by Julia London
He’d never been the sort to place a woman on a pedestal, had never met one that had sparked that desire in him. Had never been in one place long enough to feel that sort of desperate attraction. There had been nights, in ports far-flung, where perhaps he’d felt it for the space of a few hours, but it had never lasted longer than that.
No, the sea was his love. The world and all her beauty is what called to him. And yet, in a strange way, this woman called to him. The truth, if he could admit it to himself, was that he admired her. He was furious with what she’d done, but he admired her bravery. Her willingness to at least try. He wanted to know how it had all come to this. He wanted to understand her.
He ate the cheese, washed it down with wine, then asked, “How is it that such a bonny lass has come to be in my cabin, in my clothes, in command of my ship? We offered to take you aboard. There was no need to attack us, aye?”
She picked up the bottle and leaned closer to him, unaware—or perhaps very much aware—that the vee of his shirt afforded him a tantalizing glimpse of her breasts. “There was every need.” She fit the bottle into his hands, then straightened up again.
“Tell me,” Aulay said, and drank. “I should like one day to tell my children of the day I was captured at sea by a beauty, and I would know why.”
“Donna call me that,” she said abruptly.
“Beauty?”
She glowered at him.
Aulay shrugged. “Verra well. When I tell the story, I’ll cast you as an old hag.”
She suddenly smiled, and it lit her face. It lit the cabin. “I would prefer that to beauty,” she said, as if the word offended her.
“You are the first woman I’ve ever met who did no’ care to be considered beautiful.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Tell me,” he urged her.
She yawned. “You’ll be disappointed, that I know, for you’re a man of the world. We are only peasants and our dilemma is verra simple, it is. We’ve had hard times, we have, and we canna let the whisky go. It’s all we have.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, returning the wine bottle to her.
“We’ve never been accused of refinement,” she said with a snort.
Aulay didn’t follow.
“There, you see? A man of your refinement canna understand. I refer to our circumstances at home.”
“Lismore Island,” he said. “The giant would that he were there now.”
“Aye,” she said, and rubbed her eyes. “Lismore Island, a wee spit of land on the western coast of Scotland, scarcely good for living at all. The south end is inhabited by the MacColl clan,” she said, holding a hand out. “Where the fishing is quite good and the land arable. We have the northern end,” she said, holding out her other hand, “good for naugh’ but a few sheep, a few cattle and perhaps a wee bit of linen, but for the rabbits that have overrun us and eat our crops and burrow under our houses.” She shifted her gaze to her father. “We donna earn enough to pay our rents, and our laird is quite unhappy.”
“Who is your laird?” Aulay asked curiously.
“Duncan Campbell.”
Aulay knew of Duncan Campbell. He’d become laird two springs ago when Jacobites who had not accepted the defeat of Prince Charlie had murdered his brother, Colin. Aulay also knew him to be an ambitious man, as most Campbells were. They aimed to be the only licensed distiller of whisky in the Highlands, an end that they aggressively pursued.
“My father is our chief, aye? He’s a wee bit starry-eyed.” Her expression softened as she gazed at the slumbering figure. “He means well,” she murmured and leaned against the wall, crossing her arms over her abdomen. “But he’s quite careless.”
“So you are determined to sell whisky to afford the tenant rents,” Aulay said, filling in the pieces.
“’Tis our only hope.”
“Must you go to Aalborg?”
“How I wish I’d never said it!” she moaned. “But our laird, he suspects we were making spirits. He kept coming round, unannounced, to have a look. He inquired after us in Port Appin and Oban and he heard talk. We decided we had to sell what we had ere he found it and we lost all that we’d spent. But because he suspected it, and my father had recklessly talked of it around the island and in the nearest ports, we thought it no’ safe to attempt to sell in Scotland or England.” She dropped her gaze to her lap. “I was the one to suggest Aalborg, aye? My family and more of us on the island are descendants of Danes from Jutland.”
Her rationale was not surprising to Aulay. Entire clans had been dispersed by the retribution heaped on the Highlands after the Jacobite defeat, and those that remained survived by any means possible. Even clans that had not taken the side of the Jacobites were suspect, and any whisper of it was all the English forces needed to raid cattle and villages. Livelihoods had disappeared and every remaining man, woman or child worked to rebuild and move on from those bleak years.
“So we made sail,” she said. “There was no’ a soul about, and yet, no’ a day later, a ship flying the king’s colors had found us, a tiny wee dot in a vast gray of sea against a vast sky of gray.” She turned her gaze to Aulay. “Who was it?”
“Campbell, lass,” Aulay said. He’d thought it a royal ship, but now, he had a different idea. “I’d wager he had someone watching you.”
She sighed and closed her eyes. “’Tis my fault, all of it.”
Aulay felt a twinge of sympathy. He’d been chased a time or two, particularly in the years before the rebellion when he and his brother, Cailean, had smuggled in French goods. He knew how fear gripped a belly when a bigger, stronger ship gained on you. It was only because of his intimate knowledge of the Scottish coastline and his crew’s ability to trim sails faster than most that he’d escaped when he had. “Your ship was too small, Lottie. The naval ship, its masts were taller, its sails fuller. You could no’ have outrun it.”
“Aye, so we discovered.”
“They fired first?” Aulay asked.
She didn’t answer right away, her gaze on her father. “He was concerned for me,” she said softly, and drew her knees to her chest, her arms wrapped around them. “He was fearful they would catch us, and...well, the spoils of war, aye?”
Aulay said nothing, the thought souring his appetite.
She told him about how the blast that had hit their ship had knocked her father across the deck, and he’d been impaled with a piece of wood from the hull. “I thought he was dead. I turned about to fetch Morven, but another explosion came, and the top half of the main mast fell and scarcely missed us. And then another explosion, louder and more violent, only farther away. I didna realize that we’d fired on the other ship.”
She was speaking quickly, as if to purge it all from her memory. She told him how bedlam had followed, of how barrels of whisky rolled into the sea from a hole in the side of the ship’s hull until her brother—Drustan, the giant, she said, threw himself across the hole and stopped them.
She told him that she’d turned her back on her father for only a moment, and he’d used that moment to yank free the piece of railing with his hands. She took another long drink of wine, then handed the bottle to Aulay.
“I tried to staunch the bleeding with my hands,” she said, and stacked her hands on top of one another to mimic what she’d done. The color in her cheeks was rising. “There was so much blood. Then someone was pulling me away and Morven was there with a blanket or perhaps a bit of that mangled sail, and my father, he was pleading with me, ‘Donna let go the whisky, Lottie.’ It was impossible to think. Everyone was shouting and the ship was roiling beneath my feet so that I could scarcely keep my balance, and my insides were being tossed about. I thought I would vomit.” She laid her hand against her throat and released a slow breath.
She was still terrified—Aulay could almost feel it filling the room. Many years ago, he’d been caught
by a particularly bad storm and had lost control of the rudder. They’d tried to manage it with the sails, but in winds that high, it was no use. With every wave that crashed into the ship, he thought he would draw his last breath.
He had awakened on deck the next morning to bright sun and a battered ship. One of his crew had gone missing, no doubt blown overboard. It was only by the grace of God he’d lost only one man. It had been the most harrowing night of his life.
“It was madness,” she said. “My brother Drustan was quite upset, and as you’ve seen, he’s no’ right in his head. He can become...destructive,” she said carefully. “And Mats! Diah, he believes himself to be a man, but he’s no’ a man, he’s a lad still, and he canna save the world, no matter what he believes.” She hopped off the desk and began to pace, rubbing her nape with her hand. “Gilroy said our ship was taking on water. The other ship was on fire, and they pulled around and sailed in the direction of Scotland. My heart was in my throat—I believed all was lost, we’d all drown. My father was cursing, trying to rouse himself when he could no’ lift his head, and his face as gray as the sky.” She shook her head and turned away from Aulay. “My father, he took my hand, squeezing as tight as he might, and said that I must pay him heed.
“I didna want to heed him,” she said, clearly distressed. “I didna want to know how bad our circumstance. But he’d no’ let me go, he kept gripping my hand, squeezing it,” she said, shaking her hand. “He said, Lottie, donna lose the whisky, aye? If you lose the whisky, all is lost. There is no more money.”
She seemed to be speaking more to herself, her gaze on the middle distance, as if he were not present.
“I didna believe him—how could it all be gone? But he swore he was telling me the truth. All gone.”
She sank slowly onto a chair, her hands squeezed between her knees.
Aulay leaned forward. “Lottie, lass...”
She glanced up as if he’d startled her. “That was the moment we saw you,” she said. “Can you imagine? At first, we thought it was the other ship, come round to finish us off. But it was you. You flew the colors of Scotland. It was a miracle.”
Aulay frowned. “A miracle, was it? If you believed it so, then why did you deceive us?”
“Oh.” She glanced at her hands. “You willna care for the answer.”
“Tell me.”
“Well. I tried to think what to do, but my father, Diah, he kept shouting, ‘Save the whisky, Lottie, think of the Livingstones we left behind, Lottie, they’ll be sent from their homes if we donna pay the rents, Lottie.’”
Things were becoming a little clearer to Aulay now. She was not ruthless, but an inexperienced woman thrust into an untenable situation by her father and the men of her clan.
“And then it came to me—I knew how to save us all and the whisky. What we needed was another ship.”
“Obviously.”
She smiled ruefully. “Do you no’ agree that it was a miracle of heaven that you came along when you did, Captain?”
“No.”
“I suppose it must seem unfair to you. But we didna know if you were friend or foe, and as Duff pointed out, it hardly mattered either way, for if you were a friendly ship come to help, there’d be no room with your cargo and our whisky. And if you were pirates? Or worse, Campbells?” She turned her hands palm up and shrugged. “In either event, we had no choice but to take your ship. Would you no’ have done the same?”
“No,” he said. “Did it occur to you, then, that you might have accepted our offer of assistance and asked about your cargo? We might have taken some of it. You might have even offered a small share in your profit to transport it, aye? Or you might have taken what we could hold and sold it in Amsterdam.”
She gave him a contrite smile. “I knew you’d know what to do. Pity I didna seek your advice.”
“Pity,” he said crossly.
She leaned back, stretching her legs before her and crossing them at the ankles, as if the telling of her ordeal had settled everything for her, had absolved her of the sin.
“You’ve no’ yet told me of your brilliant scheme to steal my ship. You didna appear to have any plan at all.”
“Aye, that was the plan.”
“Pardon?”
“I was to appear to be a damsel in distress, on a voyage with men who’d never been at sea, who didna know what to do. If you believed it to be true, which you did, we could board your ship without suspicion. Then, of course, the challenge was to surprise you. But as it was the only chance we had, I let down my hair.”
“You let down your hair?” he repeated incredulously.
She nodded. “My hair is what a shiny pebble is to a crow, Captain. It was Duff MacGuire’s idea that we all appear inept, which, frankly, we were. Duff is an actor—he told the men what they were to do.”
Aulay was incredulous that they had crafted such a ridiculous plan. More incredulous that it had worked. He closed his eyes with a groan of indignant shame. “You have added grave insult to my injury, madam.”
“It was Gilroy’s idea that I bear a cut on my leg in the event we could no’ surprise you straightaway. But we had no’ the slightest hope that it would work. It was far easier than we could have imagined,” she said, sounding perplexed by it. “None of you bore swords? Why did you no’ bear swords or guns? And your men! They wouldna turn away from me.”
Aulay felt utterly humiliated. His lack of foresight was astounding. Had he been away from the sea for so long he couldn’t think?
“Does it no’ seem utterly preposterous in the telling?” she asked curiously.
“Please, say no’ another word. No’ a single word.”
She smiled sympathetically. “I beg your pardon, Captain. But I do hope you understand that for us, it was either drown or...or borrow your ship. We had so much at stake.”
“So do we, Lottie, aye?” he said angrily. “Did you consider it for a moment? Did you bother to think that you were no’ the only one with so much at stake?” He shifted his gaze away from her, ashamed he’d been felled by a beautiful woman with a shapely leg.
“I regret the blow to your head the most,” she added quietly.
Aulay gave her a sidelong glance.
“You were the only one who looked at me askance. The others, they looked at me as men always look at me, but you seemed a wee bit suspicious. And, well...poor Drustan doesna know his own strength.”
“I beg to differ,” Aulay said. “He appears to know it verra well.” He wanted to murder something. His gaze traced over her body, down to her toes, and slowly up again. He had a fury rising in him that made him feel almost ill. He was a colossal fool, had made the mistake of a lifetime, and as he gazed at the very woman who had caused it to happen, his rage mixed with...desire. Lethal desire.
It was insanity to admire her for being so bloody audacious, for making a laughingstock of him, but that’s precisely what he did. Had he ever known a woman, or a man, for that matter, who could best him so? It was madness to imagine all the ways he would make her pay for what she’d done, and yet in the same thought imagine making love to her. But that was precisely what was in his head, imagining her without a stitch of clothing, how she would look beneath his body. How soft and warm and wet she would feel.
He’d lost his bloody mind.
He wished for sleep, to wake refreshed so that he might think again how to free himself of these goddamn binds. He stood up from the chair. “I’ll sleep now.”
She stood up, too, and watched him put himself down in the corner of his cabin and kick the chair away in frustration. He propped himself up against the wall and closed his eyes, unwilling to look at her bonny face another moment.
He heard her move the chairs around, heard her put herself on the floor next to her father’s bed.
When he opened his eyes later, he was struck by how graceful she looked
, curled with a blanket wrapped around her, that ribbon of blond hair snaking out behind her, that laughably small dueling pistol beside her.
He thought of how she would look in the days to come, when the authorities caught up to her. No matter the mad thoughts roaming about his head, he would not allow her to escape her fate for this. That was impossible. Pirates paid for their piracy, and audacious beauties were no exception.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LOTTIE WAS SURROUNDED by wildflowers—the bright gold of gorst, the brilliant purple of thistle and heather, the rare lilac bindweed. Flowers covered the meadow—which meadow, and where, she wasn’t sure—but her horse, Stjerne, trotted confidently along, shaking his mane now and again with his pleasure at being in bright sunlight.
Lottie glanced back over her shoulder. Anders was riding an inky black horse and she laughed—he’d been trying to catch her for miles, but could never reach her.
She came upon a stream and dismounted to let her horse drink. She heard the black horse approaching and stepped out from beneath the boughs of a tree that stretched over the stream. She leaned up against Stjerne’s side, his body warm and firm. Lottie watched the man ride into view, and realized, with an increasing race of her heart, that it wasn’t Anders at all, but Captain Mackenzie.
He was wet, soaked through. Wet and vexed, judging by his dark expression. His hard gaze slid from her face to her legs, and Lottie glanced down. When had she donned trews? She looked up, her pulse galloping, because his gaze was quite heated and locked on hers. She couldn’t move. Her feet were stones, unmovable. She had no feeling in one arm, and the other was as heavy as a dead man. He leaned closer still, and his lips touched hers so softly that Lottie’s heart stopped beating altogether. It aroused her, pooling warm in her groin, making her perspire in spite of the chill around her. But the kiss was rough and strangely tasteless, too, and something smelled like mildew...
Her eyes flew open. She blinked the morning blur away and slowly became aware of something at her back, something warm and firm. And against her mouth and cheek, the rough fiber of rope.
