Mariah's Prize by MIRANDA JARRETT Read Free Book Online

Mrs. West’s head ached too much for her to notice what Mariah wore, and she kept to her bed with the hangings drawn against the daylight. Mariah gathered the withered lime rinds from the top of the claw-foot table and took them away with the empty pitcher.
    By the time she’d reached the Revenge’s wharf, Mariah wished she’d changed back into her old dark wool. Jenny was smaller, and Mariah had had to lace her stays tighter to make the pale blue gown fit. She had tied a scarf around her shoulders to hide the way the lacings pushed her breasts up above the gown’s low round neckline, but from the suggestive invitations she received along Thames Street she realized the scarf was a failure. Beneath her wide-brimmed straw that her face was red with embarrassment, and she was nearly running, her eyes steadfastly on her feet, when she finally reached the sloop’s gangway.
    “Here now, sweetheart, what’s your hurry?” A bare male arm snaked around her waist and nearly lifted her off the deck. Mariah twisted around to see the man’s face, shiny from the sun and work and rimmed with a curling red beard.
    “Couldn’t bear to be away from me, eh, love?
    And brung me supper in a willow basket, too! “
    “Let me go!” cried Mariah indignantly, but the man’s grip only tightened, pulling her face close enough to his that her that brim bent up against his forehead. She swung the basket up to strike his chest, but the man only laughed and swatted it away. All around them other men were laughing, too, and as Mariah struggled she wondered furiously who they all could be on board her sloop.
    “Let me go, you great oaf!”
    Suddenly she was yanked free and set down on the deck so sharply she almost tumbled back from the impact. She shoved her that brim up in time to see Gabriel Sparhawk’s fist strike the bearded man’s jaw and send him sprawling against the railing as the other men scattered out of the way.
    “Why’d you go putting your dirty hands on the lady, Duffy?” demanded Gabriel as the other man held his jaw.
    “Don’t you know who she is?”
    “Sorry, Cap’n,” he mumbled thickly, “I never would’ve touched her if I’d known she belonged t’you.”
    With his hands on his waist, Gabriel glared down at him. “That would have been bad enough, you great randy fool. But it’s worse than that.
    She doesn’t belong to me. This sloop belongs to her. “
    “Th’ owner?” repeated Duffy weakly.
    “Ah, damn it all, Cap’n, how would I know?”
    But Gabriel had already turned toward Mariah.
    “Did he harm you, lass?”
    Mariah shook her head, clutching the basket with both hands before her. By now she should remember the man’s sheer size and presence, but still she caught herself inching upward, striving to make the most of her own diminutive height before him.
    “But who is he. Captain Sparhawk? And these other men, too. Only the Revenge’s crewmen have any right to be on board.”
    “Then they belong here and no place else,” declared Gabriel, wiping his shirtsleeve across his brow. In this heat he longed to peel off the shirt and the satin waistcoat over it and work bare chested like the men, but not until after he’d met with this blasted clerk, wherever he was. He looked past the girl, wondering if the man had come with her. She didn’t have any other reason for being here, and her presence was one more irritation in a morning full of them.
    “If the logbook below’s to be believed, your father sailed with barely enough men to trim his sails. A vessel this size needs eighty good hands to make a privateer out of her, men for sailing and fighting and taking prizes into port.”
    A wild, whooping cheer rose up from the men at the mention of prizes, a cheer that Gabriel silenced with one black look over his shoulder. Best to let them know early on what kind of captain he was. Enthusiasm was one thing. Raving like jackals was quite another, and he was in no mood for jackals, or, for that matter,