“Good.”
I started to turn away but stopped when he said, “Oh, Amy?”
He was on me before I could ask what he wanted, his mouth hot and demanding, and I didn’t for a moment think of protesting the arrogant gesture; I just melted into him and enjoyed the most blatantly sexual, erotic kiss it had ever been my pleasure to receive. When he was done, I stood breathless, staring in wonder at his lips, my mind stripped completely clean of all thoughts but how I enjoyed the kiss… and how much I wanted another one.
“Just a little something to remember me by,” he said, gently turning me toward the path and giving me a swat on the behind.
“Somehow, I don’t think remembering him is going to be a problem,” I muttered to myself as I watched him wade out to the ship. “No, the problem is what I’m going to do to stop thinking about him long enough to do my job.”
Chapter 10
Oh, here is love, and here is truth,
And here is food for joyous laughter…
—Ibid, Act II
I was in the square the following afternoon—trying not to notice how the gleaming blade of a newly crafted sword hanging in the open doorway at the blacksmith’s shop looked just like Corbin’s eyes when he was kissing me—
when an odd figure skulked into view. The man was dressed in a ragged collection of ill-fitting garments: yellow striped knickers, rags strapped to his feet in lieu of shoes, and a long, knee-length red jacket tied around the waist by a dingy white sash. But it was the battered green tricorn hat, the eye patch, and what looked like a poorly stuffed green and blue parrot attached to the shoulder that caused pretty much everyone in the square to stop talking and stare at the bizarre sight.
“What in the Seventh Sea is that, do you suppose?” Sly Jez asked me as the man suddenly adopted a hunched-over stance, skirting the crowd with strange, unintelligible noises. “Is it a leper?”
The man stopped in the shadowed doorway of an empty building and twitched a couple of times.
“I have no idea. Is there an insane asylum around here? He definitely looks unbalanced,” I said, unable to take my eyes off the apparition.
“Bedlam, ye mean? Nay, that be on Mongoose Island.”
“Hmm.” I turned back to the ladies gathered around the well that sat in the center of the square. It was the pirate version of the water cooler, and I found to my delight that almost all the women of the town visited at the well at some time or other during the day.
I had spent the remainder of the night before distracting myself from thoughts of Corbin and his extremely talented lips by coming up with a plan of action for grilling the citizens of Turtle’s Back, and had struck what I thought was an excellent idea. Conversation with the ladies of the house had proven that the computer characters, while fully formed in almost all ways and possessed of unique artificial intelligence, had one major fault—they had no past. If I asked one of them what she had been doing a week before, she could tell me in great detail, but when I asked about events in the distant past, all I got was a blank stare and a shrug of indifference.
All I had to do was interview the citizens of the island, gently probing for a past, and eliminate those people who didn’t fit the profile of human players.
“That boil remedy is very helpful, I’m sure,” I told one of the women who had been telling me about the affliction her husband, one of Bart’s crewmen, suffered from. “But how long has your husband been cursed with the boils?”
The woman looked mildly confused. “Eh. Been a long time, now.”
“Amy? I think the leper is trying to get your attention.”
“Hmm?” I glanced over to where Jez was pointing. The leper/madman was doing a deranged sort of twitching dance. I’d seen enough mentally disturbed people huddled on the streets to know that he was probably happier on his own, but made a mental note as I turned back to the woman in front of me to locate the head of the island’s watch and have the man evaluated for his own safety. “I don’t think he wants me, Jez. It’s probably Saint Vitus’s dance or the bubonic plague or malaria or something like that. I’m sorry to be so nosy, Ruthful, but how long is a long time? Weeks? Months? Years?”
The woman blinked at me, her face devoid of emotion, something else I’d noticed happened to the computer characters when they were faced with something their programming didn’t know how to handle.
“Amy, I really think he’s trying to get your attention,” Jez said, tugging on my sleeve, her face concerned as she watched the madman. He seemed to be struck with some sort of palsy now, his head twitching to the side in a manner that had to leave him with a kink in his neck.
“Ignore him,” I told her quietly. “I don’t normally approve of pretending the less fortunate aren’t there, but there are some times when direct attention only exacerbates the situation. I’ll make sure someone takes care of him later.”
I turned a bright smile on the woman next to the wife of the boil man, waggling my fingers at an adorable small child resting on her hip. “What a sweet little girl! She looks a lot like my daughter when she was about two.
When is your girl’s birthday?”
The woman’s face went blank. Scraaaaaatch. Another person off my potential villain list.
“Amy?”
“What?”
