Devil in Tartan (Highland Grooms #4)(68)

She had made slow progress when a hand reached through the opening. “Give me your hand!” Aulay shouted.

Relief flooded her, and she grabbed his hand with both of hers. He yanked her up through the opening, pulling her out of the hold and setting her on her feet on the deck. Lottie’s knee buckled in pain. “Can you walk?” he demanded.

She shook her head.

Aulay immediately swept her up in his arms and strode to the port railing. They’d already lowered the jolly and the Reulag Balhaire’s larger boat. “Help her down!” Aulay shouted. “She’s injured!”

Everything was a blur from there. Lottie made it down the rope ladder with the help of two men, and was practically tossed into the jolly while the sea frothed around them and battered against the sinking ship. There were still men on deck as the jolly was pushed away and men began to row, straining to battle the waves. Lottie looked frantically about her, relieved to see Mathais and Drustan with her in the jolly, and behind them, Duff, too, who was helping two Mackenzie men row.

She twisted around to see the ship. It was listing horribly now, the main deck at a sharp angle. The ship looked close to capsizing. She couldn’t see where the other men were, not in the great sheets of rain that came down, and she couldn’t see what was happening on the deck. She went up on one knee to see, but the jolly rode up on a wave and came down so hard that she fell back and struck her head on the side of the boat.

“Hold her!” someone shouted, and a hand wrapped firmly around her wrist to keep her from tumbling into the water. Drustan.

When she tried to sit up, everything around her blurred. She couldn’t tell sky from sea, and the water was so rough and choppy that she was made quite ill. Everything began to spin away from her. She was reeling into oblivion, and she thought she would do anything to make it stop...including dying.

Her last conscious thought before she was spun into blackness was, where was Aulay?





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

BRINE FILLED AULAY’S MOUTH. He choked on it, sputtering it out of his mouth. Water was lapping around his body, getting in under his clothes, in his mouth and nose. He pushed up, his hands sinking into dark wet sand. He spit salt water from his mouth, and when he moved, he felt sand in every crease of his skin, rubbing against him.

Diah, but his head ached. A jib had come undone as the ship foundered and had hit him square in the side of the head.

He rolled onto his rump, gasping for air, and looked around him. The tide was coming in, pooling where he’d been lying. The bodies of men were scattered across the sand like so much seaweed, all of them utterly spent from a harrowing twenty-four hours. There was the giant, sitting up, his legs crossed beneath him, his face tilted up to a perfectly brilliant blue sky.

Aulay slowly came to his feet, unsteady at first, but finding his balance.

There was Mathais, on his back, gulping like a fish for air. The actor and MacLean, and the rest of the Livingstones, all accounted for. Iain the Red was leaning over his brother, who was retching. Beaty, shaking the water from his hat, which he’d somehow managed to keep on his head. Billy Botly with his arm in a splint, who looked no worse for the ordeal. Geordie Willis and even Jack Mackenzie with his injured leg, leaning up against a rock, speaking quietly.

And there was Lottie, lying on her side, her back to the water.

Aulay turned to face the sea. A different sort of pain squeezed at his heart. There was nothing there, no sign of his ship. The sea, calm now, looked as empty as one of his paintings. A few crates and whisky casks were being carried along by the tide onto shore, but his ship was gone, sunk a quarter of a mile off the coast.

He climbed onto a rock and stared blankly at the sea, unable to fully grasp his loss. As the last of them had rowed away, he’d watched it go down, disappearing into tumultuous waves. The man he’d become, his entire adult life, had been forged on that ship and now it was all gone. His paintings, his books, his French wine, gone. The small knife he’d won from a French pirate, the instruments of sailing, all gone. The cargo he’d carried, the sails, the rigging, the guns...gone.

That ship was everything he was, and he would never be the same again. He’d never sail again—how could he? The Mackenzies had scarcely afforded to sail this time, and now they’d have to make recompense to William Tremayne for his lost cargo. It would likely ruin them.

What Aulay dreaded most was his father’s disappointment. Arran Mackenzie had steered the clan through the best and worst of times in the Highlands, and they had weathered it all, better than most. Aulay did not want to be the one to destroy what his father had worked tirelessly to build, in the twilight of his father’s life. He’d seen gut-wrenching worry on his father’s face too often in the last decade, and could not forget how skeptical he’d been of Aulay’s plans to rebuild their trade. But when Aulay had set sail, his father had smiled more brightly than anyone. He’d seemed younger somehow, his features filled with hope and the excitement of a new beginning.

Arran had believed in his son.

The sea turns over on itself. Aye, Aulay’s own personal sea had turned over on him and washed him away. He was adrift.

And he was furious.

Fury was boiling in him as he stood on that rocky shore. It was a cauldron, near to the point of spilling over in hot, molten waves.

“What now, Captain?” Beaty asked, having come to his feet.