Page 21 of Maggie and the Pirate’s Son (Brides of Chattan #3)

Chapter Twenty

T he perfect future Maggie had envisioned crumbled before her eyes, as Bash attempted to pry the old chest from the earth to hand off to his father. She was forced to stand by, helpless, immobilized by the captain’s knife, while Bash lost everything and she lost any chance of a life with him.

This was all her fault.

She hadn’t wanted to spend their last hours fighting with each other over her refusal to sail away alone, but now she wished she had fought him. Anything would have been better than this. Instead, she’d gone off on her own, searching for both him and the treasure, and when she found him, sneaking silently behind, ready to emerge for the celebration when he found the spot.

Had he been less intent on solving his mother’s riddle, he’d have undoubtedly noticed her following him. Had she been less intent on creeping after him unseen, she might have noticed the captain following, too.

But she didn’t—not until Mad grabbed her, the cold steel of his knife pressed against her throat.

“If you so much as breathe, I will slice your neck so deep your head falls off and vermin will crawl inside the gaping hole,” he had whispered, pinning one arm so far behind it made her back arch.

Now Bash was staring at them, his eyes ablaze with fury, and Maggie glared right back at him, trying desperately to convey that he shouldn’t, under any circumstances, follow the captain’s orders and hand over the gold. Not on her account.

He seemed to be getting the wrong message though, or else he ignored her, because he kept on digging.

There were two weapons trained on her now, the knife and a blunderbuss, and she half wondered just what Mad intended to do. If he shot the gun, wouldn’t he blow his own knife hand off in the process? Was he too far gone to care?

What a terrible hash she’d made of everything, just like always, when she only ever wanted to help. Well. To help and, selfishly, to run away with Bash, she admitted. Such selfishness was about to be her downfall, and his. That was the unfair part. He didn’t deserve any of this. It was just one more bad thing heaped atop his lifetime of bad things.

After several excruciating minutes, Bash extracted the heavy chest and stepped towards Maggie.

“Let her go,” he tried again.

The captain laughed. “You’ll have to start joining the lads for Ruff. You don’t seem to understand I’m holding all the cards.”

“Except one,” Bash said. “One very heavy card. The only card you’ve ever cared about, at least so long as I’ve known you.”

“True,” Mad agreed. “But I’m holding the prettiest card. So which do you want more, boy? Wealth or beauty?”

When Bash didn’t answer, his wretched father chuckled.

“That’s what I thought. Now bring it here and put it in her hands.”

Maggie shook her head the tiniest bit, but, sensing the movement, Mad pressed the knife tighter to her throat, and she held her breath, not even daring to swallow.

Bash did as he was told, staring into her eyes with so much sorrow that she wanted to weep. The gold was his by rights, earned if nothing else, through toil and the lash. The one thing which could finally set him free from the cruelty he’d known all his life, and now he was being forced to sacrifice it to save her. She was grateful, but she wasn’t sure she was worth it.

His hand brushed against her arm as he surrendered the chest. Like the day he found her, St. Elmo’s Fire sparked between them, and Maggie almost stopped breathing. When their eyes met, his were filled with sorrow.

The gold was heavy, and she grunted under the weight, nearly forced to her knees. The captain cackled at the most unladylike sound.

“Now what?” Bash asked, stepping back only a pace or two as the captain waved him away. “You have your long-lost treasure. Let the girl go.”

“Have I taught you nothing about the value of a hostage?” Mad asked with a disappointed tone.

“You’ve taught me nothing except how to hate.”

The captain threw back his head to roar with laughter, his dagger scraping against Maggie’s throat. The stinging cut brought tears to her eyes, or would have done, if her vision wasn’t getting cloudy around the edges, her legs threatening to buckle.

“A worthy lesson every boy should learn.”

Instinctively Maggie turned her head away from the knife and noticed a third man creeping up to join them. He wore a naval coat of blue serge.

“Cornelius MacLeod,” the man said calmly. “At long last. Care to introduce me to your friends?”

Realizing he must be the captain of HMS Pursuit , Maggie’s breathing grew shallow, and she darted her gaze to Bash, who stood frozen, weaponless and exposed.

“Constantin,” Mad exclaimed, swinging Maggie and his gun around to face the officer. She staggered to her knees, dropping the chest, as the man raised his hands in supplication. “You’re here just in time. I caught these two red-handed.”

“Come now, Cornelius. After twenty-two years, you must call me Frederick!” the officer said jovially.

Both captains laughed like old comrades and Maggie grew faint. The warm air she had once longed for was too thick and humid. She couldn’t catch a proper breath, especially not wearing her horrid bodice and stays. How had she ever stood them before?

“This woman is a pirate thief,” Mad continued. “She boarded my vessel uninvited and in disguise. She stole from me. I followed her here, only to discover the two of them attempting to hide what they took.”

Bile surged up Maggie’s throat, sour with the taste of regret. Was this how her foolish adventure would end? Prosecuted as a criminal when all she’d ever stolen was a kiss?

“Lies,” Bash said, his voice soft but strong and cold.

Constantin turned his way as though noticing him for the first time, but Mad remained focused on the navy man.

“She’s no pirate,” Bash explained desperately to Constantin. “Just a silly girl, forced into hiding when she snuck aboard the wrong vessel by mistake.”

Tears burned her eyes, but she refused to let them fall. He would implicate himself if he didn’t stop talking. She shook her head once more, ever so slightly despite the blade still at her throat.

“I’m the one responsible for all of this,” Bash went on. “It was me who took his property. Believing we were lovers, he kidnapped her to get it back.”

Constantin looked at each of them in turn with an inscrutable expression on his face. “Which is it, miss? A thief or a victim?” the officer asked, and Maggie opened her lips to plead with him, but her throat was too dry to make a sound.

“Please sir, you must believe me,” Bash implored. “She’s innocent in all of this. I should have put her on a ship straight back to Scotland as I intended, but I was a coward. I couldn’t watch her sail away from me.”

The last, he addressed to Maggie, and when she blinked to ease the burning in her eyes, salty tears began to trickle down her cheeks.

“I see,” the officer said, though as far as Maggie was concerned, he saw nothing at all. “And you are?”

Bash stood up straighter. “Sebastian MacLeod, sir.” And then, apparently resigned to his fate, he added, “Sailing master and boatswain of Auldfarrand’s Revenge .”

“Now that does interest me,” Constantin said. “I’ve been searching for you a long time.”

“For me, sir?” Bash asked.

“Indeed. You’re all under arrest. Kindly drop your weapons.”

“Come, now, Constantin, we’ve led a merry chase, you and I. Be a shame for our little game to end this way,” Mad growled. “Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll let you have the boy and a third of the gold. You get your hanging and become a very wealthy man. Everybody wins.”

“Everyone except Bash,” Maggie exclaimed.

And then several things happened all at once.

Mad yanked Maggie’s hair, tipping her head back to better expose her throat.

Bash lunged for his father.

A gun went off, singeing Maggie’s cheek with the heat of the powder.

The captain threw her to the ground, slicing another cut along her throat.

Someone covered her body with theirs.

And then, mercifully, everything went dark.

“No!” Bash screamed as Maggie fell before his eyes.

Without a thought to the naval captain, he raced to her side, shoving Mad off her.

What had the fool been thinking, firing a pistol while Mad was using her as a shield?

She was covered in blood, slick and sticky and warm. In contrast, her skin was white and cold.

“What have you done?” he gasped up at Constantin, who merely scowled.

From both sides of the house—his mother’s former home, perhaps the same structure in which he was conceived one dark night when the devil came to call—a dozen more officers converged, marching in two straight lines.

Bash was pulled away from Maggie and yanked roughly to his feet before being clapped in irons as he watched them encircle her, his beloved, his life. Then he was jostled around so he couldn’t see her at all, no matter how he twisted or craned his neck. Instead, he came face to face with Mad, whose shoulder was covered in blood.

Mad sneered at him. “I always knew. From the moment I heard she was up the duff, I knew you’d be the end of me.”

“Fitting,” Bash spat, “since you were only ever the beginning of me.”

They marched him away, tripping in his leg irons, back up the same streets and through the town center, as villagers who might once have been his mother’s friends, who could just as easily have been his mother’s sister, threw rotten vegetables at him until he smelled like his own death. A chill ran through him when they passed the permanent gallows before turning into a gaol ripe with the stench of piss and the bowels of hell.

He’d known in his heart it would come to this someday. There were only two ways for a life such as his to end. His grandparents had known it, too. It was why he couldn’t allow himself to give his heart to Maggie, more fool him. She had it already—all of it—every beat and the skipping pauses in between.

Bash had also known better than to go looking for Mad’s lost gold. Just as the search had driven the captain mad, that way could only lie destruction. But the lure of freedom had been too tempting, as was the idea his mother might be guiding him and would somehow protect him from her ghostly realm.

When faced with only two bad options, seizing a third had seemed worth the risk, but only when the risk was his alone. Never Maggie’s. She was supposed to be safe.

His only consolation was that if she was dead, he would soon join her. And if she wasn’t, they would go together, side by side, on the gallows come dawn.

It was a very shallow consolation. They’d surely end up in different places for the duration of eternity because she was a kind, loving, free-spirited woman who deserved every good thing, and he was pirate scum unfit to clean her boots.

In a nearby cell, Mad raised a ruckus, by turns cursing and moaning, then snoring until he started all over again.

There was no sign of his darling Maggie, no weeping or murmured prayers, none of the soft sighs she made in her sleep. Bash supposed she must be gone, and he wept for her—silently at first, until something like a sob tore from his throat when he drew a wheezing breath.

“At least we go together, eh, boy? Father and son, at last,” Mad called out to him.

Bash settled himself and steadied his voice to answer coldly. “You were never my father, Cornelius MacLeod.”

“Ungrateful fucking wretch,” Mad muttered, but he made no further attempts at conversation and soon went back to snoring loud enough to rattle the iron bars on the door.

Finding a corner that smelled the least like human excrement, Bash curled up in a ball, rocking back and forth as he waited for morning .

When he finally dozed, he dreamt only of her. Free of blood and dressed in breeches, she appeared the way he liked her best—sun-dappled and smiling as the ocean breeze tousled her short, chestnut hair and Caribbean waves sparkled in her azure eyes. She kissed his cheek, and he grew hard with longing, but on reaching out, her hand slipped through his grasp, and she was gone—his cheeky, wild girl from the Scottish Highlands.

He only wished he’d told her in words how much he loved her. He only wished his cowardice had not prevailed.