And far away on a ship about to make harbor in an American port—a ship with a Dutch name hastily painted on to obliterate the name Dolphin on her hull—a woman whose hair gleamed like a fox’s brush in the late afternoon sun held her little reddish-colored Pomeranian close to her tawny velvet breast and leaned over and murmured in French:
“She is too beautiful, is she not, mon ami? We will not tell him about her after all. We will let her stay on her island... forever.”
She gave a little tinkling laugh and the Pomeranian, sighting port, began to bark.
His lustrous mistress held him in one relaxed arm and began to smooth her tawny velvet skirts and to adjust her broad-brimmed hat, afloat with orange plumes, with the other.
The man who would be waiting for her on the dock was all that any woman could ask for. He would ask her bluntly what she had learned—about the girl.
And she would answer blithely—with a lie.
BOOK I
Destiny’s Daughter
Daughter of destiny, daughter of fate,
Daughter of passion, daughter of hate,
Daughter to whom the world must bow,
Claim your birthright—do it now!
Part One
The Bride In Red Slippers
All that I ask of heaven,
All that I ask of life,
Is that you hold me first in your heart,
Take me and make me your wife!
Aboard The Dame Fortune
Late September 1673
Chapter 1
Something brushed her bare leg and Anna stirred in her sleep. A frown creased her smooth young forehead and her head with its great cloud of burnished gold hair moved restlessly on her pillow. She had been smiling in her sleep, for she had been dreaming that she was still in Bermuda, still mistress of the great plantation of Mirabelle with half the island lads dancing attendance on her every whim. Now as she fought her way up from that dream, she decided drowsily that it must be Coral who had wakened her, for the big tortoiseshell cat often leaped in through the open jalousied window beside her bed, sprang onto the embroidered blue and white French coverlet and curled up purring beside her.
Still half asleep she reached out to stroke Coral’s soft thick fur. And it came to her, vaguely penetrating her subconscious, that something was wrong.
Slowly her fingers stiffened and her hand went rigid, for what she was touching now was not fur. Neither was it the fine imported linen of the sheets or the embroidery of the coverlet at Mirabelle.
Her hand was wandering along warm bare skin, and beneath that smooth skin were rippling muscles, hard and resilient. It came to Anna with a shock that snapped her turquoise eyes wide open that her hand was idly caressing a man’s lean buttock. That sudden realization made her jerk away with a gasp and simultaneously sit up in bed to stare wildly about her.
A naked man was lying beside her! A well-built, broad-shouldered man with a thick shock of dark hair that fell to his shoulders. Her startled gaze traced the rippling flow of his mighty back muscles, his lean torso, the fluid lines of his narrow hips and long legs as he lay on his side beside her, relaxed in sleep. And she was naked too!
But hardly had that gasp cleared her lips before she realized where she was.
This narrow bunk in its small cabin setting bore no resemblance to the square featherbed four-poster of her big airy bedroom at Mirabelle—or at least the bedroom that had been hers until her foster father’s new wife had booted her out of it and reduced her to sleeping in a nearly airless closet off the kitchen, which she was forced to share with the cook! She was not even in Bermuda but on a ship headed north and west toward an American port. Mirabelle was no longer her home—and now it never would be. When Papa Jamison had died, Bernice had snatched it away, along with her clothes and her jewels. She could never go back. Everything had changed for her—even her name. She was no longer Anna Smith, belle of the islands, as she had been when Papa Jamison was alive. Nor was she, as she had been this past summer, Anna Smith, bondwoman and outcast—she was Anna Danforth now!
And this long form beside her, looking suddenly so formidable and unfamiliar in the silver wash of moonlight that lit the ship’s cabin—this was her bridegroom, Brett Danforth, the man she had met but last night when he had saved her from her attackers on St. George’s brawling waterfront—and married in haste this afternoon.
And what an afternoon it had been! With Brett suddenly, mysteriously, producing a special license and rushing her through a hurried ceremony in white lime-washed St. Peter’s Church, with its lighthouselike square belfry, that church where she had once dreamed of walking down the aisle a stately bride with all Bermuda’s gentry agog at the grandeur of the wedding procession—not scurrying down it as she had in a makeshift gown! And seeing plain in the minister’s eyes his disapproval of the whole proceeding!
They had come out of the dim coolness of the church into the blazing afternoon sunlight, their little wedding party of four—no three, for Brett had lagged behind to pay the minister. Around them the sleepy little port town of St. George lazed as it did on any hot afternoon. Only to Anna it had all looked different suddenly—for she had realized with a sense of shock that she was leaving it. Forever.
She had stood there uncertainly in her makeshift wedding gown of pale yellow voile, and reached up to adjust her wedding circlet. It was not the handsome circlet of seed pearls she had imagined for herself, but a circlet of pink Chain of Love blossoms snatched up from the roadside and hastily woven by her best friend. Sue Waite, on the way to the church. Taffy-haired Sue, always strongly affected by weddings, was crying and hugging her—and then giggling through her tears when Anna confided that the yellow voile dress was practically the only one of her gowns that Bernice had not yet altered to fit her own daughters, and that she had slipped into the unlocked house at Mirabelle only this morning and snatched the dress and the lemon satin petticoat over which it was now draped, and the very chemise she had on plus another, and three pairs of slippers, which were sizes too small for Mirabelle’s new occupants and which Bernice had already bagged for shipment to Boston or some other place for sale! Sue had hooted at that and they had both laughed over Anna’s unbridelike scarlet slippers that poked out from under the lemon satin petticoat.
“To think that’s all you have left out of that huge closet of lovely clothes Tobias Jamison bought you,” Sue had sighed. “And your pearls and your coral jewelry and all your other lovely things—it doesn’t seem fair that Bernice and her daughters should have all that and you should have nothing!” Sue’s sweet face reflected her indignation.
“Oh, it isn’t fair,” laughed Anna—for this was her wedding day and she felt at that moment that all the bad times, the dreadful times, were behind her and that from this day forward the sun would always shine. “But never say that I have nothing! I have Brett now and”—her voice broke a little with emotion—“with him I come first. Sue. It’s all I ever asked of life.”
“Oh, Anna, I’m so glad for you!” Impulsively Sue kissed her friend’s flushed cheek. “I do so hope you’ll be happy in America.”
“I will,” declared Anna confidently. “And I’ll make Brett happy too.” Her turquoise eyes held a soft promising glow that made Sue swallow as she pressed her friend’s hand. Sue only hoped that she and Lance would be as happy when they got married, and she said so.
And then Brett had joined them, striding tall and confident out of the church. And Lance was shaking his hand and clapping him on the shoulder in congratulation and saying they’d have time to clink a glass at a tavern down the street before the bridal couple sailed!
And so the afternoon had gone, and on the dock Sue had hugged her again and promised Anna faithfully to take care of Coral, Anna’s big tortoiseshell cat she’d had to leave behind at Mirabelle. Lance, who had been Anna’s suitor in the days when she was an heiress and could finance the stables he dreamed someday of having, but whose affections had shifted easily to Sue, who loved
him, had crowded forward to wish her well too. But she could see in his gloomy face that he was seeing trouble ahead—trouble with Arthur Kincaid, to whom this marriage would come as a shock that would rock the islands, for Arthur had never meant to let her go....
All of this flashed through Anna’s mind as her startled gaze traced the contours of this long lean naked form beside her.
This was her husband, Brett.
For a wild moment he had seemed a stranger.
Now she relaxed and a smile curved her soft mouth as she remembered what it had been like with Brett last night, that first night before the wedding bells had even pealed, that breathless night that he had come ashore from a ship in the harbor—this very vessel, the Dame Fortune—and saved her from two stout freebooters who were in the very act of kidnapping her for who knew what evil purpose. Brett, with his arrogant stride and his easy way with women, who had introduced her to the wonders of love on a moonlit beach in Bermuda—and when she had run away from him, believing him false, it was Brett who had arrived just in time to save her from Arthur Kincaid’s wrath the next day.
Her eyes gleamed as she envisioned the scene as it had been: Arthur confronting her with his whip, Arthur dragging her from her horse, Arthur shouting at Brett as he thundered up that he was but chastening his bondwoman as he had every right to do—and, indeed, in the tangled skein she had made of her life, Anna had briefly been his bondwoman. But Brett had cared nothing for that!
Now Anna thrilled at the memory of Brett’s sword flashing silver in the sun. How recklessly he had flung himself at Arthur, throwing himself forward into the whip even as Arthur brought it down! Anna had nearly fainted at the sight of Brett allowing that long murderous whip to wrap around him, certain that Arthur would bring him to the ground and cut him to pieces. Instead Brett had jerked a surprised Arthur off his feet by that very whip. Leaping forward he had held the point of his blade to Arthur’s throat in the dust and made him sign over—for golden coins contemptuously flung—the rights to Anna’s Articles of Indenture and a bill of sale for Floss, Anna’s beautiful silver mare that Arthur had threatened to kill if she would not go with him to Boston.
Anna’s gaze turned caressing. Surely all her dreams had been answered in this mighty lover, who had sailed out of nowhere to break her bonds and carry her away with him to an unknown future.
Her heart had asked no questions, nor did it now.
Brett was turning over restlessly now, again his lean leg brushed her. He was muttering in his sleep and Anna leaned closer to hear him. It was incoherent at first, then it sounded vaguely like “... find a way to keep it from her.” Anna frowned. “She need never know,” he muttered. And again, more forcefully, as if he were trying to convince himself, “She need never know."
Unaccountably, those muttered words struck cold fear into Anna’s heart. Something he had said this afternoon, before he took her to bed this night, came back to haunt her: I came to Bermuda to marry Anna Smith—only I was under the impression at the time that she was the heiress to Mirabelle.
He had come to Bermuda to marry an heiress, a girl he had never seen.
But—somewhere along the way he had changed his mind. For he had married her, Anna Smith, fortune or no, had he not? Even though she had lost Mirabelle to Bernice’s conniving and had no hope of ever getting it back? That meant Brett loved her, didn’t it?
So why, then, as she stared at him, lying prone and naked beside her in the warm cabin with the moonlight silvering the long clean lines of his lean body, should she feel so unaccountably afraid? Why had those mumbled words seemed suddenly so cold, so forbidding?
In that moment it came to Anna with force that she had married a man she scarcely knew. A stranger.
Instinctively she moved away from him a few inches and as she did he turned and woke. His gray eyes flickered open and he was instantly fully awake—in the manner of men such as he, she would come to realize. For Brett Danforth was a man whose life had often depended on the length of his sword—and his ability to wield it against odds. He was a man accustomed to danger and to trouble—and accustomed to facing them both frontally without flinching or regret.
Those keen gray eyes were studying her young face in the moonlight.
“You look frightened,” he observed. “Is something wrong?”
“No. You—you were talking in your sleep,” she murmured, embarrassed. And looked swiftly away from his naked form.
Brett quirked an eyebrow at her, and his rakish expression well hid the sudden tremor of alarm that went through him—for what might he not have said in his sleep? Words too harsh for the ears of this tender young thing who had entrusted her future to him?
“And what did I say? In my sleep?” he drawled, reaching out a lazy arm to seize her smooth naked hips and pull her down toward him across the sheets.
“Nothing,” murmured Anna in a choked voice, for the feel of his strong gentle fingers on the silky skin of her hips, the slight rasping of the sheets along her thighs and buttocks and back, the embarrassing fact that she was naked in the probing moonlight, all combined to make her senses swim. She was new to passion, for but last night she had been a virgin, and it seemed to her alarming that this man’s very touch should be a sweet fire that reduced her to hot instant confusion. Against her will, for at that moment she wanted desperately to keep cool and judge him, she felt her resolve melting under the very bombardment of his masculinity.
“Are you sure?” His warm lips passed caressingly over her trembling satin-smooth stomach as he dragged her body inexorably downward, and now his lips moved up tinglingly over the delicate white skin of her round breasts, upward over her pale heaving bosom and along the pulsing column of her throat. His level gray eyes were even with hers now, and her own turquoise eyes were wide and the pupils were dilated and dark, for she was suddenly—in spite of the intense physical attraction that almost overpowered her—unsure of him. He was grinning into her face, his strong teeth flashing white in the moonlight. “Perhaps I called out another woman’s name in my sleep?” he hazarded in a teasing voice.
“No.” She could feel a hot flush rise to her cheeks and she squirmed in his arms as his expert hands roved lightly, teasingly over her resilient young body, so unused to the ways of men. She gasped as his fingers teased a pink nipple to hardness, then danced as if he were playing a scale on the harpsichord to her other breast and tweaked that nipple to hardness as well.
“What, then?” That easy grasp refused to let her go. He gave the silky hair at the base of her hips a light chiding tweak and Anna felt her tense body give an involuntary jerk. “Come now,” he demanded, “What did I say in my sleep that upset you?”
“You said”— Anna told him breathlessly, slapping at his hand and hearing him chuckle—“you said something about—about 'keeping it from her'—whatever that meant.”
Did she detect a sudden stillness in his body? An abrupt hardening of that sardonic expression? The moonlight was treacherous—she could not tell. Certainly she could not fault the lazy voice that answered her.
“Ah, then I know what it must have been,” he said suavely. “I must keep it from her—the knowledge that I love her so much, lest she use her power to bend me to her will.” He bent his head to nuzzle her bare breasts.
Easy liar, she thought warily, trying to hold him off, for his touch was wickedly seductive and it was her own will that she could feel bending! “How do I know you love me so much as all that?” she challenged.
His head rose and he shook back his dark hair with a grin. Heavy strands of it slid across her breasts and she could feel her breath shorten.
“Does not your common sense tell you? Did I not pursue you like a schoolboy?”
No, she thought, even as white fire pulsed through her veins as his hips moved subtly against hers. You pursued me ruthlessly, like a man intent on his quarry. And why, Brett? Why me?
“Hold still,” he instructed mildly, cradling her in one hardmuscled arm. “Tell m
e what you’re thinking.”
His hawklike face, so hard and masculine, was very near. His dark hair fell across her bare white shoulder and mingled with her own burnished gold hair on the pillow. His very nearness half suffocated her and made her breathless but—tell him what she was thinking? Never!
For she was thinking that perhaps she should not have married him, this man who had swept into her life like a whirlwind, changing everything. Perhaps she should have waited. Known him better. What matter that she had surrendered herself to him on a windswept beach on a night of sighs and promises unspoken? She had felt so secure then in his arms, so sure of herself—and of him. Why could she not feel that way now? Why should she waver?
“Come now,” he prodded gently. “What were you thinking? I cannot have you look so troubled.”
“I was thinking,” she improvised, “that Mirabelle was mine—until Bernice tricked me out of it. It was the only real home I’ve ever known. And now I’ll never see it again.” There, there was a grain of truth in that!
Something lost and forlorn in her young voice reached out to him and his strong arm tightened about her. “You’ll have a new home, Anna,” he promised her huskily. “With me.” He was holding her closer now, closer, her body curved to his broad chest, conforming to his flat stomach and hips. His caresses grew ever more insistent, luring her along inviting lovers' paths—but still she hesitated.
“Will I be happy there, Brett?” she asked in a troubled voice. For now abruptly all that had seemed so sure this afternoon seemed less than sure—nothing seemed certain.
“Yes,” he assured her firmly. “You will be happy there. It is where you belong.”
“Where I belong?’’ she whispered.
Rich Radiant Love Page 6