Pirate Wolf Trilogy (106 page)

"Well you need not fear any of my men. They
would as soon touch a leper as touch you at the moment. As for
myself—" his gaze settled on the oily tangle of her hair— "should I
become feverish over the next few hours it will not be out of
lust."

She raised a hand self-consciously to touch
her face, then her hair, then to smooth her fingers along the
shapeless black shirt she had been given. She had not yet seen
herself in a mirror but she guessed she must present quite the
bedraggled, smelly fright.

Dante laughed again. "You really must make up
your mind whether you wish your appearance to appeal or
discourage."

She lowered her hand even as her chin tipped
up. "Yours is not exactly a countenance one would swoon over,
Captain Dante. Not in a good way, at any rate."

Gabriel was taken aback. He was also glad
Jonas was not present for he could imagine the gales of laughter
and endless teasing that would follow upon discovering there was a
female on this good earth who did not instantly melt into a puddle
at the sight of the strikingly handsome youngest son of the Pirate
Wolf.

"My apologies, Captain," Eva said, having
bitten her tongue hard enough to draw blood. "I meant no insult.
And you did mention that you and your ship have recently been
involved in some sort of fracas."

"A fracas?" Gabriel snorted and uncorked the
wine bottle. "A fracas involving over a hundred ships; one in which
my own was lost, leaving me to make do with this—" he paused and
looked around— "this floating bordello."

"It is rather grandiose,"
she agreed. "The captain's cabin on board the
Eliza Jane
was a third the size and
had one small writing table and a berth. My own cabin was the size
of that water closet, but it was adequate for my needs."

He poured some wine into
his goblet and took a healthy swallow. "So. You spent six weeks in
an adequate cabin hoping to do what when you arrived in New
Providence?
As the daughter of a shipyard owner, you must
surely be aware that there are a thousand islands big and small in
the Indies and several thousand leagues of water surrounding them.
I am curious to know how you were going to set about finding your
father."

"Chandler-Ross Shipping has an agent in New
Providence."

"Do you think he might know where your father
is?"

"I don't know. I had hoped it was a place to
start the search."

"And likely to end it before you'd even
begun. New Providence is a pesthole, filled with pirates and
whores. The bidding for something as sweet and fresh and young as
yourself would start the instant you stepped onto the beach.
Furthermore, many of these islands are covered in jungle—thick
impenetrable jungle with snakes and crocodiles with teeth as long
as your fingers, poisonous spiders and leeches that can suck the
strength and life right out of your flesh."

If he expected his description of tropical
paradise to make her crumple into a heap, he was disappointed, for
she kept her expression blank and her gaze steady on his.

"What would you suggest I do, Captain Dante?
Abandon the search? Return home to the safety of England knowing
that my father might be struggling on his own somewhere, possibly
hurt, possibly imprisoned or enslaved in chains?”

“If he is, then you said it best yourself:
you can’t save him.”

“When did I say that?”

“When I was dragging you off the jolly boat
and you were doing your best to drown us both.”

“I didn’t mean it. And I’m certainly not
going to give up just because of a few snakes and leeches. Would
you
? Would you sail away and abandon your father, or your
brother, or any member of your family? Would they abandon you?"

Gabriel narrowed his eyes. He disliked
arguments where he could not actually argue. Having just emerged
from a battle where not one member of his family, least of all his
sister Juliet, had so much as entertained the notion of abandoning
him to his fate, he could understand the emotion driving the girl
forward. Feisty as she might be, however, this waifish little chit
was no Juliet. She was all bones and big green eyes. It was a
struggle for her just to drag around the cocoon of blankets she
kept wrapped around her shoulders. How would she fare with a
machete, slashing her way through the jungle?

"No," he admitted finally. "I would not
abandon any of my family if I thought they were in trouble. But
then I was born and raised in these climes, Mistress Chandler.
Battles and bloodshed were daily fare and we were all taught from
an early age how to survive if we were shipwrecked on a deserted
island with no food or water. These islands were our playground and
all three of us grew up sailing these waters, playing cat and mouse
with the Spaniards, the Dutch, the Portuguese. We speak several
languages other than English so that we know when we are being
offered a fair price for our cargo and when we are being told to
get the hell out of port before they hand us our ballocks in a bag.
No offence, little
esquilo
, but if you were to find yourself
in a Spanish-speaking village, how would you go about asking
someone for information?"

"
Me gustaría preguntarle
si
había oído
algo
sobre mi
padre
," she answered calmly. "I
would ask if he had heard anything about my father. And kindly do
not call me squirrel."

Gabriel tapped his long
fingers on the desk. "
Je suppose que vous
parlez français aussi
?"

"
O
ui
.
Très
bi
en
."

"Dutch?"

"
Een
beetje
.
A little. As I mentioned, I worked in the shipping office for a
while, helping with import, export manifests."

He drummed his fingertips a moment longer.
So she was educated and had enough language skills to know how to
ask for a map rather than a banana. But asking questions and
getting answers from the right people was a whole other matter.

"Why are you not afraid of me?" he asked
with a thoughtful frown.

Here, at last, was a question that gave the
quickness of her tongue pause. "Should I be?"

"You have come aboard a
ship full of surly men who are wary that you might be carrying the
plague. You find yourself locked away in a cabin with someone who
is not in the best of humor at the moment—" he fanned a hand
absently at the injuries to his face—" and who might well resent
being infected with whatever pox killed your ship. A man who has
just come through a battle that saw his ship sunk, half his crew
shredded by cannonfire, and in no mood to compare those losses to
that of an absentee, wandering father. I would think it prudent to
be a
little
frightened, yes?"

She gave her answer some
thought before she shook her head. "I was frightened on board
the
Eliza Jane
. I
was terrified to think I was completely alone with nothing but
death and empty sea around me. For two days I tried to work up the
courage to jump into the ocean and simply end the fear, but I was
too frightened to even do that. So no, Captain, I am not afraid of
you. Curious, perhaps, but not afraid."

"
Curious
? About what,
pray?"

"About why you risked the wrath of your crew
to bring me on board. About why you put your own health in jeopardy
to fetch me out of the boat and bring me here. About what you plan
to do with me if we pass through the night with no ill
effects."

"What would you like me to do with you?"

"Help me. Help me find my father."

“I have already told you—“

"You told me these islands were your
playground and you know them well. I expect your name and
reputation are equally well known, whereas Captain Fitch was a
stranger and therefore likely not to have been given any truthful
answers on Fox Island, regardless who he asked. But you are...
well... one of them. One of the pirate brethren and any questions
you might ask would surely win a more honest answer."

Gabriel shook his head. "My dear Mistress
Chandler--"

"Captain Dante,
you asked me why I left Portsmouth to come on
this wild goose chase. The truth of it is, I did not leave by
choice. I left because I
had
no choice. Someone tried to kill me. Had I not
escaped on the
Eliza
Jane
, the killer would have tried again
and very likely succeeded."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Her words hung in the air for a moment,
twisting this way and that. While she might not have been expecting
him to leap up in chivalrous outrage and tear out fistfuls of his
hair, she wasn't expecting him to simply sit there unmoved, his
expression unchanged. Was it because he didn't believe her, or
because it was commonplace in this part of the world for people to
kill one other?

His chair squeaked as he leaned forward and
refilled his goblet. After a moment's thought, he filled a second
one and slid it toward her.

"Someone tried to kill you? That's rather a
bold declaration."

"Nonetheless, true. I was shot. I can show
you the scar if you do not believe me."

Dante's gaze roved down the slender length of
her body at the same leisurely speed his thumb followed a bead of
wine that dribbled down the outside of his goblet. "In due time,
perhaps. Do you know who shot you? Or why?"

Her nod was supplemented by a whispered, "Yes
I know who, and yes, I think I know why. Or at least... I'm fairly
certain I know why."

~~

Every room in the house was a shambles.
Furniture was broken, the cushions cut and torn apart. Books were
pulled off the shelves, the bindings ripped and the pages
scattered. Her bedroom had been completely destroyed, feathers
laying about like snow from the mattress and pillows. Curtains had
been torn from the windows, her writing desk smashed to bits, even
the heels had been broken off her shoes. It was not a simple
robbery, nor had the intruder taken the trouble to make it look
like one. The small box that held her jewels had been upended, the
contents thrown on the floor and left there, crushed under heavy
boots.

At first she could think of no reason why
anyone would ransack the house top to bottom. But then a feeling
came over her, an icy hand that scraped down her spine and pushed
her toward the fireplace in her bedchamber. Trembling fingers
touched the loose stone cherub. It scraped open, revealing the
secret compartment inside, the one she had found as a child and
still used to hold her most precious belongings. The letters from
her father were there, along with a small brass box containing
several dozen wax disks.

She removed the letters and the box and
clutched them to her breast. Her relief in finding them was
short-lived, however, for a moment later she became aware of the
soft tread of a boot behind her. Her back was to the door and she
did not see him as he came into the room. But she felt him. She
felt the quality of the air change, become thicker, blacker
somehow. The mad rushing in her ears, the pounding of her heart
almost took her to her knees as she heard the distinct snick of a
flintlock pistol being cocked into the firing position.

~~

"Mistress Chandler?"

She looked up and realized that Gabriel
Dante was waiting for her to expand on her answer. The question
was: how much should she tell him? How much could she trust
him?

The ability to trust or be
trusted is in the eyes, always in the eyes.
Her father’s words, but they were hardly comforting now.
Dante's eyes were rather daunting and completely inscrutable. The
color was not quite brown, not quite green, but an unusual blending
of both, like tarnished gold. They were always watchful, always
alert, belonging to a man who had lived too long with danger to
ever completely drop his guard.

At the same time, they were clear and
direct, they did not flick away or cut slyly side to side as if he
was calculating the next lie to tell. Moreover, he had risked his
life to bring her on board, and he had risked the wrath of a
potentially mutinous crew to lock himself away with her in his
cabin. He was still a pirate and she could not afford to forget
that, regardless how civilized he appeared to be. But if she wanted
his help to find her father...?

"Mistress Chandler? As I said before, we are
going to be together for some time. You can either tell me what has
you all tied up in knots... or not. The choice is yours. But it has
been a very long day and I've not had the luxury of a twelve hour
nap."

Hoping she would not live to regret her
decision, Eva reached up and unfastened the chain from around her
neck. She let the silver links spill between her fingers and pool
in her palm before settling the locket on top and reaching over to
offer it to Dante.

He looked at the locket, then back up into
her face.

"Take it," she said softly. “Open it.”

The chair protested as he leaned forward and
took the locket out of her hand. He tilted it toward the lamplight
and turned it over his fingers, noting the scrolled initial, E,
that he had seen before. Locating the tiny indent on the side, he
flicked the halves apart with a thumbnail. Unsure of what he
expected, to see—a tiny painted portrait or a precious curl of
hair—he was moderately surprised to see a coin. A Spanish escudo to
be precise.

He started to lift his free hand in a
gesture of confusion but then his gaze flew back down and he stared
hard at the small silver coin. After a moment, he drew the oil lamp
closer and turned the wick brighter, slanting the coin this way and
that in the light, inspecting every tiny detail.