Pirates (41 page)

Alex, who had not liked being parted from his new bride, was every bit as impatient to return, and he joined Duncan at the bow.

“The sea’s almighty quiet tonight,” he said, and though the words painted a calm picture, Duncan heard the uneasiness behind them.

“Yes.” he said. “One would almost think these were times of peace, offering no peril to men abroad on the waters.”

“It is women at home on the land that I’m thinking of now,” Alex replied. “I shouldn’t have left Phillippa behind.”

Duncan was not unsympathetic. He had wanted to protect Phoebe, too, when she had been with him. Now, he would have given anything he owned to have her at his side again, no matter what the danger to either of them. “What could you have done, Alex?” he reasoned. “Brought your lovely wife aboard and allowed her to rub elbows with the likes of Jacques Mornault? Risked having her captured by the British and taken to England or somewhere else as either a prisoner or a prize?”

Alex shook his head, but his attention was fixed on the dark waters. He narrowed his gaze and frowned. “Do you see a light?”

Duncan peered into the gloom. Sure enough, there was a faint, flickering glow, far off. Not landward, certainly, but well away from the coast of any of the islands, and directly in their path. Without speaking to Alex, he turned and summoned the crew from their quiet pursuits with a shout.

The cannons were prepared for combat, and those few men who had been unarmed strapped on swords or tucked daggers or pistols into their belts. Duncan climbed the rigging
himself, trying to make out the origin of the light, but they were still too far away to assess the situation with any real accuracy.

“Maybe we should just go round,” Alex suggested. He was a raider at heart, striking suddenly, taking the enemy by surprise when he could, and staying out of their way when he thought they were laying a trap.

“No good,” Duncan disagreed, with a shake of his head. “They know we’re here. That’s why they’ve shown themselves.”

“But it may be an ambush,” suggested Lucas, who had come on deck when the alarm sounded and immediately sought out Duncan and Alex. Despite his Tory tendencies, the man appeared to enjoy the life of a rebel. Perhaps they would yet win him to the cause of liberty.

“A clumsy one, if that’s the case,” Duncan said.

They drew nearer, skimming almost silently over the obsidian waters, riding the night wind under a starless sky, and the cannons were loaded and tamped and ready for firing. It was a surprise when they came upon two small skiffs, bobbing on the tide. One had been set ablaze like a Viking funeral pyre, and would go under soon, and the other held four cloaked figures with lamps upraised.

“Don’t shoot,” a female voice shouted over the crackle of the burning boat.

The bottom seemed to fall out of Duncan’s stomach. Phoebe? But that was impossible; he’d left her behind, however unwillingly and inadvertently, in that crazy century of hers.

Nonetheless, her name escaped him anyway, a hoarse shout, carrying over the water. “Phoebe?”

“Duncan!” she screamed back, and the sound was full of joy.

Duncan closed his eyes for a moment, in an effort to hold onto his emotions. “Phoebe,” he whispered, as Lucas and Alex gave shouts of delight.

When the skiff had drawn alongside, and a rope ladder had been thrown over the
Phoebe Anne
’s sleek side, Duncan was the first to descend. He did not speak to Phoebe, but
simply wrenched her into his arms, nearly oversetting the small boat in the process, and buried his face in her neck. He didn’t give a damn if she felt his tears on her skin.

She clung to him, and he felt her belly, full of his baby, pressed against him.

While they stood there, holding each other, swaying with the motion of the great sea, Phillippa, Margaret, and even Old Woman ascended the ladder to the deck. The burning rowboat sputtered and went under.

“How—?” Duncan began, capable of speech at long last.

Phoebe touched his lips with her fingers. “No time for that now, darling,” she said. “We’ve got to get away from here, quick, or your story, as told in
Duncan Rourke, Pirate or Patriot?
is going to end on a real downbeat.”

He laughed, because he was so full of joy, because life had surprised him and brought her back. He would ask nothing more of it than that, he thought. Phoebe, his baby—they were more than enough.

Phoebe started up the ladder, and Duncan followed.

On the deck of the ship that bore her name, Phoebe told her husband that the British were waiting on Paradise Island, and for once in his life, he did not question her. He nodded, but did not give the expected command to turn the ship in another direction. Instead, they sailed steadily on.

Phoebe was alarmed. “Aren’t we going to turn aside?”

“No,” Duncan replied, in a damnably calm tone of voice. “Paradise Island is my home. I will not let them have it without a fight.”

An image of Duncan tied to a tree flashed into Phoebe’s mind, and she thought she would be sick. “Have you gone mad while we were apart?” she whispered, horrified. “I’ve just told you what the future holds …”

Duncan touched her face in a gesture that was at once reverent and defiant. “I love you, Phoebe Rourke, and having you here beside me again is all I would ask of heaven. But don’t you see? There is no turning from our destiny—if we do not go out to meet it head on, it will follow us.”

Phoebe lowered her head, and Duncan drew her into his embrace.

“I’m afraid,” she whispered. “I’m so afraid I only found you to lose you again.”

He cupped his hand under her chin and made her look at him. “As long as you are nearby,” he said, “I am invincible.”

Phoebe simply clung to him, knowing it would do no good to argue.

A few hours later, Phoebe sat with Phillippa and Margaret in the galley, waiting, offering silent, frantic prayers. The gloom was so impenetrable that she could not see her companions, who were on either side of her. The only sound, besides their breathing, was the rhythmic slap of water against the sides of the ship.

The first cannon blast, when it came, reverberated through every timber of the vessel and set Phoebe’s very soul a-tremble within her. The three women clasped hands, but no one spoke.

There was another explosion, then another, before the objects of Duncan’s attack fired back. The
Phoebe Anne’s
bow shuddered under the impact, and there was shouting above decks.

Phoebe pictured British soldiers boarding the ship, bayonets drawn, and suddenly she could not sit and wait for another moment. She pulled free of Margaret and Phillippa, who tried valiantly to restrain her, and stumbled through the galley to the portal, feeling her way, bruising herself on tables and benches as she went.

Finding the door, she threw back the bolt and flung it open.

A wash of lantern light spilled into the companionway from the upper deck, and the din of fighting was dreadful. The air was acrid with smoke and the odd, metallic scent of blood, which Phoebe was learning to recognize only too well.

“Phoebe!” Margaret gasped from behind her. “Come back!”

“Are you mad?” Phillippa added.

Phoebe groped for a weapon and found a heavy drinking
ladle in a bucket of water. Grabbing that, ignoring Duncan’s mother and sister, she flung herself up onto the deck.

A sword blade whistled past her and lodged in one of the masts, and Phoebe, fueled only by adrenaline, wielded the ladle with a force born of desperation. After that, she lost herself in the fray, swinging and dodging, coughing and squinting as she searched for Duncan. She had no time to ponder the question of what she would do when she found him.

Presently, Phoebe’s head cleared a little, and she realized the futility of fighting pirates with a dipper. She crouched behind a barrel and waited, holding her breath.

Men screamed both in pain and in fury, and intermittently there were loud splashes as one unfortunate or another plunged over the side. On shore, a great fire blazed and roared against the dark sky, consuming Duncan’s house.

Closing the passageway to the future forever.

And the battle continued, finally distilling, after what seemed like hours, to two men, swords clanging in the flickering light of a single lantern. The combatants were Duncan and the British captain, Lawrence.

From the surrounding silence, Phoebe deduced that, for everyone else aboard the
Phoebe Anne
, the fight was over. She couldn’t guess which side had won, wouldn’t look away from Duncan once she had found him again.

Lawrence was a formidable swordsman and almost forced Duncan to his knees at one point, but Duncan rallied in a burst of strength and, in a shower of bluish sparks from their upraised blades, drove the other man back into the ship’s rail. Phoebe saw her husband stop, weigh the situation, and then thrust his sword through Lawrence’s heart.

Duncan stared down at the man he’d killed for a long moment, but spared only the briefest glance for the fire on shore. After wrenching the sword blade free, he flung the weapon down onto the bloody deck and turned.

“Phoebe?” he rasped the name, and all his hopes and fears were audible in those two syllables.

She ran to him, flung herself into his arms.

They had met destiny, together, and they had altered it.

“It’s gone,” she said. “The house—the elevator…”

“It doesn’t matter,” Duncan said raggedly, holding her very close.

And he was right. Nothing mattered, except that they were together and, for the moment at least, safe.

The
Phoebe Anne
was a small vessel, and since there was no privacy to be had, some of the more eagerly anticipated aspects of Phoebe and Duncan’s reunion had to be postponed. After the prisoners had been bound and the wounded attended to, they sat in the galley, across a table from each other, through all that remained of the night, saying nothing, palms touching, fingers interlocked. Souls joined.

When they dropped anchor, just after sunrise, in a cove off a rugged, unpopulated island, Phoebe did not recognize the landscape. It wasn’t among those she had visited on the canoe trip from Paradise Island to Queen’s Town, when she’d left Duncan to begin her brief career as a tavern wench.

“What is this place?” she asked, standing beside her husband on the deck.

Duncan grinned, leaning against the rail and surveying the white beach and thick foliage like a patriarch looking out over his kingdom. “I’m surprised you don’t recognize it, Mistress Rourke,” he said. “This is the Garden of Eden.”

Phoebe looked back, taking in the population of the ship with a pointed glance. “It seems we have an abundance of Adams and even a few extra Eves,” she said.

“It’s a big island,” Duncan replied.

And it was.

While the ship danced on sheltered, sparkling waters, Duncan and Phoebe went ashore in one small boat, Phillippa and Alex in another. The two couples parted from each other on the beach, traveling in opposite directions. The moment they’d rounded the first bend, Phoebe turned and planted herself in front of Duncan, slipping her arms around his neck.

“Not another step,” she said. “I’ve waited as long as I can, Duncan Rourke.”

He threw back his magnificent head and laughed, and the sound echoed over the waters that had been his home and his mistress for so long. “What a brazen chit you are,” he said and kissed her hard.

She caught his hand and led him into the shade, where the sand made a bed of sugar and the foliage provided a bright green canopy, scented and moist.

He kissed her again, and they dropped to their knees, never breaking the contact, trying to remove each other’s sooty, dirty clothes with gentle, awkward movements of their hands. They had been apart for what seemed like an eternity and had expected the separation to last forever, and now they found themselves together, in Eden. Patience was beyond them both.

Duncan lowered Phoebe to the sand and raised his mouth from hers only when he opened her bodice and spread the fabric wide, to reveal her full breasts. “I love you, Mistress Rourke,” he said. “Will you make your home here with me and start the world all over again?”

Phoebe clasped his head in her hands and brought him to her nipple, giving a strangled cry of ecstasy when he closed his mouth upon her and drew greedily. “I love you as well, Mr. Rourke,” she replied. “And yes—yes—I want this to be the beginning—of everything …”

He raised her skirts and tore her pantaloons away in desperation, entering her in a single long, deep stroke.

The first climax racked Phoebe the instant Duncan claimed her, and he compounded the pleasure, made it nearly unendurable, in fact, by moving with deliberation against that secret nerve center deep inside her, a place he had found and mastered during other, earlier sessions of lovemaking. After the initial explosion, there was another, and still another, until Phoebe was dazed and whimpering, dissolving into the hot sand. Only then did Duncan unleash the full force of his lovemaking and take her in earnest, and the result was cataclysmic.

When it was over, at long last, and they could move again, and breathe, they bathed each other in the warm, clear water. Then they came together again, in the ebbing tide,
like two creatures of the sea, their strong young bodies flexing in graceful union.

They were a long time in satisfying each other, were Duncan and Phoebe, but it didn’t matter. After all, this was Eden. The world was fresh and new, and they had forever.

Somewhere in Present-day America
…

T
he book, offered for twenty-five cents at a church rummage sale, was old and musty, and there were probably only a handful of copies left anywhere in the world. Pleased, the collector held it close against her chest for a moment and smiled. Then, after paying the price, she carried her volume outside, into the parish garden, which was bright with flowers and spring sunshine. Taking a seat on a stone bench, she opened the little tome to its title page.

Duncan Rourke, Pirate or Patriot?

The woman flipped slowly through the pages, skimming a paragraph here and there and examining the lovely old engraved illustrations one by one. Finally, she turned to the last page, for she was overly curious and liked to know in advance how things were going to turn out, whenever the opportunity presented itself.