HARD DECK WOOD spread beneath him. The smell of fish and salt-soaked ropes surrounded him, making him nauseous. The night was silent.
His heartbeat was the only sound, droning in his ears. He tried to count seconds, to keep aware of the minutes passing, to keep his senses close to him, but that ability was rapidly failing him. The deck was flat, rough against the side of his head. His right shoulder was crushed up against his ear as he lay there, both arms coiled around his battered body. The reflex to hold tight against his wounds caused him even more pain.
He couldn’t remember. Had she gotten away?
Had he been fighting with two men, or three? He only remembered two. He begged his memory to recall the other man, to tell him Abbey hadn’t had to grapple with Cobb.
But there were only two faces hating him there in his memory, and only four fists hammering him.
His legs were a mile away. He tried to move them. Moans rolled across the deck, like wounds. On his fingers, moisture. He knew the feeling of seawater, but this was sticky. Warm. It flowed down the side of his hand to his wrist, then sneaked into the cuff of his coat and was absorbed by the sleeve of his sweater. Blood.
He clung to a vision of Abbey. It was torture to see her again and again struggling against Maynard and that knife, to see her lips screwed up in anger and defiance. Torture, but it also gave him strength. If she could fight, so could he. So would he.
He raised his head from the deck. A flush of dizziness destroyed both his thoughts and his vision, and only now as he stared out at the blurry night did he realize his eyes had been open all this time. He thought they’d been closed; in fact, he thought he’d been unconscious.
Not so, it seemed. Some part of him had clung to wakefulness, and now his senses were gathering themselves. He refused to let his head sink to the deck again. His neck began to ache, but he resisted. A terrible trembling gripped his shoulders and thighs, but clinging to the effort itself, he pulled up one arm and heaved himself up on that elbow.
Pain cut through his midsection. All kinds of pain—a bite, a stab, a throb, a rip, all at once, in several places.
A loud gasp bolted from his throat. On its heel he rasped her name and clung to the sound. A whisper, a whimper, a shout—he had no idea how loudly or softly it came out of him.
If only he could be sure of one thing, anything, to hold onto.
Revenge drove him up onto his knees. He didn’t like to be hit. He hadn’t liked watching Sumner paw Abbey. As Sumner’s hand had palmed Abbey’s bared breast, Jake knew his anger was partly from wishing it was him, wishing he’d done it when he had had the chance, when she wanted it from him. Sumner had taken from him that first moment of seeing each other naked in the soft light of the evening. That moment would never be recaptured. Jake raged within himself as he thought of it, feeling that somehow this pain was his punishment for failing to give Abbey what they both needed and wanted. If he’d only given in to her, she would never have been on the dock tonight.
So everything was his fault. Her humiliation. His pain. Their loss.
And he hadn’t told her yet. He should’ve told her.
He pressed his hand into his wounds, and the other hand on the fo’c’sle hatch of the ship he’d been dumped on, and struggled for balance. These were humiliating feelings. Humiliating for Abbey, and for himself. What disservice he’d done her, denying his hunger to touch her and feel her, stalling too long.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the amber-haired image flooding his muddled mind. I should’ve told you . . . Abbey . . . I’m in love with you. . ..
She hadn’t gotten away. He knew she hadn’t. Sumner, Maynard, and the knife. It was all he remembered. Cobb . . . Cobb . . . Abbey . . .
His legs shook like a newborn’s as he forced himself to his feet. Each puff of breath tore a new hole in his effort. Pain roared through him relentlessly. He crushed his arms into his middle and folded over them, his lips quivering, his eyes blinking in the closing darkness. There was no fighting the weight of his feet. He stumbled to the edge of nightmare.
Two steps, possibly only one.
He slammed to the deck. Blood flowed over his arm and dripped onto the thirsty wood.
She never imagined she could run so fast. Fury gave her good wind.
Her boots clattered back onto the dock planks not five minutes later, and she brought the cavalry with her.
More than a dozen men clattered after her. At her side were Jake’s cousins. As they ran down the wharf, her mind was full of the thudding memory of fists against flesh.
But the dock was completely dark, and there wasn’t a soul in sight.
“Jake!” she called, panting. Had they killed him? Pitched his body over the side?
“Jacob!” Matthew called as he and the other men dispersed to search the dock and the ships. His booming voice spread out across Old South Wharf. “Jacob!”
“That one!” Abbey gasped, pointing at the boat where she’d been held captive. Immediately four men dropped onto its deck and swarmed it. Abbey watched from the dock, clutching the lapel of the sea coat one of the men had chivalrously lent her when he’d seen the condition of her clothes.
Where was Jake? Her skin crawled with worry.
The intensity of her fear surprised her. Attraction, yes. Hunger, Desire, passion, curiosity, a bond neither of them understood—all that had been present before. But this feeling was none of those. This was a feeling of excision. Something was being cut out of her as though Maynard had used his blade on her heart. She knew, within the deepest part of herself, that if they never found Jake, or they found him dead, part of her would die as well. Part of her. Jake . . .
How had he become part of her?
Several men were running down toward the end of the dock, searching. Elias Colbert was with them, leading.
Matthew Colbert appeared beside Abbey, his thick body strung with tension. “Might they have taken him with them”
Abbey swung around. “I’ve no idea,” she gasped. “They might do anything, those kinds of men. Anything. I shouldn’t have left him—”
“No, ma’am, you did right to come for us,” Matthew told her. “Ladies can’t face down mariners and win.”
“What if they threw him in the water?” Her voice cracked on the question. “Can he swim?”
“Uh, no, ma’am,” Matthew told her solemnly. He bracketed his mouth with his hands and called, “Elias! Search the boats! Ma’am, you know the names of those men?”
“Yes!” she blurted back, caught in the chance to say something constructive. “Cobb, Maynard, and the leader was called Sumner.”
Matthew made a surly sound in his throat. “Yeah, that figures. . ..
“Figures with what?”
Matthew glanced at her, then squinted evasively down the dock, pressing his lips together. “That’s for Jacob to tell you, missus, not me.”
She stepped closer to him. “It’s Pollock, isn’t it? Those were his men, weren’t they?” she demanded.
Matthew’s eyes focused on her, wide now. “How do you know about Pollock?”
“Matthew!” Elias’s voice trailed across the water from one of the boats tied at the end of the dock. “Here!”
“Oh, God—” Abbey choked.
Matthew Colbert took her arm and they broke into a run.
The dock planking had an unsettling give, not like land, not like sand, not like a sidewalk, and it made an awful rattling announcement of their fears, its terrible clatter echoing he’s dead he’s dead he’s dead in Abbey’s mind. But that spark. . . it still lay in her soul, glowing softly, a tiny amber light against the blackness of her fear. Like the beacon of Great Point seen from an impossible distance, the tiny glow signaled a quiver of life. Life, hope, the unrelenting token that Jake wouldn’t allow himself to die before the nexus between them had been fulfilled. They couldn’t have beaten it out of her, she knew, and she clung to the belief that they hadn’t been able to beat it out of Jake either.
The boat was a sandbagger, a low-slung single-master with a transom stern and a ridiculously enormous sail plan for its size. A bunch of sandbags sat idle on its afterdeck, to be heaved port or starboard as deadweight ballast when the ship tacked. Abbey and Matthew and half a dozen men clamored to the dock’s edge to peer inside the boat.
Elias and two other men were crouching on the deck, blocking the view. All Abbey could see was a pair of familiar legs lying on the deck at Elias’s left, one leg sedately crossed over the other, neither moving.
“Jake!” Her cry battered the solemn silence that had fallen over the wharf She jumped down onto the deck without waiting for help, with Matthew following, dropping at her side with an ominous thud.
Jake’s head and shoulders lay in the crook of Elias’s arm. His face was oyster-gray against his cousin’s sleeve.
Before Abbey could make a move, Matthew had stepped over Jake’s legs, knelt down and tenderly turned Jake’s face toward him with his big hand. “Jacob, look at me.”
Abbey dropped to her knees beside Elias as the other men got up to give her room. She wanted to speak, to call his name out, to sob her apologies for getting him into this situation, but her voice caught in her throat and wouldn’t come out.
Matthew brushed the damp blond bangs out of Jake’s face. “Jake, look this way. Open the eyes, mate.”
His cousin’s voice sank through Jake’s unconsciousness and took hold. He moaned. Then he followed in discomfort and turned his head toward Matthew. After a moment he looked at him.
“That’s the way,” Matthew said. “Hold on. Let me see you.”
Carefully Matthew slipped his hand into Jake’s open coat, palming his ribs for breaks. Judging from the look on his face and Jake’s wincing, he found some.
Abbey held her breath, still afraid to speak. Elias was silent, too, his youthful face stiff as he watched Matthew hopefully probing Jake’s battered form.
“Christ Almighty,” Matthew whispered. His eyes clamped shut for an instant, and he pulled his hand out.
Abbey covered her mouth, stifling a moan of horror. Matthew’s hand was a canvas of blood. Shaking, Abbey pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth to keep it silent, unbuttoned the coat she was wearing, and found the edge of her sliced camisole. Without thinking, she ripped along the cut fabric, then forced the rip to change to the bias, and finally half the camisole came away in her hands. Gently she pushed Jake’s coat aside and found the bloody place. Maynard’s knife. That knife . . . meant for her. She stuffed the swatch of cotton into the wound. It would hurt him, but the bleeding had to be stopped. The pain might as well have been her own.
Jake’s face crumpled and he arched against Elias. His hand came up out of nowhere and clamped around Abbeys wrist.
“Godameracy—” he ground out.
Matthew wrapped an arm around Jake’s shoulders and helped him sit up, which closed the wound somewhat, though it probably did little to ease the pain. His head fell forward, his eyes clamped shut, and his breath came in chunks.
“Jake, I’m sorry,” Matthew said. “I should’ve listened to you.”
Jake found a pause in his panting to offer his cousin a tight grin, partly of reassurance, partly of forgiveness, and as he glanced up, he saw Abbey. His glance bounced off Matthew, catching Abbey in his periphery, and he suddenly realized whose wrist he was holding onto.
“Abbey!” he choked. Then in a different way, “Abbey . . . I think . . .”
“Not a word,” she said, touching her palm to the side of his face. “I’m here. So are you.”
He tilted his head into her hand, relief flowing over both of them.
“He’s cold,” Abbey said, gathering her self-control. “We’ve got to get him out of the night air.”
Matthew craned to look past Elias at the crowd of sailors waiting tensely on the dock. “Louis, find a stretcher!”
“Got one on board,” one of the men said, wagging a finger toward a big old schooner tied up nearby. He grabbed another man’s sleeve, and the two of them dashed across the wharf and disappeared into the other ship.
Elias shifted Jake to Matthew, then stripped out of his own jacket and wrapped it gently around Jake’s shoulders. “Only landlubbers freeze to death within sight of shore,” he said.
Jake smiled thinly and put a great deal of commitment into his response. “Elias . . . you’re . . . stuffed with . . . seaweed.”
Though Abbey shuddered at the weakness of his voice, Matthew and Elias smiled and shared a glance that contained more than amusement. They knew him well. Well enough to know when he was going to be all right and when he wasn’t.
As if to reassure her, Jake’s hand slipped down her wrist and found her fingers. Her hand, like a thing with its own mind, fell into his as naturally as a bird into its nest.
The stretcher came and was handed down into the boat. After that things moved very quickly, too quickly to sort out. The only anchor Abbey remembered from those minutes was Jake’s unremitting grip on her hand. He clung to her now, and no amount of prying could rive him from her. The sailors had to maneuver Jake onto the stretcher with Abbey still holding his hand. They had to squeeze the stretcher through the door of The Brotherhood with Abbey at its side. They had to lift him onto the bed in back of the pub with his trembling hand gripping her fingers in something akin to desperation. They had to undress and stanch his wounds and bind his ribs with Abbey alternating which hand she was holding with which sleeve they had to get off or which rib had to be examined. He refused to let go of her, no matter what limits of consciousness engulfed him or failed him. Lucidity came and went with the sensation of losing that precious grip. He would slip into sleep for a few moments, only to drag himself back to wakefulness if her hand fell away from his even for an instant. His eyes would open in a kind of surprise, he would search for her face, find it, find her hand, and sigh back against the pillows again.
The Brotherhood’s back room was warm, and Jake’s chilled body soon began to accept the warmth as Matthew stanched the flow of blood from a wide gash Maynard’s blade had left under Jake’s right rib. Once his body no longer had to fight the loss, color came back into Jake’s cheeks, and his fingers grew warm around Abbey’s.
There had been a doctor waiting at The Brotherhood who had tended Jake swiftly and stoically and had finally left, leaving Jake in his cousins’ care, and now the only people there were Abbey, Matthew, and Elias. Abbey didn’t have to guess where the other men had disappeared to.
They were combing the wharves for the criminals who had done this.
The hours passed slowly. Darkness on Nantucket seemed unending tonight. Daylight wouldn’t come until it knew Jake was going to get better, so it waited just offshore and let the candles do its job.
Jake had no sense of time when he started to realize what he was seeing and feeling. The smell of The Brotherhood swarmed around him—food stewing in the kitchen, warm grog, the faint smoky scent of lanterns and candles. The familiarity of it pushed him deeper into the bedcovers. He finally managed to open his eyes and keep them open.
For many minutes he watched, unseen, while Matthew and Elias shuttled in and out of the room. He had the vague awareness of a pillow beneath his head, bunched up around his ears, a charming and comforting feeling after the hard chipped wood he had been lying on before. How long ago? A day? An hour . . . he couldn’t tell. His hands felt warm; a good sign.
Before him his body lay stretched out under the blanket. A brown wool blanket, tattered and worn, just the blanket he had dreamed of as he lay chilled and bleeding on the deck of the sandbagger. Wooden panels and the brick above it surrounded him in the small room, glowing with the warm gold of lanternlight. He felt that warmth on his cheeks. Yet none of that could assuage the hole in his soul, nor brush aside the memory of Maynard’s hunting knife sinking into the right side of his stomach, the grate of it upon the underside of his rib, mutilating any chance of his helping Abbey.
He blinked. His eyes were dry. They focused on Elias’s familiar blue shirt and brown vest.
Jake stiffened for a moment, to test his muscles, and tried to move his hands. His left hand wouldn’t move, but his right palm slid up his thigh to his midsection, to the place where the knife had sunk in. He pressed it down.
Dull pain suddenly turned sharp and burned through him under his hand. His eyes tightened, and he sucked in a short breath, wincing.
Elias turned and instantly snatched Jake’s right hand from the wound, clasped it and patted it. “Oh, not a good idea there, landlubber,” he said, holding on to Jake’s hand as it naturally tried to pull back to the pain. “Don’t touch. You’ll scotch all our handiwork.”
Hearing that, Matthew reappeared from the pub kitchen. When he saw Jake, his face broke into a grin. “Rosebush! Wide awake.” He strode into the room, wiping his hands dry on his pub apron, and sat down gingerly at Jake’s side. “The mates’ll be glad about that.”
Jake cleared his throat and murmured, “Sumner?”
“No sign of any of ’em. Wouldn’t bet they’s stay on the island. Couldn’t show their faces if they did. They’d find themselves staring at their feet from a tops’l spar.” He wobbled Jake’s knee and grinned reassuringly. Even past the grin there was a haze of defined threat for those who had done this to his cousin.
Strengthened by Matthew’s private anger, Jake forced out a single, terrible question. “Where’s Abbey?”
“Where do you think?”
Matthew’s mouth hadn’t moved, and it wasn’t Matthew’s voice he heard. This voice was soft as meadow wind, strong as the scrub oaks, and sounded amused that he would even have to ask. It came from his left side, and the sound of it gave him the strength to tum his head.
There she was. There she was.
Beside him, still holding his hand, there was Abbey. Her hair was a delirious wreck. It was longer than he remembered from that hazy time in the lighthouse, and in this lamplight the color was darker, the shade of buttered toast. She wore one of Elias’s shirts, this one gray flannel, and it hung on the round bulbs of her shoulders like a napkin draped over the back of a carved chair. Its big buttons gave weight to the soft fabric, holding it down between her breasts—safe. The gentle territory was safe. . ..
Her long fingers were coiled around his left hand—that was why it was so warm, and why he couldn’t move it.
Her presence shocked him, fortified him. His mind, fogged with guilt and anguish about what happened on the wharf, hadn’t let him remember that she’d been here all the time. Those had been only dreams and wishes—no, they’d been real. She was here.
“Abbey!” he gasped, raising his head and his right shoulder as he tried to turn to her, tried to sit up, tried to reach for her. Abbey, I think I . . .
Elias and Matthew both grabbed him and pressed him down before all the stitches broke.
“Whoa, rosebush,” Matthew soothed. “Stick to, now. No roving tonight for you. Not for a while.”
“He just wants me, that’s all,” Abbey murmured, drawing his hand to rest between her breasts, where she knew it wanted to be. She pulled her chair right up to the bedside until her knees pressed into the slats and leaned right down against him, her face impossibly close to his, her eyes right where he could stare into them. “I’m here, Jake, here with you.”
“But Cobb . . .”
Abbey smiled at him, stroking the side of his face. “Oh, it takes more than an overstuffed porkhead like him to get the better of me. Don’t you know that by now?”
His head dropped back onto the pillow, and his eyes, quite suddenly, cleared. “Guess I do now. . ..” he murmured. “Don’t leave me, Abbey.”
She brushed at his hairline with just enough playfulness to reassure him. “In the morning, I’ll go just long enough to get Dominic’s children up and fed and off to school. Then I’ll be back with you.” She smiled at him and whispered, “And even when I’m gone, you know we’ll be together. That’s the way it seems to be between us . . . you know.”
“I know,” he whispered back.
Abbey leaned even closer, until her cheek lay against his and her lips brushed his ear. She kissed the soft flesh in front of his ear and whispered even more softly. “I want you . . . I get what I want. No one can take you away. Sleep now, and I’ll be there with you in your dreams. You may not see me, but I’ll be there, somewhere near you. Don’t forget. Go to sleep, now. Close your eyes . . . that’s right . . . shhh.”
Again she kissed his neck, his ear, his temple, until his eyes drifted closed and a small groan of comfort fell out of him on a sigh.
“Sleep . . . dream . . . and I’ll be there with you. . ..”