But Georgette, having gained the center of the stage, was unwilling to surrender it. “That woman in purple that Papa was talking to,” she told her mother importantly. “The one with all the feathers. I asked someone who she was and he said that was ‘Old Rocking Chair’ and laughed. What did he mean, Mamma? That doesn’t sound like anybody’s name to me.”
“Of course it isn’t!” Esthonie gave Imogene a wild look at this explicit appellation for Madam Josie. “Who told you that?” she demanded sharply.
“I don't know.” Georgette’s white dimity shoulders twitched in an indifferent shrug. “Just some man on the quay. Dr. Argyll came up and shushed him and sent Andy, who was with him, off to buy some tobacco and started talking right away about the weather, as if I—”
“How often have I told you not to talk to strange men?” shouted her mother, and Georgette fell back, frightened.
She watched her mother apprehensively as Esthonie began to talk very fast, to Imogene. Then Virginie began to squabble with her about the ownership of a pink hair riband.
Under cover of her daughters’ bickering, Esthonie muttered behind her fan, “And what does that name suggest to you?”
That you’d better lock your husband in! Imogene wanted to reply irrepressibly. Aloud she said carelessly, “Don’t concern yourself, Esthonie. People get called all kinds of names.”
“Yes.” Esthonie gave her a significant look. “And some of them are deserved! Did you see where Gauthier went? He had completely disappeared when I looked around after dragging Georgette away from those men. Virginie, stop tugging on that hair riband; let Georgette have it. I said, did you see where your father went?”
“No.” Virginie let the hair riband go so suddenly that Georgette fell back against the carriage.
Imogene had seen the little governor rejoin Madam Josie and hurry away from the quay but she felt it best not to say so. “No doubt he’ll be along,” she said vaguely.
“No doubt! And smelling of wine that will never see our cellars! Well, I see we’ve arrived at your house, Imogene. No—don’t ask us in, we must go straight home.”
Imogene alighted and stood for a moment watching the carriage drawn by its matched grays proceed down the street. Esthonie’s strident voice carried to her.
“Georgette, Virginie, you must keep a sharp lookout for your father and call me the moment he arrives. Mon Dieu, I must get these stays loosed, they’re killing me. Remember now, the very moment he arrives! Tell him I want a word with him!”
With a chuckle, Imogene moved through the iron griilwork doors that big impassive Arne, with his silver-studded wooden leg and his one dangling gold earring, held open for her. She moved through the second set of doors—these of heavy black oak and garnished with stout nailheads, for this house van Ryker had built in Tortuga was half fortress and built to withstand siege—and entered the coolness of the hall.
Outings with turbulent Esthonie, she thought wryly, were always interesting.
CHAPTER 5
“Van Ryker.” Imogene flung her small purchases—a tiny steel mirror in a gilt frame for her reticule, a dozen pale green candles that burned with almost no smoke, a sachet scented with attar of roses—upon the bed. She turned her challenging gaze upon the tall dominating man who lounged in the doorway, watching her. Seeing him with Veronique had put her in a mood to quarrel with him. “I went to the market with Esthonie today. She says that you will never change.”
Van Ryker had arrived just before her and gone to the storehouse next door to confer with the brace of buccaneers who guarded it. He had returned to hear lmogene’s light step upon the stairway that led upward from the stone inner courtyard. Knowing he had something to tell her that would upset her, he had hesitated for a moment by the tinkling stone fountain. Then, because he was not a man to duck obstacles, he had set his booted feet firmly upon the stair and reached her bedroom door by way of the long open-air gallery that surrounded the courtyard, even as she was flinging her purchases upon the big square bed.
Now he leaned his broad shoulders against the doorjamb and cocked an eyebrow at his golden English bride. “And what would our governor’s wife know about it?”
Imogene tossed her gloves after her purchases. “She says you will not be allowed to change, that your success in taking the Spanish treasure fleet is on everyone’s lips and that you have become a target, not only for individual pirates or fleets of pirates but a target for countries—she swears a navy may be sent against you.”
Van Ryker had pondered the same thought. He gave her a broad smile and his teeth flashed whitely in his dark face. “ ’Tis true the king of Spain would love to chastise me—but until he has built or bought more ships he has not the floating bottoms to do so. As for the rest—” he shrugged.
“I think you discount this too much,” frowned Imogene. “Esthonie says—”
“Come, let’s not waste a beautiful afternoon talking about the wife of our French governor!”
Imogene stood her ground and watched him sardonically as he shed his clothes. The hot tropical sunlight pouring through the open shutters of their second-floor bedchamber revealed to her a long supple body, whipcord lean, with a deep chest, wide shoulders, and arms and neck bronzed to leather by the Caribbean sun. Her smiling gaze left those narrow hips and lightly furred chest and met his gray eyes squarely, intending that he should answer her.
“What are you going to do about it, van Ryker?”
“I am tired of counting gold. I am going to take you in my arms,” he said, ‘if you will ever get that damn dress of "
She gave a rippling laugh and with it her serious mood was broken. They had indeed spent long hours counting gold since that great coup when van Ryker’s Sea Rover had surprised the broken treasure flota smashed in the wake of a great hurricane that had passed over the Antilles. Months they had been, making their arrangements to leave Tortuga. Always some new problem arose, such as the sale of the house, or what to do about the servants, or the ransoming of the Spanish prisoners, or the need to wait to get the best price for captured goods and fair distribution of the proceeds. A magnificent booty—ransom of a hundred kings. And it had all fallen to the hand of a single buccaneer captain.
And now that same buccaneer captain was waiting impatiently for her to undress.
She gave him a seductive smile, her eyes kindling. ‘‘If you will help me with these hooks? You know I can never manage them myself.”
He complied with alacrity, moving toward her as a strong man does, with easy grace. His practiced fingers swiftly worked the invisible hooks of the thin gray taffeta and she thought ruefully that he had been good with hooks when first she’d met him—ah, the things other women had taught him! But the very feel of his long fingers along her spine had waked the wild girl within her and made her remember what it had been like the first time she had looked into his eyes, the first time he had held her, caressed her, made her his.
Her smooth buttocks brushed his loins as the gray taffeta dress whispered down her body and rustled to the floor, and for a moment fingers of fire seemed to set her alight. Then her embroidered satin petticoat slid gracefully down about her ankles and she stepped out of them both and turned in her sheer white lawn chemise to face him, cheeks flushed and blue eyes flinging him a challenge.
He gave a low exultant laugh and caught her to him, miraculously at the same moment loosing her chemise so that it feathered down between them like a lover’s caress. She felt its lightsome touch drift past her hips and buttocks, felt it shimmer down around her stockings even as his arms went round her and her round breasts were crushed against his hard chest.
She managed to kick off her black satin slippers before he swooped her up and carried her to the big square bed. Together they sank into its soft surface in the sultry island heat, their hearts beating in a wild rhythm, their legs tangled, their heavy hair tangling too, making a frosted pattern of mahogany and gold upon the pillow.
“Let’s rid you of thes
e,” he muttered, and she squirmed as his knowing impudent fingers found her garters and removed them.
“Van Ryker!” Her voice was breathless, for little currents of feeling were pulsing inside her, faster and faster, as they always did when he touched her.
But he was already removing her black silk stockings with an urgency that spoke fulsomely of his intentions.
“Be careful,” she gasped. “They’re finest silk!”
“Not so silky as your legs,” he muttered, tossing one away and sliding his hands up her legs to secure the other. “And if I tear them, I’ll replace them!”
But he had already replaced them a dozen times, for he loved to shower her with gifts, and her wardrobe—so much of it “lifted” from Spanish galleons carrying the best of stuffs to the wealthy ladies of Cartagena and Lima and Panama—rivaled the wardrobes of kings’ mistresses.
But she did not really care if he ripped them. As the stockings left her legs and she lay naked in his arms in the tropical heat, she could think of nothing but the man whose strong arms held her, whose gentle hands caressed her, whose warm lips pressed demandingly down upon her own, and whose manliness was even now sinuously at work between her thighs, moving to some unheard but deeply felt lovers’ rhythm.
Their joy in each other was a marvel. They drowned in it at night and waked to reimmerse themselves in it with each new day. For he had ever the power to move her, to shift her mind from all the pressing matters of the day and still it to forgetfulness and bring her heart throbbing to his bed.
I love him, she thought, forgetting Veronique as passion coursed through her veins like liquid fire. I was born to lie in his arms like this, to let him take me, lead me into the wild byroads of passion. Ah, I was born to be his wife!
And van Ryker, strong, intense man that he was, was lost again in the miracle of her beauty, her softness, her grace, her pliancy. He was beguiled anew by the depth and sweetness of her response to him, so that their lovemaking had all the magical grace of a lovers’ dance in some secret hiding place known to them alone.
He had known she was the one woman for him from the first moment he had seen her that day in Amsterdam. All the heartache, all the wild venturing, all the scheming that had brought her at last to his arms had been worth it. Van Ryker knew in the depths of him that he would love this woman to his dying day—and that without her life would be shallow, worthless, not worth living.
They were—and they knew it—made for each other: mentally, physically, spiritually.
And there in the steamy heat of torrid Tortuga they moved as one being, exalted, star-reaching, dragged heavenward by great, far-reaching forces and a love that could never, never die.
To Imogene, van Ryker soared above other men as the eagle soars above the gulls. In him at last she had found her match.
They were—and all Tortuga knew it—the perfect couple.
Now in the afterglow of passion, he caressed her golden hair, let his sun-bronzed hand stray down tenderly to fondle her round white breasts.
“I have not been so idle as you have thought me,” he murmured.
“I have not thought you idle!” she protested indignantly, her voice catching a little as tiny ripples of passion surged through her still quivering body.
“Not a trustworthy ship has left the port of Cayona without some small chest of gold or bullion on its way to a Dutch bank or an English solicitor—and all to be deposited well cloaked in other names.”
‘‘Can it not be traced to you?”
He shrugged. “Who would bother? The amounts are not that large. They trickle in, they are accepted as the rewards of some rich planter in the Caribbees. No, Imogene, they will not be traced to me.”
So that was what he had been doing all these long months when he had seemed entirely occupied with apportioning fairly the loot he had won, and with arranging for and receiving the ransoms of the wealthy and chagrined Spanish officers who had manned the treasure flota. Sometimes it had seemed to her that the very floors of their fortlike house in Cayona were paved with gold, for stacks of new-minted coins had been counted there, and great carved chests unloaded and refilled.
Her own reward had been the jewels. For van Ryker’s generous crew—all now wealthy beyond their wildest dreams—had voted to a man that all the finest jewels taken should be showered upon the bride of the captain on whom they doted.
Such an avalanche of jewels had fairly taken Imogene’s breath away. She had marveled over big white pearls from off the coast of South America, mounds of dazzling cut and uncut emeralds from the mines of Peru, caskets of carved jade and jadeite from Mexico and Central America, and an unending trove of intricately worked gold bracelets and crosses and chains.
Enough, she supposed, to make her the richest woman, jewel wise, in the world.
And yet from this fortress of a house, she dared not venture far. For she was now—like van Ryker, as Esthonie had maliciously reminded her—a target.
She was worth a queen’s ransom and van Ryker would pay it for her willingly, all the world knew it.
There were many who would claim that ransom—if they dared. All that stood between her and such men were van Ryker’s buccaneers, still afloat on a sea of grog in Cayona, as they celebrated night after endless night their mighty victory. Them—and the reputation of the tall buccaneer who had married, of whom men whispered in awe that he was the best blade in the Caribbean and had spitted five men in a single sword fight on a slippery Spanish deck.
That she was a prize herself this golden woman discounted with a shrug. More blood would be shed for gold, she told herself cynically, than ever would be shed for love.
Still it was a troubled face she turned toward van Ryker on the pillow.
“I know the governor of Jamaica has put through a request for pardon for you,” she began.
“It came today. A king’s pardon. The governor of Jamaica sends you his greetings.” Van Ryker’s sardonic gray eyes were on her, and lmogene flushed, remembering how that same governor of Jamaica had sought to blackmail her to win her to his bed!
“So now the old charges are dropped and you may face the world under your real name at last,” she murmured. “And I shall have to remember to call you ‘Branch Ryder’ and not ‘van Ryker.’ ”
“Not yet awhile,” he said lazily, bending to slide his warm mouth down over her breasts and deliciously along the smooth yielding flesh of her taut stomach. “Not till we’ve cleared Tortuga once and for all.”
Once and for all! It had the ring of freedom to it.
“Oh, van Ryker,” she whispered wistfully. “Will we really get away?”
“Certainly. I've been sounding out some of the men. There are those like myself who’d prefer to retire from the buccaneering life. Some of course will be away on pursuits of their own but there are some who’d like to go where we go, and make new lives for themselves.”
“Enough to man the Sea Rover?”
He nodded. “And repainted and with a new name, who’ll call her that?”
“Who indeed?” she murmured. “After all, she was once El Cruzado, the Crusader, when you took her from the Spanish!”
“So who’s to know if a man named Ryder occupies his plantation upriver from Port Royal and comes and goes by way of a secret bay? And who’s to know if a planter named Ryder, who’s been a landgrave in Carolina all these years, even though an absentee owner, chooses to occupy his forty-eight thousand acres? We’ll be safe, Imogene.”
“We could even go to England,” she murmured.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll have my London solicitors enter into negotiations to buy Ryderwood back, now that my name is cleared.”
Ryderwood ... the home that had been sold out from under him long ago to ransom his father from a Spanish prison. Her eyes smarted at the thought, and a great encompassing happiness that van Ryker should live to see this day overwhelmed her.
“We’ll see England again, then?”
“Certainly we’ll
see England,” he promised her coolly. “And Paris and Amsterdam too. But my heart is in this New World, Imogene, with the Colonies. I believe America has a great future. I’m for Carolina—with you beside me.” Imogene thought of the wasteland the Indians had made of Longview, his secretly owned Carolina plantation, and sighed. It could happen again. But perhaps not with this determined forceful man at the helm.
“Perhaps we could see England first?” she suggested. “I’d forgot—” her face clouded. “The old murder charge against you has been dropped but you’ll still be wanted as a buccaneer and if anyone were to guess who you were—!”
“I’d chance that,” he said calmly. “For the chance to show you London and to see Ryderwood again. I would ride those meadows of my boyhood again, Imogene, and leave them to the sons we will one day have.”
She was touched and turned away her head abruptly so that he could not see the tears that shone suddenly in her eyes. For she had borne—and lost—a daughter during her disastrous first marriage and the doctors had despaired of her ever having another child.
Even if it killed her, she promised herself, she would accomplish it! She would give van Ryker the son he deserved!
“Gauthier has finally agreed on a price for the house, so that’s out of the way at last.”
“Yes, I know Esthonie has always coveted it—it is larger than the governor’s mansion!”
He smiled. “And next week we will pack our things and be off!”
“Where are we off to?”
“To Amsterdam, I think—for we will be well weighted down with jewels and gold, and Dutch banks are still the safest.”
“Then we will pass England on the way....”
“England we will visit on the way back. I will take you to Ryderwood, Imogene, to visit the home of my boyhood.”
Imogene forgot about Veronique and seductive amber eyes. “It will be a lovely journey,” she murmured. “Once again the two of us in the great cabin of the Sea Rover—only this time crowded in by chests of gold and jewels! It will be a second honeymoon!”
Wild Willful Love Page 7