Morgan’s fierce expression softened. “Let’s go, manasvinii.”
He turned to leave and Juliana followed, suddenly so tired she couldn’t think straight. “What did you call me?” she asked his back.
“Proud woman,” he shot over his shoulder.
When they reached Morgan’s cabin, she sank wearily onto his bed. Her eyes closed of their own volition and she swayed with fatigue. Gentle hands cupped her shoulders and she opened her eyes to see Zach standing in front of her. She blinked. No, not Zach. Geez, she was exhausted. It was only Captain Morgan.
At his prompting, she lay on her stomach and tried not to feel his hair skim her arm. Tried not to feel those big hands as they raised her shirt. Who was this man who effortlessly commanded a ship of seamen? Who calmly spoke of pirates and yet handled her wounded back so gently.
“What’s your first name?” she asked, giving voice to her curiosity.
Warm hands touched her even warmer skin.
“Morgan.”
“That’s your first name?” She closed her eyes.
“First and last.” His voice drifted around her, through her.
“Morgan Morgan?”
He chuckled. “Just Morgan.”
“That’s my name, too.”
His hands stilled for a moment before resuming their tender ministrations. “Is it?”
“My middle.”
“Mmmm,” was his only reply.
He worked on releasing her bindings.
“Are you a pirate?”
“Not anymore.”
Her eyes shot open. “So, you were a pirate?”
“Yes.”
The bindings gave way and he cleaned her wounds. She wanted to see her back, wanted to know if it was as bad as she feared. She lifted her head and tried to twist around but Morgan gently forced her back down.
“You’ll reopen the wounds.”
“Is it bad?”
No answer, which in itself was answer enough. She closed her eyes against the tears.
Crying, Juliana? Her mother’s voice taunted her.
No. Her own voice answered, as it answered thousands of times before. But her mother’s drunken, slurred laughter still rang in her memory. The sound always managed to make her feel small and unwanted and unloved.
Morgan sat in the straight-backed chair and watched her sleep. She’d tucked a hand under her cheek and her other hand was curled into a loose fist on her pillow.
Needing to feel the warmth of her skin, he reached down to touch her brow, to smooth away a lock of hair that had fallen over her cheek. However, before he made contact, he tightened his hand into a fist and pulled back.
He grappled with his mixed emotions, still feeling the zing of jealousy when she’d smiled up at Thomas and the way Thomas smiled back. The two had no business smiling at each other. Thomas needed to concentrate on his duties, Juliana on healing. And Morgan on… Hell, he needed to concentrate on his duties as well, but a certain female stowaway grabbed his attention and refused to release it. He shouldn’t be angry at Thomas for doing the things he himself was doing. Yet he had been angry. Furious even.
He relaxed back in the chair, his body aching. His eyes grew heavy and he stopped fighting the inevitable. His mind drifted and he jerked his head in an effort to end the nightmare he knew was to come before it even began.
It overtook him as easily as sleep did.
Almost immediately he turned to crawl back through but the mirror wasn’t there. Only endless trees. Miles and miles of trees. A person could get lost in those trees and not be found for years, if ever. A small brook ran close to his feet. The sky was a bright blue. More birds than he ever saw in one place flew over his head and the air was sweet and free of any noxious smells. He turned in a circle, wondering where he was.
When he was.
For the first time in his life, he was scared. All those stunts he’d pulled growing up were nothing compared to this.
What had he done?
He frantically looked around, convinced that if he searched hard enough salvation would appear and he could return to his life. But there was nothing except a few deer who peered at him before ambling away to drink in the brook. He swallowed hard and tried to think, but surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, his mind refused to work properly.
Morgan’s eyes flew open. He surged off the chair and stared at the woman sleeping peacefully in his bed.
When he first visited her in the hold, he saw only what he wanted to see—a young man sent by his enemy. Ever since learning her name, he’d turned a blind eye to the truth. No more. He couldn’t lie to himself anymore. But the truth was almost too painful to bear.
Juliana Morgan MacKenzie had found her Zach.
Chapter Six
Juliana.
Of course he’d known from the moment he undressed her that she was a time-traveler. Just like himself. That’s why he tied her clothes to a cannonball and threw them in the ocean. But Juliana? The girl he’d loved so much it’d become a physical ache? The girl he’d left behind in the twenty-first century because he’d been so stupid as to fall through the mirror when his mother told him not to go through it.
The girl who wasn’t a girl anymore but a woman before him. Here. In the eighteenth century.
Morgan squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them she was still there, sleeping the sleep of the exhausted.
How? How did she get here?
The answer was simple—the same way he’d arrived here. The other answers were more difficult.
What was he going to do with her?
Morgan hadn’t felt panic in a long time, but it hit him now like a fist to the gut, stealing his air, making him weak. He ran a hand down his face having no idea what to do.
I love you, Juliana. You know that, don’t you?
Those had been the last words he, as Zach, had spoken to her. The night before he traveled to a different century. She’d stood in the driveway of his parents’ home, looking up at him with those green eyes that always managed to weaken his knees and smiled. As always, her smile melted his heart. Not that a seventeen-year-old boy would admit to his heart melting.
I love you too, Zach.
Who would have known, who would have guessed, that was the end? Certainly not Zach.
Morgan wanted to shake her awake, to tell her who he was and ask her all the questions that had been plaguing him for fifteen years. Instead, he turned on his heel to walk out. Fresh air. He needed fresh air so he could think logically. Realistically. Don’t say anything rash. Think before you speak.
“Don’t go.”
He stopped but didn’t turn back.
“Stay with me,” she said.
“I—” He cleared his throat and reluctantly turned around. “I have things to do. Up top. Sailing. Things.” Did she know? Did she know he was Zach? He studied her expression, the eyes that were always a mirror to her soul, looking for some sign of recognition. Hoping?
Yeah, maybe even hoping. But there was nothing. Just the same expression he’d seen before—wariness and a knowledge that he was her protector no matter what he’d done to her.
Ah, God. He’d had Juliana flogged. How was he ever going to live with himself?
“Can I come with you?”
He was shaking his head before she even finished her question. “Not a good idea.” He needed to be away from her, to think. To figure out what to do, where to go from here. Tell her he was Zach? Should he?
“Please,” she whispered.
As it had that fateful night fifteen years ago, Morgan’s heart melted for this woman. How in the hell did he not recogniz her from the beginning? Now he saw the younger Juliana in the older version. The eyes gave her away—that green that would always remind him of her.
She was climbing out of his bed, pulling her shirt down and straightening the breeches still tied with the damn rope.
“Juliana—”
“I can’t…” Her hands fell to her sides. Her eye
s were sad. Her shoulders drooped. She was at the end of her reserves, pulling on the last of her energy. “I don’t like the dark, Morgan. I don’t want to be alone.”
Of course. How could he have forgotten her fear of dark places? And he’d had her thrown in the hold for hours. What had that done to her?
“Come on.” He headed toward the door. What kind of fool was he to take her with him?
To give her credit, she remained quiet while he checked the sails and consulted with Thomas and John, the night watchman. John who kept shooting glances at Juliana as she stood on deck and looked out toward the dark waters. Almost unconsciously Morgan took a step closer to her. Ships in this day and age were not a safe place for a woman and whether he liked it or not, he was her protector. John understood the threat and turned away.
For a long time Morgan stood at the bow, staring into the blackness of the night. His mind was as muddied as the bottom of the ocean, his heart as dark as the sky. He thought of things he hadn’t let himself think about for years. Zach and Juliana. What he’d been and what he’d become. Zach had been everything Morgan was not. Good to his bad. Optimistic to his cynical. Hell, Zach had been downright holy compared to Morgan’s life of sin.
Even if Morgan told Juliana he was Zach she probably wouldn’t believe him. Even he didn’t believe it. It was almost as if Zach and Morgan were two separate people.
He turned to her. “We need to talk.”
By the light of the half moon, he watched her face grow paler. “Okay.” Her hands rested in her lap and she began twisting her fingers.
Talk about what? What was he going to ask her? He couldn’t exactly come out and say, “By the way, how are Zach’s parents and his sister, Molly?” Nor would he allow himself to say, “I’m Zach.” Two simple words that were much more complicated than that.
His dad would be nearing retirement by now and his sister… Christ, Molly was twenty-nine. His baby sister all grown up. Was she married with kids and a mortgage? And how was his mom? What was she doing these days?
He burned with the need to know. But how to ask without giving himself away?
Simple. He couldn’t. He fisted his hands at his side and ground his teeth together. He had no right to be disappointed. He’d turned his back on his old life and forced himself to banish the memories in order to live the life he’d been dealt. Yet he felt he’d been given a second chance, a reprieve from the constant guilt of leaving Juliana the way he had. Here was the chance he’d only dreamt about in his darkest hours. Except the chance had come at a high price. For years he told himself he’d done what he did in order to survive and he pushed his shame to the darkest corners of his soul, but now the shame came flooding out. His parents would be shocked at what their son had done. And Juliana? She would be horrified.
Yet he still burned to know and thought he might be able to discover something of his family and her life. He moved closer to the stack of sails, sat on the edge and turned to her.
“Do you have family, Juliana? Someone I can return you to?”
She looked down at her hands and didn’t say anything.
“Juliana?”
“I have no family.” She didn’t raise her head and her tone was flat.
Morgan sat back, intrigued. Of course a drunken mother and a father who turned a blind eye to his child’s abuse did not a family make. It was his greatest regret that he’d left her to deal with her family alone.
“There’s no one? No one you can turn to?” Like my family.
God bless his mother and father. From the moment Zach brought a bedraggled, seven-year-old Juliana home with him one hot summer day, his parents enfolded her into the fabric of their lives. When he allowed his mind to go back to those days, to think of his family and Juliana, he’d been comforted by the fact that at least they had each other.
“No one.” She lifted her head to look out over the ocean, carefully keeping her gaze from him.
She’d wanted to be a journalist, he a police officer. The idea was laughable now, when he’d gone so far in the opposite direction. Hell, for a time he’d had a price on his head and wouldn’t be surprised if Barun put another on him. There was that shame again, biting and cruel.
He hadn’t accomplished his dreams but Juliana, she could have accomplished it all. She’d been driven to succeed, to escape from beneath her mother’s thumb. And he’d been certain his parents would have helped her. So what happened to her and her relationship with his family that she now had no one in the world?
She looked at him and smiled, the false sort of smile bestowed during a particularly boring dinner party while you were seated next to a particularly boring dinner companion.
She cautiously settled against the mast, careful of her wounds. “Tell me about your family.”
“I have no one either,” he said automatically and maybe a little defensively. It was the truth, strictly speaking. He had no one anymore. Not since the fateful night he’d left his family and Juliana.
“Pirates weren’t born pirates,” she said. “They had to have family at one point. Or is there some island where you’re all hatched?”
“My family is dead.” And that’s what he needed to remember. If not dead then at least gone from him. Looking back wasn’t doing him or Juliana any good except to distract him from the important things like staying ahead of the sloop still hovering over the horizon and deciding what to do with Juliana. Would she be better off not knowing who he was?
The rigging above creaked. It was such a common sound that Morgan gave it almost no thought until the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. The rigging wouldn’t creak like that while they were becalmed.
He lunged toward Juliana, knocking her off the stack of sails as a dagger went flying through the air and imbedded itself in the mast Juliana had been leaning against.
“Morgan!” she shrieked. “What the heck? Let go of me.” She struggled against him, but her hands and arms were pinned between their chests. He saw the flash of panic in her eyes. She struggled harder as small whimpers escaped her. He held on tightly knowing he was hurting her back but unable to let go.
“Quiet,” he ordered in a low whisper.
Juliana quit struggling and to his relief, her body sagged against his.
“Are you hurt?” he whispered close to her ear.
She shook her head. A tremor ran through her, echoing inside him.
He let go of her and she rolled off him. With a flick of his wrist, he silently told her to stay put while he unsheathed his knife from his boot and rounded the sails at a crouch.
Chapter Seven
Furious, Morgan took off in the direction the dagger came from. He was more angry than he’d ever been before. Not because someone tried to kill him but because Juliana could have been hurt. He strained to hear anything out of the ordinary. All the lanterns had either been extinguished or turned low to conserve fuel. In their becalmed state there was no fear of another ship running into them but it also made it nearly impossible to see. Morgan heard the sound of running feet not too far off and gave chase. Whoever tried to kill him surely had been planted on this ship by Barun and therefore wouldn’t know the ship's layout as well.
Unfortunately, whoever it was got too far of a head start and Morgan quickly lost him. He stood on the upper gun deck for as long as he thought safe, trying to hear where the person went. He could be anywhere by now. He could even have turned around and headed for Juliana. With that thought Morgan made his way back to her.
He found her sitting behind the sails waiting for him. He expected her to be a quivering mass of hysteria. Instead she appeared calm, as if almost getting killed was an everyday occurrence. John was with her as well as Patrick but both kept their distance.
“What did you see?” he asked them quietly.
“I was on forecastle,” Patrick said.
Too far away. Morgan looked at John.
“I was on the upper gun deck,” he said.
No help there. Of course the
killer would have struck while no one was around.
With a nod from Morgan his men dispersed. Morgan yanked the dagger out of the mast and pocketed it. Juliana watched his every move.
“Let’s go below deck.” All the way down he felt her presence behind him like a black cloud following him.
She climbed onto his bed and sat cross-legged. His clothes were so big on her they nearly swallowed her up, making her appear smaller than she was. More a child than a woman and it reminded him that he needed to be extra cautious because she was much more vulnerable than the hardened men working this ship.
“Do you know who did this?”
He opened a cupboard door and unfurled a rope hammock that he attached to rings set in the walls. “No, but I’ll find out.”
“Who would want you dead?”
The hammock creaked and swayed slightly as he put it together. “That’s a long list.” Barun. Barun wanted him dead. And he’d sent an emissary to do the deed. Morgan only had a moment to look at the dagger, but he knew the type. This was definitely Barun’s handiwork and since he was fairly certain Barun wasn’t on this ship that meant one of his men was. Who? It had to have been someone from his own crew. It made Morgan sick that he could have brought the danger with him.
He didn’t much care about himself—long ago his safety had become a moot point—but he damn well cared if Juliana lived or died and he vowed the person who put her in danger would pay.
“I can help,” she said quietly.
“Not necessary, Juliana.” No way would he let her get close to any more danger. How he would keep her away since he didn’t know the face of danger, he didn’t know.
“But I want to help.”
“This isn’t your concern.” He climbed into the gently swaying hammock. He was mentally exhausted but physically wired tight. He tried not to listen to Juliana slide beneath the bedclothes or picture her curled upon his bed.
He stared up at the beamed ceiling. The light from the moon made shadows on the walls. The reflection from the water sent ripples dancing across the ceiling. And in the darkness he let himself wonder what could have been instead of what had to be. What would she say if he told her he was Zach? Would she be happy? Mad? Would she cry? Laugh in joy?
Wherever You Are Page 6
