Captain of My Heart (10 page)

In the entrance hall he looked warily over
his shoulder for the dog, and assuming it was probably off
harassing one of the cats, opened the door and went out.

He stood for a moment in the hot, blistering
sunlight, wondering why he felt like a prisoner escaping a gaol.
The urge to peek over his shoulder was strong; his determination
that he would not stoop to such foolishness was stronger. Taking a
deep breath and listening to a locust humming in the nearby field,
he filled his lungs with the sweet scent of late summer
grasses.

With a jaunty step and newly found purpose,
Brendan paused to get his bearings, and without a backward glance,
headed down the driveway and toward High Street beyond.

It was a quarter past one.

###

Beside the small paddock attached to the
stables, Mira stood holding Rigel’s reins and eyeing the empty
saddle atop his back.

She wasn’t one to believe in premonitions; if
so, she might have heeded the little voice that warned her that
riding Rigel for the first time today was not a good idea. The
colt’s dark eyes were rolling, he was lathered in sweat, and he was
dancing circles around her.

Rigel was smarter than most dogs she’d known.
No doubt he knew her intentions.

She glanced quickly up at the house, at the
open windows of the east bedroom, where the chintz curtains that
Mama had made so long ago—before the birth of a third child had
claimed both her and the babe—were blowing in, blowing out. Was the
handsome captain watching her? She imagined him leaning out the
window, his hands gripping the sill as he might a quarterdeck rail,
that one fine brow that was set a little higher than the other
raised as he smiled down at her and admired her flawless
horsemanship. . . . Inexplicably, her heart gave a little flutter.
But the window was empty, and her only spectator was Rescue Effort
Number Thirty-One, sitting in the shade of a rosebush and licking
his orange coat.

Some audience. But it was better than
nothing.

Nevertheless, she glanced up at the empty
window a final time and berated herself for letting her attention
wander. Impressing that haughty Brit was not important.

Was it?

No!

She turned away so she couldn’t see the
window. Above, clouds lolled in a silver-hazed sky, and barn
swallows wheeled in and out of the stable’s loft. “Now, Rigel,” she
said, stroking his sweaty neck in an attempt to calm him. “It’s not
going to be that bad. Do you think I’d let anything happen to you?
Do you think I’d do this if I thought you were going to get hurt?
Hell, do you think I’d do this if I thought
I
was going to
get hurt?”

The colt stepped up his fidgeting, blowing
hot breath through red-flaring nostrils and eyeing her warily.
Despite herself, Mira glanced up at the window a final time. It was
now or never. Taking a deep breath, she grabbed a fistful of reins
and mane in her left hand, put her foot in the stirrup iron—and
vaulted lightly into the saddle.

She was on. On!

And almost off as Rigel exploded
sideways—then bolted.

“Whoa!” Clinging like a thistle, she hung on
for dear life as he tore blindly around the side of the house and
rocketed toward the street. Powerful muscles rippled beneath her.
His whipping mane stung her cheeks. Shortening the reins to no
avail, she managed to get her seat under her and her feet back in
the flying irons. “Rigel, whoa! Easy!
Whoa!”

The side of the house and the front door
passed in a blur. Shod hooves thundered across the lawn, struck
sparks off the cobblestoned drive, and hit the street. Desperately
she drew on the reins. “Whoa, Rigel,
easy!”

Houses flashed by. Passersby screamed and
dove out of the way. An oncoming shay careened to the right, then
to the left, and overturned against a tree. Rigel shied and found
more speed. He had the bit in his teeth now, the wind in his mane,
and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do but hang on and enjoy
the ride.

Too late, she saw the Jacksons’ tricolored
hound sitting on his lawn with tongue lolling, waiting, as he did
every afternoon at exactly a quarter past one, for the black
stallion El Nath to come thundering down High Street in much the
same manner as his colt was doing now. Mira glimpsed him through
the strands of Rigel’s whipping mane, tried desperately to turn
him—and saw the dog hurl himself across the lawn straight into
their path.

Rigel never slowed, shying sideways and
across the street, flank and shoulder first. A woman screamed.
Someone shouted. Mira saw a white shirt, a startled face, and then
the colt’s shoulder hit something hard and her seat went out from
under her. She felt space where the saddle should have been . . .
air whistling through her clothes—

Bang!
She landed in a very undignified
heap on a manicured front lawn, in plain and humiliating sight of
everyone: Jonathan Jackson, clad in his banyan and a red velvet hat
and hanging out of his second-story window; Nathaniel Tracy, rival
shipbuilder and privateer, leaning from a carriage and touching his
cocked hat to her in an amused salute; three women who’d been
taking the air on the far side of the road, now standing in
speechless horror as they watched Rigel’s riderless flight back
down High Street—and a man, lying crumpled in the road. Mira felt
the blood draining from her face, and a flood of prickly
horror.

The man was Captain Merrick.

As one, the three women picked up their
skirts and rushed to his side. Tracy’s carriage slowed, stopped,
turned around in a cloud of dust. And coming up the street was a
group of seamen who pointed, yelled, and broke into a dead run
toward them. But Mira, forgetting her humiliation, saw only the
captain, lying very still on the hard-packed dirt, and as the
people surged forward, nothing but a wall of breeches, coattails,
and skirts. “Let me through!” she cried, leaping to her feet and
trying to shove them aside. “
Let me through!
”

Tracy, adjusting his powdered wig, was
stepping down from his carriage. “You really ought to be more
careful on those horses, Miss Mira. Racing down the street like
that, ’tis a wonder you haven’t hurt someone sooner.”

“Hurt him?” A woman turned, her hand to her
mouth and her eyes horrified above it. “I think she’s killed
him!”

“No!” With a cry, Mira ducked between a
seaman’s bowed legs and fell on her knees before the captain. He
was as still as death, and just as white. “Captain!” She seized his
hand, rubbing it, patting it, slapping it in frenzied terror.
“Captain Merrick, oh God—”

Father was going to murder her.

“Captain, wake up!”

“You killed the poor fellow, Miss Ashton,”
Tracy said quietly, and took off his hat.

One of the women began screaming, another
swooned, and the third, gasping like a dying cod, clung to Tracy’s
arm, her wrist flung across her forehead. The hound raced to and
fro, barking in mindless frenzy. And then the group of seamen
thrust through the crowd, tossing people aside, their yelling—and
the hideous wailings of the oldest, smallest one—bringing the
clamor to din pitch. Horrified, Mira fell forward, blocking out the
screaming, the bellowing, the barking. She put her arms around the
captain’s shoulders, a hand behind his head, and pulled him up
against herself, where she hugged him for all she was worth as
though to hold the life in him.

He was warm and heavy and smelled faintly of
seawater. His chestnut queue was silky beneath her fingers, the
back of his head warm against her palm. And as she held him,
pressing her lips to his forehead, his arm moved and his hand came
up to push blindly against her breast.

A shock wave tore through her at his touch,
but she had no time to ponder it, nor savor the relief that she
hadn’t killed him after all. “Make way there, make way!” someone
shouted, and then she was seized by a pair of brawny hands, yanked
to her feet, and flung rudely aside, landing hard on her shoulder
just beyond the throng of people.

One of the seamen—the big one with bare arms
showing through slit sleeves—had done it. And now he was bent over
the captain, slapping his cheeks hard enough to dislodge a tooth
and yelling in an Irish brogue so thick, she could barely
understand him.

“Brrrrendan, wake up, me laddie, wake up! Fer
God’s sake, wake up!”

Mira sprang to her feet. She was a child of
the docks, of the sea—and of Ephraim Ashton. Cursing, she pounced
on the big seaman’s unsuspecting back like a hellborn sprite, fists
beating against his beefy shoulders, and feet kicking at his stout
legs. His ear was conveniently close. “Damn you for a bloody idiot!
How dare you toss me aside, you big, stinking oaf! Now, get away
from him, you heap of bilge rot, before I—”

The seaman was turning, an incredulous grin
splitting his broad face, his bear paw of a hand already removing
his tricorne. “God Almighty,” he said slowly. “’Tis—”

“—a
woman,
Liam!” another shrieked,
grabbing the big one’s arm. “By the blood of Christ, a woman!”

She glared at them through a wall of hair.
“Damn right I am! You think because I’m in breeches and shirt, you
can treat me like a bleedin’ barnacle? Try it again and I’ll send
your nose right through the back of your bleedin’ skull. Wretch!
Brute! Bastard! Now, let me through, you blithering barrel of sea
slime, so I can tend to the captain!”

The one named Liam threw back his head and
split the air with laughter. The toothless seaman was guffawing,
the little one was clutching his belly and looking quite ill, and
the others were all bending over Captain Merrick. But the
townspeople were staring at her; not in disbelief, for they were
well used to her ways, but in a manner that spoke all too well of
their sympathy for poor Ephraim at having to take such a wild one
in tow.

Ephraim. At that moment, Mira heard
hoofbeats—and saw her father’s horse and shay coming back up High
Street.

She stared, eyes widening in horror, the
blood draining from her face. And then she panicked and ducked back
through the forest of hanging coattails, stockinged legs, and
buckled shoes.

###

Brendan was awake. Painfully so. He may have
been stunned and he’d certainly had the breath knocked out of him,
but he’d never quite lost consciousness. Being run down, being
slapped, being screamed at, and being hugged
—
he’d felt it
all. He sat leaning heavily against Keefe, his elbows on his knees,
his aching head cradled in his hands, and his ears ringing like a
blacksmith’s anvil. People were yelling, screaming, crying all
around him. A dog was barking. Dalby—that
was
Dalby’s voice,
wasn’t it?—was wailing at the top of his lungs, and someone else
was shouting. Quite loudly, in fact. He would’ve recognized that
voice anywhere. Ephraim. And with sudden, awful clarity, he
recalled the face of the young laddie who’d run him down and knew
it had been no laddie at all.

Miss Mira Ashton.

And she’d hugged him.

Not just hugged him.
Kissed
him
.

He panicked. Fighting off Liam, Keefe, and a
crowd of concerned people he’d never seen before in his life, he
lunged to his feet. Above the screening buffer of their heads,
Ephraim’s bellowing was much louder.

“What are you doing out here dressed in those
clothes? I told you I don’t ever want to see you in public in
anything but skirts and gloves again!”

“I can’t help it, Rigel got away from me! And
you can stop screaming, I can hear you just fine!”

“I’ll scream all I want!”

“Scream a little louder and maybe they’ll
hear you clear over in Salisbury!”

“They’ll hear me clear down to Boston if I
ever again catch you outside of the back pasture wearin’
breeches!
What the hell kind of daughter have I raised?
Whaddye think the client would say if he saw you like this?”

“Why the hell don’t you ask him? He’s sitting
right there!”

But Brendan wasn’t sitting anywhere. He was
off at a brisk, limping walk that was just shy of being a dead run.
Away from the crowd. Away from the commotion. Away from those crazy
Ashtons.

There were plenty of other shipbuilders in
the world.

“Merrick!” Ephraim roared.

Brendan stepped up his pace, moving so fast
that Liam had to break into a run to catch up.

“
Merrick!”
Ephraim’s voice would’ve
cut through a mile of fog. “Merrick, for God’s sake, don’t go!”

Liam was there beside him. “Brendan, wait! Ye
can’t go off, just like that.”

“I can and I will.”

“What about the ship?”

“Someone else can build it. I’m done with
this town!”

“But Ashton’s the best!” Liam tried to keep
up with Brendan’s long strides. “Ye said so yerself.”

Brendan whirled to face his friend. “I’m
through with Ashton, too. And his daughter, and her cats,
and
her dog,
and her pudding!”

“Pudding?”

“Stow it, Liam!”

“But I thought ye wanted to come to
Newburyport to get the schooner built. I thought ye were determined
that this Ashton fellow would do it. Besides, his daughter’s not
the one buildin’ the ship!” Seeing his captain’s set, angry
face—Brendan? Angry
?
—Liam tried a different tack, for
Brendan was off again, faster than before. “What are ye, afraid of
her? A lassie? Ye sit there cool as frost on a pumpkin when the
ship’s gettin’ blown out from under us, yet ye run from a mere
lassie, and a wee one at that.”

“I am not running!”

“Oh? Then what d’ye call it, eh?” Liam edged
around in front of him, trotting backward to keep ahead. “I dare ye
to go back there and confront her!”

“Forget it, Liam! Dare me all you bloody
want, but this is one dare I will not take you up on! If I stay in
this godforsaken town any longer, I’ll end up buried here! Already
I’ve nearly been poisoned with pudding, knocked down by a dog, and
now, run down by a horse! No, thank you. We sail on tonight’s
tide!”