The Pirate Captain (95 page)

“I’m fine. I…Ouch! Dammit!” she said, plunging her finger into her mouth. The honing oil, combined with an untimely lurch of the ship, caused the knife to slip and sliced her finger.

Nathan drew the wounded digit out. The blood welled, but didn’t spurt. He sucked the blood away and frowned intently as he inspected it.

“You’ll do,” he said.

“Since when you do carry a handkerchief?” Cate asked at seeing him pull one from his sleeve.

He cocked an eyebrow as he dabbed her finger with it. “Since I’ve been ’round you. I find an inordinate need for one, heretofore never experienced.”

Cate's gaze fixed on his right hand as he tended hers. The cut, inflicted by Thomas’ blade, was now bound in a bit of rag from heavens knew where. “Your hand should be looked at.”

Nathan's mouth quivered with the effort to not smile. “It’s fine.”

While she knotted the cloth around her finger, Nathan collected the knives from the floor, depositing them in the basket. He stood back to regard her with an expectant fatherly look that she found altogether disquieting.

“Very well, let’s have it,” he finally said.

“You need to sit.”

One eye narrowed, thinking it to be a jest. A scowl came with the realization that she wasn’t.

“Very well.” In exaggerated steps, Nathan went to his chair and sat.

Cate stood over him, looking down. “I need you calm.”

“I am.”

“No, you’ve a fist, and your lip is doing that little thing it does whenever you’re upset.”

“I’m not upset, I’m—” Nathan checked himself then made a made a great show of opening both hands, and then strained to rearrange his face.

“You’re still tense.”

“I’m not—”

“Sit back and relax.”

“Goddamnit, I am relaxed. See!” Nathan drew back his lips into a smile that resembled a skull’s grimace.

Cate stood back, but on second thought, pulled Nathan's pistol from his belt. A defiant gaze fixed on her, he reached across the table to slide the sharp-edged objects away from her.

“Now, promise you’ll stay there.”

“I’m not a ruddy dog…oh, very well,” Nathan said over her objections. “Like the damned Number One anchor I’ll be. On to it, then.”

So overtly serene, Nathan was more a caricature and less at ease than ever. Cate took a deep breath. She had come this far; there was no turning back now.

“I need to beg a great favor.”

The false smile faltered and Nathan blinked, thinking there was a trick in there somewhere. “I’ve bid you welcome to anything you desire,” he said with measured caution.

Cate surreptitiously crossed her fingers in the folds of her skirts. “Yes, well, in that spirit…I wish to go fetch Prudence.”

“What!” Nathan launched to his feet. “What the goddamned hell…? Are you trying to put me in an early grave?”

Her glare reminded Nathan of his pledge, and he sat heavily. He exhaled through his nose several times, and then scrubbed his hands tiredly over his face.

“Explain to me
again
, why we should be so all-fired concerned with this girl? Arranged marriages happen all the time. Why are you so fixated on this one?”

“I’ve told you.” Unable to stand still, Cate set to stalking the cabin. “There’s something about Prudence. I can’t leave her to a hopeless marriage with a—”

“Bastard,” Nathan finished, shrugging a half-apology. He leaned back in his chair and drew his fingers down the curve of his mustache. “Aren’t you being a tad over-dramatic?”

“No.” She paced the gallery. “Well, maybe a little. I sympathize.”

His frown deepened. “I thought you said your marriage wasn’t arranged.”

“It wasn’t—sort of. We probably would have married…eventually…if Brian’s uncle would have allowed it.”

“Then what has all this have to do with anything?”

“Her father, my father…Her family, my family…” she ended, lamely.

Nathan exhaled heavily and closed his eyes as he rubbed his forehead. “You’re not making any sense a-tall.”

“I had a particular friend in school—you recall me telling you about it the other day by the pool?”

He nodded.

“Her Uncle Naecel was the head of the Mackenzie clan, one of the biggest in the Highlands. It was through her that I came to live there. Marriages there are often arranged when the participants are very young. Mairi was six when she was promised to a cousin of the laird of the neighboring clan. There had been a border dispute of some kind or another, and she was part of the settlement.”

“Tangled webs.” Nathan rose and came around the table. “Here, I fear Defoe is not up to the task.”

Nathan gently pried a book from Cate’s hands, one that she had no idea of having picked it up, nor that she had been worrying it to the point of threatened destruction. He pulled a length of cord from his pocket and her heart sank, fearing another lesson was in the offing. Knot-tying lessons were always tedious, Nathan a dogged instructor. To her surprise, he left her to work it in her hands.

“You’ve no idea,” she went on grimly. “He was a monster: nearly thirty years older, and looked and smelled like an old bear. He lived in a house with his prize bull on one side and his bed on the other. He treated the livestock better than her, beat them less, too. Several of Brian’s uncles tried to intervene. Even Brian tried to bargain, and then outright threatened the man, but nothing helped. They found her frozen to death in the bottom of a burn. She had run away…again.”

Nathan considered for several moments from his chair, his expression growing grave.

“No, I’m not buying it.” He rose to circle her. “You’ve been at loose ends since Prudence was shipped, before, come to think on it. It’s not the ladyship, nor a churlish father, nor some damned arranged marriage something or other. It’s something else…”

Cate bristled, for no one liked their motivations questioned.

“It’s the kidnapping.” She drew back at her outburst. At first, she wanted to reject it out-of-hand, and yet at the same time, was relieved to have it off her chest.

“It’s wrong. I was uncomfortable with it from the first, especially for someone so young.”

“And how were we to have known that?” Nathan said, leaned against
Merdering Mary
’s barrel.

“You didn’t, but it doesn’t make the deed any less,” she said peevishly. “You have no idea what it’s like for a woman to be taken: the terror and cold dread, being frozen with fear of what’s to happen next.”

Nathan reached to seize her by the arm and turn her to face him. “But it wasn’t like that for you…was it?”

“The first time…well, both times, yes,” she said to the floor.

“
First
?”

“Oh, umm…” She sidled away.

Dammit!
It was the hazard of giving way to one’s emotions: the inadvertent inevitably tumbling out.

“I was taken once before, a year or so after we were married. Deserters…I was…It was…”

Cate's voice caught and she waved Nathan away, the handkerchief on her finger like a flag of truce.

“Here, at first, yes, I was scared beyond words.”

Weeks had passed, but the anguish was fresher than she had imagined. Her heart picked up that same pounding rate once more, and a cold sweat prickled her spine. That terror must have shown on her face, for Nathan came round to stand over her. So caught up in the emotions once more, she cringed.

“You were never in danger.” His voice quaked with fury.

“I know that.”

“No one was going to lay hands—”

“But I had no way of knowing that, did I,” Cate said levelly. “It was the
Ciara Morganse
, the dreaded Captain Nathan Blackthorne. Anyone would wish to escape,” she said, glancing toward the windows.

They had fought her first day aboard. Thinking Nathan sought to violate her, Cate had bitten him and tried to jump. It had been folly, but hindsight always came through a clearer lens.

“It was either stop you, or watch you kill yourself,” Nathan said, following her thoughts. He studied Cate, regret knitting his brows. “You were that afraid?”

She forced a smile. “Water over the decks, as you like to say.”

He was barely appeased.

“I didn’t object to the kidnapping at first,” she said, returning to her initial point. “Because I knew there was little danger. I knew I would be here to aid and protect, save whoever it was from what I had to endure.”

“Endure, eh?”

The glumness in Nathan’s voice caused her to stop.

“Please, I don’t mean to reproach you,” Cate pleaded. “You’re doing what you must. It’s me. I can’t…I can’t—”

“Bear to be brought so low,” he said, sinking further.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Not quite, but so very,
very
near,” he said, bitterly.

“I understand why you loathe Creswicke, and I am in fullest sympathy why you want to do everything in your power to make his life a misery.” God, she was making such a hash of this. “But I’m uncomfortable with—”

“Being drug down and obliged to wallow in the gutters with the rest of us.” Nathan thumped his fist on the brass back of the great gun. “And so this is what I’ve done: made you do what you wouldn’t else, until your conscience won’t allow you peace.”

“No, no, I don’t mean that it’s your fault,” Cate said, clutching his arm.

“Aye, but it is.” The walnut eyes were sharp with hurt. Nathan made a caustic noise. “Pirate, darling. Not much more to be said. It’s what I am. It’s not a pretty world, but ’tis the hand I’ve been dealt, and by the Great Lucifer’s horns and tail, I’ll do what I must.”

Nathan's shoulder slumped. He raised a hand and dropped it to his side in surrender. “But you…you didn’t choose this. You don’t deserve…this…”

He moved to the window and stared out. “I should have gotten you away from all this,” he said, more to himself. He looked over his shoulder toward her. “You tried and…”

Nathan clamped his lower lip between his teeth and shook his head with a rustle of bells.

“I said I wanted to stay,” she said evenly.

“You should be where it’s…”

“I’m where I want to be.” Fears began to rise that he meant to send her away. “And I’ll suffer anything to…” Cate checked herself, for she was on the verge of making a confession which no one wanted to hear. “You declare yourself guilty of allowing me to be where I desired? That’s a strange Court of Justice your running, Captain Blackthorne.”

Cate touched Nathan's arm and gazed earnestly up into the dark, troubled eyes. “I’m exactly where I want. There is no place else.”

Nathan smiled faintly, somewhat appeased.

He shook off his mood to say, “But Prudence is back, safe and sound amid the fold once more. You should be skylarking in the rigging with joy. Instead, you’re skulking about like we’d just sent her to Jones’ Locker.”

“I have to help her.”

Nathan slumped in his chair and propped his head in his hand. “You’re making no sense a-tall.”

“You know Creswicke better than I. Can you honestly say you’re comfortable with leaving her to a man like him?”

Nathan shrugged, looking off. “I can sleep with it.”

“Well, I can’t.”

Looking up, he smiled crookedly. “So you propose to right the wrong, by doing another wrong, to save her for her own good from something which she might well desire to do. You’ve been tying too many knots, darling. That’s positively convoluted; it has as more turns in it than a Spanish bo’lin.”

“I’m not talking about taking her again, but what’s so wrong with allowing her a choice?”

Nathan rolled his eyes to the beams overhead and said under his breath, “Where have I heard that before?”

Cate winced. A few days earlier, she had indeed uttered those same words in the fervor of offering a different kind of plea on the girl’s behalf.

“You think I’m as half-crazed and misguided now as I was then?”

Nathan regarded her balefully. “’Tis but a strake one way or t’other.”

Heaving a sigh, Nathan closed his eyes like a man commending himself to the gallows. “So put a name to what’s in your mind.”

“I have no idea.”

With an exasperated gasp, Nathan buried his face in his hands.

“Well, have you always gone into every action, with your every move planned to the letter?” Cate demanded defensively.

“Of course!” Both knew that to be a blatant exaggeration. “A man without a plan is a man what plans to fail, or get himself killed, as the case might be. Be warned, you darling, best intentions are often not appreciated. They can be a sour fruit.”

Cate dropped into a chair, tiredly rubbing her temple against a headache, which for a week seemed to have taken up a permanent residence. “All I know is I shan’t be able to live with myself, unless I’ve at least tried to do something.”

“Fancy it will allow you to sleep, do you?” Nathan asked. “Allow me to be so bold as to say it will help precious little. I don’t expect a place in line at St. Peter’s gate all for the cause of a few ‘I’m sorry’s’ But for you.” The walnut eyes grew gentle. “For you there shall be a golden pass, for there is no badness and you shall go to the front of the line. I’ll put in a word, if you like, should you think it might help, but mum might be best, all things considered.”

Another crooked smile appeared; the one which came with uncertainty. The sight of it tugged her heart, as it was meant to do. It was one more coin in the price of being with him.

Nathan narrowed an accusing eye. “Putting the curse of your perpetual happiness on my shoulders, eh? Bloody heavy burden, that one. Could haunt me the rest of me days.”

Drumming his fingers on the table, Nathan slammed the flat of his hand. “Oh, very well. Deliver me from well-meaning, good-hearted, meddlesome women. They don’t call me Daft Nathan for nothing. I just hope they don’t call me Dead Nathan.”

###

The late afternoon shadows of the trees crawled like fingers across the stilling water, as the
Morganse
slipped into the back bay of Hopetown. Under jibs and staysails, she passed through the reef and stood in with a familiarity that almost rendered the lead lines a formality. Cate paced the forecastle while the longboat was roused over the side, for only one would be going ashore. To be there and gone before even the fish took notice was the plan.