Page 27 of Enchanted By a Pirate
"We'll get to the traitors in a moment. How did you get there? What happened prior to that?"
Anna shook her head. She thought she would get answers from him, but again she was going in circles. "I don't know. Until a few hours ago, I thought I was born there, a normal woman who worked in the garden department at a home improvement store."
He pushed away from the wall abruptly. "You worked? Were you enslaved? I will make your tormentors atone for every lash!"
Anna chuckled briefly. "There were neither whips nor tormentors. I did it voluntarily. It was fun and my colleagues were nice and…"
"You didn't do it voluntarily!" He angrily punched the air with his fist. "If you forgot yourself, someone banished you to that world and convinced you that you were happy. You left… everything behind!"
He said it with such fervor that she wondered if he was referring specifically to what had been between the two of them. Why had the others warned her about him? There had to be a reason. "Why did my friends try to convince me it was you?"
Anger glowed in his dark eyes. "Because they wanted to prevent us from continuing what we started."
Anna frowned. "Which was…? Spreading fairy dust on your pirate ship?"
He snorted. "No, madam. Finding the person responsible for the disappearance of the fairies."
Anna lowered her arms in disbelief. "Us? The two of us? Together?"
"Aye." The glow came back into his eyes again, but it immediately disappeared and the captain punched the cold stone wall with his fist. "You must have gotten in the way because you figured out who was responsible. Then that person put a spell on you, banished you, and made you work as a slave.
Anna no longer understood what was going on. If what the pirate said was true, she wasn't the one to blame. It was tempting to let go of this burden, but how did she know if she could trust him? Was she falling into the very trap that this scoundrel had laid out for her?
She felt her reaction to him in her body and her heart beat faster as she was filled with longing. There probably had been something between them at one time, but that didn't mean the rest of his story was true. But what if it was? If the fairies had begun disappearing before…
She had an idea. "What's the last thing you remember? I mean when was the last time we saw each other?"
He closed his eyes then opened them again and a noise that almost sounded like a sigh left his mouth. "We were at sea for a few days. We were…" An eyebrow danced up anddown lasciviously and Anna could barely suppress a grin. "…conferring. You left to meet Iris and Jasmin."
"I had already brought you the fairy dust?"
"Aye, we had met in our bay before." Seeing her perplexed look, he added, "It's remote, on the border between the Kingdom of Flowers and the Rocks. You brought me a rum barrel full of fairy dust and we hid it below deck. Then we sailed off to confer."
"Okay, and we were traveling for how long?"
The look in his eyes grew angry. "Why does it matter?"
"I have to reconstruct the events in as much detail as possible, Cap… Um, what did I call you?"
He grinned suggestively at her. "Captain?"
Anna shook her head resolutely. "I don't believe you."
He chuckled softly. "Chris. You called me Chris."
"Okay, Chris, how many days were we at sea?"
"Two, madam."
"Okay. I brought you a rum barrel full of fairy dust to this bay, we stored it on your ship, and then we set off. We were at sea for two days conferring," she said, emphasizing the last word so that there was no doubt that she didn't mean it in an ambiguous way. "Was it just the two of us on the ship or was your crew there?"
"Obviously my crew was there."
Anna tapped the tip of her nose thoughtfully. "Then I set off to meet up with Iris and…who did you say?"
"Iris and Jasmin.”
"Jasmin… I haven't met her yet. Probably a fairy too, right? Hopefully, she's still… around." She glanced up, embarrassed.
