“Your men are to be commended,” he told Ian, “acting as they did. And I have assured Lieutenant Kincaid that I blame no one but Bryce for his death.”
Christiana breathed a soft sigh of relief. Smiling softly, gratefully, she dipped into the broth and fed Ian another spoonful.
“Bryce was waiting for us,” she said, “with a dozen others. When O’Malley’s men came, Bryce would not relent. He tried to shoot us both.”
“So I heard,” he told her. “Je suis desolé.”
She sat a little straighter and spooned another bite. “You have nothing to be sorry for. This—it—was all Bryce’s doing.” She paused with the spoon above the bowl and turned her head, staring out the window for a long moment, as if she could not bear seeing how her father had suffered. Shuddering, she blinked the tears from her eyes and fed him the next bite.
“Vallé, there is something you should know.” Christiana spoke softly, but her voice was torn with emotion. “Bryce said that he hunted down those responsible for your parents’ deaths. He claimed that he avenged them—that he had avenged Felicia’s death as well. I don’t know that he would ever have told you. I’m sorry,” she said. “He believed that you deserved to suffer.”
“He hated me,” Justin admitted. “He wanted Felicia for himself. He tried to persuade her to wed him. He went so far as to seduce her, hoping to prevent our marriage by proxy. If she had lived, she would have come to me enceinte with his child.”
A knock on the door interrupted them, and James Kincaid burst into the room. “Mistress McBride—it’s her time,” he blurted, looking to Christiana for help.
“Chances are, it’s another false start,” she tried to calm him. “She’s had two since we’ve been aboard.”
“Not this time.” Kincaid rubbed a hand over his face, visibly disturbed. “I just finished cleaning the mess she made on the floor when her water broke.”
“Oh, dear.” Aware of the perils of childbirth, Christiana looked at Justin, her green eyes searching for assurances he was powerless to give.
“The baby’s coming,” Justin said. “Comfort needs you.”
Christiana set down the porringer of broth and handed the spoon to Justin. “Can you help here, please? I don’t know how long I’ll be.”
“Go. I’ll see that he finishes.” Justin brushed her cheek, then stroked the delicate curve of her jaw with the backs of his fingers. Catching his wrist, she turned her face and pressed her lips against his callused palm before leaving with Kincaid.
The exchange did not escape Ian. “She must love you.”
Justin nodded. “Oui. She does, though heaven knows why.”
Ian chuckled, then put a hand to a catch in his side and drew a sharp breath. “Heaven knows,” he agreed through clenched teeth. “My son. Do you know how odd that sounds? Not that I don’t want her to wed,” he muttered. “It’s just….”
“Awkward? I agree. Marrying your daughter wasn’t something I planned. It just…happened.”
Taking the porringer, Justin sat down and spooned a bite of broth. When he lifted it to Ian’s mouth, he saw that his old friend was less than comfortable with the situation.
Ian rolled his eyes and resigned himself to being fed an invalid’s share by the man who’d sailed with him, whored and drank and fought with him. And now he was pledged to his daughter. “And before all this,” Ian wondered aloud. “Is there aught else I need to know?”
“Only that I love her,” Justin said simply, feeding Ian another bite. “Perhaps I always have.”
Ian choked. Coughing was painful enough to bring tears to his eyes.
“Dammit, Ian. You just had a bullet dug out of you.” They’d had to wait until they were clear of Kingston harbor, far enough away to risk striking a light, and Ian had lost a considerable amount of blood. “Take care, or you’ll open up, and then there’ll be hell to pay. I prefer to stay in your daughter’s good graces.”
“Seen her bad side, have you?” Ian swallowed the last bite and sank back on his pillow, exhausted with the effort. “Stubborn, that one. Like her mother, God rest her soul.”
Justin wondered how much Ian really knew about Christiana’s mother. But it was Christiana’s place, not his, to tell him. Instead, he focused on the child the two had created and the woman she’d become.
“Stubborn, and too brave for her own good,” Justin added. “If you’d hoped she would outgrow it, well….”
Ian closed his eyes, remembering. “When she was young, she seemed to bring out the best—and the worst—in you.”
“Oui. Our paths parted, and in all the years between, I’ve never found another like her.” Justin paused, wondering how much to share. “I am no saint, Ian. But I’ve held enough women to know the difference between love and lust. And with Christiana, well…I’ve never felt this way. I’m not certain I like it,” he confessed. “I am tormented, plagued by nightmares. Betimes, I cannot sleep. I lie awake, sweating in fear at the thought of losing her.”
Ian’s eyes were closed, but the smile on his face spoke volumes. “Separate beds, then,” he said with great satisfaction. “But you’re handfasted now, me boy-o. Soon you’ll have the license to share. And when the first bairn comes, you may send word to Ian O’Manion, gentleman farmer, in care of The Oaks plantation, in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Christiana closed the door to the lieutenant’s cabin and motioned Jimmy to step away from it with her.
“She needs help,” Christiana whispered. Rubbing her forehead, she cast an anxious look at the room where Comfort lay panting in Jimmy’s bed, drenched with sweat and worn out from her labors. “Where’s the leech?”
Jimmy snorted in disgust. “That worthless, scurvy bastard? ‘Tis his habit to get roarin’ drunk as soon as he finishes in surgery. Right now, he couldn’t carry coals to Newcastle. He’s passed out on his bunk.”
The news fed her rising panic. Something was wrong, and Comfort needed someone with skill and knowledge in birthing—something Christiana knew nothing about. Oh, she had seen puppies come, once, whelped in the gutter and gone soon after. She’d watched one of O’Malley’s horses delivered of a healthy foal, and had witnessed another die from the ordeal of trying to expel one lost in the womb.
“She needs someone who knows what to do,” she told Jimmy meaningfully.
“Bastard,” Jimmy named the ship’s surgeon again. “Once he finished with Captain O’Manion and he saw the job she did stitching me, he slacked his pace and let her do his work. She tended half the men before her water broke.”
“She helped you,” she reminded him. “And now you must help her.”
“Me?” Jimmy tore his gaze from the door. Panic shaped his features, and he rubbed his palms on his thighs. “No. No. Not me. I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.” When he stayed rooted, Christiana threw up her hands.
“You will help,” she said, “and I’ll tell you why. Comfort says that your mother had a babe nearly every year, and that you delivered the last two.”
If she’d been younger, she’d have knocked him over with a feather. But the time for teasing was in their distant past.
Jimmy’s mouth dropped open. He shook his head. “How?” he demanded. “How can she know something that I’ve not told another?”
Christiana shrugged. “Dreams. Visions. Pictures that come when she looks in a glass, or a mirror, or touches something. She’s no witch, if that’s your fear.”
Jimmy drew himself up. “She doesn’t scare me.”
“And she shouldn’t. But she’s afraid—afraid for her child. She’s been getting visions of an empty noose, and until today, she believed it was the one meant for—O’Manion,” she remembered to call him. “A sign that he’d escape it. But now….”
Christiana touched Jimmy’s good sleeve. “Please?”
A cry came from beyond the door, underscoring the urgency of the situation.
“Jimmy?”
Chr
istiana wanted to kick him. “Two births, three babes,” she hissed when he remained frozen in place. “The last two were twin girls.”
Jimmy shook himself. “God,” he breathed. “The first was hung up. The cord was wrapped around her neck. My mam came close to losing them both.”
“If you trust anything,” she said, “trust this: Comfort still sees an empty noose, and she says she needs you to keep it that way. Now, the two of us are going back in there. You’re not going to help me. I’m going to help you—and together, we will see this baby safely delivered.”
It was long after dark when Christiana finally emerged from Comfort’s cabin. Her eyes burned from the smoking flame of the lantern. Her feet—nay, her whole body—was in dire need of rest. Yet despite her fatigue, she smiled, her heart squeezing gently, her spirit still elated to have witnessed the miracle of birth.
It had been exactly as Comfort feared. Jimmy had to reach and slip the cord from around the baby’s neck before it could be safely delivered. Once his job was done, he’d been only too glad to leave the room, allowing Christiana to clean the mother and son and put the room in order.
He’d surprised her, Jimmy had. The experience made Christiana look at her childhood companion with new eyes and truly see the fine man he had become. After witnessing the strange yet wary familiarity between him and the doctor’s daughter, she could not help smiling at the whims of fate.
Aye, she thought. Comfort would someday get the dark-haired daughter she’d foreseen, once Jimmy stopped fighting and learned to accept that some things are just meant to be. Heaven knew, if Justin Vallé could do it, James Kincaid could, too.
Christiana checked on her father, who was, blessedly, resting soundly, lost in a laudanum dream. She smiled to see that Vallé remembered to take the bottle with him.
She would make certain that Jimmy knew to do the same.
O’Malley’s sea chest was pilfered, and clean clothes procured. Christiana dressed in the dark, then went in search of her husband.
Most of the men were asleep. Stepping carefully over sprawled bodies, she made her way to the railing, her eyes gradually adjusting to the midnight shadows. She scanned the deck, looking for pale hair in the thin moonlight, only to see flickering lights of other ships close by.
She swallowed the panic that rose, unbidden, in her throat before she realized it was Vallé’s fleet. No alarm had been sounded, and her husband was nowhere to be found.
Jimmy came to stand beside her. “The captains are meeting aboard the Principia,” he told her. He pointed toward Vallé’s flagship and shoved a loose lock of black hair behind the ear that she’d double-pierced for him when they were young. “Plans are to sail on the morrow. Captain O’Manion goes to his horses in Maryland, and then we are to take to the sea again. The ships are newly fitted, with new names, and new ownership. Orders are to stay legal. No smuggling. Legitimate trade only. A gentleman farmer, he plans to be.”
James stopped himself from saying more. It wasn’t his place to tell her that the captain had signed papers turning half of the Bold Avenger over to her. A dowry, of sorts, for when she went with her Frenchman.
“Take no chances,” Christiana warned him, “you and the men who came for us. You took up arms against Bryce’s men. The British will be looking for those who left them where they lay.”
He nodded, thoughtful. “If we’re lucky, they’ll blame everything on the escaped prisoners who attacked the others.”
“But we can’t be certain. You were with me when I met with Simon. If he tells a tale, or if anyone saw you tonight—Jimmy, if any witnesses come forward, it would mean a dance on the gibbet.”
Christiana shook off a sudden chill and rubbed her arms. “Night air,” she quipped lightly.
“Aye,” he said, knowing better. He turned his gaze to the heavens and began picking out points of lights, his baritone voice identifying constellations while Christiana rested a hand at her waist and began counting the days. Until now, she’d put her lateness down to the stress of her situation, worried about Bryce’s behavior and O’Malley’s rescue. Having heard Comfort’s litany of symptoms she’d suffered with her pregnancy—amidst curses piled atop the father’s black-haired head for getting her in that state, Christiana wondered if she and Vallé might not have conceived their first child the night of the storm.
Suddenly, she realized that her fantasy of a normal life—husband, children, social status—things she’d never believed she would have, were miraculously within her grasp. Vallé had accepted who and what she was, as she had embraced him. Now that they were pledged, Christiana understood exactly how the two of them would be made complete, once their union was sanctioned by the laws of God and man.
Aye, she would be Vallé’s balance, there to shelter him in her arms, offering a safe haven from the storms of life. Their children would serve to ground him, a reminder to lessen his risks and not fly too close to the sun with waxen wings. And Vallé would be her joy and her salvation, offering her paradise on earth and a chance for heaven at last. She’d done penance enough. No longer the daughter who’d inherited the sins of her mother, but a wife, and, God willing, a mother, her husband’s partner in teaching their children, showing them by example that love makes all things possible.
She felt as if she’d reached for a star, and successfully brought it down to earth. Christiana stood at the rail, listening to Jimmy, and basking in the warm glow of love made manifest.
After a time, Jimmy fell quiet, and she felt a palpable shift in his mood. When she met his eyes, his gaze, like hers, was filled with concern.
“What will you do?” she asked him. “Where will you go? You weren’t a wanted man before, but now….”
He’d killed Bryce Vallé, had aided a prison escape, had led an assault that left twelve other men dead.
Had saved her. Saved her father. Had come to the aid of Comfort McBride and saved her fatherless son when he surely would have died. And she thought, even good things must come in threes.
“Vallé’s island is enough removed from English rule to offer sanctuary,” she told him. “If you—or any of the others—need refuge, I swear that you’ll have it, for however long you wish to stay.”
Acknowledging her offer with a nod, Jimmy looked as if he would give it serious consideration. The two of them looked out to sea, lost in private thoughts. Christiana thanked God and all the saints that Comfort’s babe was a strong, hungry lad, for all that he came too early. The way that wee Micheil had worked for his dinner, he’d soon grow to size.
Hers eyes misted when she recalled the sight of Comfort putting her newborn son to her swollen breast for the first time. The babe looked like a little bird, tiny bald head bobbing, hungry mouth opened wide. He’d rooted for the nipple and latched onto it like a starving man.
Jimmy’s eyes met hers. When his gaze dropped to her chest and he looked away, his cheeks ruddy with color, she knew that he was remembering, too. Like the sight of a crowning head and a slick red wriggling bit of newly hatched humanity, ‘twas the kind of thing never to be forgotten.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Moonlight slipped through the gathering clouds, bathing the sides of the crow’s nest as Justin gained its perch. Christiana had fallen asleep with her back against the mast, her legs curled beneath her in an irresistible pose. The sight of her resting, safe and sound, high above the deck in her favorite childhood haunt, eased the fear that gripped his heart when he’d returned from the Principia and found her gone.
“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.” Bending down, he brushed his lips across hers, and a sigh of contentment drifted free, carried on the sea-scented night wind as she welcomed him into her world.
“Are you awake now?” he whispered in her ear.
Minx. She had yet to open her eyes, but the smile on her face spoke volumes.
On bended knee, he gathered her in his arms and turned, easing her up and onto his lap, until he sat in the wooden well of the crow’s nest, his back brac
ed, his hands wrapped around her waist.
“What of now?” he asked again, noting the way she snuggled against him, then lay very still within the circle of his arms, with her ear pressed to his heart.
“No,” she murmured beneath his chin. “I’m dreaming. Dreaming that my prince has come to carry me away.”
“That was my plan,” he agreed, “since we shall have no bridal bed here. For that, we must go to the Principia. But,” he said, “I fear if we descend from your tower now, someone else—your father, or Comfort—will need you before I can steal you away. You will be rocking a baby, or soothing a brow, or fetching lemon water, and I shall be abandoned, and forced to sleep alone.”
She pushed away slightly, her lips in a moue as she slanted a meaningful look at him. “What kind of wife would I be, to choose Comfort over you…especially on our wedding night?” she asked him, her voice unbearably husky as she lifted her face and drew his down to meet it. “We’ve a lifetime to spend in civilized beds. What say you if tonight we ride the wind?”
When Vallé twined his fingers in her hair, Christiana smiled and pressed her lips to the pulse-point in her husband’s sun-browned throat. She kissed it again, and felt his smile when she tasted it with her tongue. Running her fingertips over his loose-fitting white shirt to feel the carved slabs of muscle beneath it, she touched his ear and made the gold hoop wink in the moonlight.
The breeze was gentle on her face, heaven’s breath, renewing her. Raising her chin, she saw her love reflected in Vallé’s eyes.
“How long do we have?” she asked, mapping the contours of his chest.
“Till morning,” he said, warming as the lambent flame of passion flared beneath her fingers. “My fleet returns to Valhalla. All but the Yseult,” he amended, distracted by the feel of her hips, restless in his lap. “O’Malley’s lieutenant-at-arms saved you. Now we do his other lieutenant a favor. Rafe has agreed to see McGuire’s prisoner returned—a vicar’s daughter who unfortunately was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”
Touch the Wind: Touch the Wind Book 1 Page 28