Page 21 of Maggie and the Pirate’s Son

So Maggie finished her gruel and got to her feet. Running her fingers down her chest to ensure the cloth binding had stayed in place all night, she turned her back on Bash to adjust it. A large atlas sat open on the desk behind her. It was beautifully illustrated and covered in intersecting crisscrossed lines, as well as perfectly penned letters she recognized forming words she couldn’t read.

Had so much sunshine made her addlepated? Or perhaps it was the rum having an effect? She reached out a finger as though touching the words, tracing each letter in turn, might unscramble them in her brain.

“El grande rio de las Amazones,” Bash whispered, suddenly so much closer than she’d realized, his breath tickling the back of her neck. “The great river of the Amazon. ’Tis Spanish.”

“You speak Spanish?” she asked, a little awed.

“Aye. Spaniards make the best maps.”

“You learned Spanish so you could read maps?” she asked, turning to look over her shoulder, and his face was right there, his lips full and pink, only an inch or two away.

“Aye,” he breathed, and Maggie licked her own chapped lips. He swallowed, and she watched his throat go up and down.

She turned back to the book. “I was taught French,” she said, almost to remind herself that knowing a second language wasn’t so remarkable.

“Ah! Je parle français aussi,” he said. “And that is Latin,” he added, leaning over her shoulder to point out a calligraphed word on the map, near where she’d been touching.

“Show off,” she told his forearm.

He shrugged but tucked his arms safely behind his back.

“Are they similar? Spanish and French and Latin?”

“More than not.”

His eyes scanned her face and down her neck, and she could feel every bit of skin they lighted on, so she turned back towards the book of maps, flipping to the next page to see if he would stop her. “What else can you speak?”

“Bit of Yoruba. Jamaican. Gaelic. Portuguese. Some Italian. And Dutch.”

Now he really was showing off. “Did the quartermaster teach you?”

“Some.”

“Does he miss it?”

“Holland, you mean? He’s never been there. Dutch pirates attacked a slaving ship, and when they saw how quickly he picked up their language, they took him onto their crew for a time.”

Maggie’s face burned for having known so little of the world, but she appreciated the way Bash related the tale without the imperious grandstanding her father liked to employ as the smug keeper of the knowledge. Bash didn’t make her feel stupid for not knowing, merely uninformed, with no judgment in it.

“Does he miss his real home then?” she asked, wondering the same of Bash, with his warm, tawny skin.

“What good does missing it do?” he asked gruffly. “This ship is his home now. We are his country.”

Sensing the conversation was over and Bash’s patience had worn thin, Maggie flipped the page back to where it started and turned to face him. He wasn’t much taller than she was, merely the distance between his lips and his eyes. She wondered, despite herself, what his lips would taste like—the same sweet spirits and citrus she could smell on him every time he stepped near?

Settle down.

Those were dangerous thoughts, best left to restless dreaming.

“So, messages?” she asked, swallowing a sudden dryness in her throat.

“Aye. And anything else I need done.”

“Just for you?”

He smiled, the one dimple popping out below his scar, like a special sort of punctuation mark for his emotions. “Were you looking to take orders from someone else?”

Maggie shook her head and followed him up to the deck.