Sea Fire (13 page)

The rasping emphasis he put on the word “honeymoon” brought color surging into Cathy’s cheeks. Jon was furious: she could tell, although he was doing his best to conceal it. So he had believed Harold’s lies! Cathy knew she should be furious as well that he had had so little faith in her. But she was so wondrously glad to see him, alive and apparently free, that her anger died.

“How on earth did you get here?” she gasped, that question surfacing from the dozens that hovered on the tip of her tongue. As she spoke she pushed impatiently at Harold’s limp form. If she could only get up . . . !

“You weren’t expecting me?” Seeing her frustrated attempts to shift Harold, Jon’s lips curled sardonically. With easy strength he reached out and grasped Harold by one shoulder, flipping him over
onto his back and away from Cathy. “Obviously not.”

Hearing the freezing sarcasm in this last, Cathy followed his eyes. They rested, granite-like, on the bared lower half of her body before moving to touch on Harold’s nakedness. Knowing what he was thinking, she couldn’t stop herself from flushing guiltily. Which was absurd, as she had done absolutely nothing to be ashamed of! Damn the man for being so quick to jump to conclusions!

“It’s not what you think,” she began, hastily pulling her nightdress down so that she was decent as she scrambled into a kneeling position on the mattress.

“Of course not,” he responded coldly, pulling loose a length of rope he had coiled about his waist and beginning to cut it into smaller sections with a wicked-looking knife he withdrew from a scabbard at his belt.

“What are you doing?” His actions momentarily diverted her. She watched, wide-eyed, as he turned the unconscious Harold over onto his stomach and proceeded to tie him up.

“What does it look like?” As a final touch, Jon pulled a rag from the pocket of his black cloth breeches and thrust it into Harold’s mouth. He then proceeded to strip a pillowcase from the pillow he pulled from beneath Harold’s body, and used that to tie the gag in place. “I suppose I should kill him, thus making you a widow, my sweet, but I find that I no longer consider you worth risking the death penalty—even a second one.”

Cathy stared at him in dismay. Why was he always so ready to believe the worst of her? Surely she had proved her love over the past two years!

“Listen, you big oaf, I said it’s not what you think!” She glared at him furiously, fueled by a sudden spirit of rage. He ignored her, reaching down to pull the coverlet up so that Harold was completely hidden from sight. Watching him, with his white shirt open carelessly halfway down his chest so that the pelt
of dark hair covering his body was tantalizingly visible, the muscles in his arms and thighs rippling as he moved, Cathy was struck by a sudden sense of
déjà vu
. With his hard, handsome features set ruthlessly and stubbly blue-black bristles obscuring his jaw, he was frighteningly like the pirate who had abducted her two years before. Even the pair of silver-mounted pistols thrust into his belt added to the illusion!

“I presume you have a trunk?” His question was clipped. Cathy nodded, bewildered. What did her trunk have to do with anything?

“Where is it?”

“In the corner!” Cathy’s tone was as short as his. He turned to look where she had pointed, then fixed those steely eyes on her face once again. “But I don’t see. . . .”

“But then no one ever accused you of being overly bright, did they?” Jon was fast losing his facade of politeness. Cathy’s eyes widened furiously at this insult; then, as she sat there killing him with her eyes, she had to smile at herself. For weeks she had been longing for the sight of him, doing everything in her power to see that he was unharmed. And now, when a miracle had brought him back to her, all she could do was quarrel with him! She shook her head at her own perversity. She would be sweetly reasonable. . . .

“Jon, darling, I’m really so glad to see you!” she sighed, clambering across the mattress until she reached where he was standing at its side. “If you’ll just listen. . . .”

Smiling at him, she reached up to twine her arms around his neck. He caught her hands, holding her off. Her sweet smile turned to a glare of anger; the answering twist of his lips denoted satisfaction at her response.

“You really think you can have your cake and eat it too, don’t you?” he asked as if marvelling. “Not this time, my sweet. You’ll not get around me again with sweet smiles and kisses and your soft, seductive body. I’ve got your measure at last: you’re
nothing but a whore, for sale to the highest bidder. Or whoever can do you the most good at a particular time.”

“How dare you say such a thing to me?” Cathy gasped, hurt mingling with her rage. “If you think that of me, then you can just leave! Go on, get out of here! I’d rather stay with Harold than you, by far!”

Jon smiled then, mirthlessly. His fingers tightened on hers so that she almost cried out with the pain.

“Very nicely done, Cathy,” he applauded softly. “But you forget—I know you rather well. You can be quite a consummate actress, when it pleases you. And there is something else that you forgot to take into your little calculations: what is mine, I keep.”

“I think it’s
you
who’s forgetting!” Cathy threw at him, incensed. “It’s Harold I’m married to, remember? I am not yours, and if you keep this up, I never will be!”

“Oh, yes, you are,” he said very softly. “You’re mine for as long as I want you. When I tire of you, why, I might even return you to your precious Harold. Console yourself with that thought, my sweet, if you can!”

“What are you doing?” The question was jerked from her as Jon transferred both her hands to one of his, securing the wrists together with a piece of rope. Cathy tried to pull free as he tied the knot, deftly tightening it with his teeth.

“You’re mad!” she cried with more anger than conviction as he turned her over onto her stomach on the mattress, affording her feet the same treatment he had given her hands. She struggled wildly, trying to kick him, but he held her down by the simple expedient of setting one muscular knee into the small of her back.

“If I am, you’ve driven me to it,” he sounded grim as he knotted the rope about her ankles, then turned her easily over onto her back.

“If you don’t let me go, right now, I’ll scream. They’ll catch you and hang
you for sure this time! I mean it, you filthy swine, I’ll scream!”

“Will you?” The silky question should have warned her. That it didn’t she supposed she should attribute to the fact that even after all that he had said and done, she couldn’t believe that Jon would actually use her in such a way. But the cloth that was roughly thrust into her open mouth took her by complete surprise. While she was still spitting at the taste of it, he was securing it in place with his own neckerchief!

Cathy wriggled protestingly as Jon scooped her up, her blue eyes blazing fire.

“You bastard!” she tried to say, but the gag muffled all utterance. Jon grinned without humor at the strangled sound she made, as if he could somehow read her mind.

“Don’t worry, I feel exactly the same way about you,” he mocked harshly, and then he was laying her down on the floor. Cathy had only a moment to ponder his purpose before it was made crystal clear: he began rolling her up in the fringed Chinese carpet that adorned the floor beside the bed. She kicked wildly with both legs as she saw what he was about, but it was useless: he controlled her struggles as if she had been a child. Dust entered her nose and she sneezed, then choked on that horrible gag. Immediately Jon loosened the folds of wool swathing her face.

“Stay still, and you’ll be fine,” he told her roughly through the opening at the top of the rug. Cathy could only lift her head to glare smolderingly at him in reply.

She felt his arms go around her through the many thicknesses of wool, and then he was hoisting her to dangle ignominiously over his shoulder, as if it were in truth only a rug he was carrying! Fuming, she tried to kick, but his arms about her were like iron bands holding her helpless. Had he taken leave of his senses? she raged inwardly. He must have, to accuse her of such things, to dare to treat her in such a way. She had lived with
him as his wife for over two years, borne him a son, loved him, cared for him—and he believed her capable of throwing all that over at the earliest opportunity, just to marry Harold for his social position? It was almost funny, Cathy thought furiously. Strange that she felt not the smallest desire to laugh.

Jon stopped on his way out of the cabin to pick up Cathy’s small trunk, which he tucked under one arm. The other arm was busy holding a wriggling Cathy firmly on his shoulder. Finally, as he climbed the stairs leading to the deck, she seemed to give up, and lay quite still. Jon could only hope that the rug hadn’t suffocated her. Really, it was just as well that she was not, as he would have expected, fighting him like some tawny hell-cat. When he had first seen her, sprawled wantonly across the bed with her lover, rage had torn at his innards like a wolf with a slaughtered calf: his first instinct had been to throttle the pair of them. With considerable control he had managed merely to knock Harold senseless, and carry off his wife—no, not
his
wife, Harold’s. He kept having trouble with that. But it wouldn’t take much to stoke that banked-down fury into raging life, and woe betide Cathy if she managed it!

Luckily, an icy wall seemed to have descended over his emotions. Jon knew it for a fragile thing, but he was deeply grateful for its presence. It had stopped him from doing something he had known even then he would regret. The urge to strike her, to make her suffer as she had made him suffer, had been very strong. In that first shattering moment, when he had surprised her nearly naked in bed with her totally naked husband, the terrible reality of what she had done had seared through his mind and heart like a red-hot poker.

She had been his wife, before God if not legally before man, and she had betrayed him. Deliberately, wantonly, she had sold the body she had vowed to keep only for him to another man. And for what? Did he love her, that disgusting lump of suet she had taken to her bed? Would he work from daylight to dark for
her, struggling to wrest a living from an uncooperative soil for herself and her son? Would he give his life to spare the smallest centimetre of her white skin from harm? Hell, no! Cathy had traded the gold of his love for the dross of wealth and a glittering London social life, just as he had always feared she would. In the process, she had proved herself to be just like every other woman he had known: like cats, they loved whoever fed them the choicest bits of fish, offered them the softest cushion beside the warmest fire. Their oft-protested affection went no deeper than that.

By now, that bastard cousin-husband of hers undoubtedly knew everything about Cathy’s enticing little body that there was to know. As he strode along the dark, deserted deck of the
Tamarind
, looking like a sailor carrying his few possessions ashore to any who happened to glance his way, Jon tried and failed to banish an image of Harold’s slack mouth and pudgy fingers crawling over Cathy’s slender body. Had Harold made her cry out with pleasure, as he, Jon, had done time out of mind? Had he made her pant and beg and writhe, and brought her to an ecstasy she had never even dreamed existed over and over again? Jon ground his teeth. Doubtless Harold thought he had. The little bitch had probably put on a damned good show, knowing the way to bring men under her spell. He, Jon, had taught her well the secrets of how to pleasure a man. It flayed at him like a thousand cat-o’-nine-tails to imagine her using that knowledge to play the whore in her new husband’s bed.

Jon’s eyes were fierce and his jaw was clenched forbiddingly by the time he reached the
Tamarind
’s aft rail. O’Reilly, waiting with another former prisoner, Tinker, in a gig bobbing on the waves far below, thought that he had never seen a man look angrier than Jon did as he lowered the small trunk into the gig with a rope.

“Did you find what you were after?” O’Reilly finally summoned up the nerve to call guardedly, knowing a good bit of the story behind Jon’s
pursuit of the
Tamarind
. He had been surprised, when Jon had reappeared, to see him alone. The
Cristobel
’s new captain had come for a lady; in the brief time he had known him, O’Reilly had already learned that Jon Hale was not a man to fail.

“Yes.” Jon gritted that and no more as he swung himself one-handed down the dangling rope suspended from the
Tamarind
’s deck, his legs wrapped snugly around it for leverage. His other arm he kept firmly about a rolled and tied rug that dangled over his shoulder. O’Reilly stared at it for an instant, perplexed. What in hell . . . ? Then, suddenly, light dawned and he understood.

“Let’s go,” Jon said briefly when he stood upright in the gig. O’Reilly and Tinker began obediently to row. As the little boat pulled away from the
Tamarind
’s towering side, Jon lowered the now-writhing rug very gently to the bottom of the boat. A muffled, angry-sounding noise came from the rug’s depths. O’Reilly was amused to see Tinker cast it a startled glance.

“I said, be still!” Jon told the rug sharply, dropping to his knees beside it and adjusting the opening at one end. Tinker looked even more startled, his pinched cockney face turning to see what O’Reilly made of their captain’s sudden eccentricity. O’Reilly reassured him with a broad wink.

When another muffled sound came from the rug, Jon set his teeth, and ignored it. He moved to the gunwale, and stared stonily out to sea.

The
Cristobel
was anchored at the very mouth of La Coruña’s harbor, and it was toward her tall silhouette that the gig headed. A cool night breeze blew over the water, hinting strongly at rain soon to come. White caps rose in little flurries on the crests of dark waves. The sea was choppy, and the gig bobbed roughly up and down. O’Reilly supposed that the lady in the rug must be getting a severe jarring, but he told himself that it was none of his concern. Besides, if even half of the tale of what
she had done to the captain were true, it was nothing compared to what she deserved.