He’d actually heard of her, although he wasn’t about to tell her that. He even had one of her books. In the Footsteps of Montezuma, it was called. It had been written with a wonderfully dry wit and an acerbic way of looking at the world that had appealed to him. He remembered finishing it and thinking, Now, that’s one Scotswoman I wouldn’t mind meeting.
Just went to prove how wrong a body could be, he thought.
“I’ve come to offer you a business proposition,” she said, when he continued simply to stare at her.
“Not interested.”
“How can you know when you haven’t heard what it is yet?”
Patu had been right, Jack realized. The woman was a bloody Amazon. She barely had to tip back her head to meet his gaze squarely.
She nodded toward the sleek, American-built yacht riding at anchor in the lagoon. “Is that your boat?”
The glint of sunlight off the water hurt his eyes. It wasn’t fair, really, having to deal with this bloody shark of a woman and a hangover, both at the same time. He hadn’t even had time to take a bloody leak. He thought about taking one now, right off the end of the dock. That would surely send Miss Priss-faced McKnight scurrying back to her rusty steamer, where she’d probably sit down and write all about it for her next book. He wouldn’t have expected the thought to give him pause, but it did.
“She’s called the Sea Hawk,” Jack said, contenting himself with giving her another of his nasty smiles. “I won her off a couple of Yankee blackbirders in a poker game a few years back.”
“And are you a blackbirder, Mr. Ryder?”
They were the lowest of the low, blackbirders. They called it recruiting, what they did, stealing young Melanesians and Polynesians and taking them away to work in the fields of Queensland and Fiji and South America, but it was really just another word for slaving. If she’d been a man, he’d probably have punched her one for that. As it was, he took a hasty step forward, then drew up short. “What do you think?”
She kept her gaze steady on his face, her gray eyes dark and solemn in a way that almost made him regret baiting her. “I think I owe you an apology,” she said after a moment. “I hear you are familiar with the passage through the southern reef off Takaku.”
She so took him by surprise that he answered her without thought. “Familiar enough. Why?”
“I would like to hire you to convey me to the bay below Mount Futapu. If we leave first thing tomorrow morning, we should be there before eleven. That would give me some four or five hours to climb the slopes of the volcano and investigate the so-called Faces of Futapu, and still—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Jack brought up both hands to clutch the sides of his aching head. “I’m not conveying you anywhere, lady.”
She gave him a calm, appraising look that took him straight from annoyance all the way to full fury. “You’re concerned about the recent reports of cannibal activity in the area, I suppose,” she said in a self-confident, faintly condescending tone that would have been enough, by itself, to aggravate him. “I can assure you, you will be in no danger. I am not asking you to accompany me in my ascent to the summit. You may remain safely aboard your yacht in the harbor.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the bloody cannibals,” Jack bellowed. The echo of the shout reverberated in his head, making him groan.
She gave him another of those critical assessments, and this time he’d swear he saw a gleam of amusement sparkling in her clear gray eyes. “From the looks of things, Mr. Ryder, I’d say you have what we call in Scotland a deevil of a haid. Is that why you’re so cranky?”
He walked right up to her, deliberately intimidating her with his big, nearly naked, sweat-sheened, sun-browned body. “I am not cranky ,” he said, enunciating each word softly and carefully as he leaned into her, close enough that his breath stirred an errant, chestnut-colored curl peeking out from her sensible bonnet. “Nor am I some bloody tour guide. I’m an antisocial renegade wanted by the British bloody navy for mayhem and murder, which means you’ve probably far more to fear from me than from any headhunting black men of Takaku.”
He saw her chest jerk as she sucked in a deep breath, her eyes growing wide as she stared up at him. She was younger than he’d first supposed, he realized, twenty-four or -five at the most, with smooth cheeks and fine eyes and the kind of clear-cut features that would probably be called handsome by those who admired that sort of woman. Jack didn’t.
He also saw that she wasn’t nearly as self-possessed as she liked to think she was. Her gaze skittered sideways to the longboat that still bobbed, waiting, beside the dock. She might not be afraid of cannibals, but a naked male chest in close proximity was obviously something else again. She probably would have gone away then and left him alone if he hadn’t spoiled it all by adding, “Besides, the so-called Faces of Fatapu are a natural formation.”
Too late, he saw the leap of interest in her eyes. “Natural? Are you certain? Because according to my sources—”
“Which sources?” Jack demanded, before he could stop himself.
“Dunsberry,” she said, with a little lifting of her head, as if James Dunsberry were the definitive expert on the South Pacific.
“Huh. Dunsberry never got within a hundred miles of Takaku, let alone climbed to the summit of Mount Futapu. If he had, he’d have known that the Faces are just weirdly folded upthrusts of old lava.”
“You’ve seen them?” Her lips parted on a little gasp of excitement that set him to thinking, for some reason he couldn’t begin to understand, that this was exactly the kind of erotic, breathy noise she’d make when a man took her.
Jack stared off into the distance, and willed a certain wayward portion of his anatomy to behave itself. “Of course I’ve seen them,” he muttered, wishing he were wearing something more confining than a twist of cloth around his hips.
“If it’s true, you understand what this means, don’t you?” she said, for all the world as if she were having an esoteric scholarly conversation in some stuffy London drawing room, rather than standing at the end of a weathered dock on a flyspeck of an island in the middle of the South Pacific, with a half-naked Aussie no-account preoccupied with lascivious thoughts of what she might look like if someone could ever get her out of that ugly, high-collared dress of hers.
“If it’s true,” she was saying, “then it is more important than ever that I go to Takaku and verify what you’re saying. Dunsberry used the Faces of Futapu as proof of an ancient link between the rock-carving traditions of Laos and Burma and the statues and marae of the Marshalls and Easter Island. But if he was wrong, if there never was a Polynesian rock-carving presence in Melanesia, then the break is significant.”
“Just wait right there.” Jack brought his bleary gaze and wandering attention back to focus on her animated face. “Where exactly do you think the Polynesians came from?”
“South America.”
She said it with a tightening of her jaw and a steely gaze that defied him to laugh at her. He didn’t laugh. But he did shake his head. “You’re wrong.”
“Am I?” Her tone told him she’d had this argument before. “The Polynesians are concentrated in the eastern islands of the Pacific. The common consensus, of course, is that they were forced to keep moving through the western islands such as New Guinea and the Solomons because of the presence of the headhunting Melanesians. But what if they’re found predominantly in the eastern islands because they came from the east? It’s the prevailing direction of the trade winds, isn’t it? Botanists have documented numerous native South American plants throughout the islands—the sweet potato and coconut palm and many others. And if the vegetation could move from east to west, then why not the human inhabitants? I have compared photographs of the statues of Fatu Hiva with those I have seen myself in the jungles of Central and South America, and the similarities are startling.”
He stared at her through squinted eyes. “You’re writing a bloody book about this, aren’t you?”
<
br /> A faint, unexpected hint of color touched her cheeks. “As a matter of fact, I am. I’m thinking of calling it From Mandalay to the Cannibal Islands.”
“Huh. Given your argument, one would think you’d have started in the Americas, and called the book From Peru to the Cannibal Islands.”
He was silently laughing at her, and her chest rose and fell with indignation when she realized it. “You made it up, didn’t you? What you said about the Faces of Fatapu? They’re not a natural formation. You just said that so I’d go away and leave you alone.”
Jack let out a soft sigh. “That’s why I said it, all right. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“Prove it.”
He should have told her he didn’t need to prove a bloody thing to her. He should have told her to get the bloody hell away from him and stay away. Instead, he said, “You’re forgetting about the cannibals.”
She shook her head. “You told me you’re not afraid of cannibals.”
“I’m not. But you should be.”
“Because I’m a woman?”
“Women make good eating.”
He said it with a smile, meaning to scare her. Instead, a gleam of interest lit up her eyes. “Really? Have you ever eaten one?”
The question was so unexpected, Jack almost jumped. “Bloody hell. What do you think I am?”
“I heard you lived with cannibals once. For two years.”
“Not here.”
“Where?”
Jack half turned away, then swung back on her. “Look, you want me to take you to Takaku, or not?”
A flicker of surprise animated her expressive face. She’d make a lousy poker player, Jack thought. “Does this mean you’ll do it?”
“For ten pounds.”
“Ten pounds! But that’s outrageous!”
He shrugged. “Take it or leave it.”
She looked at him through the narrowed eyes of a woman who had haggled her way from Egypt to Mexico. “Five.”
He grinned. “Eight.”
“Seven and a half.”
“Done.” He jerked his head toward the German settlement of Neu Brenenberg, tucked into the side of the verdant mountain that rose dark and steep on the far side of the bay. “Have these men take you to a place called the Limerick. The old one-legged Irishman who runs it looks like a pirate, but he keeps a bungalow hotel you’ll find considerably cleaner than that steamer you just got off. Unless you like rats, of course.”
“Actually, I came to appreciate their presence on the steamer,” she said with a slow smile. “They scared away the cockroaches.”
He found he liked her smile, liked the way it banished that spinsterish pinch of earnestness and hinted at the existence of another side to this woman altogether. “I’ll pick you up from the Limerick at first light,” he said gruffly, and took a step back.
He stood and watched as, with the aid of one of the seamen, she clambered down into the waiting longboat. Then she paused, her head falling back and her brows drawing together as she stared up at him. “You will be there, won’t you?”
It was his last chance to get out of it. For one, oddly suspended moment, he was intensely aware of the golden heat of the tropical sun on his bare shoulders and the violent boom of the distant surf and the rocking of the dock beneath his feet. Then he said, “I’ll be there. Now get the hell out of here, would you? I need to take a leak.”
Chapter Three
ON THE DECK of the HMS Barracuda, First Lieutenant Alex Preston paused to watch Captain Granger lean against the rail and lift a spyglass to one eye. Around them, the wind-whipped waves of the tropical blue sea surged, foam-flecked and empty. Captain Granger’s jaw tightened in a careful checking of emotions that Alex could only guess at.
Already, the light had taken on a richly drenching golden quality that spoke of the imminent descent of darkness. Even after some six months of sailing these equatorial waters, it still amazed Alex how rapidly night replaced day here. One minute, the sun would be shining fierce and bright. Then, suddenly, the world would be bathed in a glorious tapestry of orange streaked with red and purple, a breathtaking panorama that disappeared all too quickly to plunge the earth into starry darkness.
“I thought you weren’t expecting Ryder to show up until tomorrow, sir,” said Alex.
Captain Granger lowered the glass, but kept his gaze on the wide, swelling sea. “I’m not.”
Alex studied the other man’s hard, closed profile. They’d been friends once, Captain Granger and Jack Ryder—or so it was rumored. That had been back in the days when they’d both been junior officers, before the Australian deliberately caused the sinking of their ship, the HMS Lady Juliana, and the death of more than half its company, including the Lady Juliana’s captain. As the only officer left alive, Simon Granger had spent six weeks with the surviving crew members in an open lifeboat before being rescued by Malay fishermen somewhere in the Dutch East Indies. The incident had made Granger a hero, and Ryder an outlaw.
But the Admiralty, like Disraeli’s Conservative government, had been distracted at the time by events in South Africa and India, Afghanistan and Turkey. It had only been recently, with the victory of the Liberals and their leader, Gladstone—a near-cousin of the Lady Juliana’s ill-fated captain—that the Admiralty’s determination to capture Ryder and bring him to justice had resurged.
It was the reason Alex was here now as first lieutenant, an appointment almost unheard of for an officer of his age and experience. For Captain Gladstone had been Alex’s uncle, and the Prime Minister was cousin to Alex’s mother. The appointment was a dream come true. Yet Alex felt the weight of his new responsibility and his family’s expectations sitting heavily on his shoulders. They expected him to make certain Captain Granger didn’t allow his past friendship with the renegade to interfere with the execution of his orders. Only, if the need were to arise, Alex wasn’t exactly clear on how he, as a mere first lieutenant, could be expected to control his own captain. Even if Alex’s mother’s cousin was the Prime Minister of England.
“You must be looking forward to getting your hands on the man, sir,” said Alex. “After so many years.”
“Looking forward to it?” The captain’s nostrils flared, his chest lifting as he sucked the salt-tinged air deep into his lungs. “I’m just following orders, Mr. Preston.”
Alex kept his gaze fixed on the captain’s face. There was no hint of impatient anticipation, no thirst for the chase. Yet Simon Granger had volunteered to be the one to bring Ryder in. “The man’s a disgrace to the service and to England,” Alex said, his voice rough with emotion, for Alex was a man with high ideals and little but contempt for those who fell afoul of them. “He never should have been allowed to roam free for so many years.”
The captain turned his head then, his gray eyes narrowing as he studied Alex. “Tell me something, Mr. Preston; why did you join the navy?”
Alex lifted his chin with self-conscious pride. “To serve Queen and country, sir.”
A slow smile curled the captain’s lips. “Nothing else?”
Alex felt himself growing unexpectedly warm under the other man’s scrutiny. “And to see something of the world.” There was no need for Alex to mention the other reason—the one that had to do with being a gentleman’s younger son, and the need to make his own way in the world. That was a driving force common to every officer in the navy.
“You’re from Norfolk, aren’t you?” said the captain.
“Yes, sir.”
“And this is your first assignment overseas?”
“Yes, sir,” said Alex, wondering where the captain was leading, for he surely knew Alex had spent his first years in the navy on a steam sloop based out of Southampton.
Granger swung away to stare once more at the surrounding sea, pale silver now in the vanishing light. The island of Takaku, with its steaming volcanic peaks rising up steep and wild, was only a dark silhouette against the fading orange of the horizon. “Ever make love to
a Tahitian woman, Mr. Preston?”
Alex felt himself heat, once more, with embarrassed confusion. “No, sir. Why?”
Captain Granger pushed away from the rail and turned toward the stern, his voice carrying back to Alex on the warm trade winds. “Because until you do, I wouldn’t be too quick to judge Jack Ryder.”
India’s encounter with Jack Ryder should have prepared her for the proprietor of Neu Brenenberg’s bungalow hotel, but she still found the gnarled, one-eyed, one-legged Irishman who ran the Limerick a shock. The man said his name was Harry O’Keefe, although India had her doubts about the veracity of that.
He looks for all the world like a character out of Mr. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, she wrote in her notebook later that evening. One can’t help but wonder what crimes this Australian and Irishman have committed, to make them so eager to live with the shadow of a German gunboat protecting them from the long arm of British law.
Still, she thought, absently chewing on the end of her pencil, she had to admit that the appalling Australian had been right. The Limerick’s rooms were unexpectedly, refreshingly clean, and she could find no fault with the hearty Irish stew Mr. O’Keefe had sent up for her supper. The lack of a lock on the door she had solved by shoving her trunk in front of it.
The sound of a child’s laughter carrying through the open window on a fresh sea breeze brought India’s head up. She heard a woman’s laughing admonition, and a man’s voice, deep with amusement. India hesitated a moment, then laid aside her pencil and crossed the room to where the light muslin curtains billowed in the warm night air.
Mingling moon- and star-shine bathed the scene outside her window in a clear, silvery-blue light. She could see the white line of the surf, breaking on the beach below, and the feathery, wind-ruffled darkness of the palms silhouetted against the night sky. It was early yet, the inhabitants of the tidy little German settlement of Neu Brenenberg not yet having settled down for the night. Two men, their voices low murmurs, bent over a chessboard set up on the deep veranda of a nearby house. And, beyond them, India could see a young family, out for a stroll along the beach.
Beyond Sunrise Page 2