The door slammed shut, and there were footsteps on the porch and steps. Merry raised her eyes, helpless, humiliated, frantic, and saw standing in the starlight before her Morgan’scompanions, the blond archangel of a man and the long-haired boy. Her galloping heart sped blood through her fragile veins until she was nearly deafened by its pounding rush, and with fear-dulled senses she saw dimly that the blond man was laughing.
In one flashing second the boy sank an iron grip into the curve of her shoulders and hauled her to her feet. He gave the fallen bundle a nudge with his moccasined foot.
“Congratulations, little mother,” he said in a dangerous tone. “Is it a boy or a girl?”
Three lives besides Merry’s own hung suspended in the balance. She croaked, “Don’t kill us! Please! We weren’t going to bring the militia.”
“The devil you weren’t,” snarled the boy, his fingers pressing tighter into her aching shoulders.
Behind him she heard the blond man say, “Softly, Cat.” Then with a laugh, “You had a mother once yourself.”
“No, Devon,” snapped the boy. “I was spawned.” He took a handful of her bodice and shook her back and forth slowly, as easily as he might have a cloth doll. “Stupid, lying bitch. I ought to feed you to the sharks. Where’s your friend?”
She would have died rather than expose Sally. “I don’t know.”
This time the shake was painful. “That isn’t what I wanted to hear. Do you want to learn the hard way how little patience I’ve got?”
He put back his hand to strike her, but even as she recoiled shudderingly from him the man called Devon stopped the boy with a gesture. “Cat, no,” he said. “I know it doesn’t seem worth the trouble to you, but there really are better ways to do these things.”
To her surprise the boy released her. She staggered on legs that had little strength to hold her, and Devon encircled her shoulders with a light protective arm. It had been a night ofone shock after the next, and Merry’s unaccustomed senses blazed as he caressed the tumbled curls from her taut cheeks.
“If you like, don’t tell us where your friend is,” he said. “Just tell me why she left you.”
Merry’s voice trembled. “She had to bring more pins, so that no one would see that I was really not—that I was not…”
The boy swore and said, “If we get militia,yourswill be the first throat I’m going to cut.”
Devon brought the back of his hand softly down the side of her face. “You think she’s lying, Cat?”
“Oh, I suppose not,” the boy said irritably. “It’s ludicrous enough to be true. Look, if you don’t want the wench mauled, then you’d better stay here and keep her out of sight when the crew comes. I’ll go signal. And who knows?” He swept up a hunk of the filling from Merry’s cotton sack and tossed it casually into the breeze. “Maybe this time you’ll be the one who gets to stuff her.”
He left them, running lightly down the silver beach, his white-blond hair catching the moonbeams, gleaming like a passing banshee.
Caught still under the drape of Devon’s arm, her body stiff, Merry raised a hand despairingly to her forehead.
“Do you know,” he asked her in an amiable way, “that you’re white as a sail?”
Her palm fell to her cheek; the skin was clammy under her shivering fingers. She was ashamed of her cowardice, her crying, the whimper in her voice. There were probably a hundred spunky things that a woman of spirit would have thought of to say, and all she had managed to do was plead pitifully for her life. In a bitter epiphany she saw herself as she was, an inexperienced, awkward teenager, endowed with more imagination than poise.
Knowing she must confront this man, she turned to face him, but since the top of her head came no higher than hisshoulder, she found herself looking straight at his chest and made the unsettling discovery that he had no shirt on under his jacket. Hastily she looked up at the gemstone eyes, which were tucked at the corners with a smile.
In all her upbringing there had been nothing that taught her how she ought to behave now, and the only thing she could think of was a line from a penny dreadful that one of the maidservants had once let her read. Somehow, though, looking at the clever face above her, she doubted that a proclamation of “Unhand me, sirrah” would achieve much more than a laugh. Reworking it into the vernacular, she said, “Let me go.” It was the best voice she could produce, but it was a forceless one for all that, and it cracked embarrassingly on the last word, so she was hardly surprised when it produced no immediate results. “Please,” she added.
He slid his hand under hers, where it lay cupped on her chest. His hand seemed warmer than her own, and drier, and the shock of the unfamiliar intimacy made her stumble backward into the rickety porch railing behind her. She spun and clutched at it to save herself from falling. The railing gave under the pressure of her hand, sending a stream of splinters flying to the ground. The self-reproach came, instantly and automatically.
“Oh,” she said numbly. “I’ve broken it.”
She heard his soft laughter behind her and wheeled in fear, the broken railing held tight across her bosom.
“Be careful, there might be nails,” he said, and in a gentle imperative added, “Hand it to me. I’ll fix it for you.”
She put it in his hand and then thought, too late,Merry Patricia Wilding, if you had half an ounce of courage, you’d have whacked him over the head with it.
“You’re very amusing, you know,” he said conversationally as he was sliding the railing back into place, matching the holes with the nails.
For the first time since she’d left the tavern, she felt an emotion stirring within her that was not terror.
“I wasn’t aware that I was being amusing,” she said, a terse edge to her voice.
