Pirates (35 page)

Perhaps she wasn’t embarrassed, but Alex was. “Stop,” he pleaded.

She laughed, and the sound was moist, because she’d been crying earlier. What a contradictory creature she was, delightful and infuriating at one and the same time. “Of course you’ll have to marry me first,” she announced. “If you don’t, my brothers will kill you.”

Alex tilted his head back and searched the starry sky, a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. This, he thought, was a form of suicide he had not yet considered.

P
hoebe waited until everyone but Duncan had left the study. He did not meet her eyes, or rise from his chair, when she came to stand beside him. She laid a hand on his shoulder, where the sling was tied, and he flinched at her touch, although she had been careful to avoid his wound.

“Lucas didn’t mean what he said,” she told him. “About John dying because of you.”

Duncan was a long time in answering. “Yes,” he said finally. “He did.”

Phoebe knelt next to him, pressed one hand to his face, made him turn his head and look at her. “You know it isn’t true—don’t you? John was sick long before …”

He sighed, brushed her cheek with the knuckles of his right hand. “I don’t know anything,” he told her, “except that my father wouldn’t have wanted me to believe I’d done him harm. Lucas is hurting, and he has no pretty wife to bind his wounds.” Here he paused and offered up a slight, sad smile as he raised Phoebe to her feet and then drew her down onto his lap. “Considering that my brother never had much tact in the first place, I guess it’s not surprising that he would say what he did.”

Phoebe took a deep breath and let it out slowly before speaking. “You don’t really plan to steal a ship?” she ventured. She would have to find a way to go along if Duncan went pirating again, but she hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. She enjoyed an adventure as much as the next person, but she’d had enough swashbuckling to last her. “Couldn’t we just stay here and mind our own business for a while?”

Duncan chuckled, but his eyes betrayed the depth of his suffering. “Phoebe, Phoebe,” he scolded. “Harrying the British
is
my business. If I stay here and wait for them to find me, it will spoil the fun—theirs as well as mine.”

Frustration surged within Phoebe, and she controlled it. She’d learned a lot about self-restraint, she reflected, since meeting this man. “Couldn’t you just lie low for a month or two? The British are bound to be in a bad mood, after what you did to the
Northumberland
, and by now they surely know who did it.”

“ ‘Lie low,’” he mused, seeming to savor the phrase. “Another interesting term.” He moved one thumb over Phoebe’s lower lip, as if preparing her for his kiss, and she felt a spilling warmth, somewhere deep inside, followed by a singular ache in a much more specific place. Where this man was concerned, she was an absolute harlot.

She shivered. Duncan hadn’t touched her in an intimate way, and yet there could be no denying that the lovemaking process had already begun; mysterious, elemental things were happening inside her—passages widening, needs awakening, tiny muscles contracting. And contracting further, like the spring in an old-fashioned clock.

“You deliberately misunderstood,” she said in a somewhat tremulous voice. Phoebe wanted to make love to Duncan and to have him make love to her, but not in the study, with so many people around. “To ’lie low’ just means not drawing attention to yourself.”

“Hmmm,” Duncan replied, pretending to ponder her words. At the same time, he dipped a finger beneath her neckline and found a nipple with which to amuse himself. “I am sorely in need of a wife’s loving attention,” he said. “Will you pleasure me, Phoebe?”

She gasped as he bared the breast he had been teasing. “Yes,” she managed. “But not here—for heaven’s sake, Duncan—
not here
.”

He laughed, low in his throat, and set her, wobbling, on her feet. “But here is where I want you,” he said reasonably. “Here and, certainly, now.”

Phoebe grabbed the back of the chair, since she was feeling a bit weak-kneed. “No,” she said, watching as he crossed the room. He closed the terrace doors first, and then went to shut and lock the ones opening onto the hallway.

“No?” he echoed. He returned to her and kissed her, at the same time tugging down the front of her bodice to free the eager swell of her breasts.

“Duncan,” she whimpered, in lame and admittedly ineffectual protest, when he released her mouth. He was holding one of her breasts, preparing the nipple with the pad of his thumb, just as he had made her lower lip ready for his kiss minutes before.

He bent his head and took suckle, at the same time raising her skirts and untying the ribbons that held her drawers up. It occurred to Phoebe that her husband was remarkably agile, for someone with only one good hand.

Phoebe swayed in his embrace, her head flung back, completely lost.

“Do you still want to refuse me?” Duncan inquired, with damnable confidence, when at last he had apparently satisfied himself at both her nipples.

She sighed dreamily, bemused. “Refuse?” The exact definition of the word eluded her.

He kissed her again, making everything worse—or better—and she was vaguely aware that her drawers were down around her ankles. Furthermore, there was a breeze coming from somewhere. “Step out of those pantaloons, Mistress Rourke,” Duncan instructed gently. “Or you might trip over them.”

Phoebe obeyed and would have tripped anyway, if Duncan hadn’t steadied her. He brought her to the chair where he had held her on his lap before and did the same again, only with a difference.

*   *   *

Early the next morning, when Duncan was already locked away with his men, no doubt laying plans to rip off half the British navy, Phoebe went in search of Simone. Phoebe herself was subdued, grieving for John Rourke and, because the echoes of last night’s pleasures were still thrumming in her nerve endings, inclined to be charitable.

Simone was alone in the washroom, bent over a tub full of soapy water.

Phoebe stood in the doorway and waited until Simone acknowledged her presence with a grudging, desultory nod.

“He’s got you breeding,” Simone commented, without undue malice. She was scrubbing a linen shirt and went on with her work.

“You found your way back rather quickly,” Phoebe replied, since Simone’s remark did not require an answer. Since she’d become the mistress of Duncan’s house, she hadn’t been near the laundry room. She had to admit, she hadn’t missed the place. “I guess everyone else has been too distracted to ask, but I’d like to know how you got here.”

Simone shrugged, keeping her eyes averted. Gone was the bristling defiance of old; something vital had gone out of the girl, and Phoebe took no satisfaction whatsoever in the knowledge. “I was born in these islands,” Simone said. “I can find my way betwixt them.”

Phoebe left the doorway, where she had been framed in an aureole of sunshine, and came to stand on the other side of Simone’s washtub. “What happened when you got to Queen’s Town?” she asked, reaching out and stilling the servant’s strong brown hand with her own.

Misery flickered in Simone’s lovely dark eyes as she looked, at last, into Phoebe’s. “I found out that I should have stayed here,” she said. “There was no honest work for me—they wanted me for a whore or a slave.”

“I’m sorry,” Phoebe said, and she meant it.

A tear followed a crooked path down Simone’s cheek. “Don’t waste your pity on me,” she warned fiercely. “I don’t want it.” She lowered her gaze to Phoebe’s still-flat
stomach, and there was something like contempt in her face. “Soon, Duncan will be wanting a mistress. He’ll come back to me.”

The words stung Phoebe, as they were intended to do, even though they hadn’t come as any sort of surprise. She straightened her shoulders and raised her chin. “I’m not going to argue with you, Simone, so you can stop trying to make me angry.” Then, since there was nothing more to say, she turned and went back to the main house.

Seeing Simone had done nothing to ease her apprehensions, but it wasn’t the prospect of Duncan’s infidelity that Phoebe found so disconcerting—he was a man who appreciated the bounties of nature, and she suspected that the further her pregnancy advanced, the more intrigued he would be. No, it was something else that was bothering her, some nameless nuance, insubstantial as smoke, subtle as a viper slithering through deep grass.

An hour after dawn the following morning, when Phoebe lay curled against Duncan’s side, recovering from another bout of lovemaking, there was a sudden, deafening boom, causing the whole house to shake.

Duncan spat a curse and flung himself out of bed, tearing off his sling and hurling it to one side before hauling on his clothes.

“What just happened here?” Phoebe asked in a thin voice. She was more inclined to huddle, with the covers pulled up to her chin.

“We’re under attack,” Duncan replied, with a sharpness that gave Phoebe to believe he considered her question a stupid one. There was another crash, followed by the sound of their terrace crumbling. “Son of a bitch!” he bellowed, going to the window. “They’ve gotten to the ridge, the blighters, and turned our own cannon on us!”

Phoebe hopped out of bed and yanked on a wrapper. They’d already knocked out the terrace, whoever “they” were, and being a sensible woman, she wasn’t about to stay around until the outside wall went, too. All of the sudden
she knew, as she dashed for the door, what it was in Simone’s manner that had bothered her so much.

Guilt.

“What do you want me to do?” Phoebe asked, as Duncan hustled her through the doorway and then gripped both her upper arms and wrenched her onto her toes in a highly successful effort to get her attention.

“Find my mother and Phillippa. Old Woman will hide you. That’s all I have time to say, except this: if you disobey me now and bring harm to yourself or our child, I will never forgive you.”

The words gave Phoebe a chill; she knew he meant them.

“Be careful,” she said.

Duncan didn’t answer; he planted a hasty kiss on her forehead and vanished.

Phillippa and Margaret had been roused, with the rest of the household, by the cannon fire, and the assault continued unabated as they all raced downstairs in their nightclothes, carrying whatever other garments they’d been able to snatch up before fleeing. Old Woman was waiting in the entryway, looking serene and serious, ready to usher them into the cellars, along with the female servants.

There was no sign, Phoebe noticed, of Simone.

“Is it the British, come to hang Duncan?” Phillippa asked when they were all huddled in a dank room, with a single candle for light, clad in their mismatched, hodgepodge clothes.

“It is the pirate,” Old Woman said. “Jacques Mornault.”

Phoebe, seated on a crate, drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. Her gown was of rough, colorless cloth, lent to her by one of the maids. “He got past the watch,” she mused aloud, “and took over the cannon on the ridge above the house.”

“Yes,” Old Woman answered, reflected candlelight flickering in her eyes as she looked at Phoebe. Simone’s name wavered between them like a specter, but neither of them mentioned it.

“Are we going to die?” one of the younger servants asked, lip trembling.

“No, child,” Margaret Rourke said confidently. She moved to sit beside the girl and put a motherly arm around her. “There’s no reason to think matters will come to that.”

Phoebe was not concerned with her own safety, just yet, but she was only too aware that Duncan was in mortal danger. All the worse, she thought miserably, that the damn fool didn’t have the sense to be afraid and take precautions to protect himself.

“Where do you suppose Alex is?” Phillippa asked, in a small voice. “I didn’t see him.”

Phoebe and Margaret exchanged glances, but neither of them spoke.

Another round of cannon fire shook the house, and Phoebe bit back a terrified sob. Was this how it was going to end? she wondered. Had she traveled through time and fallen in love with Duncan Rourke only to end up dead, at the bottom of a pile of rubble?

Phillippa stood up and began to pace.

Phoebe rested her chin on her knees and waited, in a daze, and time became irrelevant. Above their heads and outside, the battle raged on, endless, earsplitting, and for all the hoopla, oddly monotonous. Some of the servants actually went to sleep, and Old Woman murmured low, wordless chants, prayers to some ancient island goddess. Margaret seemed lost in a private reverie; perhaps, despite her brave assurances that they were not about to die, she expected to join John in some better, brighter world.

The candle burned out, and Old Woman replaced it with another.

As the new light spread, stronger and brighter, Phoebe looked around for Phillippa—and found no sign of her.

Phillippa groped her way up the cellar steps, which were littered with fragments of the walls and ceiling. The light was dim, and the air was so filled with smoke and dust that she could barely breathe. She heard men talking, somewhere in the distance, but the shooting had stopped, at least temporarily.

At the top of the stairs, she waited, and listened.

The voices were far away and dearly familiar. She heard Lucas, and Duncan, and thanked God, with tears blurring her vision, that they were still alive and whole enough to argue with each other. No doubt Alex was with them, safe and sound.

Phillippa would not return to the cellar until she knew for sure.

She made her way through the wreckage of Duncan’s beautiful house, stepping over books and fallen statues and shattered pieces of furniture. She did not call out, lest she attract her brothers’ attention and be sent, or more likely dragged, back to the assigned hiding place. She must see Alex for herself, and then she would return to the cellars of her own accord.

Another volley struck as she was crossing the main parlor, with a violence so swift and stunning that Phillippa was hurled to the floor as forcefully as if someone had grabbed her arm and thrust her down. She lay still for a few moments, the breath knocked out of her, collecting herself and coping with the brutal surprise of what had happened. She must have cried out at some point—the soreness in her throat indicated that—but she had no memory of making the smallest sound.