by Nina Bruhns
But it was those very qualities in Elizabeth Hamilton that would keep her from ever accepting him into her life. Because he could not be truthful with her. How could he? How should he tell her what lay in his innermost heart when doing so would reveal an even greater lie? At least she would believe it to be so.
This was an impossible situation.
Why, oh, why had he spoken that damned curse those many years ago? Why had he dared to tamper with God’s plan?
And yet, if he hadn’t, he would not have come back to life to witness its culmination. Would never have met, nor held in his arms the woman with whom he was falling in love.
Was this his punishment, then? To see the closure of one horrific wound, only to have that very resolution viciously rip open another? Must the scales of cosmic balance always be fed with pain?
With a roar of anger, he flung himself back on the bed.
This would not do! If this lamenting and self-pity continued, he might as well find a good ship and cast himself off its prow into the sea! But that would be a coward’s way out. And Sullivan Fouquet may be a lot of things, but a coward was not one of them.
What he needed was a route out of this tangled mess. Some way to avenge his parents, and yet still win the heart of his woman.
Unfortunately, he feared it was hopeless. If there was such a promising solution, the path to it eluded him.
“Nothing?” Elizabeth adjusted her cell phone to her ear and frowned. “You found nothing at all? Are you sure?”
Her mother made an impatient noise. “Not a blessed thing. As far as I can see, there is no feud between the Connecticut and Carolina Sullivans. I just don’t understand it.”
Elizabeth didn’t, either. Although, admittedly, she was having a hard time getting her brain to function. It was late the next morning but she was already on her fifth cup of coffee. Thanks to a completely sleepless night tossing and turning in her feather bed thinking about Sully and his damned contradictions. To no avail, of course. Other than to exasperate herself with the intermittent, unbidden urge to climb the stairs to his room and toss and turn in his feather bed. With him.
Oh, Lord.
“Are you listening to me?” her mother demanded.
She fanned herself. “Yes, of course, Mom.”
“I stayed up until 2:00 a.m. looking through every book and set of papers I could find, all the way back to the turn of the century. The last century! Surely it couldn’t have happened before 1900! Who remembers that far back?” Gilda blurted out in frustration.
Elizabeth didn’t answer, but mentally flinched. Actually she could think of one person…
Honestly, it was the last thing she really wanted to know, but there was no putting it off.
“Mom, in your research did you happen to run into anything about Sullivan Fouquet? Some connection to our family?”
She could hear papers rustling. “Yeah. In the household accounts for the mid-to-late 1700s,” her mom answered. “Fouquet’s name was listed among the servant families. There was a husband, wife and two children who worked on the estate for about thirteen or fourteen years.”
“Seventeen-hundreds?” Elizabeth’s stomach did a slow roll. The pirate Sullivan Fouquet had died in 1804. The time fit, but…“What happened to them?”
“Doesn’t say.”
She bit her lip. For some unfathomable reason she was compelled to ask, “So, Sullivan Fouquet, he was the husband?”
There was a pause. She held her breath as more papers rustled.
“No. One of the kids,” her mother answered. “The oldest.”
Her breath whooshed out in on irrational puff of relief. Though why it should matter, she couldn’t fathom.
Lord in heaven, was she ever losing it! Worrying about whether a long-dead pirate had a wife and kids! She already knew Fouquet supposedly had a fiancée after settling in Magnolia Cove. What was so different about a wife? And kids?
And what the heck did it have to do with her, anyway?
Determinedly she shut down the rebellious voice niggling the back of her mind. The one that said it had everything to do with her. None of it mattered, in any case. Surely it was a coincidence.
“Why would a servant couple name their kid Sullivan?” she asked grouchily.
“It was a fairly common sign of respect in those days,” Gilda explained, “naming a child after the patriarch of the family you worked for. Of course, in this case it was a bit strange…considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Oh, didn’t I mention? There was a notation after their name in the ledger. The Fouquets were Acadian indentured servants.”
Ah, hell. “Acadian?”
“You know. The French Acadians from Nova Scotia. When they were expelled by the British in the 1750s, a lot of them went to Louisiana.”
“And became the Cajuns.” So much for coincidence.
“Exactly. But many stopped here in Connecticut.”
Elizabeth managed a noncommittal noise.
“Of course, having been exiled from their homeland and sold into virtual slavery by the British, it’s a bit unusual to name a firstborn child in honor of a British lord,” Gilda stated.
Elizabeth sucked in a sharp breath as the implications assailed her. “Maybe Lord Henry was nice to them,” she choked out.
“Yeah,” her mom said, confirming her worst fears, “or maybe he was really, really bad.”
“You seem preoccupied. Didn’t the physical therapy go well today?”
Sully propped his boots onto Jake’s desk with a clunk and gave his friend a wry smile. “You mean the torture? God’s Teeth, that woman would have put old Edward Teach to shame.” Jake grinned, as Sully knew he would. You couldn’t grow up in Magnolia Cove and not know your pirates backward and forward. “But no, it went well enough. She says I’ll soon be walking without the cane.”
“Already? That’s incredible.”
“Aye.” Sully shrugged unenthusiastically. The sooner he was completely healed, the sooner he’d run out of excuses.
“Then what’s bothering you, my friend? Not ready to come back to work yet?”
Jake had an uncanny way of seeing straight to the truth of things. Probably why the man was such a good arson investigator.
When Sully remained silent, uncertain how to answer, Jake tipped his chair onto its back legs and regarded him. “You should think about coming over here to the Magnolia Cove station like I did. It’s a lot quieter than Old Fort Mystic. That alarm bell hardly ever rings.”
“I’m not a quitter, Jake.”
“You’d be transferring. Not quitting. Did I quit when I moved? No.”
Sully laced his fingers over his thighs and frowned. “Easy for you to say. You’re the department’s only arson investigator.”
“You’d still be fire chief.”
He snorted. “Of a place a tenth the size.” It would be like giving up the Sea Nymph for command of a river ferry. “I don’t want to lose the respect of my men, Jake. I may not remember, but I know the kind of respect they show me was hard-earned. A man has to accept his responsibilities.”
“Even if he’s not that man anymore?”
Sully’s gaze darted to Jake and narrowed. Exactly how much could the man see? “What—”
Jake held up his palms. “Down, boy. I only meant that a blind man could see that the fire three months ago changed you. I’m not talking about physically—you’ll get over the injuries. I mean in here.” He tapped his temple. “And here.” He tapped his heart. “This isn’t about responsibilities or respect, Andre. It’s about what you want out of your life and what you’re going to do to get it.”
“But—”
“Nobody’s going to blame you for reevaluating.”
Suddenly an ear-splitting siren blasted through the air. Men started shouting, and downstairs a rumbling engine sprang to life.
Sully’s gaze met Jake’s in a grim acknowledgment.
No time like the present to face the fut
ure.
Chapter 9
T here was no hiding from it this time.
The fire was raging by the time the lone fire truck from the Magnolia Cove station made it to the remote island home that had called in the alarm. Ladders from Old Fort Mystic and other stations were on their way, but still over fifteen minutes out. This place was on the edge of the ocean, in the middle of nowhere.
“Forget the bedrooms!” the desperate owner was yelling over the din of men shouting and equipment being unloaded. “Save my office! Oh, my God, three years of work!” he wailed.
Sully had ridden in Jake’s smaller yellow truck so the big fire engine could cram in as many volunteer firefighters as possible, scooping them up as they ran out from stores and businesses to meet it as it careened through town. Sully’d been pretty damn impressed by the split-second precision of the maneuvers, every bit as well-executed as any boarding of an enemy vessel he’d orchestrated in his day.
He continued to be impressed as the men tackled their duties upon screeching to a halt in front of the burning structure. Equipment was freed, hoses stretched and water cascading faster than he could figure out how to get his seat belt off.
“The computer!” the owner shouted frantically as two firefighters prevented the man from running back inside the inferno. “Try to get the computer! And the books!”
Smoke and ash swirled thickly all around as Sully eased guardedly from the truck. Immediately the roar of flames filled his ears; his lungs burned from the scorching heat.
“Chief!” Jeremy Swift yelled as Sully fought to quell the instinctive panic. “Grab that shovel and put out those hotspots, okay?”
Jeremy waved at several small patches of flame that had been spit out onto the surrounding dry grass close to the main blaze. Then he was gone.
Desperately Sully glanced around f or someone else to do it. But there was no one. Everyone was busy with their own critical task.
His nerves threatened to snap. Bon Dieu.
Without giving himself a chance to think, Sully swiped up the shovel, ran over to the hotspots and started pounding them out. They were small. Manageable. Single-mindedly concentrating on his job, he was able to ignore the thundering of his heart and the licking of the huge burning monster behind him and keep the sparks from spreading. With every whack of the shovel, he imagined he was subduing a small piece of his fear. It seemed to work.
At one point someone tossed him a pair of gloves and a helmet with a visor. A bit later Jeremy ran over with a pair of tall rubber boots for him to pull over his shoes and jeans, which were getting so hot he was afraid they might melt any second.
After running around putting out hotspots for what seemed like hours, Sully’s arm muscles were screaming with exhaustion, his leg throbbing and his skin burning from the intense heat. But the panic was largely gone.
Needing a breath of fresh air to quell the residual nausea in his stomach, he limped a few yards back into the cooling shade of the junglelike forest that huddled on one side of the property.
And startled a man out of hiding.
“Hey!” Sully shouted as the stranger jumped up from behind a bush and wheeled off, stumbling through the underbrush. “Arrête! Stop!”
He took three giant strides after the man, then felt his knee give out. As he started to fall, with an awkward effort he slid the heavy boot off and hurled it at the man. Sully heard a thud and a yell before hitting the ground himself, and rolling to protect his knee.
He was still swearing a blue streak at the stabbing pain when Jake came running up. “What happened?”
He waved a hand after the fleeing man. “There was a guy hiding. Could be involved,” he shouted back. “I threw a boot. He might be down. Go!”
Jake took off at a tear. By the time Sully had shaken out his knee and staggered to his feet, Jake came running back. He dropped the boot and a dirty backpack next to Sully and kept right on running.
“Take care of that backpack!” he yelled. “I’m going to cut the bastard off.” He jumped in his truck and with a spray of gravel he’d turned it around and was barreling down the road.
Since there was only one bridge onto the tiny coastal island, Sully figured that’s where Jake hoped to catch up to the man. He quickly relayed that information to a patrol cop who’d just arrived on the scene, and the cop took off to help.
The fire was under control by this time, its flames nearly battled into submission. But the house was a wreck. Black with soot and sagging under the weight of exposed framework and thousands of gallons of water, it looked as if it would collapse any second. Sully sympathized. He felt the same way.
Hoisting the grimy backpack onto his shoulder, he joined the clutch of firefighters gathered around an engine gulping down water. He was greeted with slaps on the back and a bottle of water thrust into his hand.
“Great job, Chief,” several of the guys called. “You’ll be back in the swing in a flash!”
“Just like old times!” Jeremy Swift said, grinning widely.
“Got yourself a new cane, boss?” someone said with a chuckle.
Sully looked down and realized he was using the shovel instead of his usual bow-handled walking stick to help him stand. “Well, hell,” he muttered. And grinned. Then he started to laugh.
Suddenly he knew he’d be all right. He hadn’t been scared, not after banishing the initial panic. He’d done his job and he’d even flushed out the bad guy. His men were now gazing at him with eyes full of respect and affection. He didn’t have to say a word. They understood.
And suddenly he understood. No matter what choices he made in the future, they’d still respect him.
He’d paid his debt to Andre Sullivan. And now he could let it go—the guilt about being alive and taking over his body. What Sully did with this life from now on was up to him alone.
The question was, what would he do with it? And who would it include…?
Elizabeth and Mrs. Butterfield were drinking afternoon tea—iced sweet tea, of course—in the shade of the veranda when the Magnolia Cove fire engine thundered up to the front gate and from it slid a very tired and sooty figure that Elizabeth could only guess was Sully.
“Oh, my stars!” Mrs. Butterfield declared, dropping her glass and scurrying out to meet him. “Chief Sullivan, what have you been up to?” She flitted around him as he limped up the path—minus his cane, Elizabeth noted—not quite daring to touch his soot-encrusted arms or clothes.
“There was a fire,” he said, voice weary, as his eyes met Elizabeth’s. “Out on Morrisey Island. Some professor’s house.”
“Oh, dear!” Mrs. Butterfield said, obviously recognizing the place. “Not Professor Rouse’s home? Oh, what a shame! Was he able to save any of his work?”
Sully shook his head, but his gaze never left Elizabeth’s. “Don’t believe so. Aye, a real shame.”
Mrs. Butterfield tutted. “And doubly so because he was almost finished with his book, from what I hear.” By this time the pair had reached the front steps and the older woman leaned in conspiratorially, lowering her voice. “Though, perhaps it’s an omen. The book was about voudou, you know.”
Sully and Elizabeth both glanced at her in surprise.
“Voudou?” Sully asked.
Mrs. Butterfield nodded knowingly. “He taught anthropology at the College of Charleston. Was an expert on the Caribbean, and very interested in the old cultural connections between Haiti and South Carolina. Voudou in particular.”
Sully staggered, and before Elizabeth knew what she was doing, she had flown down the steps and had her arm around his waist to keep him on his feet. It was a testament to how exhausted he must be that he actually leaned on her.
“Well, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see you need to get inside and lie down,” she said worriedly, taking the backpack he had hanging from his shoulder. “Come on. I’ll help you upstairs.”
“Careful of that backpack,” he said, but didn’t protest when she urged him up the steps
. “It might be evidence.”
“Was the fire bad?” she asked.
“Bad enough.”
“Were you…okay?”
They stopped in the foyer to gather themselves for the climb upstairs. He looked down at her and smiled. “Just fine.”
Despite the thousand conflicting emotions triggered within her by that smile, she returned it. His refusal to help her brother would always paint her feelings for Sully with the brush of anguish, but…she couldn’t deny the feelings were there. Their mutual attraction practically lit up the room with the sparks it generated. And if he were any other man in any other circumstances, she would be falling even harder for him. She didn’t know what it was, but there was something about Andre Sullivan that had toppled her defenses and crept into her heart. By all rights she should hate him, or at least resent him. But the truth was, she adored him.
Maybe it was the sexy way he looked at her with those sultry bedroom eyes, or the confident way he touched her with his gentle, powerful hands. Or his sculpted mouth, so firm and skillful…
“I’m getting soot all over you,” he murmured, trailing a finger over her cheek, and she realized she was just standing there staring up at him. Probably with her heart pinned to her sleeve for anyone to see.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, shaking off the impossible longing and attempting to get businesslike. Armed with her mom’s new information, maybe the test situation was still salvageable. “But you better clean up before lying down on Mrs. B’s pretty lace duvet. You’re a mess.”
“Here you are,” Mrs. Butterfield sang out, hurrying up to them with a bright pink box. “Bubble bath! I just knew I had some tucked away. Turn on the jets, and have a nice, soothing soak.”
