But Rosalie had seen it when he hadn’t.
Rosalie, whose little hand was now unbuttoning his placard and pushing inside to touch and hold him, to play with his balls and to stroke his cock into shuddering anguish until he thought he’d explode.
The British ship lay safely astern now. Rosalie corrected their course once more, the wind blowing a spiraling hank of her hair across Kieran’s cheek as she aligned ’Piper’s bowsprit on the tip of a darkened point of land far off to larboard. Kieran had little idea what that land was and at the moment, cared even less.
Rosalie’s hand continued to rub him. To stroke him. To squeeze him.
Forward, he could see men moving on the deck, shadowy figures in the darkness. He shut his eyes, swelling in Rosalie’s hand.
“Got any bad poetry for me, Captain?” she whispered playfully.
He couldn’t think. Not even of bad poetry. Especially not of bad poetry.
“Kieran?”
“You’re a—my God!—a torment.”
“I’ll stop if you want me to.”
“You know I don’t want you to.”
“Then show me how much you don’t want me to,” she breathed into his ear, and he shuddered with want.
“Lash the tiller,” she whispered. “There’s nothing out here now but us.”
He did as she asked. And as they stood there together at the helm, her hand working him in the darkness not twenty feet from where a crewman lounged at the weather rail, he quietly pulled her close, kissed her hard, lifted her skirts and, anchoring her with a hand behind her back, pushed himself deeply into her.
Their coupling was short and hard and silent and fierce, their gasps of pleasure muffled by sealed mouths and the sound of Sandpiper’s bows knifing happily through the building swells as the approached the open Atlantic.
And just as with the frigate, nobody was the wiser.
* * *
Sandpiper rounded the southernmost tip of Virginia’s eastern shore and, as the wind strengthened and salt foam began to fly through the air, cool and refreshing after the stifling heat that was Baltimore, Kieran called for all plain sail and the ship’s topgallant to be set.
The wind befriended them, veering around the compass until it blew stiff and hard off Sandpiper’s starboard quarter.
“Get the stuns’ls on her,” Kieran called. “Might as well let our little bird fly!”
And fly she did.
The sea turned hard and deep and blue as they headed north up the long coast of Virginia, the swells capped with foaming white lace, and the sloop pushed happily through trough and crest alike, her long bowsprit pointed for home. Shoes were shed, and stockings too. The sea found its way over the plunging bows, sheeting in cold, delicious streams down the decks and around bare ankles before spilling through the scuppers and back into the endless blue expanse. With the oppressive heat behind them, everyone’s spirits were high.
Everyone’s, that is, except their captain’s.
And only the two people on the ship who knew him best saw the pain in his eyes, the quickness of his come-and-gone smile and general air of distraction, and knew the reason why he did not share their buoyant mood.
“Unfinished business in the Caribbean,” murmured the new crewmembers from Baltimore, sagely. “He’s thinking of a way to get back there and finish off those damned pirates.”
“Then why’re we headed north?”
“Family matters,” Joel said, with a warning glance, “And that’s all any of you lot need to know about it.”
The bosun was protective of their captain and his dark glare should have been enough to still the wagging tongues, but even so, speculation abounded; after all, many of those aboard had lost friends and loved ones to the pirates who’d slaughtered so many of Penelope’s crew and they, too, thirsted for vengeance.
And so the tongues continued to wag. Maybe the captain was headed north to enlist the help of his cousin, the United States Navy’s own Ruaidri O’ Devir, who commanded a forty-four-gun sister frigate of USS Constitution out of Boston. Maybe he’d pick up more crew in his hometown and then return to Barbados to lead his British brother-in-law, Admiral Sir Graham Falconer, back to the Caribbean and let him blast the pirates to Hades and beyond.
Either way, Escobar would be dealt with and the crew couldn’t wait to spill blood.
Lots of blood.
But what nobody aboard the sloop knew was that Escobar was no longer in the Caribbean, but only a day’s sail behind them and about to send a boat into Baltimore to make discreet inquiries—and learn that the elusive Sandpiper was on her way north to Newburyport.
* * *
Sandpiper glided north through the open Atlantic, the wind driving her by the great wing that was her mainsail, the miles falling steadily away astern. Virginia. Delaware. New Jersey and New York, with Long Island pointing the way to Block Island and Nantucket. Another sunrise, another sunset and two days lost when they put into Providence at the request of a Baltimorean whose aging mother lived in Rhode Island and whose welfare he wanted to check.
Kieran, in no hurry to get home, was happy to oblige him.
He was just as happy to let the crew go ashore in Providence for wine and women while he enjoyed a night with his new bride in Sandpiper’s small cabin. Outside, the winds began to pick up, blowing through the open windows and cooling their heated flesh, and sure enough by that evening it was apparent that they weren’t going anywhere.
The gale winds kept them bottled up in the harbor for another day. They rode the tail-end of the storm out past Warwick, North Kingston and Newport, and were soon in flight once more in the open Atlantic, heading out and around the formidable arm of Cape Cod. There, Sandpiper turned her long, jaunty jib-boom northwest.
To her captain, the wind off the water smelled like home now… Cape Ann and Gloucester cloaked in haze off to larboard… Rockport…around the point, Essex and Ipswich and their miles of tidal flats, and the southern tip of Plum Island. Kieran’s heart began to pound with dread and emotion as the flat, familiar coastline of his homeland, flooded by beams of late-afternoon sunlight slashing out of scudding clouds, came into view.
Pain began to press behind his eyes. His temples started a dull throb. He felt Rosalie’s touch on his arm, took comfort in her presence, but even she could not penetrate the thickening cloud of anxiety and gloom. By the time Plum Island’s seven barrier miles of north-to-south running sand reached its inevitable end to allow the mighty Merrimack River to empty into the Atlantic, Kieran had a full-blown headache. Beyond that break in the land was Newburyport.
Home.
“Heave to,” he ordered, a half mile out beyond the river’s mouth. One had to time their entrance into the river just right; powerful currents, underwater sandbars and the occasional rogue wave combined with a contrary wind, could make this one of the most treacherous spots on the east coast. At the moment, he longed for an east wind against a fierce outgoing tide. It would have made entering the river dangerously impossible and put off the inevitable all the more. But of course, the gods of avoidance were not granting him any such favors today. Instead, the tide had turned and was flowing back up the river and the breeze, gentle and warm and kind, was sweet and steady out of the south.
The sea moved under him, restless and persistent. Pain throbbed dully across the top of his head, down the side of his skull. He sensed someone at his side.
Rosalie. She said nothing, just reaching out and taking his hand, holding it in her own. And there, Liam, coming to join him at the rail, his great, beamy smile fading as he saw his captain’s face.
The old Irishman put a hand on Kieran’s shoulder. “No sense delaying it,” he said gently. “Couldn’t ask for a sweeter wind and a better tide.”
Kieran said nothing.
“I know ye’re hurting. But muster a smile, Kieran, and try to find some joy in your homecoming.”
“Not much to come home to, Liam.”
“Aye, ’twill be hard,
and I won’t deny it. Hard for me, too.” He glanced at Rosalie, standing quietly beside him. “But ye’re not alone, lad. Ye’ve got her. Ye’ve got me. Ye’ve got yer uncle and aunt, yer cousins, and plenty of people to share the grief with. Won’t take it away, can’t take it away, but ye won’t be alone.”
Kieran tightened his mouth to hold back the sudden rise of emotion. Dadai would not be there. Mother would not be there. They would never be there again, and he didn’t want to face that empty house, oh, God help him he did not. Could not.
He felt the tide moving Sandpiper beneath his feet, urging him to follow it in, to follow it up that river, to follow it home.
Home.
His heart ached, burned in his chest, spread upwards and created a stinging ache behind his eyes, a lump that clogged the back of his throat.
“Ye’ll miss the tide if ye dally too long, lad.”
He glanced about. His small crew were all standing silently at their stations, awaiting his word, feeling the weight of his pain even if they didn’t know the reason for it. The long swells coming in from the open Atlantic rolled the deck beneath his feet. Far above his head, the pennant licked at the burnished sky, pointing the way toward the river.
Liam was right. There was no sense delaying the inevitable.
“Strike the topsail and we’ll head in under jib and main alone,” he said brusquely, and meeting Liam’s equally pained gaze, he turned abruptly and headed aft.
The tide might be right, the wind might be sweet, but the mouth of the Merrimack was treacherous and cruel.
He would steer Sandpiper in, himself.
Chapter 28
A son of Newburyport had come home, and as Kieran pointed ’Piper’s long, jaunty nose on the distant spires of the city’s churches while wind and current carried them through the river’s mouth, he heard bells clanging and knew the welcome was for him.
He felt Rosalie’s excitement at her first glimpse of her new home but he did not share it, and as he carefully maneuvered the sloop up to the private pier of the Ashton and Merrick Shipyards, the townspeople were lining the shore and cheering. Somewhere a cannon went off in salute. Joel and Liam threw out lines to men waiting on the dock while others tossed canvas fenders over the side to buffer ’Piper’s hull against the pier. The ship was drawn close and tied off, finally snug and secure in her berth.
I’m home.
Nearby, Rosalie watched him silently, feeling his pain as tangibly as if it were a knife slicing into her own heart. If Kieran seemed to take longer than need be to finish securing the sloop, she understood. If his face was taut, his eyes haunted, his words few and his manner withdrawn, she forgave him. It was not easy to confront one’s own dread, to look it in the eye and stand your ground. And despite her own eagerness to see Kieran’s home, her pride in the warm welcome his friends and neighbors were intent on giving him, she knew that grief, no matter what Liam said about him not being alone, was a place that could never be filled by another person—with the exception of the ones that you’d lost.
“Furl the jib.”
Several men moved out along the bowsprit and began stuffing the great, salt-stained canvas into place. A gull flew overhead, its tapered wings in silhouette against the setting sun.
The crowd, still cheering, was surging along the waterfront.
“Welcome home, Captain Merrick!”
“So good to have you back!”
“Ahoy, Doherty! Where’d ye get that fine new coat, eh?”
She knew that Kieran could have left the securing of his ship to Liam’s capable direction and given himself over to the townsfolk’s welcome, but he did not. Instead, he briefly acknowledged their welcome and moved to the opposite side of the sloop, shielding himself from the small crowd behind the struck mainsail. And it was as he stood directing its furling, even lending a hand himself in what she assumed was an attempt to stay busy so that he could keep his mind off what he would soon face—the inevitable questions about Kestrel and his parents’ fate and worst of all, the sympathetic words that could be the undoing of someone so close to falling over the precipice of grief—that Rosalie saw Liam Doherty’s broad face break into a smile of recognition. She followed his gaze as he moved to the rail.
“Matthew,” he said with something like relief, and reached out a large, calloused hand.
“Liam, you old sea dog, you! Good to have you back, old friend. Town ain’t been the same without ye! And where the hell is that nephew of mine, eh?”
Rosalie stood watching as the newcomer came aboard. He had a shock of thick gray hair, broad shoulders, kind brown eyes beneath a pair of wiry brows and little spectacles that would never do much to restore the sight in what looked to be a blind eye. As he stepped onto the sloop’s deck, the formal handshake that he and Liam might’ve shared was abandoned for a bear-hug that ended with much backslapping and strangely moist eyes for them both.
Rosalie glanced at her husband, who stood quietly watching this exchange at Sandpiper’s massive boom, one hand still on the canvas. He looked up and caught her gaze, his eyes bleak. She saw him swallow hard, saw his shoulders rise and fall as he steeled himself for the coming encounter. She moved closer to him in silent support. He might be able to ignore the townsfolk, but not this man. Leaving the furling of the mainsail to others, he came forward, his face strained.
“Uncle Matt.”
“Kieran, boy! Get over here and give your uncle a proper greeting now, for the sake of the living Chr—” The newcomer paused, his brows rising in surprise as he spotted Rosalie. “Well now, the least you and Liam could’ve done was warn me ye had a lady aboard so I could watch my damned language!”
Kieran took Rosalie’s hand in his own. “Uncle Matt, I’d like to introduce my new wife to you. This is Rosalie McCormack Merrick, from Baltimore. We were married last week. Rosalie, dearest, this is my uncle, Matthew Ashton. He’s my mother’s brother, and the other half of Ashton and Merrick Shipyards.”
“Wife! Well, knock me over with a feather, I couldn’t be more surprised and delighted. ’Bout time ye settled down, Kieran, but couldn’t ye have waited to perform the nuptials here so we could all give it our blessings? Ah, never mind…. Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am!” The New Englander might be a bit rough around the edges, but he knew how to execute a good leg, and following more small talk between them all, the older man and his nephew caught each other’s gazes and there it was: that awful, awkward moment whose coming was inevitable, and full of unspoken pain.
Kieran looked away, then down. Rosalie saw something soften in Matthew’s brown eyes and wordlessly, he pulled Kieran into his embrace. Neither said a word for a long moment, and when they parted, the older man’s eyes were glassy behind his little spectacles and Kieran’s face was hewn of stone, his shoulders stiff with the effort of containing his emotions.
“I guess you already know, then,” Kieran said, looking up and out past the mouth of the river to the sea beyond.
“Your sister wrote to us shortly after it happened.” The older man laid a hand on his nephew’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Kieran.”
Kieran looked at his men out on the bowsprit, their hands making short work of furling the jib. “Aye. I’m sorry, too.”
“I know it’s of no comfort, but they’re together. All three of them. Your father, your mother, and Kestrel. Just as they’d have wanted it.”
Kieran nodded stiffly and began to fidget, and Rosalie sensed that he was barely holding himself together.
“I, uh… I don’t know if I can stay in the house tonight, Uncle Matt. You’ll understand.”
“Of course I do. You’ll stay with me and yer aunt. Been too many months since we’ve seen ye and we both’ll want to get to know Rosalie, here. And if our place is too loud for ye, why, there’s always your cousin the Commodore and Lady Nerissa—things are quieter over there, I wager, but it’d do my heart a bucketload of hurt if ye chose them over us and Nathan and Toby wouldn’t like it none, either.”
“Nathan and Toby?” Kieran looked as though he’d been struck. “But they’re off with Connor….”
“And Connor’s here. Arrived a week ago from England and is driving me crazy, wanting me to build him a ship to replace Kest—” he cleared his throat. “Wants me to build him a ship, that is. Said your brother-in-law Sir Graham lent him a cutter but he has to give it back and now he’s restless as a panther without a tree. Always was, though, wasn’t he? He got married, too. You Merrick boys are full of surprises, aren’t ye? Wish my Nathan would find a good girl,” he said, with a conspiratorial wink at Rosalie. “Got any sisters as pretty as you are?”
Kieran had paled. “Connor’s here?”
“Aye, he’s at his house.” Matthew eyed him narrowly, seeing more with his one good eye than if he had full use of them both. “Everything square between you two?”
“In his mind. Not in mine.”
“You blame him for what happened, don’t ye.”
Kieran’s eyes flashed with sudden anger. “How can I not? If it weren’t for him and his arrogance, his reckless stupidity, they’d both still be alive.”
He stalked off toward the bow, and Rosalie exchanged glances with Liam and Matthew Ashton.
“Some wounds take time to heal,” Liam said quietly, watching his captain direct more attention than was needed to the furling of the jib. “Why don’t we finish up here and then call it a day? I fancy a meal over at Davenports so I can find out what’s been going on in town since we left, and you all have some catching up to do.”
Matthew Ashton was eyeing his nephew in concern. “Eveleen’s got a kettle of chowder going,” he said to Liam, though his gaze remained on Kieran. “The girls baked fresh bread this morning and Indian pudding, too, if ye hanker for something sweet to eat afterwards.”
“’Tis kind of ye, Matt, but I just want to get good and soused and chew the fat with the lads.”
Heir To The Sea Page 24