His jaw tightened again. “This is where the trail led me. There was nowhere else to look.”
“So you took me in retaliation, an eye for eye. If something has befallen them, will you kill me in return?”
“I don’t have to take your life to ruin it, Daniella. I only have to tell your father that I have bedded you and within you grows my seed. Do you think it wouldn’t break his heart to see his unmarried daughter pregnant to his enemy?”
She knew how her father would react to that and it wasn’t the type of noose that hangs a man until dead in which James would find himself. He was right about breaking his heart though. She didn’t want her father to think her a whore, or worse. What’s more, she would not be forced to marry James at the end. She needed to be back on her ship with her men, with her friends, her accepting family.
*
“Did you bump your head or did I break your brain when I hit you?” she asked, her green eyes narrowed. “Was it all an act then, last night? The dream? The violence?”
It was no act on his part. But what of hers? Even in his anguish, she hadn’t admitted to knowing the truth about his possessions, about his mother and sister, missing on the high seas, taken by pirates. The way she felt about a woman being a man’s pawn, she would have revealed earlier her knowledge of her father’s hostages.
In fact he wouldn’t have spoken to Daniella the way he had if he wasn’t in complete agony. Sweat beads formed on his brow and ran in rivulets down his back to dampen his shirt. Inside his boot the stickiness of his own blood was warm and uncomfortable. Not a fatal amount but enough. When she’d ripped the dagger from his boot, the sharpened blade had sliced right through his hose and into his skin.
He’d begun to think of her as a partner in this predicament rather than the means to the end. He hated himself for that. He could not and would not risk the only family he had left for Daniella. A pirate. A wild immature girl with a conniving woman’s body.
The space between his eyes throbbed mercilessly and his head ached along with the rhythm set by his erratic heartbeat.
“I have neither the time nor the patience to keep fighting with you, Daniella. I’ll have your word now, as a pirate, as a woman, as a Germaine, that you will not do anything stupid while we make this last dash for the border. Do you understand? Can I have your word?”
“Who gets to decide what is stupid?” A hint of a smile ghosted over her lips but didn’t quite reach her eyes.
“Just ask yourself if I would find it stupid and go with that. Actually, I’ll have your word that not only will you not try to escape or run, you will tell me every move before you make it.”
“That is unreasonable. I will not consent to it. I can give you my word I won’t run or escape but that is all.”
“It’s not enough.”
“What do you want from me, James? I will not submit to you. I will not bow at your feet and call you my master.” Her eyes grew wide. “That is what this is about, isn’t it? It kills you that you can’t control me, that you can’t control the situation like you did your men in the war. You couldn’t control your sister or your mother or your brother and it eats away at you inside.”
She knew everything about his brother as well? Damn. “I cannot control anything in this cat-and-mouse chase, Daniella. I just want to know your antics won’t leave me dead in a ditch somewhere.”
“I look after myself.” She lifted her chin back so he could once again see the mess that was her neck, the bruises purpling until her throat was almost dark blue. “And if you find yourself in a ditch, it will indeed be because I put you there.”
“You were lucky I was…not myself last night. Even you cannot take on a man in charge of his faculties. You cannot take on a group of ruffians without your father or your crew at your back.”
“I killed a man two days ago, did I not? I also disarmed you. Twice.”
“You did but we were there also that first time. Had you been alone, those men would have taken their turn raping you. They then would have taken you back to their place of hiding and raped you again. The first time you fought back, you would have been tied up or killed. Either way, you would have been raped again and again and again, dead or alive. You had one ball in one pistol and a tiny knife. That is one dead man, perhaps. Much harder to shoot a target that moves than one at your back.”
Her eyes turned glassy and flat. “I am not useless.”
“I never said you were. Without you, there would have been one more man for Hobson or myself to dispatch. Without you, I have no leverage against your father to get my mother and my sister back.”
She did not like that honesty. By the look on her face, she hoped James would say something else. What that something was, he didn’t know.
She needed the truth.
It didn’t mean she had to like it.
Chapter Twenty-One
They didn’t get more than a mile down the road before a bullet hit the back of the carriage, splintering the wood with a deafening crack that made them both duck for cover. When they began to slow, James knew without a doubt they were done for. Nowhere to run and hardly anywhere to hide. It was stand and fight to the death or be captured. Either way they wound up exactly the same. Dead.
He stared down at the finally
