m sure you will be the first one he comes to see when he gets back.”
Beau blinked against the weight of the rain and searched his handsome face a moment. “I just … didn’t expect to be so worried.”
“None of us ever does, until it happens.”
“But … I never wanted it to happen. Part of me still doesn’t. Part of me just wants everything to be simple again, like it was … like it was before…” She stopped and agonized over the admission, not even absolutely sure what she was admitting.
Pitt saw her shiver and put his arm around her shoulder, drawing her against what little heat he had to spare.
“I am truly sorry, Beau, but when you love a man like Simon Dante, nothing is ever going to be simple again, believe me.”
Beau looked up at him through the rain, but there was no point in arguing or denying the charge.
“Nothing?” she asked forlornly.
“Nothing. But if it is any consolation, I would say you have managed to confound the hell
out of him, too, he’s just too proud to admit it.”
“I wouldn’t be too proud to admit anything right now,” she said with honest misery in her voice, “if he would just come back.”
“He’ll come back, I promise you.”
Beau peered one last time through the driving rain and mist, then touched Pitt’s arm to thank him. She was about to descend the ladder to the main deck when she saw a blur of movement near the gangway. She stood poised with one bare foot on the top rung and her hands gripping the rails, watching as something big and black swelled over the lip of the decking and rose to what seemed like monstrous proportions. It curled over and rose again and Beau was opening her mouth to scream when she caught a glimpse of light reflecting wetly off the curved blades of Lucifer’s scimitars.
“Mister Pitt! They’re back!”
“I’m right behind you,” he said, too gentlemanly to push her off the ladder, but not too rash to vault over the rail and skid to a landing on the slippery deck below.
Lucifer grunted when Pitt arrived by his side. He was bent over, trying to haul a deadweight up the wooden steps on the hull. Beau held her breath. She covered her mouth with her hands, scarcely daring to watch as, together, the two men pulled Jonas Spence up the last two rungs and dumped him in a sprawl across the deck. Beau fell onto her knees beside him and lifted his head onto her lap. His eyes were closed and his mouth slack, but at the feel of a welcoming lap beneath him, he raised his eyelids and beamed up into the rain.
“Ay-y-y-ye, an’ a jolly wee lass she were, she were; a jolly wee lass, wi’ a hand up her … eh? Beau? Is that you, girl?”
“Father?”
“Blow my ballocks, who’d ye think it were?”
She sat back on her heels—driven back, more’s the like—by the overpowering smell of spirits on his breath. “You’re drunk.”
“Aye, that’s me, lass. Drunk an’ useless.” His head flopped back on her lap. “Too useless to be any good to the likes o’ Drake an’ his lot, so I’ve been told. Sendin’ us home, he is. Says we’ll be doin’ him a favor, takin’ his sick an’ his sour home. Watchin’ over his wee pinnace. Aye. His wee pinnace. ’At’s what he has, all right. A wee pinnace fer a wee man.”
Beau looked at Lucifer. “What is he talking about? What has happened?”
“What’s happened,” said a voice from the top of the gangway, “was that we had a hell of a time loading him into the jolly boat, and an even more hellish time finding the right damned ship.” Dante sighed expressively, his breath as thick as the mist, and held out his hand. “Lend a poor, drowned sailor a helping hand, mam’selle?”
Beau surged to her feet, heedless of Spence’s head bouncing down onto the deck again.
“We were worried sick about you. Pitt and I were both worried sick about you. We have been back and forth”—she punctuated both words with angry swipes of her hand—“in the cold and the rain! We have been watching and waiting and worrying about all of you. We thought you were dead!”
Dante pulled himself up the final few steps. “Would it please you any to know I might very well have been? Black as it is, I damned near walked into a loose spar. Lucky for me, Lucifer saw it in time and swung it back.”
“Did he hit anything on the return?” Pitt asked casually.
“He may have. We had our hands too full of Spence to check.” He looked at Beau. “I’m sorry if we worried you. And I’m sorry if your father is drunk, but he did not take too kindly to Sir Francis insisting he take the Egret home.”
“I suppose you did everything in your power to argue in our favor.”
“I happen to agree with him,” Dante said quietly, “for the reasons I told you before. And a few other concerns I may not have mentioned.”
Beau stood in the rain, trembling against the cold, her fists clenching and unclenching as she glared at him. “Your reasons don’t interest me, Captain. Neither do your heartfelt concerns.”
She spun around and ran through the hatch, cursing when she stubbed her toe on a step, swearing vociferously when she slammed the door to her cabin shut behind her. She limped the length of the room twice before she thought to return to the door and slide the iron bolt into its ring, but she was a split second too late. Dante pushed his way inside like a strong wind, shedding water with every step.
“My reasons may not interest you, but you’re going to hear them anyway.”
She offered up an anatomically impossible retort as she presented him with her back.
Dante reached out a hand, thought better of it, and raked it through the heavy, wet waves of his hair instead. “Are you not even interested in knowing if I saw Victor Bloodstone or not?”
“I am assuming he was the ‘spar’ who hit you on deck.”
“As a matter of fact, he wasn’t; he was long gone by then.”
“Gone?” Her head turned, barely enough to notice. “You didn’t kill him?”
“No. I didn’t kill him. I stood closer to him than you and I are right now—much closer, dammit—but I did not kill him. I wanted to. I did … in my mind … a dozen different times, a dozen different ways, but I kept hearing your voice in my ear saying ’don’t be a fool’ ‘don’t be a fool.’”
“You’ve never listened to me before.”
Dante’s throat worked for a moment, but the words would not come, could not come, and his hand, still threaded into his hair, started to wilt down by his side.
“Because I did not think it was possible,” he said finally, “to feel anything but hatred anymore. It was all I was when I came on board this ship: hatred and revenge. It was pure and undiluted and so strong, I did not think anything that was soft or beautiful could find its way inside me again. Then tonight”—he paused to take a breath—“when I saw Bloodstone, the desire, the need, was still there to kill him … but so was the need to come back here, to feel your arms go around me and your body take me where it’s soft, and beautiful”—he looked at her squared shoulders and the small white fists clenched by her sides, and his voice fell to a whisper—“and safe. And if I don’t know how to say the right words anymore it’s because—it’s because I never thought I would want to say them again.”
Beau’s shoulders sagged and the anger drained out of her in a rush. She lifted her hand and dragged it across her cheek, pushing back a strand of wet hair that had fallen over her brow, and when she turned around, her eyes were huge and dark and glistening in the candlelight.
“I hope … you are not trying to tell me …”
“That I love you? I’m afraid I am, mam’selle. And I’m afraid I do. Very much so.”
She stared at him for a long moment, then bowed her head and shook it slightly. “You can’t. You just … can’t.”
He arched a genuinely curious eyebrow. “May I ask why not?”
“Because … it just isn’t fair,” she whispered. “How am I supposed to hate you when you tell me something like that?”
He closed the gap between them and framed her face between his hands. He held her that way for the short breath it took to whisper her name, then his lips were brushing her temple, her eyes, her cheeks, the corner of her mouth. The lush heat of him drew her inside, and the kiss deepened, became bruising and urgent, claiming her, branding her as his own.
“I do hate you,” she gasped. “I do.”
Her hands went around his shoulders and his arms brought her crushing into his embrace. Her toes came off the floor as he lifted her and he turned her in a slow circle, once, twice, before he set her down again. His hands slid up from her waist and she heard the damp rasp of tearing cloth. It was all she could do not to comment on his impatience as he growled another lame apology, but his mouth was hungry and insistent upon hers and patience of any kind became the farthest thing from her mind.
He stripped off her shirt and stripped off her breeches and his mouth followed his hands everywhere, intent upon inflaming her body with a need as urgent as his own. Blood was drumming through his temples, through his
fingertips, through the raw nerve endings on his skin, but when he stood back to fling off his own clothes, her hands were already there.
She grasped the open neck of his shirt and tore it down the center seam, opening a gash all the way to his waist. She fumbled next with the buckle on his belt and cast it to the floor, then tugged at the shrunken wetness of his hose, the stubborn, clinging barrier of wool that would not budge until she broke free of his mouth and fell to her knees, peeling the recalcitrant garment down his thighs with her.
Her hands circled the iron-hard shaft of his flesh and her tongue slid over him like a hot, wet flame. Dante swore and pushed his fingers into her hair, trying, in the beginning, to hold her away, to keep her from bringing him out of his skin too soon … too soon … But her hands stroked his thighs and her lips stroked his flesh and he could only groan a warning as his whole body began to shake, to tremble. His hips began to buck against the pressure and a raw, ragged gasp broke from his throat. The heat flooded into his loins, threatening to explode, and a moment before he did, he lifted her roughly into his arms and carried her the few steps to the bed.
“And you accuse me of not playing fair?” he rasped.
Without preamble he buried his mouth between her thighs. Beau arched up off the bed, but he would have none of it; he kept his hands on her belly and breasts, and his tongue ravishing, plundering, pillaging, until she was hoarse from crying out and weak from the waves of pleasure so relentless and powerful, there was no stopping them, no interrupting them, not even when he rose above her and sank himself into the hot, drenching splendor.
“You need me,” she whispered some time later. “You know you need me.”
“I don’t know any such thing,” he said, his teeth clenched through a snarl.
“You don’t know this Edward Carleill, you don’t know what kind of a helmsman he is. For that matter you don’t even know the ship, or what she is capable of doing. You need me, Simon Dante, and by God”—her mouth closed around the dark disc of his nipple and worked it until she heard him gasp out a curse—“I intend to make you admit it.”
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