Captain Rourke

by Helena Newbury

  I turned and looked over my shoulder. There was a dark doorway between two buildings, with stairs leading down. A pink neon cocktail glass was the only sign it was a bar: there was no name, no indication of what to expect inside. I turned back to Rourke.

  He’d moved closer and he towered over me, his body dwarfing mine. Every muscle was tensed, as if he was ready to face off against an army. His voice was low enough to put the fear of God into any attacker. And yet his eyes were everywhere but on my face: he was awkward as a teenager. “Look, do you want a damn drink?” he blurted.

  An apology. Or as close as Rourke got to one.

  And I thought I knew why he’d suddenly blown up at me, when I’d asked about the smuggling. He didn’t want me thinking he’d done bad things.

  He met my eyes and that heat throbbed straight down inside me again, slamming into my groin and radiating out.

  I nodded.

  And he took my hand and led me into the bar.

  27

  Hannah

  The steps were steep and I had to go carefully, unused to the heels. I could hear singing, in Spanish. Then the cellar came into view: bare brick walls and a small stage at one end, the whole room packed with locals. It was dark and warm, the tiny tables lit only with candles that cast everything in a flickering orange glow. Up on stage, a man was just finishing a ballad, struggling to hit the high notes. But everyone cheered and clapped anyway, and he waved happily and hurried off stage. A woman replaced him. It was some sort of open mic night, I realized.

  We found a table near the back, so small our knees were nearly touching. Rourke grabbed a spare stool and put his left foot up on it, then gave a long sigh of relief. It was the first time I’d seen him really acknowledge the pain in front of me. But I wasn’t going to ask about it. Not yet. Not after the way he blew up at me outside.

  “Where did you learn to dance?” I asked, trying to keep things light.

  Rourke grimaced, but in embarrassment, not anger. “Officer’s ball,” he said. “It’s a tradition. Dinner jackets or kilts. Canapés and dancing.”

  “You were in the army?”

  “Navy.”

  I nodded silently. Now I knew where that authority came from, why he commanded where Ratcher just raged and yelled at his crew.

  We were interrupted by the waitress, a beautiful, leggy woman with long dark hair. She looked how I imagined Esme had: glamorous and sultry, in a way I could never be. “Hello, Rourke,” she said coolly, her tray tucked under one arm.

  I saw the way she was looking at him. The way she was looking at me. My stomach hit the floor.

  “Carla,” said Rourke with a nod, his voice carefully level.

  “And who’s this?” asked Carla, eyeing me.

  My face felt as if it was on fire. My stomach tightened. Nerves and self-consciousness and...something I hadn’t been expecting: a fierce rush of jealousy. Her and him....

  “Hannah,” said Rourke carefully. “I’m helping her.”

  If Carla was a book, it would have been one of those bodice rippers with a big, sweeping title in gold embossed text. And a sultry maiden in a peasant blouse wrapped around the hero and sex scenes that would make you flush and check no one was reading over your shoulder.

  She was sexy and adventurous and darkly alluring in a way I could never be. They’re perfect for each other, I thought miserably.

  We ordered drinks and Carla strutted out of sight. “We used to have a thing,” Rourke said, by way of explanation.

  Used to? My heart leapt. But then why had he brought me here? Did he want to make me uncomfortable? I mean, he couldn’t have brought me here, to this one particular bar, knowing his ex worked here, without even considering….

  Then I studied his face and groaned. Yes. Yes, he could. Rourke was exactly that man. I bet he’d been coming to this bar for years, every time he came to Havana. He’d been here before he met Carla and while he was with Carla and he’d kept coming here after they broke up. He hadn’t considered that it might be a bad idea to bring a woman here because—

  My stomach flip-flopped. Because I’m the first woman he’s ever brought here.

  Carla returned and set Rourke’s rum in front of him, then my mojito in front of me. I thanked her and it was a little less awkward, this time. At least I knew where I stood.

  I made the fatal mistake of relaxing. That’s when Rourke’s phone rang.

  He put it to his ear. “What? I can’t—” He sighed and stood up. “I barely have a signal, down here. I’ll just be a minute.”

  I felt my eyes widen and I think I gave a kind of horrified moan as he limped off towards the stairs. What? Wait! Don’t leave me alone with—

  Carla slid her perfect ass onto Rourke’s vacated stool. I turned to her in dismay, just as she leaned forward across the table. “So!” she said, picking up Rourke’s rum.

  I swallowed. She was like a cat, prowling and watchful, trying to decide exactly how she was going to tear my eyes out. She crossed her legs and I saw three different men around us swivel to gawp at her. “So?” I asked in a shaky voice.

  She took a long sip of Rourke’s rum. Her eyes were so dark brown they were almost black. “You and Rourke.” Her accent was smoky and dark, almost a growl.

  I took a sip of my cocktail and shook my head. “He’s just helping me,” I told Carla.

  “Really,” said Carla.

  I nodded.

  She leaned an elbow on the table. Her perfectly-toned, smoothly tan forearm would have made a personal trainer weep. She rested her cheek on her hand and drummed blood-red nails against her scalp. “See, the problem with that is...Rourke doesn’t help people. Not since he quit.”

  I took another gulp of my cocktail for strength. “He doesn’t even like me,” I told her. “He’s grouchy. Bad-tempered. He snaps at me.” With each word, Carla’s face soured. “What?!” I asked.

  “That’s what he does to someone he really likes,” said Carla. “He cares enough about you to push you away.”

  I stared at her, stunned. And thought of Hobbs, and how Rourke treated him.

  Carla leaned back from me and drank the rest of Rourke’s rum in one gulp. The anger seemed to have gone out of her, now that she knew what was going on.

  “Did he push you away?” I asked tentatively.

  At first, I thought Carla wasn’t going to answer. She stared at the woman who was singing another ballad on stage. Does no one sing anything but love songs in this place? But eventually, she spoke. “It was...before. He was different, in those days. He and Edwards used to come in here with fresh scars and a new haul of treasure. They were inseparable. They’d buy the crew drinks. Rourke and I would….” She trailed off, remembering.

  “Edwards?” I asked. I remembered Rourke mentioning the name. “Rourke has a friend?” I couldn’t imagine Rourke being inseparable from anyone.

  Carla said nothing. But when she looked at me again, her eyes were shining with tears.

  Oh God. He’d had a friend. And something had happened, something so awful that it had changed Rourke forever.

  Carla turned back to the stage and went silent for long minutes. “Do you sing?” she asked, nodding towards the woman.

  My face flushed at just the thought of someone actually hearing me. “No!” I said quickly. “I mean, not that you’d want to hear.”

  Carla took another minute to compose herself, then continued. “Afterwards...Rourke would still come here but he was hurting.” Her tone was bitter. “And I couldn’t pull him out of it, however hard I tried.”

  I looked away, embarrassed. For days, I’d been desperate to know more about Rourke. Now I felt like I was invading his privacy.

  But then I felt a soft hand on my face. Carla was leaning across the table again, gripping my chin between thumb and forefinger. She gently turned my head to look at her. The anger had gone from her eyes. “I couldn’t pull him out of it,” she said softly. “But I was only ever a warm bed to him. You….”

 
; I flushed, eyes wide. “I’m not—”

  But Carla shook her head. “I saw the way he looked at you.”

  I stared at her in amazement and my heart wanted to lift and soar. I wrestled it back down. “I’m not part of...all this,” I said, waving my hand at the bar, at Havana, at treasure and bribing officials and men with guns. “I’m a librarian. Rourke is some...treasure hunting, rum-drinking, smuggler.”

  “Smuggler?” asked Carla. She shook her head. “The only thing Rourke ever smuggled was medicine, for the doctors.”

  The whole incident in the street flipped around in my mind. He hadn’t been angry because I discovered he did something bad. He’d been angry because I came close to discovering he did something good.

  He doesn’t want me to like him.

  At that moment, Rourke walked up. “It’s happening,” he said as I turned to him. “We need to get to the harbor, now.” Then, when I just stared at him, “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said in a choked voice. I turned to Carla to say goodbye, but she was already stalking off across the bar.

  Rourke picked up his empty glass, eyed the lipstick on the rim, and glanced at Carla’s departing back. He shook his head ruefully and I saw that pain again, the same pain I’d seen when I’d asked why he was an asshole to Hobbs. He doesn’t want to be like that. He wants friends. He’s…

  I thought about the Fortune’s Hope and its solitary hammock. Rourke was the most independent, self-contained man I’d ever met but...he’s lonely.

  “Come on,” he grunted. “We need to go.”

  28

  Hannah

  The habor was in uproar. A crowd had gathered to watch as at least twenty harbor police officers swarmed over Ratcher’s boat, which was anchored next to the Fortune’s Hope. Ratcher himself was on the dock, screaming at a placid, silver-haired cop whose generous belly stretched out his uniform pants. I was guessing he was the Police Chief Rourke had called.

  “This is bollocks!” yelled Ratcher. “We’re clean!”

  “Then as soon as we’ve conducted a thorough search, you can be on your way,” said the police chief smoothly. He took out a cigar and took his time lighting it. “Contraband is a very serious issue.”

  Ratcher saw us. “You!” He surged forward and two police officers grabbed his arms. Even so, he managed to keep inching along the dock towards us until a third grabbed him from behind.

  Rourke and I hurried aboard and I helped him cast off. Moments later, we were gliding forward and... for the first time, I felt a little ripple of excitement. I was still terrified of the open ocean but there was something about being on our boat, being able to set a course for wherever we wanted. I was beginning to understand why Rourke loved this life so much.

  There was a growl from the dock and I turned to look. Ratcher had used his bulk to throw the cops off him and charged back aboard the Pitbull. He raced along the deck, separated from us only by a thin strip of water. “Rourke!” he bawled. “You’re finished! You’re fucking finished! You and your boat.” Then he looked right at me. “And your bitch!”

  Rourke had been ignoring him but his head whipped around at that last word. He stared at Ratcher with such vengeful fury it was chilling...but at the same time, it made me go warm inside. And then we were past Ratcher’s boat and heading out to sea, and I let out a long sigh of relief.

  Rourke anchored us far off the coast of Cuba, where Ratcher wouldn’t be able to find us. I went below deck, made a nest in the hammock, and cuddled in with the diary. Within minutes, Yoyo had made himself comfortable on my chest: I’d found he’d happily sit there for hours as long as I kept stroking him.

  The diary was amazing. Everything was there, from the first time she met Captain Mace to when he set off on that fateful final voyage, and I devoured it in big, hungry chunks. I read late into the night and then carried on the next day. But not long after breakfast, I was surprised to hear a voice outside that wasn’t Rourke’s. I looked up in panic. Had Ratcher found us?

  Rourke walked in carrying a big cardboard carton. “It’s okay,” he said. “We had to leave in a hurry, so I had one of the fishermen buy us some supplies and bring them out.” He nodded to the carton. “Got some stuff for you.”

  I rooted through the carton. He must have sent the fisherman on a shopping trip around Havana because there were tank tops and shorts, a swimsuit, underwear and toiletries. “Thank you,” I said with feeling.

  He shrugged as if embarrassed. “I just wanted my t-shirt back,” he grunted.

  He went outside to work on the boat: maintaining it seemed to be a full-time job. By the time he returned, it was almost noon. “You’re still reading?” he asked.

  I was so deep into Esme and her feelings for Captain Mace that it took me a couple of seconds to re-surface. “Hmm?” I shook myself back to reality. “It’s just so romantic! Did you know Mace didn’t want women on his ship—?”

  “Smart man,” muttered Rourke.

  “...but she couldn’t bear to be apart from him, so she snuck aboard and hid in his cabin while the ship was in port, and by the time they were at sea it was too late, so he had to take her with him?”

  “So she didn’t do as she was told either,” grunted Rourke.

  “And when the British were hunting Mace, they came to the gypsy camp and took her prisoner, to try to lure him into a trap,” I said. “But Mace took a boat of his men and just...descended on them and wiped them out. He burned a whole British fort, just because they’d taken her.”

  I looked up and caught Rourke’s eye. Just for a second, there was a gleam there, as if he understood what it was like to feel that way. As if he’d do that for me.

  “Bloody fool,” he muttered at last. And limped out into the sunshine.

  I kept at it, losing myself in the pages, and soaking up Esme’s life. Rourke refueled me with mugs of steaming coffee and thick slices of the local bread. Rich and yellow, it was baked with coconut and sugar and tasted amazing toasted and spread with butter.

  One by one, I figured out each of the four references in the clue. Each was about something that had happened to the couple and each one was a number. The first two were easy: the number of charms on her bracelet when they met (six) and the number of days she’d made him wait before they’d finally made love for the first time (fifty-one). The third answer was the date when you woke the whole village, from the bell tower. I hadn’t yet found anything relating to bell-ringing. And I was horribly aware that time was ticking away. Katherine had only days left. Me, maybe even less.

  Wait. There.

  Mace had met Esme early one morning and they’d crept through the village and into the bell tower, where they wouldn’t be disturbed. And Esme had screamed and, yes, she’d woken everyone in the village and they’d had to flee before they were discovered. I scrunched up my forehead. Why had she screamed? Some of the English was very old-fashioned and Esme had a tendency to slip into Spanish, too. I re-read the paragraph. Her clothes were tangled. Why would she scream because her clothes were tangled?

  Wait: her clothes were tangled on the floor.

  Oh. Oh!

  I stood naked and bent for him, my hands on the window ledge. He pressed his body to mine from behind. One hand captured my breast while he slowly entered—

  “So do we know where we’re going?” asked Rourke.

  I slammed the diary closed, my face going beet-red. He’d come in without me hearing him. We stared at each other and I tried not to see him as Captain Mace and to absolutely not think about him entering—

  “Almost done,” I squeaked.

  He gave me a curious look, grunted and left.

  I opened the diary again. The fourteenth. That was the date Esme had...screamed. 14, 6, 51...one more number to go. The last answer was the date a fire destroyed her home town. Shit! It was something Esme would know, but it happened way before the diary started.

  Hobbs. Hobbs might be able to find out. I borrowed Rourke’s satellite phone, a bright ye
llow waterproof thing, and called him. I imagined him in a wingback chair, picking up the handset of some antique phone.

  “Warrington Hobbs?”

  His first name was Warrington? “It’s Hannah.” I explained the progress I’d made and asked whether he knew of a fire that burned down Esme’s home town. With his local knowledge, it only took him a few minutes to find the right book and get the date: the 16th. 14, 6, 51, 16.

  “It’s a location,” said Hobbs. And he translated it into longitude and latitude for me.

  I wrote it down and thanked him. Then, while I had him on the phone, “Hobbs? Rourke was in the navy, right?”

  “Indeed. Captained a ship.”

  “That’s how his leg was injured?”

  “He never shared the specifics with me, but yes. Some unpleasant incident off the coast of Africa.” While I was still digesting that, Hobbs continued. “You know, you’re the first person he’s let on that ship in two years.”

  I crept to the door that led out onto the deck and peeked out. Rourke was hauling on a wrench, tightening up the bolts that secured an eyelet to the deck. He’d stripped off his shirt and the muscles of his back stood out, his wide shoulders hulking and powerful. He was glaring at the bolt, that ever-present anger radiating out of him. Anger from the pain. Anger at whatever had injured him. Anger at whatever had happened to Edwards. “I don’t think he wants me here,” I whispered into the phone.

  “That’s funny,” said Hobbs. “Because I think he really does.”

  29

  Rourke

  We were flying. The wind had filled the sails, the prow was slicing through the blue with a slender slash of foaming white, and the hull barely seemed to touch the water as we sped along. It was my idea of heaven. Sailing like this, I’d slip into a kind of meditative state where even the pain dropped away. I’d focus on the horizon and the boat and me would almost blend into one.