Aching for Always by Gwyn Cready

Author:Gwyn Cready
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

Joss had insisted Hugh be transported first, and now she stood shivering in the cold, despite the blanket around her shoulders, watching the sailors attach his litter to the rigged pulley line. Cold and dizzy, she was dreading her own moment of transport and unnerved by the trousers and tailcoats the officers wore. She was deeply concerned about Hugh.

“Will he be all right?”

A lieutenant named Roark, a portly man with closely cut red hair who had followed the first sailor over to the island, gave her a steely look and said in an English accent very much like Hugh’s, “I shouldn’t worry too much. The ship’s surgeon is a fine one. Trained in Paris.” Despite Roark’s words, however, there was a look of concern on his face.

“Where are we, exactly?” she asked.

It seemed a simple enough question—and far simpler than the next she would ask—but it was as if a veil had dropped over the lieutenant’s ruddy face.

“The North Atlantic, m’um.”

She was at sea, hundreds of miles from Pittsburgh. It was more than hard to fathom; it was impossible. “And w-when?”

He paused. “November eleventh.”

“In what year?”

He shouted to the men who were unintentionally rocking Hugh’s litter as they adjusted the pulley. “Damn you! ’Tis not a crate of cabbages you’re transporting there, for the love of Hades.” Then he gave her a careful look. “For that I’m afraid you’ll have to wait to ask the captain.”

The year’s a secret? What was this?

“Then would you mind,” she said, “telling me where I could find him.”

Did she detect a smile on his face? “That, too, will have to wait. Come, let us get you safely lodged in your quarters.”

There was an undercurrent in the words “safely lodged” that made her distinctly uneasy.

“I have a phone, you know,” she said, indignant, and held it up.

Which was a mistake, for Roark lifted it from her hand. “That, I’m afraid, will have to be confiscated.” He slipped it into his pocket.

While she alternately fumed and shivered, the rigged litter delivered Hugh to the ship and returned, not as a litter, but as a seat fashioned out of woven ropes. Still irritated, she refused Roark’s offer of a hand as she threaded her legs into it. Closing her eyes, she tried to beat back her growing panic. If she let it, the fear would paralyze her. She gasped as the seat lifted into the air, swinging wildly in the wind. She wished Hugh was there to reassure her, then kicked herself for worrying about herself when she should have been worrying about him.

She could hear the waves breaking beneath her like the snapping jaws of alligators, and she closed her eyes and began to cry.

When she opened them again, she was over decking. An able-bodied seaman lifted her free, and she was handed into the custody of two men with guns.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.