Once a Pirate by Susan Grant Read Free Book Online Page A

chicken.
    Willoughby resumed his inventory of the tins. He lifted a lid and inhaled. “Ah, nutmeg. The booty from your ship is a cook’s dream.” He thrust the tin at her. “Smell.”
    She sniffed gingerly, then read the invoice attached TO THE BOX. BRITISH EAST INDIA COMPANY. SHIPPED AUGUST 1820.
    Shaken, she dropped her spoon. It splashed into the pewter bowl. Vaguely disoriented, she let her eyes drift closed. The invoice was another brick in an insurmountable wall of evidence. Maybe the last brick.
    In warfare as well as life, those who failed to adapt perished. If she wanted to survive this and return home, she had to accept the extraordinary possibility that she’d moved through time. There was the Bermuda Triangle, after all, and the Druids with their circles of stones. Plenty of people had mysteriously disappeared over the centuries. What if she had, too?
    But what if this is some kind of purgatory, the place you go if you aren’t quite good enough to go to Heaven?
    With that, all the dirty laundry of her sad little past flitted before her eyes. There were the wild Friday nights at the officers’ club. No doubt those had gotten her here. So did picking wimpy strawberries from the green plastic baskets at the supermarket and replacing them with the ripest, monster-sized berries. And she drove fifty-five in the thirty-five mile-per-hour zone each morning on the way to the base because she knew the cops never patrolled that street before six.
    God was watching.
    If she was truly deserving of Heaven, she wouldn’t have felt compelled to lie about her rich father, saying he’d died before she was born. She would have been strong enough to admit that he’d dumped her white-trash mother after getting her pregnant. And had never once come to see their daughter.
    A small, tired moan escaped her. “I should have known it would all come back to haunt me,” she whispered, shoving away from the table.
    Willoughby and Theo stared at her with that now familiar look of pity and regret. How could she explain her predicament when she didn’t understand it herself?
    Without saying good-bye she fled the galley and ran to Andrew’s quarters. There had to be something she’d missed, something that would explain what had happened to her. A clue she hadn’t seen.
    She yanked open the door and stumbled to Andrew’s desk, tipping over a stack of papers, which sent an ink bottle crashing to the floor. Shards of sticky glass crunched under her boots as she tore through Andrew’s books. Keats, Sir Walter Scott, Shelley. Published: London, 1816. “No!” She threw the book against the wall.
    Andrew appeared in the open doorway, an ashen-faced Theo behind him. “Run along, lad,” Andrew said to the boy and closed the door.
    Palms raised, as though soothing a wild animal, Andrew stepped toward her.
    “What year is it?” she demanded.
    “’Tis 1821.”
    She crushed her hands into fists. She was a logical, reasonable person, a highly trained professional. Things like this didn’t happen to people like her. She picked up an unlit candle and hurled it at him. “You’re lying!”
    He swerved out of the way. “I would not lie to you.” He ducked as a copy of Sir Walter Scott’s
Rob Roy
sailed over his head.” ’Tis 1821, five months since you left your home in India.”
    “No!” She clamped her hands over her ears. The vise she’d clamped around her self-control wrenched open. The control had gotten her through her mother’s sickness and death, her fiancé’s betrayal and the catastrophe that followed. But the added pressure of not knowing whether she’d see her home again proved too much.
    A sob tore from her, and her face contorted. “Why has this happened to me? Why?”
    Startled and dismayed by Amanda’s tears, Andrew snatched her wrists. “Don’t. Before long, you will be in England with your betrothed. The duke is anxious to marry, I’m told. You could have done far worse. Richard is neither fat nor old.”