The Sea Wolves

Page 5

Jack used the toe of his new boot to knock.

“Come!” Ghost called from within.

It was a tricky matter to balance the tray and unlatch the door as the ship swayed beneath him, but Jack managed it and shouldered the door open. Only once he was a step across the threshold did he realize that he had been mistaken—this was not the captain’s quarters after all, but some sort of chart room. On the walls were various ocean maps, but they were hung alongside what seemed to be charts of the heavens themselves, maps of the stars, perhaps to navigate by.

Three people sat around the table. Ghost was there, bent over an enormous, weathered map. Johansen sat to his left, which was to be expected. What startled Jack enough to freeze him in midstep was the person to the captain’s right, who peered even more intently at the maps and charts spread across the table. Delicate and lovely, with a tumble of dark hair veiling part of her face, the woman seemed to be stroking her fingers across the table as though sightless and in search of something she’d lost.

Then she blinked as though awakening and glanced up at him, her copper eyes alight with intelligence, her coffee skin gleaming in the sunlight streaming through the porthole. And she gave him a smile so sad that it cracked his heart in two.

“Good morning,” she said, her French accent adding exotic emphasis to the words. “You must be Jack.”

CHAPTER THREE

WRAPPED IN BEAUTY’S GAZE

He served breakfast to the crew, accepted their jibes and barbed comments, barely kept his feet when Tree tripped him, avoided catching their eyes, collected their plates, and mopped up their mess, and all the while he was thinking about that beautiful woman and what she might mean.

Sweating as he cleaned the galley after breakfast, Jack had entertained the idea that he might have imagined her. But he could never have dreamed up those eyes, and such underlying sadness. Then he had scoured his mind for any memory of her having been on the Umatilla but drew a blank. It was a waste of time; if she had been on the ship and he had seen her, he would have remembered her instantly. She had that sort of face. And just as with that mad forest spirit Lesya, if he never laid eyes on her again, he would still remember her forever.

Was she Ghost’s woman? Sailors—even pirates—usually considered a woman on shipboard to be bad luck, but if she was the captain’s wife or mistress, that would explain it.

“Cooky, that was almost edible,” Louis said.

Jack jumped—he hadn’t heard anyone approaching along the short corridor to the galley. Wrapped in beauty’s gaze, he thought, but then he realized that this might be an opportunity. Louis seemed to be a talker, and Jack was an experienced conversationalist.

“I just threw it together,” Jack said. “Give me the proper ingredients, and I’ll make something truly edible.”

“I believe that,” Louis said, a hint of laughter in his voice. His French accent held none of the beauty of that woman’s. It was a mocking, knowing lilt.

“The crew enjoyed it,” Jack said. He dropped the wire brush he was using to clean the scarred wooden surfaces and turned to face Louis. The thin man leaned against the galley bulkhead, eyes flicking this way and that, and as Jack turned, his face broke into a feral smile. His golden tooth seemed to glow with an echo of moonlight.

“Of course,” Louis said. “Finn feeds us dog waste, and you gave us something…” He shrugged, both hands out as if balancing his thoughts.

“Better?” Jack suggested.

“Something to tide us over.” The grin remained.

“Who’s the woman?” Jack asked. He tried to sound uninterested, turning back to scrubbing down the surfaces. Louis chuckled behind him.

“Ah, you’ve met Ghost’s guest. Well, Monsieur Cooky, once met, never forgotten. Did she cast her spell over you? Possess your eyes? Does she haunt your memory?”

“She’s just a woman,” Jack muttered, but all those things were true. He could not recall what Johansen had been doing in that chart room, could not even remember how Ghost had been sitting or the expression on his face. But the woman’s words repeated to him again and again, chanted into his ear by a songbird on his shoulder. Good morning. You must be Jack.

“That’s much like saying Ghost is just a man,” Louis whispered.

He isn’t? Jack almost said, but he bit his tongue. He had no wish to betray his doubts. So he turned to Louis again and tried a different tack.

“Is she his wife?”

Louis frowned. “Wouldn’t put it that way. But she’s precious to him, all right.”

Jack couldn’t forestall the flash of jealousy that went through him. It was absurd—he couldn’t even claim the woman’s acquaintance—but the sight of her had made his breath catch in his throat the same way it had the first time he’d seen a snowbird in the wild during the winter he’d spent trapped in a Yukon River cabin on the verge of starvation.

“You know her,” he said.

“Me? Oui.” Louis’s smile faltered for a moment, and his gaze went far away.

“And does she know you?”

Louis laughed, then glanced over his shoulder, perhaps checking to see if anyone else could hear their conversation.

“Only so far.”

“Only so far?” Jack repeated. What the hell did that mean? You must be Jack, the woman had said, and the sadness in that voice was undisguised.

“I am the one who found her,” Louis said. “I knew of her, and I told Ghost. Of course I did. He’s my captain! Word of her was widespread in New Orleans, and for every ten people who did not believe, there was one like me.” He laughed. “And for every thousand of those who did believe … again, there was one like me. So perhaps, Monsieur Cooky, I was destined to cross paths with Sabine.”

“Sabine,” Jack said, and the name felt sensuous in his mouth.