Chapter 17 #2
It would have surprised her to learn that he wasn’t thinking about punishments at all.
For the first time in a life of clear-thinking certainty Devon was learning doubt.
And he was finding the lesson a singularly painful one.
His motives, his feelings, even the logic of his imprisonment of her were being called up and explored.
His conclusions, tentative as they were, were affording him no comfort.
Purple twilight surrounded them as they reached the starlit jumble of limestone boulders and low, spiky vegetation that edged the beach.
Raven found them first, at an odd ticklish instant when Devon had turned to her and hauled her close, inexplicably, startlingly, without speaking, whispering her name.
He drew back when he saw Raven, releasing her to the boy pirate’s gentle consolations.
A single shot from Devon’s pistol brought the others, who had been searching too; they joined them like shadows, to see Merry and scold, or tease, or sympathize, as their natures dictated.
It was Raven whose bare, slim arms encircled her lovingly and held her as though she were something precious while they sailed the jolly boat toward the Joke.
Another time he would have avoided that kind of contact with her because it would have put too many of the wrong sort of ideas in his head, but that worry seemed a little petty just now.
Her earlier tide of defiance had faded into a vaporous tiredness, and her hands, clinging to Raven’s shoulders, felt to him cold as a polar sea.
Gently he separated their bodies and began to rub the chilled flesh of her palms and fingers.
“Hear me, lovey. You’ve got to start being more careful about your getaways,” he said softly. “I’d like to know what possessed you, making sail on the sly with that rascally galley help of Cook’s—what’s his name?”
“Michael Meadows.” She curved herself back into the comfort of his strength.
“It’s not like I was the prized plum from the Garden of Prudence myself, but—Michael Meadows!
I couldn’t believe it. The man don’t know his arse from an ax handle,” he said, the tartness and worry in his voice softened by his voluptuously slurred vowels.
“And where in sweet heaven is he anyway, leaving you on your own like that?”
Even in the dim light he could see the change in her face. With sensible kindness he suggested to her, “Dead, is he?”
Devon had been watching the interchange in a manner that Raven had privately noted fell far short of enthusiasm, so Raven was surprised when the blond man remarked dispassionately, “Dead and eaten. I found an interesting fragment.”
Getting interested, Raven said, “Don’t tell me! What et him?”
“A crocodile,” Merry whispered, her wide-open eyes fixed in remembered horror at the elkhorn corals reaching in pointing fingers upward through the eerie green curl of the surf.
Raven’s arms tightened around her and held on like armor until they came to the Joke and he disengaged his indignantly protesting body from her to deliver her into Cat’s ascetic grip. But much later that night, after she had been put to bed, Raven was frank with Will Saunders.
“If that don’t beat everything,” he said. “That Meadows. There wasn’t a piece of responsibility in the whole of him. Just like him to up and get himself eaten and the bits strewn for anyone to come upon, and Merry left to fend for herself. You want my opinion? Eating was too good for him.”
In the morning Merry woke in the sturdy bunk of the cabin on the Black Joke she had come to think of as her own. Fuzzy sunlight poured through the open windows above, and the ship bucked and straightened in the leaping motion she had learned meant they were at sea with all drawing sails set.
Cat was sitting on the bunk, and he looked as though he had been there for some time.
His weight slightly constricted the cotton sheeting over her feet.
He was stretched back at an angle, supporting himself on his elbows, his shirt opened to the waist, his hair draping in loose swags over his cheeks and dropping behind the prominent ridge of his shoulders.
The light softened him, giving a white glow to his body and the illusion of a flush to his cheekbones with their gaunt sensuality.
His eyes, blue-snow colored, were assessing her in a hard way that seemed able to extract silent information from her mind.
He waited courteously for her to speak first, and she would have if she could have thought of something clever.
Finally he shrugged upright and handed her a glass from the table.
Watching him over the rim, she drank down the contents and made a face.
“Ugh! What was that?” she said.
“Don’t ask. I see you’re thinner. I would have thought by this time you’d know enough to keep eating no matter what. If you’d roll over on your stomach, I could do something about those weals on the backs of your legs. Thank you.”
She felt him draw up her nightshirt to uncover her legs. Her smile curved against the pillow as he treated the scattered bite marks, the cool sting of alcohol tingling pleasantly against her skin, his touch light, efficient.
“They should do something about the insect problem on these islands,” she said presently. “It would encourage industry.”
“I don’t know that industry needs to be encouraged. You’ve been industrious enough already.”
When he finished, he came around to the side of the bunk and pushed her onto her back and sat looking down at her with his palms resting on either side of her waist. His unbound hair was so fine and clean that each silklike fiber moved independently of the rest and streamed in a flaxen spill down his arm and over her stomach and thighs.
His expression would have terrified the Merry Wilding of four months ago.
“I wish you’d stop doing crazy things,” he said.
Pressing her head backward into the pillow, she gave him what tried to be a placating smile. No effect. So she made a copy of one of Raven’s rude hand signs.
“That,” he said dryly, “wasn’t even the right finger.”
She could feel her placating smile becoming a little sheepish. “Aren’t you even going to say how glad you are to see me?”
“No.” An incidental movement of his head sent his hair over her like a caress.
“I was hoping that you had made it to New Orleans. With Michael Meadows, of course, that wasn’t likely.
Did Devon tell you how we were able to locate you?
” After she shook her head from side to side in a negative, he continued.
“A couple of months ago Meadows happened to show Will Saunders that miserable scrap of paper Meadows had the audacity to call a map. Thank God Saunders is bright. He only saw the map for a few seconds, but he was able to draw it from memory. The reason it took us so long to get to you was that we spent days searching the Devil’s Kettle and terrorizing the occupants before Rand thought to turn the map upside down.
And that led us straight to you. Incidentally, Raven and Saunders have been trying to circulate the story that Meadows broke into your room and forced you to go with him. ”
Her eyes widened involuntarily. “Does Devon pretend to believe it?”
“Michael Meadows was the last man on the ship with the gumption to carry off any woman of Devon’s.
Besides, there’s a small matter of a squid that everyone knew Raven left in with you and which vanished when you did.
Meadows might have kidnapped you—but he was hardly likely to make off with your damned mollusk. ”
Hope died. There was no way to sit up without knocking flat into Cat’s body. Merry wriggled upright against the wall, and his tumbling hair brushed over her lower body and then lay, tickling, on her knees and bare ankles. “What’s the crew thinking?”
In a facile movement the boy pirate swung his head back slightly. The gesture pulled his hair from her legs and settled it behind him.
“We’ve spent almost two weeks looking for you,” he said.
“That was two weeks without a prize—without even looking for one. The decision to search for you was fairly popular, given that you didn’t leave in the steadiest company—but no one likes to have commerce interrupted.
And there are some missing gold pieces, which one assumes Meadows took; but can you prove it was him and not you? ”
“Well.” She smiled too brightly. Every nerve was alive and jumping. “I guess it’s the bow cannon and a cat-o’-nine-tails for me!”
“Is it?” he said dryly. “From what Raven told me in confidence, last night you put up a little insurance against that with Devon.”
From brightly smiling to brightly angry. “If Raven told you that was why—”
He interrupted. “Raven didn’t tell me anything of the sort because, innocent that he is, it’s never occurred to him that you and Devon don’t ride together.
It’s part of your protection that the men think you belong in every way to Devon, and no one other than Morgan and I and possibly Sails knows any different.
” Moving away from her, he lifted the empty glass of herbal tea he had given her and held it in a loose clasp.
“Last night, if it wasn’t insurance with Devon, what was it?
” Then, absorbing the look she was giving him, he snapped, “Listen, I don’t want to discuss this either.
But there’s no one else to tell you, so I’d better.
I turn, take a breath, and whenever I look back in your direction, you’re in deeper. About last night?”