Captain of My Heart (31 page)

“Without his bridle. . . . ?”

She stroked his hair, loving its crisp
softness between her fingers. “Yes. You see, when he returns to the
barn without it, they’ll know I intentionally set him free.”

A long moment went by before he answered, as
though he was having trouble collecting his thoughts. She pulled
her fingers through his hair, over and over again. He rested his
brow against the cup of her shoulder, his head grew heavy, and
within moments he fell still in her arms.

Mira bent her cheek to his hair, watching the
flames dance in the little stove, smiling as
Kestrel
gently
rocked her captain to sleep.

She was happier than she had ever been in her
life.

Chapter
18

Brendan awoke very late the next morning, to
the sound of water gurgling past the rudder and the feel of a hard
deck beneath his back. He opened his eyes, momentarily disoriented.
Above, the river’s reflection danced on the deckhead beams; at
least the sun was shining today. But a chill permeated the room,
for the little fire in the stove had long since gone out. He
shivered, and pulled the heavy quilt up over his bare
shoulders.

Faith, what was he doing on the deck?

And then he remembered.
Mira.

He sat up with a start, his body stiff and
sore but filled with a languid satisfaction that could only have
come from a night of lovemaking.
Faith.
Where was she? Had
he actually fallen asleep in her arms?

He grabbed his shirt, hopped into his
breeches and boots, swept up his tricorne, and ran from the
cabin.

Topside, the deck was white with snow,
catching the sun’s glare and reflecting it back with such blinding
brightness, it hurt to look at it. Huge ice floes drifted down the
river, sparkling in the sun. Brendan stood there, blinking,
listening to the drip and trickle of running water as snow melted
on shrouds and sheets, furled canvas and spars. Giant clumps of it
slid down the masts, dropped from the lofty yards, left depressions
in the pristine whiteness at his feet. There, a faint set of
footprints led to the rail and stopped. They were hours old.

Then he noticed that one of
Kestrel’s
boats was gone.

Mira.

Raw terror struck him. What if she’d slipped
and fallen into the ice-choked river? She would have been swept out
to sea with no one the wiser!

Ten minutes later, Newburyport’s newest hero
was racing headlong down High Street, coattails flapping behind
him, legs pumping madly, and the demons of hell on his tail. From a
tavern window Liam, wiping the frost from the panes with the heel
of his big hand, looked out, saw his captain’s flying form, and
threw back his head in hearty laughter.

“You dare to laugh! I’m sitting here, coming
down with something horrible this time—oh, Liam, it’s
smallpox,
I just know it is—and you have the gall to sit
there and laugh!” Dalby, sitting miserably on his bed, had his hand
clamped to its usual place over his gut. His face was wretched.
“Come feel my forehead, Liam. I know I’ve caught something, and
this time I just know it’s something bad—”

Liam turned from the window. “I think, Dalby
m’ friend, that our cap’n’s caught somethin’ far more deadly than
the smallpox!”

Dalby went white, his own imagined illness
forgotten. “Oh, Liam. . . .”

But the lieutenant was clutching his sides,
his great peals of laughter booming out against the low-beamed
ceiling. “Aye, he’s caught somethin’, all right! ’Tis called
love,
Dalby! An’ unless I miss me guess, the one who got him
infected is none other than the Ashton lassie herself!”

###

“Good heavens, Captain Brendan! Whatever on
earth is wrong?”

Abigail stood in her kitchen with her hands
plunged wrist-deep in a bowl of bread dough, flour dusting her
apron, and her cheeks as red as apples from the heat of the fire.
Surrounding her was a collection of black iron stew pots, caldrons,
and frying pans, some hanging on nails from the walls, others from
cranes above the fire.

Brendan yanked off his tricorne and clapped
it to his chest. He was breathing hard, sweating as if it were
mid-July, and his face, unshaven, was the color of Matt’s hair.
“Mira! My God, where is she?”

Never had Abigail seen the normally blithe,
laughing Captain Brendan in such a wild-eyed panic. “Calm down,
young man! Miss Mira’s just fine. Why, she’s off in the back
pasture, giving your sister a riding lesson.”

Brendan reeled back against the cupboard,
flinging his arm over his eyes. “Thank God.”

She eyed him curiously. “Captain?”

“Thank God, thank God, thank
God.”

“Yes, I’m sure He heard you the first time.
You all right, young man?”

He let his arm fall to his side, tipped his
head back, and sucked in great gulps of air before letting them out
in bursts of hysterical laughter.

“Sit down, Captain, before you collapse. How
’bout a slice of hot buttered toast? You have your breakfast yet?”
He sank into a chair, wiping his brow with the back of his sleeve
and shaking his head. But she was already cutting a chunk of
freshly baked bread from the loaf cooling on the little drop-leaf
table, putting it in a wire-framed toaster beside the hearth, and
humming to herself as she placed jam, butter, and a knife before
him. His mouth was watering by the time she added a slab of cheese,
a steaming cup of black coffee, and a piece of ham the size of a
dinner plate.

“That’s it, eat up, young man!” she chirped
happily. “We’ll get some meat on those bones of yours in no time!”
But Brendan was wolfing the food down as fast as she could set it
before him, oblivious to both her fond smile and the admiration in
her bird-bright eyes. Abigail loved to cook; she loved to see a
vigorous young man enjoying her fare even more. She refreshed his
coffee, set a bowl of fried hasty pudding and maple syrup before
him, and watching him approvingly, went back to kneading the
bread.

“I’ll wager you didn’t know you’re the talk
of the town this morning, did you, young man?”

He almost choked on the hasty pudding. Was it
already common knowledge that he and Mira had been out last night,
alone and unchaperoned? Good God, did everyone know she’d spent the
better part of it aboard
Kestrel?

Or had she shared the news that he’d asked
for her hand in marriage?

Abigail’s bright eyes didn’t miss a thing.
“You’re far too humble for your own good,” she scolded, mistaking
the reason for his high color and clucking like a mother hen. “Look
at you! Why, everyone’s talking about how you stole the crew right
off that frigate. And all those prizes you brought in! Why, they
just love to hear of such audacity, you know. Britain needs that
haughty nose of hers tweaked, and fellows like you—”

“More butter, please?”

“—are the ones to do it! Imagine,
eight
prizes.” She put her hands on her hips and shook her
head in admiration. “And on that schooner’s maiden voyage, too!
Matt hasn’t stopped talking about it.” She flipped the dough over
and punched it down, missing his expression of relief. “And of
course, Ephraim was just beside himself with glee. Can’t wait to
get down to Wolfe Tavern and do his share of bragging about you.
He’s like that, whenever one of his ships does well for herself.”
She dumped the dough onto a floured board. “In fact, he tells me
that the man who captained this ship you, uh, robbed was none other
than a fellow named Crichton.”

He wiped the crumbs from his mouth with a
linen napkin and reached for more hasty pudding.

Abigail peered at him slyly. “This Crichton
fellow wouldn’t happen to be the same one you tricked at the
river’s mouth last year, would it?”

“Could be,” he said, with a mirthful, crooked
grin.

Abigail wagged a flour-caked finger at him,
her bright eyes shining. “I knew it! And I’ll bet he didn’t take
kindly to your recruiting his men!”

“Don’t know.” Brendan scraped the last of the
crumbs off his plate. “I didn’t stop to ask him.”

She managed to stop staring at him long
enough to look down at his empty plate. “Gracious, Captain, you
still hungry after all that?”

He had the grace to look sheepish. It was
amazing how much he could eat and still maintain that lean, sinewy
form of his. Heavens, if she were thirty years younger. . . .

“So how is Miss Mira this morning?” Brendan
asked suddenly.

Abigail grinned, and her eyes grew brighter
than ever.
So,
she thought,
the handsome young captain is
taken with our little Mira, huh?
She turned away to hide her
pleasure, and decided against teasing him about it. “Why she’s as
chipper as a spring robin. If she keeps up like this, who knows?
Maybe she and that sister of yours might actually get along.”

“Get along?”

“Oh, they’ve been caterwauling all morning.
I’ve never heard the like.”

Brendan put down his fork. “What are they,
er, caterwauling about?”

“Heavens, you name it.” Abigail shaped the
dough in smooth, precise movements. “The cat your sister found in
her bed this morning. The riding lesson. The apple tart Eveleen had
for breakfast—”

“Apple tart?”

“Most of the time they get along quite well .
. . but Mira, you see, has a short fuse. It doesn’t take much to
set her off.”

That’s for sure,
Brendan thought, with
a wry grin.

“Anyhow,” Abigail continued, sighing, “Mira
figured your sister might like an apple tart with some fresh cream
for breakfast this morning. Found her in the kitchen here before
the sun was even up! Did it all by herself, too. Rolled out the
dough and everything. Unfortunately, though, Miss Eveleen thought
Mira deliberately left out the sugar.”

“Did she?”

“Leave out the sugar? Oh, probably, but I’m
sure she didn’t mean to. Mira can be a real handful, but there’s
not a mean bone in her body. And she doesn’t like being accused of
something she didn’t do . . . Young man, now where are you
going?”

Brendan slapped his tricorne onto his head,
pausing long enough to lean down and kiss her matronly,
flour-scented cheek. She blushed like a schoolgirl. “Seems to me I
hear some, er . . .
caterwauling
going on right now. Think
it warrants some investigation?”

“It most certainly does.” She saw the
eagerness in his laughing eyes, and knew that he was just itching
to get out there and see his little sweetheart. “You just mind
yourself, though, and stay out of the line of fire. Those two
aren’t likely to show mercy to anyone unlucky enough to get between
them.”

He went out the back door, landing knee-deep
in snowdrifts and almost falling on his face. The sound of angry
shouting drew him around the back of the house, through a stand of
oak and maple and pine, and into a big field ringed by a fence,
atop which sat no fewer than three cats in various stages of
repose. One of them was eating something. He shut out the crunching
sounds and tried not to imagine what it was—or had been.

And then he looked toward the center of the
field.

There was Mira, sitting astride that wee gray
colt, her back toward him, her impossibly thick, straight hair
caught in a red ribbon and hanging all the way to Rigel’s back. She
looked very small and very angry, her shoulders stiff and her crop
thwacking repeatedly against her thigh in vexation. As he watched,
she stood in her stirrups, her little rump shockingly revealed by a
pair of breeches that fit her like a glove. Dropping her reins, she
cupped her hands around her mouth and began hollering in a voice
that would have had no trouble at all carrying the length of
Kestrel
’s decks in a raging gale.

“I said, head
up!
Heels
down!
And for God’s sake, make her move! You ain’t gonna learn a damned
thing just letting her stand there like that.”

And there was Eveleen, glaring down at her
instructor from her lofty perch atop the elegant white mare. She
was splendidly garbed in a pink—faith, he wished she’d stop wearing
that color—riding habit that did nothing to flatter her. Her golden
hair was stuffed beneath a little hat, one hand clenching the reins
and the other carefully hidden beneath the closure of her jacket.
Although she was trying her best to look regal, Brendan knew her
well enough to know she was terrified.

Mira was pitiless, unwilling to let Eveleen
back down no matter how scared she was. “For one thing,” she
snapped, “the horse ain’t going to move if you just sit there like
a bump on a log. For another thing, she is not
bucking,
she’s merely swishing her tail! You are not going to fall off by
making her walk around the field, and if you do, there’s enough
snow on the ground, you damn well won’t hurt yourself!
Now, make
her do it!
I am not asking you to take that fence yonder, I am
merely asking you to press your legs gently to her sides and make
her walk!”

Beneath the yards of voluminous pink skirts,
it was impossible to tell if Eveleen moved her legs or not.
Spellbound, his heart aching for his sister, and his desire for her
instructor beginning to swell painfully against his breeches,
Brendan watched. He tried not to think of his arousal, a condition
that worsened every time she stood up in those stirrups and
presented that little rump. Instead, he forced his mind to focus on
the drama before him.
Please,
he thought,
have patience
with her, Mira.

“Well?”

Eveleen raised her fleshy chin. “I did. She
doesn’t like me. She’s not going to do it and I want to get off.
Now. My legs hurt and my back’s starting to ache—”

“You can dismount
after
you make her
walk around that field in one—full—circle!” The crop began to slap
rhythmically against Mira’s thigh. Brendan swallowed tightly and
drew his coat over the front of his breeches.