Beyond Sunrise by Candice Proctor Read Free Book Online Page A

ship's ladder. "Come along, Mr. Prescott. Let's hope that life continues to be so kind to you."

    Jack paused with one booted, canvas-covered leg thrown over the Sea Hawk's rail, a machete strapped to his side, and watched the British corvette in the open water on the far side of the reef launch its jolly boat with a rattle and a splash. "Bloody hell. I can't believe this. What the blazes are they doing here?"
    Oars in hand, Patu looked up glumly from the dinghy. "I did try to warn you. You said you weren't worried."
    Jack scrambled down the rope ladder and dropped the last few feet into the yacht's small boat. "If I didn't know better, I'd swear Simon and that bloody Scotswoman set this whole thing up as a trap."
    "Huh," Patu grunted, pulling hard on the oars. "I thought you said you and Granger were old friends."
    "What does that have to do with it?"
    "Because if it'd been me, I wouldn't have expected a woman like Miss McKnight to interest you."
    "What the hell are you talking about? That woman doesn't interest me. I did this for the money, remember?" Frowning, Jack stared up the steaming summit of Mount Futapu. The way he figured it, he was looking at a two-to three-day overland trek—he refused to think of it as a flight —to the French port of La Rochelle on the northern end of the island. It would be up to Patu to deal with the British boarding party and see that Miss McKnight made it back to Neu Brenen. Damn the woman with her bloody theories of Polynesian migration and that infectious, beguilingly attractive glimmer of excitement in her eyes.
    "And if Captain Granger figures out where you're going and has the Barracuda patrolling off La Rochelle when I come to pick you up?" Patu asked. "What then?"
    Only two usable channels cut through Takaku's fringing coral reef: the pass here, at Futapu Bay, and the wider break in the north that led to the harbor of the French trading post of La Rochelle. There was a third passage, a small, tortuous route barely wide enough for an outrigger canoe, that lay on the windward side of the island, but no one in their right mind would think of taking it, especially at this time of year.
    "Then I guess I'll just have to hang around La Rochelle until the Barracuda goes away."
    Patu grunted again, and ran the dinghy into the beach. "That could take a while."
    Jack swung out of the boat and splashed ashore. "It's better than the alternative."
    "Which is what?"
    "Hanging." Gripping the sides of the dinghy, Jack made ready to push it off.
    "Is it true," Patu said suddenly, his hands slack on the oars, "what they say about the natives here? That they've taken to eating people again?"
    "Not people. Just missionaries." Jack gave the boat a hard shove that sent it shooting away from the beach. "Don't worry," he called. "No one's going to mistake me for a missionary."
    "No." Leaning into his oars, Patu threw a quick glance toward the reef, where the Barracuda's jolly boat was already threading its way through the passage. "But someone might easily take Miss McKnight for one."
    Jack stood for a moment, the waves breaking at his feet, his gaze fastened on the approaching jolly boat. A blinding flash of sunlight glinted as if off the lens of a spyglass, and a shout went up to mingle with the roar of the distant surf and the buffeting of the fresh sea breeze.
    Jack took off across the beach at a run, dodging through the thinly scattered coconut trees, his boots kicking up sprays of soft sand that fanned out behind him. He followed, for now, the same path India McKnight had taken, for it would lead him around to the other side of the mountain where he would find another trail he knew that would take him north.
    As the trees thickened, he slowed to a steady dogtrot, but it still wasn't long before the sweat was sticking his shirt to his back and rolling down his face and into his eyes. Bloody hell, he thought, sucking in air. Too many late nights drinking brandy or kava. There'd been a time, once, when