If I Wait For You (22 page)

Once he was back in
Honolulu, West lost no time pulling anchor and setting sail,
determined to find out if anyone had heard news of the
Bonnie Lassie
. The first
two ships knew nothing, and by the time West spied a merchant ship
on the horizon, he was nearly mad with worry.

“
Captain, I’m sure she’s
fine,” Oliver said. “It takes a bigger storm than that to sink a
ship.” Next to him, Sara’s brother tried for a valiant
smile.

But West could not be placated. Until
he heard the ship was safe, he would not rest. He signaled the
ship, and the two vessels moved closer.

“
Ahoy,” West called, as
the
Julia
moved
within shouting distance of the ship. It’s captain waved a
greeting.

“
Have you news of the
Bonnie Lassie?”

The vessel’s captain hesitated, and
West’s fear grew. “She foundered off Kapaa,” he called. “All
lost.”

West raised his hand in
acknowledgement. Message received. He watched the other boat tack
away, watched dry-eyed until it was only a small speck on the
horizon. He was unaware of Zachary’s soft sobs.

“
You son of a bitch. This
is your bloody fault. She loved you and now she’s dead.” Zachary’s
scathing words hardly abraded his consciousness, though a part of
him acknowledged the truth of the boy’s words. He was unaffected by
his third mate’s hasty retreat to his cabin, for he was unaware of
anything except Sara’s soft voice in his head: “I love you, West.
I’ll wait for you if you wish it.”

He felt a strong hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry West.”

West turned with confusion to look at
Oliver. The old man’s eyes were red-rimmed and watery. He shook his
head, trying to clear it, trying to remember something, something.
Something about Sara.

“
Sara’s fine,” he said, not
recognizing his voice.

“
Ah, my boy.” Oliver looked
so damned sad.

“
Sara’s fine,” he repeated
more forcefully, but he could feel panic setting in. Something
awful nagged at his brain. He shook his head again, this time
violently. Sara was fine.
Fine
. His nostrils flared, his eyes
grew wild. She was fine. She loved him, she would wait for him and
they would marry and…

“
If you’ll excuse me,” he
said politely before heading to his cabin. He grabbed up his
charcoal and his pad and began drawing furiously, capturing Sara as
she’d looked at him on that beach in Hilo, love for him in her
eyes. He blinked away tears he was unaware he was shedding, drawing
her image like a man possessed. She wasn’t dead. He wouldn’t allow
her to die.

His drawing finished, he stared at her
upturned face, black charcoal on white paper.

“
Oh God, no.” He couldn’t
breathe, his lungs ached, his entire body ached. “No. God, no.”
West collapsed onto his table, his head on his arms, and he
wept.

Zachary stood in the doorway of the
aftercabin, his eyes, filled with rage from misdirected blame,
slowly filled with anguish. He’d thought the captain unfeeling, but
clearly he’d been wrong. Zachary backed out of the cabin to allow
his captain to grieve alone for the woman he loved.

Chapter TWELVE

Six months after nearly
dying on the
Bonnie
Lassie
, Sara found herself walking toward
the Mitchell mansion on the Hill. The bitter November wind swept in
from the river, a cold blast against Sara’s back as she made her
way up streets that were achingly familiar. Though she wanted to
gaze about, her fear kept her head down and well cloaked, not only
against the wind but against any prying eyes.

The notorious Sara Dawes had
returned.

It was her imagination, she knew it
was, but Sara was certain she could smell the lingering and acrid
scent of the fire. She shook off her fear like an unwanted cloak.
After nearly dying in a typhoon, Sara had done away with fear, the
kind that paralyzed, the kind that would have prevented her from
walking up to the Mitchell mansion like she planned. As if she was
certain of her welcome.

Terror was a weak word to
describe how she’d felt when the
Bonny
Lassie
was being ripped apart by the
typhoon. It was the sort of thing that changed a person forever,
and it had changed Sara irrevocably. Before the storm had ended,
two crewmembers had been swept off her decks, her masts had snapped
with frightening ease, the rudder disabled, and the sails torn to
shreds. By the time dawn broke, the schooner was a floating wreck,
that blessedly was drifting toward Maui. Blessedly, because the
ship was taking on water at an alarming rate. The crew had been
almost giddy with relief that, not only had they survived the
storm, but the sea had seen fit to shove the vessel within a good
swim of a soft, sandy beach. As the twelve-member crew and she sat
in the lifeboat, the
Bonny Lassie
slipped silently into the sea behind them, a
gurgling farewell, her entire cargo lost.

That sort of experience aged a person,
she realized. After surviving such a tempest, finding another way
to San Francisco seemed like child’s play. A woman alone, but for
the distracted escort of Captain Crowley, Sara made her way to
Maui’s small port, booked a cabin on yet another small merchant
ship, and sailed to San Francisco, arriving only two days later
than she originally had planned.

She looked back, down the street, down
where her home once stood and pulled her wrap tighter. She was no
longer Sara Dawes. She was Sara Dawson, orphan daughter of the
Hartford Dawsons, taken in by the Tillinghasts and sent home by the
good Captain Mitchell who’d promised his mother could care for her
closer to home. The entire lie was written on a letter he’d
composed. Even though she balked at lying to his mother, she could
come up with no alternative. She had no one but Zachary. And as
much as she hated lying, the thought of turning herself in to the
police paralyzed her.

And so, clutching that letter in hand,
Sara presented herself to Julia Mitchell, who, after mild
bewilderment, accepted her with the alacrity of a woman who has
never had a daughter and has the good fortune of having a surrogate
thrust at her unexpectedly.

Months and months had passed since
she’d been that girl on the beach declaring her love to a man who
did not love her. She didn’t quite know who that girl was, the one
with the wind-whipped hair and burnt nose. The one who’d fallen so
desperately in love with a man who even now, nearly two years
later, just thinking about could make her stomach feel a bit sick.
Though, for some reason she could not fathom, it was not an
entirely unpleasant sickness.

With two years between her
and that girl, Sara could be fairly philosophical about what had
happened to her in those six months aboard the
Julia
. With her newfound wisdom, she
realized that the girl who stepped aboard the
Julia
three years ago had been
profoundly alone and terribly young—ripe pickings for a dashing
captain. Of course, this particular captain was of the sort not to
take advantage of a young woman’s ridiculous crush. That made it
all rather more humiliating. Poor, poor West, she could now think,
he’d done a wonderful job of holding her at bay, a young woman who
fancied herself in love, who dreamed that her heroic captain would
fall in love with her.

She was a woman now, in temperament
and looks, she decided looking at her placid countenance with
satisfaction. At twenty, she had sailed to the other side of the
world, seen things most women could never imagine seeing. She’d
nearly died, but she had lived and lived and lived ever
since.

Sara found herself on that trip, and
she lost the ugly little girl who hung her head low, who was afraid
of saying foolish things. She lost, she was certain, that silly
ninny who fell so desperately in love with a whaling
captain.

Sara found she could control her
fluttering heart—it hardly fluttered at all any more even in the
presence of men far more classically handsome than her sea captain.
Why, just look at her behavior with Gardner, West’s fabulously
good-looking younger brother. There was none of that
soul-wrenching, stomach-churning feeling when she was near him. She
loved Gardner dearly and had decided she would likely marry him. It
was a sane, calm love. Manageable. Thank goodness that temporary
affliction, that madness West had made her feel, was
gone.

Well, nearly.

West was due home soon, and just the
thought of that homecoming made her palms grow damp. And she still
wore the busk he so beautifully and painstakingly carved. Every
day. Each time she slid the busk into a clean corset, she felt
guilty for betraying Gardner. For some reason she could not bring
herself to store it away, a keepsake of another time. It belong in
a drawer, not pressing against her, a constant reminder of West and
his unrelenting hold on her. It had been the sort of gift a man
gives to his wife. But even then, she had held it against her
heart, not once considering the impropriety of such an intimate
gift.

Sara placed her fingertips at her
temples and pressed little circles there. What would she do when
she saw him? Pretend he was a dear old friend? He was that, and so
very much more.

“
No,” Sara said aloud, glad
to see her face harden in the mirror, her eyes glittering with
determination. “He’s nothing. You will not, Sara Dawson, do a thing
to make him think you are still that silly little girl who fell in
love with him.”

Saying her new name aloud was like a
balm. She would never forget the look on West’s mother’s face when
she arrived at the door, looking travel-weary and somehow fierce,
bearing a letter her son had written more than six months before.
Nearly the first thing she’d said to her once Sara and Julia were
settled into her parlor was, “My dear, what an unfortunate name you
have.” Sara’s face had turned scarlet, which, thankfully, Julia
mistook for outrage.

“
You see, Miss Dawson, one
of New Bedford’s most notorious women is named Sara Dawes. A
murderess and a fugitive. She killed her lover then burned her
parents alive and fled. It quite captivated the city for
weeks.”

Sara could think of nothing to say, so
she remained silent. With an ease she now found remarkable, Julia
welcomed Sara into her home. She hardly asked her a question, other
than to ask after West. She’d taken everything West had written in
the letter at face value: Sara was orphaned in Hawaii when her
mother and father died of a fever, leaving her and her older
brother—whom he had taken on as a mate—stranded among strangers.
West had written he met Sara through the same missionaries that he
stayed with during his stop at Hilo, and had sympathized with her
plight, offering to give her a home.

Sara had thought the story contrived,
but Julia never questioned the validity of the tale and welcomed
her into the Mitchell home. In the months and months that passed,
Sara came to love Julia like a mother. Julia was tall and willowy,
with hair that was once blonde, but was now turning a soft gray.
She was elegant, soft-spoken, and the kindest person Sara had ever
known. She was, Sara came to realize, much like herself. It was a
startling revelation, and wonderfully liberating, to discover that
she greatly admired a woman who was so similar to
herself.

Afraid she would somehow betray her
feelings, Sara did not allow herself to talk about West, though she
could not help—at least in the beginning—thinking about him
endlessly. It had been her one weakness. After six months living in
the Mitchell mansion safely cocooned and out of the public’s eye, a
packet of letters arrived, and Sara, her stomach a jumble of
nerves, gathered in the parlor with Julia and Gardner and listened
to West’s prose.

Gardner, his legs stretched out before
him and crossed at the ankles, said only, “If he’s in such a hurry
to give up the ship, I wonder that he didn’t give it up to me on
this trip.” It was a touchy subject, Sara soon realized, the fact
that West had thought Gardner too young to be ship’s master. It was
the one thing that could make him angry, the single subject Sara
found she could not tease him about. Otherwise, Gardner was the
most pleasant man Sara had ever met.

Sara found herself frowning into the
mirror. Of late, Gardner had become more and more insistent they
marry, immediately, if possible. It was always done lightly, as if
he were a suffering swain being torn asunder by her ruthless
rejection of him. She could hardly take him seriously when he acted
so tragically in love, though she suspected behind all the play he
was quite serious about marrying her. He’d told her he loved her so
many times, she’d lost the wonder of hearing it. Still, it was nice
to have a man like Gardner act so thoroughly besotted with her.
Sometimes she wondered, though, if Gardner’s declarations were more
theater than emotion. Sara couldn’t help but think that even if she
were to reject Gardner’s proposal outright, it would not wound him.
He would simply shrug his elegant shoulders and move on to the next
girl. When these doubts assailed her, she told herself it was
simply her insecurities so well fostered by her mother coming to
head.