The Windflower (30 page)

"Lass, no ... Ye must be seein' sense now . . ."

But she could hardly hear the last words because she had the plate up and was slamming it against the door again and again. She wouldn't stop, nor would she listen to him as he went on trying in a kindly way to convince her that she must discontinue this foolishness.

When her situation changed, it changed quickly. She had barely time to assimilate the swift footsteps on the stair, the rapped-out order, the key turning in the lock. All she had was the broken part of a second to leap backward to keep from getting the thrust-open door in her face.

"My love, did you summon me?"

Devon stood on the threshold, the smile on him so sweet and barbed that he might have breathed attar of roses and brimstone. Hips down, he was encased in denim trousers that revealed more of his lean musculature than Merry knew was good for her to see. Hips up, he was bare, discounting an open leather vest, which Merry was trying hard not to do. They were pirate's clothes. He was a British spy in pirate's clothing, a wolf in wolf's clothing, and yet somehow his appearance was as neat and decorative as an enameled thimble.

Merry was all in favor of being belligerent toward him, even though she'd known it would be a little difficult to put that brave policy into practice. Face to face with him
a little difficult
was turning into
next to impossible.
Resisting an impulse to retreat behind the table. Merry said, "Certainly not. 1 want to talk to Rand Morgan."

"Do you? I'm sorry to disappoint you—his arrival isn't imminent. Tell me, did you sleep well last night, dear?"

"No," she said, paling another shade. "But I'll bet you've been up for hours, sharpening your fangs. What do you want first, an arm or a leg? Or are you going to go right for the throat?"

"Are we a willing victim, then, this morning?"

Her sigh was quick and frightened. "You know I'm not good at waiting, Devon. Do and have done."

"Bare your throat then, my love," he said. "I've come to invite you to see Raven flogged."

She had been expecting an attack, but nothing as indirect or as cruel as this. Her first thought was not to believe him, and she said jerkily, "Your sense of humor is a little wanting today."

"I agree. I suggest you keep that in mind. Last night when Tom Valentine ordered Raven not to jump into the sea after you, Raven pulled a knife on him."

Belief came slowly to Merry. She shook her head in abstract denial. "Last night he was injured. Surely after that they would not ..."

"Yes, they would. Particularly since Raven announced chattily at his trial that he stands behind his actions last night and he'd do the same again if the need arose. If the child weren't so popular, he'd be dead. Come on deck with me. You can tell your grandchildren that once you saw a boy whipped on a pirate ship."

She recoiled from him, pride forgotten, hardly aware of her body's motion. "Devon, don't let them do it! Don't!"

"Merry . . . Little Windflower—" His voice was soft and textured. "You know so much. You must know that I don't have a vote here. Why else would you have stolen my letters?"

She would remember in her nightmares his expression in the boat when the letter bundle parted company with her shirt. She had taken those letters without having any idea what they contained. Now she never wanted to know. She heard herself say. "How dare you judge me for that? Or— Of course. You hire gutter trash to do your stealing for you. Everything I've learned about vice has been from you."

Quietly he said, "Merry, I offered you friendship."

Sick. She was going to be sick. "You offered me captivity."

"Which I promised to end."

"If," she said, "I met your demands."

"Oh, my dear girl," he said softly, "and you wouldn't have met them, would you? You should have told me the truth. Before yesterday afternoon do you think I could have hurt you?" He came to her, his stride fluid and predatory, his gaze holding hers. He lifted his hand and turned it to brush the back of his curved fingers slowly down the tight slope of her cheek. "What would you have done with the letters. Windflower? Sold them to the highest bidder?"

Merry grabbed his unresisting wrist in shaking fingers and held it stiffly, away from her face. She started to speak, to say something that would stop his words, but the chaos of her thoughts couldn't seem to make speech.

He waited for a reply, and when it did not come, he said, "What happened, Merry? Weren't the things I offered you enough? What price buys entrance to your pretty body?" And then, "Would Raven's reprieve be enough?''

She was too anguished to examine his intent. There was strength only to unclutch her fingers from his wrist and to take a backward step that brought her legs up against the writing desk's sharp wooden edge. His hands encircled her waist, and she could feel the sweet heat from his uncovered chest as he drew her toward him. A pained whimper escaped her as his experienced fingers tilted her chin and his mouth sought her. The kiss was spark-hot and scarring, deeply arousing. When finally he had carried its message to the limit and dragged his lips from her. Merry was so angry at him and so filled with bitter sorrow that her power of speech returned, full colored.

"Very well!" she flashed out. "If you need payment in blood for a small act of charity."

He released her completely, and with a deadly smile he said, "Well, well. 1 believe you actually would. How noble you are. But 1 don't think 1 could stomach a sacrificial lamb, and besides, my pretty one, even though your charms have their moments, my interest in them is low just now. And none of it matters in the end because there's nothing I can do to help Raven. By all means though," he said, going back to the door and holding it invitingly open, "go out. Look around. If you make the same suggestion to enough men, in time you might be able to find someone who wants to play."

That last insulting reference made it especially difficult, but in spite of it she brushed past him and left the room.

Merry found Morgan in his cabin stretched out on his goliath bed eating allspice berries. He heard her out in silence, the pleas, the frayed threads of logic she wove to show why it was
she,
if anyone, that ought to be punished, and not Raven. When she was finished, he studied her for a minute, showing no expression, and answered calmly, without a trace of sympathy, "1 can't have my men flashing steel every time they get excited about something. He'll be wiser in the future if we blood him a little now. Don't worry. We won't kill him."

In desperation she went to Valentine, her voice raised more than it should have been. He listened to her with wary annoyance and then said, "Cat! Where the blazes is he? Cat! Get over here and take her below."

She fought Cat furiously as he strong-armed her to her cabin, and even there she lashed out wildly and struck at him with her fists. The young pirate knew many ways to silence a hysterical victim. None was a method he cared to use on Merry, but when she would not let him quiet her, he pushed her to the floor and stilled her frantic struggles with his body.

"Merry, listen to me. Listen to me!" In one hand he caught her flailing wrists, the other covered her mouth. The deeply blue eyes glaring up at him were nearly delirious with anger, but to his relief they held no fear. "Damnation, Merry. Listen. You've stretched this as far as you can. Tempers are short. One more scream and you're likely to end the morning with your back bared by Raven's side."

"I don't care!" she said, the words muffled under his strong fingers.

"So what?" he snapped. "I do. If you won't clap a stopper on your tongue, I'll do it for you. Open your mouth again, and I'll drug it shut. I mean it. I'd rather humiliate you than hurt you. My choice."

Through his fingers she said, "Why
yours?"

She was breathing in short gasps, but her eyes were calmer. He loosened his hold on her mouth.

"Because," he said, "haven't you noticed? I'm the one on top."

She was imprisoned in her cabin, and it was two days before she saw Raven. Cat unlocked the door the second evening and allowed Raven to enter before him. Standing quickly, coming toward him, she saw with unclad anxiety that the cloudless friendliness in his eyes was as bright as ever, although the firm facial skin was still gray from suffering. His easy sailor's grace had become stiff and awkward, and when she saw it, she ran into his arms with a cry.

"Merry! Here now, none of that," Raven said softly, flattered and a little embarrassed. "Don't take on so. I'm the same—sound of body, soft of brain. Ouch! Here, dear, don't hug me, please."

"I'm sorry!" she said, carefully and quickly redirecting her hands. "Raven, if 1 had known—"

"M'lady, it had nothing to do with you. 1 don't mind a thrashing now 'n' again, if it's in a good cause. I'd be right as a red currant by now if it hadn't been for Sails. Mind you, his intentions were the best, but to keep me company on the first night after, he took to reading from a sermon book. Forty pages, he read, and the print on them smaller than flea tracks, and titled 'The Divinity of Christ, by One Who Had Been for Thirty Years an Atheist.' Lord, by the time it was over, you pretty well felt like putting your fist in the nose of the man who converted him."

Raven's lips, smiling at her with kindness, were dry and set with pain twists. She stood tensely before him, her hand resting against the loose weave of his cider-colored shirt. She said, "Will Saunders calls himself your best friend. I can't understand how he could stand by and watch them beat you."

"If you want the truth," said Raven with amusement, "it didn't exactly break his heart to see them lay stripes on my back. Madder than an empty duck with his quaker stuck shut, Will was. You should hear him quoting Pere Ardier on the subject of Caribbean males."

"I heard," Cat said and quoted, " 'While they are generally intelligent and well made—' ''

"Thank you," Raven said.

" '—they are also unreliable, lazy, capricious, and ready at any time to commit suicide,' " Cat finished.

Grinning at Cat, Raven retorted, "And have you heard, mayhap, what the good father said about Swedes? 'Quarrelsome, insolent, arrogant, and prone to wantonness.' "

"That," said Cat dryly, "was quick. Why don't you sit down and quit trying to be jolly? Look at her face. She knows you're acting."

It was agonizing for Merry to watch Raven lower himself clumsily into the chair that Cat had turned backward for him. Again she said, "I can't understand how they could do that to you."

"Merry, it was a light sentence—" Raven began.

"Light!"

"In the Navy—any navy—I would have been hanged for it," Raven said cheerfully. "As it was, Valentine should have held me to a trial by combat, but you see, Valentine is the best swordsman on the ship, while I—"

"Would be hard put to slash your way out of a barberry hedge," Cat said. "I've told you, Merry, Tom Valentine couldn't let Raven go unpunished without looking like a weakling, and no one wants a weakling for a quartermaster."

Not convinced, not consoled, Merry angrily said, "And this is why, I suppose, they say, 'No man would go to sea on a ship who could contrive to get himself into jail'?" She turned away furiously, facing the window where the high rectangles showed a sky of deep slate, and a few stars made lonely, splendid pinpoints in the fading twilight. The room was hot, the surfaces sticky and pleasantly spiced with the warm raisins Cat had brought to her earlier. Their notions of justice were alien to her and seemed appallingly stupid. She could scarcely comprehend the logic that required someone to see a friend whipped to preserve some useless standard of consistency that was too harsh to begin with. And yet, what good would it do to harangue Raven about it when she'd already had the same argument through the door with Sails on two occasions, with Cook once, and with Cat every time he'd set a foot inside the threshold?

Behind her she heard Raven say, "Have you talked to Devon, then?"

Devon. The most alien and appalling of all difficult males.

In an abrupt way Cat said, "You know she hasn't seen him in two days. Gossip around here is thicker than Scotch thistles."

"Don't Cat say that good?" Raven marveled. "Hardly spits at all. Mind you, I didn't know that we
had
Scotch thistles thick around here, but then it's been a few days, think again, since I've been inside the hold."

The lilting tones, the tenderness in his voice were irresistible. Merry turned toward him, her hands back at her waist and resting on the bunk. She made herself smile and, working hard at keeping her tone lighthearted, said, "Cat is correct, as usual. I haven't seen Devon. He probably waits until I'm asleep to slip in and change his underclothes. I have a strong suspicion that he means to make me walk the plank."

Like her Raven hid distress under a smile. "Impossible. Pirates don't do that, you know. The newspapers made it up."

"Did they? Well. There's another myth about pirates laid to rest," she said.

"Yes, indeed. We never make people walk the plank. Too ghoulish. We simply"—Raven made a nimble diving motion with one hand—"throw them over the side."

She wasn't sure why that should make her laugh, except perhaps that Raven's expression was so droll. Looking highly encouraged, he put out a hand to her. "Come over by me," he said. "I can't fetch you. Give me your hand." When she did, he carried it to his lips.