Happily Ever After (15 page)

“They are so tiny!” she declared, speaking of the
cannons. “Why so little?”

“She was never meant to be a warship,” Kell
disclosed. “No reason for heavy artillery.”

Her brows knit as she watched Kell struggle with
the preparations. “Quite a tedious process!”

“Sometimes it was,” he agreed. And then he
finished at last and lit the fuse. “Ready?”

Sophie nodded excitedly.

He backed away from the cannon and took her by the
shoulders, pulling her out of harm’s way.

The cannon went off with an explosion that nearly
left her deaf.

“Oh, my!” Sophie exclaimed.

The cannonball landed in the ocean with a lame splash,
not more than fifty yards from where they were.

Sophie laughed. “How pitiful!”

Kell nodded. “Yep, and at this point, the ships
are crashing,” he told her, donning his storyteller’s cap. “The crew is off and
running to grab their real guns...

Sophie grinned at his boyish gestures. He
brandished his finger at her as though it were a pistol.

“No swords?” she asked.

“Nope, no swords,” he said. “Guns ...” He stopped
and winked at her. “Or maybe a few poison arrows... we’re going into savage
country,” he reminded her. “Wanna try the cannon?” he asked abruptly.

Sophie blinked in surprise. “Me?”

“Yes, you. C’mere, I’ll teach you how.”

Sophie followed him. It was, after all, just a
baby cannon, hardly much bigger than a rifle. What harm could possibly come of
it?

Kell walked her through the entire process, and
she felt almost like a pirate standing beside him, packing the powder to his
boyish utterances. “All right, here they come!” he encouraged. And, “Hurry ...
they’re almost upon us!”

Never mind that this wasn’t a pirate ship at all,
it felt dangerously exciting to play along.

The crew joined Kell in his banter, and Sophie
never felt so much a comrade in arms. She giggled as she rushed her
preparations, trying to arm the ship before they could be overtaken by their
imaginary foes.

Someone lit a match and came running to light the
fuse for her, and Sophie stepped back, plugging her ears as she waited for it
to go off.

“What the hell is going on here?”

His voice thundered over the decks and Sophie
heard it despite her muffled ears.

She spun to face him, her heart leaping at the
prospect of seeing him again. He’d been locked in his cabin working all
afternoon with strict orders that he not be disturbed. As she turned, her feet
tangled in a coil of rope and it sent her tumbling backward against the cannon.
She merely brushed it and tumbled past it onto the deck, onto her rear, but the
impact of her weight tipped the cannon upward slightly, small as it was.

Sophie only had time to realize what had happened
when the cannon exploded.

“Hell’s bells!” someone exclaimed.

It might have been Kell.

Sophie lay there helplessly as the ball went
flying upward. Every gaze followed it.

Complete silence fell as it rose above the sails
... and then it seemed to pause in midair for an interminable moment. Chaos
broke loose as it made its descent, plunging toward the stem. It ripped through
the sails, and Sophie gasped in alarm.

She met Jack MacAuley’s murderous gaze for the
briefest instant before he sprinted after his crew toward the hole she had just
put in his ship.

CHAPTER 13

Sophie
was afraid to move.

She
watched the crew gather around the damage she had done, and she was taken with
the most overwhelming urge to jump overboard.

Had
she managed to sink the boat?

Jack’s
silence was terrifying.

In
fact, everyone seemed suddenly mute. They all gathered like mourners about a
casket, curious and grim. Jack had disappeared into the mob of his crew, and
had yet to resurface, but Sophie could tell by their stoic silence that she had
done something really, really terrible.

Her
heart beat frantically, and though it wasn’t her way to fly from trouble, she
might have done so... if she’d had somewhere to go—but there was nowhere,
and nothing else to do but face Jack.

Deciding
she couldn’t avoid it, she picked herself up and brushed herself off, then went
to view the damage.

Instinctively
she hid behind Kell, peeking between him and Randall.

“Someone
get down there,” Jack barked at them. He gestured with his hand, and several
men obeyed at once. He got down on hands and knees and peered into the
cannonball-sized hole. It was a long, uncomfortable moment before he spoke.

“I’ll
be damned,” he swore, and Sophie held her breath, waiting to hear the report.

“Do
you see it?” she heard Jack ask after a moment. Apparently the men had reached
the damage site.

Sophie
couldn’t hear their muffled responses, but she heard the chatter of voices
below deck. Kell suddenly seemed to notice her standing beside him and put a
hand on her shoulder, as though to comfort her, but he said not a word. The
gravity of the situation did not escape her. If the ball had managed to go
through the hold and bottom of the ship, would there be anything they could do
to stop it from sinking?

Her
heart raced wildly.

“Are
you sure?” Jack shouted through the gaping hole.

More
chatter below.

“What
stopped it?” he asked.

A
thousand sighs exploded around her, and Sophie thought that might be a good
thing.

She
nibbled her lip anxiously.

“You’ve
got to see this!” she heard someone below deck shout up at them.

“I’m
coming!” Jack told them, and bounded up from his knees. As though he had sensed
her presence, his gaze seemed to find her at once, and the look in his eyes
sent her pulse skittering.

He
came toward her, pointing rudely, and Sophie froze. “You!” he said. “Come with
me!” And he seized her by the arm.

“Hey,
Jack, it wasn’t her fault,” Kell said in defense of her.

No
one else dared to speak up.

Silence
followed them.

Sophie’s
heart pounded with fear as he dragged her behind him. He came to the ladder and
released her, practically jumping down, not bothering with the rungs, and then
he motioned for her to come down after him. Sophie didn’t dare resist.

He
pulled her through the mess hall and then down another ladder, and up into the
captain’s dining hall.

Sophie
had yet to see any sign of the cannon damage.

And
then she did.

Several
crewmen were gathered around her cabin, staring inside. They parted for Jack,
and he released her long enough to go inside and inspect the damage firsthand.

“Lucky
thing she packs like a woman, eh?” she heard one man whisper.

“There
went her summer wardrobe,” snickered another.

Sophie
groaned inwardly and stepped forward to see for herself.

There,
indeed, went her summer wardrobe.

The
cannonball had come through the roof of her cabin and had landed, of all
places, on her suitcases ... which were of course stacked upon her bed. She had
dragged them out to find a suitable dress and then had stacked them on top of
one another, smallest on top, because there just hadn’t been room to do
anything else. She had left them there, intending to set them aside later when
she went to bed.

The
first and smallest bag had been tossed aside. It had been crushed, actually.
Sophie winced at the sight of it... her mirrors and toiletry. The scent of
perfume permeated the cabin. The second, too, had been destroyed along with its
contents and now sported more than abundant ventilation, but the third remained
in place, the cannonball snuggled deep within the folds of her very expensive
gowns.

Sophie
cringed at the imagined sound of her mother’s voice in her ear, shrieking with
indignation.

As
she watched, they dragged that suitcase aside as well, and then her bedclothes,
and found the cannonball had stopped short of destroying the wooden structure
that was her bed. It was cracked and dented from the impact, but otherwise
intact.

She
blinked at the sight of it.

It
was, indeed, fortunate for them all that she had packed heavily. After it had
ripped through the sails and crashed through the deck, and then three
suitcases, her gowns had provided adequate stoppage for the ball.

Her
gaze was drawn to the picture of Harlan she had placed face up on the bed this
morning. Less than a foot or so to the right and his face would have been
plastered to the cannonball... but it had been spared... more’s the pity.

“Isn’t
that... lucky,” Sophie managed to say, her stomach roiling.

Now
what was she going to wear?

Jack
glared at her, his green eyes smoldering with ire. “For the first time I can
honestly say I’m damned grateful a woman never travels light!”

Sophie
didn’t know whether to be relieved or offended by his remark. Since she
couldn’t very well defend herself, she might have been inclined to defend all
womankind in that instant except that she was afraid to even open her mouth.

“If
there is a God out there,” he told her, “we’ve seen proof of it today!”

She
thought he meant because they had been spared. The ship was intact and they
weren’t going to plummet to the bottom of the sea to be eaten by little fishies.

“Out
of everywhere on this ship that ball could have landed,” he continued angrily,
“this is the one place where justice is served!”

Sophie
opened her mouth to speak in self-defense and indignation, but nothing came out.

She
closed it again.

It
was true—even though he didn’t have to be so gleeful over her loss!

She
peered up at the hole in her ceiling to find half a dozen pair of eyes staring
down at them, and turned to face Jack again, wincing at his wrathful stare.

She
straightened her shoulders. “You really don’t have to shout,” she told him with
as much dignity as she could muster.

She
had tried so very hard to make up for their first meeting. So much for the
morning’s efforts. It seemed she and Jack were destined to remain forever at
odds.

Jack MacAuley was an insensitive brute!

Sophie came to that decision as she lay in
her bed, staring at the stars through the hole in her roof.

She wondered how a man could grow to be so
hard, but she didn’t really wish to explore the answer to that question because
she didn’t want to feel sorry for him. If he’d had a hard life because of his
upbringing, well, it wasn’t Sophie’s fault. Nor was it her fault that her life
had been made easier by her own birth circumstances.

And neither was the afternoon’s mishap
entirely her fault either!

He didn’t have to come storming into their
midst, shouting in anger. He’d frightened her, and she’d tripped, and she had
just as much right as he did to be angry. She could have been hurt, but he
hadn’t even stopped to think about that!

The look in his eyes had been
terrifying—almost as terrifying as her mother’s had been to her as a
child.

Her father had been soft-spoken to the
extreme, bowing to her mother’s every wish, and no one in her household had
ever dared go against Olivia Vanderwahl’s edicts. Only Sophie’s grandmother had
ever dared scold her mother, and then only with subtle undertones that Sophie
hadn’t understood for many years.

In truth, she hadn’t even realized her
father had any backbone at all until she had seen him at work in his own
environment, and then it had left no doubt in her mind who was truly in charge
of their household. Despite the emotional berth her parents seemed to give each
other, her father had humored her mother in most things. Sophie supposed a man
didn’t always have to exert his dominance... not if he had nothing to prove,
and her father hadn’t had a thing to prove.

Jack
MacAuley was somewhat of a different animal, she decided.

He
didn’t actually exert his dominance over anyone... but those in his presence
seemed to bow to him anyway—even Kell to some degree. It was obvious the
two of them were friends, but Kell hadn’t even stood up to him to defend her,
beyond his simple statement that it wasn’t all her fault.