Pirates (30 page)

Duncan lowered his eyes. “I would stay,” he admitted.

“Yes,” his father agreed and laid a hand to Duncan’s shoulder. “Take your wife, if you must, and put Troy behind you, now. Do not return until this bloody rebellion has ended.”

A sound rose in Duncan’s throat and was aborted before it could find utterance. He had seen a phantom in his father’s eyes, the spirit that would live on after John Rourke was dead. And death, he knew, would not be long in coming.

“Be gone,” John insisted, with a note of sad amusement in his voice. “I am that weary of looking at you, Duncan Rourke.” Having so spoken, the patriarch stood, raising Duncan with him, and embraced his son. “God be with you,” he said.

Duncan did not turn from his father’s farewell, but returned it, as near to weeping as he could afford to be. Before him was the man who had loved him unequivocally, despite their difference, who had taught him to read, to hunt and shoot, to anticipate the weather by the signs the earth offered, the man who had cut him free of a British whipping post and carried him home, delirious and soaked in blood, on his own horse. John had taught him to be strong and
stubborn, had shown him that he must learn to govern himself before he could dead others with any success.

Lucas rose, too, and shook Duncan’s hand. “I’ll look for you to come back home,” he said, “when this fighting’s over.”

Duncan nodded, not trusting himself to speak. After a last long look at John Rourke, he drew a cask out of the corner, climbed onto it, and hoisted himself through the hole in the ceiling. For some time afterward, he lay in the cramped filthy space above the wine cellar, listening, thinking, remembering. Imprinting his father’s image on his mind for all time.

Eventually, he allowed himself to weep. His sobs, though silent, were deep, wrenching ones, rooted in some part of him he had never acknowledge before. When at last the worst of his grief had passed, he moved back through the bowels and walls of the great house, traveling routes he had learned in childhood.

When he reached the chamber where Phoebe waited—it had been his room, once—he pushed the tapestry aside and found his wife lying on the bed, fully clothed and sound asleep. Her arms were thrown wide of her slender body, and she was snoring ever so slightly. She had exchanged her ball gown for a divided skirt made riding astride, a pair of boots, and a long-sleeved shirt that might have been his at one time.

Duncan stood over Phoebe for a time, watching her sleep, coping in silence with a storm of poignant emotions, fully aware of other sounds—a light step in the hallway, guests in the rooms on their side of his one, settling in for the night, talking, making love. He never considered leaving Phoebe at Troy; with the events of that night, the plantation had, for all intents and purposes, fallen to the enemy. He bent and kissed her lips like the prince in a tale he’d heard once, long ago, beside the fire on a winter’s night, and she opened her eyes.

Duncan did not speak; he merely gave her his hand. She was on her feet in a moment, and he led her out onto the terrace. The party had ended, the Chinese lanterns were
extinguished, and the garden appeared empty. He whistled and heard the corresponding signal return to him on a balmy breeze.

They descended from the terrace by means of a rope, Duncan going first, Phoebe following. She did not hesitate or utter a sound as they fled across the darkened lawn and into the night.

Men waited deep in the woods, patient, silent, well versed in such tactics; with horses and muskets. Duncan mounted a gelding, bent to extend a hand to Phoebe, and swung her up behind him. They rode hard, a score of men, Duncan and Phoebe, and a small, cloaked figure he did not notice until nearly sunrise, when the sea was near enough to smell.

Phillippa flung back the hood of her cape and beamed at her grim, exhausted brother. “I’ve decided,” she announced, “to participate in the revolution.”

A glance back at Phoebe revealed that she’d known Phillippa was present all along. Perhaps she had even helped arrange the deception, and his men had participate, too. Duncan swept them up, one and all, in a single, scathing glare, warning them without words that they would suffer for their foolhardy audacity.

Finally, he spat a curse, but secretly he was pleased that one member of his family, at least, had seen the light. “Mind you don’t get underfoot,” he told her sister, “or make a liability of yourself.”

Phillippa laughed, though he could see that she had been weeping during their long flight from Troy. Perhaps she knew, as he did, that their father was sick unto dying, that she might never see her home again. “I will do my best to behave,” she promised.

The
Francesca
awaited them on turquoise waters frosted with white foam, but it was nightfall before they dared to board her and set sail for friendlier waters. Phoebe had seen the anguish in her husband’s face and guessed at its cause, but she did not offer him comfort until they were alone in their cabin, long after midnight.

Phillippa was sleeping soundly, just across the passage-way;
Phoebe knew that because she looked in on her sister-in-law only minutes before Duncan came belowdecks and let himself into their tiny chamber.

Phoebe had given herself a sponge bath and donned one of Duncan’s shirts in place of a nightgown. She was certainly no expert on masculine emotions, but she knew how to console one particular man.

Gently, she removed his shirt, which was stiff with dust and sweat, and began to wash his upper torso with tepid water from the basin on the washstand.

Duncan submitted in silence, tilting his magnificent head back, closing his eyes. The muscles in his jawline, for all of that, were rock-hard, ridged, the muscles of an ancient warrior, caught forever in marble.

“Thank you,” she said.

He did not open his eyes. “For what?” he asked, his voice low and somehow broken, though he was trying hard not to let her see that he was suffering.

“For not leaving me behind,” she replied. “Now …” Phoebe paused, sighed deeply. “If only you would talk to me.”

He met her gaze at last, and she saw utter despair in his eyes, along with the conviction that he had failed. “There is nothing to say.”

’Isn’t there? You were forced to leave your family—most of it, anyway—in the hands of the British. You have no way of knowing what will happen to them. I’d say that was something to talk about.”

Duncan pushed her hand away, when she would have continued to sponge his chest and belly with light, tantalizing strokes. “What do you want me to tell you?” he rasped. “That I’m a coward?”

Phoebe dunked the sponge, squeezed it languidly, and moved around him to begin washing his back. It was a beautiful, well-muscled expanse of sun-browned flesh, even with the whip marks crisscrossing and rooted deep. “You, a coward? Good Lord, Duncan, sometimes I actually wish you
were
a little less darling—that way, you might live longer.”

Something moved in him, some emotion he quickly suppressed. Phoebe’s heart ached.

“My reasons are selfish, of course,” Phoebe prattled on, continuing the sensuous bath. “I love you very much. I want to be a wife for a good long time—so mind you don’t make me a widow.”

He sighed, gazing straight ahead, pondering some scene Phoebe couldn’t see. She unbuttoned his breeches, freed him, and went on wielding the sponge. Duncan gasped before he could stop himself, and he had no control whatsoever over the response of his body. His member rose against his belly like the mast of a ship. Despite his state of mind, he was more than ready for further attention.

It was the only way Phoebe knew of to get past the barriers he’d erected and meld her soul with his. In that fusion, Duncan might know a few minutes of peace, and Phoebe wanted to give him that gift, however fleeting.

She put the basin and sponge aside and stroked him. She told him to kick off his boots, and he obeyed her. When she had removed his breeches, he was utterly vulnerable to her, and so completely, perfectly masculine that he took her breath away.

The lamp guttered out just as she knelt, to worship and to conquer.

Duncan groaned and plunged his fingers into Phoebe’s hair. She imagined those hands, moving with graceful fury over the keyboard of a harpsichord or the strings of a mandolin, as she enjoyed him. For once, for that night if never again, Duncan was the instrument, and she was the musician.

She played him with tender, relentless skill, made him spend himself, led him to their bed, and extracted still more music—melodies, thunderous rhapsodies, crescendos. He gave himself up to her completely, and she loved him all the more for having the strength to submit. Duncan had trusted her with far more than his body; while she made love to him, at least, he entrusted her with his soul as well.

“Tell me about Troy,” she whispered, when they lay entwined on the bed, emptied, for that night at least, of all
their passions. “Tell me about your father and your beautiful mother, about Lucas and Phillippa.”

Duncan was silent for a long while, and when Phoebe reached up to caress him, she felt tears on his face. It was time, she knew then, to reveal her secret.

“Okay, then,” she said,
“I’ll
tell
you
something. I’m going to have a child.”

He drew her on top of him in a single motion, the effects of his repeated releases evidently forgotten. She saw his face in the moonlight flooding in through the high porthole and knew that he could see her clearly, too. She felt his gaze probing the deepest, most private parts of her being, and the sensation was not entirely pleasant.

“What did you say?”

“I believe you understood me the first time, Mr. Rourke,” Phoebe whispered. She was less sure of his reaction than she had been a moment before, a little frightened now that he would not want her, would not accept the baby they had made together. “You will be a father—sometime in March, probably.”

“My God,” he breathed, and Phoebe wished he would show some emotion other than mere surprise—joy or sorrow, fury or regret.
Something
.

“Old Woman says our baby will be a boy. She’s already named him John Alexander Rourke—for your father, of course. And Alex.”

For an excruciatingly long moment, he simply stared into her eyes. Then, just when she had almost lost hope, he pulled her very close, as if expecting someone to try to tear her from his arms. “Trust Old Woman,” he said, close to Phoebe’s ear, “to know all about my child before I do. Good Lord, Phoebe—why didn’t you tell me?”

“Things kept coming up,” she teased.

He laughed, and the sound was better than music, better than good news. “A child,” he repeated. But as he held Phoebe against his side, some of the joy seemed to seep out of him. “What kind of man will our son grow up to be,” he asked, “with an outlaw for a father?”

“He won’t have ‘an outlaw for a father,’ Duncan,”
Phoebe pointed out, snuggling close and holding on tight. “He’ll have a hero—a man who helped give him a free country to grow up in.”

Duncan plunged the fingers of his right hand into her hair, much as he had earlier, in passion, though this time the reason was different. Slowly, halting every few moments in order to regain control, he told her that his father and brother had refused to be rescued, that they had preferred to take their chances with the hangman, that he’d seen a ghost in John Rourke’s eyes and knew that he would soon perish.

Phoebe listened—she had led Duncan to this point, after all, through the sponge bath, the easy words, the lovemaking, and the tenderness that had followed. Now, she would simply hear him and hold him in her arms while he told her things that were both important and trivial. While he talked, she took his right hand and laid it on her bare belly, to remind him of the tiny life growing beneath his palm.

T
he closeness Duncan and Phoebe enjoyed that night was not destined to last. Before the sun rose, Duncan was out of bed, washing and dressing silently in the slowly fading darkness of the last hour before dawn. Phoebe, sensing his reticence, knowing his mind almost as well as her own, pretended to be asleep.

When he was gone, without kissing her forehead or murmuring a farewell as he had always done, she cried. Duncan had opened his soul to her the night before, but now he had retreated into his private regrets again, and Phoebe knew he was suffering the agonies of the damned, as surely as if he’d been hurled into some medieval hell. His father and brother were captives of a government he opposed, and the home he dreamed of returning to one day was in the hands of his enemies. His despair was overwhelming, and, strong as he was, Phoebe could not be certain he would recover. Human beings had limits, even the special ones, like Duncan.

She waited, drifting in and out of a fitful sleep fraught with nightmares, until the sun filled the cabin with golden light. Then she got up, washed, pulled fresh clothes from the trunk at the foot of the bed, and dressed. She paused at
Phillippa’s door, but there was no answer, and when Phoebe gained the busy deck, she found her sister-in-law standing at the bow, gazing out at the sea as if spellbound.

Phoebe stepped up to the rail beside her. “Good morning,” she said.

Phillippa turned that brilliant Rourke smile on her, dispelling all Phoebe’s worries that the girl might be regretting leaving home. She did not seem to have Duncan’s grave doubts about the futures of John and Lucas, and of Troy itself, but then Phillippa was very young. In her sheltered experience, no doubt, everything had always worked out in the end—dragons slain, castles conquered, princesses rescued from the clutches of the evil magician.

“I thought you would sleep all day long,” Phillippa scolded. “Heaven knows, I have no one to talk to—the men are all busy, and Duncan is in one of his moods.”

“He’s worried about your father and brother,” Phoebe said without rancor.

Phillippa’s smile faded, and she nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said. “As am I.” Her countenance brightened again, but the effort was visible. What brave, sturdy people they were, these Rourkes. “Father and Lucas will be set free,” she said determinedly. “After all, they’ve done nothing wrong, and that incident at the party was all a ruse on Major Stone’s part, an attempt to force Duncan to surrender. By now, the major must know he’s failed, and I should imagine he’s quite ashamed of himself in the bargain.”