simply going to talk to the girl, apologize if she expected it and listen to what she had to say. Where was the harm or the scandal in that?
She came skipping along the beach right to the water’s edge, heedless of the damp sand that clung to her shoes and hem. “Grâce à Dieu!” she cried as Josh climbed from the boat. “I feared I was too late, that I’dnever see you again to explain!”
Without thinking, Josh reached for her hand and felt her fingers tremble against his. “You shouldn’t be prowling around the waterfront alone like this, lass, not at this hour. Must be three o’clock in the morning at the least.”
“I had no choice, monsieur.” She shoved the shawl back from her face, and in the moonlight her dark eyes shone bright with excitement. “I couldn’t leave until Papa had closed the shutters and gone to sleep. But I’m safe enough. You forget my living depends on drunken rogues, and I know how to take care of myself.”
Josh could only shake his head, remembering how Jerusa had always claimed she, too, would be safe in Newport. “You could have waited until morning.”
“Mordieu, and let you go to your bed believing the worst of me?” She squeezed her fingers around his. “What you must believe instead is this—that until this night my father had never spoken that evil man’s name in my hearing! Not a word, no, not once, not even after what Deveaux did!”
“Then your father did know Deveaux?”
“Dieu merci, they never met. Deveaux was too clever, too grand for that. But Papa and ma chère Maman, may she rest in heaven by the side of the Blessed Virgin, how they suffered at his hands!”
She quivered now with the same righteous fury as her father’s, her face with its small, plump chin every bit as fierce. “Deveaux was born a gentleman, monsieur, and Papa says he was handsome enough to melt the sun from the sky, else Antoinette would never have done what she did.”
“Antoinette?” asked Josh.
“My mother’s sister, my aunt.” She was speaking so swiftly, driven by the shame to her family, that she was almost breathless with outrage. “Antoinette, too, worked in our petite auberge, and Papa says there was not a man in St-Pierre who did not worship her. But the only one she listened to was Deveaux. My mother’s tears, my father’s pleas, were nothing against his false promises and candied words. Nothing!”
Sadly Josh could guess the rest. Who couldn’t? “He seduced her?”
Ceci nodded, shaking her little fist at Deveaux’s ghost. “He seduced her, monsieur, and took her from those who loved her to his grand house, built with the blood and tears of those he had robbed and murdered. And it was there she perished by his side, in the fire that God sent in his fury to destroy that evil place and Deveaux with it!”
She wove her fingers into his to draw him closer. “You can understand it all now, monsieur, can’t you?” she said, almost pleading. “Why my father said what he did to you? It was because he loves me, monsieur, because he would not see me come to the same sorrow as poor Antoinette.”
“He believes I would do that to you?” demanded Josh incredulously. “Just because I mentioned Deveaux’s name?”
Ceci shook her head helplessly. “He said you would not seek out those left of Deveaux’s men unless you wished to join them yourself. He said—”
“He can damn well listen to what I have to say!” said Josh hotly. What right did some little hotheaded French barkeep have to insult him like this? “I’m sorry about his sister-in-law, sorry as can be. But it’s my sister that concerns me now, and if asking about Deveaux is going to bring me any closer to finding her, then I mean to ask you or him or anyone else I please until I find her.”
“But Papa said—”
“I’m not done yet, Ceci!” Struggling to keep his temper, Josh forced himself to lower his voice. “Your father’s got it all wrong, mind? I don’t know what happened to Antoinette, but Deveaux didn’t die in that fire. I know because he lived long enough to try to kill my parents. Instead my father wounded him so gravely he decided to take his own life, there with my own mother as witness.”
Now Ceci’s eyes were round as the moon above. “Your father killed Deveaux?”
“My father wouldn’t lie about a thing like that,” he said sharply. “Why else would Deveaux’s men decide to kidnap my sister now?”
“Revenge,” she whispered. “Oh, Monsieur Sparhawk, forgive me!”
“You’re not the one who needs forgiving.” Suddenly weary of the whole misunderstanding, he freed his fingers from hers and stuffed his hands into his coat pockets. “You tell your old papa that we’re on the same side. My sister Jerusa, his sister-in-law Antoinette—it all amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? You tell him that, Ceci. And if he’s got any notion of justice and wants to help, he can find me easy enough on the Tiger.”
He turned and began to walk toward the boat, his shoes silent on the packed sand.
“Wait, please, I beg you!”
He stopped and looked back over his shoulder. She was standing with her fists clenched at her sides and her chin lifted high, the black shawl trailing like a ragged pennant from her shoulders.
“He will help you, monsieur,” she said slowly. “If he has any hope of finding peace in this world or the next, he will help you.”
Chapter Fifteen
Michel lay in the hammock, cleaning one of his pistols and listening to the doleful ballad of lost loves and thwarted dreams sung by one of the Swan’s crewmen on the deck above. Michel sighed. He could sympathize all too well with whoever had written that ballad. His own love wasn’t exactly lost—she was lying soundly asleep in the bunk not three feet away from him, her hair tousled about her face and one arm thrown back enticingly behind her head—but she wasn’t exactly his, either.
This last week together with Jerusa had been both the best and the worst of his life. She had rarely left his sight, day or night, and with so much time together, he’d come to appreciate her as a companion as well as a woman. Which was, he thought wryly, just as well, since companionship was all he and Jerusa were destined to share.
Idly he kicked his foot against the bulkhead, rocking the hammock in time with the song. The hammock was one of the precautions he’d taken against being tempted again, and, even so, he’d been sorely tried by being able to hear Jerusa’s soft little sighs as she slept in the bunk across from him. Sacristi, he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted any woman, but to give in to his desires would be the worst possible thing he could do for them both.
And she knew it, too. After that first night aboard the brig, she’d been as careful as he had. There had been no more kisses, no more embraces and certainly no more of what they’d done so pleasurably that one time on the bunk. They slept in their clothes the way they had while traveling, and they made elaborate, self-conscious excuses whenever one or the other finally wished to change and needed the cabin’s privacy. The entire contrived arrangement, thought Michel with another sigh, would have been worthy
