Rash Reckless Love, page 2
“And did you know who this lady was?” wondered the lean buccaneer, flicking off yet another bit of braid.
The boy at his feet gulped—and nodded. He was past lying—and almost past speech.
An even deeper frown descended upon the buccaneer’s dark visage. His thick shoulder-length dark hair flowed down around a face that had turned better men than the lad who now lay beneath his sword to trembling jelly.
“You knew?" Silkily.
“No!” Imogene saw the danger and sprang forward, seizing van Ryker’s arm. “I tell you, he’s drunk.”
“Not so drunk he can’t answer,” said van Ryker coldly. With a shrug of his wide shoulders, he shook off his bride’s restraining grasp. “Now tell me, lad, what ship are you off of?”
The boy moistened his dry lips and his eyes rolled about him before he spoke. Above him a flight of seabirds banked and swooped and called to one another with raucous cries. The sky was a vivid uncaring blue, that diamond-hard blue of the tropics that had seen so much of death.
"What ship?" Van Ryker leaned closer, his face exceedingly evil.
“The Barracuda" whispered the youth, his eyes round and staring.
There were indrawn breaths. The Barracuda was Captain Flogg’s ship, and there had been bad blood between Flogg and van Ryker ever since van Ryker had gone to Flogg’s aid in an action against a Spanish squadron, and the Barracuda, out of immediate danger, had swiftly sailed away, leaving the Sea Rover to finish the engagement alone.
Van Ryker straightened a bit, staring down at the lad. “Then if ye ship aboard the Barracuda, ye know the temper of my steel. What madness induced ye to seize my lady here upon the quay?”
The boy swallowed. His terrified eyes rolled this way and that, seeking escape—and found none. “It is a message,” he croaked.
“ ‘A message’? What message? Quick about it!” That wicked point left the doublet and played about the lad’s terrified face.
“A message from Captain Flogg,” choked the boy. He looked about to suffocate.
“And it was to be delivered thus? You were to affront my lady?”
Miserably, the boy nodded.
Shoulder to shoulder now, the crowd pressed forward in a circle around them. All knew the Barracuda had departed Cayona Bay on yesterday’s tide and her captain must have left this arrogant message as a taunt for Tortuga’s leading buccaneer. If van Ryker chose to storm out of port after Flogg, and if men began to choose up sides, it could mean the breaking up of the Brotherhood—that Brotherhood of Buccaneers who had built the town of Cayona and the frowning Mountain Fort, with cannon pointed out to sea, that protected their perilous stronghold.
“Well, stand up,” said van Ryker, stepping back. “Undoubtedly there’s more to this message. I doubt me Flogg would leave you in Tortuga just to buss my lady. What word does he send me?”
The terrified lad scrambled up and stood poised for flight. Imogene looked on in terror.
“He said—Captain Flogg said that I was to seize your lady and throw her skirts over her head in public,” he gulped. “And I was to tear off her petticoat and save it and give it to him when he returned to port.”
There was a general gasp at such insolence.
“But I couldn’t do that,” the lad added hurriedly, for some leaping expression in the tall buccaneer’s face had led him instinctively to throw up an arm to shield himself. “So I had me two tankards of rum in a tavern and I found her here and I kissed her instead. And he said”—he backed away from van Ryker as he spoke—“Captain Flogg said that I was to tell her she’d soon be in his bed aboard the Barracuda and you in no case to stop him!”
“Flogg can’t have liked you much,” said van Ryker in a conversational tone. “Else he wouldn’t have sent you to bear such a message. He can’t have expected you to survive it?”
The boy’s white face went a shade paler. He looked about to expire. “I didn’t see you, Cap’n,” he blurted. “I thought the lady was alone.”
Van Ryker’s dark head went back and he gave a short laugh that chilled the nearest onlookers. “Turn around,” he said coldly.
The lad cast him a look of utter terror, but turned reluctantly around. He stood hunched over and trembling in his worn homespun. Imogene lifted her arm in a gesture of mute appeal, but van Ryker brushed it aside.
“What’s your name, lad?” he asked. “I like to know the names of those I kill.”
“Lark Saxon,” came the mumbled answer.
“Well, Lark Saxon, let this be a lesson to you not to bear other men’s messages if they involve a lady!”
Imogene gave a short sharp scream as van Ryker brought up his sword. She could not stop him now. That swinging blade glinted in the sunlight, and as one man the crowd gave a deep sigh and surged forward to see the insolent youth die.
But the shining blade did not follow its expected course. Instead, with a sudden loud whack, the flat of van Ryker’s sword landed stingingly across the seat of young Saxon’s trousers. The startled youth leaped in the air and broke into a run. To the accompaniment of deep bellows of laughter from the crowd and shouts of approval, van Ryker pursued the lad all the way to the bay, giving him a last hard spank that toppled him into the water.
“When Flogg returns, ye can give him a message from me.” Van Ryker leaned over the edge of the quay, looking down into the splashing water where the youth was just surfacing. “Tell him my sword is at his disposal. I’ll be delighted to rid the world of him. And tell him that he’ll ne’er touch my lady while I’m alive and if he’s lucky enough that I die at my trade, there’ll be others rise up to defend her.”
“I’ll tell him. Thankee, sir!” The lad, no great swimmer, took a gulp of salt water that ended his words and, much relieved, struck out for an arm that was proffered to him from a longboat just pulling in.
“ ‘Tis not enough punishment for so impudent a puppy!” cried a harsh voice behind van Ryker, and the crowd’s attention was suddenly focused on a newcomer—a dark Frenchman, clad in handsome maroon ornamented with gold braid, who had stepped from the crowd and was now aiming a heavy pistol at the swimming lad. “I’ll give him what he deserves!”
Van Ryker whirled. Instantly his sword snaked out and knocked the long-barreled dueling pistol from the hand that held it. “I’ll fight my own battles, Captain Vartel, and mete out my own punishments.”
The Frenchman scowled and bent to retrieve his pistol. His long body came up and he thrust the pistol back into his scarlet baldric. “I should think ye’d have done more to avenge an insult to your lady, van Ryker.” His hot gaze wandered over Imogene, who had followed van Ryker to the bayside, stripping her casually as it moved along her body.
"And such a lady,” he added softly. His arrogant head lifted and he smiled directly into her eyes.
Imogene had felt herself flushing under that penetrating inspection and now she stiffened. The deep breath she took strained her already tight satin bodice to the utmost.
“Captain Vartel.” She acknowledged the Frenchman’s compliment coolly. “I thank you for coming to my defense but—I need no other champion than my husband.”
“My lady is safe,” said van Ryker crisply. “Next time I won’t be so lenient!” His voice carried to the crowd and held a warning for any who might seek to emulate the lad and steal a kiss from the Caribbean’s most fabled beauty.
With a curt bow, Vartel turned on his heel and left them, disappearing into a crowd that went back to haggling and dickering over barrels of captured wine, and kegs of gunpowder and salt pork, and limes and spices and perfumes and jewellery—and haggling, too, for the favors of seductive waterfront bawds who sidled up to buccaneers and traders, sometimes reaching out to stroke a lean sleeve or brushing a tempting breast clad in brilliant captured silks against a strong arm more used to swinging a cutlass than holding a woman. It was once again an ordinary day on Tortuga.
But not for van Ryker. And not for Imogene. The incident had brought them face to face with their world and neither of them liked what they saw.
It was suddenly borne in upon nineteen-year-old Imogene how tawdry and violent was this new world into which her love for the lean buccaneer van Ryker had thrust her... and how perilous. On any voyage she might lose him. How had he put it? Buccaneers don't live to be old..... And then what? It came to her forcefully how rash and reckless was her love for the strong man beside her. Prevented by some shadow, some blot upon his past, from ever returning home again, something he had not told her and perhaps never would, he must needs live out his life in some buccaneer port like Tortuga among men hunted like himself.
And if he died at sea? Would word of his death be brought to her by a sudden crash as her door was broken in and Captain Flogg—or another like him—stormed in to take her and carry her off to his ship? A fallen buccaneer’s share of the spoils was scrupulously sent to his widow in England or Holland or wherever may be. But what of a widow on Tortuga? What of a widow men's eyes followed greedily as if she herself were a prize to be fought for?
Beside her, van Ryker was thinking his own dark thoughts. Forgotten now by the onlookers, he stood beside his golden woman and watched the dripping lad being pulled over the side of the longboat. There was a frown upon his keen, hawklike face. The incident had sobered him. Of no great moment in itself, it had brought to him forcefully the position of his young bride on this isle of dangerous men. She was beautiful as the sunlight and there was the challenge of the sea itself in her delft blue eyes with their dark-rimmed irises and long sweeping dark lashes. Her every fluid movement was feminine and alluring—enticing as Eve. She was the kind of woman men fought for, died for—without counting the cost. He should know. He was one of those men.
And he had brought her here... here into the path of danger. His soul squirmed at the thought.
Flogg, but half a coward and entirely vicious, a pirate in a land of buccaneers, was not the only one who wanted Imogene. Although assuredly he must have been drunk when he flung this challenge, for he had shown no desire ashore to challenge van Ryker’s possession of her. Perhaps someone had twitted him about running away from the Spaniards and leaving the rescuing Sea Rover to her fate.
No... Van Ryker’s heavy frown remained as he sheathed his blade and turned away from the sea. Flogg had flung this challenge for some deeper reason. He wondered what treachery awaited him out there past the bay.
“Come,” he told Imogene gently. “It is over. And”—there was a grimness to the smile he gave her—“it will not happen again.”
He took her hand and shouldered his booted way through the crowd, which parted silently to let him pass. Men sporting gold earrings and cutlasses, hard-faced sun-bronzed men from a dozen countries, glanced up speculatively as he brushed by them, then turned back to their inspection of the wines and brandies, silks and laces, oranges and bananas, weapons and leather goods, perfumes and spices—all captured booty displayed for buyers from everywhere in the marketplace of this buccaneer stronghold. Van Ryker glanced up once, speculatively, at the great Mountain Fort that loomed above them, its guns pointed toward any who dared to question here the absolute power of the buccaneers.
There was much force here, he mused, but little law. The governor sent by France was a friend of his, but the governor had at best a tenuous hold on the place. Mainly he was useful for issuing—for a price—letters of marque, which turned buccaneers into privateers. Spain rarely honored those letters of marque, choosing instead to hang the bearers with the letters hung derisively around their necks. For himself, van Ryker had never bothered with them.
No, here the power rested with the buccaneers themselves and if there was a lord mayor of Cayona—as there was not—he supposed he would be that lord mayor.
And now Flogg, of all men, chose to challenge his authority The question was, why?
They had reached an empty space between the clots of wandering customers that dotted the quay.
“I am glad you spared him.” It was Imogene’s hurried voice, speaking quickly before they reached earshot of another group. “For a moment there I was afraid...” She let her voice trail off and he stopped and turned to study her.
“Have ye ever known me to skewer an unarmed man, let alone a lad?” he asked her gravely.
She flushed and looked uncomfortably away. Of course she had not! But these last months she had seen so much. Cayona was a wild town, the wildest in the Caribbean. Here had drifted the dregs of many nations, here the political outcasts, murderers, thieves, graduates of many jails rubbed elbows. Even in broad daylight they were a murderous lot.
“No,” she said softly. “I have never known you to do a dishonorable thing.”
The sudden smile that split his dark countenance reflected his pride in her. “Nor, God willing, will you ever do so. Although”—his tone changed, lightened—“I’ve pondered doing so from time to time! Come, you were considering that shipment of laces and stuffs over there when the lad seized you. Let us go back and resume our shopping as if nothing had happened.”
As if nothing had happened. . .But something had happened.
She had come to realize her position here. She had of a sudden lost her taste for shopping in Cayona’s marketplace.
Nevertheless, she offered no resistance as van Ryker urged her back to her former inspection of the wares of a grinning giant in leathern breeches. In the heat she saw that he had stripped off his shirt, which was flung carelessly atop one of the piles of bolts of materials.
“Taken off the Santa Cecelia out of Barcelona,” the giant assured her with a wheezy lisp. She guessed the lisp might be a token of that engagement, for most of his front teeth were missing. “Good merchandise all, m’lady—fit for a queen it is.”
“So you told me,” she said, restlessly pulling out a bolt, pushing it away again.
“You were lookin’ at this one here,” said the lisping giant helpfully, thrusting a length of blue silk toward her.
“I was just—looking at it.” She pushed it away.
“ ‘Twould become you well,” observed van Ryker, reaching out to take the length of blue silk. “D’ye not want it?”
Imogene fingered the shining cloth he held out to her. It had attracted her by its color—her favorite color, the color she had worn on a soft night in the Scilly Isles... the night she had lost her virginity to a copper-haired lover who had soon left her.
Her lovely face saddened, for she had borne a child of that event and that child had been wrested from her arms, and had gone down with a ship sunk by the Spanish. Little Georgiana, her daughter, and Elise, the maidservant who had been almost a mother to her, both lost when the Wilhelmina had dipped beneath the waves. Imogene had nearly died of grief when she heard it and it was van Ryker who had dragged her back to life, van Ryker who had got her through the worst of it, who had carried her to Tortuga in his ship, the Sea Rover, van Ryker who had married her in a “buccaneer’s wedding,” a sword marriage. How proudly she had walked beside him beneath that arch of crossed cutlasses! How she had sworn—silently of course—to love him forever and to give him, no matter what that doctor had said about the danger of having another child, the night Georgiana was born, children of his own. She had vowed in her heart to be forever faithful, forever true, and her whole being had thrilled to the deep-throated song of the buccaneers—that unforgettable music of her wedding night that still sang through her mind when the moon was high, just as it had on her wedding night when she went into the arms of her dangerous lover.
But that particular shade of blue reminded her of other days, of a copper-haired lover who had proved untrue, and of the aching loss of her baby daughter.
“No,” she said, pushing the blue silk aside. “I think I would prefer something else.”
Van Ryker sighed, for he privately thought that shade of blue became her well, and she wore it so seldom these days.
“Perhaps this length of gray silk,” she suggested, snatching up the nearest thing that came to hand.
“You are gone suddenly demure,” he said regretfully. “I think I prefer you as a bird of plumage. Even without your whisk.”
His voice was droll and Imogene shot him a sudden look through her lashes. For like the ladies of the English court, she had an old habit of tossing aside her whisk and baring her bosom, despite her deep-cut necklines. A habit that had been thought shocking in the Scillies, where modesty bade young women of fashion to fill in that space between tight bodice and neck with a lawn or cambric scarf or whisk. What fun it had been to shock them!
She laughed, her brooding mood broken. “Wait till you see what I do with it, van Ryker!” she promised him gaily. “Loaded with silver lace and silver tissue and with black velvet ribands catching up the flowing lace cuffs of my virago sleeves—ah, I’ll be something less than demure, I promise you! And you in your silver-shot gray doublet and red satin baldric—ah, we’ll cut a figure at the governor’s next party!”
“No doubt we will,” he grinned, letting the sky blue material go with a sigh. “We’ll take the gray silk, friend—and anything else my lady takes a fancy to.”
He was generous always with his gold, with his kisses—but he had told her so little of himself, of his past, she thought. For instance, although he had once told her he was English, he had never told her his real name. He had married her under the Dutch name he sported aboard the Sea Rover and in the Caribbean, where men knew him as a dangerous buccaneer ... Ruprecht van Ryker.
“Shall I call you Rupert?” she had asked him two days after their marriage, Anglicizing his Dutch name of Ruprecht.
He had hesitated. “No—van Ryker will do well enough for now.”
She had asked him then point-blank what his real name was. And he had frowned.
“I’ll tell you soon,” he had said evasively. “And”— he swept her up and kissed her—“marry you again under that name if you like.”
At the time, melting under his hot kisses, it had seemed enough. But now she was suddenly restive after the boy’s swift unwarranted attack. Slight though it was, it had served to remind her that she was a woman in a buccaneer port and that there were hot-blooded men about who would seize her from van Ryker if they dared.
