“You don’t think things are going to blow over, do you?” I said.
“No.” The word was frightening, but Max looked alert and calm. Just facts, his manner seemed to say. You have to work with the facts. “Neave, I grew up with him. We know each other. I didn’t want it to get to this point, but here we are. Let me help you.”
I felt a kind of cool rush move through my abdomen and up to my chest. It wasn’t fear. It was something else.
“Just think about it.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, but I wasn’t thinking about it. I was thinking about him. Max Luhrmann was in my head and Max Luhrmann believed in evil.
I was not alone.
THE PIRATE LOVER
Saved
The cold shock of immersion was so total, so encompassing, that at first Electra could not draw a breath. She sank down, struggling. Then she felt a hand around her body, another body rising up in the water beneath her and lifting her, pulling her to the surface. She gasped and her chest opened to accept the bracing air.
“You are strong, Electra. You can reach safety with me.” His voice was so clear! It penetrated the deepest parts of her. A wind behind the change in the tide cut the water’s surface up, a turmoil of foam around them and the waves building higher. Lightning again, and in its light she could see Henri Le Cherche’s black ship behind them and the Cat half a league away and firing steadily toward their enemy. Waves broke around them in lacy confusion. But Basil Le Cherche’s powerful body swam now alongside her, now beneath her, and she glided beside him, taking whatever risk there was with a high heart and more confidence in this strange man than she had ever felt for any other human being. She did not fear the future or consider the past—there was only this moment with this figure pushing through the waves, pulling her along with him.
He felt the change in her body, the fluid reengaging of thighs, arms, the coming to life in the water. Still he held her aloft and she let herself be held as he swam in steady great thrusts away from their captor’s ship. They could see the silhouettes of sharpshooters in the Cat’s rigging, waiting for Henri Le Cherche’s ship to get close enough for them to do their deadly work by light of cannon fire and lightning.
Electra felt her body pressed to Basil Le Cherche’s, moving with him stroke for stroke. They moved in a dark waste of water while the world above and beyond them seemed full of fire. She felt something she could only call joy—a keen sense that she was thoroughly present and struggling for survival alongside a man who was thrillingly alive, whose touch had changed her irrevocably.
“Are you with me, little witch?” he called to her over deafening sounds around them.
“I am, truly!” she cried.
Another flash of lightning and she saw that Basil Le Cherche was smiling at her—smiling in this moment when they struggled through what might become their watery grave. She threw her head back and laughed. “Let Destiny take me where she will,” she cried, “for she led me to you, Basil Le Cherche. If death is the price I pay for that leading, I shall tender Destiny what I owe her.”
They met each other’s eyes then in the enormity of the night sea as if there were only them, only these two beings in the entire universe.
A rending crash behind them and they twisted around together to see—the broad expanse of one of Judge Henri Le Cherche’s convoy’s mizzen sails was slowly, slowly, collapsing over the side, bringing a mass of spars and ropes with it as it fell. Electra and Basil witnessed the destruction, heard the screams of men pinned and broken beneath it, the shouts of others cutting away the rigging so the ship could make way again and not be turned to take the waves directly against her exposed starboard side, leaving her wallowing between troughs and in danger of capsizing. The other ships in the convoy let loose their sails, temporarily stopped their chase of the Cat, and made for their crippled companion.
“We will be within hailing distance of the Cat in but a few strokes! If they know their captain and their profession, they will be scanning for any sign of us,” Basil cried. “We have but the narrowest window, and have no doubt about it, my brother will be shipping a launch over the side to search for us the instant he realizes we are gone.”
No sooner had he said these words than Electra saw a darker shape in the water ahead: a barge, oarsmen pulling hard, every man scanning the waves in search of them.
“Basil!” she cried. “Ahead of us! Is it your brother’s?”
Basil peered into the darkness and though she could not see it, the changes she felt in the body gliding by her side made it clear that he was smiling still. “It is the Cat’s launch—our own Cat.” He bellowed out in a gale wind voice. “Ahoy, Cat!”
“Cap’n? Cap’n, keep up your calling, sir, in this flaming bloody dark so we can find you and get you aboard before those swabs sail around that goddamn mess and come to blow us to Kingdom Come!”
And so they were dragged, dripping and shaking, into the boat and swathed in cloaks as the barge crew pulled madly back to the ship. Within the hour they were on the quarterdeck of the Cat, the ship running for its life, skipping into waters threaded through with sandbanks and islands—places that Basil Le Cherche’s somewhat piratical crew knew intimately but that would be death to the deep-bottomed ships of Henri Le Cherche’s convoy. Anchor dropped, night watch set, Basil Le Cherche took Electra Gates’s hand and led her to his cabin. He peeled the storm-soaked silk from her body and stood gazing upon her, and she let herself be regarded. In his eyes she saw things that made her feel feverish, urgent. She stepped toward him, wound herself around him, felt in his body the clear proof of his answering feelings. “Take me now, Le Cherche, or I will not be able to bear it,” she whispered. “Now!”
And so he did. And though she was still new to lovemaking, he was a man who had learned from his numberless, nameless partners exactly what would move her, and he provided it. She could not have imagined any of the things he did to her before the actual moment when he did them. She could not have imagined herself doing what he urged her to do, and yet she did it, over and over. All through that long night they made love until they finally lay, spent and beaded with sweat, in the first light of dawn.