For Her Love (34 page)

“
¡Buenos días, Señora!
” he called down to her.

She looked up with a smile and waved to him. “
¡Buenos días, Capitán!
”

He watched her cross the deck, looking studiously ahead of her, ignoring the appreciative stares of the crew, and moving with as much dignity as she could muster in the oversized men’s jacket.

“I trust you had a good night’s sleep.”

Señora
Courtney ducked her head self-consciously. “Wonderful. I feel terrible for putting you out of your bed, but I am truly grateful. I really cannot thank you enough…”

“You have thanked me, many times.
No importa
.”

“
No importa?
”

“It is of no importance.”

“You have saved my life,
Capitán
!”

“You exaggerate,” Diego protested, but he stood a little straighter.

“Nay! What would a Spanish maiden have done in my place? I fully intended to take my own life at the first opportunity.”

“That is a mortal sin,
Señora
!”

“Then you saved my life
and
my soul!”

Diego felt his cheeks grow warm. He had done all of that, hadn’t he? “It was an honor,” he replied.

And while that was true, it had been an honor, it didn’t hurt that he had decided it would be fair to ask a tidy little sum over and above the reimbursement he was owed. A finder’s fee, passage for the woman from Cuba to Jamaica… He was not a greedy man, but he expected reasonable compensation.

Unfortunately, he had met with a number of obstacles to collecting it. They had already attempted to approach Port Royal and had been greeted with warning shots fired across their bow by no fewer than seven English ships,
Magdalena’s
white flag of truce having been summarily ignored. They had sailed on, heading toward Welbourne, but had been forced to turn away by an English naval vessel patrolling the coast. Now, they were sailing toward the western end of the island, in hopes of finding refuge at Winston Hall, the home of Diego’s uncle and his English aunt.

Suddenly, Diego felt overly warm, and the morning sunlight became too bright for his eyes to bear. It was a familiar feeling, one that had come to him many times before. Of their own accord, his eyelids lowered, and a voice echoed inside of his head.

Diego
. It was a woman’s voice, speaking in strange and lyrically accented Spanish.
The ship just on the horizon, the one that flies a French flag, they are privateers, and you are far from Spanish waters
.

He didn’t have to open his eyes to know the ship she spoke of must surely be there. In the two years she had been coming to him, Magdalena had never led him astray.

Although he knew the answer, he could not resist thinking, Can you not send them in another direction?

She didn’t dignify the question with a response.

Shall we fight?
he asked.

Flee
, she answered.

Damn! How am I supposed to get this woman home? You are the one who insisted that I rescue her. I felt that as clearly as I hear your voice now. Surely you can offer some help!

The wind on his face felt like the sigh of a woman’s breath.
Now is not the time, Diego.

She was gone. The breeze cooled him, and he opened his eyes again into sunlight that dazzled, but did not overwhelm him. Grace was frowning at him in concern.

“Are you quite all right, Captain?”

“
Sí
,” he answered, distractedly. Under his breath, he mumbled, “Now is never the time. Now is not the time to play the hero. Now is not the time to get what you want. Now is not the time to take this woman home.” It was a litany of things that, in the past two years, Magdalena had relegated to some distant, indefinite future.

“Excuse me?” Grace asked.

“Nothing,” he said. She was looking at him as if he were crazy. How could he fault her? He often wondered himself. To his crew, he shouted, “Evade that ship!”

The crew knew better than to argue. Their captain’s ability to sense danger was acute, and his judgement in knowing when to fight and when to flee was uncanny. If he said the ship they could barely see was a threat, a threat it was.
Magdalena
swung away from the coast of Jamaica, out toward the Spanish Main and friendlier seas.

*

Her home receding before her very eyes, Grace held herself rigid. Captain Montoya had good reasons for doing what he did, she told herself. Too many English ships had already fired them upon. But he hadn’t even let that last ship get close enough to see if it was a threat! What if it had been another Spanish vessel, or one from some other friendly country?

Tears burned her eyes and a lump formed in her throat. She didn’t know where Giles was, but one thing was certain, he wasn’t going to look for her near the Spanish Main! Damn her uncle! If he had taken her to Saint-Domingue, Giles might have found her.

If he had taken her to Saint-Domingue, Diego might not have found her. She might have, at this very moment, been on her way toward becoming a well-seasoned prostitute. Still, Jamaica had been so close!

“Captain Montoya, are you quite certain that the ship you saw was…”

He glared at her, and she closed her mouth. The whole episode had been so strange. One minute she had been thanking him for all he had done for her, the next he had gone pale as the sails billowing above them. He had closed his eyes and looked like he might even pass out. When he opened them again, they’d had a glazed quality, and he had begun to mutter something, obviously angry. The next thing she knew, they were avoiding some unidentified ship and sailing away from home. Away from Giles.

But in all honesty, was she ready to face him?

“I am sorry,
Señora
,” Diego said. “Believe me, I am as frustrated as you are by this turn of events. Forces beyond our control seem to be conspiring against us on this voyage.”

She smiled weakly at him, and he excused himself to confer with his first mate.

Was the delay so terrible, really? Grace shuffled over to a giant coil of rope and plopped down, wrapping Diego’s jacket more snugly around her, as though it might be Giles’s arms keeping her safe and warm. But the jacket still smelled of citrus and Captain Montoya. It didn’t envelop her in the spicy, musky scent of her husband.

She had to tell him. Everything. And she had to tell him before they consummated their vows. In all fairness, she had to give him a way out, once he knew the truth. Giles was such a good man. She wouldn’t be at all surprised if he felt honor bound to stay with her, but she couldn’t bear the thought. Once, she had dreaded sharing his bed; now, she dreaded that he would leave her to sleep alone. Once, she had feared a real marriage; now, it seemed she might well be left with naught but a sham. Aye, Giles was a good man, a compassionate man, but was he the kind of man who would not care that his children’s blood was mixed? Even her own father had always seen her as tainted.

How could she tell him? She looked back out to sea. Her island was gone. Maybe ‘twas better that way. Maybe she needed just a little more time to build up the courage she needed to show herself to him fully, though she risked losing him forever in the process.

Giles watched bleakly as Welbourne’s dock drew nearer. His hair hung limp and unbound down the back of the rumpled shirt he’d slept in for two nights. Geoff stood at his side with a hand on his friend’s shoulder. Jawara positioned himself at the other side, his thick arms crossed over his bare chest, intervening whenever a crewmember was fool enough to approach the captain with some trivial concern. If the first mate or any other man balked at Jawara’s self-appointed position, one look at the captain’s haggard face kept them from bothering him with their complaint. Encantadora and the little girl from Havana sat together atop an empty crate on the opposite side of the deck. The older girl patted the younger one’s shoulder comfortingly, but she eyed with hostility the plantation in the distance. From time to time, her gaze would wander to Jawara’s broad back, and her face would soften, almost imperceptibly.

“You could take
Reliance
and plunder the Spanish Main for the next ten years and not find her,” Geoff said to Giles. “She’d not want you to go back to that life for her.”

“I’ll be damned if I’ll leave her to be some Spaniard’s whore!”

“Whoever he was, he wanted to help her. He may very well have brought her home.”

“Were she here, she’d be at the dock with that man.” Giles nodded to the overseer, who stood at the landing watching the ship.

“Unless she is in Port Royal,” Geoff suggested.

Giles snorted skeptically. “A Spanish ship, docking in Port Royal. Why can I not fathom such a thing?”

“Sintime you gotta jus’ go on,” Jawara advised. “It don’ do no good a kill youself tinkin’ of it. You kill de mon dat stole her from you. Dat more dan me got.”

Giles brought his fists down on the ship’s rail. “I want the man who stole her from the brothel! I cannot believe we combed the entire dock and every tavern, and no one knew who he was!”

“Giles, upon my word, if I thought we’d any chance of finding her, I’d sail right by your side until we did. He could be on his way back to Spain for all we know.”

“What am I supposed to do, Geoff? Am I to just go on as though I had never met her? Just pretend that none of this ever happened? What am I to tell her father?” He looked back to the dock, annoyed that he saw no sign of Edmund. “And where the hell is he?”

“We’ll tell her father that his bloody wife is the one responsible for this.”

“Grace is my wife! I was supposed to protect her! For the love of Jesus, Geoff, I delivered her uncle to Port Royal. I gave him time alone with her! God help me. How am I to live with this?”

“You didn’t know!”

“Were it Faith, would you accept that as an excuse from yourself?” When Geoff didn’t answer, Giles nodded. “I thought not.”

“You a-go drive youself mad tinkin’ like dat,” Jawara interjected. “Sintime deh jus’ nutten you can do.”

Giles finally tore his eyes away from the shore, and he looked at Jawara. “Is that what ‘tis like to be black? You just get used to being powerless?”

Jawara’s eyes flashed with anger. “Nay, dat not what it be like! Not in Africa! In Africa, we not black. Dem otta men dat steal us, dem
white
. We jus’ people. Sum be slaves, an’ sum be free.
Me
be a freemon. Even in de white mon’s world, me
not
powerless. Do me be anybody slave? Me jus’ know whey a hold on an’ whey a let go.”

Giles clenched his teeth in frustrated rage. He would not just let go of Grace! In the past few days he had gone back through every memory he had of his wife, searching for something that made her one thing and him another, and he had yet to find it. She had a quick wit, a sharp mind, an infectious laugh. And what of Jawara, his newfound friend? Mayhap he looked different, but he had sisters with whom he quarreled and whom he loved nonetheless. He grieved the loss of his wife and their unborn child. And he had ambition, wanting things from this life. If these things did not make a man, what did?

When he reviewed all these things together, he came to one inescapable conclusion. Grace was a woman, like any other woman, no matter what color her parents. But there was something that
did
set Grace apart. She was the woman he loved. He could not bear the thought of returning to his empty apartment. He wanted to have to dig through untidy mounds of lace to find his cravats. He wanted the top of his chest of drawers to be scattered with pots of mysterious creams. The thought of sitting at his immaculate desk all alone and adding up numbers slowly in the night filled his chest with a sharp pain. When he said something arrogant or was too certain he had everything in hand, he wanted someone to narrow her discerning green eyes at him and put him in his place with a cynical grin.

He wanted Grace.

Aye, he wanted Grace! He wanted to hold her in his arms and erase every evil thing that had been done to her at the hands of men who had not seen her for what she was. He wanted to turn her cries of fear into cries of delight. And he needed her to hold him back, to let him know that he was important to someone, that his life meant something. He thought with painful longing about the children they might have had. Bright children with their mother’s penetrating refusal to take anything at face value and his loyalty and competence.

How could he possibly live with himself if he left her alone with some faceless Spaniard, never knowing what had become of her? The only answer was that he couldn’t. Nor would he return to the relative civility of privateering.

“I’ll turn pirate, if I must,” he said to Geoff.

Geoff pondered for a moment and replied, “Then we’ll sail together again.”

Giles’s brows shot up in surprise. “You cannot do that, Geoff. ‘Twould mean your very life! Montoya could not save you from Spain again.”

Geoff gave him a steady look. “Would you do any less for Faith?”

Giles swallowed hard, humbled by a profound sense of gratitude. Still, he shook his head. “You have a wife to think of, and two children.”

“Her family would take care of them. Besides,” Geoff added with an excellent imitation of his old, wicked grin, “we are a formidable team. That Spaniard caught me off guard! It won’t happen again.”

Giles sighed. He would stay at Welbourne no longer than a night. Then he would get back to sea and find Grace ere she had sailed forever beyond his reach.

Despite his impatience, when they dropped anchor and lowered a rowboat into the water, Giles found himself wishing he could delay the moment when he must confess to Edmund his utter failure in Havana. If Grace had indeed been awaiting him on the dock, Giles could have rowed there effortlessly. As it was, the strain of the last several days and the weight in his heart made every pull of the oars a Herculean task.

“Cap’n Courtney!” the overseer shouted. “Thank God you’re here. I’ve only just sent word to your office, and I feared you were at sea!”