by Nina Bruhns
“Elizabeth Hamilton,” he emphasized, shaking his head almost imperceptibly.
But Elizabeth didn’t catch the exchange because she was too busy staring at a large painting that graced the center hallway. A painting of himself and Tyree in the prime of their privateering days. One of their friend Thom Bowden’s overly melodramatic works done in oils, it showed them on the deck of the Sea Nymph, armed to the teeth, ready to take an enemy vessel by force. Thom Bowden never had a coin to his name, but had been a likable enough fellow, always hanging out at the Moon and Palmetto sketching portraits for ale and grocery money. He, Tyree and their ships were frequently the subjects of his paintings.
And the uncanny likeness of his old self to Andre was unmistakable in this one.
“Good grief,” she murmured. “No wonder you identified with the man. You’re a dead ringer.”
He hid a wince. “Aye. You might say that.”
“Was he some kind of distant relative?”
He cleared his throat. “In a manner of speaking.”
“Who’s the other guy?”
“His partner, Captain Tyree St. James.”
Her dubious gaze turned to his. “Tyree?”
He cleared his throat again. “Alors. My friend on his honeymoon, his name is really James Tyler. I just call him…” He realized he was only digging himself deeper and glanced around for a distraction. Suddenly his whole body froze in shock. There, mounted on the wall above the fireplace in a salon just off the hall was a pair of crossed sabers.
His saber. And Tyree’s. The very swords they’d dueled with two hundred years earlier. The swords with which they’d killed one another.
Sacre coeur. He took a deep breath and shook off the eerie feeling, tearing his gaze from the instruments of his own destruction.
Elizabeth looked from the painting to him, to the sabers and back, questions clearly shining in her eyes.
He shrugged, and gave her an awkward grin. “Sorry. What was I saying?”
Luckily Mrs. Yates came to his rescue. “Never mind. Kitchen’s this way,” she said, herding them away from the painting and the swords, toward the back of the house. “I’ll put on a kettle and tell you the news from Captain St…. Captain James, shall I?”
He dragged himself back to the present.
“James was—is—my best friend, who has been a constant presence at the hospital during my recovery. He and his wife, Clara, are on a year-long sail around the world,” he explained to Elizabeth, shifting his concentration to her long, sexy legs as he followed behind, amazed as he had been last night, at the amount of skin she was showing. He was still getting used to the revealing clothing women wore these days. Not that he was complaining about her short skirt, mind you. “Clara is a travel writer.”
“And James?” she asked as they took seats around a giant antique clawfoot table and Mrs. Yates fussed with tea things.
“James is…an eccentric,” Sully said with a chuckle. “He likes to sail and to collect old things.” He peeled his gaze from Elizabeth’s mouthwateringly sexy T-shirt and looked around the kitchen counters, which were crammed full of a multitude of shiny electrical gadgets and cooking implements. “And new things. He’s a bit of a fool for those…what are they called? Online auctions?”
Mrs. Yates rolled her eyes. “Much to the joy of the local women’s shelters. It’s a pain to keep up with him, but he’s very generous. Next, though, I expect it’ll be baby things.”
Sully jerked up in his seat. “Baby things?”
She cackled happily. “A pretty new wife, a whole year in a tiny sailboat cabin and no TV? You do the math, Captain.”
The thought of Tyree having a child was too bizarre. He’d always been the confirmed bachelor with a woman in every port. Sully was the one who’d longed for wife and family. He glanced at Elizabeth. She hadn’t wanted children before. Would this new Elizabeth want them? He hoped so.
“How romantic would that be?” she murmured with a wistful smile. Perhaps she did…
His heart squeezed with the distant but familiar pang of his love for her, filling with memories of the blissful days and nights they’d spent together so long ago. She’d been a wonderful companion. Spontaneous and full of laughter, always ready with open arms when he came home from a voyage. Her disposition was cheerful, her nature passionate.
He wanted those days back. And even more, the nights.
Mrs. Yates had been chatting on about e-mails she’d received from Clara and Tyree, and brought him back to the present by addressing him. “They send greetings, Captain, and a reminder to set up the laptop computer Captain James gave you.”
He grimaced. Tyree was wild for all the newfangled stuff his friend called “technology.” With Tyree, it was online this and online that. Rose Cottage was now practically a fortress with all the electronic security measures Tyree installed before consenting to leave Mrs. Yates by herself for a year. Which was a good thing because Sully would have been useless as a guard in his present condition. But as for technology, hell, Sully was still getting used to zippers on his pants instead of buttons. He wondered if Elizabeth’s skirt had a zipper….
She smiled over at him. “I’ll help you get it up and running, if you want.”
He was thinking more of getting it down, and her not running.
Her eyebrow raised.
Ah. The laptop. He returned her smile wryly. It was a humbling experience having a woman know more than he about pretty much everything around him. “I’ll have to start paying you as my secretary,” he muttered. “Or my nursemaid.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m happy to help,” she said.
For which he was very grateful. Especially if she continued to wear that skirt.
But for a split second he wondered why she offered him so much of her time.
Dismissing the thought, when Mrs. Yates served the tea, he took the opportunity to broach the subject he really wanted to talk about. “I spoke with Jake Santee today.”
She handed him his cup. “The arson investigator at Old Fort Mystic?”
He took a deep breath of the fragrant orange spice tea, the scent exploding over his newly liberated senses. “He moved his office here to the Magnolia Cove station part-time. And he’s closed the case.”
He didn’t need to say which one.
“But they never found Peel!” she objected, setting the pot down with a clatter. “Or his body.”
Wesley Peel was the prime suspect in a string of arson cases over the past year, culminating in the fire at the historic pub in which the arsonist supposedly died.
Only Sully, Tyree, his wife Clara and Mrs. Yates knew about the more incredible, otherworldly results of that fire—Sully’s transmigration and the lifting of the curse that had held Tyree prisoner as a wandering spirit for two centuries—that had caused both men to become mortal again.
The thought that a witness to those events might be lurking about somewhere, with nefarious purpose and uncertain means, made Sully uneasy. Not to mention Tyree’s suspicions…
“Jake said he was getting pressure from the mayor,” Sully said, savoring the tang of the citrus tea as it slid over his tongue. “He was not happy to close it, but had no evidence Wesley Peel wasn’t dead.”
“True, there have been no more fires since.”
“How many fires did this man set?” Elizabeth asked.
“Five,” he said. “All very old buildings on the historical register.”
“Strange choice for an arsonist.”
“The theory was, he was searching for something specific. And when he didn’t find it, he burned the pla ces down.”
“What was he looking for?” she asked, openly curious.
“He always took paintings,” Mrs. Yates supplied, “by a certain artist, Thom Bowden—the man who painted the one in the hall you were admiring. And also volumes from a set of old journals. Peel appeared to be after one diary in particular.”
“A diary?” Elizabeth asked incredulously
.
Mrs. Yates poured her another cup of tea. “Yes. Written by one of the sailors on the Sea Sprite, sister ship to Sullivan Fouquet’s Sea Nymph.”
“Ah.” Her eyes brightened in understanding. “A pirate treasure map!”
“Wesley Peel’s ancestor, John Peel, was said to have discovered one of Fouquet and St. James’s buried treasure chests after their deaths, and built the Peel family fortune upon it. A lumber mill,” Sully supplied. Tyree had uncovered that information in his research. “The mill recently went bankrupt. It’s possible Wesley Peel thought there was more treasure to be found somewhere, and he could save his family’s business.”
Of course, there isn’t. Tyree had recovered the remaining chests nearly two hundred years ago, founding his own fortune. Recently he’d given much of his wealth away, but enough remained to keep them all comfortable for life, including Sully, to whom Tyree had insisted on signing over half before leaving on his honeymoon.
Mrs. Yates gave Sully a surreptitious glance. “Captain James thinks it more likely Peel is after the words to a potent voudou curse.”
Elizabeth’s jaw dropped. “Voudou? In a pirate diary?”
“Privateer,” Sully swiftly corrected, stepping in to steer the conversation away from that particular patch of quicksand. He couldn’t believe Mrs. Yates had mentioned it.
Elizabeth blinked. “Right. Privateer. I read something about that. What exactly is the difference?”
“A pirate is an outlaw,” he explained. “A privateer has letters of marque from his government, authorizing him to seize enemy ships on their behalf. All legal and aboveboard.”
When Sully had first been forcibly transported to South Louisiana from Lord Henry Sullivan’s estate in Connecticut, in youthful bitterness he’d signed on with one of the notorious pirate ships that plied their trade around the gulf and Caribbean. He’d done well. Very well. But when the War of Independence came along, he’d jumped at the chance to sail for the newly formed revolutionary government. As a side-benefit he’d received a full pardon for all previous crimes. Then he’d met Tyree, and the rest, as they say, was history. Literally.
“Okay,” she said. “But what made this Peel guy think a privateering diary contained a voudou curse, of all things?”
He should have known she wouldn’t be distracted.
He puffed out a breath. Mrs. Yates rose to fetch a plate of her home-baked macaroons from the pantry. Somewhere in another room a mantel clock chimed twice. And Sully decided since they’d gone this far, he might as well tell the whole truth.
“A well-known legend has it that a powerful Haitian voudou priest, Jeantout, taught Sullivan Fouquet his secrets in exchange for saving his life. Fouquet’s dying words were said to have been a two-hundred-year-long curse on the man who’d accidentally killed his fiancée.”
“Tyree St. James,” Elizabeth murmured.
“Aye,” Sully said, suppressing a shudder at the sharp memory of cold steel slicing through his gullet and rage over Elizabeth’s death. “Supposedly this voudou curse was written down word for word in the journal of an eyewitness, Davey Scraggs.”
“The sailor from the Sea Sprite.”
“Aye.” The old busybody. Everything that ever happened to any man on either crew was dutifully scribbled down in those blasted journals. Scraggs could have been rich through blackmail alone if he hadn’t had the integrity of a parson. Sully hadn’t been a bit surprised when Tyree had told him Scraggs continued to write journals until his death, many years after Sully’s own.
She raised a skeptical brow. “So, Peel thought if he read or spoke the words of this voudou curse, what would happen?”
Sully grimaced and turned his attention to more pleasant fare—the plate of macaroons. “Who knows. The man lost the family business and all his money. Maybe he believed if he didn’t find the treasure, voudou could get it all back for him.”
“Was that the arson investigator’s theory?”
Sully bit into one of the sweet cakes with an appreciative hum. “To be sure, Jake Santee didn’t so much care why Peel was setting fires,” he hedged. “Only that he was setting fires.”
For a long moment he could feel her eyes on him. Weighing. “But you care,” she finally said. “Why?”
Merde. Leave it to her to get right at the heart of the matter.
He set down the macaroon. “Because Wesley Peel is a madman,” he answered. That much, at least, was true. “And because he tried to kill my best friends. Mrs. Yates herself barely escaped the fire unscathed.” Also true. “And because I believe Peel is still alive. And that he’ll stop at nothing to get what he is after.” And that was what really worried him.
He met her gaze, and saw the color drain from her face as she realized the meaning beneath his words.
Her voice was unsteady as she said, “And since it was in all the newspapers how you awoke from your coma thinking you were Sullivan Fouquet…” she whispered, “this time, he’ll be coming after you.”
Suddenly the amusing quirkiness of Sully’s trick memory took on a whole different quality. Frightening. Dangerous. Anything but amusing.
“Oh, my God,” Elizabeth said, aghast. “What are you going to do?”
“Not much I can do,” he answered all too calmly. “Not until Peel shows himself.”
“What about the journal? Where is that?”
“With Peel,” Sully said. “Wherever that might be.”
“He got all of them,” Mrs. Yates explained. “Stolen from the houses before he set them ablaze.”
“Including the volume with the curse?”
“Aye. It had been in Clara James’s possession. But he was able to steal it from her.”
At that, Elizabeth’s anxiety notched down a bit. “Then he’s read it. And surely must realize by now that the curse is just nonsense. That it doesn’t work.”
Sully and the old woman shifted in their seats.
After a moment of hushed discomfort, Sully said, “I must compliment you on your excellent macaroons, Mrs. Yates. They are truly delicious.”
“Why, thank you, Captain,” she chimed in. “I have some oatmeal-raisin, too, if you’d care to try those?”
He grinned wolfishly. “You should know better than to tempt a man like that. I’ll certainly not refuse.”
Elizabeth watched the exchange with stark disbelief. She wasn’t sure what perplexed her more, Sully’s almost orgasmic enjoyment of his simple tea and cookies, Mrs. Yates consistently calling him “Captain” rather than “Chief,” or their almost conspiratorial silence—and therefore tacit disagreement—regarding her observation about the curse.
“Oatmeal-raisin, dear?” Mrs. Yates asked, extending the plate toward her.
Elizabeth stood abruptly. “What on earth are you two playing at?”
They both blinked at her innocently. “Whatever can you mean, my dear?”
Good grief. She spun to Sully. “Please don’t tell me you buy into this curse thing. Lord, Sully, tell me you don’t somehow still think you really are a two-hundred-year-old pirate!”
He actually squirmed. “Chère, I know this will probably be difficult to believe, but—”
She slapped her hands over her ears. “Andre Sullivan, I do not want to hear this!”
Unfortunately, she was pretty good at reading lips. The swearword he muttered as he rose and reached for her was fairly clear.
He grasped her wrists and pulled her hands away from her ears. “Lizzie, none of that matters. It’s what’s inside a man that counts, non?”
She wanted to agree. Really, she did. And she hoped like hell he meant it. For Caleb’s sake. But for hers…her heart couldn’t help but sink.
Not that it should matter one iota if the man was crazy as a loon. She had no personal stake in his sanity or insanity. None at all. But still…
“Yes, you’re right,” she said, trying desperately to be reasonable. “I just worry, that’s all.”
He looked absurdly pleased. “About me
?”
She wanted to groan. “Andre—”
“Sully.”
She huffed impatiently. “The point is, if Wesley Peel really is still alive, and you persist in this…insane delusion…it could get you killed!”
“I’ve faced scarier men than Peel in my day,” he assured her with a kiss on her forehead.
Why did that so not comfort her?
She looked to the older woman for help, but Mrs. Yates just beamed at the tender way Sully took Elizabeth into his arms. There would be no support from that quarter.
Elizabeth sighed, and for a brief moment let herself enjoy the warm contact with the infuriating man’s tall, strong body. Though she’d known him less than a day, and he was being remarkably presumptuous, it felt exactly right to be in his embrace, pressed close to his muscular chest, her cheek resting on his broad shoulder. She had an almost irresistible urge to lift her face and let his lips meet hers. As they had in the garden yesterday. As she’d so desperately wanted to last night when he was in her bed.
Damn.
She really had to tell him why she was here in Magnolia Cove. Soon.
Pulling away, she avoided his gaze, but he snagged her hand so she couldn’t escape completely.
“Mrs. Yates,” he said, ignoring her not-so-subtle tugs, “before he sailed, Tyree said he’d leave a package with you for me?”
“Oh, yes. I’d completely forgotten about that. I’ll run and fetch it for you.”
She bustled out of the kitchen, and Elizabeth was left alone with Sully, still trying to extract her hand from his.
“It’s no use, you know,” he said, turning to her.
“What is?”
“Denying your attraction to me.”
She gave one last yank. “Who’s denying it?”
A second later she landed back in his arms again with an oof. “You’re not?”
“I think it’s been pretty obvious I find you quite, um—” sexy, desirable, appealing “—attractive.”
Far too attractive for her own good.
His smile blazed back at her. “I’m glad to hear it. I was afraid you were avoiding touching me.”
With that, his mouth came down on hers. She wasn’t exactly surprised, but gave a small gasp nonetheless. Which let him in—to her consternation…and her pleasure.