Pirates

by Linda Lael Miller

  The next time she woke up, tropical sunlight was spilling in through the window, full of dancing diamonds snatched from the sea, bathing her in a dazzle of gold and platinum. But the music had stopped.

  Phoebe stood on her bed, grasping the windowsill in both hands, and gazed out at the blue-green sea and the white sand, stricken to the heart by their splendor. It was worth it, she thought, as her soul stirred, painfully at first, like something long frozen. Here and there, in the uncharted regions within, a dream trembled into wakefulness and reached for the light.

  Someone hammered at the door of her room, startling Phoebe so thoroughly that she nearly toppled off the bed.

  “What?” she demanded, annoyed.

  “I got your costume,” answered an unfamiliar adolescent voice.

  “What costume?” Phoebe asked, after wrenching open the door to find a teenage girl standing in the hallway, chewing gum and holding out a pile of cheap muslin.

  “There’s a party tonight,” the young woman said, orchestrating the words with a series of crisp snaps. “After you’ve seen the condos and stuff, I mean.” She smiled, revealing enough braces to set off the metal detector in an airport. “My name’s Andrea,” she said wistfully. “I wore that outfit last time we had a batch of investors out from the mainland. It was kinda fun to dress up.”

  Phoebe frowned. This, she thought, must be the “gala affair” the brochure had mentioned.

  She decided to feign a headache that night and sneak out to walk on the beach. “Great,” she said without conviction.

  Andrea waggled her fingers. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll make a great wench.”

  Phoebe stepped out into the hall, not caring, at that point, that she was wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts. “Wait a second,” she called. “I’ll make a great what?”

  “Wench,” Andrea replied blithely, without slowing her steps or looking back. “You know, one of those chicks who served rum and grog and sat on pirates’ laps.”

  Phoebe closed the door and leaned against it, holding the muslin dress against her bosom and gazing into the murky mirror on the opposite wall. “You deserve whatever happens to you,” she told her reflection.

  2

  Phoebe sincerely tried to be philosophical.

  Breakfast consisted of two wilted croissants and a cup of strong coffee. The condominiums faced the sea, and they were nice enough, though cheaply built and alike down to the last carpet tack. An extensive sales pitch followed the tour, involving slides and brochures and flip charts and overhead projections, and seemed to go on forever. Lunch—fruit salad on a wilted lettuce leaf, strawberry gelatin, and hard rolls—was brought in by tanned and slender young women in shorts and the standard Paradise Island T-shirts. Once the meal had been served, the Amazons took up their posts beside the door again, arms folded, expressions impassive, clearly prepared to foil any attempt at escape.

  It was three o’clock when the captive audience was finally released, though the reprieve was only temporary, of course. Everyone was expected to attend the costume party that night, the man Phoebe had privately dubbed Jack announced, explaining that anybody who skipped the festivities would be required to find his or her own way back to the States.

  Phoebe accepted the fact that she would have to dress up as a pirate’s main squeeze and listen to another lecture on real estate, and made a dash for the nearest exit. Her only other option, she figured, was to swim across the Bermuda Triangle and hope she washed up in Florida. In the meantime, she was free to enjoy the sun and sand, and she meant to make the most of the opportunity.

  After purchasing sunscreen and a big straw hat in the hotel’s dusty gift shop, Phoebe headed for the beach.

  The tide was warm enough for a bath, and the water so clear that she could see the thin reeds and jewel-like shells wavering on the bottom. The sand was as fine and white as sugar, and Phoebe kicked off her sandals and waded in to her knees, exultant with the pure joy of being exactly where she was.

  Within the hour, despite the sunscreen she’d lathered on every inch of exposed skin, Phoebe was forced to cease communing with the sea and go inside. She bought a tall pink drink with a cherry in it at the bar and sipped the concoction as the old elevator wheezed its way to the third floor.

  In the privacy of her room, Phoebe gingerly removed her red polka-dot sundress, smeared herself with burn cream, and stretched out on her bed, imagining that she was lying in a hidden cove, naked except for the shade of a palm tree. She smiled, perfectly content, the sea murmured a lullaby from beyond her window, and sleep stole over her, soft as the shadow of a phantom.

  Her dreams were erotic, mysterious, interwoven with the music of a harpsichord.

  She was lying in the sand, shaded by the fronds of a palm tree. A man came and knelt beside her, and, although she could not see his face or find his name on her tongue, her heart knew him well. He stroked her bare thighs with a minstrel’s light, deft fingers until she quivered and whimpered beneath him, and then he weighed her breasts, first one and then the other, in a reverent, calloused hand. Phoebe felt as beautiful and magical as a mermaid, or a princess waking to her prince’s touch after a century of slumber in a castle encompassed by thistles, and she longed for the familiar stranger to make her completely his own.

  He bent his head, and she caught just the hint of a smile on his well-shaped lips just before he kissed her.

  An exquisite instrument played by a master, Phoebe’s body arched, bowlike, in response, and there followed a surge of passion so strong that it flung her spiraling upward, out of the sleeping rhapsody and into the real world. She lay despairing on her lumpy hotel bed, soaked in perspiration and still trembling from the violence of the imagined release. And she grieved, because she was alone, after all, and because her lover had vanished with the dream.

  Since the divorce from Jeffrey, Phoebe had been telling herself that celibacy wasn’t so bad, but now the very essence of her femininity was saying something quite different. She was still young and vibrantly healthy, and she wanted the emotional and physical satisfaction of total intimacy with a man.

  Well and good, she thought, wincing as her sunburn made itself known. She was ready for another relationship, ready to trust a guy, to let him touch her heart and her body. Now all she had to do was find one who met her standards, which were much stricter than they had been when she’d met and fallen in love with Jeffrey, back in college.

  It wouldn’t be easy to make a new start, Phoebe knew, but she resolved to try. Maybe the best thing was to leave Seattle entirely, with all its memories, and look for work in San Francisco, or New York, or even somewhere in Europe. London or Paris, for instance, or somewhere smaller, like Florence or Lyon. In time, if she didn’t creep back into her shell to keep from getting hurt again, and if she was very, very lucky, she might just meet a terrific man.

  Feeling better just for having made a decision, Phoebe took her watch from the nightstand and squinted at its sand-coated face. “Damn,” she murmured. It was almost time for that dratted costume party.

  Phoebe dressed carefully in the cheesy gown, with its lace-up bodice and low-cut neckline, brushed her hair, and applied a touch of makeup. A headache was just pulsing to life beneath her right temple, but she didn’t pause to gulp down an aspirin because she didn’t want to be late. It wasn’t that Phoebe was afraid of missing the flight back to the mainland—if it hadn’t been for the condominium people, she might have decided to stay forever, swinging from jungle vines, wearing fig leaves, and living on coconut milk. No, she only wanted to get through the evening, return to her room, and listen for the faint strains of a harpsichord.

  Phoebe’s headache intensified as she stepped into the elevator, alone, and pushed the button for the basement level. Odd place for a ballroom, she thought, opening her purse and rummaging for the small, dented tin of aspirin she’d glimpsed a few weeks ago among the debris.

  “Hell,” she said, doggedly plundering the mysterious depths of
her bag as the metal cage lurched on its no-doubt rusty cables and settled, with a clatter, to the floor. There was no sign of the wonder drug, and by now Phoebe knew she wasn’t going to survive the evening without anesthesia. No sooner had she left the elevator, her attention still fixed on her purse, when she decided to risk going back to her room to swallow two tablets from the bottle in her cosmetic case.

  She turned, hoping to get back inside before the elevator doors closed.

  A blank wall confronted her.

  For a moment, Phoebe just stood there stunned, staring in disbelief. The elevator was gone, grillwork, rattle and all, and furthermore, the light had changed, dimming from a hard fluorescent glare to a faint and flickering glow. She could no longer hear the laughter and talk coming from the ballroom.

  Phoebe took a deep breath and shut her eyes for a moment. It was the headache that was making her see things, she reasoned. Maybe she was suffering from sunstroke. Or it might be that she’d simply gotten off on the wrong floor while she was looking through her purse for the aspirin.

  She raised her eyelids again and was discouraged to see that the elevator had not reappeared. Some time had passed before she realized that her head no longer ached, and under the circumstances, she wasn’t sure whether that was good news or bad.

  She stood still, waiting, but the wall where the elevator should have been was just that—the wall where the elevator should have been. And most definitely wasn’t.

  Phoebe had decided to look for another way out of the basement when she heard whistling, decidedly masculine and unconcerned, from somewhere farther along the passage. She peered into the shadows.

  “Hello?” she called. “Who’s there?”

  He rounded a corner just then, carrying an old-fashioned brass lantern in one hand, and something slammed into Phoebe’s heart, like a mallet laid hard to a great brass gong. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe, let alone speak, and simply stood there trembling with the reverberations.

  The man was tall, with dark hair worn long and tied back at the nape of his neck with a thin ribbon or a thong. Fawn-colored breeches of some soft material like chamois clung to his finely muscled thighs, and his black boots reached, cavalier style, to his knees. He wore a loose shirt, probably made of linen, and carried a dagger in a scabbard on his belt.

  Phoebe found her voice at last. “Wow,” she said, a little too brightly, “you certainly got a better costume than I did.”

  He raised one eyebrow, and the corner of his mouth twitched slightly, though whether from amusement or impatience, or something else entirely, Phoebe could not determine. “Who are you?” he demanded, his gaze moving over her in an imperious sweep of assessment before swinging back to her face.

  Phoebe was flushed, and she hoped he couldn’t see that in the dim light of the lantern. “My name is Phoebe Turlow,” she said. “And I’m lost. I’m also late. Could you just show me the way out of here, please?”

  He ignored her request, stooping a little and peering at her as though she were some sort of curiosity. Her breath caught in her throat, though not from anything so sensible as fear, when he reached out and touched her hair. What she felt, to her everlasting chagrin, was the same erotic heat that had made her cry out in her dream that afternoon. “Have you suffered a head injury?” he asked. “Or been taken by a fever? Or perhaps you’ve fallen upon hard times and sold your hair to a wigmaker?”

  “A wigmaker?” Phoebe retreated a step. The man was obviously eccentric, or even crazy. There was little harm in his wanting to dress up like a pirate, she supposed, but it was just plain irresponsible to let him wander through the bowels of the hotel, carrying a kerosene lantern and armed with a knife. Someone should have a word with whoever was supposed to watch him. “I like my hair short,” she added, patting it self-consciously, only too aware that she sounded hysterical and still unable to help herself. “I have good bone structure, and this style accentuates it.”

  “Speak plain, wench,” commanded the handsome maniac. “Who are you, and what are you doing prowling about my house in the dead of night?”

  Careful, Phoebe told herself, easing her way backward along the very wall that had swallowed the elevator. She summoned up a shaky and, she hoped, reassuring smile. “Have you taken your medication today?” she countered.

  “God’s blood,” the pirate muttered. “You are a lunatic.”

  Phoebe wasn’t foolish enough to point up the irony of a full-grown man in a pirate suit calling her crazy. By then, all she wanted was to escape before he decided to shiver her timbers, or hoist her on her own petard, or whatever it was people suffering from pirate delusions liked to do to their victims.

  She turned and ran wildly into the darkness, wondering what the hell had happened to the lights, not to mention the elevator and the ballroom and the people who had been trying to sell her a condominium all day. Just then, she would have been glad to see them, even if it meant sitting through another sales pitch.

  Fate, alas, is not always kind. Phoebe tripped over the hem of her wench’s costume and plunged headfirst onto the cold stone floor of the passageway. She was dazed, but when a powerful arm encircled her waist and wrenched her onto her feet, she struggled like a wildcat, clawing and kicking and, when she could find a place to sink her teeth, biting.

  Her captor cursed roundly, but his grip did not slacken. He hauled her easily through the dark labyrinth beneath the hotel and up a set of stairs lighted on either side by candles in wall sconces. Phoebe stopped fighting for a few moments, saving her breath to scream for help as soon as she thought the lobby might be within earshot.

  A second man loomed at the top of the steps, dressed for the eighteenth century in breeches, a tailored shirt, and a bottle-green waistcoat. There were large, shining buckles on his shoes.

  Wonderful, Phoebe thought from that calm place in the center of the storm of delirium swirling around her. The pirate has a friend who likes to play dress-up, too.

  “Great Apollo, Duncan,” growled said companion, “what in hell are you doing?”

  No sense in calling for help, Phoebe reasoned prosaically in her state of shock. Then her eyes widened as the name struck home, and she turned to stare into the hard, ruthless face of the man who carried her as easily as if she weighed no more than his pocket watch.

  “Did he just call you Duncan?”

  “Yes,” he replied, pushing past his friend, who looked sane, in spite of his odd clothes, and very concerned.

  “Why?”

  “Most likely because that is my name.” He flung her onto a settee in a billow of cheap muslin, and Phoebe, always a quick thinker, came up with a new theory. This was a part of the hotel she had never been in before, reserved, perhaps, for the bizarre and decadent pleasures of the rich. She should probably be grateful that the theme for the evening was pirates and not the Arabian Nights—in which case she might have been issued a veil and harem pants and ordered to dance for the sultan’s entertainment.

  Phoebe folded her hands in her lap and smiled winningly, first at one man and then the other. “I’m afraid there’s been some kind of mix-up, fellas. You’ve obviously mistaken me for part of the entertainment, but the fact is that I’m a guest in the hotel, too. I’m here to look at condominiums—not that I can afford to buy one—while you two are obviously with the deluxe tour …”

  “Is she mad, poor creature?” Alex said, color climbing his neck. “By God, Duncan, if you’ve been keeping this woman hidden away somewhere, like a bird in a cage …”

  The man who called himself Duncan paled beneath his tan. It was a relief to know he probably wasn’t a crackpot at all, but simply an overworked professional man from California or some other sunny, progressive state, enjoying a unique vacation from the real world. “And if you were anyone but who you are, Alex,” he countered, “I would call you out for insulting my honor.”

  Phoebe tried to stand, intending to make herself scarce, but Duncan extended a hand and stopped her without so much
as glancing in her direction.

  Alex gave a great sigh. “Who is this girl, and where did you get her?” he demanded evenly.

  “I found her skulking about in the cellars,” Duncan replied, and though his voice was soft, it was plain that he was seething.

  “I’m not a girl,” Phoebe said with admirable restraint. “I’m a woman.” She paused, making a real effort to be diplomatic. “You guys are really good at this,” she said. “I’m sure dressing up and playing games is very relaxing for executive types with stressful jobs. However, I definitely do not appreciate being dragged into the act, and if you don’t let me leave this room, right now, I will scream until the chandeliers rattle. And when the police come, I will have you both arrested.”

  Both men turned their heads to stare at her, Alex in bewilderment, Duncan in cold, speculative irritation.

  “You are and shall remain a prisoner,” said the latter flatly, “until your identity and your reasons for being here are brought to light.” Phoebe caught a glimpse of fire in his eyes and knew, despite undeniable evidence to the contrary, that this man was not mad. The vitality he exuded came not just from physical strength, but from a formidable intellect, sharper than his tongue and more deadly than the dagger worn so carelessly at his side. “In the meantime, you will be given comfortable quarters, food, and something fitting to wear.”

  Phoebe bolted for the double doors at the other end of the room, which were at least twelve feet high and trimmed in gilt, and this time no one gave chase. “Help!” she screamed, bursting into a foyer with marble floors and exquisite paintings on the walls. “Somebody help—” The cry died in her throat as she stopped at the base of the great curved staircase—the same one that graced the lobby of the Eden Hotel—and turned slowly around in a circle, staring, as yet another revelation struck her. “Oh, my God,” she whispered hoarsely. Somehow, impossibly, this was that place, in an earlier and still-glorious incarnation.