'Avast, there, Magruder, you're goin' too bloody fast for me old bones!"
The shout came from somewhere close at hand. It froze Lilah and Joss in their tracks, still shoulder deep in the pool.
"Aw, step lively, Yates! If my ol’ peg leg can set this pace, sure to God your two good ones can keep up!"
Joss and Lilah exchanged astonished looks. The voices were coarse, the accents rough, but they were certainly no ghostly utterances. There were at least two flesh-and- blood men on the island with them. After nearly a week of being alone, and a growing fear that it might be a long time indeed before they were rescued, the voices struck Lilah as manna from heaven. With a delighted grin at Joss, she opened her mouth to call to the strangers.
He quickly silenced her by clapping a hand over her mouth. "Don't. You're the next thing to naked, and there might be more than two of them."
Lilah had forgotten about her state of undress. She nodded, and Joss removed his hand with a cautioning look. The voices grew closer, arguing loudly now about who was carrying the heavier end of the load. Joss edged Lilah over into the lee of a large rock, and they stood silently, their heads just above the water, listening. It occurred to Lilah suddenly that with rescue at hand, her time with Joss might be over before it had truly begun. At the thought, her throat tightened, and she clutched his hand.
The voices of the intruders faded away into the distance. Joss listened intently, then with his hands braced on the sides heaved himself out of the pool. He reached down and pulled Lilah out of the pool to sit on the rocky ledge at his feet.
"Get dressed," he said in a terse whisper. "I want to follow them."
He was already stepping into his breeches. The heady lover of the firewater pool had turned in an instant into a grim-eyed man with his mind on matters far removed from the pleasures they had just shared. He hardly even looked at her as she pulled her dress on over her soaking chemise. His attention was totally focused on the intruders, whose fading voices could still be heard cursing one another in the distance.
"Joss!" It was a whisper. He turned to look at her, his expression impatient.
"Do up my buttons, would you, please?" Though she had managed to get out of the dress on her own, buttoning it up again was beyond her. The buttons were tiny and slippery from where her chemise had already soaked her dress. Even when dry, she found buttoning herself up a slow, arduous process. Dressing herself was one of many things she would not miss a bit once they were rescued from the island.
In fact, the only thing she would miss was Joss.
She turned her back to him and he did up her buttons with quick efficiency, clearly no stranger to assisting a lady's toilette. His thoughts were not on what he was doing, she could tell, or even on her at all. The ramifications posed by the intruders occupied all his attention. But when he finished, he bent to slide the sandals on her feet, taking care to wrap the vines securely around her ankles. At that evidence of his care for her she felt a lump rise to her throat.
She almost wished they would never be rescued.
"Come on," he said, taking her hand and pulling her after him as he set off in the direction the strangers had taken.
Once in the forest, they marched single file with Joss in the lead. The undergrowth was thicker in this direction, which was due south, away from the small bay. Joss tried to shield her from the worst of the vines and branches, but a long scratch quickly decorated her arm, and her dress suffered a triangular tear in the skirt that made it just this side of indecent.
Lilah came up beside Joss and was astonished to see the blue of the ocean glinting beyond the thick curtain of vines that he had moved a scant few inches aside.
"We must be at the opposite end of the island," Lilah whispered. Joss nodded.
"Look there."
They had emerged at the edge of a cliff overlooking a small, half-moon-shaped bay. Joss pointed toward the curve of the beach below them.
Lilah looked, her eyes widening. The scene was incredible. On its side in shallow water lay a ship nearly as large as the Swift Wind had been. At first Lilah thought she must be looking at the results of another shipwreck, although there had been no storms since she and Joss had washed up on the island and they had already tramped its circumference on foot and found themselves alone. But then she saw that the ship was held on its side by blocks and tackles tied to trees, and that men in rowboats were busy scraping her hull. The ship had been denuded of everything: topmasts, sails, seabags and chests, weapons and a welter of miscellaneous stores and goods that were scattered along the beach helter-skelter. Some piles were protected with tarpaulins, some were not. Not far from the ship two men hauling logs stomped up to where a fire blazed under a huge kettle. It was too far to hear the exchange that took place between these two and the stocking-capped man stirring the kettle, but Lilah guessed from the peg leg on one of them that these were the men they'd heard.
"What are they doing?" she asked.
"She's being careened."
At Lilah's look of incomprehension he added patiently, "Having her hull scraped, caulked and repaired. She must have taken some damage in the storm. Smell that?"
Lilah sniffed, then nodded, wrinkling her nose.
"Hot tallow. They'll coat the hull with it, make her watertight again."
Lilah watched for a minute or two, then looked at Joss again. "Shouldn't we go down and tell them we're here?"
His eyes ran over her face, down over her body, whose feminine curves and hollows were clearly delineated by the wet-through dress. He shook his head.
"I think we'd better keep an eye on them for a while first. If the whole crew of them decided to take a fancy to you, there wouldn't be much I could do to stop them."
His eyes ran over her again. Looking down at herself, at the full mounds of her breasts pressing wantonly against the cloth, at her nipples clearly visible as the wet friction of the cloth rendered them hard as buttons, at the transparent nature of the skirt, which had never been intended to be worn without a petticoat around her legs, Lilah blushed. When it was just herself and Joss, she had not worried about her state of undress. But at the thought of so many strangers seeing her like this, her cheeks burned.
"My dress will be dry in an hour or so."
He shook his head. "Wet or dry, you'd be too much of a temptation. They don't strike me as a simple crew of honest sailors."
Her brow wrinkled."What else could they be?"
"Pirates. An honest ship would not be likely to do their careen on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere. Not when there are livelier ports around."
"But…"
At that moment a woman screamed, the sound high and shrill and frantic.
Lilah looked down the beach to see a woman running, her black skirts and equally black hair flying behind her. Chasing her was a man with a red kerchief tied over his head, his chest bare except for a leather strap cutting across it that might have held a sheath for a knife. As Lilah watched, wide-eyed, he caught the woman by the ends of her long hair and jerked, tumbling her to the ground. As she hit the ground she rolled onto her back, her hands going up as if to ward off the man, though the gesture was useless. He fell on top of her, and as she screamed again Lilah saw that he was pulling up her skirt and fumbling with his own breeches. Lilah's eyes widened as the man's thin white rump was revealed to her view. It settled into position between the woman's bare thrashing legs, and began to move.
"You don't need to watch that," Joss said roughly, catching her by the shoulders and pulling her around and into his arms so that her face was pressed against his chest.
"But we have to help her!"
"What do you propose we do, run down there and punch him in the nose? We're unarmed, remember? And you are a far more fetching package than that poor woman down there."
"Oh, dear God!" The thought that she might suffer the same degradation as was being visited on that woman had not even occurred to her.
"Come on, I've seen all I need to."
Joss's expression was grim as he led her away from the cliff. He kept her hand in his, and Lilah followed him meekly, shocked by what she had seen. If she had followed her original impulse and shouted out from the pool when she'd first heard voices, she might very well have shared that unfortunate woman's fate. That Joss would have fought to the death to protect her she had not a single doubt, but he was only one man and unarmed. If not for his caution, he would very likely have lost his own life and she would even now be worse than dead.
They'd been lucky. She'd been lucky. For the time being.
But a serpent had invaded their small paradise. The island was tiny, and the chances of their being found by the intruders were good. They would have to hide until the ship had finished with its careen and left.
The taste of danger was bitter in her mouth.