Chapter Twenty-One

“We are not alone.”

Adriana forced herself to step back. She moved up the bank until she could feel the pebbles of the path beneath her slippers. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed several groups of people casting curious glances their way. She needed the protection of their gazes as a brake to her tangled impulses.

If he touched her now, she would be lost.

“Adriana.” His voice was soft. “You’ve grown into a wild, beautiful blossom, petite.”

His words flummoxed her. She was thrilled at the compliment yet at the same time it annoyed her. She’d worn the mask of a woman long enough to know that sweet words came easily to a man’s tongue if a woman’s bodice was cut low enough.

“After all these years,” she said, her voice husky, “and that’s the first thing you say to me?”

“I hardly know what I’m saying—”

“You seem to be poetic, nonetheless.”

“I’d rather speak the truth than insult your intelligence.” A strong emotion rippled across his face. “In all the ways I thought we might meet again, never did I expect it to be in the house of the governor of the Carolinas.”

Her mind did a stutter-jump. “Then you knew I was alive all along.”

“I didn’t know.” He shook his head hard. “I only hoped.”

“Well I knew you were dead.” She spoke the word through a throat gone tight. “I saw you dead.”

She would never forget the sight of all those bodies washed up on shore. She would never forget Gwynn’s swollen, half-eaten face. She would never forget the man in Roarke’s clothing, the man whose head had been crushed to a pulp.

“That explains why, when I walked into the room,” he said, breathing hard, “you looked at me as if I were a ghost.”

“Yes.”

“I took your hand so you wouldn’t faint.” He raised his hand as if he were going to touch her, but dropped it so it lay by his side in a fist. “You thought me dead because you heard the gunshots?”

“Gunshots?”

“That night I sent you to shore, the men attacked. I tried to shoot, but they wrestled the gun from me.”

“Mutiny.”

“Yes.” His palm drifted to his shoulder. “They shot me and I toppled over the gunwale. I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the chaloupe with Drake.”

She didn’t remember hearing gunshots during that terrible first night, not over the crash of the waves upon the shore. Now her breath came hard and fast as she tried to make sense of his story.

“You were in a boat,” she said, “during that terrible storm.”

“Was there a storm?”

“A hurricane.” It hurt to trace the familiar lines of his face. The last time she had observed him so closely, they had been naked in bed. “As bad as any cyclone in the Indian Ocean.”

“I don’t remember it. Drake spent a lot of time rowing before he found landfall.”

“Your ship was destroyed. Days later I found pieces of it washed up by the Santee. I found Gwynn. I found you.” Her voice broke. “Your burgundy velvet coat. Your boots—”

“I’d taken the coat off,” he said, understanding lighting his eyes, “preparing to fight unencumbered.”

She whispered, “Somebody else—”

“Yes, some unlucky soul sported my coat. Such fools, those men,” he said, in a voice that almost seemed as if he mourned the deaths of mutineers. “Not a one of them knew how to handle a ship properly in a storm.”

“They got their just deserts.”

“It’s done then. Captain Wolfe is well and truly dead.”

Captain Wolfe did not look dead as he stood before her. Her mind ran with questions but she had enough of her wits to hold her tongue, for some of the governor’s guests drifted their way and now stood dangerously within earshot.

“We can’t talk here.” He dropped his voice so only she could hear him. “Let me come to you tonight.”

Her heart raced in her chest. She had so many questions. She could barely think straight, but under the murk of her confusion one single, disturbing thought rose like a bubble floating up out of molasses.

Roarke had been alive all these years.

Yet he’d never tried to find her.

“Adriana,” he said, with urgency.

She met his eye.

“Come to me an hour after this gathering disperses,” she said. “I shall leave the back door unbolted.”

***

As promised, the back door to her house was open.

Roarke slipped in and closed the door behind him. He stood in the gloom waiting for his vision to adjust. A golden glow spilled from a hallway. He followed that light until he found a room with a large wooden table strewn with papers and lit by two single candles.

Adriana stood behind it, still laced tight in her jewel-green dress. She gripped in her hand a crystal glass filled with the same liquor that gleamed in a nearby decanter. Even if she finished the bottle, he didn’t think it would make this reunion any easier. If he had to wager, he’d say that Adriana could handle her drink better than any woman in Charles Town.

It made his chest ache that she looked so guarded and so breathtakingly beautiful.

He nodded to the room. “You’ve done well for yourself, Adriana.”

“I’ve heard the same said about you.”

He’d seen her approach the governor later in the evening, talking in low tones. “It’s true that I’ve prospered.”

“Astoundingly, for a man risen from the dead.”

“Only Captain Wolf is dead,” he corrected, hearing an edge in her voice that he’d dreaded but expected, now that the shock had worn off. “The respectable Captain Roarke Lee Cameron has taken his place.”

He tried very hard not to stare at her. He knew his presence unnerved her. He’d noticed that in the garden when he called her petite and her little nostrils had flared and her chin had gone tight. But he still couldn’t quite reconcile the tiny beauty he saw before him with the dirty-faced girl he’d known upon the ship. He couldn’t yet discern whether the fine satins, ribbons, and lace were just another disguise, or whether she had finally come out from behind all her masks.

“What I would like to know,” she said, “is what you’ve been doing since you marooned me on the shores of the Santee.”

He flinched as if she’d hit him with a splintered spar.

It was no more than he deserved. “It’s a long story, petite.”

“I’m in no particular hurry tonight.”

She kicked back her foot, juddering the chair behind her a few inches, before dropping into it like a sailor onto a coil of rope.

He filled his lungs with air. He would tell her the truth. He would tell her all of it, from beginning to end, even if it meant that, when he was done, she would hate him for the rest of his life.

He gestured to a chair across the table from her. “May I?”

A lift of her glass was her only assent.

“As I mentioned at the governor’s house,” he said, settling uneasily into the hard-backed chair, “I was wounded during the mutiny. Drake fished me out of the water. I only came to when our chaloupe was very far from the ship. Drake was in a panic, trying to find landfall in the dark.”

Sharp needles of rain had awoken him, he remembered, the rain and Drake shouting curses toward the sky. The boat rode the growing swells in a way that lifted him off the boards and slammed him back so that his shoulder exploded with pain. He must have lost consciousness several times, because he remembered little else until he woke again somewhere on shore.

“We put in to shore just north of Charles Town.” He hadn’t known it at the time, because he’d been beset with fever-dreams of Adriana lost in the woods. “Drake was concerned about being caught by the English authorities. Once I was strong enough to take to sea again, we made our way down the coast.”

“Down the coast?”

Her eyes glittered in the candlelight. Sharp little darts piercing his conscience. He supposed he could tell her that he’d argued with Drake to sail north to retrieve her from the wilderness. He could tell her that he was too weak with blood loss and fever to convince his own lieutenant. It was all true.

But that was nothing but a litany of failures—failure to convince Drake, to muster the strength to physically overwhelm him, and a failure of heart, as well, for reasons it took him a long time to grasp.

That was the heart of his shame.

“We had no food, no water, no coin.” The words were like rocks in his mouth. “We’d heard that in the inlets south of Charles Town we might find friendly faces.”

She swirled the liquid in her glass. “You went looking for pirates.”

“As long as a man knows a foresail from a jib, pirates don’t ask uncomfortable questions about nationality or loyalties.”

He held out his hand toward the decanter and raised his brow in question. She waved for him to pour.

She said, “You gave me the impression at the governor’s house tonight that you put Captain Wolfe firmly in his grave. Yet now you tell me you went looking for pirates.”

“Not as a captain, but as a common sailor.” He pulled the stopper out of the bottle. “Drake and I found transport on the first ship we could. We jumped ship weeks later, in Jamaica.”

“And then?”

“Drake and I had nothing but the clothes on our backs. For a while, we worked on merchant vessels, doing some shipping among the islands. St. Kitts, Barbados.” A man had a lot of time to think about his life’s bad choices when swabbing decks on someone else’s ship. “Eventually, I made the acquaintance of a man who owned a ship and a sugar plantation, whose captain had died during a smallpox epidemic. He put me in charge of his cargo.”

“Fortuitous.”

“I have discovered,” he said, “that a man doesn’t have to become a pirate to make a fortune in this new world.”

“Thus you put Captain Wolfe in his grave.”

“It had been my intention from the very start,” he said. “It’s the reason I took a false name.” He searched for some explanation she would embrace. “I was Captain Wolfe in the Indian Ocean, and, for a very short time, in the waters outside Saint-Malo. There are few people in the Caribbean waters who know my face or my name. It seemed the opportune time to let him drown in the Atlantic.”

“Fortunately, most of the men who would recognize you,” she murmured, “went down in L’Aventure.”

“Which explains why I never came face-to-face with any of the mutineers, as I expected to, eventually.” He took a sip of the brandy and felt it burn down his throat. “This new world,” he said, “allows fortune among common men.”

“And women.”

He thought he saw a flicker of a smile on her face, but it was there and gone before he could be sure.

“Is fortune what you were striving for,” she said, “while you sailed on those merchant ships? While I spent my days grinding corn and sewing skirts in the swamps of the Santee?”

“They weren’t my ships,” he said, trying not to wince at her words. “I sailed under other men’s orders until I finally had saved enough to purchase my own vessel.”

“How very respectable of you.”

“The minute I bought my ship, Adriana, I came here to look for you.”

It was a bald confession that had little effect on her. She made a moue with her mouth, a lovely shape that he wanted very badly to kiss.

“It seems,” she said, “we’ve both had adventures in the three years since we’ve seen each other.”

“You haven’t told me yours.”

“Another time.”

In the golden light of the candles, he watched the perfect mounds of her breasts swell against the constriction of her bodice. His cock noticed, too, stirring in his newly-bought breeches, in a way that made him wonder for the thousandth time since she’d promised to unlock the door to her house whether she would welcome him into her bedroom as well.

He didn’t deserve her forgiveness. He didn’t even know how to ask for it. But he couldn’t keep his heart from hoping.

This woman had every reason to despise him for what he’d failed to do. He couldn’t erase the past. He couldn’t make her believe that he’d spent every hour of the past three years thinking about her. All he could do was tell her the truth and see if some of it slipped by her defenses and stirred old feelings.

“I knew that you would survive this new world, my strong, resilient Adriana.” He tried to catch her suddenly elusive gaze. “I knew it in my heart three years ago. And here I am, finally returned, and I discover you dressed like the finest of Charles Town ladies, with no need of the fortune I spent three years raising so that I might finally—”

“Stop.” She clattered the glass upon the table. “Don’t talk of what you might finally do if you finally found me.”

His chest tightened. He saw the color on her cheeks, her swift breathing, the way she tried so hard not to show how much his return had affected her. He sensed that she balanced on a knife’s-edge of indecision, the kind of decision that an honorable man would allow her to make without influence.

She stood up suddenly. “I’m very glad to find you alive, Roarke.” Her throat flexed as she swallowed hard. “I wish you the best of prospects in your business here in Charles Town.”

It was a cold, undeniable dismissal. She met his gaze with all the street-urchin courage he remembered. He pushed himself up from the hard-backed chair, taking his time about it, debating whether he should press the subject or let it lie, whether he should try to step around the table and take her face in his hands, debating whether truly he’d become an honorable man in all the years he’d been away, whether he’d become the kind of man that a woman like Adriana deserved.

“As for your pirating past,” she continued, with a nervous wave of her hand, “you need not have any fear in that regard. I will never refer to you as Captain Wolfe. Your secret is safe with me.”

He didn’t give a damn about his secret. He didn’t give a damn about anything except kissing those soft lips that he’d dreamed of too many times. He didn’t give a damn about anything but making her love him again.

“Adriana,” he said. “That’s not why I came here tonight.”