The Pirate Bride

by Shannon Drake

  And more barrels. He waded out deeper to retrieve the one floating closest. It had been staved in, he quickly realized, and was worthless.

  He looked back toward Red again. She was up, a hand shielding her eyes from the sun as she, too, looked out to the deeper water. As he watched, she began to wade out, as he had been doing.

  He didn’t know what she had seen that had so drawn her attention. He started sloshing through the water to reach her position.

  She stood stock-still. And then a cry escaped her, a cry so startled and shrill that his heart thundered.

  “Red!”

  He raced to reach her.

  As he ran, he saw what had drawn her attention.

  A man.

  A man floating facedown in the water.

  His sea-darkened hair was red, and he wore a coat similar to the one Brendan usually wore.

  She was standing frozen in horror, so he stepped forward and, his heart in his throat, turned the body over.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THERE WAS A new ship in the harbor.

  Using her spyglass, Sonya could see that it had taken some weather damage; men were even now busy repairing the mast.

  There had been a storm; they’d seen it out at sea. But it hadn’t taken a swipe at New Providence, and she was glad. It seemed to have taken a northeasterly path, perhaps cutting across Cuba and following the North American coast. She hoped it hadn’t sunk Red Robert’s Eagle.

  All right, so she had taken some coins to betray Red Robert. This was a pirate island, after all, and in her own way, she was a pirate, too. It hadn’t been personal. She had needed the money. And it had ended well, in any case.

  But since the Eagle had sailed, she had been worried. She liked Red Robert, effeminate fop though he might be, but she had long had an ache in her heart for Haggerty. He lived within the law, but he seemed to understand those who were often forced to live on the other side of it. He was a man who abhorred violence, but he wasn’t afraid of a fight. And when his eyes flashed with humor, she melted.

  Even if he never wanted one of her girls. Or her.

  She was jolted out of her thoughts when Blair Colm walked into the tavern.

  It had been a slow morning. Though the storm had sent many a ship to this safe harbor for repair, the men had no time to go drinking. The able-bodied were busy at their work, sewing canvas, obeying the commands of the carpenters. The injured would be nursing their wounds, with the ships’ physicians and even barbers sewing up flesh wounds and setting smashed limbs, or removing those that couldn’t be saved.

  Colm stared at her for a long while before speaking. He had been in before, and she took his money. After all, it spent just the same as anyone else’s. But she had always hated the man, who was considered a monster by some and a hero by others.

  She, for one, found it all too easy to believe the rumors that swirled about the man.

  Rumors such as the one that said he had killed children by swinging them around by their heels and cracking their skulls open on rocks.

  She felt a sudden wave of guilt. Red Robert might be effeminate, but the pirate had never been anything but decent to her. And she had betrayed him, knowing all the while that it was in the service of Blair Colm. True, the bald man had offered her a fine sum of money just to discover that Robert had left, and in what direction.

  She had to survive, didn’t she?

  But she had known, deep down inside, that something evil was afoot, with a monster like Blair Colm seeking out Red Robert.

  And she had taken the coins anyway.

  “Sonya!”

  She looked up.

  “Captain Blair.”

  “Sir Captain Blair,” he reminded her.

  “Sir Captain Blair,” she parroted.

  “I’ll have the private room, and your finest wench. No one old or worn out.” He looked her up and down, to be sure she didn’t miss the point that his insult had been directed specifically to her.

  She only smiled and said, “As you wish.”

  “And your best rum. None of that rotgut you serve the drunkards.”

  “As you wish,” she said again.

  He still didn’t move. She was dimly aware that the bar boys in the back had suddenly developed loose fingers and were dropping things. Blair Colm created such an atmosphere. He’d been known to backhand a lad or two for spilling a drop of rum.

  “The room is yours, Sir Captain Blair,” she said, hoping he would wait there for whatever poor girl she chose for him.

  “You will join me.”

  She started. She was glad to be older and worn out when he was about.

  “Aye?”

  He let out something like a sniff. “I need information.”

  “I have no information.”

  “I believe you do.”

  He departed for the room. She rose slowly, afraid not to follow. He’d not been kind to women who dissented, either.

  She followed him in. “I can’t see to your rum and services if I’m here,” she said.

  He took a seat against the wall. “Sit,” he ordered her.

  She sat with alacrity.

  “Where did they go?” he demanded.

  She stared at him, her mind genuinely blank. He was a big man. Muscular. But his features were sharp and vulpine. His hair and eyes were dark. He was English, but he had the look of a Spaniard. There was a sense of cruelty about the man, maybe in the very narrowness of his features, maybe in the way he moved, and maybe in those hellish dark eyes.

  “They?”

  “Red Robert and his crew.”

  “Oh. Yes, they were here, just before the storm,” she said.

  Blair Colm suddenly moved forward. It was the striking motion of a snake.

  “Red Robert is coming after me, but that storm will hold him up.”

  “You tried to have him killed. Here,” she said softly, guilt settling over her like a dark cloud.

  He waved a hand dismissively. “I didn’t try to have anyone killed. That wouldn’t be honorable, now would it?” he asked quietly.

  He was lying through his teeth, and they both knew it. She hated the man. All she wanted was to get away.

  “They sailed out. They didn’t say where they were heading.”

  Before she knew it, he was on his feet, holding her by the hair in front of him. “Red Robert took a ship before he got here and is traveling with a captive.”

  “Yes!” she cried out. He had her dead against him. She could feel strands of hair tearing from her scalp. Her heart was thundering.

  She could scream, but she knew no one would come.

  “The captive is Lord Haggerty,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said again, and this time the word was a whimper. She had always thought herself hardened, inside and out. She had seen so much. She had slept with more men than most women ever knew. She despised them, as they despised her.

  But now she was afraid.

  He stared at her hard. “They are coming after me. Together. They are hunting me.”

  “I know nothing of that!” she insisted, frantic. “Think! Would they discuss their business with the likes of me?”

  He leaned closer, eyes peering into hers. “Many men speak to you, wench.”

  What the hell did he want her to say?

  “Perhaps they are seeking you out. I don’t know. They sailed into the storm—they’re probably all dead. Let me go!”

  “Not yet. Now, the real question. Who is Red Robert?”

  “What?”

  Another jerk on her hair. Pain shot through her skull. Tears pooled in her eyes.

  “Red Robert is…Red Robert,” she said, tears of fear and pain springing to her eyes.

  “Liar!”

  She found herself flung onto the table. He was quickly on top of her. “The truth! I’ll have the truth.”

  “I don’t know! I swear to God, I don’t know!” He was straddling her, and she knew fighting back was foolish, but she couldn’t help herself.r />
  She spat at him.

  She should have expected it. He slapped her with a vengeance that knocked her unconscious, though for far too short a time.

  She vaguely felt him rise, felt him shuffle her skirt out of his way. Too weak to fight, too groggy even to protest, she simply turned away. She never said a word.

  And when he was done, he dropped a coin on the table as he casually straightened his breeches. “Who does know?”

  “Bend down, kiss your arse and die,” she managed to respond.

  She was ready for the next blow. It was worth it.

  “I’ll find Teach and ask him,” he said.

  She laughed, not bothering to rise. “By all means, find him,” she suggested. “He’ll help you bend over, kiss your arse and die.”

  One last blow and he was gone.

  Not even then did she burst into tears.

  She told herself that she was too hard, but in reality she was simply too numb.

  When she finally rose, she went to talk with her girls, and she told them that he had the littlest penis she’d ever seen and couldn’t keep hard long enough to finish.

  The girls would talk. It would be all over the island.

  She began praying that Red Robert would find him on the high seas.

  And that Robert did indeed intend to kill him.

  LOGAN HESITATED, but they had to know the truth, one way or the other.

  The dead man was floating facedown.

  Red stared at the corpse, stricken, as he had never imagined she might be. Brave pirate, brave actress. She loved her cousin. She looked unbelievably fragile and vulnerable now, and he was afraid himself. He didn’t want to turn the body over, because he felt helpless in the face of her obvious distress.

  He swallowed hard. One lesson life had taught him: face all demons. Nothing could change what was, and acceptance allowed you to move on.

  He turned the body over.

  She gasped, and stepped back shaking.

  It wasn’t Brendan but some other poor soul. The fish had already been nibbling at his nose, and he was a pathetic and dreadful sight.

  But he wasn’t Brendan.

  Logan reached out to Red to steady her. And for a moment, she leaned on his strength. Then she pulled away, as if furious with him. But she wasn’t angry with him, and he knew it. She was angry with herself. Red Robert, who had mastered her act so long ago, was ruing her own show of weakness.

  But the sight of the corpse was a horrible one. The corpse had bloated in the water, and now he had the macabre appearance of something unreal, something that had never been human.

  “I’ll bury him,” he said curtly.

  “He—he isn’t one of ours,” she whispered.

  “Whoever he is, he deserves a decent burial.” He didn’t add that a rotting corpse on the beach would create a horrible miasma. He turned, pulling the corpse through the shallows as he paralleled the beach. She was still for a moment; then he heard a splashing behind him as she followed to help.

  He dragged the body up to a cluster of palm trees far above the water.

  He didn’t want high tide undoing his work.

  He still hadn’t found any tools, but a broken coconut made a crude scoop. Fifteen minutes later, when he was already dripping with sweat from the effort of working with so small a tool, he looked over and saw that she had gone back down the beach to discover a large silver soup tureen, which made a much better scoop, and had started digging alongside him.

  “Let me,” he said.

  She was working vigorously and didn’t even look up at him. She shook her head, intent on her task. She worked almost as if she were in a frenzy, burning her strength. He let her, certain she was trying to allay her fear that although the body they had found was not Brendan, the crew of her ship might have met a similar fate. When he was certain she had burned away most of her emotion, he stepped forward again, reaching for the silver tureen, forcing her to look at him. “You’ve done more in a matter of minutes than I did in twenty. Let me finish,” he said gently.

  She stared at him, blinked, lowered her head and nodded at last.

  The tureen was a big help. His shoulders and back ached, but in the end, he managed a deep-enough grave. He pulled the man in and was ready to drop the sand back over him when she stopped him.

  “Wait.”

  “Yes?” he said, and eyed her expectantly.

  “Don’t you…know a few words to say?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “You’re a captain.”

  “So are you.”

  “I’ve never lost a crew member,” she said proudly.

  “Neither have I,” he informed her.

  “But you—”

  “I what?”

  “You still believe in God,” she said flatly.

  He looked at her for a moment. So do you, he wanted to tell her, but something in her eyes told him to keep the words inside.

  “Father, accept the soul of this, thy servant,” he said instead, and crossed himself.

  “And may ye be in heaven an hour before the devil knows ye’re dead!” she said, and did likewise.

  Strange prayer for a man who was already dead.

  “Amen,” he said, and she turned away.

  Scooping the sand back on wasn’t half as hard as digging it out. He was done in a matter of minutes. To his surprise, she had fashioned a cross out of palm fronds, and when he had finished, she set it into the sand covering the body.

  “It won’t stay, you know,” he said gently.

  “Ah, but it’s there for the journey,” she replied.

  She turned away and started walking back down the beach. As she left, he felt his stomach rumble. Without the labor to take his mind off things, his body was reminding him that they hadn’t eaten.

  Well, if nothing else, there were coconuts. And rum.

  But hunger didn’t seem to be plaguing Red yet, as she examined the flotsam that continued to wash up on the beach. He followed her, collecting timber, then shouted out with triumph, seeing what appeared to be a chest of carpenter’s tools next to a broken crate.

  “Aha!”

  “What?” she cried, startled and clearly afraid of what he might have found.

  He was already down on his knees beside the chest, pounding at the lock with a sharp stone. When it split apart in his hand, he didn’t care, he just picked up another one and resumed his efforts.

  Finally the ring holding the lock in place gave, and he looked up at her, smiling in triumph, feeling as if he had just stumbled on a cache of gold doubloons.

  “Nails! We have nails. And a hammer, a lathe…and a leather needle…!”

  She didn’t respond with the same enthusiasm.

  “What?” he asked her.

  “It’s not…ours, is it?” she whispered.

  He sat back on his haunches. “There are no markings,” he told her.

  She let out a sigh. “Ours had initials. It isn’t ours.”

  “There’s been nothing on this beach to suggest that the Eagle broke up,” he assured her.

  She looked reassured, at least for the moment.

  “All right, take the chest,” he said.

  “Me?”

  “Unless you want to carry the lumber?”

  “And where are we going?” she demanded.

  He rose and looked around, then pointed out a place a good twenty yards farther inland and a good hundred yards to the east of their hasty cemetery. Palm trees surrounded a glade where their shade had kept the earth barren of brush and scrub.

  “Come on, let’s go,” he said.

  “I’m the captain here,” she insisted.

  “Fine. You build the shelter.”

  “I am willing for you to be the carpenter.”

  “Ah. And were you going to sit somewhere on your arse while I worked?” he demanded. “That’s no captain’s privilege, not on a pirate ship.”

  “No, I was simply…setting the record straight.”

&
nbsp; “Let’s move.”

  “You are still my prisoner.”

  “Indeed? Well, I’m a hungry prisoner who knows that night will come. And that it may rain again. And I’d like to get a shelter rigged up. So I hope you’ll excuse me if I don’t pretend I’m in chains and you’re wearing a brace of pistols.”

  She picked up the chest of tools and started ahead of him, then stepped back and watched while he plotted the strength of the trees and their position. He quickly set forth flattening his chosen ground and mentally drawing the dimensions of the abode he intended to erect, and then got started with timber and nails, creating a frame. He couldn’t have been happier with his find.

  He realized she was missing at one point and began cursing beneath his breath. Had she gone from being a pirate to a princess?

  But as he turned to head back to the beach to look for her, he heard the sound of something being dragged along the sand.

  She was bringing back a huge mass of canvas.

  A sail from the broken ship that had given them both the cargo and the corpse.

  Tugging the canvas, she looked slim and frail. And yet he realized that though she was slim, she was well-muscled, and that all her pretending and parading as a pirate had certainly given her an excellent physique. But she was tiring, so he hurried forward to help.

  “I thought we might be in need of a roof,” she said dryly.

  “I had certainly planned on one,” he said. “But palm fronds would have sufficed.”

  “Canvas will be better.”

  “I agree.”

  She actually smiled.

  “So you admit I’ve been helpful,” she said.

  The canvas was heavy. He had to admit it: he was impressed that she had lugged it so far. “I’m going to take part of it up that tree to get leverage, then drag it over the frame. I’ll need your help, handing it up to me.”

  “Aye, aye,” she said, but she looked irritated.

  “What?”

  She didn’t say anything, just pushed the canvas toward him. With the first side done, he had to climb down, then shimmy up a farther tree, so he could lean out across the frame and pull the canvas over and down. He just managed not to let her see that he nearly fell during the effort. The near miss sobered him. It was one thing to be stranded on the island. It would be quite another to be stranded there with a broken leg.