Page 12 of Maggie and the Pirate’s Son

“What should I call you? Sailing master, you said?”

“No such ceremony here. Just Bash’ll do. Come on, we’d best get back before they think I’ve… that is…”

She turned her face away to hide a smirk, catching his meaning. She didn’t know the half of it.

The sooner they reached Jamaica and he could toss her on a ship back to Scotland, the better.

“This way, Magnus,” he said, overly loud, pulling back his curtain and leading her to the galley where he wiped a tankard clean with his shirttail and filled it with spirits.

When he handed it over, she took a tentative sniff and grimaced.

“It was so watered down Roo had to doctor it up with spices and the like. Calls it bumbo, though it barely passes for that.”

She took a sip and shook her head in disgust.

“Every drop,” he reminded her. She looked up at him like she had stopped herself mid eye roll. “When you finish that, you come back down here and fill it again. You’ll get used to the taste. Cheer up. We’ll soon run out of rum and you can choke down watery ale instead.”

She huffed but drank a little more. A lady’s throat moved in an awfully delicate way when she swallowed, didn’t it? Her eyelashes were fine, too, like the fraying edges of softest linen or the downy feathers of a newly hatched chick.

He shook his head to clear such thoughts away and handed her a fistful of dried beef and a hardtack biscuit. “Ready?”

For a moment she scrunched her face as though she might cry again, but then she took a deep breath and swallowed it down with a nod, and he led the way back to the hatch. God help them, it was either going to work or it wasn’t, and then they would both sink or swim.

Too late, he realized he should’ve told her what to do if they were thrown overboard, to flip on to her back and float for as long as she could and hope the tide would carry her someplace dry.

It was the plan he’d concocted as a boy, swaying in his hammock or keeping watch across a blackened sea. He would run calculations in his head: how long it might take to reach inhabited land or a deserted island, how likely to meet another vessel and what sort of ship it might be. It passed the time, and, though grim, he liked the security of having a plan. Sometimes he imagined a friendly dolphin taking pity and allowing him to hold tight to its dorsal fin as it scurried with the current to safety on a remote Jamaican beach.

This time, he ascended the ladder first, which would hopefully support the narrative that Maggie was a chastened boy but would also save him from having every detail of her arse outlined in linen a foot before his face as he climbed.

For both their sakes, he resisted the urge to turn and help her out of the hatch, leaving her to struggle to her feet, sloshing her rum. In the sunlight, her pale face looked red and almost tear-stained, despite being too dried out for actual tears.

The nearest men stopped pretending to work and openly stared at her once more.

“Meet the newest member of the crew, lads,” he announced, putting on his boatswain persona and swaggering toward the middle of the deck.

“Say again?” Dutch asked.

Bash pretended not to notice the captain watching them both shrewdly, but he couldn’t pretend away the sweat beginning to bead on the back of his neck.

“Quite the thing,” he boasted loudly for all to hear. “I take the lady in hand and lift her skirts, and what do I find but a tiny prick and two balls staring back at me. Not a lady at all, but a lad of fourteen. Seems young Langley ain’t the babe of the crew anymore.”

Samson and Duffy cheered and jostled Langley, who grinned a sheepish gap-toothed smile.

“I wore him out good and proper anyway, on account of the ruse,” Bash went on.

The girl did a fair job of looking chastened and focusing on her rum, but Dutch narrowed his eyes and studied the pair of them just as the captain had.

“What’s your name, son?” Dutch asked.

She glanced quickly at Bash before answering. “Mag—Magnus, sir,” she said, that raspy voice even lower and more sultry than it had been before. Christ.

“D’you have any skills, Magnus?”

Another glance at Bash, which he supposed was helping to sell that he’d thoroughly blistered her. “He says I’m to fetch and carry.” Then she nodded towards a ripped sail flapping in the breeze. “I could mend that. Wouldn’t look pretty, but it would hold.”

Dutch nodded. “I’m quartermaster of this ship. You do as Bash tells you, and we’ll be square. You need anything, come and find me.”

She nodded solemnly, but Bash didn’t allow himself to draw a relieved breath yet. The older man cast another suspicious glance his way. Dutch wouldn’t call her out publicly, but he might not be easily convinced.