The Tiger's Bride

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.