Beyond Sunrise by Candice Proctor

Author:Candice Proctor [Proctor, Candice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Romance, Historical, General, Erotica
ISBN: 9780307414663
Google: Jy7S8yWtWYsC
Amazon: 0345447182
Publisher: Ivy Books
Published: 2003-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

She could see him standing at the water's edge, his body taut as he watched her walk out to him. The air was soft and warm and sweetly scented with brine, the sea a dark, star-glittered presence that stretched beyond tomorrow.

"Why don't you ever sleep?" India asked, pausing only a short distance from him.

A flicker of a smile lightened his eyes. "I do sometimes."

"It's because of what happened on Rakaia. Isn't it?"

He didn't answer her, but she knew from the tightening of his jaw, the cording of the muscles in his throat as he swallowed, that it was true.

"Tell me," she said. "Tell me how your wife died."

He turned, his gaze sweeping the distant line of breaker-shattering reefs. "You don't want to hear it."

"Tell me."

He swung his head to look at her over his shoulder, his gaze narrow and piercing. "You want to hear? You want to hear how three sailors from the Lady Juliana raped an island woman so viciously that she died?"

India felt a sick, hollow dread settle heavily within her. "Not... not your wife?"

"No. Another village girl. But the Rakaians handled the situation badly. They thought the island was theirs, you see. They thought they had the right to exact their own justice on these visitors who had broken the island's laws."

"They killed them?"

"Yes."

It would have been the penalty for such a crime in England, of course. But the captain of the Lady Juliana wouldn't have seen it that way, India knew. He'd have seen three British sailors murdered by hostile natives. "The captain..." Her voice was a scratchy, broken whisper. She thought, too late, that he'd been right: she didn't want to hear this. "What did the captain do?"

Something flared in Jack's eyes, something that blazed up, deadly, then grew cold and hard. "He lined up thirty of his men and ordered them to open fire on the village. Men. Women. Children. It didn't matter. Those who could ran for the edge of the forest. Only, Titana couldn't run very fast. She was a month away from delivering our second child." He drew in a long, ragged breath, then let it out in a rush. "She was eight months heavy with child, and they shot her down like a rabid dog. Like she was nothing. Because to them, she was nothing."

"I don't believe it," India said, although even as the words left her lips, she knew what he'd told her was true. She simply didn't want to believe it.

He shifted to face her, his hard gaze locking with hers. "Why can't you believe it, India? For the same reason you can't believe that thirty years ago in the Subcontinent, a British squadron strapped the Sepoy rebels they'd captured to the mouths of cannons and literally blew them to hell? For the same reason you can't believe the good, God-fearing Puritan colonists of New England had a nasty habit of surrounding native villages and burning their inhabitants alive?" He took a step toward her, his eyes blazing.

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