Trade Winds Read online

  “That’s it,” came the evil laughter again. “Sí, my little witch, I knew there was some fight left in you. Oh! That’s a lovely move you have in that right knee, amada. So perfect in the middle of my back, too. I might even get a welt. But it will be worth it.” The grip around her wrists constricted tighter. “Oh yes, well worth it.” The laughter dropped to a gloating growl. “Caramba, I can’t wait to see you die. First Mast, and now his sea witch whore. My dreams have finally come true. At last, come true.”

  Many times in her life, Golden had looked at rolling storm clouds, wondering how they held their downpour in check. She no longer pondered that mystery. Her body shook with the effort of channeling every drop of strength along her right arm and into her wrist. She coiled it up like an antagonized cobra, the dagger its poised fang.

  In a rushing instant of adrenaline, she made the strike.

  The blade slicing fast and deep into Nanchez’s forearm.

  His howl of pain echoed through the cavern.

  Past the monster’s Spanish curses came Maya’s cry now. “Golll-den! The other pirate! Ayyee, behind you!”

  She whirled but dizziness caused her to overcompensate on balance. The pirate’s one-eyed face wobbled in her own sights. She even thought, for one bizarre moment, that true concern burned from the wretch’s eye.

  She ripped off the gag, planted her feet with new strength and boldly brandished the dagger again. A drop of Nanchez’s blood wobbled on the tip before splattering into the dirt.

  “Back,” she hissed. “You already know I’ll use it.”

  “Now, little hellion, let’s talk about this. Why don’t ye put down the knife and—”

  “Don’t call me that!” Her voice caught and broke. “You have no right to call me that! Damn you, get back!”

  “Fine. I promise I won’t call ye that. Put the knife down, dearie.”

  “Put the knife down, bruja!”

  She realized her mistake the instant she’d made it. Whether she admitted it or not, in a strange way she believed the gentle words of the grimy stranger, and didn’t think twice about turning her back on him as she spun to confront Nanchez again. She recognized that delusion quick enough and turned back, but the stranger was already waiting with a determined gleam in his eye.

  “Trust me.” She swore his tone implored her, just before he grabbed her arm. Unlike the bedraggled rest of him, his grip was like steel. But Golden didn’t pause to contemplate that irony. She tossed the dagger to her other hand and continued it up toward the wretch’s face. He saw the assault and dodged—quick enough to avoid the blade but not the force of Golden’s thrust. For a stunned moment, she stared as his eyes rolled back and he crumpled to the ground.

  It was all the moment Nanchez needed. “Well done, my friend,” he growled to his unconscious mate while grabbing both Golden and the knife. She gasped as he slammed her back against his chest, his arm fastened around her middle. “You’re going to pay now, ramera,” he gritted into her ear. “Oh, you’re going to pay.”

  After that, there was only his low, husky laughter, building with every breath, intensifying with each pass of the knife before her face. Invading her. Slithering into the deepest reaches of her, refusing to stop until the Moonstormer found what he’d stalked all these years. Her soul.

  “No!”

  Firelight flashed off steel as he kept veering the dagger in at her. But the gleaming blade wasn’t what Golden fought, wasn’t the pain she feared beyond anything else. She thrashed with all her might against the anguish of the voices that suddenly erupted around her, inside her.

  “Golll-den! Great Puntan, have mercy and help her!”

  Maya. My friend. My confidence. My sister.

  “Golden? Oh, Golden. My little girl. My life.”

  Mummy! Oh Mummy, you’re on fire! Don’t die!

  “Golden. Ah God, Golden!”

  Mast.

  She couldn’t listen to the pain cracking that once-invincible voice now. Worse, she couldn’t bear the way it sounded as if Mast were but across the Athena’s main deck from her again, yelling some ridiculous, overbearing, wonderful command at her. “No!” she yelled again.

  “Oh, yes, yes!” the voice at her ear hissed. “Just one more moment, love, and it will be over. Are you excited? Oh, me too. Me too!”

  “Mast. Mast, I love you!”

  “Mast is gone,” jeered Nanchez. “Yes, finally, gone! And now, my love, so are you!”

  But her mind had finally collapsed beneath the weight of emotion. Suddenly without their center of command, her nerves and muscles followed.

  Her entire body gave way, slumping to the side—just Nanchez swooshed the dagger into his own throat.

  There was a strange, sickening moment of silence. With a leaden gulp, Golden summoned the strength to turn her head.

  His lifeless eyes bulged at her. His nostrils were spread wide. His smooth-lipped mouth opened far enough to release a thin river of blood. His hand was still wrapped around the weapon’s hilt. The point of the blade jutted out the back of his neck.

  She screamed and shoved free of the body. It fell at her feet.

  The Moonstormer was dead.

  “Golden!”

  Maya’s shriek brought her out of her stupor too late. Golden looked up to see Nanchez’s cohort, newly awakened, stumbling toward her. Before she could move, he grabbed her elbow. She wrenched against him.

  “Don’t,” he ordered. “Don’t. It’s all right. It’s over.”

  Golden narrowed her eyes at him. The hoarse edges to his voice persisted, but gone was his high-pitched gravel. His exposed eye maintained its unsettling fixation on her, but why did that stare now glimmer, flickering with a deeper, more intense kind of light? Why did she feel as if she were being opened wide by him? Even stripped naked?

  Her stare exploded open with comprehension. Golden flailed against the pirate with any remaining strength she could summon. “Get your filthy hands off me!”

  The wretch began to growl in earnest. Snatches of his grouses made their way to her. “…God’s sake, hellion…this is enough…Holy hell…”

  She didn’t allow the objections any room to stay and linger. She was too panicked by how he grabbed her other arm and pinned her back against the cave wall. Wiser from his groin’s previous encounter with her knees, the pirate shoved both his thighs against hers, rendering them helpless as well.

  “I’ll kill you,” she seethed. “You know I’ll do it. I swear to every god in the heavens, I’ll kill you before your diseased stick of manhood crawls inside of me!”

  The wretch didn’t say anything. He just watched her writhe and swear and spit at him. Then suddenly, he smiled. It was a slow, sensuous smile, tilting up just one side of his mouth, lifting up just one dark and dirty eyebrow.

  For one shock-filled moment, Golden went still.

  The pirate bent his head and kissed her.

  Terror returned her senses to her. I’ll die first, her soul screamed. I’ll die…I’ll die!

  But to her mortification, the chant in her mind became a back beat to the primal rhythm her mouth responded to. Her lips started dancing with a mouth that knew just how to caress her…a mouth that knew just where hers parted the easiest, the tongue knowing just how to graze hers, just how to stroke, how to produce the most exquisite shivers down her body. Things she thought only Mast knew…only Mast had discovered.

  Only Mast.

  It couldn’t be.

  Only Mast.

  She began to weep. The hands that shackled her now released her and wrapped around her. She gripped his corded neck, ran her fingers down the familiar muscles of his back, joyously clutched his straight and strong shoulders.

  Mast’s shoulders. Here beneath her hands!

  She wept harder.

  “It’s all right, sweeting,” He murmured it against her lips and cheeks. “It’s all right.”

  “It’s you.” She pushed both the eye patch and his hair off his face, gaping at the fe
atures that now made perfect sense. “Oh, stars…it’s really you.”

  “Yes. I’m here. And I’m never going to leave you again.”

  She pulled away and gazed at the astounding sight of him. For this one miraculous moment, it didn’t matter what had happened, or how. He was here. He was alive. That was all.

  Then she took a deep breath and slapped him. Just once. Very hard.

  “Bastard!” she yelled at him. “Why did you leave to begin with? Stop laughing! Do you know what you put me through? I thought you were dead, damn you! Do you know what that did to—”

  Mast retaliated by kissing her deeply. “I’m sorry,” he told her in a voice that was mostly command, anyway. “Nay, I’m not going to repeat it. And nay, I’m not ever going to leave you again.”

  He lifted his hand to her cheek, underlining just how much he meant it with the ferocity of his stare. Ah, God, he thought, how wonderful—and surprising—love was. He’d gone for so long closed off from feeling, from living, because he was so damned afraid of being left alone. Now, in order to regain his life, he was promising not to leave. And he wouldn’t. Not ever. He loved her. Oh, how he loved her. If he’d had to go through today’s ordeal a hundred more times over, the love and passion of this stubborn, feisty, impossible woman would be well worth it.

  “Ayyee!” came a cry that brought both their heads up. “What under the stars is going on?”

  Golden gasped. “Maya. Oh Lord, she’s still tied up—”

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Mast wrapped himself tightly around her again and kissed her soundly. “Don’t worry,” he reassured. “I think Maya will be just fine.”

  He tilted back his shoulder to let her see Dinky rushing into the cave, whooping with joy as he beheld Maya squirming impatiently on the hard ground. The delirious man sliced her ropes free between the fervent kisses he showered on his fiancée’s face and lips.

  Mast looked back to Golden. A smile inched across her dirt-smudged face as she watched the pair across the cave. His heart burned fiercely in response, right beneath where her hand lightly rested on his chest.

  “What happened?” she asked him. “How in the world did you know I was here? And how did you—”

  “Hold your sails, woman.” He punctuated the protest with a laugh before bringing her fingers to his lips. “I’ll explain everything after I get you out of here,” he huskily commanded.

  Golden nodded, though Mast couldn’t help but notice the fear still glimmering in her topaz eyes. When she wobbled on her first step away from the cave’s wall, he took no more chances. He swept her up into his arms and carried her toward the daylight himself. She gave him another special happenstance by which to remember the day by not fighting him at all on the matter.

  If he’d dictated the scene to God himself, he couldn’t have created a better day to carry her out to. Seagulls swooped over the shimmering water, its azure hue surpassed only by the deep cyan sky. Lacy clouds were draped on the horizon. A gossamer-light breeze sprinkled the air with the enticing aromas of cascarilla, orange blossoms, and hibiscus. Brilliant diamonds of water twinkled in the air as the tide crashed against the rocks in the cove below.

  But none of nature’s splendor refreshed his weary body and senses more than Golden’s face at his shoulder. The wind lifted her hair from her face and the sunlight sparkled in her eyes as he caught her gazing, still disbelievingly, at him. For a long time, he stared back, not knowing if he remembered to breathe or feel anything…but Golden.

  She slowly raised her fingers to his face. “Sky in his eyes, wind in his hair”—she slid both her gaze and her touch along his cheek—“catch the brightest star beams, and you’ll find him there.”

  Mast chuffed at her affectionate revision to the island verse. But Golden’s features pursed. “I lived so many years by that silly rhyme,” she said. “Words. Just words.”

  “No,” he countered. “Not just words. They were a part of you. The part that trusted and believed and risked in something. The part that chased dolphins off my bow and robbed El Culebra’s crew of their body functions with her dancing.” She threw a hand over her face in embarrassment but he pulled it back. “The part,” he asserted softly, “that showed me the magic of a human touch again. The part that taught me how to feel again.”

  “You mean the part that made you spank me with fury?”

  “Yes.” He flashed a savoring grin. “That, too. But that’s part of living too, sweeting. The anger, the frustration, the stormy times, and”—he glanced around at the water and the sky—“the bright. Life and love include them all. And Golden…I do love you.”

  It stunned him that the simple quiver of her top lip in response could move him so deeply. Shaking with intensity himself, Mast pressed his own mouth to that moist coral softness, melding his lips to hers in a long, loving kiss.

  “But it’s not true, is it?” she questioned when they’d parted. “The words themselves; the verse. The whole Moonstormer legend. Carlos Nanchez was the killer, not you. He admitted it to me. He was proud of it, Mast. He was proud of killing my parents and all the others.”

  “I know. And I’m sorry you had to hear it like that. But it’s done with, and—”

  “Nay, there was more,” Golden rushed on. “He told me he did it to get revenge on you, because you created the Moonstormer in the first place. He spoke of King George and the Royal Navy, and that he blackmailed Ben to spy on you for him so they’d know where all the best ships and cargoes would be…”

  Mast averted his gaze as her voice dimmed, but came face-to-face with the realization that he didn’t want to. Damn it, it was all over. All of it. The secrets, the sneaking, the hiding. Never again.

  He met Golden’s wide eyes, and let her view the unblinking truth in his.

  “Then it is true,” she whispered.

  He took a deep breath. “Aye.”

  He didn’t know what to expect then, but the unnaturally inert woman in his arms was not it. He waited in tense silence for Golden’s next move.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He gently placed her back on her feet. “All right.” He slipped his hand into one of hers and said, “Walk with me.”

  As they descended the path around the cove, he told her everything. The fifteen-year story of a young, proud sea captain, his cocky braggart of a first mate, and their dreams and desires of furthering England’s “divine cause” in a faraway paradise called the West Indies. Thus, the Moonstormer had been born by the dim lantern in a London tavern, nurtured by a wildfire of rumor along every dock and warehouse in the country, and matured to full infamy long before Mast and Dinky ever got their first sights of palm trees and coral reefs.

  “The idea was more successful than we ever imagined,” he stated as they made their way onto the small beach below the rocks. “Whenever we replaced the British jack with the Moonstormer’s flag, the water seemed to part for us. England’s top secret communiques were safer than a babe in its mum’s arms.”

  Golden maintained the quiet mien with which she’d been responding to him. He finally dared a glance in her direction. Her eyes were focused out over the water, but he could tell she was trying to envision him as the arrogant young rooster he once was. He acted on the yearning to stop, grasp both her hands in his, and pull that faraway amber stare back to him.

  “I had no idea, sweeting, of what Carlos was doing with our secret.”

  “I know.”

  He let out a steady breath of relief before tugging her along the sand again. “From the beginning, I’d always sensed something from Carlos,” he confessed. “Jealousy. Maybe resentment. Mostly just anger, even on the day we first met. But I never thought, in my wildest imagination—” The shock and hurt crashed through him as if it were the first time he was experiencing them again. “Until that night—ah, that wonderful night when we first made love, hellion, and you shared with me about your parents, and about the flag you saw as they were destroyed with your ship. My flag, I re
alized. The flag of the “fake” pirate I’d created.

  “Christ.” He stopped, clenching his fists at his sides. “I couldn’t believe it. The stories Dink and I had laughed off as tavern gossip over the years weren’t stories at all. They were real events, carried out by some real bastard. Bloody saints. What had I done?”

  Only Golden’s fingers, biting into his arms as she circled in front of him, brought his head up. Her eyes flashed gold shards at him. “You’re guilty of nothing but answering the call of your king when he needed your help, and honoring your country and all your countrymen.” She slid her hand beneath his shirt collar to stroke his neck. “That means me, too, you silly oaf.”

  Her smile permeated Mast’s senses until he found his lips tilting, too. He shook his head in amazement. “You take my breath away. You take it away until it hurts. And that’s why,” he continued on a hard grunt, “I decided it was time for the Moonstormer to die at last.”

  Her hands stilled over his nape. Her head cocked in the curious, kittenish frown that made his heart leap and his cock pulse. “Because of me? I don’t understand.”

  He flashed an incredulous frown. “Golden, you beautiful creature of my heart, do you want to know something? In the beginning, in those first stormy days we were together on the Athena, you terrified me. Aye, woman, you did—and how I hated you for it. How I damned you for daring me to feel again. How I vowed you’d never fucking succeed.

  “But for some goddamn reason, you never gave up on me. You didn’t stop until every last block of me came crumbling down, and I could do nothing but concede defeat—and my love for you.” He dropped his eyes and turned toward the water. “I just didn’t realize it until we discovered you missing in New Providence.” He bit out a dark laugh. “That was when I realized that terror and I weren’t even remote acquaintances yet. That fear stunned me, Golden. It drove me to my knees in prayer. The thought of losing you—” He swung around again, as if just invoking the nightmare of a possibility might make it come true. “I never, ever want to feel that rot again.”