Desire in the Sun (36 page)

“I never dispute a lady’s word,” he said finally, and his mouth twisted in what was almost a sneer.

“So you’re a slave, belonging to Miss Remy here? Or her father? I want a plain answer, yes or no.”

“Joss, …” The near-whisper was involuntary, drawn out of her by the sudden harshness of his features.

“You hush, missy!”

Lilah was silenced. She could only look miserably at Joss, knowing what he must be thinking. But what else could she have done?

“Yes or no? I don’t have all day!”

Joss stared at her for a seemingly endless moment, green eyes cold as ice. Then he said, “Whatever else she may be, the lady is not a Liar. If she says it’s so, then it’s so.”

That was enough for the captain.

“Hell, throw him in the brig, lock her in a cabin, and let’s get back to business. The cargo won’t keep forever, and I’m not of a mind to be owing five hundred dollars and be out a spoiled cargo as well. We’ll sort the pair of them out when we get to Barbados. And I’m not forgetting the reward you promised, young woman.”

Minutes later Lilah found herself being marched away under guard, with Joss being hoisted by two sailors and half carried behind her. As she approached the hatchway, she heard a hoarse scream from the front of the ship. The hangings had begun.

Her escort took her arm, his touch surprisingly polite, and turned her along a hallway while Joss’s guards began to descend with him farther into the bowels of the ship. Lilah stopped.

“I would see him secured, if you please.”

The three sailors looked at each other, shrugged, and permitted her to trail along as Joss was half carried down the narrow stairs.

The
Bettina’s
brig consisted of a single cell, dark and dank and comfortless. Lilah’s heart sank as she saw where they meant to leave Joss. But with luck it would only be for a few days, and in any case it was better than hanging.

She only hoped that Joss would see it that way.

Lilah stood outside in the passageway as Joss was taken in and lowered to the bottom of the two tiers of bunks. The young sailor who was her escort was no longer holding her arm, apparently responding to her as a young lady now instead of pirate lass. With no one to prevent her, Lilah stepped inside the cell. The two guards had left Joss lying on his belly in deference to the wound in the back of his head. It was no longer bleeding, as far as she could tell in the sickly light of the single lantern that hung from a hook outside in the passageway. But his hair was matted with blood, and he still seemed weak and groggy.

“Joss …” she began, leaning over him, her voice low as the men waited for her by the cell door.

He lay with his head pillowed on his arm. In the darkless his eyes gleamed a hard, glittering green.

“You treacherous little bitch,” he said. Lilah caught her breath.

“Joss. …”

“Miss, you’ll have to come out of there now. Cap’n said you were to be locked in a cabin, and I have to get back on deck.”

Lilah nodded in response to the sailor’s summons, and turned away, her opportunity to explain gone.

As the door clanged shut behind her, was locked by one of the men who had carried Joss down, she spoke to her escort.

“Could you see that he has medical care? He … as I said, he’s very valuable.”

The sailor pursed his lips. “I’ll ask Cap’n Rutledge. it’s his decision.”

And with that Lilah had to be content.

XLII

F
or three days Joss was left alone in the gloomy dampness of the
Bettina’s
brig except for a single visit by the ship’s doctor, who looked at the back of his head, dusted the wound with a malodorous powder, and took himself off, never to be seen again. The decidedly spartan accommodations did not particularly bother Joss, but the solitude did. Not that he wanted to hobnob with the crew. He was happy to see them for the few brief minutes three times a day when they shoved a tray of food through the opening in the half-timbered, half-barred door.

The person he wanted to see, urgently, was Lilah.

He had much he wanted to say to her.

The more he dwelled on her actions—and with nothing to do but think, he dwelled on them at length—the more her betrayal infuriated him. After all they had shared, that she would tell the first sympathetic warm body she saw that he was a slave made him long to wring her slender neck. It made him want to shake her until her head was in danger of separating from her shoulders. It made him want to turn her over his knee and paddle her backside until his hand ached.

The faithless little bitch had claimed to love him, and he had believed her. Then as soon as she was back in reach of civilization, she had allowed the blind prejudices she had been raised with to reduce him to the
status of a nonperson, not good enough to kiss the hem of her skirt, let alone her mouth. Let alone live with filer, love her, marry her, father her children.

Bitch.

He had known it, somewhere in the back of his mind though he had hoped and prayed he was wrong, had known that in the end that tiny bit of blood would come between them. He had known that she would never admit, in the cold, hard light of day and society, to loving a slave. A Negro slave. Because that was what he was, as hard as it was to admit even to himself. That minute infusion of blood from an ancestor far, far back along his family tree mattered more than his education, his upbringing, his character.

That minute infusion of blood made him a black man, legally and socially.

Miss lily-white Lilah had bedded a man of a different race. What did that make her? Or rather, what would that make her, if her fancy family and fine friends should discover it? At the very least, a social outcast. At the worst, a fallen woman, a strumpet, a whore.

Angry, bitter, Joss toyed with the idea of trumpeting their liaison to all and sundry just as soon as there was any all and sundry for him to tell. How the hoity-toity little bitch would cringe when the world knew her for the round-heeled hypocrite she was!

But he was a gentleman, damn it, and a gentleman did not boast of his conquests, no matter how badly the lady might have behaved toward him.

The little bitch had been hot as hell. She’d wanted him for a stud, damn it; that was the plain truth of it. And now that she was about to be restored to the bosom of her family she would marry that rawboned farmer, Keith or Karl or whatever his name was—if justice hadn’t been served and he hadn’t drowned. Even if he had, she’d marry someone just like him.

And she’d spend her nights lying in her husband’s
arms, suffering his touch while she pictured the steamy nights that the two of them had shared. He’d be her goddamn fantasy, and that thought made him madder than ever.

She’d wear another man’s ring, bear his name and children, and all the while yearn for him. But the sanctimonious little hypocrite would never admit to it, except perhaps in her deepest soul. She would never come to him. Never.

He was a Negro slave. She was a white lady.

That was the truth of the matter as she and the world saw it, and he’d better get it through his head before he came within reach of the little bitch again. Strangling her would gain him nothing but a short dance at the end of a long rope.

He didn’t want to kill her anyway. He wanted to spank her until she couldn’t sit down, make love to her until she couldn’t walk, and keep her properly under his thumb for the rest of his life.

He loved her, goddamn it all. Loved her so much that the thought of her with another man made him homicidal. Loved her so much that her betrayal made him sick to his stomach.

Well, first things first. He had had this slave business clear up to his eyebrows. No matter who his ancestors had or hadn’t been, he was getting the hell back to England as soon as he could. And the little bitch could get on with her plans for a nice, tidy, boring life. He wished her joy of it!

That night, when the same wizened sailor who had brought his food for the last three days came again, Joss was on his feet, waiting by the door. In his best humble tone, Joss asked for a quill, ink and paper. Somewhat to his surprise, they were brought to him.

And with a grim half-smile he set himself down to write a long-delayed letter to his second-in-command at his shipping company in England.

XLIII

T
he next morning the
Bettina
sailed into Bridgetown. Joss knew only that the ship had dropped anchor in a calm harbor. Their exact location was not revealed to him until two days later, when three sailors came to release him from the brig where he had spent nearly six days in isolation. To his silent fury, they clapped irons on his wrists before leading him topside. He was clearheaded now, able to walk without aid, but was a trifle weak from being confined without fresh air or exercise.

As he emerged into the sunlight for the first time in almost a week, Joss stopped in the hatchway, blinking furiously against the blinding glare. His escort nudged him in the back with a musket, urging him impatiently on.

As his eyesight gradually adjusted to the brilliance of the tropical afternoon, he became aware of four figures standing near the gangplank, watching his approach. Three were men, one of whom was, he thought, the
Betting
‘s, captain.

The fourth, he realized as his escort brought him to a halt a few feet from the little group, was Lilah. She was fashionably dressed in a low-cut gown of palest pink muslin that bared her white shoulders and slender arms beneath tiny sleeves. A wide sash of deeper pink was tied beneath her breasts. A ribbon of the same shade
was threaded through the tousled cap of palest gold curls that framed her small face. To his annoyance, the boyish style became her, emphasizing the fragile perfection of her features, the creaminess of her skin, the soft blue-gray of her huge eyes. The very loveliness of her infuriated him so much that it was all he could do to look at her without gnashing his teeth.

He restricted himself to a single icy glare.

She met this without so much as a flicker of her thick-fringed eyes. The soft half-smile that curved her lips never faltered as she said something to the short, stocky man on her right. Joss didn’t know him, but it didn’t require genius to deduce that he must be Lilah’s father. He was perhaps sixty, burned a permanent lobster red from the sun, his hair a gingery version of Lilah’s fairness, his figure portly but not yet totally run to fat.

The man on Lilah’s other side he did know. Joss cursed God, the devil or whoever was responsible because Lilah’s erstwhile fiancé hadn’t drowned after all.

XLIV

“J
oss. …” His name died as a mere breath in Lilah’s throat, unheard by anyone. She couldn’t go to him, couldn’t acknowledge that he was any more to her than a slave to whom she felt grateful. Her father and especially Kevin were already angry and suspicious, ready to suspect the worst of Joss—and herself.

Because she’d spent almost two months alone with him.

If Bajan society knew only that and nothing else, she would be the subject of a raging scandal. If she’d been shipwrecked with a young, virile white man who was single and looked like Joss, her father would already be planning a shotgun wedding. But since Joss was of mixed race, he was almost a nonperson as far as society was concerned. The taboo against a respectable white lady taking a man like Joss as a lover was so strong that it almost precluded the possibility that such a thing could have happened. At least in her father’s mind. Others in their social circle, some of whom had long been jealous of Lilah Remy’s beauty and wealth, would likely welcome the spread of such gossip. Lilah could just picture them tittering behind their hands over her downfall. … The idea frightened her almost as much as did the prospect of her father’s rage if he should discover what she had done.