Sea Fire (24 page)

The situation between Jon and Cathy could best be described as a state of armed neutrality. He took her body when he could resist it no longer, and she didn’t fight him. On that one memorable morning when he had accused her quite rightly of jealousy, he had taught her once and for all that her physical responses were his to command. Rather than risk further humiliation by putting up a fight only to have him reduce her to a clinging supplicant in his arms, Cathy preferred to submit from the beginning. At least that way only she was aware of the totality of her own defeat.

They barely spoke; they lived together like outwardly courteous strangers except for the time they spent in that too-narrow bunk slaking their hunger for each other. Cathy was bitterly ashamed of herself for responding so completely to a man who had openly betrayed her with another woman, a man who made no bones about treating her as the whore he plainly thought she was. But she couldn’t help herself. Her traitorous body had only to feel the touch of his hands or lips to melt like butter set too near a fire. She wanted him, God help her, and he wanted her. On that one subject, if no other, they were in complete accord.

The wound she had inflicted in Jon’s shoulder was almost completely healed. Jon had tended it himself, holding her off with a cold stare when she had offered to help. It was as if he wanted to keep her at arm’s length in as many ways as he could. By the middle of January there remained only two red, puckered circles to show where the hole had been, and Jon had almost completely recovered the strength in his arm and shoulder. For this Cathy was profoundly, if secretly, glad. The inexperience of the
Cristobel
’s crew meant that Jon had to spend much time in the rigging, setting canvas and securing lines. Every time she watched him pull himself hand over hand up a rope high above the deck, her heart was in her mouth. If he fell.
. . . But Jon was incredibly strong. At full strength, it was most unlikely that he would make such a mistake, and he was almost at full strength again.

For some time now Cathy had noticed that her stomach was inclined to get upset if the ship pitched too much, or if she stayed too long in the heat of the day. At first she had put her symptoms down to the deplorable food that was all that was available to eat, and let it go at that. But gradually an appalling fact began to dawn on her: she had not had her monthly courses for—oh, for a long time. Horrifying as the thought was, it was more than likely that she was pregnant.

When Cathy admitted the possibility to herself, late one afternoon as she stood at the taffrail, the sun an enormous fiery ball beating down on her bare head, she couldn’t believe that she had not realized it sooner. As she thought back, she could see that her stomach had been most unreliable for months. And as for her monthly time—Cathy concentrated. She had not had it since before she left Woodham. That meant she was—dear God, she was nearly five months pregnant!

Cathy went numb with shock, her hand flying automatically to curve over her stomach. Now that she thought about it, she could feel a slight roundness there, but surely not as much as there should be for a pregnancy so far advanced. Maybe she had miscalculated the dates, or maybe the child was to be exceptionally small. Cathy contemplated what Jon’s reaction would be to the news that he was to become a father for the second time, and felt herself pale. He would be far from pleased, she knew. He would blame her. . . . Cathy tilted her chin up in a gesture of defiance. It took two to make a baby, and he was certainly every bit as responsible as she. Besides, it really had very little to do with him. In the eyes of the law, Jon would not even be the child’s father. Harold would be, because Cathy was legally his wife. She had to fight a strong urge to giggle hysterically. Jon would turn murderous when that aspect of the situation occurred to him. His child legally claimed by Harold!
If it was a boy, it would inherit the title, and all of Harold’s dubious honors and assets. Cathy pictured Harold’s outrage if informed that the wife he had never even bedded was due to present him with an heir, and this time she did giggle. God, was there ever such a mess?

“What’s so funny?” a deep voice growled in her ear. Cathy started guiltily, and cast a quick look over her shoulder to see Jon towering tall behind her.

“Nothing,” she said hastily, knowing that she must have time to ponder the situation herself before breaking the news to him. “I was just—just laughing.”

“I wish you’d share the joke,” he said sourly. “I could do with a good laugh.”

Cathy turned another, more searching, look on him. He looked as if he were tired, or under a strain. The lines carving his face from nose to mouth were cut deeper than usual, and his gray eyes were hooded. His hair had grown so long that it was curling thickly over his collar in the back, and Cathy thought, “I must persuade him to let me cut it,” before turning her attention to more serious matters.

“Is something wrong?” she asked quietly, half-turning to face him. Jon grimaced.

“Nothing more than usual,” he said, not looking at her but over her shoulder at the deep blue sky. “What I came to tell you is, I think we’re getting ready to run into a storm. A bad one. All the signs are there. I’m going to be working my ass off keeping this ship afloat, and I won’t have time to be worrying about you. I want you to promise me that, no matter what happens, you’ll stay in the cabin until I tell you it’s safe to come out. Agreed?”

Cathy cast him another inquiring look through the thick screen of her lashes.

“If I didn’t know better, Captain, I’d think that you were worried about me,” she murmured provokingly. Jon snorted.

“Let’s just say I’m not ready to see sharks feast on that delectable little body—at
least, not yet. For the time being I can think of so many more enjoyable things to do with it.” Cathy stiffened indignantly at this drawling speech.

“You can jump overboard,” she told him icily, and turned her back on him, meaning to flounce away to a more private spot. Jon caught her arm, holding her in place. Cathy shot him a hostile glare.

“Promise me,” he said softly. “Or I swear I’ll lock you in. And if something should happen to me, and the ship were to sink. . . .”

Cathy gulped a little as she pictured this dreadful eventuality.

“Oh, all right, I promise,” she said ungraciously, and he allowed her to pull her arm from his grasp and escape.

She stayed out on deck until long after dark, sitting with her back against the mizzen and her arms wrapped around her drawn-up knees. Jon was busy on the quarterdeck, and Angie had disappeared below. No one else bothered her, and Cathy was left to her own thoughts. They centered almost entirely on the coming baby. She would have to tell Jon: there was no way around that. Being with child was something that a woman could not hide indefinitely. At first she was fiercely resentful at the idea of an infant coming into her life at this time, when her world had turned upside down almost overnight. She wasn’t even married to the baby’s father, which was what made the situation so impossibly difficult. But worse than the absence of words written on a piece of paper were the lack of heart-ties that should have bound her to Jon. He didn’t love her, he’d made that abundantly plain. He wanted her, and that was an altogether different—and to Cathy’s mind insulting—proposition. And she—did she love him? Her emotions were in such a tangle she couldn’t be sure. Sometimes she did, when he was the Jon she remembered from Woodham, her gentle considerate lover, Cray’s father. But other times, when he was a sneering, sadistic brute intent on punishing her for an infidelity that she
had never committed, she loathed and despised him. And every time she thought of that night he had spent with Sarita, hatred rose in a thick gray fog before her eyes. That incident topped the ever-growing list of things for which she could never forgive him; other items included his distrust of her, his refusal to believe in her innocence no matter how much she protested, and his callous taking of her body whenever it pleased him. So, in answer to the question, did she love him? Cathy had to be honest with herself and admit that she didn’t know. If she did, it was a curious, twisted kind of love, a deformed ghost of the joyous flowering of passion that had once existed between them.

The sea was growing increasingly choppy, and the wind was beginning to pick up. The
Cristobel
plowed up and down through the rolling waves. Overhead, a thick canopy of black clouds had blown up, completely blocking out the pale sliver of moon. A cold salt spray borne over the ship’s side by the wind caught Cathy full in the face; she sputtered, jerked from her thoughts by the cold shock of it. As she wiped the moisture from her face, a sail caught the wrong way by the wind began to snap and crack like a bullwhip gone mad.

“Drop that canvas!” she heard Jon’s voice roar, the authority in it unmistakable. Cathy slewed around in the direction whence it had come, her eyes searching for and finding his dark form as he strode the length of the deck. He stopped at the foot of the mainmast, repeating his instructions to a man high in the rigging in a voice that rivalled the thunder that was beginning to boom.

“Hell and damnation!” Jon swore, and to Cathy it was apparent that the man was not following Jon’s instructions adequately. Her eyes widened as she saw Jon catch hold of the pole with both hands and begin effortlessly to shimmy his way up it. By the time he had climbed less than a third of the way she was standing beneath the mast, her head tilted as far back as it would reach as she fixed him with fearful eyes. He was not alone in
the rigging; there must have been a dozen other men up there with him, some dangling precariously from poles, others clinging to the ropes for dear life. Their mission was plain even to a landlubber like herself: to get the sails furled before the storm hit.

He was up there for a good quarter-hour, and Cathy thought that her neck would break by the time he came sliding down. His expression was a mixture of exasperation with his men’s inexperience and grim determination to get the job done. When he saw Cathy waiting beneath the mast for him, apparently oblivious to the large rain drops that had just started to splatter the deck, exasperation won out.

“Damn it, I thought you promised to stay in the cabin during the storm!” he yelled at her. Cathy, not over-fond of his tone, made a face at him.

“What storm?” she asked impudently. “All I see are a few drops of rain.”

Jon audibly ground his teeth. Reaching out, he grabbed her arm in a grip that hurt.

“What I see is the tail end of a hurricane,” he said between clenched teeth. “And in about ten minutes, all hell is going to break loose. I don’t have time to play games with you. You’ll go to the cabin, and by God, you’ll stay there, or I’ll tie you to the bunk until we’ve ridden the storm out!”

“A hurricane?” Cathy breathed, appalled. The very name conjured up images that were terrifying. It would be bad enough to face such a tremendous storm on land, but in the middle of the ocean, with only a small, not particularly sea-worthy ship between the souls on the
Cristobel
and a watery grave, the prospect brought goose bumps to Cathy’s flesh.

“Yes, a hurricane,” Jon growled, his fingers digging into her arm with so much force that the limb was actually going to sleep.

“I didn’t realize—I’ll stay in the cabin,” Cathy said, but Jon was no longer prepared to take a chance on her word.

“O’Reilly!
” he bellowed, and when the other man appeared beside him, directed: “Escort Lady Stanhope here to my cabin. And damn it, see that she gets there! No little excursions on the side, understand?”

“Right.” O’Reilly nodded curtly in response to Jon’s command. In an aside to Cathy, Jon added fiercely: “And if I see you out on deck again, I’ll take my belt to you! And that’s a promise!”

Cathy was too shaken by the prospect of an imminent hurricane to take umbrage at this threat. Obediently she allowed O’Reilly to take her arm. They had moved only a few paces when Jon called to O’Reilly again.

“Send the other women to my cabin, too,” he ordered. “They’ll be safer, and I think it’s better that we know where they all are. I wouldn’t put it past one of the feather-brained creatures to decide to go for a stroll in the middle of the bloody storm!”

“Aye, sir,” O’Reilly said, grinning at this furiously uttered last. Cathy bristled, but O’Reilly was already hustling her off, and she was too aware of the steadily rising wind to want to linger. He saw her safely inside and then left; Cathy lit a candle and waited for the other women to appear.

“Cap’n says no candles—too much danger of fire,” O’Reilly told her tersely when he returned with Angie, Sarita, and the others. They filed silently past him to huddle in a tight little group inside the room.

“You ladies stay put!” he added forcefully, singling out Sarita in particular with his eyes. Then he blew out the candle, and as the cabin plunged into darkness, left them.

If Cathy had thought that she and Sarita couldn’t stay in the same room for five minutes without coming to blows, she was soon proved wrong. Penned together in pitch darkness while the ship was tossed crazily hither and yon by the wind, the muffled but still terrifying sound of the wind howling and wood snapping in their ears, they became allies in fear. The ten of them clung
together, sometimes sitting on the bunk, sometimes pitched onto the floor if the ship bucked unexpectedly. All thoughts of class or rivalry were forgotten: each of them merely wanted to survive.

The storm raged for forty-eight hours, and many times during those two days Cathy thought a specific hour might be her last. Once the
Cristobel
seemed to stand on her head, caught in the deep trough of a huge wave. Cathy saw the black ocean race to cover the portholes, and said a fervent prayer. From the hastily moving lips around her, she realized that the other women were doing the same. Another time a wave broke over the deck, sending floods of water washing beneath the cabin door. Several of the women screamed; the only reason Cathy didn’t join them was because terror had strangled all utterance.