Rough hands grabbing her beneath her armpits and dragging her out of the warm cocoon in which she slept woke Lilah. She had a single shocked instant to register that it was no longer night but dawn. Pink and purple pinwheels spiralled out from the pale yellow sun just peeking over the eastern horizon. The tide lapped far up the beach, dangerously close to where she had been lying, narrowing the strip of sand to a width of less than a dozen yards.
Then in the same instant she realized that she had been sleeping in Joss's arms on the beach, and she was now being dragged away from him, her bare skin scraping over the gritty sand. A grinning, dirty-looking man in a scarlet shirt and black breeches whom she immediately took for one of the pirates stood with his bare foot on Joss's shoulder, aiming a pistol point-blank at his face.
Joss, too, seemed stunned by what was happening. As Lilah looked on in horror, Joss's head rose an inch or two from the sand, swivelled in her direction. The pirate holding the pistol said something, cocked the pistol, and Joss's eyes swung back to the pistol and the man who held it. Joss froze, every muscle in his body seeming to tense. The pirate's grin broadened. His finger seemed to tighten on the trigger…
Lilah then understood that the hands holding her belonged to another pirate, one with a lush red beard and a missing front tooth, who was leering at her nakedness as he dragged her farther along the beach. Lilah had no doubt that in a matter of seconds the pistol in the hand of the first pirate would explode, Joss would be killed, and she would be brutally raped by one and possibly both men.
The reality of what was happening sank in at last and she screamed.
The sound was as loud and shrill as a steam whistle. The man dragging her jumped and cursed, kicking her in the back with his bare foot. Lilah barely felt the blow as she struggled to escape his hold. Her scream had apparently distracted for a vital instant the pirate bent on murdering Joss. Even as she fought to break free of her captor, she was aware of Joss's hand closing over the hand holding the gun, of the pirate who had threatened him twisting through the air… Suddenly there was an explosion, and then she was free. The red- bearded man abandoned the fight and took to his heels as Joss came running toward them. The other pirate lay motionless in the sand. Lilah sank to her knees, shaking. After a single glance at her that seemed to register in a millisecond that she was unharmed, Joss chased the red-bearded man along the beach and into the forest. And it was then that Lilah thought that even if Joss caught and killed the other man, the pirates would certainly miss two of their number. They would come looking for their crew-mates. More pirates might even at that moment be watching her.
Eyes wide, Lilah looked around, fear causing a sour taste in her mouth.
Except for the dead man, the beach was deserted. She was alone. At least, she seemed to be alone.
Her eyes scanned the forest. If they were watching her, they would come out. They had no need to fear a lone woman. On the contrary…
The memory of the fate that had befallen that other woman taken prisoner by the pirates flashed into her mind as vividly as if it was happening before her eyes at that very moment. Lilah shuddered.
She was naked. Her eyes swept the beach for her clothes.
Funny how different everything looked in the brightening light of dawn. Some half-dozen yards away, just beyond the dead man, loomed the rock from which she had watched Joss swim. The tide had almost reached it. Her dress lay in its lee.
Whatever happened, she would face it fully clad.
Barely taking time to brush the sand from her body, she shook the clothes out and pulled them on, doing up the buttons and lacings with a frantic haste slowed only by trembling fingers.
She had no sooner swept her hair out of the back of her dress than Joss emerged from the forest. Heart pounding, she ran up to him.
"He's dead."
The words were in response to the unspoken question in her eyes. Without a pause he walked past her to the other man, stared down at him for an instant, then bent and cautiously turned him over. Lilah, following, shuddered and turned away at the sight of blood oozing from where the left side of the man's face had been. Joss's shot had blown it clean away. When she looked again, it was to find that Joss had emptied the pirate's pockets and was in the process of stripping him of his breeches.
"What are you doing?" Her voice was faint.
"We need his clothes."
"Why?"
Joss looked up from what he was doing only briefly, but she saw that his eyes were dark and hard, his expression grim.
"When they find us-if they find us-I want them to think they've found two men. You'll be safer by far if we can keep them from guessing that you're a woman."