The Tiger's Bride. Merline Lovelace

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