Beyond Sunrise

by Candice Proctor

  It was only then, as he stared deep into his daughter’s angry eyes, that Jack realized he couldn’t explain even to himself exactly what it was he feared, why the mere thought of returning to Rakaia overwhelmed him with such a blinding, head-throbbing terror. And so he said, “I don’t know,” and although it was the truth, it came out sounding pitiful and inadequate and evasive.

  She gave him a long, thoughtful look. “Those things you want, we hid them in a cave on Rakaia. Did you know?”

  Jack nodded.

  “So you’re going to have to go back there now, aren’t you?”

  The sun was setting, throwing out streaks of glorious color that seemed to set the sky ablaze and turned the sea into a heaving expanse of gold and purple. Somewhere out there was Rakaia. Too far away to see, and impossible to reach, now, without the Sea Hawk. “The problem is, I don’t have a boat anymore.”

  Ulani laughed, suddenly very much a child as she slid off the rock and scooped up her shells. “That’s not a problem,” she said, her long hair flying through the air as she swung around to look back at him. “How do you think we came to be here?”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  "I FOUND HER washed up on the outer reef, a few years back,” Toby said. They were standing at one end of the moon-bathed strand, where what had once been the jolly boat of a frigate called the Reprise was drawn far up on the sand, away from the reach of the tides. “ ’Course, she were bunged up a bit, but I managed to salvage what I needed to fix her from the Lady Juliana.”

  Jack shifted his gaze to the blue-black, star-sparkled darkness of the sea. “It’s a long ways to sail, in an open boat.”

  Toby pulled at his earlobe. “Aye. It was. But it was either this, or them dinky little outriggers. Or the blackbirders.” Once, the Rakaians had sailed the South Pacific in great seagoing canoes big enough to transport war parties, or entire families along with their pigs and dogs and whatever else they chose to carry with them when they migrated from island to island. But those days were only distant memories, commemorated in festivals but otherwise as much a part of the past as the windblown, abandoned maraes.

  “It took a few trips to haul everyone over here,” Toby was saying. “On the last trip, the sea was running a bit rough, and they all started puking like a passel of landlubbers caught in a typhoon.” Toby spat in disgust. “Islanders. Imagine it.”

  Jack squinted up at the boat’s single mast. “Does she still have sails?”

  “Aye. Although I can’t say they wouldn’t rip to shreds in a good gale.”

  Jack nodded, but India reached out to slip her hand into his and clasp it, fiercely. “You can’t mean to go to Rakaia.”

  Jack searched her eyes, and saw there fear, and something else, something he wanted to think was love, but he couldn’t be sure. He wondered if a man could ever be gut-sure of the love of a woman like her. And he knew the terror, and the vulnerability, of loving more than one was loved. Of not being able to live without someone who could get along just fine without him.

  With slow deliberation, he lifted one shoulder in a careless shrug. “I don’t see as how I have much choice.”

  Her hand trembled within his. “But the Barracuda could easily be there already, waiting for you. You know that.”

  Jack glanced back at Toby. “How long does it take to make the run to Rakaia?”

  Toby screwed up his face with the labor of thought. “If this wind holds? I’d say five hours, maybe less.”

  “So if we leave early afternoon, we ought to get there around sunset.”

  “Aye.”

  In the moonlight, India’s face showed pale and tight. “But you could miss the island entirely!”

  Jack laughed then, because it felt good to laugh, and if he couldn’t laugh, there wasn’t much point in living anymore. “If I miss the island, I miss it,” he said. “It’s missing the passage through the reef that’s liable to kill me.”

  India stood in the purple shadows of a spreading mango tree and watched Jack Ryder’s daughter playing in the moonlit surf. A warm wind gusted up, carrying with it the salty breath of the sea and the sound of the child’s laughter as she ran from a wave that broke white and foaming against the sand.

  One could see the man in the child, India thought, in the high angle of the cheekbones, and the squareness of the jaw. India traced the image of the man she loved in the child he had made with another woman, and she knew the pain of want and longing, and a surge of other emotions that left her confused and shaken.

  There had been a feast that night, to celebrate Jack’s return to the people amongst whom he had once lived. But the child had held herself apart, always on the edge of the firelight, or absorbed, as now, in some game that seemed to occupy all of her attention. He had borne it well, India thought, laughing with his old friends, remembering past joys, and listening, intent, to their tales of all that had happened since last he’d seen them. But sometimes . . . sometimes she had caught him staring at the child with such naked longing and love in his eyes that it had been painful to see.

  He was there now, standing with his back pressed against the trunk of one of the tall coco palms that lined the beach, his gaze fixed on the distant, laughing child. India went to him, her boots making soft shuffling sounds in the loose sand as she walked up to him.

  He kept his face turned away from her. He smelled of the sea and the trade winds and the warm, tropically scented night, and she wanted to go to him and slip her arms around his waist and press her cheek against his hard chest. Instead, she wrapped her arms around her own waist, and hugged herself.

  “You don’t need to go to Rakaia,” she said. “You can raise the Sea Hawk. Get her seaworthy enough to make it back to Neu Brenen before the monsoons hit.”

  He swung his head to look at her, his eyes gleaming blue-black in the night. “And then what?”

  “Then you stay there, and wait for the Barracuda to be called home. This intense interest in you can’t last forever.”

  A cold smile curled his lips. “In other words, I hide.”

  “It’s what you did before.”

  He turned his gaze, again, to his child. “She thinks I only came here because of the Lady Juliana’s charts and log.”

  “Then show her that she’s wrong. Take her away from here now. Forget about proving your innocence. Just keep yourself safe. For her.” And for me, she wanted to say. Please, keep yourself safe, because I don’t think I could bear it if something were to happen to you.

  He shook his head. “I won’t raise her to think that’s the thing to do. To run and hide.”

  India felt her heart twist with a renewed spasm of panic. “And who do you think is going to take care of her if you’re dead? Or rotting in a British prison?”

  She saw his nostrils flare on a quick intake of breath. Then his jaw hardened, and he shook his head. “I’ve spent the last ten years of my life running from what happened.” He paused. “Running from myself. I’m not running anymore.”

  She stared at him. In the silvery glow of the moonlight, the sharp bones of his face looked fiercely drawn, and so dear to her that she felt the sting of tears in her eyes. She let her gaze rove hungrily over him, and the steady crash of the surf against the sand was like the pounding of her heart, dangerous, and wild.

  “And if I said I’d come with you?” she somehow managed to whisper, pushing the words out past the fear that was squeezing her throat. “If I said I’d stay on Neu Brenen with you?”

  She saw the flare of surprise in his eyes, and the hope that narrowed down into a wariness that was almost like pain. From one of the bungalows down the beach came the sound of a woman’s voice, calling Ulani in for the night. His head turned, his chest lifting on a sigh as he watched the child run through the moonlit waves, away from him.

  The wind gusted up, rustling the palm fronds overhead and fluttering the ends of his hair where it lay long and dark against his throat. “You’d do that?” he said, his gaze coming back to fix In
dia with a fierce, intense stare. “You’d do that to keep me from going to Rakaia?”

  “Yes.”

  He reached for her, his palm cupping the back of her neck to draw her to him. “Then maybe if I make it back from Rakaia, you’ll still stay.”

  She went to him, her arms sliding around his waist to hold his warm, hard body close to hers. “Jack—”

  “No.” His mouth took hers in a kiss that was fierce, burning, almost cruel. “No,” he whispered again, his lips moving against hers. “Don’t try to talk me out of this. Just make love to me, India. Just love me.”

  The afternoon was hot and overcast, the sky a smudgy gray that hung low and forbidding over choppy seas.

  Jack stood at the water’s edge, the wind throwing a wild salty spray against his face as he stared into the hazy distance. “We could wait until tomorrow,” he said, although he knew that with each passing day, the likelihood increased that he would find the Barracuda waiting for him at Rakaia.

  Beside him, Toby Jenkins shook his head and spat into the frothing surf. “Ulani tells me she had a look at the sea urchins, and they’re still out.”

  They had an old saying on Rakaia, The ocean roars and the sea urchins listen. No Rakaian ever put out to sea without checking first to make sure the echini hadn’t crawled into their holes. It was the surest weather forecast Jack had ever known.

  He glanced over to where the jolly boat rocked back and forth in the pounding surf, despite the steadying hands of the islanders who had volunteered to sail with them. In the time he’d spent staring out to sea, the boat had acquired two extra passengers. And he understood now why Ulani had been inspecting sea urchins that morning.

  He splashed through the fast-running surf to where India and his daughter had taken up positions in the boat’s prow.

  “We’re coming,” India said, her gaze locking with his as he walked up to them, “so don’t even try to argue with us.”

  Jack looked from her still, carefully composed face to Ulani’s fierce scowl, and back again. “We?”

  “That’s correct. We arrived at our decisions independently, but we find ourselves in perfect agreement.”

  He sucked in a deep breath. “Have you taken a good look at that sea?”

  “I am untroubled by mal de mer. And I have it on the best of authority that since the echini have not sought refuge in their usual places of concealment, we are unlikely to encounter weather any more severe than this.”

  “Maybe. But we could very easily encounter a certain royal corvette.”

  She stared at him with a wide, unblinking gaze. “All the more reason for our presence.”

  He knew what she was saying, and he didn’t like it. “Oh, no. It’s not going to happen that way. So you can just get out of the bloody boat right now.”

  She sucked in a quick, angry breath that flared her nostrils and lifted her breasts in a way that stirred a quick, unbidden memory of the things they had done together last night, with the trade winds warm against their sweat-slicked skin and her breasts soft and heavy in his hands.

  “There, you see,” she was saying. “It is precisely this sort of autocratic male behavior that has given me a distaste for marriage. I would certainly never presume to order you about in such a dictatorial fashion.”

  Jack wrapped his hands around the gunwale and leaned into it, his voice pitched deliberately low and even. “India, I’m worried about you. You and Ulani.”

  Her expression didn’t alter. “Thank you for your concern, but if I choose to risk my life, it is my own affair.”

  His hands clenched the gunwale so tight he wondered it didn’t crack. His voice was no longer low and even, but loud and harsh. “And I suppose you’re going to try to convince me that my daughter’s safety is none of my affair, either?”

  It was Ulani who spoke, her gaze lifting beyond Jack, to Toby Jenkins. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  Jack spun around to glare at Toby, who was pulling his earlobe and staring at the wind-whipped sea, and the mist-covered hillside—anything and everything but Jack.

  “Tell me what?”

  Toby pursed his lips and blew out a long, slow breath. “When we decided to leave Rakaia, I put the Lady Juliana’s charts and log back into the old half cask they’d washed ashore in, and asked one of Titana’s uncles to hide it in the caves. Ulani here went with him.”

  “Which cave?”

  The old seaman’s brine-stiffened whiskers swept back and forth as he worked his mouth. “I don’t rightly know for sure. I reckon we could find it, if we looked long enough. But I didn’t think you had a mind to linger on the island.”

  Jack swung back to where his daughter sat, graceful and serene at the prow of the boat, her long dark hair streaming in the wind. He opened his mouth to order her to tell him where they’d hidden the cask, but the stubborn tilt of her chin and the flash of anger in her eyes told him he could bluster and yell all he wanted, and she still wouldn’t tell him. Not until she was ready.

  Then her head turned, her lips parting on a quick intake of breath as she stared out over the heavy sea, and something about the angle of her chin and the curve of her cheek reminded him so much of Titana that his chest ached. “Please,” she said, her eyes dark and huge as she looked at him again. “I just want to go back to Rakaia.”

  He stared at her, at this child he had made, and loved, and forced himself to stay away from for so many years. And it came to him that while a man might think he controls his own life, all he can really do is try to make the right choices. And half the time those are wrong, anyway.

  He held her gaze steadily. “You’re sure about the echini?”

  A slow, triumphant smile curved her lips and lightened her eyes, and she nodded.

  Jack slapped the side of the boat and made ready to shove off. “Then I guess we’d better get going.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  ALEX PRESTON STOOD up to his thighs in the gently lapping waters of Rakaia’s broad lagoon, his hands braced against his hips as he bent over almost double. When he’d left his shoes and socks on the white sand and rolled up his trousers, he’d only meant to wade out a little ways. He’d felt vaguely foolish, even a bit guilty, doing it, but a quick glance around had reassured him that he was alone. It wouldn’t have done for one of the men to catch their first lieutenant in such an undignified posture.

  He’d been cautious at first, wading only in the shallows. But the lure of those impossibly clear, magic-filled waters had beckoned him on until a wave sloshed against the rolled-up legs of his trousers, wetting him to his knees. And then he thought, Well, since I’m already wet . . .

  Sucking in a deep breath of air that puffed out his cheeks, Alex cinched his lips together tight, thrust his face into the water, and opened his eyes. He saw the spreading jaws of an enormous clam, a hundred years old or more, surrounded by a wonderland of corals in sapphire and yellow, crimson and orange, some high and feathery, others smooth and bulbous. He saw twinkling yellow and green tiddlers, and slow-moving parrot fish, and quick silver flashes of reef trout. Again and again, he plunged his face into the lagoon, raising his head only when he needed to take another breath. He had to step warily, of course, keeping to the narrow patches of clear sand. He longed to strip off his clothes and paddle out farther, to where new wonders beckoned. Instead, he straightened reluctantly, water dripping down his cheeks and off his nose, and headed back to shore.

  The pounding of the surf against the island’s fringing reef filled the air with an endless boom and crash that mingled with the wheeling calls of the seabirds and the seductive rustling of the coco palms. There was a still, white quality to the cloud-filtered light that told him the sun would be setting soon. Rolling down his wet trousers, he sat on a wave-smoothed rock and thrust his legs out before him to dry.

  They had been here for three days now, and still the beauty of this place had the power to take his breath and leave him feeling restless and vaguely sad. The main island was fai
rly small, a steep-sided mountain cloaked in a velvety green mantle of giant rain-forest trees dripping with orchids and ferns and great pendent ropes of lianas. Along the gleaming white sandy beaches grew the coconut palms, their delicate fronds waving gently in the warm, fragrant breezes, while the narrow valleys abounded with oranges and pineapples, guavas and bananas and mangoes—an endless harvest of sweet fruit, free for the taking.

  His trousers were still damp, but he put on his shoes and socks and walked along the sand. In the long, idyll days since the Barracuda had dropped anchor in the lagoon behind the island, Alex had avoided this part of the beach. Now he found himself oddly drawn to it. He walked past rows of pandanus-and-bamboo bungalows, standing silent and empty in the gentle evening light. A whisper of sound brought him jerking around, thinking someone was there, but it was only a loose corner of thatch, lifting in the warm breeze.

  He walked on. A small chapel built of crudely cut coral blocks stood at the far end of the deserted village, and beyond that, a cemetery filled with row after row of silent mounds of freshly turned earth rapidly disappearing beneath a luxurious growth of running vines and softly waving grasses. Most of the graves were marked with simple wooden crosses. But in the older section of the graveyard, he could see a rough granite slab almost overgrown with creeping fig.

  Intrigued, he tore away the vines and found himself staring at a deeply carved inscription. IN LOVING MEMORY OF TITANA AND HER UNBORN CHILD, MURDERED BY THE BRITISH NAVY ON SEPTEMBER 10, 1874. Below that was something else he couldn’t quite read. Alex had been making a study of the various Polynesian dialects, and as he traced the crudely incised letters with his finger, it came to him suddenly what it said. Ari rangi. Paradise is empty.

  Sitting back on his heels, Alex stared at those painstakingly incised words. After so many months at sea, he more than understood the carnal urgings that could drive a man to couple with one of the beautiful, half-naked women with which these islands abounded. But raw sexual hunger didn’t explain this, this tortured out-pouring of grief and rage and love.