Devil of the High Seas, page 23
“Owed you . . . a life . . . brother . . . ,” Griffin rasped, then his eyes rolled back in his head and he passed out.
“Help him! Someone, please!” Gavin’s voice broke in agony. A thousand images of them as boys flashed across his mind, and the gaping emptiness left by their years spent apart tore him open. He’d been such a damned fool to run away. A coward. If he’d stayed, everything would have been different. Everything . . .
“Someone help me move him back to the ship,” Brianna said, and several men helped lift Griffin and carried him toward the Serpent.
“The Siren is sinking. We need to move, lad.” Camden put a hand on Gavin’s uninjured shoulder.
His ship was lost. The thing he had so foolishly believed was worth fighting and dying for was soon to be swallowed up by the sea. He couldn’t even feel pain now. He could only feel emptiness. He could not mourn the Siren as the blue waters of the West Indies took her. He got to his feet as Camden lifted Josephine in his arms.
“Let me take her.” He reached for Josephine but Camden hesitated in giving her to him.
“You’re wounded, lad. You’ve lost a lot of blood. I will carry my child. We’ll see to your arm, and then you may sit with her,” Camden said. His tone was firm but gentle, and Gavin felt too bloody tired to argue with him. He wanted to hold her for a moment but Camden was right, he couldn’t carry her to the other ship.
Camden navigated the gangplank between the two ships, and Gavin followed behind him. When he reached the Sea Serpent, Dominic took Josephine from his father.
“Let’s get her settled below to rest,” Dominic said. “Then you need someone to look at your shoulder.” His tone was surprisingly gentle for such a fierce pirate.
Because my brother is dying . . .
A great and terrible hollowness filled him like a black night sky devoid of stars. Blood dripped down his arm and he stumbled when he tried to descend the companionway as he followed Dominic.
“Here, lad.” Camden helped him the way a father would an injured child. “This way . . . Easy now . . .”
The pain and the loss had numbed his whole body as he struggled to walk toward the surgery. If he lost his brother or Josephine, it would surely kill him.
CHAPTER 17
Josephine felt like she was underwater, a dark and terrible weight pressing down on her from all sides. She fought to breathe, and the first thing that she became aware of was the warmth of a hand holding hers. The grip on her hand tightened as she struggled to open her eyes. She craved to see only one person, but the man watching her wasn’t him.
“Where’s Gavin?” Her voice was a bare rasp. Each word scraped against her throat.
Her father stroked her hair back from her face, his eyes soft. “He’s with his brother.”
“Brother?” Griffin . . . Griffin was here. Her father was here. But how? At first, it all tumbled about in her head before she finally remembered . . .
Griffin cutting her free of the foremast while she was barely alive. Smoke and heat had nearly overwhelmed her. Then, as they had escaped the fire, she had seen Beauchamp charge them. She saw a pistol raised and the flare of a spark as Griffin turned. Then . . . nothing.
“Is Griffin . . . ?” Her lips trembled. She couldn’t finish her question.
Camden looked away. “He’s nearly gone, my child. It won’t be long now.”
The pain of those words pierced deep and tore at her heart so deeply it felt like she was dying. Griffin had given his life to save her. Gavin had lost his twin because of her. What if she had lost Adrian because of something Gavin had done? Would she have been able to forgive him?
“Can I see him?” she asked her father.
“I suppose, if you feel you can walk. You inhaled a lot of smoke, and the doctor believes you should rest.”
Her father helped her to sit up. She sat for a moment, getting her bearings in the small cabin. She still felt short of breath, and it hurt to breathe.
“What about everyone else?”
“There were some losses among the crew, but not as many as we’d feared. Your brother, Brianna, and Nicholas are fine. There were a few minor injuries here and there. Gavin took a bullet to the shoulder, but the surgeon says it will heal with time.” Her father reached out to touch her arm, but she flinched.
“What happened to you, my child?” he asked.
“I was trying to save Sam. And . . .” The moment came flooding back to her. “Oh my God, Sam!”
“The young boy? He is all right.” His reassurance lifted a great weight off of her.
“Tell me Beauchamp and his men are dead.” She needed to hear the words.
Her father met her gaze as she stood. “He is. I shot him myself. His crew are dead, save for a handful who surrendered. The Siren is at the bottom of the sea.”
The weight returned to press against her chest. Gavin had lost his ship and his brother because of her. Perhaps that was truly unforgivable.
Her father escorted her to another cabin and knocked softly on the door. When no one answered, he tried the handle and the door opened. Griffin lay still upon the bed, his chest slowly rising and falling. Gavin sat on a chair beside him, his hand clasped around Griffin’s bare arm. Griffin had been stripped to the waist and his abdomen bandaged with strips of cloth.
“Thank you, Papa. I’ll be all right.” She embraced her father and then joined Gavin at his brother’s bedside.
His vigil was so deep that he was unaware of her approach. When she moved one of the chairs to sit by him, it scraped on the deck. He jerked and turned to her, his eyes full of tears.
She parted her lips, but no words came. She wasn’t sure if any words were right for a moment like this. She placed the chair beside him, and for a moment he simply stared at her. She reached out and put her arm around his shoulders. He started to shake and his head bowed. His hair fell to shield his face as he pressed his fingers to his eyes and wept.
Josephine held on to him, a lifeline in the storm, and said nothing at all. Her touch would say what words could not.
Time passed, and eventually Gavin stopped shaking. His grief softened into lighter, uneven breaths as he tried to calm himself. They both watched Griffin’s pale face as he slept. Then, without warning, Griffin’s lips parted and a whisper escaped.
“Vesper.” The name drifted in the airy silence.
“Vesper?” Josephine said aloud and reached for Griffin’s hand. Had she misheard him?
Griffin’s muscles tensed slightly. “Vesper,” he said again. “Tell her . . .”
Gavin glanced between her and his brother, seeming confused. “That’s your maid, isn’t it? She was on the ship with Griffin and the others.”
Josephine’s eyes began to water. “She came? But Vesper is afraid of water.” Did her maid, her friend, love her so much that she had crossed an entire ocean to find her? She would have spent more than a month with Griffin on the same ship. Perhaps they had spent time together talking and . . .
“Tell her . . . ,” Gavin said softly. “Tell her what?”
Suddenly, she understood. “He loves her,” she whispered. “He loves Vesper.”
It made sense. Vesper was quiet, generous, and kind. She was very much like Griffin in temperament, just as Josephine was more like Gavin.
Josephine had a sudden burst of hope. “Is she on the ship?”
Gavin shook his head. “No. Vesper and the rest of your family are on the Isle of Song. We left them there with the Pixie and some of the crew, should the need arise to escape.”
Josephine gently grasped Griffin’s hand. “Griffin, Vesper is close. You must hold on for her.”
Griffin’s lashes fluttered and Vesper’s name escaped his lips again, but he did not fully wake.
“We cannot give up.” She rested her head against Gavin’s shoulder. It was so clear to her that life was a tapestry of a thousand strands woven together. Had this been their fate all along? To end up here, fighting to keep Griffin alive?
Gavin drew in a breath. “You’re right. He wouldn’t give up on me. I cannot give up on him.”
“How far are we from the Isle of Song?” she asked.
“With good winds? Two days.”
Two days. If they got him to Vesper, it might give him the strength to fight, to stay here with the woman he adored. Her father would argue that love had little to do with the healing of a physical wound, but Josephine believed deeply in the power of love. After everything she and Gavin had been through, she believed in love above everything else.
Gavin set his brother’s arm down gently, then cupped Josephine’s face. She knew she looked dreadful. Her face still hurt from the blows she had taken, her hair was a tangled mess, and she ached all over. She was no pirate’s pretty prize now.
His brown eyes warmed as he seemed to drink in the sight of her. “You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” He lowered his head, and their lips met in a soft kiss that seemed to go on for hours.
“I must look absolutely frightful, and I feel even worse,” she said, but he had relit a glow within her that Beauchamp had nearly extinguished. Gavin’s words and that single kiss full of all the love that existed between them, a kiss that held a thousand beautiful unsaid words within it, had brought her back to life.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you woke,” he said. “I couldn’t bear to leave him. I . . .”
She pressed her fingers to his lips.
“This is where you should be. And it is where I should be as well. Right now, he needs both of us.”
They kept their vigil at Griffin’s bedside, and Josephine sent a prayer upon the sea breeze. She prayed for the sea to carry them swiftly and for the wind to fill their sails so they could reach the Isle of Song as quickly as possible.
Save him . . . save him.
Two days later
Vesper was keeping herself busy, helping another woman cook in one of the small island homes, when a cry sounded through the village. A sail had been sighted. Hope flaring within her, Vesper hung her apron up on a hook before following the villagers to the shoreline.
There was a mix of hope and fear among everyone. Hope that it was Gavin and the others returning, fear that it was Beauchamp coming to finish what he’d started. But it seemed the ship had been recognized as the Sea Serpent, because the islanders soon started to wave and cheer.
She smiled as she saw a small boat lowered, rolling toward shore. Josephine was at the bow. Vesper rushed into the shallows, uncaring that her gown got wet. All that mattered was that Josephine was alive. Josephine hiked up her skirts and jumped down into the surf and threw her arms around Vesper in a tight embrace.
“My lady, you’re all right!”
“I am. I can’t believe you came all the way here for me,” Josephine said.
“I’d do anything for you, my lady. Anything.”
“And I’d do anything for you, Vesper.” Josephine seemed to be on the verge of tears. Vesper could only imagine the ordeal she had been through to get here.
Vesper turned to the rest of the boat’s passengers, searching for the face she longed to see most aside from Josephine’s. Griffin was not among the passengers in the first landing party. She smiled a little. Knowing him, he would have let the others come to shore first .Lord Camden, Dominic, and a little boy leapt out, along with a tall, rather attractive dark-haired man with brown eyes who watched over the child with a fatherly protectiveness that Vesper didn’t miss. His uniform, while faded, was clearly a naval uniform. It was not, however, a new uniform. Working as a lady’s maid the last few years, she’d become adept at recognizing old clothes that someone was doing their best to keep well mended.
Jada, one of the women from the island, rushed over to the little boy, the one who had been kidnapped along with Josephine. Jada shouted his name, and the little boy threw himself against his mother, hugging her around the waist. The dark-haired man followed closely behind, keeping an eye on the boy. Sam pointed at the man and chattered excitedly about how this man who apparently was a vicar, had saved him.
“My name is Jada.” She held out her hand to the man, who gently took it and kissed her fingers with respect.
“Henry Sheridan,” he replied.
“I cannot thank you enough, Mr. Sheridan.”
“Please, it’s just Henry.” Sheridan’s face turned a little red as he stared at Jada’s beautiful face.
Vesper tore her eyes away from the lovely scene. It only made her think more about who she wanted to be with right now.
“Where’s Grif—Lord Castleton?” she asked Josephine. “Was he needed on the ship?”
The concern on Josephine’s face now grew to a deep agony. “Griffin is . . .” Her friend apparently couldn’t bring herself to say the words.
“No . . .” Griffin couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t. It wasn’t right. He was the one person who had seen the real her. The one person she’d dared to believe truly loved her.
Josephine gripped her shoulders. “Breathe, Vesper.”
Vesper struggled to draw air into her lungs, and her legs became unsteady.
“He’s alive, but he needs you. Please, come with me.” Josephine grasped her hand, and they waded back into the shallows. Lord Camden helped Vesper and Josephine aboard the longboat and then the sailors rowed them back to the ship.
Once the sailors helped Vesper and Josephine on board, they bowed their heads respectfully to Vesper. The pit in her stomach deepened. It was clear they did not expect Griffin to survive.
“He’s this way.” Josephine led her to one of the cabins below.
She found Griffin lying on a bed, his chest bandaged. A man sat beside him, one hand on Griffin’s arm. The man in the chair turned at their approach, and Vesper gasped. He looked so like Griffin that for a moment she nearly ran to him.
Josephine introduced them. “Vesper, this is Gavin. Griffin’s brother.”
“He’s been asking for you,” Gavin said, his voice thick with emotion. He got up and stepped back to allow her to sit next to her love.
“He has?”
“Yes,” Josephine said. “I’d hoped . . . I know it sounds foolish, but I hoped that if he heard your voice and felt your touch . . .”
Vesper’s eyes blurred with tears, and she took Griffin’s hand and pressed it to her cheek.
“I’m here, Griffin. I’m here.” Her voice trembled as she spoke. “You promised me that we would be together. Do you remember? You cannot break that promise. I won’t let you.” She pressed her lips into his palm in a kiss and closed her eyes as she focused on him hearing her. “Please fight for me.”
“Vesper . . .” Griffin’s lips shaped her name, and a sliver of hope sprang free in her chest.
“Yes. I’m here. Come back to me.”
Griffin had never understood the sea, or the way it called to some souls and not others. He had always loved the solid earth beneath his feet. But now he was drifting, rocking in an endless dark sea he couldn’t escape. The ocean called for him to let go and sink beneath the surface into gentle nothingness. Surrendering would be easy.
Yet each time he tried to let go, something kept his head above the water. Green eyes, soft honey-blonde hair, a warm laugh, an even warmer heart . . . These images and sensations teased him, haunted him, made him unable to relinquish himself to the sea. The siren’s call of the water began to fade as a voice on the wind whispered to him.
“Come back to me, Griffin . . .”
An island appeared in the distance. The horizon behind it was bathed in a brilliant golden glow. But every stroke in the water hurt, every inch he swam more agonizing than the last. Yet the harder it became, the more he wanted to feel that pain instead of escaping it.
“Fight for me . . .”
He was so bloody tired, but he couldn’t give up. Not with that voice begging him to fight. The shore was closer now. So close. He was almost there…then it all faded away into nothing . . .
His eyes opened. Muted light filtered into the room where he lay. He blinked and licked his dry lips. A woman sat in a chair beside his bed, her body bent over the bed as she slept with one hand lightly wrapped around his. The visions of the ocean and island faded, and he began to remember the battle on the Siren.
He had taken a bullet to the back to protect Josephine. The evidence of that wound was found in the weight of the bandages wrapped around his chest. The woman beside him was not Josephine, but Vesper. Vesper. The sight of her there at his side filled him with a joy that, for a moment, robbed him of his speech.
Finally, he spoke her name and she stirred. When she lifted her head, her green eyes were wide with hope and love.
“Griffin?”
He smiled wearily. “I came back.” It was all he could say in the moment, but she seemed to understand what he meant. Those three words echoed as strongly as the three words he should have said instead. “I love you.”
She wiped away tears and smiled at him. “You’re free.”
“Free?” he asked.
She nodded. “Josephine and your brother wish to marry. That means you are free.”
Wonders would not cease today, he thought, and a flood of joy surged like a wave through his chest.
“How long have I been . . . here?” he asked.
“It’s been two weeks,” she said. “We couldn’t bring you ashore, not in your condition. I’ve been feeding you soup and water.”
She had? He hadn’t even been aware of that.
A knock at the door interrupted them, and Gavin stepped through the open doorway.
“I thought I heard voices,” his brother said, his face etched with lines of worry.
“I will let you talk.” Vesper stood, pressed a kiss to Griffin’s lips, and slipped from the room.
Gavin sat down beside the bed after she left, and for a long moment the two of them were silent. Finally, his brother spoke.
“You saved her.”
There was only one “her” Gavin could mean. The ship, the sea, they no longer held Gavin’s heart the same way. It was a woman he loved most now.
