Estelle cracked open one eye, watching him strain and move the stones beneath her lashes. His shirt strained across his wide shoulders as he moved. He leaned over a large pile of stones and she had an unrestricted view of the back of him. His breeches stretched lovingly over toned buttocks and highly defined thighs. He was well toned, his heaviness all in his tight muscles and substantial physique. A kick in the gut response made her insides purr. Her brow pulled in a frown. That was not the internal response she neither wanted nor needed.
As if sensing that she watched him, Gregory turned to her. It was good that she hadn’t moved a muscle from her slouched position. She let her eyelid close. Eventually the rocks started moving but she kept her eyes closed, not daring to watch him, ignoring her swollen lips and the unsettling tingle that swirled in the pit of her belly.
Chapter Eight
Gregory stepped into bright sunshine. It took a moment for his vision to adjust from the relative gloom of the cave. Stretched either side of him was a vast beach of glorious white sand that greedily embraced the ocean’s waves as far as he could see. The tide was out and the waves had receded quite a way. Brown seaweed marred the white sand, creating a pattern of irregular lines. Towards them was the larger debris that the ocean had thrown in the high tide. Pieces of drift wood, larger green-brown leaves of kelp, and broken shells.
Behind them, the beach was bordered by a towering cliff wall made from grey, weathered rock, with a drop so steep that it was nearly vertical. Boulders laced the bottom of the cliff. It was a large pile of them that had created the small cave in which they had spent the night. Some of the rocks had rolled a little further from the cliff and were half buried with sand. Debris brought in from the ocean was caught between the rocks.
Although the sun was set in a cloudless blue sky, the wind ripped through his shirt with an icy bite that clawed his bones. He tucked the discomfort into a corner of his mind. Being cold was of little matter. He had been through the ranks of the Navy, and none of them boasted of any comfort. He had managed, from a young age, to make do with whatever was at hand.
At the moment, what was at hand was an extremely infuriating red head.
She emerged from the cave and treated him to a frosty stare that could grow icicles. His gaze automatically fell to her bruised rosebud pink lips, which were currently pursed in displeasure. He returned his attention to the ocean. It was safer.
She was a siren, a lush female who had no idea of the impact she could have on a man. Currently had on him. Even given the circumstances, he knew when he was physically attracted to a woman. To her. It was absolute madness. She had stolen aboard his ship, the first under his own command and had kidnapped him from amongst his own crew. That was completely unforgivable.
Even so, he had tumbled headlong into lust when he had first laid eyes on her in his cabin. Through eyes of a long, hard day on the verge of sleep he had thought she was part dream, part apparition when she appeared, silent as the night from the shadows of the pier.
She was a vision. An unearthly beauty that would inspire a work of art from a painter. A barbed, prickly banshee, whose exquisite physical appearance totally belied her thorny character. She was bold, daring, and was true to her words, true to herself, however misguided it was. She was no simpering female and would be appalled if someone thought that of her. He grunted impatiently into the wind. He knew it was madness, but the concept was appealing. Interesting.
“What’s your big idea now?” A seductive low toned female voice said behind him, slipping into his mind alongside thoroughly illicit thoughts.
Estelle wore a distinctly acerbic look. She tilted her chin and continued to gaze at him from down her upturned, rather neat nose. He had seen that look on the faces of generals when talking to lowly foot-staff. It was a taunting, contemptuous expression meant to bully and if he didn’t know what she was doing then he possibly could be intimidated by it. But today, now, given their circumstances, he most definitely was not.
He stepped purposefully towards her and noted that her haughtiness crumbled for a split second. She recovered, pulled her shoulders back and straightened her back into a rigid line. Although she treated him to a trenchant gaze and stood her ground without a tremble, he also saw a hesitant spark in her eyes. He noted with satisfaction that she wasn’t as immune to him as she would make him think.
“We need to find a way off this beach,” Gregory said.
“You can’t keep me manacled like this.”
“I can do what I like with you, Captain. You saw fit to leave them on me for the duration of the night, and I see fit to offer you the same concession.”
Her brows pulled together. “You wouldn’t dare keep a woman tied up.”
“You are neither delicate in body nor helpless in nature and I will be in danger of losing you, or parts of myself, if you are set free. You should be thankful I left your hands in front. At least that way you can, err … attend to daily matters … without the need for me to unmanacle you.”
Her autumn eyes filled with fire. “Get these off, or you will be sorry you put them on me in the first place.”
Gregory rested onto one leg and crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s something I could look forward to.” He quirked a brow and waited to watch her amusing reaction.
Her eyes widened, and her mouth pulled into an outraged ‘O’. She opened her mouth while he waited in anticipation, but before she castigated him, her attention slid over his shoulder and her eyes went cold. Her breath hitched, seized. “No, it can’t be,” she whispered.
Gregory followed her gaze. And froze.
He immediately saw them dotted along the line of the horizon like bruised blemishes on a smooth blue carpet. Their thin masts reached endlessly towards the sky. Between the tall masts were a range of billowing grey sails that made them fly across the water. The ships sailed fast, white frothy water laced their boughs.
“Cutlass,” Estelle said flatly.
The black ships cut through the water in a definite path straight towards them and would be close in no time. He grabbed her elbow and tugged her. “Come on. We’re sitting ducks on this beach. We have to find a way off.”
“How could he know we’re here?” Estelle gasped.
“I don’t know. But it seems that we are a definite target for some reason. And if we don’t get away, we most probably will be in a great deal of trouble.”
He ran and held Estelle firmly at his side. For the first time he dammed the folly of the manacles. She would be able to run and be more agile with the full use of her arms, but there was no time to get them off her. The ships approached fast, cutting through the ocean on a straight path towards them, and they had little enough land to run before they were caught like rats in a sewer drain.
Loose sand hampered their progress, their feet losing traction, muscles burning, lungs contracting, breath bursting from open mouths. He ran as fast as he could, and even then he felt the ships bearing down on them. Gregory glimpsed over his shoulder.
“Faster,” he urged Estelle. They had to get away. There was no other option.
“We have to get off the beach.”
The cliff rose high on their right, imprisoning them better than iron bars. They could climb, but the rock was too vertical, too slippery. They would never make it to the top in one piece.
There was a thunderous boom then a high pitched whistle sounded, seemingly from all around. The sound was so strange, so unearthly then even the gulls had stopped their squawking. There was only the sound of the waves breaking, the gentle pull of ocean breeze and the high whistle that steadily grew louder.
He threw Estelle to the sand, fell on top of her and covered his head with his hands, as if that could do any good. She fell with a winded sound and twisted beneath him to look behind them.
“Keep down,” he snarled.
An explosion shattered the cliff and showered them with shards of rock. There was a deep grumble and the earth shook as rock disintegrated with the force of the blast. Boulders tumbled, bounced against each other, falling to the sand below. Gregory glimpsed upwards. Where there once was an impregnable wall where the cliff rose vertically, now there was a gaping ravine, weeping rock and powdery dust falling over them. It gave them something to climb on. This was their way out.
“Estelle, get up,” he said. He hauled her by the elbow and pointed at the destruction. “Can you climb?”
She nodded, quickly comprehending his idea and strode towards the fall of boulders without hesitation. He caught up with her, held her back.
“You can’t get up with these on.” He unlocked the manacles and threw them away. Now neither of them would have to worry about them again. She sent him a level look and wordlessly started to climb the fall of rocks. They were out in the open and they climbed as fast as they could, stepping onto huge upturned rock, to jump to another.
There was another boom. The high pitched whistle bore down on them, splitting the air, screaming for blood. There was another explosion, not far from where they climbed. Gregory grabbed Estelle, pulled him towards her, locked his arm around her and grabbed onto a boulder. The wall of the cliff shook with the pounding blast. They were sprayed with stones. His back was powdered with flying shards of rock that ripped through his shirt and cut his skin.
“Keep going,” he said.
He didn’t bother looking behind him at the ships. He knew they were too close. Gregory saw tufts of green grass atop the rocky cliff, whipping all about with the wind. The edge from the blast had weakened the rock, so that it crumbled beneath his hand. He tried to find purchase, but his hand came away with a fistful of dirt.
“There’s nothing to hold onto,” Estelle said.
“We’re nearly there,” Gregory said. They were just out of reach form the top. He reached over to her and cupped her bottom in the palm of his hands. Her derriere fit snugly in the breadth of his palms.
“What are you doing?” she hissed.
“Just grab the top of the cliff and haul yourself over when I lift you up,” he said.
He braced his legs, locked his knees against the cliff and pushed her up as high as he could reach. He felt her grappling for a handhold. Her body braced and he felt the strength in her as she climbed from his reach and up and over the cliff.
He looked upwards. And saw nothing. She had disappeared.
He looked over his shoulder at the ships. They were as close as they could be to the shore without dry landing themselves. The black-clad crew watched him from the gun rails. They seemed eerily focused. Quiet. There were no shouted orders, no cursing men. There was a black flag flying on the tallest mast. A skull and crossbones. The mark of Jack Cutlass. Gregory could not comprehend how Cutlass could get his ships to sail as fast as they did.
There was a movement from below the gun rail. A canon had moved, was being squared up on him. He was a sitting duck with nowhere to go. He clung to the rock and braced himself. Hopefully they would be on target and he would know no more after a few seconds. The agony would be if they missed, bringing him down with a ton of rock to fall on top of him and smash him to pieces.
“Grab this!”
Estelle crouched over the edge of the cliff, her red hair streamed in wild, writhing waves as she held a long branch down to him.
He gripped the end of the branch and she pulled. Using his feet and knees to crawl upwards, he allowed her to haul him up until he reached the edge of the cliff, swinging himself the rest of the way.
There was another boom. He rolled on the grass carpeted, level ground, found Estelle’s hand, stumbled to his knees, tripped to his feet and ran as fast as he could away from the ocean, away from the cliff. He didn’t see where he went, just stumbled with a death grip on her hand, enclosed now in a blur of green, of snapping branches and deep shadow.
The whistle surrounded him, brought him swinging to his right. Trees grew like a twisted fortress around them. He hurtled over fallen branches, caught Estelle when she stumbled, snatched her from her knees and had them pounding the earth away from the whistling.
The explosion cracked the air. The earth rumbled, protested. Trees splintered, branches toppled. The after waves of the blast struck him, gripped him in a gigantic crushing force, made Estelle stumble, hit the ground. He followed, his hand locked with hers. Something cracked onto his head and he went face down in damp dirt. Estelle’s hand went limp, entwined with his. He couldn’t lift his head, couldn’t focus. Too heavy. Waves pounded into him and he rolled beneath them in a blanket of total, impregnable blackness.
Chapter Nine
The gentle crackling of burning wood reminded him of his mother’s kitchen. He would sometimes sit and watch her cook. She would make a stew in a large steaming pot over the open fire in the kitchen’s hearth. Other times she would use the huge, blackened oven to bake bread, or roast their dinner. Always there was a friendly fire that warmed every corner of the snug little kitchen.
He opened his eyes and half expected to see his mother’s smiling face as he often woke head down on the kitchen table. “Gregory, you fell asleep over half peeled potatoes,” she would gently scold then give him a wink and a piece of bread and send him to play with his friends while she finished cooking.
There was no such comfort here. Although the fire was a gentle one, contained in an open hearth, it was in a foreign room that was filled with murky, shifting shadows. He tried to focus. But his vision blurred and spiraled into dark, indistinguishable shapes.
Gregory lifted his head and winced when a shot of heated pain blasted through his head. He rolled onto his elbow, felt the back of his skull and found a tender lump the size of an egg. That was the reason why he remembered nothing between blacking out and waking … wherever he was.
His vision cleared a little and he found he was in a darkened, dirty little room, no more than a hovel. The fire was in the center, surrounded by a rough circle of rocks. Above it, on an iron skewer, balanced a small blackened pot. Steam spewed from the top, followed by an unpleasant smell. There was little else more, save a small three legged chair, a rough handmade table that held a collection of dirty glass bottles on its top.
The sun found holes, creating pockets of dappled light in the small space. The roof was no more than thin layers of bracken. The walls were made of straight twigs, bound by smaller branches knotted together. There was a narrow triangular door from which bright daylight streamed in.
A soft body stirred next to him and he looked over his shoulder to see who it was. Estelle. Her silken auburn hair streamed over her shoulders in cascading waves, a perfect frame for her delicate face. He rolled to face her, picked a silken strand from her shoulder and let it glide between his fingers.
She opened her eyes and became alert in a second. Her body tensed and her autumn eyes locked with his. “Where are we,” she hissed, sitting up next to him. She had woken better than he had.
A shadow moved from the entrance and he was on his feet, Estelle followed and they were facing an old woman who didn’t seem surprised at all they were in here. She was old beyond guess, her face was wrinkled so much that deep lines beneath her eyes and around her mouth nearly folded over on themselves. Her skin was yellowed and thin and reminded Gregory of melted wax that had pooled at the bottom of a long burnt candle.
There was a lump behind her neck that caused her to bend forward, unable to stretch to her full height. She was dressed in rags. The black material was stained with ingrained dirt and mildew, the smell of which assaulted Gregory’s nostrils the moment she stepped into the hovel. She clutched the end of a stick with a thin, claw-like hand. The skin on the backs of her hands was blotted with large brown stains. On one hand a scab formed a raised, red-brown lump on her knuckles.
S
he blinked at them through light blue, watery eyes. Her mouth opened in a toothless smile and she cackled without humor. “Awake, I see,” she said.
“Who are you and where are we?” Gregory demanded.
The old woman shuffled into the hovel and stirred the pot over the fire. “Full of demands, too,” she said in a dry, paper thin voice. The old woman was in no rush as she stirred the mixture from the pot. She leant over the mixture and sniffed. Satisfied, the old woman picked up two wooden bowls from the table and filled them both with the steaming brew and handed one to each of them.
“Eat,” she said.
Gregory smelt the contents which reminded him of week old wet sails. “No, thank you.”
The old woman cackled. “The smell is the herbs I put in for your health. The meat is good. A rabbit I caught this morning. Send praise to the gods for the food and eat. It will satisfy your empty stomach and calm your nerves.” She handed them spoons and gestured for them to eat.
Estelle sat back onto the pallet, clutching the bowl tentatively between her hands. She tasted a small amount of food from the edge of the spoon. Her eyes opened and she nodded to Gregory. “It’s good.” Her voice matched the surprise in her eyes.
Gregory’s stomach cramped uncomfortably and he couldn’t remember when he had last eaten. If not for the taste, he would eat for the energy the food would give him. He sat next to Estelle and soon found the bowl empty. The old woman filled his bowl without a word and waited for them to finish. She handed them a rough wooden cup of water to finish off their meal.
“Where are we?” Gregory asked.
“You will know where you are soon enough. So near your home, but still such a long journey,” the old woman said.
“What do you mean? What is the name of the land?” Gregory asked.
“Each island a country in full, but all a part of a larger land. So powerful, and yet so secret. Finish your meal and I will tell you more,” the old woman said when she saw the frustration on Gregory’s face.
Paradise Island Page 8