Rash Reckless Love, page 6
Over Captain Vartel’s lean shoulder as he led her out onto the now cleared floor around which people had clustered to watch, Imogene caught van Ryker’s eye. He was frowning. Undoubtedly he did not approve of her association with Vartel, who, he had once told her through his teeth, was “a bad one.”
Imogene shrugged and gave her husband a blithe, lighthearted smile as the wiry Frenchman swung her into some new dance steps that had the women oohing and aahing. Let van Ryker see what her life would be like if he left her on Tortuga!
CHAPTER 4
“What brought you to these waters, Captain Vartel?” she asked as he showed her a step, then swung her out to try it beneath the hanging garlands Esthonie had devised.
With arrogant stance his fawn satin figure took a couple of prancing steps, which Imogene imitated faultlessly. “You mean, madame, why did I become a buccaneer?”
“A pirate, I think.” She held that steady smile.
He grinned down at her delightedly. “A nice distinction, that! Well, call me what you will. Like your husband”—his lightly accented voice held a slight but meaningful taunt-—“I came to these waters for gold.”
Her silver satin skirts flew out as she. pirouetted in an elaborate step. “And have you found it?”
“A bit.” He shrugged. “Not as much as I desire. Nor any so tempting as the gold of your hair. Will you not call me Jacques, that I may call you Imogene?”
She was about to deny him when again she thought of van Ryker, standing across the room with the governor. A good lesson it would be for him to find her already on first names with a man he despised. For still in the back of her mind lurked the possibility that he might relent and take her with him.
“All right—Jacques,” she murmured.
He looked very pleased. “Yes—ah, you did that step perfectly, Imogene. This one is a bit trickier. Turn—now your foot so. And turn again. Ah, Imogene, you are an apt pupil!”
“And you, Jacques, are an excellent teacher,” she countered, matching him step for step in what was really an elegant new dance. “So good in fact that I am tempted to believe you must have been a dancing master at some time in your checkered career.”
A slight frown of annoyance passed over his dark face, for in his native France dancing masters were not “gentlemen” and although his world had long since turned its back on him, he still jealously guarded that distinction. “Just a frequenter of balls,” he corrected her a shade coldly. “Lured there by beautiful ladies like yourself.”
“This is as near as we will come to a ‘ball’ on Tortuga,” said Imogene. There was a touch of bitterness in her voice, for she missed the polite society she had known in her native Scilly Isles, the balls at Star Castle when she had stood on a torchlit parapet and looked out over a waste of moonlit islands and rocks stretching far away.
“You sound,” he said softly, “as if you too have known better days.”
She gave a little start. Her attitude could be adjudged a criticism of the man who had brought her to Tortuga, and she had no mind to criticize van Ryker to this Frenchman. “I was young then—and foolish. I am married now.” Her voice was stiff.
He chuckled. “You must indeed have been very young then, for I judge you now to be all of eighteen!”
“Almost nineteen.” Haughtily. “And I have seen much in my nineteen years.”
“Oh, yes,” he grinned. “I am sure you have! But you fancy a ball, you say? Would you permit me to give one for you on board my ship, Le Sabre?”
Imogene caught her breath. She remembered how van Ryker, in those first days after he had caught up with her, having pursued her across an ocean, had given an improvised “ball’ in her honor on board his ship, the Sea Rover. She remembered the gaily colored paper lanterns strung above the deck, the creaking of the great ship as it cut the waves heading for America, the music of the violas that went right through you, and the deep full-throated song of the buccaneers. With a tug of her heartstrings, she remembered dancing with van Ryker beneath the stars and thrilling to his touch.
“I—I could not let you give a ball for me,” she said on a caught breath. “But Le Sabre is indeed a beautiful ship. I have seen her in the harbor.”
“Yes, a ship of thirty guns—while your husband has forty.” Regretfully. “But she is well named, don’t you think? In your language, the Broadsword—and with her I sweep the seas!”
“You are also wearing out Georgette as you sweep me about the floor,” laughed Imogene. “She is straining so for high notes, her voice nearly cracked on that last one.” Her amused gaze was on the girl in the white dress who leaned against the harpsichord.
“The little Georgette has no voice—she should not sing,” frowned the dark Frenchman.
“Oh? I thought you were closely closeted with the little Georgette,” sparkled Imogene. “At least, your face was very close to her ear when I first saw you and she was giggling like the schoolgirl she is.”
“Georgette fancies dangerous men.” He shrugged. “She has a wild nature. I think she yearns to run away to sea.”
“Her mother will soon scotch that!” Imogene executed an intricate turn and swirled back to face him.
“Who knows?” He smiled and lifted his head so that his dark honey hair swung about. “Georgette is very young, very enticing. A captain such as myself might be persuaded to take the little baggage aboard.”
“Oh, you would not!” she gasped, missing a step. “Georgette is only a child!”
His hard dark eyes met her own. They had a steely look. “Girls younger than Georgette are walking to the altar every day,” he pointed out.
It was true but—it was wrong, she thought. Little girls, betrothed as children by their parents, to little lads they scarcely knew, walking up the aisle at twelve. Her gaze shot to Esthonie Touraille’s youngest daughter, piping her heart out in this smothering hot room. Foolish little Georgette, starry-eyed over every good-looking buccaneer captain, was too young to wed, too young even to know her own mind. If Georgette chose life beside this dark elegant Frenchman today, how would she feel tomorrow when the glamour had worn off?
“You are thinking dark thoughts of me, Imogene,” Vartel accused with a chuckle.
“And of myself,” she said suddenly. For it came to her with sudden force that she was one of this company—rakehells all. Who was she to criticize? Was she any better? Her past was as stormy as any of theirs.
The dance came to a close amid hearty applause. Imogene’s silver satin skirts swept into a deep curtsy and the Frenchman’s dark honey locks brushed the floor as he bowed deeply to acknowledge the acclaim of the company.
“We must all try those steps!” cried Esthonie, surging forward to embrace them both.
“I am sure Captain Vartel will be glad to be your tutor,” smiled Imogene, pulling away. “While I would welcome this chance to teach them to my husband.”
Vartel gave her a regretful look. “I have taught lovely women many things that they have later no doubt taught to their husbands,” murmured his outrageous voice in her ear.
“I don’t doubt it,” said Imogene tartly. “Van Ryker.” She beckoned the tall silver-clad buccaneer, who was already striding toward her.
“I see you have discovered one of our worst citizens,” was his low-voiced comment as the music struck up again and he whirled her out upon the floor.
Imogene shrugged as she matched her step to his. “But then we are renegades all,” she said carelessly. “There—with that foot. There, you’ve got it! And now whirl me around.”
But van Ryker had studied the steps as Captain Vartel trod his measure with Imogene, and needed little coaching. “I do not like to hear you describe yourself as a renegade, Imogene,” he said soberly. “Nothing in your life warrants it.”
“Does it not?” She gave him a bleak look. “Are you saying that I am better than these—renegades of Tortuga?” She faced him frankly and her blue eyes held a tortured look. “No, perhaps I am worse. For I caused so much trouble for so many people who loved me.”
A muscle in his jaw worked, and he swung her around with more force than was necessary. “You must not feel so,” he told the silver-clad woman. “You were bruised by fate. None of it was your fault.”
Automatically, Imogene executed the next step, which brought her satin skirts swirling around his boot tops. “It was all of it my fault,” she said reflectively. “I have told myself that I could not help it, that circumstances drove me on, but for Bess Duveen there would have been a way.” Her voice softened as she named her old friend, now living on Barbados.
“But Bess Duveen would not have been offered your chances,” he reminded her.
“I suppose you are right.” Imogene sighed. It would have been so good to see Bess again—indeed she might have asked van Ryker to let her visit Bess while he voyaged, but of course she could not. Because Bess was now married to Stephen—and Stephen was Imogene’s copper-haired lover of the Scillies. Life tangled you up so. She supposed she would never see Bess again.
She gave van Ryker a melancholy look. Tomorrow or the next day he would depart. God only knew when she would see him again—maybe never. “Are you not afraid to leave me here in this place, van Ryker?” she demanded, her golden curls bouncing with her dance steps. “Surrounded by so many men of”—her soft lips twitched—“unbridled lust? Like the ‘worst citizen’ you speak of?”
“Vartel is skating on thin ice,” van Ryker told her. “If his crimes can be proved against him, he may be cast out of the Brotherhood.”
Cast out of the Brethren of the Coast... denied the buccaneer stronghold of Tortuga. A chilling thought.
“And who will cast him out, van Ryker?” she asked soberly. “You?”
“If I had proof.”
And that would mean, at the very least, a duel between him and the dark Frenchman—at worst a pitched sea battle between the Sea Rover and Le Sabre. Her heartstrings, tightened—she did not want either to happen.
“Those women who disappeared, you mean?” she asked argumentatively. “Because nobody knows what happened to them? I charged him with it and he told me they had run away with buccaneer lovers. Suppose it is true? They could have disappeared in that fashion so word would not get back to shame their families in Barcelona or Madrid.”
Van Ryker snorted. “A persuasive talker is Jacques! And did you believe him?”
Before the hot force of his gaze, she felt herself flushing. If Vartel had spirited away those women, of course he must be brought to account for it.
“Did you believe him?” repeated van Ryker harshly.
“I don’t know,” she admitted thoughtfully. “Yes, I think I did when he said it, but now across the room from him, I am not so sure.” She gave her tall buccaneer a slanted look. “Jacques has asked if he might not give a ball for me on board his ship....”
She could feel the sudden tension in van Ryker’s body. “You will of course refuse,” he said firmly.
“Oh, I have not given him my answer yet,” shrugged Imogene, whirling back to face him in the dance. “Who knows, the days may grow very long without you....” It was a desperate thrust to get him to change his mind and take her with him, but it did not work. His face went cold and he bowed and relinquished her without comment, as the music crashed to a close, to his ship’s doctor, de Rochemont, who was an expert dancer.
“What do you think of Jacques Vartel, Raoul?” Imogene asked him frankly, after Claude had wiped his perspiring face and begun to play again.
De Rochemont’s moustaches swayed as he laughed and led her out on to the floor. “I think Jacques is a liar and worse,” he said. “He comes of a fine old French family, ’tis rumored—and Vartel is not his real name. He is what you English would call a ‘black sheep.’ He has fled from his debts and misdeeds in half the cities of Europe, falling ever deeper. I suppose it is only natural that he would end up here—like the rest of us.”
“And the women whose ransoms he received and who never reached home again?”
De Rochemont frowned as he executed a difficult step.
"That I do not understand,” he admitted. “A Frenchman might have kept a likely jeune fille around as a mistress, but kill them—not likely. I disagree with your husband about that. Van Ryker believes that Vartel, for reasons of his own, may have caused their disappearance.”
Imogene glanced over de Rochemont’s brocade shoulder at the swarthy Frenchman, who at this moment was teaching Virginie Touraille the new steps—to the accompaniment of many giggles and stepped-on toes. He was dangerous, he was attractive, he had turned on her the brilliance of his charm. And there was an innate cruelty she had sensed in him. But was he a murderer of women? Remembering the caressing touch of his hand as he led her out on the floor, she could not believe it.
The evening had progressed and Imogene was dancing with van Ryker again when Captain Vartel, now teaching the new dance steps to young Georgette, who laughed aloud as she trod on his toes, looked over her tossing dark curls and studied the pair narrowly.
Of solid silver, they seemed—glittering, unique. The tall buccaneer with his thick shock of gleaming shoulder-length dark hair and his strong silver-clad body built for battle. The woman, delectable in her silver tissue, a woman of tinsel and fire, moving like a moth in the candlelight, with the same candlelight dancing in her delft-blue eyes as she looked up at van Ryker and turning her fair hair to glowing gold.
Handsome, well matched, a set. The Frenchman’s dark eyes glittered. This was a set he was determined to break up.
Imogene, meeting his hard gaze suddenly as van Ryker spun her out into the dance, lifted her chin and gave the Frenchman back an insolent stare.
Vartel inclined his head in a slight but wicked acknowledgment of that stare and his bold gaze traced the outlines of her lovely figure meaningfully.
Imogene turned her head away irritably. Vartel’s intentions seemed to her clear enough, even though unwelcome.
But she would have been startled had someone told her that it was Vartel himself who had sent yesterday’s “message” from Captain Flogg, he who had offered a poor and desperate young Lark Saxon money to do it—although that bit of bravado on the quay when he had drawn his dueling pistol and aimed it at Lark had caused the terrified lad to flee without trying to collect. And she would have been stunned to learn that Vartel had brought his ship, Le Sabre, to Tortuga for reasons that had nothing to do with buccaneering, reasons that involved only her—and van Ryker.
No hint of any of that crossed her mind of course.
But van Ryker, with that sixth sense that came of surviving many a battle, was warned. Something deep inside, some note of caution was struck. For van Ryker had seen the way the dark Frenchman had looked at Imogene. He had seen the rapier-thin Vartel smile that wide wolfish smile in admiration of her beauty—and then turn to him with a narrow appraising glance. That look of Vartel’s had had the quality of a narrow blade sliding in between his shoulder blades.
Suddenly, for no reason that he could pin down, he questioned Vartel's eagerness to shoot down that lad on the quay yesterday. At the time he had assumed it was only a stage gesture designed to impress Imogene. Now suddenly he was not so sure.
And when Imogene was claimed for the next dance by a puffing but merry Dr. Argyll and van Ryker sought the garden as a relief from the oppressive heat of the dance floor, and found himself brushing inadvertently against Vartel, who was of like mind, he gave the French pirate a sudden challenging look. “D’ye know Captain Flogg?” he asked innocently.
Captain Vartel’s dark eyes went wary. “Not that I remember,” he said innocently. “Isn’t he a tall, slender reed of a fellow?”
“No, he’s built like a bear with a grizzled black beard,” said van Ryker.
“Is there some special reason why I should know him?” drawled the Frenchman.
Van Ryker knew he had nothing solid to confront him with—naught but an unfounded suspicion. “No,” he said reluctantly. “But from something that happened yesterday, I thought you might.”
Vartel’s dark eyes widened. He was damnably clever, this "Dutch” buccaneer who spoke perfect English! Plainly, he’d have to watch his step. He did not inquire what that “something” was, for that might have provoked a quarrel and he was not ready for that—at least not yet. Instead, he tried an angled thrust.
“I’ve offered to give a ball on board Le Sabre in your lady’s honor,” he said, eyes glinting. “She mentioned the lack of luster in Tortuga society and it seemed fitting.”
“Fitting or not, she must refuse you,” said van Ryker, giving the Frenchman a level look. “For she sets no foot off dry land when I’m not with her.”
“Oh, I could guarantee her safety,” said the Frenchman impudently.
“I’ve no doubt of it.” Van Ryker’s tone was ironic. “But she still regrets.”
The tropical night hung heavy around them. Music from the harpsichord drifted out. Through the open door they could see Imogene’s silvery form drifting by in the throng.
“You’re sailing shortly, I hear?” The question was couched in a tone faultlessly correct but the implication was still there. You will be gone and I will still be here. We will see what happens then!
That implication was not lost on van Ryker.
“Yes,” he said shortly. “I will be sailing soon.” His cold gray gaze raking the Frenchman said that sailing or not, he would keep his woman!
“A long voyage?” pursued Vartel insolently.
“A short one. I find myself eager to return to my bride even before I have left her.”
