Patrick stepped up beside her. He’d been hovering since her return, as had Morgan and Thomas. Her triumvirate of protectors.
He rolled a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth but didn’t light it.
“Do you ever actually smoke those things?” she asked.
“Against the rules. Fire.”
“Ah.”
He pretended he was puffing on the unlit cigarette while he stared off into space. “What’s your family name, lassie?”
“MacKenzie.” Juliana leaned her elbows on the railing.
He turned to her with a look of surprise. “It’s a Scottish lass you are, is it?”
“A long time ago. My family’s been in the…colonies…for a few generations.” Actually, her ancestors were probably somewhere in Scotland at this very moment. Interesting. Maybe she could look them up when she returned to dry land and tell them she traveled backwards through the centuries to find them. She chuckled, but it wasn’t all that funny.
“Once a Scotsman, always a Scotsman,” the little man said.
They stood together in companionable silence for a time.
“How long have you known Morgan?” she finally asked.
“Well, let’s see.” Patrick gazed off toward the horizon. “I think I’ve known the lad about fifteen years now.” He nodded. “Yes, sounds ’bout right. Met him and Jane when they boarded the Megan Kelly.” He looked at the tip of his cigarette and chuckled. “She would be Lady Isabelle now. She pirated under the name Lady Jane, and a fiercer lass you’ll never again meet.”
“Sounds like a good story.”
A stern, nostalgic look crossed his face. “That it is, lass, that it is. Jane and Morgan sailed these waters for years. Feared, they were.” He straightened and threw his unlit cigarette over the railing. It fell end over end until the waves swallowed it up. “That’s all in the past now. Isabelle, she married Reed and became respectable. Pulled us all along with her too, she did.” He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe he was a respectable sailor. “Captain Morgan, he’s a good man.” He shot her a pointed look. “Had a hard life, he has. Deserves a good misses to warm his bed and give ’im bairns.”
Juliana laughed to cover her shock. Wed Morgan? No, she didn’t think so. She needed to get back to her time and Morgan wasn’t part of the twenty-first century. “You’re barking up the wrong tree there, Patrick.”
He gently patted her on the back. “I think not, lass. I think not.”
Morgan watched Patrick pat Juliana. She laughed at something he said and a wave of relief washed over Morgan. She was healing. He saw the physical side of it, but feared the mental may never happen. With that one laugh he’d been given hope. She still had her nightmares and he figured she would for a long time to come.
While he was happy to soothe her tortured soul, a part of him wanted her to call for Morgan when the nightmares became too much. Except it wasn’t Morgan she called. It was Zach and he found himself playing the role to quiet her nightmares.
The setting sun painted the sky lavenders and pinks. He inhaled the scent of saltwater and pushed the painful thoughts away. The whole world was stretched out before him, endless blue water that had healed his soul many a time. A seemingly never-ending sea that would be there long after he was gone.
“It’s a beautiful night.”
He looked down to find Juliana beside him. She stood so close the heat of her body warmed him and her scent drifted to him on the cool breeze. Her hair blew around her face, the last of the sun’s rays highlighting the blonde strands, making them appear silver.
Her gaze searched his before she rested her head against his upper arm.
They stood there for some time, silently communicating what they may never be able to put into words. After the light gave way to darkness, Juliana stood on her tiptoes and brushed his cheek with her lips. It was a quick kiss, a peck, but it stunned him nonetheless. For a moment he stood motionless, feeling the warmth of her lips against his cool cheek.
He pulled her closer, lowered his head and brushed his lips against hers. This is not a good idea. He blocked his mind from the thoughts. He didn’t care anymore. This was Juliana, the only woman he’d ever loved and damn it, he wanted to kiss her. He cupped her face, closed his eyes and tumbled back fifteen years to a time when the only troubles he had was a geometry test he hadn’t studied for.
Her breath caressed his neck. Her warmth surrounded him, drew him to her. She smelled of fresh sea air and woman. He was lost. Lost to a love he’d buried deep inside himself. To a love that had never gone away, never faded, never ebbed.
She was everything he remembered—warm and sweet, hot and demanding.
His hands slid down her face to her shoulders, her arms, and settled on her hips. He drew her closer until she rested between his thighs. Deep within he sighed, finally feeling complete. Juliana was here, she was his for now. She may not know it but he did and that was all that mattered in this moment. A memory to cherish, to take with him when she was gone.
Her arms wound around him. Her breasts pushed against his chest and he swallowed a groan of need. It could go no further than this, but for now he would cherish her as he hadn’t been able to for fifteen long years.
The shipped rocked, throwing them off balance, tearing her away from his arms. She stumbled back. He reached for her. Why did it seem as if everything conspired against them?
Her green eyes were wide and she covered her mouth with one hand. “Oh, wow.”
Morgan’s mind cleared and the full impact of his actions hit him. Oh, shit.
She reached a hand out, then let it fall to her side. “Morgan…I’m… That was. I kissed you as a way to say thank you. But I didn’t think…”
He ran a hand through his hair and swore silently. His gaze landed on her swollen lips. Lips that turned his world upside down fifteen years ago and again a few minutes ago. He shouldn’t have kissed her. Keeping his distance was becoming harder and harder but it was something he had to do. She had to go. He had to find somewhere safe for her to live when they reached London. Somewhere far from him where Barun would never find her. To stay would certainly kill her now that Barun was after her as well as him. Kissing her just made everything worse.
Her body stiffened and he knew she’d seen the regret in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “And thank you. For saving me.”
She turned and walked away, her back straight, her hands balled into fists at her side, and Morgan knew a whole different kind of hell.
Chapter Twelve
“Juliana, wake up.”
“Go ’way.” She swatted at the hand shaking her shoulder and snuggled into the covers.
“I want to show you something.”
The pillow was pulled off her head and she blinked. It wasn’t daylight, but the middle of the night and Zach wasn’t in her bed as she’d been dreaming. She scooted up. The bedsheets tangled between her legs and hiked her shirt up to her waist.
“What are you doing in my bed?” She’d been dreaming about Zach. Again. Ever since her ordeal with Barun she’d dreamt of Zach. Sometimes she thought she was going nuts. A slow slide into insanity that scared the hell out of her because she couldn’t tell reality from her dreams. Heck, she was living in the eighteenth century, maybe she was going insane.
“I want to show you something,” Morgan said.
“In the middle of the night?”
He pulled on her hand. “Come on.”
The tender look in his eyes and the smile on his face reminded her of Zach when he discovered something interesting and couldn’t wait to show her.
Maybe that's what confused her. At times Morgan reminded her so much of Zach it was scary. She touched his bare arm, felt warm skin. Alive skin. Morgan’s skin. Not Zach’s.
She scooted off the bed, pulling her shirt down at the same time. Morgan stood, his gaze going to her bare legs. Something flared in his eyes, a fire he quickly extinguished.
After
their kiss she saw the regret in his eyes. It hurt because she’d needed his touch, his understanding. She’d needed him. But as soon as the ship pulled them apart, he’d pulled away.
She grabbed a pair of pants and struggled into them while he didn’t even attempt to look away. When she finished fastening her pants—honestly, when would the zipper be invented?—he grabbed her hand, snagged the blankets off the bed and led her out the door toward the top deck—or the poop deck as she learned it was called.
He climbed into a tender, spread the blanket out and lay down, motioning for her to join him. She hesitated, but not for long. His regret may have hurt her feelings but he would never hurt her physically. She trusted him and he was all she had in this world. She lay beside him and stared up at the thousands of stars twinkling down on them.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” His soft voice drifted to her like silk caressing bare skin.
“Yes.” She breathed in the salty air and closed her eyes, letting her other senses take over.
“People living hundreds of years from now will look up and see the same stars we’re seeing now.”
She pictured herself on the porch of her apartment, looking at these stars. When she returned—if she returned—she’d never look at them the same again. Never see them without remembering Morgan. She felt a sudden, unexpected twinge of regret. She wanted to go home, but at the same time she didn’t want to leave Morgan behind. Yet it didn’t seem right bringing him to her time. This was where he belonged. He was born to this, knew only life in the eighteenth century and while she’d love to watch him experience the twenty-first century, it could never happened.
“They’re beautiful,” she murmured. “Thank you for showing me.”
The silence that followed was comforting. What she loved most about Morgan was he knew when she preferred quiet—which she preferred more than usual lately.
She was very aware that her ordeal with Barun scarred her. There were times when she wanted to tell Morgan everything, but she was embarrassed she allowed Barun that much power over her so she kept quiet.
Morgan rolled to his side and braced his head on his hand. “I brought you out here because I owe you an explanation. You deserve to know why Barun is after me and now you.”
Juliana held her breath. The knowing couldn’t change the past, but it would give her another glimpse of Morgan. It would allow her to understand, at least a little, what made him tick and what formed him into the man he’d become.
He studied a wrinkle in the blanket, plucked at it with his fingers. “I left my family when I was young. Seventeen.” He rolled onto his back, folded his hands over his chest and crossed his ankles. “At the time, I thought of myself as worldly. And stupid, but that’s an observation from hindsight.”
Juliana sympathized. After all, at seventeen she’d known it all too. Had believed everything in her life would turn out fine as long as she had Zach. In a way she’d been right. As soon as Zach left, everything had gone to hell.
“I met Isabelle in Boston. She was sailing to her aunt in London and I was working on the ship for food in my belly and a pillow under my head. Our ship was attacked by pirates a few weeks into the voyage. It was over faster than it started and the pirate captain left enough provisions for us to return to Boston. He took everything else though.”
Morgan’s first glimpse of pirating hadn’t been so much frightening as intoxicating. He’d heard stories, of course, and knew there was money to be made in pirating. More money than he would ever make as a sailor on a passenger vessel. But it wasn’t the money that intrigued him. It was the adventure, the freedom, the places he could go. The power.
What many in the twenty-first century didn’t realize was that a pirate’s life was much better than a sailor working on a passenger vessel. The food was better. The money was certainly better. And unlike private ships, pirate ships held to a democracy. The majority ruled.
It hadn’t taken much convincing for Morgan to decide which side he wanted to fight on.
“Pirating seemed the thing to do.” She repeated his words from a few days ago.
He turned his head to look at Juliana. He brought her out here to bare his soul. To show her what type of man he really was. His feelings for her, feelings he’d buried, were emerging and as he was once again nursing her back to health he knew this couldn’t go on.
“It wasn’t just the thing to do, Juliana. I wanted to do it. I liked the power. I liked that people feared me. I liked the money. No, I loved the money and I loved the power.”
Her gaze met his, steady, unwavering. “You loved the adventure.”
She knew him too well.
“Yes, I loved the adventure.”
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting adventure.”
He sat up and leaned against the side of the tender. “You have this romanticized view of pirating. It’s not pretty, it’s not romantic. It’s ugly. It’s deadly. It’s dirty and it’s illegal. For years I couldn’t step on English soil for fear of being tarred and feathered. Tarred and feathered, Juliana. They really do that.”
“I know what tarring and feathering is, Morgan.”
He ran a hand through his hair in frustration. She wasn’t getting it. Where was the horror he expected?
“I’ve killed people. Innocent people.” Faces that haunted him in the dead of night. There were too many to remember but he felt each of their souls heavy on his own.
“You did what you had to.”
“I did what I wanted to.”
She sat up as well and leaned against the other side. The tender was small and their toes touched. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you need to know what type of man I am.”
“I already know what type of man you are. You’re the type who rights a wrong, who has empathy for his men. Who takes a wayward stowaway and saves her life twice.”
“That’s not me.” Yet he looked away, unable to meet her gaze. Everything he planned was falling apart. She wasn’t listening to him. She didn’t believe him when he said he was no good.
“How long were you a pirate?” she asked.
“A long time. Isabelle came with me. She had an agenda and I hooked on to her coattails so to speak. Eventually, Isabelle and I procured our own vessels by attacking some ships we had our eye on. We killed that captain.”
He paused, waiting for her reaction and was surprised to feel her fingers curl around his, squeezing.
“After Isabelle married Reed, she wanted to settle down and become respectable. They offered me a position with their company but I wasn’t interested. I took a crew and set off for the South China Sea.”
He brought Juliana’s hand to his mouth to kiss her knuckles. The South China Sea. He never made it.
“Barun rules the Indian Ocean and to get to the South China Sea you have to sail through the Indian Ocean. I was cocky enough to think I could do it, but Barun captured my ship, looted and burned it. My crew was sold as slaves and I was thrown in Barun’s dungeon.”
And the nightmares started. He would never tell Juliana about the weeks he’d been chained to the wall of his dungeon while the rodents and insects crawled on him. He would never admit the heart-stopping fear he lived with day by day, hour by hour. Nor would he tell her of the broken bones, the oozing wounds, the fevers or the hunger. His food had been withheld. He’d been isolated, denied sunlight until he didn’t know whether it was day or night, if hours had passed or days, if days had passed or weeks.
Insanity had been close and he welcomed it. Anything to escape the cruelty. Then, miraculously, it stopped. He’d been dragged, bloody, smelly, unshaven and weak from the only home he’d known for months and put onto a ship. His job, along with many others, was to row one of Sanjit Barun’s war ships.
That was the worst kind of hell—being on the water, inside a ship, the place he loved most in the world, and not able to walk around, to enjoy the spray of the ocean on his face. All he felt was the roll of th
e waves but it wasn’t enough. Not nearly.
There had been times when he would have preferred the beatings, the isolation, the rodents and bugs, especially when one of the rowers died. They were often forced to row with the dead man until someone retrieved the corpse. Sometimes that would be hours, more often than not, days. The smell was nauseating. The flies were so thick you could barely see the body.
He thought only of escape and revenge. He would escape. He would heal. And he would hunt Barun and kill him.
His soul had been taken from him while he rowed for his life and he was fairly certain nothing, not even Juliana, could bring it back.
“Is that where you got the scar?”
For a moment he had no idea what she was talking about until he remembered the brand on the inside of his arm. It was hideous, reaching from the bend of his elbow to his wrist. He resisted the urge to rub it. Sometimes he still felt the poker scorch his skin and still smelled the acrid stench of his own flesh burning. “It means slave in Sanskrit. Barun wanted everyone to know that the pirate Morgan was his.”
He jerked when her tentative fingers outlined the series of straight lines and half circles connected by another line.
“I thought it was a burn,” she whispered.
He remained silent, not wanting to take her to the dark places in his mind where even he didn’t want to go. As much as he knew he should push her away, he would never do that to her.
“One day Barun summoned me to his cabin,” he said. Juliana kept her fingers on his scar and even though he knew it wasn’t true, he could have sworn her touch was like a cool salve healing him.
“The guards left us alone. Apparently, Barun thought I was too weak to harm him. Or maybe he thought I would never attack him on his own ship. What he didn’t know was that I refused to die in the hell he created for me.”
“That’s how I felt,” she said softly. “On his ship. I didn’t want to die a coward.”
Morgan flinched, hating that Juliana had suffered at Barun’s hands. Just another reason to kill Barun. Maybe the best reason of all.
Wherever You Are Page 10