Authors: Miranda Jarrett
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #General
Frowning, she tipped the seal toward the lantern's light and gently slid one finger beneath it to crack it free. The handwriting was bold and confident, broad, black slashes across the white paper, and immediately she knew who had written it. Not an eagle graced the sealing wax, then, but a hawk, not a branch from a tree but a bit of ship's timber, a spar.
Miss Everard, will you do me the honor of joining me in my cabin as my guest for a light collation.
Yr. S'v't N. Sparhawk
Her frown deepened. She wouldn't have expected such civility from Captain Sparhawk. A light collation in his cabin? Was this some form of apology for all the ill he'd brought her, or only a mockery, another way for him to goad and torment her? She touched the seal, remembering how he'd tried so purposefully—and so successfully—to shock her with his profanity and the appalling catalog of her undergarments. No, if he wished to torment her further he wouldn't bother with anything as subtle as this prettily worded note. But why, then, would he bother with an apology, either?
She read the invitation again. There was no time or date to the invitation, and she decided with a sniff that privateering captains must consider themselves above such niceties. Rose had seen how every man on board the
Angel Lily
jumped to carry out Captain Sparhawk's every order, and doubtless she was supposed to do the same. She wasn't one of his sailors, and he'd no right to expect her to obey his commands. Instead she should tear the invitation in two and send it back to him, and she smiled to herself as she pictured the look on his face when he received it.
But both her smile and her defiance were short-lived. Except for a few moments' satisfaction, what would she gain by crossing him again? When she'd slapped him, he'd threatened to hang her, and she didn't doubt he'd do it if she provoked him too far. He'd already shown how little regard he had for laws and decency. She'd be nothing but a fool if she antagonized him again, and she'd never reach St. Lucia for her wedding.
With a sigh she laid the invitation on the mattress and began to sort through the tumbled contents of her trunk. All of her new gowns, made for her life as Lady Graham, had been left behind in the hold of the
Commerce
. The three that had been unceremoniously stuffed into the trunk were black and severe, all in the same grim mourning she wore to honor Lily, and none any more attractive than the one she was wearing already.
She propped her traveling mirror upright in the trunk's open lid, unpinned her dark hair and brushed it smooth before she twisted it once again onto the top of her head. She'd had to learn to dress her hair herself after Phoebe's death, and the most she aspired to was tidy rather than elegant. At last she pinned a tiny lace cap onto the crown and let the narrow ribbons curl down around her cheeks, her single, modest touch of frivolity.
Not that it helped, not really. With dismay she noted how crying had made her eyes a perfect red-rimmed match for her sunburned cheeks and nose, and she wrinkled that same nose at her reflection. All the lace caps in the world weren't going to make much difference. Captain Sparhawk would simply have to accept her as she was.
Finally she reached deep into the trunk, shifting aside her clothing as she felt for the carved indentation in one corner. She pressed it hard with her thumb until she heard the muffled
sprong
as the latch gave way and the trunk's false bottom lifted back. With relief she saw the privateers hadn't discovered it, for the leather pouch with the new banknotes and the hundred polished guineas that Papa had given her as wedding gifts were still untouched. Beside it were the two flat boxes that held her mother's jewelry, and another smaller, square box covered with black plush. This she set aside on the bunk, then closed the secret door and smoothed her belongings back over it.
Sitting back on the mattress, she cradled the little box in her hands and opened the brass hook on the lid. Inside, nestled in a puff of white satin, lay a gold ring with a large oval aquamarine framed by pearls: her betrothal ring. She slipped it onto her finger, the cold blue stone sparkling in the dim light of the cabin. Swiftly she curled her hand into a fist, covering the ring with the palm of her other hand and burying them both in her skirts.
She'd told herself she hadn't worn the ring on the journey because she didn't want to risk losing a piece of such value, but the plain truth was she hadn't wanted to. Hidden away in her trunk, the ring was meaningless, an expensive bauble. But with it on her finger she was forced to acknowledge everything it represented, everything she'd been trying so hard to ignore.
God help her, she could barely remember Eliot's face, and soon, too soon, she would be his wife. Dear God help her…
But she must not keep Captain Sparhawk waiting any longer. With a deep breath to steady herself, Rose slid off the bunk, smoothed her hair one last time and tried the door to her cabin.
To her surprise, it wasn't locked from the outside, though she could have sworn the man Hobb had turned the bolt. Even if she hadn't been shut away in the hold the way the poor English sailors on board the
Commerce
most likely were, she had expected the Americans to be a bit more concerned with guarding her. Perhaps, thought Rose rebelliously, they should be. She was half-tempted to do something wicked on her own simply to prove their carelessness.
Though the
Angel Lily
was a much larger ship than the
Commerce
, Rose guessed that the space between decks would be organized in the same way, with the captain's quarters to the stern, and cautiously she made her way aft. Little sunlight filtered down from the hatches into the shadowy passageway, and none of the candles in the gimbals was lit in the lanterns by day. The wind had risen and the seas with it, making the deck pitch and roll beneath Rose's feet. She braced herself by sliding a hand along the bulkheads on either side of the passage.
She hesitated only a moment before knocking on the green-painted door to the captain's cabin. She'd been here once before, to drink sherry with her father and Captain Fotherill on the day the
Angel Lily
had sailed, and the memory made her angry all over again at Nickerson Sparhawk.
He didn't answer.
She thought she could hear his voice inside, quarreling with someone else, but since she was here at his invitation, she knocked again, her knuckles rapping sharply on the door.
"Blast your impertinence, enter!" he roared, his voice as loud as if no door stood between them.
Rose's eyes narrowed. Impertinent, indeed. She'd never met a man this rude before, and she was sorely tempted to turn on her heel and forget all about his foolish invitation. Except, of course, that he would think she'd fled from fear alone, and she refused to let him believe her a coward. With her hand firmly on the latch she swung open the door.
And every last word she'd planned flew from her consciousness in an instant.
He was standing turned away from her, leaning across a pewter washbowl to peer into the mirror on the bulkhead while he shaved, and he wore absolutely nothing except the breeches slung low on his narrow hips. Rose stared; she couldn't help it. Her only experience with undressed males was the plaster casts taken from antique statues that the gentlemen in Portsmouth brought home as souvenirs from Rome, and those white, lifeless forms were nothing like the man before her.
He kept his legs angled, effortlessly adjusting to the ship's motion with an ease that riveted Rose's attention to the broad, muscled planes of his back and shoulders. Little droplets of water trickled down from his wet, sleek hair along the shallow valley of his spine, and helplessly Rose followed their course to the neat bow at the back of the waistband of his breeches.
"Speak, man," he ordered, deftly sweeping the razor's blade along his jaw to the edge of his throat, "or did the Britishers take your tongue, eh?"
"Oh—oh no, indeed not," she stammered in confusion. "That is, it's not possible, is it?"
He swiveled around to face her, clearly surprised but not shocked to find her there. "Not possible, nay," he said as he reached for a cloth to wipe away the last of the soap on his jaw."Even you British can't take what you already have."
She nodded as if this made perfect sense. His eyes seemed greener here away from the sunlight, and she felt her cheeks grow hot beneath their scrutiny.
Think, Rose, think! Don't stand here like an open-mouthed imbecile!
"You said to enter," she said, and winced inwardly at the defensive banality of it. If only the man had the decency to cover himself with his shirt so that she might think clearly! "I did not mean to intrude."
"You're not, if you've a reason for being here." Nick smiled, intrigued and pleasantly surprised by her new ingenuousness. Because of how she'd spoken to him on the deck before the others, his impression of Rose Everard was of an ill-favored shrew, and so he'd told her sister. But though she'd never be a great beauty, he now noticed the fine bones of her face, the feathery dark lashes that set off her gray eyes, and how her little pink mouth twisted unconsciously as she watched him, the way a child's would when tempted by a sweet. Far more satisfying that than her sister's ethereal indifference.
Lazily, he widened his smile and watched with amusement as the blush on her cheeks grew to match the rosiness of her sunburned nose. "You did have a reason for coming here, didn't you, Miss Everard?"
"You invited me," she said, bewildered. "You had a note delivered to my cabin asking me here for a—a light collation. I presumed you meant supper?"
His smile vanished, done in by that word
collation
. "
I
invited you?"
"Oh, yes." Rose fumbled in her pocket for the note, relieved to have an excuse to look away from his chest. "Here you are."
He took the note from her, barely glancing at the writing and the seal before he looked over her head toward the cabin's stern windows. "This is your doing, isn't it? Doubtless you opened her door as well," he said crossly. "And nay, I am not swaggering!"
Belatedly Rose recalled that she'd heard him in conversation earlier through the closed door, and swiftly she turned to see who the other person might me. But the bench below the long sweep of windows was empty, as were the chair at the desk and the two at the table. They were, it seemed, quite alone together in the cabin. Perhaps he was speaking to her instead, though his comments made little sense.
"I don't see how it can be my doing," she said slowly as she turned back around. "You can't deny that that's your ink and paper and seal, or your invitation, either."
But still he scowled past her, his brows drawn together in a single black angry line. "Damnation,
I know she can't see you! All the easier for you to make a fool of me, eh?"
"I beg your pardon, Captain Sparhawk?" Uneasily Rose glanced again over her shoulder. The sailor Hobb had told her that the captain turned "daft." Was this, then, what he meant? "Perhaps I should come back at another time."
"Nay, Miss Everard—Miss
Rose
Everard—you'll stay directly where you are." Irritably he raked his fingers back through his wet hair as he looked away from the empty window seat and back to Rose.
"You believe I'm mad, don't you?" he demanded, his green eyes brilliant. "Acting like some blessed dog whose hair's all on end from seeing ghosts? Talking at shadows like an inmate in Bedlam?"
But before Rose could answer there came another knock at the open door.
"Yer supper, sir," said the towheaded boy as he balanced the heavy tray with both hands before him. "All as ye ordered, sir. Grilled onions an' toasted cheese an' some o' th' ham Cook's kept special from Sunday last, sent up on account o' th' lady."
"Set it there on the table," ordered Nick as he reached for a clean shirt. He wouldn't give Lily the satisfaction of looking her way. He knew she'd expect him to thank her for her interference, but blast her, he wasn't going to do it. "Then leave us."
Rose ducked her chin, trying to hide the little smile of foolish pleasure as the boy arranged the meal. It had been so long since anyone had done anything with her happiness in mind that this simple meal and the knowledge that it had been ordered for her were almost beyond bearing.
Yet he is still your enemy, Rose. You must not forget that, and you must be careful. He is still your enemy, and still a dangerous man.
A very dangerous man…
She nodded to the boy as he left the cabin, and then went to stand beside the table, resting her hands on the back of one of the chairs. The smoky fragrance of the toasted bread and cheese and the onions cooked so perfectly that their rings had just begun to separate on the plate made her realize how long ago she'd eaten breakfast on board the
Commerce
.
"This is very kind of you to do this for me, Captain Sparhawk," she said carefully, concentrating on the carved, polished wood beneath her fingers instead of the man opposite. "Very kind indeed, especially since we are enemies."
"Save your thanks," he said curtly as he dropped into the second chair, not waiting for her to be seated. He stabbed his knife into one of the onions and lifted it dripping to his mouth. Irritation was making him intentionally boorish, and he didn't care. Lily had been the one who said he was a gentleman; he'd never made that claim himself. "This is none of my doing."
Rose frowned, impatiently running her fingers back and forth along the chair's back. "But this is your cabin, your crew. Who else could have ordered it?"
"Who else?" He leaned back in the chair and laughed humorlessly. "The only one who'd care enough to do it. Your sister Lily."
"M
y sister Lily." Rose's voice was flat and emotionless, too stunned by the audacity of his claim to be otherwise. "Dare I ask, Captain Sparhawk, how you believe that is possible?"
"The devil knows, for I surely don't." Nick tugged a corner from the toasted cheese and tossed it into his mouth. "Not that Lily's about to confide in me."
"Indeed not." There was a chance, a faint chance, that he'd somehow been one of Lily's less reputable followers who might not have heard of her death. "You knew my sister, sir?"
Nick shrugged carelessly, his unfastened shirt sliding across his shoulders. "Depends what you mean by knowing. But there's no denying that she's caused me trouble enough these past five days with her mischief."
"Then you didn't know her at all," said Rose sharply, "and you are most cruel, sir, to pretend otherwise. There is no possible way Lily could bring you any 'mischief.' You've no right to accuse my sister of anything, for she died eighteen months ago, may God rest her soul."
"Amen to that," agreed Nick. "But in the meantime, I tell you she's here, on this ship."
"And you, Captain Sparhawk, are every bit as mad as you fear." She couldn't help striking the back of the chair with her fist for emphasis as she turned to leave. "Perhaps then this imaginary Lily will share your company, for I shall not. Good day, Captain."
"Nay, you're not going yet." In an instant he was around the table and at her side, seizing her arm so there was no chance she'd escape.
She fought the desire to struggle, forcing herself to seem calm even as her heart pounded in her breast. Struggling would earn her nothing but grief, she told herself firmly, and fighting back would only make him angry. But, oh, dear Lord, he was so much larger than she, so much stronger!
"You have no reason to keep me here, Captain," she said as evenly as she could. "As a prisoner you've every right to confine me to the little cabin you've granted me, but not here, not in your quarters, while you mock the memory of my only sister."
"Nay," he said softly, "she is the one who mocks me. For I tell you, Miss Everard, your sister is here."
His fingers dug into the soft flesh of her arm beneath her sleeve, drawing her closer. A drop of water from his wet hair fell onto her bare wrist and she shivered.
"You
are
mad!" she cried desperately. "No one knows better than I that Lily is dead!"
"I never said she wasn't, did I?" he said roughly, his breathing harsh. He was looking beyond her again, his green eyes unnaturally brilliant as his gaze swept across the cabin. "It's her spirit, her soul, that's haunted me ever since I took this ship!"
"I don't believe you," whispered Rose. She could feel the tension building in him, transmitting itself like a current through his fingers into her arm. "How can I?"
He laughed again, a hollow, bitter sound. "Oh, aye, and why should you? Would you listen if I tell you how she's dressed, all in white with pink ribbons twisted round her head? Her wings are white, too, like a swan's."
"Her
wings?"
"Wings, aye," he said defensively. "How could she be angel Lily otherwise?"
She ducked her chin, realizing too late there was no graceful way to explain. "I didn't mean to question you," she said. "It is only that—well, as much as I loved Lily, her actions often weren't quite fit for an angel."
"No matter. She plays the part well enough now." Nick's black brows came together as he concentrated on remembering Lily clearly. "Her hair's right for an angel, too, though more copper than gold, and all fussed up on top in curls. Not a bit like yours, for all that you're sisters."
He squinted critically at Rose. "Though there's something about her eyes that's akin to yours, too, even if hers, of course, are blue instead of gray."
Inwardly Rose winced, though she offered nothing in her own defense. How could she, when her hair was dark and unfashionable and her eyes a dull, drab gray, just as he'd said?
"Anyone could know that of Lily," she said stiffly. "You could describe her hair and dress simply from seeing the figurehead of this ship. Papa was most particular with the carver about such details."
"Then how would I know that Lily cracks her fan like a whip when she's crossed, and tips her head to one side when she's pondering mischief? Would a bit of gilded, gaudy wood be able to tell me that?" His large fingers tightened on Rose's arm, his voice low and rough with the urgent need to convince her. "How would I know the sound of her laughter, rippling up and down as if played on a flute?"
Rose shrank back, not so much from him as from what he was saying, and in her confusion looked down at his fingers as they held her arm. His wrist was twice the breadth of hers, with dark curling hairs over sun-browned skin, and his hand was scarred and callused from a life of hard work and battles long past. Not the smooth, elegant hand of a gentleman like Lord Eliot, nor the ink-stained one of her father. But how could Captain Sparhawk possibly be as honest and direct as his strong, blunt hands implied?
He believed what he told her of Lily, as emphatically as Rose believed that he was wrong. She had seen Lily's body sewn in her shroud, and had stood by her sister's grave when the shoveled dirt had dropped with such awful, empty finality onto her coffin. She knew without doubt that her sister was dead, just as she knew, as a member in good standing of their grim stone church at home, that she must not believe in such things as ghosts or spirits.
But how, then, could an American sea captain like Nickerson Sparhawk have come to know so much of her sister?
"You must have found some Englishman here on board, one of Fotherill's men, who knew my sister and told you these things," she said breathlessly, grasping for a rational explanation. "Lily was often seen in Portsmouth. She was a great beauty there, a belle. Most anyone from Hampshire could have described her."
"And what would be the point of that?" he demanded. "Why should I care that much about some lord's giddy daughter? It's Lily's doing, not mine. She shows herself only to me, and in ways I can't explain. Even now she's toying with me, hiding herself away in the very air to make me question my own sanity."
"But you must—"
"Nay, don't say it," he said sharply, his fingers tightening around her
wrist. "It's nothing I haven't told myself already. No wonder you and Gideon and
likely every other man on board believe by now that I've lost my wits, when I
wonder the same thing a hundred times a day."
She lifted her gaze to stare at him, and found her own fear and uncertainty strangely mirrored in his face. He had seemed so strong, so invincibly powerful to her that the desperation she now discovered in his eyes confused her all the more.
And even worse was knowing he was, somehow, inexplicably right.
"My sister often did such things to me when she lived," she said haltingly. Though a year and a half had passed since Lily's death, still it hurt to speak of her. "It was, as you say, a game with her. When we were little girls, sometimes she'd hide from me until I wept from frustration, and then she'd show herself and laugh and hug me and call me a goose for fretting."
"Aye, that would be like her." Nick nodded with a grim eagerness. "She'll jibe and play me false, then laugh and call it parlor tricks." His gaze swept past her, around the cabin another time. "Just as she's doing now. More of her wretched parlor tricks."
"And yet you say you never met her," whispered Rose as she searched his face for the truth. "Dear Lord, how can I dare believe you?"
"You will," he said roughly. "You must."
She was, Nick knew, so close to believing him, to believing
in
him, that he would do anything to convince her. Without another thought he pulled her after him through the cabin's open door and up the narrow companionway. On the steps her feet tangled in her skirts and she stumbled, pitching backward with a startled little cry. Instantly he was there, his broad arm curling around her waist as he lifted her upwards to the windswept deck.
Against his body she was so stiff and tense with fear that he wasn't surprised she'd made a misstep. She reminded him of some tiny wild bird ready to fly the second he lifted his hands free, and beneath his forearm he could feel how her pulse raced and her breath quickened. He knew he'd no right to be holding her like this, at least not so long as he wanted to be thought an honorable privateer and not some renegade pirate. The laws were very clear about the treatment of prisoners, particularly lady prisoners with titled fathers.
But he couldn't let her go, not yet. First he had to make her understand about Lily, and prove to her— and himself—that he wasn't mad. And damnation, he
wasn't
.
He was breathing hard himself as he drew her as far forward as he could, to where the ship narrowed above the bowsprit and the figurehead below and where none of the men on the first watch could overhear them. He pulled her close against his chest, his arm tight around her waist as he steadied her against the ship's motion.
It was nearly night, the last breath of evening when the western horizon still glowed dimly pale with the final traces of sunset and the sky overhead had already turned to blue-black ink. The sliver of a new moon hung low above the sea, while the same wind that whisked the sky clear of clouds rushed the
Angel Lily
through the white-capped waves so swiftly that the ship seemed to fly over the water.
To fly on wings, white wings like a swan's…
"You can feel her here, can't you?" he said hoarsely, his mouth close to her ear so she'd hear him over the wind. "She's nearby somewhere, on the ship or in the wind. Lily's
here
."
Rose closed her eyes, struggling to find sense in a world that had gone crazily beyond reason. If she'd been tossed into the waves below she'd feel not a whit more lost and helpless than she did right now. To be taken as a prisoner by the enemy and dragged here to the bow at his whim with the black, deadly water crashing below should have been bad enough.
But it was worse than that. Far worse, for as hard as she tried she could not blot out the new sensation of her body pressed so shamefully against the hard, muscled wall of Nickerson Sparhawk's chest, or how easily he held her, his forearm as thick and strong as the branch of an oak. The thin linen of his shirt and the bombazine of her gown seemed to vanish between them, and the layers of her petticoats offered no real barrier as she stood tensed against his thighs.
It was Lily's fault that she'd given in like this. If he hadn't spoken of Lily, of how she'd inexplicably chosen to visit him or haunt him or whatever it was Lily was doing, then Rose wouldn't have let herself be dragged from his cabin in the first place, and she certainly wouldn't be here in this dreadful, humiliating position with him now.
But for Lily, of course, it wouldn't have been dreadful at all…
No man had ever embraced Rose like this—no man except her father had ever embraced her at all—and even realizing that this one meant nothing by it did little to ease the unfamiliar warmth that spread across her body at his touch. Yet as his arm curled more tightly around her, his fingers spreading to cover her protectively from waist to hip, still she gasped at the intimacy of the touch—the touch of a madman.
"She's here, lass, isn't she?" he rasped, his breath seductively warm on her ear. "Your sister's here."
Rose shuddered and tried to pull away, from him and from the truth. For if he was truly mad, her conscience told her, then so was she. Somehow, in some way, Lily
was
here on this deck, in the wild unpredictability of the wind and sea and in the beauty of the night sky dappled with diamond-bright stars. The feeling was as intangible as that, yet the aching grief that had become a part of Rose's life since Lily's death seemed wondrously to lift and ease. Lily wasn't gone; she was with her here again, to tease her, to guide her, to comfort her as only a sister could.
Blindly Rose turned her face to the wind as it tugged away at her hairpins until, at last, she felt the heavy coil of her hair slip and fall free over her shoulders, the thick waves tossing and whipping around her. That was Lily, too, for Lily had always chided her for dressing her hair so severely. "Gentlemen," Lily would declare as she tipped her head, "fancy a becoming degree of disarray." And then she'd click her tongue with resignation as Rose had pinned hers back anyway.
But this time Lily had won. The hairpins were gone, never to be recovered, and the prim little lace bonnet with them, and this time Rose didn't care.
"Oh, Lily," she whispered plaintively. "Lily, please don't go!"
"She won't," came the hoarse reply beside her, and Rose's eyes flew open. Instead of Lily's laughing blue eyes, she was staring into the green depths of Captain Sparhawk's, only inches away, as his black hair, untied like her own, tossed across his broad forehead with its fresh scar.
This, then, was reality, this man and the ship and the night wind at sea, and her sister no more than a bittersweet dream. Rose pressed her lips tightly together, fighting back the tears as she reached up to press her palms against her cheeks.
"It was so real," she said miserably, her voice breaking with disappointment. "I cannot explain it, but I knew Lily was here with me and now—now she's gone, and I've lost her once more."
"Nay, lass, don't think too hard on it," he said with a gentleness Rose hadn't expected from a man so given to arrogance and shouting orders. "Accept the feeling for what it is."
"But how can I?" Still fighting tears, Rose shook her head, sweeping aside her hair from her face. "What we are saying is impossible, and yet I felt her here with me again, as plain as day."
"Then let that be enough. God knows that's what I've had to do." He reached up and brushed his fingers across her cheek, his calluses rough against her skin, and smiled sadly. "And Lily won't take no for an answer."
"She never would before. Why should she now?" Troubled, Rose drew her face from his fingers, and saw how his smile turned wry as he let his hand drop back to his side. "Yet you swear you've seen her as an angel, the mirror of the figurehead below."