by Jo Goodman
"Because she was going to scratch his eyes out. Then mine."
He put his index finger in the neck of his shirt and drew it down, revealing several bloody tracks like those Wendell sported. "Didn't Sam Judge say her spunk would be trouble? Only a matter of time. Said it, didn't I?"
Jericho nodded wearily. "Let her go. She's not going to attack anyone now."
Judge ignored him and motioned to Hank, who was standing at Wendell's back with the whip. "Give him ten. Eyes front! Everyone! The next man who forgets that the wench here is in my care until her uncle pays will get thirty! Begin!"
Jericho turned around to watch the flogging and used his body to block Rae's view. Wendell's broad back had been bared, and the cat whispered cruelly in the air before it marked his flesh. The leather thongs were dipped in a bucket of salt water before each stroke, making every cut sting painfully while preventing infection. A pattern of thin crimson lines emerged on Wendell's white back, crisscrossing as Hank swung the whip from two angles. After six strokes Wendell cried out, a tortured rasping sound that raised the flesh on Rae's arms. At eight strokes he screamed once, then was strangely silent for the last two strikes except for a pathetic whimper. Though it seemed an eternity to those watching, the punishment did not last above five minutes.
Sam Judge gave the next order. "Cut him down and give him the whip. McClellan, take his place."
Jericho was the only man aboard not surprised by the command. He had known as soon as he saw the scratches on Sam Judge that he would be expected to take Rae's place beneath the cat. Jericho also understood that his punishment was in part a payment for Sam's keeping Rae in his protection. Jericho had never had any illusions that eventually he would have to pay for knowing Sam's secret.
"Twenty strokes, Wendell," Sam said, as Jericho stripped off his shirt.
Rae screamed at Sam Judge. "No! He didn't do anything!"
"But you did," was the calm reply. "You attacked me and one of my men."
"I was defending myself!"
"Wendell says you bargained with your body for the opportunity to be let out of the cabin, then turned on him."
"That's a lie! You heard me! I wanted nothing from him." She kicked at the men on either side of her, trying to escape them. They might have been bronze bookends for all the good it did her. "I didn't mean to hurt you, I went a little mad! Please let him go!"
Sam Judge looked at Rae impassively. "Twenty-one."
"What? Oh, no!" Tears glistened in her eyes and dampened her lashes. "Don't do this."
"Twenty-two."
Rae quieted, hating herself for begging and only bringing more grief to Jericho. She bit back a sob.
Jericho tossed his shirt at one of the men. "She doesn't need to see this," he told Sam. "You've made your point."
"Twenty-three. And she stays right here."
Jericho heard Rae breathe in sharply as she struggled for control. Without looking back he walked to the mast, slick with Wendell's sweat, and allowed himself to be bound.
"Do you want a gag?" Hank asked.
Jericho nodded and clamped his teeth around the wadded cloth Hank shoved in his mouth. Not for anything did he want Rae to hear him scream. He turned his face toward her to show her he could bear it, and because she was his strength. Her eyes were sad, haunted, and her bottom lip was slightly red and swollen because she had bitten it hard to keep from crying out to him.
"Begin!"
Wendell snapped the cat across Jericho's back viciously. His own condition was not so weak that he could not ply the whip with the devastating force of bitter revenge. Because Jericho's gag kept him from shouting his pain, Wendell flayed him all the harder.
Rae's face blurred as Jericho's eyes watered. Don't let me cry, he begged silently. His legs shook under the force of each blow after ten, and at fifteen he thought his knees would buckle. Blood trickled down his back. He glanced at the bucket where Wendell was dipping the cat and saw the water had turned a reddish hue. Jericho's knuckles whitened as they pulled on the ropes that bound him to the mast. At twenty he tasted blood in his mouth where he had bitten his tongue in spite of the gag. At twenty-two he saw Rae leaning forward again, and a nod from Sam Judge to release her.
Immediately after the last stroke fell he was cut down and Rae was there to support him, lending her shoulders to his arm. Jericho threw the gag in the bucket and held Rahab in an embrace that was not as strong as he would have wished.
"Touchin', ain't it?" Sam Judge asked scornfully. "Everyone back to work. Miller. Take the missus below. You can loose her wrists once she's in the cabin. I think she's sheathed her claws."
Rae left Jericho's arm reluctantly, but she did not move far. Miller hovered at her side. "Will you be all right?" she whispered.
He nodded. "You?"
"Yes. I... I won't do anything again. I promise. No matter what happens."
"Don't say that. This is not your fault, Red. You keep on giving anyone who bothers you hell. I can bear it."
But she couldn't. Not after what she had just witnessed. Rae gave him a watery smile that did not reach her eyes and left with Miller before she embarrassed them both with her tears.
* * *
Rahab was repairing the hem of her skirt when a scuffle in the companionway alerted her to some trouble outside her door.
Before she could rise from the bunk the door was flung open and Jericho was pushed inside. Then the door was shut and locked again. There was pounding on the other side, and Rae looked at Jericho in question.
"They're fixing some bolts to the door. Sam's orders. You and I are to remain here until Nigel pays the ransom."
"We're in London, then?" she asked in a flat voice.
"No. The coast. Flying a Dutch flag. We arrived sometime last night. Sam's got us neatly hidden in a smugglers' cove, and as long as the smugglers don't object, the ship is safe from the authorities."
A curious feeling of relief passed through Rae now that they were at their journey's end. She could no longer muster the emotion to be frightened. Six days had passed since Jericho had had his back flayed. It might well have been six months, for all that she had felt alive during that time.
Rae nodded briefly as she bent her head over her stitching. Jericho watched her for several minutes, wondering at her silence, her apathy. She had barely spared him a glance since he had come in, while his own eyes had skimmed every line of her body. He could not recall having seen her beaten before, and it was playing hell with his own confidence that they could somehow escape the ship. Her shoulders sloped forward as she worked, but the posture was more of defeat than concentration. He sat beside her, and she pricked her finger as his nearness made her flinch.
"Why do you move away from me?" he asked.
Rae sucked on the pad of her finger and shrugged, never once glancing in his direction. She made a few more careless stitches and bit off the thread then she smoothed the skirt absently and drew it over her bare legs and ankles. She slipped the needle back into Sam Judge's minuscule sewing kit and gasped when Jericho pulled the box from her hands, flinging it across the room.
"Forget that thing!" he said roughly when she made a move to get it. "Stay here and talk to me. Look at me!"
She glared at him. "What would you have me say?"
"Tell me what's wrong. Have I grown another head? Do I smell? Have I done something to give you disgust of me?"
Rahab shook her head.
"Then what's wrong? I thought it a great piece of luck that Judge consigned me here rather than in the hold."
"Don't you see? If he put you in here, it only means that he knows escape is hopeless."
"What I see is that sharing this cabin with him has made you as foolish as he. How can you be the same woman who faced a redcoat with naught but a dagger and cloak of courage?"
"I don't remember that woman, Jericho," she said, sighing. "Perhaps I am not meant to. That I could kill a man has never seemed real to me."
Jericho took Rae by the shoulders and gave her
a light shake. "Killing him was an accident, but facing him was something else again. Now you are not even alone, and you have given in. Is this what fear has done to you?"
"I'm not afraid," she said sincerely. "I am weary of it all. I want to go to sleep and never wake up." Her eyes searched his face. "They'll kill you, you know. If the duke doesn't pay, and we know he won't, they'll kill you and rape me. Sam told me. He said he would watch and make certain I lived while they used me. I want to die before then."
Jericho's head reeled at her words. "When did he tell you this?"
"When? Why he has told me from the very first. Night after night. Though I pretended not to hear, he knew that I did, and never relented."
"Bastard."
She shrugged again. "I could stand it until..."
"Until?"
"Until he said that you told the others you despised me for causing your punishment. You told them after I was returned to the cabin that I should have let Wendell have me. After all, I never fussed about Sam taking me. But Sam never touched me. I thought you knew that. So why did you say those things?"
"I never did. Oh, Red. Don't you see? Sam used your own guilt to cloud your reason? I never blamed you for the lashes Judge delivered. You did that to yourself. Sam saw an opening and drove in a wedge before you knew what happened. He's been torturing you for weeks, trying to break you as if you were some damned spirited filly. Has he succeeded, Red? Has he?"
"I don't know."
It was not the response Jericho wanted to hear. "Maybe this will help you make up your mind." He let go of her shoulders, jerked off his boots, and reached deep inside them. From one he extracted a knife and held up the tarnished blade for her inspection. "I've been carrying this piece around for nearly a sennight now, and I have the blisters to prove it." He tossed it on her lap and pulled out another dagger, this one of wood. "I used the first to whittle this one. No soft pine here, but hard wood, varnished, and stiletto sharp. No one but you knows I have them."
"But... how?"
"Didn't I say I was a good thief? And I know more tricks with a piece of good wood than making a child's whistle for your niece. Do you see that I've never given up hope that we'll be free of this place, Red?" He took the dagger from her lap where she was fingering it lightly. In a lightning-like flash of movement, which Rae had come to expect of Jericho, but to which she would never become accustomed, she found herself flat on her back on the bunk with the sharp tips of both daggers pressing against the vulnerable column of her neck. One of Jericho's legs held her thighs immobile, and her hands had somehow been trapped beneath her back.
Jericho felt Rae's heart fluttering wildly in her breast, and it gave him hope that she was not so ready to die as she had said. "Listen to me carefully, Red. This is no game I'm playing. If you want to die, I'll kill you myself rather than let Sam's men have you. You can choose which hand does the deed. Left holds the wooden dagger. Right, the steel one. Your neck won't know the difference, and though you don't recall, I told you once before, when I held you thusly in Wolfe's, that I am adept with either hand. It will be as painless as death can be under any circumstances. But do not think I shall be quick to join you. I value life more dearly than you do. After I dispatch you as per your request, I am going to use these tools to loosen the window frames. I am going to punch them out and lower myself over the side. God only knows how I'm going to get ashore, because I can't swim; I was rather counting on you to help, but if you're dead..."
A series of emotions flitted across Rae's face as Jericho spoke to her: anger, hurt, fear, and shame. But in the end a faint smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, and she said the first thing that came to her mind. "I didn't know you couldn't swim."
"Not one stroke."
"That means you would drown."
"Probably."
"You need me, then."
Jericho slid the daggers beneath the bolster at Rae's head. "I shall always need you." His head lowered and his mouth closed over hers hungrily. There was a punishment for her in his brutal kiss as well as raw need, and Rae felt anger and desire warring within him. His mouth savaged hers, but Rae had no fear that his intention was anything other than to show how much he loved her. She matched the grinding pressure, arching into him and freeing her hands. They closed around his back, and through his thin shirt she could feel the rough edge of his healing wounds. Her fingers hesitated.
"Go ahead," he said hoarsely. "Touch them. They no longer hurt. It always looks worse than it feels—except when they're being laid. That hurts like hell."
She remembered only too well. Her palms ran across his back in a soft caress. "I'm so sorry," she whispered against his mouth. "So sorry that I believed the things Judge told me. I don't want to die."
His kiss was gentle this time, infinitely loving, deeply caring. He tasted blood on her inner lip. "God, I hurt you."
Rae touched a finger to his mouth, and there was a smile in her dark eyes. "A rather late show of remorse in someone who was holding two daggers to my throat a few minutes ago. Would you have killed me?"
"Men have begged me to kill them when they lay dying on the battlefield, Red. I couldn't then, not even when there was nothing but certain death facing them. I couldn't have taken your life when there is still so much that we don't know about our future."
"You were terribly convincing."
"I was meant to be convincing. Kiss me."
"Shouldn't we be prying away the windows?"
"In the middle of the morning?" he asked innocently, as if the thought had never occurred to him. "Someone's liable to see us leave. We have to wait for night. Now kiss me."
"In the middle of the morning? Someone's liable to—"
"There's a bolt on this side of the door also. I'm certain Sam must have used it before." She nodded that he had. "Well, I closed it. It's been forty-two days by my reckoning since we made love."
Rae glanced overhead at the thumbnail scoring on the bunk frame. "Forty-three."
"Shut up, Red," he said huskily.
Rae's hands touched the taut planes of Jericho's cheeks and drew his face close to hers. She tilted her head but a few degrees to bring her lips to his. So sweet, she thought. Her tongue whispered across his parted lips, skimmed his teeth, then took pleasure in the heady taste of his full kiss.
Rae wondered if they dared remove their clothes. She wanted the freedom of touching Jericho's tautly muscled flesh unhampered by their garments. It was not enough to slip her fingers beneath his shirt. The soft linen trapped her hands, teasing the fingers that caught in the folds. Did he suspect that she wanted his naked arms to enfold her or that she desired the warm dampness of his mouth on her breasts?
The feel of Jericho's warm breath on the whorl of her ear sent sparks of delicious heat down her back. As if he knew she was burning, he touched his tongue to her lobe. The act was deceiving, for rather than tamping the heat, it fanned the flames. Then his teeth gingerly nipped her, and sparks of fire and ice shot through her again. She made a soft sound of pleasure and wanting against the throbbing cord in his neck. She heard its echo in her ear and felt it in the tightening of his fingers in her hair.
"Your hair is darker," he said, pressing a kiss in the soft mahogany strands.
She touched her hair self-consciously, thinking he did not find it attractive. "Is it?" she asked uncertainly.
"Red," he chastised gently. "It was only an observation, not a criticism."
"Oh." Embarrassed, her hand fluttered to Jericho's shoulder. "I've never liked the way I look," she admitted a trifle breathlessly. Jericho was kissing her brow and the baby-fine hair at her temples.
"Why?" He shifted, propping himself on one elbow to study her face.
"I suppose because I always wanted to look like my sister."
"Leah? Too pale."
"Then Salem brought Ashley home, and I thought she was everything that was beautiful."
"Too dark."
Rahab raised a skeptical eyebrow. "You're a sw
eet liar."
"I'm not. From almost the beginning I thought you were a sassy-looking wench. You held my interest even when I railed against it. I like everything I see. Your eyes." He bent down and touched his lips to her lids, closing her amused and sparkling eyes. "Your nose." She smiled faintly as he kissed its tip. "Chin. Not too bony. Don't think I'd like a bony chin." He saw it was trembling suspiciously as she tried to suppress her laughter. "Your neck. I like your neck. No. I love your neck. It's so achingly fragile, so smooth, like lily petals. And it tastes better than your mother's ginger snaps."
"Praise indeed," she said dryly. "Since I saw you eat above a dozen of them one evening." Then her laughter bubbled to the surface as Jericho buried his face against the column of her throat, nuzzling her like a kitten. Make that a tomcat, she amended. "That tickles."
Jericho was unperturbed. Her laughter was like innocence, and she made him feel pure and unsullied, as if nothing painful had ever happened to him. "That sound is precious. I think it must spice your lips, because they're nearly as tasty as your throat." He silenced her protest easily by teasing the comers of her mouth. "But, Red..."
"Hmm?"
"I miss your freckles like hell."
"Beast."
"I mean it. Someday you and I are going to find a sylvan spot by a glassy little pond. You'll give me a swimming lesson, and afterwards we'll dry on the bank wearing nothing but sunshine, and I'll kiss every freckle as it appears."
"But, Jericho. I would get them all over."
He continued to look at her straight-faced; then his lazy libertine smile asserted itself. "I hope so, Red. Lord, do I hope so!"
Rahab hugged him. "Don't ever stop loving me, Jericho Smith."
"Couldn't."
She believed him. He had struggled with his feelings for too long to have them be transient. She tugged at his shirt. "Let's take this off."
Jericho obliged; then, without waiting for her encouragement, he took off his stockings and breeches. Rae stole little glances at him while she removed her own clothes, fascinated by the lithe strength of his body. He was sitting on the edge of the bunk, and when his breeches joined the pile of their discarded clothes, Rae sat up on her knees, slightly behind him, and drew her arms about his chest. The curve of her cheek rested against his shoulder blade, and she could hear the thudding of his heart as her hands explored the smooth planes of his chest and abdomen. When her hands teased the length of his thighs and discovered how ready he was for her she smiled a little wickedly and whispered something brazen in his ear.
