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Jake laughed in his face. “If you were sober, I might take that threat seriously.” He wrenched Morgan’s hand free. “How long have you been in port?”
“A month,” Barney said. “A whole bleeding month and we’ve nothing to show for it. The captain won’t leave until he finds her this time. Says we’ll stay here till we’re dried bones and the ship rots.”
“Oh, Morgan,” Jake said with atsk. “You’ve got it bad for the girl, eh?”
Morgan snorted. “She can’t have vanished. I know she’s somewhere, and sooner or later someone here is bound to hear from her.”
“Very well then, I suggest you wait it out at my place. At least I won’t have to worry about the sorry lot of you getting tossed in the stocks for public drunkenness.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Morgan snarled. “Not until I find her.”
Jake ignored him. “Ushakii, you and Cookie grab him and be ready to hold him, because if he doesn’t come willingly, I’m going to knock him unconscious.”
“Go ahead and try!”
The next thing Morgan knew, the world turned dark.
“You wield a nasty blow, Captain,” Cookie said to Jake as they dumped Morgan into a rented wagon.
“Aye, and it’s not the first time I’ve had to use it on Lord and Mighty Hard-Head.” Jake looked at his unconscious friend and shook his head. “What the hell happened to him anyway? He looks like he just crawled out of a pigsty.”
And he did.
Never had Jake seen Morgan look so disgusting. His unkempt hair hung lankly about his shoulders. Morgan had a thick beard on a face that had never known more than an afternoon’s stubble, and his clothes looked and smelled as though they hadn’t been changed in a long, long while.
“He’s been a raving loon,” Barney said, stepping up to take the driver’s seat of the wagon. “We stayed for a day at Santa Maria and then the captain decided it was time we went to find the lass.”
“Then that storm hit,” Cookie interrupted. “Knocked us off course so that we had a time finding the Colonials.”
“And by the time we did,” Barney finished, “you and Serenity had already gone ashore.”
Barney shook his head. “I haven’t seen him so grief-stricken and angry since Penelope died.”
Jake swallowed at his words. He remembered that time in Morgan’s life only too well.
Poor Morgan. His pride had always gotten the better of him, and this time…
“I think I know something that might help him out.” Jake retrieved his horse from the nearby hitching post, then returned to the wagon. “Follow me.”
He mounted his horse and led them the ten miles to his plantation home just outside of Savannah.
No sooner had they entered the stable than Lorelei came rushing out, holding baby Nicholas in her arms. Jake smiled at his wife. Her red hair was swept up around her head in an intricate braid and the color was high in her cheeks.
She was every bit as beautiful as she’d been the first day he’d met her.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked, enunciating each word in such a way as to convey her pique.
“’Tis my good deed for the year.” He dismounted and handed his horse over to one of the stable boys.
She cuddled the cooing baby up to her shoulder and narrowed her gaze on him. “You can’t bring him here, you promised.”
“I promised I wouldn’t say anything, I never said I wouldn’t bring him.”
“Jacob,” she said in warning.
“Lorelei,” he responded with a laugh. “Trust me.”
She rolled her eyes as she patted the baby on the back. “I don’t even want to think about what happened the last time you said that to me.”
