“Will you join us?” Duncan asked of Lucas, later that night, when he and Beedle and several other members of the crew had gathered in his study. Alex was notably absent.
Lucas sighed. His face was shadowed with grief, but he was sturdy of mind and bone and spirit, and he was mending in spite of himself. “Join you?” he echoed. “But you have no ship, Brother. Of course, you might have refitted the Northumberland for your own use, if you hadn’t been so eager to provide a spectacle for us all.”
Duncan took a sip from the snifter of brandy he’d poured for himself, taking care to avoid Phoebe’s gaze. He was completely aware of her, nonetheless, standing near the fireplace, watching him with her arms folded and that devious little mind of hers spinning like the blades of a windmill. “That cumbersome old tub? It would be easier to maneuver a whale’s carcass. Besides, the British would have known her at a glance for one of their own.” He took another swallow of brandy, making sure Phoebe knew he’d enjoyed it. “It’s true that we’re in want of a ship, and we’ll have one.”
“How?” Lucas asked with pointed reason, raising both eyebrows. Duncan had forgotten how irritating his elder brother could be when he got bogged down in details.
“Well, hell,” Duncan said, exasperated, “we’ll steal one. Did you think I was going to row into the harbor at Charles Town and put in an order for a fleet clipper, specially designed for piracy and high treason?”
Lucas got to his feet. “I won’t be a party to thievery.”
Duncan uttered a long-suffering sigh. “Sit down,” he replied. “And leave the moralizing to our good and subversive friend, the Reverend Franks.” He paused to give that man a nod of polite acknowledgment. “What is your decision, Lucas?”
The elder Rourke son shoved the fingers of one hand through his dark hair. “Good God, Duncan, we buried our father not six hours past, and you’re talking of stealing ships!”
“I will do my mourning privately,” Duncan said, in a moderate voice that contained, nevertheless, a warning. “The war, I fear, will go right on as if nothing had happened. I intend to fight until we fall or they do. Now, Lucas—on which side shall you stand?”
Lucas hesitated. For a beat too long.
Duncan leaned forward in his chair, setting the brandy aside with a thump. “Can it be?” he breathed. “Can you really be so thick, Lucas, as to hold to your Tory beliefs after they took your land, threw you aboard a prison ship without a trial, and killed your father?”
Lucas was breathing deeply, rapidly. He’d gone pale, and his flesh glistened with sweat, but Duncan knew his brother well—despite the outward signs of it, Lucas was not afraid. He was angry. “Those things were unfair,” he bit out, meeting Duncan’s gaze squarely. “But they are to be expected, when one member of the family is a wanted man, seeking to overthrow a just government!”
“A just government?” Duncan rasped. “You think it is just to arrest an old man for the sins of his son? God, Lucas, if you truly believe that sanctimonious rot, then I fear for us all.”
“Damn you,” Lucas cried, on his feet again. “Who shall I blame for the death of my father—the King, for wanting to enforce his laws? Or you, Duncan, for breaking them with such dedication?”
A charged silence settled over the room, smothering all but the smallest sounds.
In the end, it was Margaret Rourke who spoke next, from the doorway of the study.
“You will both hold your tongues,” she said. She was slender and fragile in her widow’s weeds, her flawless skin white with grief and the strain of bearing it with dignity. “Duncan, you claim to love liberty, but adventure is your true mistress, and you would risk anything for it, including the freedom you profess to cherish. You might indeed have become a pirate if you hadn’t had a cause to take up. And you, Lucas, have said a thing many men would be loath to forgive, even in a beloved brother.”
Lucas’s broad shoulders slumped a little, as though his mother had struck him. Duncan was doing his share of squirming as well, but inwardly, and he hid it well.
“Do you think,” Duncan persisted evenly, his gaze fixed, scalding, on his brother, “that Father died because of me?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas answered. Then, without looking at anyone else, including Duncan, he strode out of the room.
There was no more talk of stealing ships that night.
Phillippa was huddled on the end of a stone bench, in an isolated corner of the garden, weeping softly. Alex watched, from a little distance, wanting to console her, not knowing how. Loathing himself for his helplessness.
She must have heard something or sensed his presence, for even though he kept to the shadows, she raised her head, sniffled, and said his name.
He came toward her, his gait graceless and slow, as always, because of the crutch and the small, slippery stones and broken shells that made up the garden walk. The effort to remain upright, and not humiliate himself by collapsing at her feet, raised perspiration on his upper lip.
“Sit with me for a little while?” It was a plea, not a command. She patted the bench.
Alex made no move toward her. “Your father was a good man,” he said. It was the best he could manage, under the circumstances. The world was a black place to him, treacherous and unjust, fraught with ugliness and pain. In point of fact, he envied John Rourke for escaping it.
Phillippa sniffled, her face aglow with moonlight. Even with her eyes red-rimmed and her nose swollen from crying, she was painfully pretty, a lily blooming in a landscape of waste and rubble. “Yes,” she said softly. “Like you.”
Alex flinched inwardly, as if she’d pierced him with a lance. “No,” he argued brokenly. “John was nothing like me. What will you do now, Phillippa?”
“Do?” She widened her gray eyes, and he saw that the thick, dark lashes surrounding them were spiky with tears. “I’ll cry a great deal, I should think, for some time. I’ll always miss Father, and I expect it will hurt when I think of him, at least for a while. But of course I shall go on. That, after all, is what he would want.”
Several awkward moments passed before Alex was able to speak. Here was a mere girl, delicate and fragile, and yet she had more courage than he’d ever possessed, even in his best days. He felt a bittersweet yearning whenever he saw Phillippa, or merely thought of her, but in point of fact he wasn’t fit to speak her name.
He stood in the darkness, his hand trembling where he grasped that cursed crutch. He had fallen in love with Phillippa, during some unguarded moment after her arrival on Paradise Island, and he knew that she cared for him as well. The idea of taking Phillippa to wife, of lying with her every night, consumed him, filled him with an unholy desire.
But he was a cripple. To wed such a woman would be a travesty on his part; she deserved a man who could protect her, provide for her, teach her pleasure …
“Alex?” Phillippa said gently. “I love you.”
He turned his back on her, turned his back on all hope of finding his way again. And he told himself it was for her sake.
She caught up to him before he’d gained the French doors leading in from that part of the garden and slipped her arms around his waist from behind. In another woman, the act would have been brazen, but it was not so with Phillippa. The gesture was one of sweet innocence, even though the reaction it stirred in him was downright contemptible.
“Why are you afraid?” she asked, resting her cheek against his spine and holding him fast. “I know that you love me.”
He did not have the heart, or the willpower, to break out of her embrace. He felt consoled, truly and deeply, for the first time since that musket ball had shattered his knee. His withered soul drank of her kindness and was soothed, temporarily at least. “Yes,” he admitted at length, his voice broken and gruff. “Yes, Phillippa, I love you. Too much to doom you to a lifetime of sorrow and pity.”
She moved, standing in front of him now, but still holding him fast in her arms. If he had ever doubted his ability to respond to
a woman, and of course he had, he could no longer do so. The evidence of his desire was embarrassingly prominent.
“Sorrow and pity?” Phillippa echoed. “All the sorrow is yours, Alex Maxwell, and so is the pity. You’re the only one around here who feels sorry for you—the rest of us just want to shake you until your teeth rattle.”
He let the crutch clatter to the ground and gripped both her shoulders, hard. “Listen to me,” he seethed, too angry now, too frustrated, to think of propriety or of a young girl’s sensibilities. “I am a freak. If we married, and I took you to my bed—” Alex realized what he was saying and abruptly stopped speaking.
There was an unsettling twinkle in Phillippa’s eyes. “Do you think I don’t know what men and women do together?” she asked. “I grew up on a plantation, Alex. We raised horses and cattle, sheep and pigs.”
Perhaps she wasn’t embarrassed, but Alex was. “Stop,” he pleaded.
She laughed, and the sound was moist, because she’d been crying earlier. What a contradictory creature she was, delightful and infuriating at one and the same time. “Of course you’ll have to marry me first,” she announced. “If you don’t, my brothers will kill you.”
Alex tilted his head back and searched the starry sky, a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. This, he thought, was a form of suicide he had not yet considered.
17
Phoebe waited until everyone but Duncan had left the study. He did not meet her eyes, or rise from his chair, when she came to stand beside him. She laid a hand on his shoulder, where the sling was tied, and he flinched at her touch, although she had been careful to avoid his wound.
“Lucas didn’t mean what he said,” she told him. “About John dying because of you.”
Duncan was a long time in answering. “Yes,” he said finally. “He did.”
Phoebe knelt next to him, pressed one hand to his face, made him turn his head and look at her. “You know it isn’t true—don’t you? John was sick long before …”
He sighed, brushed her cheek with the knuckles of his right hand. “I don’t know anything,” he told her, “except that my father wouldn’t have wanted me to believe I’d done him harm. Lucas is hurting, and he has no pretty wife to bind his wounds.” Here he paused and offered up a slight, sad smile as he raised Phoebe to her feet and then drew her down onto his lap. “Considering that my brother never had much tact in the first place, I guess it’s not surprising that he would say what he did.”
Phoebe took a deep breath and let it out slowly before speaking. “You don’t really plan to steal a ship?” she ventured. She would have to find a way to go along if Duncan went pirating again, but she hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. She enjoyed an adventure as much as the next person, but she’d had enough swashbuckling to last her. “Couldn’t we just stay here and mind our own business for a while?”
Duncan chuckled, but his eyes betrayed the depth of his suffering. “Phoebe, Phoebe,” he scolded. “Harrying the British is my business. If I stay here and wait for them to find me, it will spoil the fun—theirs as well as mine.”
Frustration surged within Phoebe, and she controlled it. She’d learned a lot about self-restraint, she reflected, since meeting this man. “Couldn’t you just lie low for a month or two? The British are bound to be in a bad mood, after what you did to the Northumberland, and by now they surely know who did it.”
“ ‘Lie low,’” he mused, seeming to savor the phrase. “Another interesting term.” He moved one thumb over Phoebe’s lower lip, as if preparing her for his kiss, and she felt a spilling warmth, somewhere deep inside, followed by a singular ache in a much more specific place. Where this man was concerned, she was an absolute harlot.
She shivered. Duncan hadn’t touched her in an intimate way, and yet there could be no denying that the lovemaking process had already begun; mysterious, elemental things were happening inside her—passages widening, needs awakening, tiny muscles contracting. And contracting further, like the spring in an old-fashioned clock.
“You deliberately misunderstood,” she said in a somewhat tremulous voice. Phoebe wanted to make love to Duncan and to have him make love to her, but not in the study, with so many people around. “To ’lie low’ just means not drawing attention to yourself.”
“Hmmm,” Duncan replied, pretending to ponder her words. At the same time, he dipped a finger beneath her neckline and found a nipple with which to amuse himself. “I am sorely in need of a wife’s loving attention,” he said. “Will you pleasure me, Phoebe?”
She gasped as he bared the breast he had been teasing. “Yes,” she managed. “But not here—for heaven’s sake, Duncan—not here.”
He laughed, low in his throat, and set her, wobbling, on her feet. “But here is where I want you,” he said reasonably. “Here and, certainly, now.”
Phoebe grabbed the back of the chair, since she was feeling a bit weak-kneed. “No,” she said, watching as he crossed the room. He closed the terrace doors first, and then went to shut and lock the ones opening onto the hallway.
“No?” he echoed. He returned to her and kissed her, at the same time tugging down the front of her bodice to free the eager swell of her breasts.
“Duncan,” she whimpered, in lame and admittedly ineffectual protest, when he released her mouth. He was holding one of her breasts, preparing the nipple with the pad of his thumb, just as he had made her lower lip ready for his kiss minutes before.
He bent his head and took suckle, at the same time raising her skirts and untying the ribbons that held her drawers up. It occurred to Phoebe that her husband was remarkably agile, for someone with only one good hand.
Phoebe swayed in his embrace, her head flung back, completely lost.
“Do you still want to refuse me?” Duncan inquired, with damnable confidence, when at last he had apparently satisfied himself at both her nipples.
She sighed dreamily, bemused. “Refuse?” The exact definition of the word eluded her.
He kissed her again, making everything worse—or better—and she was vaguely aware that her drawers were down around her ankles. Furthermore, there was a breeze coming from somewhere. “Step out of those pantaloons, Mistress Rourke,” Duncan instructed gently. “Or you might trip over them.”
Phoebe obeyed and would have tripped anyway, if Duncan hadn’t steadied her. He brought her to the chair where he had held her on his lap before and did the same again, only with a difference.
*
Early the next morning, when Duncan was already locked away with his men, no doubt laying plans to rip off half the British navy, Phoebe went in search of Simone. Phoebe herself was subdued, grieving for John Rourke and, because the echoes of last night’s pleasures were still thrumming in her nerve endings, inclined to be charitable.
Simone was alone in the washroom, bent over a tub full of soapy water.
Phoebe stood in the doorway and waited until Simone acknowledged her presence with a grudging, desultory nod.
“He’s got you breeding,” Simone commented, without undue malice. She was scrubbing a linen shirt and went on with her work.
“You found your way back rather quickly,” Phoebe replied, since Simone’s remark did not require an answer. Since she’d become the mistress of Duncan’s house, she hadn’t been near the laundry room. She had to admit, she hadn’t missed the place. “I guess everyone else has been too distracted to ask, but I’d like to know how you got here.”
Simone shrugged, keeping her eyes averted. Gone was the bristling defiance of old; something vital had gone out of the girl, and Phoebe took no satisfaction whatsoever in the knowledge. “I was born in these islands,” Simone said. “I can find my way betwixt them.”
Phoebe left the doorway, where she had been framed in an aureole of sunshine, and came to stand on the other side of Simone’s washtub. “What happened when you got to Queen’s Town?” she asked, reaching out and stilling the servant’s strong brown hand with her own.
Misery flickered i
n Simone’s lovely dark eyes as she looked, at last, into Phoebe’s. “I found out that I should have stayed here,” she said. “There was no honest work for me—they wanted me for a whore or a slave.”
“I’m sorry,” Phoebe said, and she meant it.
A tear followed a crooked path down Simone’s cheek. “Don’t waste your pity on me,” she warned fiercely. “I don’t want it.” She lowered her gaze to Phoebe’s still-flat stomach, and there was something like contempt in her face. “Soon, Duncan will be wanting a mistress. He’ll come back to me.”
The words stung Phoebe, as they were intended to do, even though they hadn’t come as any sort of surprise. She straightened her shoulders and raised her chin. “I’m not going to argue with you, Simone, so you can stop trying to make me angry.” Then, since there was nothing more to say, she turned and went back to the main house.
Seeing Simone had done nothing to ease her apprehensions, but it wasn’t the prospect of Duncan’s infidelity that Phoebe found so disconcerting—he was a man who appreciated the bounties of nature, and she suspected that the further her pregnancy advanced, the more intrigued he would be. No, it was something else that was bothering her, some nameless nuance, insubstantial as smoke, subtle as a viper slithering through deep grass.
An hour after dawn the following morning, when Phoebe lay curled against Duncan’s side, recovering from another bout of lovemaking, there was a sudden, deafening boom, causing the whole house to shake.
Duncan spat a curse and flung himself out of bed, tearing off his sling and hurling it to one side before hauling on his clothes.
“What just happened here?” Phoebe asked in a thin voice. She was more inclined to huddle, with the covers pulled up to her chin.
“We’re under attack,” Duncan replied, with a sharpness that gave Phoebe to believe he considered her question a stupid one. There was another crash, followed by the sound of their terrace crumbling. “Son of a bitch!” he bellowed, going to the window. “They’ve gotten to the ridge, the blighters, and turned our own cannon on us!”
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