Somewhere on St. Thomas: A Somewhere Series Romance (26 page)

And what if I were? Would it be so bad?

We’ve never talked specifics. I knew we both wanted a family, in that far-off “someday” that my goal of getting through school and starting my career had pushed out into the future.

A future I’d thought I’d have a lot of time for. A future I’d pictured sharing with my family, maybe when my parents were retired and ready to be grandparents.

But Rafe’s parents are gone entirely, my dad has died, and now there is only my stressed-out mom, dealing with my teenaged sisters. While I’m done with school and the dreaded bar exam, I don’t even have a job yet. None of this is the rosy scenario I’d imagined.

The ship lurches, and it flings me forward into the corner of the bathroom cabinet. “Ow!” I exclaim, even as the reverse direction lands me on my ass.

Oh well.
Whatever is going to be with getting pregnant has already probably happened. I won’t have access to more birth control until Saint Thomas, and who knows if I can get a prescription filled there. Rafe can start using condoms, but why bother?

Maybe the timing is perfect to get pregnant. I can still get a job when we got back to the States, or even do what I’d been refusing to do and work for McCallum Enterprises. Then I can make a flexible schedule.

Another heave of the ship brings me back into the present, perilous moment, and I hurry along, latching the cabinetry in the hall and ending up in our stateroom.

We’ve gotten sloppy. Water bottles roll back and forth on the floor, and the telescope has fallen over. I continue with the securing process in our closet, cabinets, and head.

Through the double row of portholes alongside our built-in bed in the bow, I can see the plunging motion of the ship. The portholes are around six feet above the surface of the water when we’re in port on an even keel. Now we fully submerge, so I can see beneath the ocean’s surface, and then lift so high I can see the sky.

It’s mesmerizing, and I thank God I have a pretty strong stomach.

I go back to the galley and check with Freddie. He’s sitting, strapped into his bolted-down chair, watching a soap opera on the tiny combo TV/VCR player at his work area. “All set below,” he says. “Don’t go above without safety lines.”

“I don’t know where those are.”

“Here.” He shows me the webbed nylon belt with its clip-on rope. “They’ve got safety cables all over. You clip your rope to the cable in case you get swept overboard.”

“Oh cripes,” I say. “Rafe told me to stay below, but I want to see what’s going on above. See what the storm looks like.”

“Look through the skylight.” He has a big plastic skylight above the galley, and he points. All I can see is gray, and I frown. “I need to at least get a look at what’s above.”

And before Freddie can stop me, I grab one of the ropes and nylon belts and head up the ladder leading topside.

Rafe

The weather is hitting us now. I can see the leading edge of the hurricane behind us, and it looks like a purple wall shot through with lightning bolts. We’ve made good time with full sail, but it doesn’t look like we are going to make it to Bermuda before we’re engulfed by that thing behind us.

I still have hopes of making it to one of the atolls outside of Bermuda. There’s one roughly an hour away, and if we can make it into a cove there, or even into the lee of the island, we’d be better off than bouncing like a cork in the open ocean.

The guys and I have our full weather gear and safety lines on now from the aft storage locker because, even though the rain hasn’t hit yet, the spray and waves off the bow are fully engulfing the
Maid
from stem to stern every few minutes.

I spot Ruby when her head comes topside, because the minute she opens the hatch, light streams out and water streams in, and I see a gleam on her red hair. I feel something new and terrible:
fear
.

Does my wife have a safety harness on?

“Get below!” I bellow, but the wind whips my words away, and I have both hands full with the big wheel of the tiller and can’t let go. Sven spots her, too, and he runs down the length of the deck to stop her, but she’s already up on deck and has clipped a safety line onto the cable. I sigh with relief as my second reaches her.

She’s wearing the same outfit she had on before, and she and Sven are instantly doused as a wave engulfs the starboard side. The big blond Swede has a grip on her arm and is arguing with her, but I am somehow not surprised when she yanks away and comes toward me, clutching the rail, all the way to where I hold the tiller in the sheltered hollow of the cockpit.

“Sorry, Rafe. I just had to see this,” Ruby says. Her eyes are sparkling, her cheeks pink, and her hair is flattened to her skull like a drowned rat. Sven, having delivered her to me, moves on.

“You disobeyed an order,” I snap, the fear I felt at seeing her replaced by anger. “This is no place for you.”

“Wherever you are is the place for me,” she says with perfect composure. “Don’t worry. I’ll go below. But I want to know what’s going on.” She turns to look behind us, and her eyes widen. “Oh my God. Is that the storm?”

“Hurricane Shellie,” I say, still pissed, and now thinking about spanking her. She deserves it for scaring me like that. The thought makes me hard, and that’s distracting, too. “You need to get below. Seriously.”

“Shellie will like that,” Ruby says, smiling. Her former roommate, Shellie, has remained one of her closest friends. “But that storm looks serious.”

“It is. Very. I’m hoping we make it to this atoll.” I point to the location on my laminated sea chart. “We have a good chance of getting into this cove on this side of the atoll and dropping anchor.”

“Then I won’t distract you any more, Captain,” she says, and presses a kiss on me with her wet, cold mouth, which tastes of the sea and makes me think of tasting it more. But then she’s creeping along the rail, her nylon safety line trailing her, and going below. I sigh with relief as she disappears and the hatch is secured by Sven from the outside.

“She had a belt on,” Sven says, reaching me, his expression apologetic in the bright yellow hood of the slicker. “She said she had to see the storm.”

He’s defending her, the sod.

“I’ll handle my wife,” I said frostily. “No thanks to you, letting her come up here.”

He shrugged. “It’s Ruby. What was I going to do?”

What indeed? Now, at least, I believe she’ll stay below, where it is safe.

* * *

The next two hours are a blur of fighting the wheel to keep the compass heading for the atoll with all sail out and the seas, churned up by the hurricane, getting bigger and bigger while the wind gets gustier and smacks us around like a giant cat’s paw.

I’m about ready to call for the sails to be pulled in, giving up our run before the storm. Sven, hanging in the rigging, spots Atoll 57, too small to even have a name, ahead. According to the charts, it has a bay on one side, really its only geographic feature. I have the guys pull in the spinnaker and tighten us up, and we tack around the islet in the waning light. Purple is the color of Hurricane Shellie, I’ve decided, as the sun shuts down into a deep violet gloom.

The crew is perilously hanging off the bow and sides, looking for shoals and reef, as Sven, wiping his binoculars constantly, scans the atoll for the opening of the bay.

“There!” he yells, pointing, and I can see a slight break in the tropical landscape of rugged black rocks and palm trees whipping so hard in the wind they look like feathers beating the air.

I clock it a few degrees, but I can’t tell if we’re coming around fast enough. “Reef all sails!” I yell, and Sven passes it on. The guys move like a well-oiled machine, dropping and furling the sails while three of them still watch for hazards in the water. “Sven! Give me headings!” I shout into the teeth of the wind, and Sven, an even better sailor than I am, calls out degree headings for the turn.

I fire the engine to counteract the momentum from the sails, and slowly, carefully, nose the
Maid
into the sheltered bay.

The bay turns out to be deeper than it at first appeared. Tall volcanic-rock cliffs rise around us, and I feel a tremendous sense of relief as we pull all the way in, and there’s at least a hundred yards on every side before the rocks.

The rocks are bad, though. Black as sin and twice as jagged. But if we can just keep from losing anchor, we should ride out Shellie just fine.

Sven is already calling for two anchors, aft and stern, and I have the guys put out a couple of sea anchors off the port and starboard, too, in case we pull a chain.

Finally, I can let go of the tiller. I find myself trembling all over, my muscles locked, my hands in the shape of claws from gripping the wheel so long and hard.

Sven takes a look at me. “I’ll take the first watch, Captain. Go below and get some rest.”

One last look around at my crew, half of them going below to rest, the other taking the watch to keep the ship from running aground, and I go in the hatch and down two levels to our bow stateroom.

Ruby’s wide-awake, sitting in bed in flannel pajamas one of her sisters sent for Christmas; they have pink pigs with wings on them. She takes one look at my face and clambers out of bed with a cry.

“Oh my God! Rafe! You look exhausted!”

“Pretty beat,” I say through chattering teeth. Now that I’ve let go of the tiller and the effort to get us here, I am coming apart physically.

Ruby pulls off my yellow rain gear, throwing it into the tiny head. She strips off my clothes, and I’m already falling asleep as she’s getting a warm washcloth and wiping down my sweaty, trembling body.

I wake up hours later. It’s night, I know, by the pitch-blackness we’re in, intermittently lit by lightning flashes. The wind is a terrible banshee howling outside, and the ship shudders periodically with its blows. We’re moving; the sea heaves around us, but the motion of the
Maid
has a very stable feel, and I can tell our anchors are holding. I’m warm and the bed is comfortable, but I’m totally rigid and aching in my hands, arms, and neck from the battle with the wheel.

Ruby is wrapped around me like a snuggly koala. She must have dressed me in something, because I can tell I have a shirt on, but nothing below. Must have been too hard to get underwear on me.

I think about her coming topside and feel a tremor of that primeval terror again. She’s not a sailor, never has cared to become one, and if Freddie hadn’t told her about the safety lines…There’s nothing to do in these dark hours of the storm but recharge our batteries and pass the time, and there’s nowhere I’d rather be than with my wife.

“Ruby.” I have to shake her a bit to wake her, but the pain is bad. “Can I get some help? My hands are all locked up.” I run the back of one of my curled hands across her soft cheek. “There’s some of that muscle massage cream in the head.”

“Of course. Poor thing.” She gets up and pads into the head. I’m glad it doesn’t seem like she’s been seasick. She comes back and, in the dark lit by flashes of lightning, she works my hands with the heating cream.

I can’t help groaning as she rubs my fingers with Bengay, gradually straightening and opening them, working her way down the wrists and deep into the bulging, tight muscles of my forearms. She strips off the shirt and gently rolls me over. She straddles me and begins working over my shoulders and neck.

My moans and groans of painful pleasure at the rolling touch of her strong little hands and drilling thumbs would be embarrassing if anyone heard them, but it’s just me and Ruby here in the womb of storm-filled dark.

She disappears for a moment, and I must have drifted off, because the next time I wake up, she’s rolling me onto my back again.

“Listen. I have to tell you something,” she says. I’m pretty groggy, but I realize she’s tying my hands with something silky to the handles on the sides of the bed where we have storage below. “I can’t decide what to do, and it’s not fair not to tell you about it. I forgot my birth control pills after I got the call about Dad. I haven’t been taking them, and I don’t have them on the voyage. It might be too late already, but it’s too soon to tell right now. So my question is, do you want to wear a condom or not?”

I tug at my hands and realize I can’t get them undone. “What the hell, Ruby?” I growl, the implications barely penetrating my fogged brain. “What are you doing?”

My erection has a pretty good idea of what she’s doing, and it’s been interested for a while now.

“You have Bengay on your hands,” she says primly. “I’m going to be taking care of you tonight.” She applies her mouth to my nipples, stroking up and down my chest and abs. I can feel the length of her hair trailing over me like feathers. Her strong thighs clench my hips, and I can feel how hot her center is, how close it is, how sweet it is.

Everything on my body rises to full alert: every hair, every muscle, and of course, my cock, but I’m still trying to process what she was asking me.

Condom or no condom? I’ve gotten spoiled by her being on birth control, and I’m not even sure I have any. Is she saying she might already be pregnant?

My hard-on gives a joyful leap of excitement as she gets to it with her mouth and those skillful hands. I’m groaning now, in an entirely different way than from the massage. “I’m going to get you back for this.”