The Wedding Ransom (3 page)

“I need another drink.” MacKenzie banged his glass on the table. He closed his eyes and hung his head. “Whiskey this time, please.”

As Rafe rose to retrieve the bottle, Ben spoke in a placating tone. “It is possible we are worrying overmuch. Chances are Mary Margaret won’t have the slightest interest in making the trip. After all, she is devoted to making Hotel Bliss a success. That is where all her energies lie.”

“I’m not worried where her energies lie. It’s where her body lies that has me shiverin’ in my shoes.” MacKenzie tossed back the drink Rafe had provided him and signaled for another.

“Now, Snake, don’t think so negatively.” Lucky twisted his earring three times. “I think Ben is right. Even though the hotel is temporarily closed, Maggie still has a lot of work to keep her busy. I don’t believe she’ll want to make the trip this time.” He looked at Gus. “I’ll bet you twenty dollars she wants to stay home.”

“Done.” Gus nodded.

MacKenzie groaned and clutched his head with both hands. “Now you’ve done it, Nichols. She’s bound to want to go if you made a bet she wouldn’t.”

Rafe poured the drink, watching him, watching his companions. All four of them appeared shaken by Lucky Nichols’s bet. Slowly, Rafe grinned. These petrified old pirates were entertaining as sin. What the hell. A call to adventure. A woman he most definitely wanted to meet. It was the best offer he’d had all day.

He flipped his chair around and straddled it. “So, men, let’s talk treasure. Where exactly is it? How much of it comes to me as my fee? And…” He paused, giving Snake MacKenzie a baiting look. “When do I get to meet your granddaughter?”

I
n her first-floor bedroom at Hotel Bliss, an ache in Maggie St. John’s right leg woke her from a fitful sleep. Wincing, she threw back the bedcovers and sat up, gingerly touching her knee. Swollen and hot. She gritted her teeth. She must have overdone it yesterday when she’d climbed across the roof to patch shingles stripped away by high winds during a recent storm. Or maybe she shouldn’t have run that second mile-and-a—half lap around the lake.

She flexed her leg, and along with the pain, anger flared inside her. She whispered one of her papa’s favorite curses. Maggie was all too familiar with this sort of pain, but she hadn’t had a spell in months. She had hoped this bit of trouble was gone for good.

“I don’t have time to be sick,” she whispered. Her grandfathers needed her to care for them, now.
They
were the sickly ones, whether they wanted to admit it or not. Poor Papa Gus, for example. Some mornings he was so stove up he could barely move from his bed.

This can’t happen to me. Not now. Not on top of all the other trouble.
Maggie drew a deep breath, attempting to calm her rising temper. And if beneath her anger lay a sliver of fear, she refused to admit it.

Light from a full moon and countless stars beamed through the open window and illuminated her bedroom with a soft, silvery radiance. Lifting her watch from the nightstand, she saw that dawn was but a short time away. Maggie listened to the night, soaking in its tranquility, until the distant sound of a masculine snore from the guest rooms upstairs destroyed any chance of regaining her peace.

She scowled and dragged her hands through her hair, finger-combing the long curls. The devil take that cursed Barlow Hill, the paunch-bellied, sour-breathed bounder who threatened all she held dear. The man who’d used lawyers to steal Hotel Bliss. For a moment she damned her conscience and wished she’d not forbidden her grandfathers their revenge. It would be oh-so-convenient if Barlow Hill were to die.

As much as she regretted the fact, Maggie couldn’t let them do it. Her papas had gone out of their way to see her raised a lady and too many of the lessons had stuck. She couldn’t condone killing the man, no matter how attractive the idea sounded.

Upstairs, Hill’s snore all but rattled the rafters, and Maggie wanted away from him, out of the hotel this minute. She rose, cautiously resting her weight on her sore knee, biting her lower lip against the pain. She whispered another invective, grabbed her wrapper from the foot of her bed, and slipped it on. Barefoot, she left her bedroom and limped quietly through the darkened hotel, headed for the summer kitchen.

Built separately from the three-story, fourteen-guest-room hotel building, the kitchen was her Papa Snake’s domain. A pot charmer of extraordinary skill, Snake took it as a personal affront that the cooking lessons he gave his adopted granddaughter had never quite taken. He’d thrown in the soupspoon, so to speak, the day he’d hung the sign that read: Where There’s Smoke, Maggie’s Cooking.

Maggie smiled at the memory as she turned the spigot of a large earthenware urn and filled a tin cup with water. Not just any water, but special water. Curative water. Lake Bliss water.

She carried her drink toward the table and chairs that sat beneath the kitchen window and took a seat. Bringing her cup to her mouth, she sniffed the water’s slightly sulfuric fragrance before downing it in a three-swallow gulp. She shuddered. Her mouth puckered. She gently massaged her knee and waited for the water to do its work.

Maggie believed in the powers of Lake Bliss water. Daily doses of the liquid had effectively given her back her life. Orphaned at the age of four and unofficially adopted by the four seafaring friends of her late father, she had spent her childhood climbing ship’s rigging during sea voyages and running the sparkling beaches of the Caribbean island where they lived when not aboard ship. When swollen joints first began to plague her at the age of thirteen, the forced inactivity of chronic illness had hurt her spirit as much as the pain plagued her body. Local physicians failed to offer a remedy, so her papas had taken her from city to city across the world, seeking answers and searching for a cure. One doctor after another had told them no treatment existed and that Maggie could expect to be crippled by the age of twenty. Unwilling to accept such a diagnosis, her grandfathers had broadened their inquiry, pursuing every avenue of potential aid no matter how unusual it seemed. Papa Ben had been the one to hear about the small lake in Texas whose waters appeared to possess healing properties.

Her first sight of the lake on that long ago morning had made an indelible impression on Maggie. To this day, she recalled the thrill that ran through her when she spied the ribbons of steam rising from emerald waters surrounded by the towering trees of the Big Thicket. She’d smiled at the pink-and-white beauty of dogwood blossoms splashed along the bank. She’d closed her eyes and absorbed the soulful note of the mourning dove’s coo. She’d sighed with pleasure as she whiffed the bite of cedar-scented air.

Something about the place, some intangible essence, struck the heart of the well-traveled girl. To her, this little piece of Texas was as beautiful as the turquoise waters and sugar sand beaches of the Caribbean. For Maggie, it felt like coming home.

They’d built a log cabin along the 130-acre lake’s south bank in March of her sixteenth year. By August, following daily doses of water and therapeutic mud baths, her pain had all but disappeared. After much planning, debate, and discussion, Maggie and her landlocked pirate papas left the place Maggie had christened Lake Bliss, taking a year’s supply of bottled water with them. Before leaving Texas, they tracked down the owner of the Lake Bliss land and purchased the area from him. Or so they had thought.

In the shadowed darkness of the moonlit kitchen, Maggie grimaced and cursed the careless mistake made so many years ago that caused them such grief today. Land speculation ran rampant in Texas, then and now. The title they had purchased had not been a clear one, a fact they’d recently discovered when Barlow Hill, rot his soul, sued them for ownership of Hotel Bliss and won.

Restless, she rose, wincing as much from the ache in her heart as that in her leg. Between the water and the exercise moving provided, the soreness in her knee had eased. Now she felt sickly in another manner entirely. Thinking about Barlow Hill had made her both nervous and nauseous. What she needed now was something calming and comforting. What she needed now was a little more Bliss.

Maggie decided to head down to the bathhouse and indulge in a mud treatment. In all of her twenty-five years, she’d never discovered anything quite so soothing as a nice long soak in the naturally heated mud of Lake Bliss.

The hotel boasted both a ladies’ and a gentlemen’s bathhouse. Papa Ben had designed and erected the three-sided structures at the spot where the hot spring bubbled up from the earth before flowing out to form the lake. The bathhouses allowed open access to the water, while at the same time providing privacy and creature comforts for bathers. Before litigation closed the hotel, a half-dozen employees worked in the bathhouses ministering to the guests. Now, Maggie was the lone woman on the premises, the only woman around to partake of the recuperative pleasures of the bath. “Just like the old days,” she said softly as she exited the kitchen and walked the gravel path toward the lake.

Above her, heaven shone in a million fading stars as the eastern sky took on a rosy glow. Maggie smiled at the beauty of the sight and repeated a silent prayer that they would defeat Barlow Hill, and that she would remain at Lake Bliss to watch a thousand more dawns like this one.

This was her home, the home she’d fought so hard to gain. It was the place that made her grandfathers’ declining years happy ones. Leaving it would break her heart.

Maggie sighed, and hinges creaked as she pulled open the bathhouse door and slipped inside. She crossed to one of the pegs lining the wall, shrugged off her robe, and hung it up. She removed the gold chain and small key-shaped charm from around her neck and looped it around a second peg. Then, assured of privacy by both the walls and the time of the morning, she pulled her nightgown up and off.

Cool night air chilled her naked skin and she shivered as she covered the necklace with her gown. Turning, she walked to the edge of the spring, extended pointed toes, and tested the water’s temperature. “Aah,” she said with a sigh as heat lapped at her skin. For a moment, she debated whether to choose the hot spring or a soak in the six-by-ten-foot log-lined pool filled with mud. Definitely the mud tonight, she thought. Her weary body would appreciate it, and by noon, the ache in her knee would be nothing but a bad memory.

She slipped into the thick warm pool and sank into mud up to her shoulders. Taking a seat upon a submerged ledge made from cemented rock, she leaned her head back, gazed out over the lake, and gave herself up to the pleasure of the moment. Stretching out her legs, she felt for the opposite ledge and purred, “You’re a lucky woman, Maggie St. John. This is true Bliss.”

Her right foot brushed something. Something solid. Something…hard.

A raspy male voice emerged from the shadows. “No, ma’am. It’s not bliss quite yet. But you’re darn sure in the neighborhood.”

At thirty-four, Rafe Malone wasn’t a stranger to naked women. A good number of husbands and lovers might justifiably accuse him of being more familiar than he had any right to be. But in all of his amorous adventures, Rafe had never faced a situation quite like this one. Being naked in a tubful of mud with the adopted granddaughter of four elderly, over—protective, homicidal pirates was a first, even for him.

As his words died in the air, the woman gasped and clutched her arms to her breasts before sinking to her neck in the mud. Rafe anticipated her scream before it ever left her mouth, but the thick ooze sucked at him, slowing him down as he lunged for her. She got out a loud, shrill squeal right before he clamped his hand across her mouth.

“Hush now, honey,” he cautioned, his free hand snaking around her waist. He pulled her against him and murmured into her ear. “Wake any of those fossilized pirates and I’m liable to lose my neck. I may be here at their invitation, but that hasn’t stopped them from promising to kill me if I dared to touch you.”

She fought him like a slippery hellcat, and Rafe hardly had time to notice the feel of her bare curves against his skin. He muttered a curse as she landed a hard jab with her elbow on his thigh, entirely too close to sensitive areas. “Please, Miss St. John,” he ground out. “I don’t aim to hurt you, and I’d be obliged if you’d return the favor. If you’ll promise to keep it to a whisper, I’ll let you go. I’d just as soon not face your grandfathers under these circumstances.”

His words must have finally worked through to her mind, because slowly she stilled. With gentle hands, Rafe turned her around to face him. He gazed solemnly into wide, frightened eyes. “Don’t be afraid, all right? If I let you go, promise you’ll be quiet?”

Slowly she nodded. Rafe released her, and she scrambled to the opposite side of the pool.

The fear faded from her features, replaced by an angry glare that gleamed like cat’s eyes in the night. He saw that he’d managed to deposit a handful of mud in her mouth. “Sorry about that,” he said, grimacing. The mud emitted a slight but distinctive odor of sulfur, and he hated to imagine its taste.

Maggie St. John twisted around and grabbed at the pile of clothing lying on the ground beside the pool, inadvertently giving Rafe a glimpse of mud-slicked breasts in the process. He drew an appreciative breath, and when she wiped off her tongue with his shirt, he wished she’d used his skin instead.

Her harsh whisper whipped across the space separating them. “My grandfathers have returned? You’re the thief?”

Good. She was thinking. Maybe she wouldn’t bring the buccaneers’ wrath down upon him. Rafe cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, I should have given you my name right off. Yes, I’m Rafe Malone. I rode in with the pirates about three hours ago.”

Turning away from him, she yanked on his shirt. Rafe heard her angry mumbles. “Never heard them come home. A man in my mud bath. They should have woken me up.” She tossed an accusing glare over her shoulder. “My grandfathers’ invitation to Hotel Bliss didn’t include an offer for you to share my bath. Please leave, Mr. Malone.”

Rafe considered it. Briefly. “I could do that, but I won’t. I’m not through soaking yet.”