Passion's Joy (37 page)

"We know what you said," Joy interrupted firmly but quietly. "But you're not giving orders anymore. I am. Now Bart, please!"

"Aye aye, my lady." He left quickly.

Ram lay back. He could not fight her; he had no strength. "Joy, if you get this fever, I'll—" "If I haven't gotten it yet, I won't. Such is the way with these things. Besides, I never get

sick," she informed him. "Joshua always said I owned the constitution of iron." "But our child—"

"Is perfectly safe inside me." It was amazing he could talk at all, and as she wrung a cloth in water, he collapsed against the bed, yet still watched her through the feverish shine in his gaze. "You know, Joy, as soon as our child is born and you are recovered, I'm going to beat you within an inch of your life."

She smiled as she gently placed the cloth over his forehead. "My heart warms to hear it, for it means you will have to recover, too."

She soon had them moved to the captain's quarters. She never heard Ram swear as he did when she told Bart and John to lay him on the bed, swearing he'd have to be dead before he took the only decent bed from his wife who was ready to give birth at any moment. Tapping some hidden strength to fight the frighteningly high fever, he stood, refusing to lay down until another bed was brought, and when it was, demonstrating how much the show cost him, he slept for the next fourteen hours.

Sean's fever rose dangerously, but only for a matter of hours before settling. Like Ram's, his fever was at a place that kept him bedridden but not high enough to be life threatening, as so often was the case with the fever. Over the next few days Joy earned the name Angel Shrew. Angel because her ministrations helped and shrew because it was obvious she enjoyed the upper hand. Joy could only wonder at how they managed to tease and laugh being so sick, but on the eleventh day she understood.

She opened her eyes to see Ram, in all his impervious nakedness, up and walking around the room looking for something. A hand went to her cheek as she felt the heat rise there. He stretched, then kind of shook, as though to rid himself completely of the disease. There was no sign he had ever been ill, at least not on his muscled frame. She gasped as he jumped up to grab an overhanging bar and started doing pull-ups. The chiseled muscles worked with fluid ease, and the sight was as unnerving as it was patently unbelievable. She was too dumfounded to speak.

Seanessy sat up with a curse. "What the hell is this?" he asked as his hand found the braid she had made of his long hair to keep it from matting. Ram only chuckled, still doing pull-ups. "Ram, toss me that dagger of yours," Sean said. "Quick, before I develop a lisp to go with this braid."

Ram swung down with easy grace to retrieve his dagger. "Hold it up, Sean. I'll do the business."

Sean held his braid to the side and Ram tossed the knife into the air. Joy screamed, but all for naught. Thrown with a light curve, the knife cut the hair at the nape of his neck before it fell point down in the floor boards. Sean held a braid of blond hair.

Joy had the unmistakable idea that they were no longer ill. "Ram, you should get back in bed. You're—"

"Fine," he said with an easy smile. "A little hung over from it but nothing a swim won't

cure."

Rake perked up suddenly. "A swim! Oh no—"

He was already heading for the door, still with impervious nakedness. "Joy, love, your days of commanding are over. I am no longer the one confined to a bed. So, that bare foot I see there will not touch the floor. Understood?"

Joy could not see her bare foot any longer and when he watched her try, he started chuckling, then laughing, laughing all the way out and to the side of the ship, laughing as he dove thirty feet into the cool blue waters. Two weeks later, Joy lay beneath the afternoon shade of a palm tree on an unnamed tropical island Ram said was about a hundred miles from Spanish Cuba. She lay on a blanket, reading a French translation of Dante's Inferno, of all things. This, while polishing off a small mountain of shrimp, a side plate of juicy pears and mango-like melons. Yet, she could not concentrate above her misery.

So much had happened. Ram could not sail the Ram's Head with the skeleton crew, at least not over the Atlantic waters to England. Yet supplies had dwindled to nothing, but a pile of crusty, rock-hard bread that to Joy's horror was infested with worms. Unlike the other crew members, she could not think of the creatures as nourishment. More dangerous by far was the water supply. Ram had no choice but to try to sail to the nearest island, which was where they presently were stranded. The ship was anchored in a beautiful crystal-clear bay, while the still recovering crew was banished to the other side of the island.

Had Ram any idea of the extra time he had been granted, he would have gotten Joy to civilization and the care of a surgeon or midwife or someone, anyone who knew about delivering children. As it was, this was her first child, and by the closest estimation she was over two weeks late. She was enormous. He never let himself think of his own mother, Joy's mother, the number of wives of his crew members that had died during childbirth. He couldn't, for the thought would have truly driven him mad. Bret Holland was too weak to give anything but advice. With all her experience with Joshua, Joy knew plenty, and though she was uncomfortable in the extreme with the idea that Ram would be there, he pursued the subject relentlessly, prying every last detail of her knowledge from her.

Joy looked up to see Ram and Sean approaching from the beach. Ram carried a bucket of fish, Sean the fishing poles. They were laughing and talking, and she felt a pang of jealousy at their easy movements. They had nothing to worry about!

She squirmed with a queer restless energy that her body's profound lethargy simply refused to accommodate. That was another thing, too, she thought as she plopped another finger-size shrimp into her mouth. She was sick to death of fish.

Ram's gaze turned to her, studying her with unsurpassed scrutiny, and she looked away, irritated. Next he would ask her—

"How do you feel?”

"Ohhh!" she practically screamed, throwing the shrimp down in the sand and, with effort, trying to sit up. "If you ask me that just one more time—"

She tried to get up. No help was extended. She glared at them, daring either to laugh at her. She finally managed to get to her hands and knees but could not seem to get her legs under her. In an effort not to laugh, Ram bit his lip so hard he drew blood, finally losing. The sudden laughter brought her pained humiliation; the more they laughed, the greater her humiliation. She was going to hit him, then she was going to cry.

Still laughing, Ram finally went to her and helped her to her feet. He was just about to hold her face to kiss her, beg a thousand apologies, when she stepped back and sent a small clenched fist hard into his stomach, only to meet a surface that felt more like a rock than flesh, and with a small cry, pain shot up her arm. Seanessy dropped to the sand, overcome with his laughter now, while Ram grabbed her hurt hand. "Oh love." He laughed. "You must warn me before you take a shot like that."

Suddenly though, his laughter died. Color drained from her face, and she gripped his forearms with a shocking strength.

As the first wave of it washed her body, she knew she was in trouble. The pain was not normal. She had walked dozens of women through the first stage of labor. Yet she could not take so much as a step. By the time Ram had carried her to the small hut he had built, the third wave washed over her. She could think of only two possibilities: Either she was truly a weak soul, one who had far less pain tolerance than any other woman she knew and would be unconscious or dead by the time the child actually came, or the child was coming far more quickly than normal.

As it turned out, the latter was true.

The sun just touched the distant horizon, melting into a breathtaking play of light and color that bathed the land and sky in gold, when Ram lay Seanessy Edward Barrington in Joy's arms.

Nothing in his twenty-nine years prepared him for the joy surging through him as he took his wife

and child against him, cradling them in his arms. Nothing had ever prepared him for the next three hours Joy and he spent staring with profound, quiet marvel and awe at the little face, the dark hair and the bright, amber colored eyes.

Marvel and awe that melted into laughter and tears. Emotions that would surely be his ruin...

Several hours later, Joy woke as though she had never slept, and the lantern Ram kept burning guided her eyes to little Sean's sleeping face, which was tenderly kissed, kissed because seeing was not enough. A new mother's emotions were far too large to be contained in the poor vessel of mere words.

As though nature knew a woman and a child were most vulnerable at this time, she endowed Joy with heightened senses. She heard the distant sounds of Ram's men still celebrating on the other side of the island. The voices coming from somewhere down the beach sounded far away, and she only heard small bits and pieces as Ram's and Sean's voices rose.

Ram seemed to be taking all the credit for little Sean, thinking he missed his calling as a doctor, and for a while she listened to an endless stream of toasts Ram and Sean were giving to the boy.

"And to the mother," Ram finally said. "To a woman whose beauty is delicate and lovely as a blossom, as irresistible as a siren's song but—" he laughed heartily— "who obviously owns the damn facilities of a brood mare."

Sean laughed and Joy blushed unseen, biting her lip with embarrassment.

"Speaking of her beauty though," Sean said. "She seemed to recover as she lay there." "Aye. I have in fact seen cats have a harder time of it."

"That's not what I meant," Sean said, suddenly serious.

There came a pause broken at last with Ram's seriousness. "I know," he said. "I have no idea what I'm to do with her as my wife. Believe me, it would be bad enough just knowing she drew breath in some faraway place like Louisiana."

"Have you asked her yet?"

"No, and I won't either. I don't have to. When I see my son in her arms, the love in her eyes, I know the only answer she could give me." His voice dropped to a whisper. "She would equate the

drinking of the tea with the murder of a child. Perhaps not in those words but with the same result. She has no choice but to deny me her bed."

Ram studied the stars in thoughtful silence. "I feel such a queer mix of things," he finally whispered as much to himself as to Sean. He could hardly comprehend how his love grew so in these last months, culminating like a heaven bound Handelian crescendo upon the birth of his son. "When I think of my boy in her arms," he said out loud, "I am overwhelmed with my joy—it's almost a physical pain in my chest. I have cried. Me, a man grown to his twenty-ninth year, cried.

"Of course I will watch this boy of mine but somehow, like Joy, now I feel—nay I know— he will be well in mind and in spirit." He shook his head. "Yet I cannot gamble another," he said in a passionate vow. "And when I think of what that means... of never touching that girl again, I—" He stopped, literally unable to face that near future.

Sean in turn, waited patiently through his struggle as any good friend would. "Sometimes," Ram said in a question, "when I hear her laughing, teasing me, I wonder if

she knows... But of course she must know what this ill-begotten marriage will reap. Yet she seems so happy with me, so confident..."

"It is not the same for a woman," Sean ventured. "A man's love is his desire, he wears it as such. Whereas a woman's love sings a different tune entirely."

Intellectually Ram knew this was true. While he had never known a woman whose passion met his like Joy's, she was hardly experienced. She had known love only three times. Three times! Once with a virgin's fear, once by force and once as she tried to save a life far more precious than her own. The experience could not have been pleasant, at the very least. Of course, love would not be the same for her. It made sense why she would not be overburdened with the prospect of not knowing his love again. He would have to put distance between them and soon. How awfully would that affect her? She would try to understand, of course but— "God's curse Sean, I see the future and it is bleak indeed."

"There is nothing you can do—"

"I know," Ram sighed. "I know I'll be forced to her side for the trip back, the initial rounds of introductions—a couple of months, I suppose—but then after that, it will be a matter of avoiding her and remembering that God awful night. I will not force her, Sean. And God's curse is right!" he swore, knowing the irony was that Joy was every reason why he should never have married. "The agony of it is what I can never forgive you for ..."

Joy could make little sense of the bits and pieces of this conversation she was certain she was not meant to hear. What agony? Why was the future bleak? Quite suddenly, as she thought of this, she felt angry. How could he discuss business prospects on this night? Men!

A frown lifted into a smile as she heard Ram's voice raise and the crash of a bottle as Ram christened the island Little Sean, vowing someday to bring his son back to teach him to swim. That was more like it, she smiled. It was the last thing she remembered on this, the first night of a long journey home again...

After giving the final orders of the night to the crew, Ram stood alone on the quarterdeck, staring out at the dark depth of the boundless blue ocean. It was the last few moments of the day, long after the sun had set and just before complete darkness swept over the sea and sky. Stars appeared one by one, and as the ship glided gracefully over the swells finally heading to England, his thoughts raced ahead to that distant shore.

In three weeks, he would be home. At his side would be his wife and son, and together, they would finally be able1 to put a halt to the assassination attempts, the threats to his life. Finally! He knew exactly how he would do it, too; he had lived the moments in his mind many times. No, he would not spill blood in revenge, despite Sean's eagerness to do so, and not from any elevated or noble ideas but simply because revenge seemed more trouble than it was worth. He had had it with trouble; he wanted to get on with life. It would all be over and all because of Joy Claret's precious gift of his son.