Mariah's Prize (11 page)

“The Revenge is the only ship fast enough to catch Captain Richardson, or arrive at Bridgetown first.”

“We’re on a privateering cruise, Mariah, or at least that’s what my orders say. We’re out to chase Frenchmen, not flibbertigibbety young females.”

“Jenny is my sister. And I’m your owner, and if I say we go first to Bridgetown, that’s what we’ll do.”

“Have you forgotten that we’re going to war? The long guns firing, boarders clambering over the sides, and you’ll be looking for your tea.”

She lowered her chin, reminding Gabriel again of a baby bull with ridiculously long lashes.

“I don’t drink tea.” “Well, then, chocolate or coffee or santagree or whatever blasted potable you do drink. You won’t be able to find it when we’re fighting for our lives against five score of French bastards.”

“I know how privateering’s done. You make sure to chase merchant ships without any guns of their own, fire a shot or two over their bows to frighten them, and then down comes their flag and up goes yours.” She knew this was an oversimplification, but she needed to retaliate after that nonsense with the tea. Tea drinking, as if she was some completely empty-headed miss! How much she’d love to toss his handsome, arrogant self out the stem windows!

“Likely you won’t see five score of French bastards total in the whole cruise.”

“Damnation, Mariah, you know that isn’t true!” In his frustration he snatched her that and threw it down on the deck. If she kept up this maddening line of argument, she would be next.

“Can’t I be concerned about what becomes of you? Can’t I want you to be here in Newport where I’ll know you’ll be safe instead of worrying that you’ll be blown to bits with the rest of us? Or was all that canting concern last night only reserved for those lucky enough to be dead?”

Instantly he regretted his words. He watched as the antagonism vanished from her eyes and the color drained from her cheeks, and he cursed himself for his thoughtless cruelty.

“I must find Jenny. My mother says I must,” she said softly, bending down to retrieve her that, “and no matter how you wish to fault me, I’d rather accept the risks than be left behind again.”

“Mariah, no.” Yet he couldn’t help thinking of all the times she must have felt abandoned, first by her father, leaving her over and over again to look after her mother, then by the boy Daniel. Some women married to sailors welcomed the time alone while their men went to sea. Mariah wouldn’t be one of them.

“You can’t come.”

She turned away from him so he wouldn’t see the bright tears in her eyes, and crossed the deck to hang her that on a bulkhead peg. Even if he’d stoop to such effortless cruelty, he wouldn’t dare have her carried off the sloop and down the gangway for all the town to see.

Gabriel’s gaze followed her, watching how her skirts swayed as she walked and remembering the shape of her pale legs. Damnation, what had she done to him? “What would your father say to see you now, the only woman on board, and sharing my cabin, too?”

“We won’t be sharing the cabin, thank you. Once we’ve fairly set sail, I’ll thank you to have your things removed,” she managed to say with surprising evenness. She could well imagine what her father would call her, and how he would have beaten her, too, if he’d been drinking when he learned of it. But he was dead, she reminded herself sternly, and guessing games like this were meaningless. “You can send Ethan to pack for you, and I’ll keep my own chest packed until he’s done.”

Incredulous, Gabriel stared at her straight back in the dark blue linsey-woolsey.

“This is my cabin, Mariah, and I’ll be damned if you think I’m going to leave it to you. There are nigh on eighty men packed onto this sloop, and that doesn’t allow an extra hairsbreadth for special accommodations. If you stay, you’ll stay in this cabin, and you’ll have me for company.”

She looked over her shoulder at him, the disbelief now hers.

“I can’t share this cabin with you,” she said, clearly appalled by his suggestion.

“A gentleman like yourself must understand that much!”

For the first time she noticed that Gabriel had had her father’s bunk replaced with one considerably longer and wider and more appropriate to his size and, perhaps, another occupant besides. In spite of what he’d just said she blushed furiously, remembering the intimacies she’d shared with him on similar checkered pillows.

His smile became perilously close to being a smirk. Perhaps if he made the threat to her reputation dire enough, she’d be convinced to go ashore.

“I thought, poppet, after last night there wasn’t much question about my being mistaken for a gentleman, not even by an innocent like yourself. Or less than fully innocent this morning, eh?”

“Oh—oh!” Mariah grabbed the heavy logbook from the desk and with both hands hurled it at Gabriel, the. empty white pages fluttering as it thumped to the floor short of her target.

“I pray you did lie with Betty Talbot, and that the slatternly cow poxed you rotten!”

God in heaven, she was jealous, and jealousy meant she cared. Cared for him, Gabriel Sparhawk, regardless of how much she mourned her Daniel. He told himself he didn’t need such concern, that he hadn’t sought it and didn’t want it. But still he couldn’t quite suppress the unfamiliar, tentative flutterings around his cynical, well-guarded heart, feelings that had no more place on a privateering sloop than the girl did herself.

“Oh, I did lie with fair Betty, sure enough,” he confessed with a show of hard-bitten relish he certainly didn’t feel.

“But though her linen was grimy, I do recall her own sweet self was quite, quite clean, and not at all slatternly, though of course that was before Talbot got his greasy fingers on her bum. Still, if you’re worried about taking the French pox, it won’t have come by Betty.”

“You would know about that, wouldn’t you?” she said bitterly.

“But if you think that’s enough to make me run back home like a frightened rabbit, you are most mistaken. I don’t run, Gabriel. I’m coming with you, and I’m staying in this cabin whether you do or not, and nothing, nothing you can say will change my mind!”

“Then stay, you little fool!” His patience was gone, and he was through arguing with her. If she wanted to come along so badly, he would take the chit with him. He’d done his best to dissuade her. If any ill befell her now, it would be her own damned fault, not his.

“But not one tear, not one sigh, or so help me I’ll toss you over the side and let you swim back to Newport!”

He slammed the cabin door so hard that her that bounced off the bulkhead peg and dropped to the deck. For a long moment Mariah didn’t move, letting the anger drain away and despair replace it. Slowly she replaced the that on the peg, then sank down onto the chest again and buried her face in her hands.

She had what she wanted. So why did she feel so wretched? No matter how much she tried to please the people she loved, she always failed.

First her father and mother, then Jenny, and now Gabriel, too. Maybe Gabriel worst of all.

She had managed to keep her father’s beloved sloop from creditors, but then had tumbled into the captain’s bed with a readiness that would have earned her every inch of her father’s fury and disgust. She had taken over all the housekeeping and cooking and family accounts when her mother seemed unable to cope with them any longer, and in return her mother had called her a dull, stingy drab who would never attract a husband.

Mariah squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to remember all the hateful words her mother had poured onto her like scalding oil as she’d made her hurried preparations to go after Jenny, beautiful, gold-haired Jenny, the only hope her mother had for an auspicious match. To her mother, there was nothing improper about her being the only woman on board the Revenge, for Mariah, she’d said scathingly, was so hopeless with men, such a confirmed, pathetic spinster,

that she’d be perfectly safe. Perfectly safe, thought Mariah bitterly, and wondered why her mother hadn’t noticed the rumpled pink silk gown with the bodice still half unpinned.

And then, finally, there was Gabriel. His bluster and swearing just now hadn’t fooled her for an instant. She could recognize the pain of rejection because she’d felt it so often herself.

She realized that he had brought her to the windmill last night determined to seduce her with his customary, calculated ease, while she had blithely gone to dine with a man she believed had not the slightest interest in her as a woman. Strange how they’d both been so confounded, and at precisely the same moment. He had kissed her, and she had kissed him, and the spark that passed between them had shocked them both with its unexpected intensity.

For that single moment he had dropped the barrier of world-weary, cynical charm that kept the rest of the world at bay and let her see a vulnerable unhappiness that no practiced rake would ever admit.

Fleetingly she’d wondered why—he was wealthy and handsome, respected by every man who knew him and adored by women—until his mouth had found hers again, and she forgot everything else.

She couldn’t remember it without setting her heart to racing all over again. The few embraces she’d shared with Daniel, the kisses stolen_in the kitchen and behind the stables, hadn’t prepared her for Gabriel.

Yet whatever his intentions had been, Gabriel hadn’t seduced her. He’d made love to her. Even in her inexperience she’d sensed the difference. The magic he’d wrought with his hands, his fingers, his mouth, had been beyond imagining, raising her higher and higher so that she’d forgotten all modesty as she’d arched beneath him with her legs spread like some common dockside trull. All she’d wanted was more of the same unbelievable pleasure he was giving her, and the part of himself that he was giving her with it, giving so freely | that the one worthy thing she could offer in return would be her heart and her love.

And then, for her, the pleasure had turned to fear. No matter if she loved him, he still would go, the same way Daniel had. If she’d accepted the brilliant promise of pleasure that Gabriel was offering, if she’d soared so high with him to find the completion her body begged for, then the inevitable loss would have been that much more unbearable. She had tried to tell him about Daniel to explain what she felt, but instead of understanding she’d seen only the pain her words caused him, and then it had been too late. All he’d heard was Daniel’s name, the name of another man spoken as she lay in his arms.

He spoke so often of her courage, but last night she had been an abysmal coward. He had offered her, if not quite his love, then his trust, and she had been too afraid of losing him to accept. And without question a man like Gabriel Sparhawk would never, never repeat such an offer.

Slowly she became aware that the sloop was moving, and she could hear the last frantic farewells called from the dock mingled with the shouted orders from the deck. Through her tears she looked out the open windows in the stem” watching Newport swing gently past her as the sloop began to make its way through the harbor to the bay and the open sea beyond. This would be the first time she’d ever journeyed from the island on which she’d been born.

All her past was being left behind. She wished she knew what lay ahead to replace it.

“Tell me the part about our wedding again,” begged Jenny, her smile full of contentment as she gazed up at Elisha. To stand here at the Felicity’s rail, with Elisha’s arms around her and the moon and a

skyful of stars over 5

head, far from her mother’s whining and weeping and nagging, was as close to heaven as she had ever imagined. She wished she’d been able to tell Mariah. Mariah might have scolded at first, but her sister would have understood why she had to leave, especially now that that wicked old captain had taken such a liking to her.

“I like the flowers best.”

Elisha cleared his throat and flipped his blond hair from his eyes.

“In Jamaica there’re flowers like you’ve never seen in Rhode Island.

Big red and yellow and white ones, bigger’n your two hands together, and they climb like beans all over every house. I mean to pick a whole bunch for you to carry when we stand before the minister, as many as you ever could want. And when he says we’re wed, you’d best toss them all up in the air, because you’ll need your arms to hold me tight when I kiss you proper as my wife. “

Jenny snuggled against his gingham shirt.

“It sounds grand, dearest, excepting that Captain Richardson says we’re bound for Barbados, not Jamaica.”

“Don’t vex me, lamb!” growled Elisha. kissing Jenny behind her ear until she giggled.

“I know where we’re bound, same as you. But I’ve never been to Barbados and I have been to Jamaica, and I warrant since they’re both in the same sea, they’ll be of a piece. The flowers will, anyways. You won’t find nothing to fault.”

“I haven’t found anything to complain of yet.” She turned in his arms and lifted her lips to his, kissing him eagerly. With a little purr of happiness, she rested her cheek over his heart.

“It’s still a wonder to me that your aunt gave you the money so we could leave together.

You’ve never mentioned her before, and now, la! She gives you thirty gold guineas, and Captain Richardson sells us passage, and here we are, next to being husband and wife. “

Knowing his limitations with untruths, Elisha kissed her bs^” i” 81 ^He hoped he’d never have to explain that his aunt was really Captain Gabriel Sparhawk. He’d sworn to the captain he wouldn’t tell Jenny until they were wed, and an oath like that, to a man like that, meant something to Elisha. He’d be seventeen in less than a fortnight, a man by anyone’s standards, but he’d felt like such a snotty-nosed boy before Captain Sparhawk that he hadn’t even had the sense to ask him why he cared so much—thirty guineas’ worth—about Elisha marrying Jenny West. But he had Jenny, his beautiful, sweet, teasing Jenny, and that was what mattered most.

“I love you, Jen,” he said softly, stroking her hair as he marveled at the good fortune that had given him the prettiest girl in Newport to be his wife.

“I love you, too, Elisha,” whispered Jenny, almost overwhelmed by sheer happiness.