Table of Contents

Cover Page

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

Excerpt

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Author’s Note

About the Author

Copyright

10TH ANNIVERSARY
Special thanks to our well-wishers, who have contributed their congratulations and support.

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The Tiger’s Bride
Merline Lovelace

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Al, my own rogue-hearted adventurer. Who could have imagined that our honeymoon in Hong Kong twenty-nine years ago would have been the start of something so wonderful?

“A damned unusual missionary’s daughter,”

Jamie muttered, as much to himself as to her.

“Well, yes,” Sarah answered, her smile fading at his uncivil tone. “I suppose I am or I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

Tired of word games, Jamie decided it was time to rid himself of this audacious female. “I assume your presence has something to do with the notes you sent me, and not any desire to learn the intricacies of the Fluttering Butterfly.”

“The fluttering…?”

With a mocking grin, he gestured to one of the painted panels decorating the bed.

A wave of color washed up her neck. Lifting her chin, she glared at him. “Of course not!”

Prompted as much by his pounding, swirling senses as by the way she stuck her nose in the air, Jamie couldn’t resist taunting her.

“You might find it enlightening,” he suggested provocatively…

Chapter One

Sarah Abernathy had never visited a brothel before.

Nor, if her family’s situation had been less desperate, would she have dreamed of setting foot inside the House of the Dancing Blossoms. But her father had been missing for almost three weeks now, and her only hope of finding him lay with the man who, according to the gossipmongers, made nightly visits to the most notorious pleasure palace in Macao.

Since James Kerrick, Third Viscount Straithe, and captain of the schooner Phoenix, had ignored Sarah’s urgent and repeated requests to present himself at the Presbyterian Mission House, she was left with no choice but to accost him in his chosen den. Setting her mouth in a way that would have made her father extremely nervous had he seen it, his eldest daughter bent to tie a wooden clog on one stockinged foot.

“Do you really think you should venture out dressed like that, Sarah?” a soft voice asked worriedly. “I can’t help feeling that Papa might object if he were here.”

Wiping the grim determination from her expression, Sarah lifted her head and gave her younger sister an affectionate smile. “If Papa were here to object, I wouldn’t be going out at all, would I?”

Abigail pursed her pink lips. “No, I suppose not.”

It wasn’t in Abby’s nature to argue or challenge her adored older sister. Still, her sense of propriety led her to one more protest.

“Perhaps you should wait. I’m sure we’ll hear from Papa soon. He’s gone off like this before. Remember the time in the Punjab, when he trekked into the mountains to find that hermit?”

“I remember,” Sarah replied dryly, reaching for the other high-platformed shoe. “I also remember the disasters that occurred as a result.”

“But Sarah,” the young boy at Abby’s side piped up. “It wasn’t Papa’s fault that the village well became foul the day he brought the hermit down from the mountain.”

“That’s true, Charlie. Nor was it his fault that lightning stampeded a herd of sacred cows through the fields that same afternoon. Still, the villagers blamed him for the disasters.”

The six-year-old gave her a gap-toothed grin. “Because he lured their holy man down from his cave, instead of letting him stay up there to protect them with his prayers.”

Charlie loved the oft-repeated tale. Although he’d been a babe in arms at the time of the Punjab incident, he could recite from memory the scriptures Papa had thundered at the villagers from the swine hut where he’d barricaded himself against their attack. Miraculously, Papa had held off the angry villagers until the raja’s personal guard swooped to the rescue.

“That was when we left India to come to China, wasn’t it?” the boy asked gleefully.

“That’s when we came to Macao,” Sarah confirmed, neglecting to add that the raja had sternly advised the unrepentant missionary never to set foot in India again. Neither Charlie nor his two older brothers knew that part of the tale, and they certainly wouldn’t hear it from Sarah.

She was well aware that Charlie often endowed their father with heroic and wholly unrealistic traits. The boy himself possessed the most adventurous little soul. With his older brothers away at school, he was often restless and into mischief. Unfortunately, The Reverend Mr. Abernathy, when he noticed his youngest at all, no longer possessed the patience to indulge his lively offspring. Charlie needed to be in school with other boys his age, Sarah knew, where his energy and daring would find kindred spirits.

She sighed, wondering for the thousandth time where she’d find the funds to send Charlie back to England to join his brothers at the Barrowgate School for Young Gentlemen. He should have gone last year, but her mama’s legacy had barely stretched to cover the older two boys. There wasn’t even enough left to provide Abigail, sweet, lovely Abigail, with the dowry she deserved.

Glancing at her sister, Sarah told herself once again that the girl’s exquisite face and gentle nature should be a sufficient bride gift for any husband. She understood the ways of the world well enough, however, to know that wealth begat wealth, and dowerless young missionary’s daughters generally married penniless young clerks. To this point, Abigail hadn’t shown the slightest interest in any of the moonstruck young men who fell all over their feet whenever she entered a room. Sarah still had hopes that her sister might attract a more mature suitor…one with the means to provide generously for the delicate Abigail’s comfort and perhaps for Charlie’s schooling, as well.

Sighing, Sarah forced herself to put aside the familiar worries about the siblings for whom she’d long ago assumed responsibility. The Lord would provide, or so her papa always promised. Now, if only the good Lord would provide her papa!

Reaching for a large, conical straw hat, she struggled to tuck her thick, unruly hair inside it. Abigail quickly came to her assistance.

“Here, let me help.”

The younger girl took the heavy reddish mass in gentle hands and held it in place while Sarah anchored it with the hat. Charlie’s merry laugh filled the small room.

“You lookee much Chin-Chin.”

Sarah couldn’t bring herself to scold him for his lapse into lilting, singsong cant. Some long-ago emperor had decreed that, upon pain of death, no Chinese except licensed interpreters could learn the tongue of barbarians. As a method of controlling contacts between his subjects and the Outsiders, the decree had failed dismally in its intent. It did, however, force everyone who wished to communicate without interpreters to do so in Pidgin, a lamentable mix of English and Chinese that made all who used it sound foolish in the extreme. In this instance, though, Sarah thought Pidgin fit the situation exactly. She did indeed lookee much Chin-Chin.

She glanced down at herself, more than pleased with her disguise. Her high-collared blue cotton robe draped her from neck to knees. Under the loose-fitting robe she wore the baggy trousers favored by Chinese men and women alike. With her distinctive gingercolored hair and most of her face covered by the straw hat, she hoped to pass unnoticed through the streets of Macao.

“Dressed like this, I daresay even Lady Blair wouldn’t recognize me,” Sarah said with some satisfaction.

“Lady Blair!” Paling, Abigail put her fingertips to her cheeks. “Oh, Sarah, do you think there’s a chance you might meet her? You mustn’t, you really mustn’t, go out if that’s the case. If she sees you or learns where you’re going, she’ll withdraw the invitations to her Venetian breakfast and spread the most awful gossip about you!”

It wouldn’t be the first time, Sarah thought wryly. The wife of the British East India Company’s Chief Factor did not approve of the elder Miss Abernathy. More than once, Lady Blair had dropped pointed hints that Sarah went too far in assisting her father with his work, particularly when that assistance involved carrying food to lepers or speaking out against the torturous practice of binding young girls’ feet. The formidable matron had been kind to Abigail, though, and invited her and the sister who acted as her chaperone to all the important social functions. For Abby’s sake, Sarah generally avoided crossing the overbearing woman.

“Abigail, pet, I was just funning you. Lady Blair won’t be about at this time of night, nor will she be in this part of the city.”

“But what if someone else should see you? Or learn where you’re going?” The beauty wrung her hands. “It would quite ruin your chances with that new clerk who’s just arrived from home, the one we met on the Praya Grande.”

Remembering the besotted young man who had trailed behind the two sisters like a lost puppy for most of their afternoon stroll along Macao’s wide, bayside boulevard, Sarah laughed.

“Mr. Silverthorne wasn’t the least interested in me, you goose. His gaze never left your face the whole time you walked with him.”

“Oh, no, never say so!” Tears sheened Abigail’s aquamarine eyes. “Truly, I only walked with him because he wished to speak to me about you.”

Charlie shook his head in disgust. “You’re not going to turn on the waterworks again, are you?”

Sarah sent her brother a stern look as she soothed the agitated Abigail. Despite Sarah’s every effort to discourage her foolish dreams, Abby still cherished fond hopes for her older sibling. In her sweet, unselfish way, she sang Sarah’s praises to the men who flocked to her side and refused to admit that her beloved sister was firmly and irrevocably on the shelf, an acknowledged spinster at the advanced age of twenty-four.

Sarah herself had long since accepted the fact that her lack of dowry and unremarkable face would win her no husband. She considered herself fortunate to have been given the responsibility of raising three lively brothers and a loving sister, thus fulfilling her maternal instincts most satisfactorily. If on occasion she tossed and turned at night, kept awake by less maternal urges, she accepted that as an inescapable fact of life. She was a woman, after all, but an eminently practical one. With time, those strange, unspecified longings would pass. Meanwhile, she had her family to care for and her papa to look after.

Assuming she could find him!

At the thought of her missing parent, Sarah patted Abigail’s shoulder a final time. “I must go now. Cook said Number Five Nephew will be waiting for me.”

“I wish you would not go,” Abigail whispered, valiantly battling her tears as she and Charlie trailed their sister out of the small bedroom.

“Don’t worry so. I’m just going to talk to Lord Straithe.”

“But Sarah, must you do so in a…” Abby caught herself just in time, glancing down at Charlie’s bright, inquisitive face. “Must you do so in that particular place?”

“Yes, I must. Since he refused to come to the Mission House, I have no choice but to beard him in his favorite den.”

“Sarah!” Charlie danced on one foot in excitement. “Never say you’re going to an opium den! Can I go with you?”

She ruffled his brown curls. “Of course I’m not going to such a disgusting place. And you may not go with me. You must stay and keep Abigail from worrying until I return.”

Charlie heaved a sigh, but even at his tender years he’d developed the family’s protective air for the overly sensitive Abigail. Nobly, he offered to hunt down a set of spillikins. The childish game would keep his sister occupied during Sarah’s absence.

“Thank you, Charlie,” she said gratefully.

At that moment, a slight, pigtailed figure glided into the room on silent feet. Bowing, he addressed Sarah by the honorary title he’d accorded her years ago.

“You go quick quick, Big Sister. Number Five Nephew no can waitchee long.”

Over Charlie’s head, Sarah met the impassive gaze of the man known to the Abernathys only as Cook. As usual, she couldn’t read the expression in his black eyes, shielded as they were by folded lids and beetling white brows. Sarah was never quite sure what Cook thought of the family of “foreign devils” he’d taken charge of. She knew only that she relied on this slender, graying servant far more than on her own father to keep the Abernathy household functioning.

“I’ll go at once,” she replied.

“Youngest granddaughter, Little One With A Limp, takes you.”

Sarah nodded to the youngster waiting respectfully behind her grandfather. The girl bobbed her head, clearly too overcome by shyness or too awed by her proximity to the Outer Barbarians to speak. After a few final instructions to Abigail and Charlie, Sarah pulled her hat brim down farther over her face, tucked her hands in her sleeves and followed the tiny girl out the back door of the Presbyterian Mission House.

Situated as it was on a steep hill in the shadow of the old Portuguese fort, the Mission enjoyed a spectacular view of Macao’s busy harbor during the day. Even now, as dusk settled in a velvet haze over the narrow peninsula, Sarah caught her breath at the vista below her.

In late July, the southwest monsoons brought traders from all over the world to the vast bay east of Macao. Hundreds of ships now lay at anchor, waiting for passes and Chinese pilots to guide them up the Pearl River to Canton, where all trading officially took place. Lantern lights winked from hulking, many-gunned East Indiamen far out in the bay. Closer in, frigates and sleek, two-masted schooners rocked on the waves. Junks and sampans of every size darted among the foreign ships, sculled by the boat girls who made their living catering to the needs of the sailors.

Sarah frowned at the thought of the boat girls, several of whom numbered among Cook’s many relatives. The Reverend Mr. Abernathy had launched a vigorous campaign during last year’s trading season to save these unfortunates from the sailors’ unbridled lusts. His efforts had proved spectacularly unsuccessful. Not only had the boat girls objected to this interference with their trade, but the sailors had grown most vociferous in their protests. Lord Blair, Britain’s senior representative, had been forced to step in to quell several near-riots. Closer to home, Cook had placed a series of inedible and highly suspicious dishes before the Reverend for weeks as a signal of his personal displeasure.

Sarah shook her head as she followed her guide through the twisting streets, wondering if life was as complicated for the families of other men of the cloth. She didn’t think so. She still held dim, distant memories of a quiet vicarage in Kent. The Abernathys had left the vicarage when Sarah was still in short skirts. Since then, Papa’s fervor to spread the word of God had taken them to a series of exotic overseas posts. In the early years, Sarah remembered, the dedicated missionary had scored some successes and could take pride in a goodly number of converts.

It was only since her mama’s death, just weeks after Charlie’s birth, that papa had grown so…eccentric…in his pursuit of the Lord’s work. There was no other word for it, Sarah acknowledged ruefully. Nowadays, his family faded from his mind completely when the call took him. So did common sense.

The Presbyterian Board of Elders had already written him twice, warning him to temper his zeal. Lord Blair had added his approbation to the board’s. Another incident could well cause Papa’s recall from China and the loss of the Abernathy family’s meager income. Yet he’d thrown those cautions to the winds when he’d heard of a mandarin in Fukien province who wanted to learn more of the Barbarian’s God. Disregarding his own safety, his family’s worry, and the Emperor’s edict against foreigners traveling inside China, the Reverend Mr. Abernathy had stolen up the coast. Sarah had to find him and bring him home before Lord Blair heard of his unauthorized excursion. And to find him, she had to enlist the aid of the most notorious captain sailing the South China Sea.

Her mouth firming, Sarah adjusted her stride to her small guide’s uneven pace. Within minutes, she’d passed through the gates that separated the Christian City, as the walled European enclave was known, from the sprawling Chinese village of Mong Ha. Immediately, the sights and scents of the teeming streets engulfed her.

Pigtailed vendors carrying steaming baskets of rice and vegetables cried their wares. In tiny, dirt-floored shops, succulent strips of duck and pork crackled on charcoal braziers. Money changers with strings of copper cash and portable scales for weighing silver shouted their skills, while herb sellers, peddlers, and sweating porters with laden pails of water at either end of their carrying poles elbowed their way through the crowd. Children shrieked, dogs barked, and huge, evil-smelling hogs snuffled in the gutters.

Careful to keep her head down, Sarah peered from under the concealing brim of her hat with great interest. In her years in Macao, she’d ventured into Mong Ha only twice, once to bring food to destitute families after a typhoon had washed their homes into the sea, and once to ascertain that their ailing Cook was being cared for by his extended family. Each time, a scandalized Chinese official had escorted her back to the gates of the Christian City. By decree of the Emperor, firmly ensconced in his Celestial City thousands of miles away, European women were barred from all Chinese soil except the narrow, three-mile-long peninsula which contained the old Portuguese walled city of Macao.

The Reverend Mr. Abernathy firmly believed that this outrageous edict was the work of the celibate Jesuits who’d held such sway over the Chinese emperors for a century or more. Sarah herself suspected that the prohibition sprang from more direct causes. The simple fact was that the European women’s mode of dress shocked the modest Chinese to their core. The high-waisted, low-necked chemise gowns brought into fashion by the French Empress Josephine some years ago displayed a shameful amount of feminine flesh. Even the Abernathy sisters’ more conservative gowns, with their long, tight sleeves and lace-trimmed bodices, raised Cook’s brows. Thus Sarah had disguised herself in Chinese clothing to seek out the man whose help she so desperately needed.

Her diminutive guide stopped and pointed shyly. “House of Flowers, Big Sister.”

Sarah glanced in surprise at the building the child indicated. Somehow she’d expected a brothel to look quite different from this elegant residence. As viewed from the street, with only the tips of its many-tiered roof visible behind its high walls, the building might have been mistaken for a wealthy mandarin’s home. An intricately carved ebony gate stood open—to admit nocturnal guests, Sarah supposed. Beyond the peaked gatehouse, she caught a glimpse of lush gardens cut by pebbled walks and illuminated by glowing lanterns.

“You wanchee come come,” the little girl urged, tugging on her sleeve.

Following the child, Sarah plunged into a dark alley that ran alongside one wall of the house. Garbage and other matter she preferred not to identify squished under her wooden clogs. Halfway down the alley, a dark figure detached itself from the shadows.

“Number Five Nephew?”

The figure bobbed its head in reply. “Yes, Big Sister. You come, quick quick.”

Sarah felt her heart begin to pound as she slipped through a side gate. Despite her brave words to Abigail earlier, she wasn’t quite as comfortable about venturing inside one of Macao’s most infamous brothels as she’d pretended.

With a terse order to wait, Number Five Nephew pushed Little One With A Limp behind a screen of trailing jasmine vines, then gestured for Sarah to follow. Head down, hands tucked inside her sleeves, she hurried along a neatly swept pebbled path.

As they rounded a corner of the main building, Sarah couldn’t resist taking a quick peek. The scene in the central courtyard made her eyes widen. She might well have been staring at Lady Blair’s own gardens on the occasion of the Midsummer’s Eve Ball, the event that always marked the start of Macao’s social season.

Well-dressed women strolled the walks on the arms of their chosen companions. An orchestra of many-stringed instruments filled the night air with silvery notes. Scattered tables held every imaginable delicacy. The only difference between this soiree and Lady Blair’s, Sarah noted with a tickle of irrepressible amusement, was that the women here wore embroidered gowns buttoned modestly up to the small collars that banded their necks. At Lady Blair’s, the revealing ball gowns would have bared acres of rounded breasts and dimpled arms.

Quite suddenly, Sarah’s amusement vanished. By the light of a hanging lantern she recognized a portly man leaning over the tiny, dark-haired woman on his arm. If Sarah wasn’t mistaken, that was The Honorable Mr. Forsythe, Senior Accountant at the East India Company and a deacon of her father’s small congregation! Her lips folded into a tight line. How would she would ever face the man…or his wife…across a church pew again?

Ducking her head to avoid any further compromising sights, Sarah followed her guide down a dim corridor. Almost immediately, the real purpose of the House of the Dancing Blossoms began to impress itself on her consciousness. Female giggles drifted through thin bamboo walls, punctuated by an occasional male grunt and, suddenly, a tortured groan.

Sarah stopped abruptly at the sound. Her first startled thought was to rush to the poor victim’s aid. Before she did so, the groan ended in a long, shuddering sigh, followed almost immediately by a muttered phrase in English that made her blush to the tips of her ears.

“Come!” her guide whispered, beckoning furiously.

Sarah hurried after him, trying without much success to ignore the sounds that emanated from the chambers they passed. By the time the boy opened the door to a small, dimly lit room, she knew her face was as red as the silk banner hanging just inside the door. To her relief, the room was empty. Her nerves jumping, she turned to her escort.

“Cap-i-tan come come, same place?”

Number Five Nephew bobbed his head. “Yes, Big Sister. Every nightee, same same.” He shooed her inside. “You waitee, he come. Then we go, quick quick.”

As the door closed behind her nervous escort, Sarah drew in a deep, steadying breath. She needed to cool her cheeks and compose her thoughts for her imminent meeting with the scandalous Lord Straithe.

According to the gossipmongers, James Kerrick had started down the road to ruin some eight years ago. Then a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, he’d been caught in a most compromising situation with his admiral’s wife. The fact that he’d just been cited for extraordinary heroism in one of the last naval battles of the Napoleonic wars didn’t mitigate his disgrace. In short order, he’d been dismissed from the Navy, ostracized by society, and shunned by a rigidly disapproving older brother. Undaunted, he’d purchased his own ship and charted a course of dissolution and dissipation ever since.

His brother had died some years ago, Sarah had learned, and the cashiered naval officer had become Third Viscount Straithe. His brother had avenged himself on the black sheep who’d disgraced him, however, by selling the family estate to a land-hungry squire just before he died. Straithe now held the title, and nothing else.

It went against Sarah’s grain to turn to such a man for help, but he was her only hope. Unfortunately, he hadn’t shown the least sign of wanting to aid her. He’d ignored her repeated notes requesting his presence at the Mission House on a matter of some urgency. When she’d tried to contact him through his man of business, Straithe had instructed the clerk to palm her off with a donation to the Mission and the excuse that the captain was too busy to concern himself with the affairs of the colony.

Evidently he wasn’t too busy for regular visits to the House of the Dancing Blossoms, Sarah thought in some pique. Well, at least Straithe’s disgusting habits had given her the means to track him down.

Tipping her hat back, she glanced around the small room. The chamber wasn’t particularly well equipped for the serious discussion she needed to have with Straithe. Aside from a low, lacquered table in one corner that held a porcelain teapot, several handle-less cups and a plate of fruit, the only other piece of furniture in the room was the bed. Canopied and enclosed on three sides by curtains painted with scenes that brought the blood rushing to Sarah’s cheeks once more, the massive platform dominated the chamber.

She turned away from its erotic splendor, reminding herself that she was no schoolgirl to be shocked at such vulgar displays. She’d nursed her mama during the childbed fever that eventually claimed her. She’d tended to her brothers and sisters and many of her papa’s flock. She’d seen more sickness and death than many women of her age and class. Nevertheless, she had to fan herself with her sleeve for some moments before she felt composed enough to face the man she’d come to see.

When the door slid open long moments later and he stepped inside, Sarah’s first, uncensored thought was that the phrase “as black as sin” might have been coined to describe his hair. The disordered locks gleamed with a dark luster that caught the lantern light and made her fingers itch to smooth it back from his brow, much as she did Charlie’s when he came to her flushed and panting after a hard game of cricket.

Her second thought was that the bed, as huge as it was, would hardly hold him. Having glimpsed Straithe at a distance once or twice, she knew he towered over most other individuals. Until now, though, she’d never appreciated just how big the man was.

For a wild moment, she wondered how in the world he managed to fold those long legs encased in tight, buff-colored trousers and black boots into the Chinesesized bed. Not that he’d be wearing his boots when he occupied that curtained platform, she reminded herself, then flushed again at the direction of her wayward thoughts. Giving up all hope of controlling what she knew was an unbecoming wash of color, Sarah lifted her chin and waited for him to acknowledge her presence.

He certainly took his time about it.

Slipping the pale, nervous nephew a coin, he slid the door panel shut. Sarah saw him wince when it banged against the door frame. His black brows lowered into a frown, as if the mere sound of the bamboo striking bamboo pained him. When he turned and saw who stood at the foot of the bed, his frown deepened into a decided scowl.

Sarah stiffened as startlingly blue eyes raked her from head to toe. When his gaze lingered far too long on the slope of her bosom, evident even under the loosely fitting blue cotton robe, her hands curled into fists inside the wide sleeves.

His gaze returned to her face at last, and the dangerous look on his face lifted the hairs on the back of Sarah’s neck. She found herself quite unable to break the silence that stretched between them. After a long, tense moment, Straithe shrugged out of his green frock coat and tossed it onto the foot of the bed.

“I take it Mei-Lin is indisposed,” he drawled. “I hope you know her repertoire. I’ve developed a decided partiality for her version of the Fluttering Butterfly.”

Sarah wet her lips. Obviously, Straithe was not at all pleased to find someone other than his chosen paramour awaiting him in this decadent chamber. Before she could respond, he lifted a brow in mocking inquiry.

“Perhaps you have your own specialty?”

Sarah shook herself out of her uncharacteristic timidity. He was only a man, after all. There was no reason for her flesh to raise into goose bumps at the mere sound of his voice. Deciding to let her actions speak for her, she drew herself up to her full, if not particularly impressive, height and tugged off the concealing straw hat.

As she’d known it would, her hair drew his eyes like a lodestone draws iron filings. Sarah realized that the heavy mass must be frizzing in its usual undisciplined manner all over her head. The humidity of Macao’s summers defied her every attempt to subdue the stubborn mass. An undistinguished color somewhere between brick and ginger, it was hot, heavy, and the bane of her existence. One of the banes, she amended, remembering her father. At the thought of The Reverend Mr. Abernathy, she lifted her chin.

“I’ve come to speak with you, Lord Straithe.”

“Have you, Miss Abernathy?”

The fact that he knew her name took some of the starch out of Sarah’s spine. It was one thing for her to recognize the rogue who caused a veritable storm of gossip whenever his ship appeared in the bay. It was something else again for the dissipated lord to recognize her.

“How do you know who I am?” she asked, curiosity overcoming her nervousness at his rather sinister expression.

“Why shouldn’t I know you? You appear to know me.”

“I hardly think the one leads to the other.”

“Does it not, Miss Abernathy?”

Sarah stiffened at the mockery in his deep voice. Gathering her dignity, she met his sardonic look with a steady one of her own. “Macao is a small community. It would be strange indeed for me not to recognize someone of your reputation.”

That black brow went up another notch.

“And it would be stranger still,” she continued, “not to notice someone of your…generous…proportions. Which explains how I know you, my lord. Now perhaps you’ll explain how it is that you recognize me?”

The saturnine expression on his face deepened. One corner of his mouth curled downward as he crossed both arms, straining the shoulder seams of his linen shirt.

“As you say, Macao is indeed a small community. There aren’t more than a handful of Englishwomen in residence. It would be difficult for any man not to notice someone of your…generous…proportions.”

Sarah didn’t care for the way he’d turned her words back on her. She’d never enjoyed anything close to Abigail’s sylphlike slenderness, but until this moment she hadn’t considered herself more than well-boned. She soon realized, however, that Lord Straithe considered only a particular portion of her anatomy generous. His blue eyes traveled once again down her throat to her bosom and stayed there for a thoroughly unnerving length of time.

Heat surged through Sarah’s cheeks with a vengeance. The urge to cross her arms over her chest and shield herself from Straithe’s inspection battled with an equally compelling urge to smack his face.

These very proper impulses gave way almost immediately, however, to the very improper one that frequently overtook Sarah at the most inopportune times. After a brief struggle, her sense of the absurd won out over other, more violent emotions. Lifting rueful brown eyes to the blue ones watching her with such lazy menace, Sarah gave a low, reluctant chuckle.

“Touché, Lord Straithe. Or, as my brother Harry would say, a neat riposte.”

Chapter Two

At the sound of her low, musical chuckle, Jamie Kerrick felt his jaw tighten ominously. He was in no mood for laughter.

“You have a damned peculiar sense of humor, Miss Abernathy,” he growled.

She nodded. “I fear you’re right. I’ve been told on more than one occasion that it’s my worst fault Or one of the worst,” she amended with a small smile.

Jamie glared at her, unable to comprehend her levity. If the truth were told, he was having difficulty comprehending much of anything at this moment. His temples pounded from cup after cup of syrupy-sweet plum wine and his temper tugged at a short rein from hours of fruitless negotiation with the mandarin who controlled the port. More to the point, his loins ached in anticipation of what normally occurred in this chamber.

From the instant he’d turned and discovered that the woman waiting for him wasn’t his usual companion, his tenuous hold on his temper had grown more uncertain with each passing moment.

He’d identified her immediately, of course. There weren’t many young Englishwomen in Macao with her generous physical endowments, and damned few who’d have the audacity to track him down to the House of the Dancing Blossoms. She was certainly her father’s daughter, Jamie thought sourly.

He’d met The Reverend Mr. Abernathy briefly the last time he was in port, just before his first mate pitched the missionary overboard. The crew of the Phoenix hadn’t taken kindly to the wild-eyed zealot who’d stormed aboard and tried to point out the error of their admittedly loose ways. Especially since they’d just completed a rough, three-month voyage and were far more interested in boat girls than baptisms.

Jamie had glimpsed the man’s daughter for the first time just a few days ago. She’d been taking the air on the Praya Grande with a lively young lad at the time. At first he’d mistaken her for a governess, given her dowdy dress and sturdy, no-nonsense walking boots. But even the unadorned green gown couldn’t disguise her noble feminine attributes. A man would have to be blind or dead from the neck down not to appreciate that prominent bosom, and Jamie was neither. The information that she was the missionary’s spinster daughter had quickly killed his incipient interest, however. He much preferred willing, experienced matrons or the delightful residents of the House of the Dancing Blossoms to dedicated, desiccated virgins.

Seeing her now at close quarters, Jamie wondered if he should have pursued his initial interest. Miss Abernathy possessed a mouth as full and generous as a man could wish for, a slender nose, and eyes that looked out on the world with a disconcerting directness. Fringed by thick, black lashes, their brown irises flecked with gold, they reminded Jamie of fine sherry poured from a crystal decanter. At this moment, they glowed with the remnants of her surprising, irritating, and wholly unexpected laughter.

“I can think of worse faults than humor, Miss Abernathy,” he said slowly, drawn despite himself by her lively countenance.

“Not for a missionary’s daughter.”

“But then you’re a most unusual missionary’s daughter,” he retorted.

Her mouth quirked. “And are you acquainted with enough of us to have any yardstick by which to measure, Lord Straithe?”

The pert response took Jamie aback. “A damned unusual missionary’s daughter,” he muttered, as much to himself as to her.

“Well, yes,” she answered, her smile fading at his uncivil tone. “I suppose I am or I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

Tired of word games, Jamie decided it was time to rid himself of this audacious female and summon the delectable Mei-Lin to soothe his aching temples. Among other parts.

“I assume your presence has something to do with the notes you sent me, and not any desire to learn the intricacies of the Fluttering Butterfly.”

“The fluttering…?”

With a mocking grin, he gestured to one of the painted panels decorating the bed.

A wave of color washed up her neck. Lifting her chin, she glared at him. “Of course not!”

Prompted as much by his pounding, swirling senses as by the way she stuck her nose in the air, Jamie couldn’t resist taunting her just a bit.

“You might find it enlightening,” he suggested provocatively.

She pursed her lips, looking remarkably like the governess he’d previously thought her. “It’s no use trying to embarrass me, Lord Straithe. I’m well past the age of missishness, but I do wish you would refrain from any more suggestive, ill-bred innuendoes.”

Jamie took a perverse satisfaction in her prim, disapproving expression. The laughter that had so irritated him was completely gone from her eyes now. He refused to admit that he felt its loss.

“If you will meet with men in brothels, you must learn to accustom yourself to far worse than suggestive innuendoes.”

He strolled forward, intending to shock her and send her on her way. Lifting one hand, he ran a careless knuckle down her heat-stained cheek. The soft, creamy texture of her skin surprised him almost as much as his touch startled her.

She took a hasty step back. When she discovered that the bed blocked any further retreat, consternation flooded her expressive eyes.

“Lord Straithe! I must insist that you refrain from such…such…”

“Such intimacies?” he murmured, beginning to enjoy his game. “No, I think not.”

Her eyes widened at his deliberate response, and she tried to edge sideways. Jamie planted one hand against the carved teak bedpost, blocking her escape. He leaned forward until his lower chest brushed the enticing mounds of her breasts. Her very generous breasts. The contact sent St. Elmo’s Fire dancing along his nerves and heated blood still warm from several cups of plum wine. Curling one finger under her chin, he lifted her face to his.

“Women who wait for a man in a room such as this, Miss Abernathy, must live with the consequences.”

The low words, half lazy threat and half challenge, hung between them. For endless moments her golden brown eyes held his. Then she gave her head a little shake, as if to clear it.

“You know very well why I’m here, Lord Straithe.”

“Do I?” he murmured, leaning down to nuzzle the springy curls at her temple. The faint scent of chamomile soap filled his nostrils, so different from the heavy mixture of jasmine and musk that usually assaulted his senses in this chamber.

She jerked her head away. “I do wish you would cease this ridiculous behavior. You must know that I only came here because you wouldn’t answer my summons to the Mission House.”

“At this point, Miss Abernathy, I don’t particularly care why you came.”

She put up both hands to push at his chest.

Once, James Kerrick had possessed a conscience that might have made him draw back at this point. But he’d long since put behind him the ideals of his youth where women were concerned. Moreover, he’d learned to read their contradictory signals all too well. A token resistance. A flutter of lashes over eyes that affirmed what soft lips denied. A trembling, breathless sigh that signaled surrender. All sent their own silent message.

Jamie hid a smile. The missionary’s daughter was most definitely trembling. He could feel the vibrations from his chest all the way down to his toes. With an ease born of long practice, he bent and captured her mouth with his.

She tasted like sweet, warm honey, he thought in some surprise, before a combination of wine and reckless hunger banished all rational thought. Wrapping an arm around her waist, Jamie dragged her up against his chest. Her lush breasts pressed into his shirt. Her breath puffed out with a little sound that might have been a gasp or a sigh. With smug male assurance, Jamie decided it was a sigh.

He widened his stance, bending her back over his arm so that she had to cling to him to keep from tumbling onto the bed. A wild, pounding need rose in him, made fiercer by the way she twisted against the hardening bulge in his trousers. With the unerring skill of an experienced and generally considerate rake, Jamie rubbed his upper body against hers. He knew that the pleasure shooting through him from the friction would generate a similar sensation in the sensitive tips of her breasts.

It did.

Jamie felt hard little pebbles rise beneath her blue cotton robe. His muscles quivered with the need to lay the woman on the bed, to tug off her tunic and bare those rigid points to his touch and his taste.

As he lifted his head and stared down at her red, swollen lips, a faint echo of a long-forgotten code of honor sounded in the recesses of his mind. Jamie ignored it without any difficulty. Releasing her, he stepped back to rid himself of his shirt.

“If you’re quite finished, Lord Straithe, I wish you would compose yourself so we may proceed with the matter that brought me here.”

Jamie’s hand stilled on the ties of his shirt. He stared at her, sure that the brisk, no-nonsense voice couldn’t have come from those well-kissed lips.

It had. With an audible sniff, she tugged at the hem of her blue robe and settled it firmly around her hips.

“Really, my lord, you’ve wasted far too much of my time with this foolish attempt to scare me off.”

It took a moment for Jamie to remember that scaring this female off had been his original intention when he swept her into his arms a few moments ago. Somehow he’d forgotten that in the course of discovering what a delectable armful she was.

“Do sit down.”

“See here, Miss Ab—”

“At once, if you please!”

Jamie blinked. After years of captaining a crew composed of the most rowdy riffraff ever collected on one ship, he was more accustomed to giving commands than to being commanded. By anyone. That the determined Miss Abernathy would stand there and issue him orders in that schoolmarmish tone of voice astounded him. His temples pounding in earnest now, his blood still hot and heavy, Jamie debated whether to comply with her extraordinary order or toss the contrary female onto her back.

Sarah hid tightly clenched fists in the folds of her voluminous sleeves, praying that the black-haired rogue towering over her couldn’t see what effort it cost her to inject just that combination of exasperation and disapproval into her voice. Not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash did she betray the fact that his kiss had sent a rush of heat to every one of her extremities.

To her infinite relief—and secret, shameful disappointment—Straithe slowly lowered his long frame to the edge of the bed. The rope springs creaked and groaned under his weight.

“All right, Miss Abernathy, I’m sitting.”

Sarah let out a long, shallow breath. It still trembled on her lips when Straithe smiled at her evilly.

“In approximately ten seconds, however, I’m going to be lying. Unless you wish to lie beside me, or under me, you’d best state your business and be gone in exactly that amount of time.”

“Ten seconds is quite enough,” she responded crisply, and plunged into the purpose of her clandestine visit. “I know that you plan to run cargo up the China coast in violation of both the East India Company’s restrictions and the Emperor’s edicts. I wish to go with you.”

He stared at her as though she’d suddenly sprouted horns.

“It’s a matter of some urgency, Lord Straithe. My father made a secret visit to the mandarin who governs Fukien. We must find him and bring him home immediately.”

His answer, short and succinct, brought Sarah’s chin up.

“Don’t be vulgar,” she admonished tartly.

“I’m going to be more than vulgar, Miss Abernathy,” he responded, rising slowly. “I’m going to—”

“In exchange for your assistance,” she interrupted, “I’ll secure you the services of a pilot.”

That caught his attention, she saw with grim satisfaction. He froze just a few paces from her, his blue eyes narrowing. For the first time since she’d entered this chamber, Sarah felt a measure of her customary confidence return.

“How the devil did you know I needed a pilot?”

“I do wish you would refrain from using such language in my presence.”

A low, strangled sound rose in his throat.

“Really, Lord Straithe, you needn’t growl at me like that. I’d like to conduct our business with some semblance of dignity.”

“We have no business.”

“Of course we do. My sources tell me that you’ve not been able to hire the services of a pilot to land your goods.” Her sources being Cook’s redoubtable and quite extensive network of blood relatives, in-laws and compatriots, of course. “Nor will you be able to do so.”

“It that so?”

“Yes, that’s so. You should know, sir, that word of your past smuggling activities has reached even the Celestial City. The Emperor sent a message sealed with his own personal chop to His Excellency, Lord Wu Ping-chien. He wants a halt to all illegal trading in general, and yours in particular. The decree has circulated throughout Mong Ha that anyone who guides the Phoenix to any port other than Canton will lose his head.”

Jamie stared down at her, his mind working furiously. So that was why he’d been kept dangling for the past three days. Why the mandarin in charge of ports had smiled and nodded and accepted the customary bribes with a gracious wave of his hand, promising all but providing nothing except plum wine. The wily old bastard!

Well, despite the Emperor’s edict, Jamie had no intention of sailing upriver to Canton. Other ship captains may dutifully load and unload their cargoes there, under the watchful eye of the East India Company, but not Jamie. He’d been his own man too long to bow to the authority of a bunch of damned clerks.

As if beating up the South China seas just ahead of the monsoons and battling off hordes of pirates in the arduous journey out from England weren’t enough, ship captains flying flags other than that belonging to the East India House were expected to hand over a hefty portion of their anticipated profits to the Company for usage fees, then still more in bribes to Chinese officials.

A growing number of enterprising captains avoided this polite form of piracy by slipping up the China coast to unload their cargoes at ports other than Canton. Jamie was one of them. On his last two runs he’d spread enough “squeegee,” as the bribes were called, to ensure a blind eye at every illegal port he sailed into. The results had been spectacular. So spectacular, in fact, that he and the motley collection of former pirates and cashiered navy men he called a crew had sunk much of their profits from the previous voyages into the cargo now crammed into the hold of the Phoenix—a cargo that would soon rot in the steaming summer heat if Jamie didn’t get rid of it, fast. To do so, he needed a navigator who knew China’s coastal waters.

“How is it that you know of a pilot who’s willing to risk his head?” he asked suspiciously.

“Our cook has promised the services of his brother’s son-in-law’s cousin. But only if you agree to aid me in my search for my father.”

Disgusted, Jamie shook his head. “I should have known! Your cook’s brother’s whatever-he-is. I’ll wager he can barely scull a sampan around Macao’s harbor, much less find his way up a thousand miles of coastline.”

“I assure you, he’s quite competent! He served in the fleet of the Governor of Fuchow for many years and knows the coast like the back of his hand.”

“If he’s so competent, why did he leave the governor’s fleet?”

She hesitated, a small frown playing about her mouth. “I’m not sure, exactly. Cook mentioned some controversy having to do with chickens, but I didn’t quite understand that part.”

“No, I expect you didn’t.”

Dismissing her ridiculous offer with the contempt it deserved, Jamie thought furiously. Now that he knew the terms of the Emperor’s edict, he had to find a way around it. The time for negotiations was past. He needed to get down to some serious bribery. And if that didn’t work, well, ship captains had been known to shanghai crew members before.

He had much to do between now and tomorrow evening’s tide, Jamie realized. And the first order of business was to rid himself of a certain aggravating female.

“Your ten seconds are quite up, Miss Abernathy.”

With no further warning, he closed the distance between them, swung her into his arms, and dumped her onto the bed. Smiling grimly at her startled squawk of surprise, Jamie pulled his shirt over his head.

“Are you mad?” she gasped, pushing herself up on her elbows.

He tossed the shirt to the floor and reached for the buttons of his pants. “No, only ready to put this chamber to the use it was intended for.”

Her jaw dropped. “But…but my father.”

“If you think I’m going to risk my ship and my cargo in a search for a missionary with more zeal than wit, you’re more addlepated than he is, Miss Abernathy.”

His fingers loosened the buttons on one side of his trousers flap. He watched with wicked enjoyment as her eyes rounded to huge, golden-brown circles.

“But…the pilot…” she said faintly.

“I’ll find my own pilot, one whose qualifications can be verified by someone other than a cook.”

His hand went to the row of buttons on the other side of the flap. She gasped again, then scrambled to the far side of the bed. Her face flaming, she pushed herself off the platform. Her magnificent bosom heaved.

“You are every bit as despicable as the gossips have described,” she announced, grabbing up the straw hat.

“That’s the first sensible statement you’ve made since I entered this room.” He pushed at the waistband of his trousers warningly.

She jammed the straw hat on her head and marched to the door, shoulders stiff, spine straight. With a force entirely inappropriate to a supposedly genteel spinster, she slammed the bamboo panel behind her.

Grinning, Jamie threw himself down on the bed so recently vacated. Forcing from his mind the vision of Miss Abernathy’s generously rounded bottom, visible even through the loose folds of the blue cotton trousers, he applied himself to the problem at hand.

He would see the port mandarin tomorrow, he decided, and make one last attempt to buy the pilot he needed. At the same time he’d send his first mate out to scour the waterfront for a likely candidate. He’d secure his pilot by noon, one way or another. He just hoped he could round up the rest of the crew before the tide turned. And that the night was dark enough for him to slip past the Royal Navy frigates guarding the—

At the sound of footsteps halting just outside the chamber, Jamie sat up abruptly. No! Surely she wouldn’t dare!

The bamboo partition started to slide open.

This time he’d take her, Jamie swore. Spinster or no spinster. Virgin or not. If she was so damned idiotic as to return to his chamber, he’d damn well take what the woman offered. He scowled at the door, thoroughly disgruntled by the sudden heat that surged into his groin at the thought of bedding the curvaceous Miss Abernathy.

A tiny, dark-haired beauty stopped just over the threshold. Her timorous black eyes widened at his fierce scowl.

“Cap-i-tan no wanchee Mei-Lin?” she asked hesitantly.

To his profound disgust, Jamie realized that he did not, in fact, wanchee Mei-Lin. He was no longer in the mood for slow, languorous love play, even the incredibly skilled love play that this delicate blossom so excelled at. His pulses thrummed at too fast a pace and his mind churned with matters that took precedence even over the delights of the Fluttering Butterfly.

With a rueful shake of his head, Jamie rose. What he needed now was a cold bath in one of Mong Ha’s tiled bathhouses and a boat girl to take him back to his ship. He had much to do before he sailed tomorrow. One way or another, Jamie swore, he was going to sail tomorrow!

He left Mei-Lin counting out a pile of silver coins and strolled out of the House of the Dancing Blossoms with a confident swagger.

Eighteen hours later he pounded on the door of the Presbyterian Mission House, his jaws tight with fury.

Chapter Three

Jamie lifted a fist to pound again. Suddenly, the door to the Mission House pulled open. He glanced down to meet the curious gaze of a boy in sturdy brown knickers and a white shirt decorated with several streaks of mud and a yellowish, unidentified substance. Since the lad carried a scimitar fashioned of wood and twine thrust through his belt, Jamie assumed he’d been indulging in that age old occupation of boys everywhere…waging fierce battle with imaginary dragons and foes.

The boy looked the visitor up and down. “Yes, sir?”

“I’m Kerrick, captain of the Phoenix. I wish to speak to your sister.”

To his surprise, the boy’s chin jutted out in a decidedly belligerent manner. “You’re the man who was so rude to Sarah last night.”

Jamie frowned. “She told you about last night, did she?”

“She told me you wouldn’t help find Papa, and you weren’t very nice to her.” A grubby hand dropped to the hilt of the make-believe sword. “I should chop off the top of your head and feed your brains to the fishes!”

After a frustrating day spreading bribes and threats with equal futility, Jamie was in no mood for more delays, much less childish threats. He still hadn’t procured the services of a pilot…but he had received instructions from the mandarin in charge to prepare to weigh anchor. Lord Wu Ping-chien had decreed that the Phoenix would proceed upriver on the morning tide and off-load its cargo in Canton under the watchful eye of the Emperor’s inspectors. The fact that this decree had been issued while Lord Blair, Chief Factor of the East India Company, looked smugly on only made Jamie more determined to flout it.

He intended to weigh anchor, all right. Tonight He also intended to sail straight up the China coast. He was damned if he’d forfeit half his profits to corrupt Chinese customs officials and another tenth to the East India Company.

First, though, he had to get past this bristling, bloodthirsty imp and speak to his sister. Jamie had dealt with enough boys during his years before the mast to know exactly how to handle this one. Summoning a suitably grave expression, he nodded.

“If someone was rude to my sister, I’d want to feed his brains to the fishes, too,” he admitted. “I hope you’ll spare me, though, since I’ve come to apologize.”

Still scowling, the boy weighed Jamie’s words for a few moments. “Are you going to help Sarah find Papa?”

“Aye, lad.”

The youngster’s belligerence vanished like a cloud blown before the wind. He spun on one heel and dashed into the house, shouting for Sarah to come at once.

Jamie followed more slowly. He hadn’t lied, exactly. He’d help the Abernathy woman locate her father. But he’d do it on his terms, not hers.

He stepped into a sitting room filled with furniture gathered from the four corners of the world and grown shabby with years of use. A heavy English settee with well-worn green velvet cushions was drawn up before an embroidered fire screen. An assortment of chairs flanked the settee, some done in bamboo, some in cane, and one, Jamie noted, in a dark mahogany carved in the exquisitely intricate style of the Upper Ganges. A gatelegged table that might once have graced an English manor house stood against one wall. Atop it sat a Blue Willow porcelain tea set so prized in the Western world and so cheaply procured here, in the land that produced it. Framed watercolors done by an obviously amateur hand hung on the walls. Scattered books, several women’s shawls, and a cricket bat carelessly tossed in one corner added to the cheerful jumble.

Some might have found the room homelike. Having spent seventeen of his twenty-nine years aboard ship, where every wooden pin and twist of rope had its assigned place, Jamie found the room far too cluttered for his taste.

The sound of hurrying footsteps brought him around. A moment later, Sarah Abernathy rushed into the sitting room. Breathless, she disdained polite amenities and got right to the matter at hand.

“Charlie informs me you’ve changed your mind about helping me find my father. When do we sail?”

Jamie took his time replying. As much as any man, he disliked being backed into a corner. The irritation that had built all through this long, frustrating day found focus in the woman before him. Folding his arms across his chest, he surveyed her coolly.

The late afternoon sun slanting through the open windows painted her in no kinder a light than the red lanterns of the House of the Dancing Blossoms had last night. Attired in an unadorned dress of serviceable brown cambric and a long white apron, she looked far more like a maid than the mistress of her father’s house. Heat or strenuous activity or Jamie’s unexpected visit had put a high flush in her cheeks. Tendrils of reddish hair escaped the loose coil atop her head to curl in the afternoon damp.

“Are those chicken feathers in your hair, Miss Abernathy?” he inquired casually, letting her have a taste of the delays and inconsequential inanities the Chinese officials had dished out to him all day. He took a small measure of satisfaction in the impatience that leapt into her golden-brown eyes.

“Very likely,” she returned with a quick shake of her head. Several downy feathers came free and floated on the air. “I was helping Cook scald hens for dinner. When do we sail, Lord Straithe?”

“We do not, Miss Abernathy.”

“We do not? Do you mean you intend to comply with Lord Wu Ping-chien’s order and head upriver for Canton?”

Jamie dropped his arms. “How the devil do you know about the order?” he demanded. “I was just informed of it myself an hour ago.”

She waved a dismissive hand, as though the source of her intelligence was a matter of little consequence. “One of Cook’s friend’s uncles works in the Customs House. He sent word that you’d been given notice to proceed to Canton immediately.” Pinning Jamie with a level stare from her remarkable eyes, she demanded an answer. “Do you head for Canton, Lord Straithe?”

“No, Miss Abernathy, I do not.”

“I thought not.”

The slight downward curl of her upper lip gave Jamie evidence of Miss Abernathy’s true feelings. She might require his assistance, but that didn’t mean she particularly liked dealing with a smuggler.

“So then,” she said briskly, “when do you weigh anchor?”

“I sail with the evening tide.”

“Good gracious!” Her hands flew to her cheeks. “That’s less than three hours from now. Cook must send word to his brother’s son-in-law’s cousin at once!” She whirled and headed for the hall. “I’ll go gather my things and—”

“I am sailing with the tide, Miss Abernathy. Not you.”

She spun back around. “But…I thought…you told Charlie—”

He cut through her stuttering confusion. “I told your brother I would help find your father and so I will. In exchange for the services of this pilot you’ll provide, I’ll make inquiries at the coastal ports of Fukien.”

“Make inquiries!” She lifted her chin. “If I provide your pilot, Lord Straithe, you’ll do more than make inquiries. You’ll take me with you and you’ll send an armed escort ashore with me when I locate my father, so I may bring him safely back to the ship.”

“The hell I will.”

“Do not use such language with me, sir! I won’t tolerate it.”

“You’d tolerate far worse if I was so idiotic as to take you aboard my ship,” he retorted.

Golden sparks lit her eyes, reminding Jamie suddenly of the woman he’d kissed last night. When she threw her head back like that and looked down her uptilted nose so disdainfully, damned if he didn’t feel a sudden, pounding urge to kiss her again. Do more than kiss her, in fact. As he remembered all too well, she carried a full set of curves under that atrocious gown.

“You’ll take me with you, or sail without a pilot.”

Jamie’s lecherous thoughts vanished instantly. When it came to ruthlessness, Miss Sarah Abernathy was no match for a man who’d battled pirates ashore and at sea for a dozen years or more. His voice brusque, he cut the ground out from under her feet.

“You’ll provide this so-called pilot, or Lord Blair will hear about your father’s disappearance.”

“You would not tell him!”

“Aye, I would. And I don’t doubt that if word gets out that the good Reverend has defied the laws governing travel to the interior of China, he’ll lose his Mission and his living, Miss Abernathy.”

Jamie steeled himself against the pallor that leached the color from her cheeks. He and his crew had invested too much in this cargo. He wasn’t about to risk it or his ship by dallying in port at Fukien province while Miss Abernathy journeyed into the interior in search of her fanatical parent.

“Although one tries not to heed gossipers,” she said in a strangled voice some moments later, “it appears in this case they were right. You are a despicable scoundrel.”

Jamie squared his shoulders. He’d been called far worse in his time. Still, the disdain in her expressive brown eyes stung a bit.

“I’ll make inquiries, Miss Abernathy. If I find that your father’s within a day’s journey of the coast, I’ll get word to him and wait a reasonable time for him to make it to the Phoenix. That’s my offer. Accept it or not.”

She drew in a ragged breath, her breasts lifting under their covering of white apron and gray cambric. Whatever she intended to say was preempted by the sound of the front door closing.

“Sarah?” A soft, melodic voice came from the hall. “You’ll never guess who I met at the Holcombes’.”

Gritting his teeth in frustration at yet another delay, Jamie turned to roust the newcomer so he could finish his discussion with the stubborn Miss Abernathy. A moment later, the speaker glided into the room with a flutter of pink bonnet ribbons, and Jamie’s frustration took an instant, unexpected twist into stupefaction.

He’d never made any claim to monkish tendencies. Quite the opposite, he possessed a virile male’s healthy appreciation of beauty in its fairest, feminine form. The golden-haired goddess who tripped into the sitting room carried Jamie well beyond appreciation, however. He felt the floor tilt under his feet.

“Oh!” The vision stopped on the threshold, a pretty confusion coloring her cheeks. “I didn’t know you entertained a visitor, Sarah.”

Miss Abernathy bit out an introduction. “This isn’t a visitor, Abigail. This is Lord Straithe, captain of the Phoenix.”

“Lord Straithe!” The young woman clasped her dainty hands to her chest. “Oh, sir! Have you changed your mind? Do you go to find our papa?”

It took some doing, but Jamie managed to tear his gaze from the perfect oval of Abigail’s face. Turning to her sister’s somewhat more irregular features, he laid the decision squarely on her shoulders.

“Do I, Miss Abernathy?”

Gold-flecked eyes clashed with his steady blue ones. After a silent battle of wills, she ground out a terse response.

“Yes, you do.”

Sarah showed him to the door some moments later, her head high and her spirits uncharacteristically low. She was far too sensible to ascribe her dejection to Straithe’s stunned reaction to Abigail. Of course he would stare at her. Every male between the ages of eighteen and eighty gaped like a landed trout the first time he laid eyes on the younger of the Abernathy sisters. Sarah had long since passed the point of expecting any man to remember she was even in the same room with Abigail.

No, she owed her dissatisfaction to the deal she’d struck with Straithe. She would provide the pilot for his nefarious smuggling run, and he would make inquiries about Papa at the ports he put into. She’d have to be greener than the first picking of Souchou tea to believe his inquiries would be anything more than perfunctory…if he made them at all.

The truth of the matter was that Sarah didn’t trust Straithe to hold to his end of the bargain. Nothing in his background gave her reason to do so. His ungentlemanly actions on the two occasions she’d met with him only confirmed his lack of character in her opinion.

Frowning, she watched him stride away. The muggy afternoon sunlight picked up the wide set of his shoulders under his green frock coat and the gleaming black of his hair.

Black as sin.

And sinful the man was. Sarah had only to remember the way her heart had thumped and breath had left her lungs when he’d kissed her to know she was dealing with a scoundrel of the first order.

She shut the door with a snap. She wouldn’t, couldn’t, trust this man. She would have to go with him, will he or nill he.

His mind racing with all that must be done in the next few hours, Jamie took the cobbled streets with a long, purposeful stride. He had his pilot, or the promise of one. Assuming the man knew Chinese waters and the Phoenix successfully dodged both the men-of-war patrolling the Macao Roads and the pirates who swarmed the coast, the entire crew stood to make a handsome profit. Most of Jamie’s share would go into the sinkhole that was Kerrick’s Keep.

He was damned if he knew why he’d repurchased the crumbling, twelfth-century fortress from the squire his brother had sold it to. The place was a ruin, or near enough not to make any difference. Jamie hadn’t taken any joyful childhood memories of its drafty halls and smoke-darkened timbered ceilings with him when he went to sea at the ripe old age of twelve. He’d been happy enough to see the last of the place, and of the stern, disapproving brother who considered it his duty as the head of the family to whip a sense of responsibility into his troublesome, reckless younger sibling.

Kerrick’s Keep belonged to Jamie now, though. He supposed he might return to it some day, when his craving for adventure and the knife-clean air of the high seas ran its course. Which, he thought with a grin, wouldn’t be any time soon. Spurred by the challenge of reclaiming his crew from the fleshpots of Macao, preparing the Phoenix for departure, and snapping his fingers in the face of the Emperor by sailing upcoast instead of upriver, Jamie took the steep, winding steps down to the docks two at a time.

If his luck held, maybe he’d even stumble across The Reverend Mr. Abernathy. His grin widened at the thought of delivering the missionary to his so-grateful and so very beautiful younger daughter.

Strangely, though, as he stepped into the sampan that would take him to the three-masted schooner riding at anchor in the roads, it was Sarah Abernathy’s disdainful face that hovered in the back of his mind, not Abigail’s more classic features. He wouldn’t mind hauling the missionary back with him if for no other reason than to make the snippety spinster eat her pride enough to thank him, Jamie thought with a grimace.

The moment the sampan sculled around a bulky merchantman and the distinctive silhouette of the Phoenix appeared, all thoughts of the Misses Abernathy vanished instantly. The schooner rode at the end of her anchor chain like the thoroughbred she was. Purchased from a Yankee who’d made his fortune privateering, the Phoenix was sleek and sharp-built by a Baltimore house known for its fast ships. At a little over three hundred and twenty tons, she sailed with a crew of twenty-nine…most of whom, Jamie knew, would now have to be rousted from drink shops and brothels.

He leaped agilely from the sampan and felt the familiar roll of the deck under his boots. Tugging his linen stock from around his neck, he shouted for his first mate.

“Burke! Get yourself topside, man, on the double!”

While he waited for the brawny Irishman, he squinted up at the sun. They had three hours until the tide started to turn. Three hours until they hauled up the anchor, doused all lights, and slipped past the shoals. Three hours until they made for the dangerous waters of South China Sea.

Damn! He hoped to hell Cook’s brother’s whoever-he-was knew his business.

The short, stocky Chinese came aboard an hour later, leaping nimbly from a sampan to the taffrail and then to the deck with a skill he thoroughly enjoyed displaying to the foreign demons. His bare feet gripped the boards with an easy familiarity as he strode to the poop deck where Jamie conferred with his bleary-eyed third mate. He waited respectfully until the captain had sent the mate off with a curt order to soak his head in a bucket of seawater.

“Then go in search of Hardesty, O’Rourke, and Smith,” Jamie called after the staggering seaman. “I don’t want to leave without them.”

When he turned to the Chinese who awaited him, the man met his eyes with a directness unusual in one of his polite, self-effacing culture.

“You wanchee pilot, cap-i-tan?”

“Aye, I wanchee pilot.”

“I werry fine pilot.”

“Werry fine maybe, but can do nightee time fast fast?”

“Day time, nightee time, all same same. Can do werry fast.”

Despite the limitations of Pidgin, Jamie conducted a brief but thorough interrogation of the man’s nautical experience and navigational skills. The pilot was named Wang Er, which translated into Son of the Second Harvest. He owed his name, he explained earnestly, to a bountiful rice crop in the year of his birth. A native of Amoy, some miles up the coast, Second Harvest rose to chief oarsman of a war junk in the mandarin’s personal fleet before being accused of sucking eggs pilfered from the captain’s coop. He was sentenced to beheading, escaped, and eventually married a relative of the Abernathy’s cook.

Jamie rocked back on his heels, his eyes narrowed and his ears half tuned to the buzz of activity behind him. During his years at sea he’d learned to trust his instincts where men were concerned. Some, he wouldn’t turn his back on in the narrow confines below decks. Others, like this one, he felt a decided affinity for.

His mind made up, he informed Second Harvest that he was hired. His first piece of business was to make some order of the flotilla of junks and sampans bobbing at the schooner’s waist, all fighting to off-load their supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables and water.

“Ai yah! Can do easy, cap-i-tan!”

Jamie kept a close eye on the pilot as he gestured and shouted the small fleet into submission. At his command, a number of Chinese leapt agilely aboard. They joined the Phoenix’s crew in a human chain that fed basket after basket of stores into the hold. Satisfied that Second Harvest had the replenishment effort well in hand, Jamie turned his attention to the ship’s armaments.

Slowly, inexorably, evening fell and the tide began to turn. The huge ships in the bay began to swing in a half circle at the end of their anchor chains. Towering East Indiamen, each a thousand tons or more, moved ponderously, their lines creaking and their distinctive black-and-white checkered sides swaying. The smaller ships dipped gracefully on the swells. Sampans and double-tiered junks floated lightly.

Lights flickered amidships, and the night came alive. Oars splashed. Laughter carried across the water. An occasional shout rang out. A drunken English Jack called out a price to one of the girls on the Flower Boats, as the decorated junks that served as floating brothels were called.

Jamie ignored the familiar sounds. Leaning both palms on the Phoenix’s rail, he studied the pinpoints of light that identified the British warship patrolling the mouth of the bay. Once, he’d served on a sister ship to that very frigate. He’d strutted her decks with the pride and arrogance that came with wearing Naval colors, and sweated alongside his cannoneers during pitched battles at sea. Now, he used his intimate knowledge of her capabilities and maneuverability to his own purpose.

His first mate’s rich Irish brogue came out of the darkness beside him. “It’ll be a foine trick, slippin’ past that one in the dark.”

“We’ve done it before,” Jamie replied, his intent gaze on the distant lights.

“Aye, that we have.” Burke looked to the shore to gauge how much the ships had turned with the tide. “If we’re a’goin’, we’ll have to go soon.”

“Are Hardesty and the others aboard?”

The fiery-haired Burke gave a snort of disgust. “In a manner o’ speakin’. They’re hangin’ over the bow rail, pukin’ up their guts.”

Jamie shook his head in sympathy, knowing from personal experience that it would take some time for his crew to recover from the potent concoction of alcohol, tobacco juice, sugar and arsenic served in the drink shops.

“We pulled them out of a brothel on Donkey Lane,” Burke added wryly. “The bluidy sods screeched at the top o’ their lungs because we interrupted them just as the girls were going to demonstrate Reversed Ducks Flying.”

Jamie sent his mate a quick, slashing grin. “They’ll not soon forgive us for that piece of bad timing!”

“That they won’t.” Burke shook his head. “Reversed Ducks Flying! That damned book will be the death of us all.”

Jamie’s grin widened at the reference to the crew’s most precious treasure. During a run up the coast some years ago, they’d rescued a Jesuit priest about to be beheaded by the irate mandarin he’d somehow offended. In his gratitude and relief, the priest had let slip that he’d translated into Latin one of the ancient manuals that instructed on ways to increase the pleasures of the bed.

The crew of the Phoenix could become as piratical as anyone on the seas when the occasion demanded. They’d wheedled, cajoled, then forced cup after cup of rum down the priest’s throat. Eventually, the drunken cleric had penned a copy of the translation for the delighted men. Jamie suspected that, out of fear for his life, the Jesuit had employed his imagination when his memory failed, since a good number of the thirty-two positions he described were physically impossible to emulate. Nevertheless, the crew had adopted the handwritten translation of Ars Amatoria of Master Tung-Hsuan as their personal manifesto. To a man, their goal was to accomplish every one of the positions described in the now yellowed and much handled booklet.

Reversed Ducks Flying had yet to be achieved by anyone aboard the Phoenix.

Jamie could understand his men’s ire at being interrupted in the attempt. Still grinning, he sent Burke to disperse the sampans clustered about the schooner like minnows about a pike. A shout to the crew alerted them to be ready to raise the sails.

The need to be off pulled at him. Like an impatient mistress, the dark sea beckoned. He took a last look over his shoulder at the lights of Macao. He wouldn’t see them again for weeks, perhaps months. As if drawn by a beacon, his gaze went to upper reaches of the city. Flickering torches illuminated the outline of the old Portuguese fort on the crest. Below the fort, Jamie knew, perched the Presbyterian Mission House.

Unbidden, the image of a prim, disapproving Sarah Abernathy flashed into his mind. Almost immediately, that gave way to a vision of the woman who’d faced him at the House of the Dancing Blossoms, her sherrycolored eyes alight with laughter. Who would have imagined a missionary’s daughter would have the pluck to enter such an establishment? She was, Jamie concluded once more, a most unusual missionary’s daughter.

He discovered just how unusual the very next morning, when the daily monsoons blew up their usual storm and a fierce gust tipped the Phoenix bow down into a deep trough. Masts groaned. Sails whipped. Waves creamed the decks, and a white-faced, wide-eyed Sarah Abernathy tumbled out of the rope locker.

Chapter Four

From the moment Sarah had climbed aboard the Phoenix with the streams of Chinese bringing supplies, she’d debated over the right time to leave the tiny, airless rope locker where she’d hidden herself and make her presence known to the captain.

She certainly didn’t wish to do so until after Macao had fallen well astern. She’d wanted to wait until they were too far out for Straithe to turn about…or toss her over the side to swim back to shore, which possibility she considered far more likely.

And she had more sense than to cause a disturbance during the nerve-racking run past the warships patrolling the entrance to the bay. Even from her uncomfortable perch atop a coil of prickly hemp inside the dark closet, Sarah had sensed the tension that gripped the entire ship as the captain ordered all lights doused and absolute quiet above decks.

For what seemed like hours, she’d huddled on the rope, her every nerve tingling, with only the sounds of the timbers creaking and the sheets rattling to disturb the silence of the night outside. Sarah knew that the heavily gunned frigates had orders to blow out of the water any smugglers caught trying to slip up the coast. Only by such draconian measures could England hope to maintain the East India Company’s tight grip on the China trade and, coincidentally, enforce the Emperor’s edict that all barbarians conduct business only at Canton.

When at last the Phoenix had gained the wide, seaswept straits and the captain ordered the sails rigged to run with the stiff southwest winds, she was so limp with relief that she couldn’t quite summon the courage to emerge from her hiding place. Instead, she scrunched her legs under her and folded into a pillow the loose, padded jacket she’d worn over her blue cotton trousers and robe. Lulled by the slap of the waves against the hull and the steady rise and fall of the schooner, she soon fell into an exhausted sleep.

In the early dawn, the ship pitched violently and dumped Sarah out of her prickly nest. She banged her head against the locker’s wall and came awake to the realization that the monsoon winds had caught the Phoenix firmly in their grip. She was struggling to right herself in the tiny space when the ship dipped again. This time, it seemed to stand almost on its head.

Looped lengths of rope dropped from their pegs and pounded Sarah’s head and shoulders. The timber walls around her groaned. Without warning, the latch securing the locker entrance popped. The door banged open, and Sarah tumbled out.

Instantly, warm, driving rain pelted her body. Waves foamed the deck, which tilted at a sharp angle under her. Floundering helplessly, she slid across the slick boards and came up hard against a raised hatch. Grabbing the coaming to anchor herself, she scrabbled onto her knees and flung her head back to clear her wet hair from her face.

The first thing that caught her eye was the seaman hanging onto the halyards a few feet away, his mouth slack with astonishment as he gaped at her. The second was the towering wall of green that rose above the rail behind him. Sarah opened her mouth to shriek a warning. The cry never left her lips.

A hard band clamped around her waist, cutting off her breath. She was yanked upward and carried like a sack of beans away from the illusive safety of the hatch cover. A heartbeat before the onrushing wall crashed down on the Phoenix, her rescuer pulled open a door and tossed Sarah down a shallow flight of stairs. She landed on a hip and an elbow in a narrow companionway.

The figure behind her braced a huge shoulder against the door to hold it against the smashing force of the water. When the surge subsided, he swiped dripping dark-red hair from his eyes and shouted an order over his shoulder.

“Stay below! The captain will be seein’ to you when the winds break!”

With that, he plunged back outside. The door banged shut behind him. For a few blessed seconds, the ship leveled. A momentary calm descended. Then the Phoenix dropped into another trough and the wild ride began again.

Sarah knew the daily monsoons that came with late summer usually blew through within an hour or less, but this time it seemed as though the ship plunged and rolled forever. After a while, she gathered enough strength to slowly, carefully, push herself to her feet.

With an arm braced against either wall, she made her way down the narrow passageway. She passed two minute sea cabins on her left. The mates’ quarters, she assumed. On her right was the open space that served as the dining saloon, where the captain and his officers would take their meals. The door at the far end of the passageway opened into the master’s cabin.

Thankfully, Sarah stumbled inside and flopped into one of the chairs bolted to the floor on either side of a similarly anchored round table. It was some moments before she’d collected herself enough to take stock of her surroundings.

Not much larger than the room she shared with Abigail at the Mission House, the cabin contained only the table and chairs, a bunk built to the captain’s rather large proportions, and a massive sea chest secured to ring bolts in the floor. A railed shelf running the width of the room at eye level held an assortment of books, decanters, instruments, and smaller chests, all secured against the pitching sea by straps.

Despite its unpretentious size and few furnishings, the cabin still conveyed a sense of richness and warmth. Perhaps it was the way the brass fittings gleamed in the gray light that seeped through the high, narrow transom window. Or the dark sheen of the Spanish mahogany paneling and trim. Or the exquisite gold embroidery decorating the green silk covering the bunk.

Richness and warmth…but not opulence.

How strange, Sarah mused. Straithe risked his life with every run he made up the coast He also gained enormous profits, if the rumors whispered about him were to be believed. Yet his private quarters displayed little evidence of a man addicted to wealth. No doubt he squandered his ill-gotten gains on drink, games of chance, and the denizens of such establishments as the House of the Dancing Blossoms, Sarah decided with a sniff.

One sniff led to another, and then to a sneeze. Shivering in her clammy clothes, she wrapped her arms around her chest. She was wet to the bone and most uncomfortable. The change of clothing and few personal necessities she’d smuggled aboard with her lay under a pile of rope in the locker…she hoped! She desperately wanted to shed the thin, wet cotton, but didn’t wish to open the captain’s sea chest to search out dry clothing. Secreting herself aboard his ship was one thing. Pawing among his personal possessions was quite another.

The Phoenix plunged on, its timbers creaking and groaning like a discordant chorus. As the minutes passed, Sarah’s eyes returned to the green silk coverlet again and again. Finally, she pushed herself out of the chair and crossed to the bunk. Bracing against its side, she quickly peeled off her robe and trousers. She hesitated a moment longer, then unwrapped the length of unbleached cotton she’d bound around her upper chest to disguise the generous bosom Straithe had referred to in such an ungentlemanly way.

The wet breast band dropped to the floor with a plop, and Sarah gave a sigh of sheer relief. Clad only in her clammy linen drawers and camisole, she swirled the silk coverlet around her shoulders. It settled over her body with a warmth welcome even in the muggy dampness. Feeling much restored, she returned to her chair to await the captain.

As suddenly as it had come, the monsoon blew through some moments later. The Phoenix ceased its violent bucking. The sea calmed. In contrast, Sarah’s heart started thumping painfully. By the time she heard the door to the companionway open and Straithe’s deep voice bellowing to someone to hold her hard to the wind, she could hardly breathe. She clutched the embroidered silk and braced herself for a storm of a different sort.

Sure enough, Straithe entered his cabin with the force of a typhoon. The door crashed back against the bulkhead. The captain stood on the threshold, his wet clothing plastered to his body and his blue eyes so dangerous that Sarah scrambled to her feet.

Under his soaked linen shirt, she could see every tight, corded muscle clearly delineated. He looked as wild and untamed as the sea he’d just battled. In that moment, Sarah understood why the Chinese sometimes referred to the elemental masculine force as a white tiger.

And the female as a green dragon, she reminded herself.

“I knew it,” he said in a low, menacing voice. “The moment Burke told me that an Englishwoman dressed in Chinese clothing had stowed away aboard the Phoenix, I knew it could only be you.”

Since the scathing remark didn’t seem to call for a response, Sarah made none.

“Are you mad?” he demanded, advancing slowly into the cabin.

No coward, Sarah nevertheless took a step back, then another, until the table behind her blocked any further retreat.

“Not mad,” she returned with somewhat less confidence than she would have liked. “Only determined.”

“To do what?” His anger leapt across the few feet separating them. “To prove yourself as addlepated as your father? To destroy your reputation completely?”

The idea that the notorious Lord Straithe might harbor any concern for her reputation struck Sarah as so novel that she didn’t answer immediately.

Straithe put his own interpretation on her silence. His face hardening, he let his gaze drop insultingly from her face to her shoulders. Only then did Sarah realize that the silk coverlet had slipped down her arms. Her wet camisole clung to her upper body every bit as revealingly as Straithe’s shirt hugged his. Heat surging into her face, she hitched the coverlet up.

The captain took another step closer. His lip curled in what Sarah could only describe as a sneer. “I must offer my apologies, Miss Abernathy. Had I realized you were so determined to put yourself in my bed, I wouldn’t have allowed you to depart the House of the Dancing Blossoms as readily as I did.”

His nearness unnerved Sarah. She’d forgotten how overpowering the man was at close quarters. It took every measure of her courage to infuse her voice with the same no-nonsense tone she’d use if one of her brothers was up to some prank.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I don’t wish to put myself in your bed. I want only to find my father.”

“I told you I’d make every effort to find your father.”

Her chin lifted. “I didn’t trust you to keep to your promise.”

Jamie stared at her, the force of his anger colliding with the tattered remnants of his pride. He’d been accused of many wrongs in his day, most of which he readily admitted to. But for all his free-spirited ways, he lived by the code that had been bred into him as surely as his black hair and stubborn nature.

He’d never killed a man except in battle or a fair exchange of fire. He’d never bedded a woman who didn’t want it. He’d never run opium or slaves, as the East Indiamen did. And never, ever, had any man…or woman, for that matter…accused him of not holding to his word, once given.

That this bedraggled missionary’s daughter would do so stoked his simmering anger at her recklessness into fury. His jaw working, he took another step closer.

“You might come to rue your lack of trust, Miss Abernathy. You chose to stow away on a ship crewed by outcasts and misfits. Until I can put you on another ship heading back to Macao, you will stay in this cabin. If you so much as show your nose outside the door, I’ll treat you as I would any man jack aboard who disobeyed my orders.”

“But—”

He grasped her chin in a cruel grip and tipped her face to his. “This is one promise you can believe. If you disobey me, I swear I’ll strip you naked, tie you to a rail, and lay a strap across your shoulders.”

The blood drained from her cheeks. “You…you would not!”

“Aye, Miss Abernathy, I would. With great pleasure.”

Jamie slammed the cabin door behind him, as furious as he’d let himself become in many a month. Damn the woman! Had she no sense? No thought for her own safety?

She didn’t trust him, yet she put herself at his mercy! She’d be well served if he showed her how truly a master ruled his ship and all aboard. He could toss her onto the bunk at his whim, tear aside the strips of transparent linen covering her lush curves, and take far more than the lips he’d already sampled. The fact that Jamie wanted very much to do just that only fueled his ire.

He emerged onto a poop deck that glistened with the aftermath of the rain. As he’d expected, the crew had gathered, all agog to know about the female who’d stowed away. Taking a wide-legged stance, Jamie eyed the motley assembly. He’d handpicked every man jack of them, and would trust them with his life. He knew better than to trust them with a woman, however. If she placed any value on her virtue, Sarah Abernathy had damned well better heed his orders and keep herself from their sight.

To a man, they voiced loud and prolonged disappointment when Jamie informed them curtly that the female below decks was not an enterprising boat girl, eager to sell herself to the captain and the crew.

“Who is she, then?” a wizened, one-eyed veteran of the wars with France demanded.

Jamie hesitated. There was a chance, he thought savagely, a slim chance, that Sarah Abernathy could save her reputation if she returned to Macao before word of this idiocy got around. Not sure why he gave a groat for the blasted female’s reputation, Jamie was formulating a careful reply when the one-eyed veteran came up with an explanation of his own.

Hooking his thumbs in his waistband, he grinned. “Never say you convinced the Dutch factor’s sister to steal away with you! The yeller-haired one, who come up you as brazen as any waterfront bawd, when you was atryin’ to cut a deal for that twelve-pounder the Dutchies shipped in.”

“No, Hardesty,” Jamie drawled, “I did not convince the Dutch factor’s sister to steal away with me.”

The seaman’s grin widened at the sardonic response. “Oh, aye! And I suppose you didn’t diddle the admiral’s wife, either.”

The crew’s sullenness vanished in a round of hearty laughter. They basked in their captain’s reputation with the fairer sex almost as much as they relied on his seamanship. Jamie’s mouth curved in a grin as well, although when he thought back to that long-ago episode, he acknowledged silently that it was rather the other way around. He hadn’t diddled the admiral’s wife as much as she’d diddled him.

From the moment he’d joined the crew of HMS Dove, Arabella Cathwright had hounded him. She’d made no secret of the fact that she’d bedded every other officer in her husband’s command. She wouldn’t rest until she’d added the newest lieutenant to her trophy rack.

To be truthful, Jamie hadn’t exactly resisted the skilled assault. Arabella’s midnight hair, milk-white skin, and so-talented mouth had pleasured far nobler men than Lieutenant James Kerrick. None of those men had been discovered in her bed, however. The admiral had been too cowardly to demand satisfaction by challenging his wife’s lover to a duel, but he put an end to the blackguard’s commissioned status quickly enough.

Her brief, sordid affair with Jamie had destroyed what little remained of Arabella Cathwright’s reputation. He wouldn’t allow the same thing to happen to Sarah Abernathy…if he could help it.

“I don’t intend to reveal the lady’s identity,” he told the smirking crew. “I do intend to put her on the first ship we hail making for Macao.”

“Good enough,” one of the seamen muttered. “Women aboard ship is bad joss.”

“Very bad joss,” the ship’s carpenter exclaimed. “Damned if the blasted female ain’t already brought pirates down on us! Look to starboard, Capt’n.”

Jamie spun around. His jaw clamped shut at the sight of a war junk in full sail beating out from shore to intercept them.

With ships from around the world sailing into Canton for the trading season, the pirates that fed on the merchantmen like sharks gathered as well. Almost one European ship in three fell victim to the marauders each year, their cargoes seized and their crews tossed overboard with throats slashed. For that reason, Jamie had added extra cannon to his ship’s armament. The sharp-hulled Phoenix could outrun or outgun almost any junk in these waters.

Jamie didn’t need his brass telescope to see that the huge, seagoing vessel bearing down on them carried considerably more firepower than most. His blood began to pound with the thrill of impending battle. He had enough confidence in his schooner’s maneuverability and his crew’s skill to know he could circle around and blast the predator out of the water. He’d lead him a merry chase in the process, though, and…

His racing thoughts scudded to a stop. He had a passenger on board. An unwanted one, it was true, but not one he could expose to unnecessary risks.

Damn the woman!

His mouth tight, Jamie turned back to his crew. “Crowd on the sails. Let’s show this rice hauler our heels.”

The men’s faces reflected varying degrees of astonishment. Never before had the Phoenix run from a fight, especially one with the mangy scum that preyed on other ships. Any seaman worth his spit would rather sink a murdering pirate than piss. Only the first mate dared question Jamie’s order, however.

“Are we not agoin’ for him, Captain?”

“No, we’re not.”

When the brawny Irishman frowned, Jamie jerked his head toward the hatch leading to the officers’ quarters. Liam Burke grasped the situation immediately. Turning, he thundered orders to the crew.

“You heard the captain. Smith, get the steam up in the donkey boiler! Hardesty, ready your men to raise all sails.”

Since the first mate had been known to lay about with his beefy fists when the crew didn’t move fast enough to suit him, they scrambled to obey.

Cursing the absent missionary and his eldest daughter with equal approbation, Jamie conferred with the Chinese pilot. Second Harvest looked disappointed at being told to lay a course that would take the Phoenix clear of its pursuer, but obeyed without question.

They made their escape, but not without cost.

The master of the junk knew his trade. Working his ship with a skill Jamie could only admire, the pirate strove to catch his quarry. In a daring move, he spread his sails so far to the wind that the ship’s rail cut water and his crew dangled from the sheets like monkeys. The added burst of speed gained him enough on his prey to fire his heaviest cannon.

The ball tore through the schooner’s rigging and slammed into the deck, throwing up a shower of splinters. Undaunted, the crew of the Phoenix hooted in derision and shouted obscenities at their pursuers. Jamie ran a quick eye over the damaged rigging and knew it would hold. Shouting at the crew to stand ’ware, he brought the ship hard over. Pulleys creaked and lines slackened as the massive, swinging booms began to cross the deck.

From the corner of one eye, he saw his first mate stagger. A foot-long wooden splinter protruded from his shoulder.

“Liam! Down, man!”

Jamie’s warning came a second too late. The huge aft boom caught Burke a glancing blow to the head. He crumpled soundlessly.

“Get him below!” Jamie shouted.

His gut knotting, he brought the Phoenix around. The wind caught the specially rigged topsails, then bellied the mainsails. The schooner lifted almost out of the water and skimmed the waves like a gull.

Within the space of a few minutes, the crew had cleared the tangled wreckage from the decks. Within not many more, the junk had dropped so far astern that Jamie could give the wheel back to the helmsman and go below decks.

Worry over Burke clawed at his stomach. The brawny Irishman was more than his second-in-command. He was the only man Jamie counted as friend.

A onetime blacksmith, Liam Burke had been shanghaied from a pub in Dublin. He’d left behind a wife and three children. After five years of involuntary servitude in the Royal Navy, he’d returned to learn that his family had died in the potato famine. Broken, he’d been drowning in sorrow and his own vomit when Jamie, newly stripped of his rank and his career, had found him face-down in a ditch. With nothing left to lose, Burke had joined ranks with the former lieutenant. Eight years and uncounted adventures later, he still mourned his family, but no longer tried to drown himself in drink.

Sliding down mahogany handrails worn smooth as glass, Jamie hit the companionway deck. A quick glance at the end of the narrow hall showed his cabin door shut tight.

At least the blasted female had the sense to stay where he’d left her. No doubt she was quaking in fright, wondering what in God’s name was going on above decks. Good! Maybe a healthy dose of terror would teach Miss Abernathy to keep to her skirts and her Mission House.

His boots sloshing in the inch or so of water that had come in with the storm, he headed for the officer’s mess. The stench of singed flesh emanating from the saloon told him that the ship’s cook had cauterized Liam’s shoulder wound. He only hoped that the blow to the head hadn’t shattered the first mate’s skull. Jamie’s dog-eared copy of The Ship Captain’s Medical Guide offered little useful advice for head injuries.

Two long strides took him to the mess. He stopped on the threshold, stunned by the sight of an unmistakably feminine form in blue cotton trousers bent over the figure on the table.

“What the devil!”

Sarah paid no heed to his exclamation.

“I warned you what would happen if you left your cabin,” Jamie began, advancing into the saloon.

She twisted around, impatience stamped across her face. Only then did he see the bright red blood that colored the front of her robe.

“Yes, yes, I know,” she snapped. “You’ll strip me naked, lash me to the mast, and lay a strap across my shoulders. But I do wish you would wait until I finish stitching up your man’s head!”

Chapter Five

Sarah turned her back on the captain and resumed her task. Gripping the bone needle in fingers slick with blood, she dug it into ragged flesh. She pushed, then pulled, and tried not to wince when the thick black string threaded in the needle’s eye stubbornly refused to follow through the hole. Gritting her teeth, she tugged harder.

The man stretched out on the table stiffened. “Are you…soon done, lass?”

“Soon, Mr. Burke.”

He nodded and took another swill from the brown glass bottle clutched in his good hand.

The stink of rum and sweat and burned skin clogged Sarah’s nostrils. Taking a shallow breath, she pinched together another inch of the gaping temple wound.

“A few more stitches,” she promised softly, then dug the needle in again.

Straithe stood close by her elbow, too close, watching her as a keen-eyed kestrel watches its prey. Sarah tried to push him from her mind, but his nearness ate at her concentration.

Drat the man! She’d not soon forgive him for his threats…nor for the way he’d left her to stew and dither and fear about what was happening above decks!

Her mouth thinning, Sarah recalled her startled shriek when a cannon had boomed across the water. She’d heard the shot strike, heard as well the crew’s shouts and the clatter of rigging hitting the deck. Like the veriest coward, she’d huddled in the cabin, unsure what to do except pray. Most fervently.

An agonized groan in the companionway had cut her off in mid-psalm. Fighting the fear that clawed at her throat, she’d listened intently. Another moan spurred her to action. Even with the captain’s threat hanging over her, she couldn’t stay in the cabin. She’d nursed her mother through too many childbirths, tended her family through all their ills, and assisted her father in his ministries too many times to sit idly when someone was in pain. Pulling on her still-damp clothes, she’d gathered her courage and gone to offer aid.

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