The Pirate Ghost Read online

  Tess just stared at him while he did his best to adjust the pants to his body. What on earth had brought him here? And now that he was here, what on earth was she supposed to do with him?

  Gabriel looked up and smiled. “Very comfortable fabric,” he said. “We’da earned a pretty penny for cloth such as this in any port of call.”

  She still couldn’t quite believe this was happening. “Is that what you did? You were a merchant seaman?” Tess dropped onto the couch. The evening had been tiring so far, and she could see that it was going to be a long one.

  “Well, I suppose you could say I was that.”

  He looked at the reclining chair behind which he’d been hiding earlier, and then, smoothing his hand down over his newly clad legs, he tentatively lowered himself into it. It supported him perfectly.

  “Well, now,” he said as he leaned back in the chair, “I guess—” But he didn’t finish the sentence. Instead of resting his back against the chair, he fell straight through it and hit the floor with a resounding thump! “God’s blood!” he shouted in surprise, lying with his hips and legs on the chair and his torso on the floor behind it. When he tried to roll over, his legs hit the arms of the chair and stopped him so that he had to push himself straight up to sit again. “What kind of a world is this where I can wear your trousers but I can’t sit in a chair?” he asked her. “I’m at loss here, lass.”

  Taken aback by his predicament, Tess had also been a bit amused, and she was at a loss to explain it, too. But then she knew, or thought she knew, what had happened.

  “Here,” she said, rising. “Put this around your shoulders and then sit down again.”

  She took her robe off and handed it to him as he stood.

  “I don’t know how I’ll look in it,” he said, laughing, “but I’ll wear it if it pleases you.”

  “It does,” she told him. “Just slip it over your shoulders and try sitting again.”

  She watched with keen interest to see if her theory would be proven correct. The man lowered himself into the seat and then, very carefully, rested his back against the chair.

  “You are most clearly a genius!” he cried out. “Yes, definitely that, for I don’t understand it at all.”

  “Me neither, really,” she admitted. “But since you can wear my clothing, it appears that the cloth will act as a buffer between you and the real world.”

  “A buffer, you say?” He gave it some thought and tested her theory by trying to rest his bare hand on the arm of the chair. His hand passed through the material, disappearing to the wrist. “But if I can touch your clothing, and yourself, as well, why not your furniture?”

  “It’s not mine,” she said. “It’s rented.”

  “Rented? The house, too?”

  “Yes, all of it,” she admitted.

  “That does make fair sense,” he said. “But then, how am I able to stand upon this rented floor of yours?”

  Tess paused, considering. “I don’t know,” she confessed.

  But he was smiling then, comprehension growing in his lively green eyes. “It’s because of you,” he said. “The flooring has borne your tread, felt the sole of your foot upon it. Yes, lass, it has the touch of your body upon it and so I can touch it, too. Ah, there’s a kinship at work here—your body to mine.”

  Tess felt herself blushing. The lilting manner in which he’d said that simple sentence had given it a carnal sound. The touch of my body, she thought, smiling. It was as though her body were a magical charm that could give him form with its touch.

  “I don’t see why that should be the case,” she said carefully. “Why me?”

  “Why not you?” He stretched back against the reclining chair, which immediately responded by unfolding beneath him. “Oh, saints above, now the chair itself is doing it to me,” he said. But he laughed, enjoying his reclining position. “So how does a body get itself up again from this miracle chair?”

  “You just grab the arms and pull...no, I guess you can’t do that. Here, I’ll help.”

  Tess hurried to help the man whose hands could not grip the arms of the chair and whose feet made no contact with the extended footrest. She took his hands in hers and pulled, and the chair folded obediently as he rose to stand, her robe falling away from his shoulders. He stood inches before her, still holding both of her hands in his, and smiled down at her.

  “I can see where I shall be surprised quite often in this world of yours,” he said. “But with you guiding me, I am certain I shall be as safe as a babe in it.”

  Then he lifted both of her hands to his mouth and kissed them, a delicate brushing of his lips, first on one hand and then the other.

  Tess found herself looking into his wonderfully green eyes and wishing he were more substantial, wishing he could actually be a man she could rely on. But how could a woman possibly rely on a ghost?

  “Well,” she began, trying to ignore the embarrassment and sudden emotion caused by his kiss. “Well, now that we know a little more about how you can get around in the world, we’ll have to figure out how you got here to begin with.”

  “I’m here,” he said, still holding her hands. “Isn’t that enough?”

  Once again, she felt out of kilter. Had her run-in with Darrell and her unfounded suspicions of Charles Dumont pushed her over the edge—into a world of fantasy? “But we don’t know why or how long you’ll stay.”

  “I think I’ll stay forever,” he told her. “Forever and a day.”

  “Please, Gabriel,” she said, trying to effect a businesslike tone. “Tell me what happened to you. Tell me your story.”

  “That I will, lass, and gladly. I don’t think it will explain my state, but if it will keep you at my side longer, the tale will be well worth the telling.”

  “I’d love to hear all of it.”

  “Well, then, I would suppose it best to begin by being as honest as I know how,” Gabriel said. “I agreed I was a merchant seaman, which I was to be sure, but our form of commerce wasn’t of the type you’re thinking, lass. At the time I met my demise, I was making my way in the world as a pirate, you see. In fact, I was captain of the ship.”

  Tess could think of no reply to that information but to stare at him in wonder. Not only did she have a ghost in her house, but the ghost was a buccaneer!

  DARRELL CAGE LEFT TESS’S bungalow nursing his shoulder and looking for a drink. The cellular phone in his car had been ringing when he got to it, however, and he snatched the receiver from its cradle and snarled into it, “Hello, Darrell Cage.”

  “Are we set, then?” a man asked calmly, ignoring Darrell’s obvious ill-temper.

  “Almost.” Darrell swallowed and took a deep breath as he gazed back in the direction of Teresa’s house. “She hasn’t signed it yet.”

  “Why not? We have to break ground in two weeks and we haven’t had a title search yet.”

  “It’s tough to get her to sign over property that she doesn’t know she owns, Carl. I’ve got to figure out a plan. But I’ll get it. Don’t worry.”

  “You better.”

  “I saved you millions,” Darrell snapped “Don’t lose any sleep over it.”

  “I won’t,” Carl assured him. “I’m not the one with his neck on the line. Face it, we’d be better off dealing with her directly...and leaving you out of it completely.”

  “Then do that and get off my back! Goodbye.” Darrell put down the phone, his teeth set in an angry grimace. Between his business “partners” and his ex-wife, he felt as though the whole world had designated him as its target.

  He really needed a dnnk now.

  Because it was Sunday, and he didn’t want to go to a restaurant, he had to settle for a six-pack of beer from a Qwik-Mart to soothe his aching body.

  When Darrell Cage began branching out from his real-estate business into other ventures, he’d found some convenient loopholes that had saved him a lot of expense and red tape. One was to place property in his wife’s name to separate it from his business a
nd, in some cases, conceal the ownership. Tess wasn’t stupid, of course, and she was an accountant, so she had a pretty good idea of what he was up to when he had her sign various papers. Not that she had any concrete proof that he knew of.

  But those papers were the main lever she’d used to obtain the divorce. The only way he’d been able to regain control of the property had been to let it go through uncontested. But she’d been true to her word and signed everything back to him. Everything but one particular piece of property, the deed to which he’d passed off as a duplicate of another to gain her signature.

  That remaining signature was his goal now, but every time he saw her he became so angry that he couldn’t concentrate. He really didn’t care about business papers or signatures, only about her absence from his home. That, and the fact that she had physically ejected him from the rattrap she was now living in. How on earth could that woman throw him out of the place like that?

  He drank and nursed his anger, then he drove back toward Tess’s house. Maybe he’d stop again and ask her what she thought she was doing manhandling him like that.

  Maybe he should tell her how she got her current job. Did she really think a woman seven years out of college with no employment record deserved as good as what she had? He ought to tell her.

  No, he ought to belt her. That’s what he should do. How dare she twist his arm like that?

  When Darrell stopped two houses down from hers, the front tire of his car rode up on the curb. He parked at a cockeyed angle that mirrored his state of mind. He staggered out of his car and swung the door shut, not quite managing to close it. The dome light of his vehicle remained on.

  As Darrell walked toward the lights glowing in Tess’s windows, a shadow moved across the shade. Something gave him the impression that she wasn’t alone.

  That thought made him angrier still.

  He stalked closer to the house, never seeing the other car parked at the curb in front of his. He would have recognized the car; he’d seen it before. But Darrell was too drunk and too angry.

  He sneaked through the yard to a side window and peered through the slim space between the sill and the drawn shade. He could see Tess’s back and could hear her talking, but he couldn’t see anyone else in the room.

  Hoping to find a better vantage point, Darrell moved around the house toward the small backyard, stumbling over something in the dark.

  “Damn,” he muttered as he regained his footing. Then, in the brief silence following his oath, he heard a footstep.

  A man loomed in front of him, blocking his way.

  “You?” Darrell spoke angrily, but in a whisper. “I thought you were... Hey! What are you doing out here?”

  The man came at him quickly, his arm slamming into Darrell’s stomach, knocking him down.

  Darrell let out a small yelp of pain, clutched his stomach and tried to roll away from the man. But the dark form stooped over him, his arm striking Darrell repeatedly until he lay quite still.

  Then, after pausing a moment to catch his breath, the man took Darrell’s inert body by the ankles and dragged it across the lawn toward the garage, leaving a trail of bent grass behind him.

  Chapter Five

  “What was that?” Tess sat up abruptly on the couch. She turned toward the back of the house as she strained to hear. She’d thought she’d heard something.

  “I heard nothing.” Gabriel followed her gaze toward the kitchen, a look of concern darkening his brow. “Would you wish me to see about it for you?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head in dismissal. “It’s probably just the wind. I’d rather hear about your life. You said you were in Africa. What were you trading there?”

  “We had stopped an English merchant ship on the West Africa route,” he said, regaining the momentum of his story. “She was loaded with muskets and gunpowder for an outpost to the south, but we redirected the shipment to a French garrison in Guinea, where they weren’t too particular about the source of their supply. I led a group inland looking for ivory or anything upon which we might lay claim and earn a profit.”

  “What did you do with the crew of the ship you captured?”

  “Set them that didn’t join us adrift in the ship’s boat,” he said easily. Then, noting her frown, he added, “They were within sight of shore at the time, lass, and all of them were fit for rowing. And nearly half the crew elected to stay aboard and pilot the ship to port for us. Merchant crews held little loyalty to the ship’s masters, and they did well for themselves in the sale of the supplies and the ship, as well. Can you find fault with that arrangement?”

  “It’s hard to get used to conversing with a pirate’s ghost, I guess,” Tess said. “Your concept of fairness is quite different from mine. The arrangement seems brutal.”

  “That it was,” he agreed. “But life in Dublin or London was no less brutal for the majority of the poor sinners whom the good Lord put down there. Survival was our game no matter where we were, and it was no different for the men of the ships we captured in our brief career.”

  “I suppose not. What about going inland? I didn’t think pirates did anything but attack ships at sea.”

  “A pirate is a man of business working beyond the legal pale,” Gabriel said with a twinkle in his eye. “Instead of buying and selling, we stole and sold. It brings a greater profit.”

  “I see you’re an unrepentant pirate at that ”

  “I have no reason to repent,” he insisted “The list of my sins may be long, but I’d set it against that of any king or nobleman of my day and come out a saint in comparison. And now that I’m back, more or less,” he added, laughing, “God has apparently given me a chance to make my list a bit longer ”

  “Well, I hope that’s not your plan.” Tess frowned. “How did you get started? I don’t imagine the Pirates’ Guild recruited new members on the street.”

  “No, the British did that for them,” he said bitterly. “I was convicted of theft and condemned to transportation to New South Wales but I slipped away from a work detail and took my own route off the island on a Dutch ship. I was sixteen at the time, you understand, and I’d have sooner been shot dead escaping than forced into servitude.

  “Well, the Dutch trader stopped in the Lesser Antilles and I jumped ship. I made it to Jamaica, where I settled down in a way. I married a fine woman—Camille, her name was. The most beautiful lass you might hope to see. I’d thought I’d found heaven, you understand, in the glance of Camille’s eyes. It’s her ribbon that binds my hair even now.”

  “But you left her?”

  “She died, miss. Cholera is a fancy word for death, and she succumbed to the scourge in the plague of 1636.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tess said. “It must have been terrible for you”

  “No finer woman ever lived,” he said simply. “But life was brutal, as I say. Death was not something that surprised anyone. I set sail a month after putting her in the ground. Our ship was taken by the crew of the Maria Louisa no more than two months later.”

  “And you joined them?”

  “Certainly. What else did I have to do with my life? I wasn’t going to work for sailor’s pay until I was too crippled to work and left to die a beggar in some foreign port of call. No, I’d run my own life or ruin it, but I wouldn’t let some bloody bastard of a ship’s master run it to ruin for me. Excuse my language,” he added quickly. “I’m a bit rusty in my etiquette.”

  “That’s all right,” Tess assured him. “Those words are vulgar, but they’re not usually considered to be quite as terribly offensive anymore.”

  “Well, things have changed to be sure when women wear pants and sailors are allowed to curse in public,” he said, marveling. “But I imagine I’ll get used to it.”

  “You were going to tell me about Africa,” Tess said. “Did you find ivory?”

  “Not much,” he replied. “We weren’t equipped to hunt the brutes and could only trade a little with the native tribes. I was the only one who m
ade a profit on that jaunt or could have had I ever put to a port where I might have sold my prize.”

  “What was that?”

  “It was an amulet of sorts,” Gabriel said. “It was carved from a hardwood I hadn’t seen, almost the size of a man’s fist. The face of it was inlaid with ivory and gold fetishes and a red stone the size of my thumb was in the center of the design. It was a fine piece of jewelry, and the owner parted with it for nothing at all.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Yes, he said it was good luck to give it away. The translation was poor, you understand, but I was given to believe it was a magic charm.”

  “But he still gave it to you?”

  “I suppose he felt he needed the luck, for he was nearly wasted away with fever when I found him. He was a traveler, not one of the tribe with whom we found him staying. Poor fellow was alone and away from his home and he wanted to buy himself a bit of luck by giving away his charm.”

  “You were planning to sell it?”

  “Certainly, miss. I don’t know the type of stone that was in it—a ruby, I would imagine, though it was darker than I’d seen before—but it would have been worth a great deal in Amsterdam were I to ever get there.”

  “You never did.”

  “No, we were surprised by British men-of-war and had to make way in a grand hurry. We left our captain hopping and spitting on the coast of Africa.” Gabriel laughed at the memory. “A foul man. No one missed him. I was his first mate, and so I took command.”

  “Were you the one who gave the order to set sail, too?”

  “That I was,” he admitted. “But then, as I say, there was no love lost between the crew and him. They all put their backs to the task of sailing readily enough when I gave the order. We split the treasures in his cabin equally among us.”

  “But they turned on you just as quickly as they had on him,” Tess said. “Why?”

  “They said I had cursed them. The superstitious heathen accused me of jinxing the voyage with my African witchery. The amulet, you see. They could all see its value and wanted it for that, but they were afraid of it, too.