Paula Reed - [Caribbean]

by Nobodys Saint

  “Capitán,” Enrique called softly from beyond the doorway. He held in his hand several sheets of heavy vellum, a broken wax seal on the outermost page. Diego rose and joined his first mate in the hall, where they conversed in quiet Spanish for a moment until Diego began reading the pages in silence.

  Mary Kate took advantage of his shift in attention to wolf down two more pieces of cheese and finish what remained of both halves of the orange he had peeled earlier. He had been studying her intently, and she’d had to work hard to keep up her shy and demure demeanor. Had he been Irish, she’d have flirted and teased until she’d had him wrapped around her fingers. But he had been so protective of her, so quick to assume that she would be distraught and powerless, it had seemed wiser to follow his lead.

  The ability to read others and become what they wanted (or what they didn’t want, in England) was a talent she used without compunction. Even as a child, she could tiptoe into a room and gauge her father’s mood in seconds. Was he happy-drunk, angry-drunk, or morose-drunk? Should she tease and play, run for cover, or offer solace? Bridget had quickly learned to let Mary Kate size him up before she joined them, and if Mary Kate sneaked quietly upstairs, Bridget soon followed. As for Bridget herself? She was the easiest of all to manage. She was so bloody contrary that all Mary Kate had to do was order Bridget to do the opposite of what she wanted. If that didn’t work, they would simply pull each other’s hair and scream oaths at one another until one of them caved in.

  Maybe they weren’t a perfect family, but whose was? Underneath the drink and the strife, they all loved one another fiercely, and Mary Kate missed them so. When Da was happy drunk, there was never a merrier man. Bridget was as likely to smile and laugh as to pull hair and screech, and she was loyal to a fault. But without Mary Kate to buffer Bridget’s temper and her da’s moods, where would they be? ‘Twas a miracle they hadn’t killed one another in the years she’d been away, no doubt helped along by her nightly prayers for their welfare.

  When the captain returned and resumed his seat, she eyed him warily. He had changed. His face was cold, impassive, and his dark eyes looked her over in careful appraisal. In his hand, he held the neatly folded papers that his crewman had given to him.

  “Was there a problem?” she asked.

  He smiled, but it wasn’t friendly. “Nothing of consequence. Do you know, I just realized that you have only one trunk in here. I sent you two.”

  Mary Kate nodded. “I sent one below. It had only heavy clothes, and the weather has become too warm for them.”

  “I see. Tell me, did we find all of your things? Was there anything besides the two trunks?”

  He had found her dowry. He had found the gold and now questioned her story all the more. Mary Kate licked her lips nervously, still tasting the sweet orange. “Well, I brought a dowry with me, of course.”

  “A dowry for the unknown husband you were seeking?”

  “Aye.”

  “A modest sum, I suppose. After all, a wealthy family of rank would never allow a daughter to board a ship to seek a husband, all alone but for her maid. They would insist upon choosing someone of equal standing.”

  So, Sir Calder had been a cheapskate. He had sent some piddling sum, doubtless with the promise of more once he had obtained his precious grandson. This Spaniard now doubted whether or not her ransom would be worth the trouble he would have to go through to get it.

  “If you’re worried about the ransom…” she began.

  He smiled again, though it seemed the expression should have cracked his stony face, and Mary Kate realized that, whatever was wrong, it went much deeper than money.

  “Then again, a dowry of but a few coins could have been easily kept in your other trunks, no?”

  Oh, God. How much had Sir Calder sent? Against her will, her voice cracked. “I’m not sure how much was there.”

  “You never saw it?” he snapped.

  “N-nay.”

  “You never looked inside the cask that your grandfather sent with you from England?”

  She could have sworn that she could actually feel every single drop of blood as it left her face. “My—? From—?”

  He began to rail in Spanish, and the only word Mary Kate could understand was a repeated reference to the name of his ship. He stood and paced before her, gesturing with the parchment and dressing her down in his foreign tongue.

  Diego was livid. Women! Saint or flesh, they were impossible. “This is how you deliver upon your word, Magdalena?” he shouted, shaking the letter Enrique had given him at the woman in front of him. “I grovel before you, obey your every command though I risk the stake to do so, and you give me this? This lying, deceitful temptress? Well, I do not want her! You can just take her right back!”

  He switched to English. “Do you know what this is?” He shook the letter again. She looked at it with wide, blue eyes and shook her head. “It is a letter from a Sir Calder Larcombe to a Mister John Hartford. Perhaps you know them?”

  Mary Kate stood up. She kept a tight rein on her temper, but damned if she’d sit and be scolded like a child! “Sir Calder’s my grandfather, as you’ve rightly guessed. I’ve never heard of John Hartford.”

  Diego braced his hands on the table and leaned across toward her. “I will tell you now, I have no patience for lies.”

  “‘Tis the truth I’m telling now. I never have heard that other name, though I can well guess who he is. He’s the bloody sot my grandfather promised me to!”

  “Not so meek and mild now, I see.”

  “He’d no right to give me to that man!”

  “What does your father have to say?”

  She hadn’t thought of that. Certainly her father’s wishes would outweigh her grandfather’s. She opened her mouth to say that he had objected and that her grandfather was sending her away, beyond his reach.

  “Do not bother to answer. It will only be another lie.”

  She snapped her mouth closed.

  “It is all here, in this letter to your intended that your grandfather left in the cask with your dowry. The contracts are all signed, and your grandfather writes that he has given a copy to his solicitor. I do not know what is happening here, but…”

  “But?”

  “But it is not what I thought it was.”

  Mary Kate gazed at him for a moment, puzzled. His face was etched with lines of sadness and disappointment. “What did you think it was, Capitán?”

  Her voice was husky, the single Spanish word oddly accented. She tiled her head and shrugged one shoulder over which dark curls cascaded, and Diego ground his teeth in frustration. What had he done to deserve being played for a fool by his lady and her minion? He remembered with painful clarity Pablo’s warning. Might his visions have been less than holy, after all?

  “Tell me, was there ever a maid killed in the battle with the pirates?”

  Mary Kate crossed her arms over her breast and gave him a sour look. “Nay, there never was. And don’t that tell you something about my grandfather? What sort of a man ships his granddaughter across the ocean with no one for company or comfort?”

  He looked at the food sitting on the table. “Eat what you want,” he told her. “I will see to your quarters and have this trunk moved in there.”

  With a sigh, Mary Kate sat back down. “I suppose you hate me now.”

  “I do not like liars.”

  “What would you have done if I’d told you true from the start?”

  “Exactly what I am going to do now. I will deliver you to a friend of mine in Cartagena. He will see to it that you are ransomed back to your fiancé and returned to him with due haste.”

  “You cannot return me to a man I’ve never even seen.”

  “You belonged to him even before you set sail, Señorita O’Reilly.”

  “D’you not hear what you’re saying? I’m not a piece of property, Captain! And what of my da and my sister? I wasn’t lying there. My da really is sick, and he and Bridget need me!”
/>   “If your father saw fit to turn you over to his father—”

  “My mother’s father, and he’d no more love or care for his own child than he has for me!”

  “And yet your father trusted him to find you a husband. In Spain, a girl does not question her parents’ decisions—”

  “Aye, she does. It may be she never speaks her questions aloud, but she questions, that I’ll tell you. Oh, I know your kind. You think there’s two kinds of women, ones who are only too happy to be whatever men want them to be and have no hopes or dreams of their own and ones like me who are nothing more than a thorn in the side. Well, I’ll tell you true sir, we’re all the same, we are. ‘Tis just that some of us hide it better than others. There’s not a one of us wouldn’t just as soon have some say in our own lives. Can you not understand, Captain? All I want is to go home!” She had scarcely paused throughout her tirade, and she had to take a deep breath when she finished.

  “I will have one of my men fetch you when your quarters are ready,” Diego replied. With a little bow, he walked crisply out the door.

  “Son of a—” She picked up an orange from the tray and let it fly with all her might against the wall opposite the cabin door, which was still propped open. It gave a satisfying splat. She started to go after him, but thought better of it.

  English, Spanish, even Irish to some extent, men were all the same. To them, there were two kinds of women. There were the meek, obedient sort, pure and chaste and made for marriage. Then there were the passionate, challenging kind. Men liked them, too. But they weren’t pure and they weren’t chaste, and men didn’t marry them. No indeed.

  She gave a wicked smile and sampled the fish. Salted, the flavor stronger than she had expected. Quickly, she refreshed her wine.

  Now that she’d gotten to know him better, she didn’t think she so much wanted to kiss this Spaniard after all. He was every bit as rigid and stuffy as any Englishman. But she didn’t want to kiss her English betrothed either, much less lie with him. If she had to give herself to a man she didn’t want, better to give herself to one who would surely cast her aside than one who would lay claim to her for life. And having been taken by the one, the other would no longer want her. Best of all, once she was back in Ireland, the only two men who could bear witness to her shame would be far, far away.

  She ran a quick tally in her head and counted on her fingers. Let’s see, four lies, one dead pirate, one blasphemy that I can recall. Maybe I should count two in case I missed one. One lustful thought.

  She finished every last bite on the tray.

  Chapter Five

  What Diego really wanted to do was to climb up into the crow’s nest and sulk under the stars, but such was not the behavior of a ship’s captain, so he stayed at the helm. He could have gone to his quarters and further castigated his saint, but the thought worried him more than a little. At one point, he would have been too awed to be so presumptuous, but that was not what caused him to hesitate now. Now, he found himself seriously questioning whether or not she was what he had always thought her. He thought about Pablo’s advice. Make a full confession and hand himself over to the Church? He should. But the thought chilled him to the bone. Was that yet another ill omen? Now his vision had him fearing his church!

  “Magdalena,” he whispered, “come to me and tell me I have made a mistake. Tell me this is not the woman you spoke of.”

  “Are you afraid of me then?”

  He whipped around and nearly fell over, unable to decide whether the woman next to him was flesh or fancy.

  She held up her bandaged wrists. “The surgeon’s done with me, and I’ve been out of your room for nigh onto an hour. You can come back down.”

  He struggled to catch his breath. “I thought to wait until you were asleep.”

  “Then you are afraid of me.”

  “I am annoyed with you.”

  “It was wrong of me to lie.”

  He eyed her suspiciously. “You are very good at it. I almost believed you.”

  “Ha! You were eating it up ‘til you read that cursed letter.”

  “Ha! You are not so good a liar as you think. I was looking very hard at you just before Enrique came, no?”

  She smiled and let her eyes wander idly over him. “You’re not the first man to take a long, hard look at me, y’know.”

  He smiled back, in spite of himself. “You think too much of yourself. I was thinking that there was something not quite right about you. I was thinking that a woman who kills a pirate does not run from anybody.”

  She laughed loudly, as unrestrained in her mirth as she was in her ire, and damn him if he did not, just for a moment, cease to care about Magdalena.

  “You’ve the right of it there, Captain. That’s a rare thing, a man who actually pays attention to a woman. There’s plenty who’ll study her form close enough, but look inside her? I’ll give you good credit for that.” She gave him another impudent look and stepped closer, and he caught a subtle whiff of roses. “How long ‘til we reach Cartagena?”

  “We stop in Havana first. It will be nearly a fortnight before this journey ends.”

  Havana? Mary Kate tucked that piece of information away. Perhaps she only had to befuddle this man long enough to escape him in Cuba. She might yet get away with her virginity intact. But he had to be good and befuddled. She drove her hands through her loose hair and lifted it from her back, causing the fabric of her bodice to stretch tightly.

  “‘Tis hot here, even at night.”

  Diego deliberately looked away.

  “A fortnight is plenty of time for me to try you down to your last nerve. Might I call you Diego, as you’re sure to be calling me any number of names?”

  “And I always thought the English allowed women too much freedom.”

  “The English think we Irish are barbarians. If it makes you feel any better, I’m the bane of my village, second only to my sister. Most Irish girls are far better behaved than I.”

  “What if I say that it would not be proper for you to call me by my Christian name?”

  Mary Kate smiled again and looked him straight in the eyes. Warm eyes they were, dark in the light of the lamp at the helm. “I’m sure to call you Diego anyway.”

  “Then I will call you Mary Katherine.”

  “Mary Kate, unless you think of something more descriptive at any given moment.”

  María Catalina, he thought, then shook his head. She was not Spanish. She was not what he was looking for. She was a manipulative little liar and entirely too forward. He already had all the casual lovers he needed.

  “I imagine I may think of something else from time to time,” he said.

  “D’you know that you smell of lemons?”

  “Of all the…have you no notion of decorum?” That was another problem. She made his head spin, the way she jumped from one thing to the next.

  “I certainly do! I was only wondering why that was. ‘Tis a clean, pleasant smell.”

  “Lemon verbena,” he explained tersely. “It is a plant that grows in Tierra Firme—the part of the New World that the English call the Spanish Main. You can scatter the dried leaves in your trunks, like lavender.”

  “I favor roses, myself.”

  It was out before he could stop it. “I noticed.”

  Mary Kate’s mouth curved upward into an expression of feline smugness.

  “You should go to bed,” Diego stated firmly.

  “But I haven’t apologized properly.”

  He looked at her, eyebrows raised skeptically.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Are you? For what?”

  “For having to lie to you.”

  “You had to lie. That is what you are sorry for?”

  “Aye.”

  Diego scratched his head. “Usually my English is very good, but I think that I do not understand.”

  “I’ve already told you why I lied. I have to get home to my family, and my grandfather had no right to do what h
e did.”

  “Then you are apologizing for lying?”

  Mary Kate chewed on her lip and narrowed her eyes in concentration. “Nay,” she decided at last. “I’m sorry you had to find out and get your feelings hurt.”

  Diego laughed out loud. “You are apologizing for getting caught?”

  With an indignant humph, Mary Kate replied, “Certainly not! That weren’t my fault! How was I to know there was a letter? I’m sorry it upset you. You’re a good man, a fine man, the sort of man a girl admires, and I’m sorry to have caused you any grief. That’s what I’m apologizing for.”

  He was staring at her in open astonishment, and Mary Kate did nothing to disguise her conquering grin. If honesty was the way to this man’s heart, he was about to get more than he bargained for. “So now, I’m hoping we can be friends.”

  “I have had an Englishwoman for a friend. It did not work out well for me.”

  Instant understanding lit Mary Kate’s face, and Diego bit his tongue.

  “So, one of them cold English lasses broke your heart. Well, you’ve naught to fear from me. I’m Irish. You’ve yet to have yourself an Irishwoman, but you’ll see ‘tis very different.”

  Diego felt like he’d been hit by a forty-foot swell. Mother of God, was she offering what he thought she was offering? Looking at her in the lamplight, he was sorely tempted to take her up on it!

  “For a friend!” Mary Kate amended with a shaky laugh. “For a friend! You shouldn’t look at a woman like you’re going to eat her up, especially when she’s helpless on board your ship!” Although his reaction had been just what she expected, the jolt she’d felt when he’d looked at her had taken her breath away.

  Diego sighed and then chuckled. He had to admit, she made him laugh. And he liked this side of Mary Kate, this irreverent and entirely too straightforward side. “Somehow, I cannot think of you as helpless. I have seen how well you wield a cutlass.”

  Mary Kate flung her hair behind her with an elaborate toss, covering her sudden uncertainty with bravado. “See that you don’t forget. I think I’ll be off to bed, after all, now that I’ve made my peace with you.”