The Tiger's Bride. Merline Lovelace

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.