Page 31 of The Sea Witch
“There is a small island, off the westernmost coast of Hispaniola. It’s lush, abundant with flora and fauna. Legend has it that a princess fled there with her lover, a man her family had determined was unworthy of her. The princess and her lover thought they were safe, but her family gave chase and found them. Heattempted to protect her, yet her kinsmen attacked and killed him, and he fell dead at her feet. Her tears were so copious, so eternal, that the nature spirits took pity on her and transformed her. Into a waterfall.”
She was quiet, and then nodded. “Tell our navigator where to locate this island.”
“And have my throat cut for my service.” He shook his head. “I’ll guide us there, step by step.”
“You aren’t in control here, navy man—Mr. Priestley.”
He stepped closer to her, into the halo of invisible energy that surrounded her. The nearer he came, the more it resonated in his own body. There was courage in her.
And doubt.
He started.
This brazen buccaneer... uncertain? Yet she was. Beneath the hard carapace of her identity as a witch, and a pirate captain, it was there.
There was sadness in her, too. The bleak reverberations of loss.
She drew in a sharp breath, and he felt it then, the resonance of himself withinher. All the parts of himself that he kept tightly locked away, they’d seeped into her. Desires and fears and hopes and sorrows. A thirst for things he dared not name, not even to himself. But now he’d become part of her, just as she had become part of him.
Goddamnit.
“We’re neither of us in control,” he growled. “Not anymore.”
The navigator for theSea Witchwas summoned, a woman named Luna. The lone lantern cast wan light on her fair but tanned skin. She appeared at the door to Alys Tanner’s cabin. Luna’s long sandy hair lay in sleep tangles around her shoulders and her gray eyes were drowsy but keen, yet she was alert and eager to listen to Ben’s directions on how to reach the island of the Weeping Princess.
She and Ben consulted as the captain looked on, nursing a tankard of rum. Fortunately for his sanity, Alys Tanner had put her breeches on. If he’d had to look at her bare legs a moment longer, with the dream memory of them wrapped around his body... The limits of his self-control could be tested for just so long, even if he still reeled at the way the sanctity of his dreams had been shattered.
He rubbed at the center of his chest. She’d said only one who desired the connection could make it happen. The last thing he wanted was to be linked to her. And yet he’d done it, anyway.
The task of guiding the ship’s navigator to the island made for a welcome distraction.
“For years, I’ve sailed these waters,” Luna admitted, her hands braced on the table as she studied the chart, her Scottish accent round and rolling, “and I never knew of this island or its whereabouts.”
“It likes to keep itself hidden,” he answered.
The navigator nodded. “All places have their own will, their own minds. I felt it in the Hebrides, where I was born, and strongly here, in the Caribbean.”
“Is it not safer for you at home in the Hebrides? Aboard a ship such as this one, your life cannot last long.” Unexpectedly, he liked Luna. Ghastly to think of her at the end of a noose, or splayed dead upon the top deck.
A corner of Luna’s mouth turned up. “Where I’m from, they gave me the wrong name, the wrong clothes. It was only when I sailed away and found my true home on theSea Witchthat I could be who I was always meant to be. There’s no safety in that, and the life I led there... it was hardly the one I wanted for myself.”
Ben gazed at her, and then at Alys Tanner, who looked at him with a challenge in her eyes. He was filled with her protectiveness for Luna. For all her crew.
He returned his attention to the chart on the table.
“We should reach the island two days after tomorrow,” he explained. “I’ll give you further coordinates as we get closer.”
“Those coordinates would be most usefulnow,” the captain returned. “Allof them.”
“Leverage, Captain.”
Luna made notes in her log, her quill scratching across the paper the only sound in the cabin. “I’ll be back at four bells for more.”
“Four bells, then,” he said.
“Back to your berth, Luna,” Alys Tanner directed. “Can’t have you yawning over your charts all day tomorrow, or we might wind up accidentally sailing to Curaçao.”
The navigator gave Alys a salute and a slight bow to Ben before hurrying out.
