Sea Fire (23 page)

Yesterday, she had shot him: any reasonable man would have been furious. But her action, and her obvious remorse afterward, had fired in him a tenderness that he had thought long dead and buried. Who but Cathy would have dared, and who but Cathy would have tended him so gently afterward? As he watched her struggling to dress him, when he was perfectly capable of doing it himself, he had felt the icy knot of rage that had dwelt for so long in his belly begin to melt. She had disarmed him, the minx, almost brought him to the point where he was trapped again and glad of it. But luckily he had caught himself in time. She had betrayed him once, and when she got the chance she would likely do it again. It wasn’t in him to hold his heart out for rejection a second time.

The experience with Sarita had been sordid. She had been naked and all over him like an octopus, and he had not even bothered to remove his breeches. He had just unbuttoned them. The whole thing had been over in less than five minutes, and then he had left the still-clinging Sarita to spend what was left of the night in solitary splendor on deck. Jon grinned sourly. If word of last night’s happenings ever got out, as it probably would, his reputation as a lover would take quite a beating. Jackrabbit Jonny, they would doubtless call him; to his faint surprise, the thought troubled him not at all. The only woman whose love he wanted, for better or worse, knew better. And he
would see to it that she at least had no doubts about his sexual prowess!

She would be furious, Jon acknowledged to himself, but he was confident that he could overcome her anger. He had almost gone directly to his cabin to face her wrath last night after he had left Sarita, but the guilt that was already strong in him had held him back.

But why should he feel guilty? he thought, suddenly remembering his grievances against her. What she had done had been far worse than his one brief encounter with Sarita. She had sold herself to another man knowing that he, Jon, loved her, knowing that he still considered her his wife. And she had let that man bed her over and over again. . . . Jon’s teeth clenched at the thought. He hoped she was angry. He hoped she suffered one-tenth the hell she had put him through!

Jon rolled abruptly to his feet, a black frown marring his face. He would go to his cabin and wash, and if the little bitch had the gall to castigate him for taking Sarita, then well and good. Because there were any number of things he wanted to say to her.

The sound of raised feminine voices checked Jon briefly as he strode toward his cabin. One woman was screeching something, and then he heard the unmistakable sound of a slap. The noise was coming from inside his cabin, Jon realized with an ominous sense of foreboding, and he was ready to swear that the voice he had heard screeching was Sarita’s. Good God, what now? Then, as one awful possibility occurred to him, Jon hurried forward.

Cathy had been awakened from a troubled sleep by two hands dragging her roughly from the bunk. For a groggy moment she thought that Jon had returned at last. Opening her eyes, prepared to freeze him with an icy blast of indifference, she found to her bewilderment that the face bending over hers was not his at all: the eyes were large and black, the skin faintly coarse, the nose and mouth thick, and the whole distinctly female. Sarita! Even as the identity of her
assailant popped into Cathy’s brain, so too did the searing memory of how she had last seen her. Brushing the sleep from her eyes with one hand, Cathy jerked free of the fingers that dug into her shoulders so painfully.

“You get out of here!” Sarita stormed before Cathy had a chance to speak. “I’m moving in! Jonny’s my man now, not yours!”

“You’re welcome to him,” Cathy snapped, her eyes disdainful as they took in the woman’s dishevelment. Apparently Sarita was not long out of bed herself. “But I move out of this cabin when Jon tells me to, not you.”

“You move out when I tell you: now! Jonny doesn’t want you anymore! Last night he made me his woman, and from now on I’m going to be sleeping in his bed!”

“Indeed.” Cathy drawled the word in her best Great Lady manner, her eyes traveling over Sarita with conscious hauteur. “How gratifying for you!”

“Don’t you talk to me like that! Like you’re some fine lady and I’m nothing! Jonny’s told me all about you: you’re no better than me!”

“A slut, you mean?” Cathy asked unpleasantly.

“Don’t you call me that! You’ve got no right to call me that, you with your light skirts and easy ways! You whore!” Sarita followed this with a whole string of filthy epithets that Cathy had never even heard before. She listened calmly to the abuse, one eyebrow raised superciliously. She had learned long ago that the best way to deal with abuse by a person who secretly considered himself an underling was to play the high-born lady to the hilt.

“You get out of here!” Sarita finally ended her tirade. Cathy looked her over as if the woman were a particularly distasteful bug that had just crawled out from under a rock.

“No.” The word was soft, and Cathy smiled as she said it. Only her eyes betrayed her rising anger. The more she thought of how Sarita had
spent last night, the harder it was for her to control an almost overwhelming impulse to claw the woman’s bulging black eyes out!

“Eeeh!”
Sarita cried furiously, and her hand rang out against Cathy’s cheek in a stunning slap. Cathy, taken by surprise, automatically clapped her hand to her bruised face. Her eyes began to glitter dangerously. Then, as Sarita reached for her, obviously intending to eject her from Jon’s cabin by brute force, Cathy drew back her hand and returned the woman’s slap with interest.

When Jon burst into his cabin, the two women were rolling around on the floor like Japanese wrestlers. Sarita had a big handful of Cathy’s blonde hair wrapped around her fist and was pulling on it mightily. Cathy’s hands were closed around Sarita’s throat. Jon stood transfixed for a moment, staring at the pair with a mixture of consternation and amusement. He had rushed to his cabin for fear that Sarita might do Cathy an injury. Sarita must have outweighed the younger girl by two stone: she was far taller, and heavier of muscle. Plus, she had been raised on London’s most squalid streets; she was no stranger to brawls, whereas Cathy had had the gentlest of upbringings. She was born and bred a lady, and fighting was not generally included in a lady’s education. Jon would have laid money that Sarita could have torn Cathy limb from limb. And what was amusing him was that he would have lost: even as he watched, Cathy managed to roll on top of Sarita, straddling her as she pinned her to the floor. When Sarita’s long nails went for Cathy’s face, Cathy raised her clenched fist and delivered a blow to the chin that would have been worthy of boxing’s finest. Sarita screamed, and the sound galvanized Jon to action. He hurried to separate the two, before Cathy could do Sarita real damage.

“That’s enough!” His voice was sharp as he caught Cathy around the waist, lifting her bodily off Sarita. Cathy dangled from his arms like a small spitting kitten, and Sarita immediately took advantage of her rival’s
situation to surge to her feet. She came at Cathy with nails bared. Jon, seeing what Sarita meant to do just an instant too late, swung Cathy behind him only after the woman’s nails had scraped a raw path down the side of Cathy’s neck. Cathy gasped, and then as Jon released her to grab Sarita, she launched herself from behind him, her nails raking Sarita’s plump shoulders, bared by the low-cut peasant blouse. Jon swore; one hand closed over Cathy’s arm, the other over Sarita’s. It was all he could do to hold them apart, and he was sorely tempted to knock their hot heads together and be done with it. Instead, in desperation, he bellowed for O’Reilly.

O’Reilly, when he arrived, sized up the situation at a glance. He locked both arms around Sarita’s waist, dragging the woman bodily from the cabin. She screamed curses at Cathy as she went.

Cathy, for her part, was trembling in Jon’s arms. As he swung her around so that he could see her face, he thought she might be suffering from a case of delayed reaction. But her blazing eyes told him otherwise: she was furious, plain and simple, and now that Sarita had been gotten out of the way, all that fire and brimstone temper seemed to be directed at himself.

“How dare you send your—your
paramour
to tell me to move out!” Cathy raged, her sapphire eyes flashing storm signals and her soft pink mouth trembling with anger. She had apparently slept in one of his discarded shirts; the garment was miles too big for her, falling down past her knees, the trailing sleeves pushed up in thick rolls above the elbows. In it, with her long golden hair and heaving breasts clearly outlined beneath the linen, she looked small and fragile, and completely, unmistakably, female.

“Jealous, Cathy?” Jon taunted softly, not liking the way she was making him feel. Cathy’s lips drew back into what was almost a snarl; she tossed her head like a wild bull before the charge, and Jon could almost feel the heat of her anger.

“Of her? Don’t
make me laugh!” she spat. Jon, still securely holding her arms, smiled mockingly.

“I think you are,” he said softly. “I think you’re so jealous that your insides are rotten with it. I think that’s why you attacked Sarita. . . .”

“
I
attacked
Sarita
?” Cathy gasped. “You really must think an awful lot of your abilities in bed! Frankly, my dear, you aren’t worth it!”

“Is that right?” Jon’s voice was silky smooth; only the narrowing of his eyes revealed that Cathy’s dart had gone home. “That’s not what you say when I hold you naked in my arms: ‘Jon,’ you sigh, and then you pant and beg for more. . . .”

“You conceited swine!” Cathy hissed, feeling her cheeks flush hotly at this all too accurate reminder of the way he affected her. “I’ll never let you near me again! You’d have to kill me before I let you lay a hand on me!”

“I don’t think so,” Jon drawled meaningfully, his gray eyes taking on an ugly gleam. And then he proceeded to prove that he was right.

nine

C
hristmas came and went, and then New Year. Due to the intermittent squalls that kept the men fully occupied with sailing the ship, Cathy thought that she must have been the only one to note their passing. Briefly she remembered last year’s holiday season, when she and Jon and Cray had celebrated as a family at Woodham. But the pictures conjured up were too painful, so she forced herself to dismiss them. That brief period of happiness was beginning to seem more and more like a dream; harsh reality was the never-ending rocking of the
Cristobel
, Jon’s growing coldness, and the fact that her son was many, many miles away.

The
Cristobel
was sailing south. The weather was hot and sultry, with rain liable to fall at any time. Jon had grudgingly told her, in response to her equally grudging question, that he was heading for Tenerife. He had many friends from his pirate days on the island, and he would need their help to insure that the
Cristobel
was completely seaworthy before setting sail across the Atlantic for the States.

Cathy had finally obtained some clothes, courtesy of Angie Harrow, another of the former female prisoners. Cathy rather liked Angie, who
was small like herself but much thinner, and as completely colorless as a piece of brown paper. Angie had been a lady’s maid until she had been accused of stealing her mistress’s diamond ear-bobs. The girl stoutly maintained her innocence, and Cathy was inclined to believe her. Not that it mattered. Angie appeared to have adopted Cathy as her new lady, and Cathy found it very pleasant to have someone around who took real pleasure in performing those tasks which Cathy had never expected to have to do for herself.

Jon looked askance on this new friendship, but he said nothing. It was as natural for Cathy to have someone to wait on her as it was for flowers to bloom in the sun. He only insisted that Angie stay out of his cabin when he was in it, and that she not neglect her other duties. Otherwise, since both girls seemed content with their arrangement, he let it stand.

The clothes that Angie had provided from her own meager store were the same type of simple blouse and skirt that had been issued to all the female prisoners. Cathy had only a single petticoat to wear under this simple outfit, but that did not stop her from donning it, and going up on deck whenever she got the chance. On the hottest days it was far more refreshing to stand out on deck, where there was almost always at least a faint breeze, than to swelter in the close confines of the cabin. For coolness’ sake she took to wearing her hair in a single thick braid; with her bare feet peeping out from under the short, full skirt and the kiss of the sun across her nose and cheeks, she looked every inch a pirate lass. Jon, watching her as she lent a hand around the deck, thought that she had never looked more beautiful, and cursed himself for the desire that grew in him like a weed that refused to be uprooted.

Jon’s eyes weren’t the only ones that followed Cathy around the deck. Many of the men lusted after her openly, but not quite openly enough to let Jon see. And Sarita watched the younger girl with evil malevolence. Since that one night, Jon had not come to
her pallet, and that lady-bitch was still in his cabin. Sarita smoldered, and bided her time.