“Yes.”
“Jenkins, bring the Moccasin in,” the captain ordered one of his young seamen.
“Yessir!” Jenkins said, saluting. The captain turned to the Moccasin. “Be careful. Please.”
“I will, sir.”
“Remember, your life is far more valuable than your cargo, no matter how precious it may be. You cannot be replaced. You must remember that.”
“I will, and I must go now, sir.”
The captain nodded. He appeared unhappy, as if he struggled for the words to say more, but could not find them.
As if he, too, had suddenly been filled with the same sense of dread.
For a moment, the Moccasin was made uneasy by his manner, and felt a strange chill, one as foreboding as the haunting night with its eerie yellow moon-glow.
“Be careful,” the captain said again, gruffly.
The Moccasin nodded, hiding a smile, eyes averted downward. “I know my business, sir.”
“We should move now, sir,” Jenkins said uneasily. Jenkins believed in his duty, and he’d die in this war if the good Lord called for it, but he hailed from Jacksonville, and he hated swampland, and he hated this southern region of the state where a deceptively beautiful coastline was but a slender thread of land that bordered the dense watery jungle of the Everglades.
The Moccasin nimbly scrambled over the starboard side of the ship, following Jenkins down the small drop ladder to the dinghy waiting below. Jenkins quickly slipped the oars into the water, and the dinghy shot across the night-black sea. The coastline loomed ever closer.
“Stop!” the Moccasin whispered suddenly, overwhelmed by a feeling that all was not well. No more flashes of eyes made red by the moon’s sudden reflection peered out, yet the spy was certain they were being watched. That something awaited them. The heavy breathing of some great horrible creature seemed to echo in the darkness. The trees were too still. Nothing stirred; no insects chirped.
Jenkins ceased to row. The dinghy, caught by the impetus of his previous strength, continued to streak through the water despite Jenkins’s efforts to position the oars to stop its progress.
Then the trees came to life. The moon was gone, darkness had settled, but the Moccasin heard the sounds as men slipped from the trees, rifles aimed at the dinghy.
“Surrender, come in peacefully, and your lives will be spared, you’ve my guarantee!”
The moon slipped free from the clouds. Eight men in hated Union blue had come from the trees. They were in formation at the water’s edge; four on their knees, four standing, all aiming their rifles directly at the occupants of the dinghy.
“Lord A’mighty!” Jenkins swore. He didn’t even glance at the Moccasin; to him, escape was impossible.
He’d rather face a Union bullet a hundred times over before daring to put even his big toe into the water here.
The Moccasin would not surrender.
Could not surrender.
The Moccasin stared at Jenkins with both panic and contempt.
“We surrender—” Jenkins began.
But before he could finish, the Moccasin had already dived deep into the water.
“Damn the wretch!” Ian swore, shedding his cavalry jacket and swiftly unbuckling his scabbard while kicking off his boots. “Men, keep your guns trained, get the Reb in the rowboat, and watch the surface for our friend emerging from the shallows. Gilbey Clark—” He hesitated just briefly. Gilbey was his new man. But a good man. “Gilbey, take the trail up a hundred yards; Sam, follow him at fifty. Sharp eyes on the water!”
He turned, running out into the shallows, then leaping into a dive that took him into the depths near the dinghy. Fool spy; they all carried their contraband in their clothing. This idiot would go down like a leaden ball.
But though he dived and surfaced in the area of the dinghy again and again, he could find no trace of the spy.
Nor did a body float to the surface.
It was night; and though he did have excellent vision in the darkness, even he was nearly blinded. Yet he instinctively believed that the spy was not dead; the spy had dived into the water because the spy was someone who knew how to swim, how to navigate the water and the shore—even in the darkness.
He made one last dive and came up triumphant: the spy’s heavy-laden coat. Dragging it along with him, he swam toward shore, then came to his feet to wade the rest of the way in. His sodden cotton shirt was plastered to his chest; his wool uniform pants felt even worse.
“There! There!” came a sudden shout.
Ian forgot his discomfort and ran to the shore. Up ahead, he could see a shadow rising from the water; Gilbey Clark had seen the apparition as well.
“Halt, or I’ll shoot!” Gilbey called out, raising his rifle.
But Gilbey didn’t shoot. Ian came behind him, burst- ing out of the blackness of the night. He laid his hand upon Gilbey’s rifle, lowering it. “No shooting; I’ll take the spy,” he said. Then he added softly, “Alive.”
He raced past Gilbey, heedless of the ground against his callused bare feet. He heard a cry which should have been a final warning to him that all that he had feared secretly within his heart, but hadn’t wanted to believe, was true. It didn’t quite register, he was so intent on the pursuit. In a little spit of sand between tree roots and shore, Ian caught up with the Moccasin at last. He threw himself upon the spy with a fierce burst of speed, grappling the spy, intending to bring the enemy down, winded, before he could be knifed or throttled in turn.
The catapulted weight of his body forced the spy down to the ground easily enough.
They were soaked with sea and sand. Ian caught his balance, easing from the figure beneath him and rolling his enemy face-upward at the same time. Without missing a beat he straddled the spy.
The Moccasin was pinned to the sand.
The moon’s light was abundant.
Even with soaked hair tangled in seaweed and lashed about her face, the Moccasin was exotically beautiful. Neither night nor water could completely dim the shimmering gold of her hair, and the glowing moonlight only helped illuminate the unique color of her eyes, a hazel so fused that the color was not green at all, not brown, but nearly as gold as her hair. Her lashes and brows darkened to a honey. Her face was delicately, artistically formed with a small straight nose, elegantly high cheekbones, a stubbornly square chin, and a beautifully shaped, generous mouth. Her cheeks were flushed to give a warmth to her coloring; her lips were naturally tinged a cherry except that now they were held in a thin, grim line and they were a mixture of white from tension and blue from the cold.
Ian drew back. In his mind, he had suspected this. In his heart, he had refused to believe it.
He didn’t know what she saw in his own features then, but it was apparently enough to draw the last of the color from her features. Yet in her own dismay, it seemed she sensed his momentary weakness in his discovery of her, and took full advantage of it, suddenly jerking back an arm to strike him with a serious punch to the jaw.
She was really quite amazing.
She could move about a ballroom as if she floated on air; she could smile and disarm the most hardened soldier, make it seem as if the sun were suddenly warming his face. She was petite, and could appear as delicate as the most fragile rose. Yet it wasn’t as if he had been unaware of the power of will and strength within her slender frame; he had simply forgotten it in his anger and dismay.
Her punch was as hard and well aimed as that of a trained boxer, hard enough to shift his balance, and after she had hit him, she thrashed and struggled like a wounded gator, trying to free herself from his weight, his hold.
He couldn’t let her go. Would never do so
She thought that freedom from him would be her only salvation. He knew better. Remaining his prisoner now was her only hope for life. He had learned the bitter lesson that he could not always save Rebel spies and soldiers from being hanged. Indeed, until the day he died, he would not forget the pain of seeing his own kin dang
led at the end of a rope. The anguish now lived with him, marched to battle with him. It was a nightmare within him, waking, sleeping, one from which he could never shake free.
The tempest of his emotions seized him in an excruciating grip. He caught her wrists and slammed her back to the sand, glad that his force was such that she cried out as the breath was knocked out of her. She stared up at him, frozen, apparently believing that he would kill her himself, here and now.
It was the best thing she could possibly believe.
“So you are the Moccasin,” he said, and his anger was so deep that his words and body shook with his effort to remain still. To control the sweeping range of emotions that tore at his heart and soul. Remembrance, fear, rage, pain.
And desire. Suddenly and wildly awakened For she remained Alaina. Curved, warm, vital, and alive, beneath him. Alaina, with her catlike eyes, her smile, her laugh, her temper. Her recklessness. Her dedication, her passion…
To her wretched cause.
His words tumbled out of him again in a rage.
“So you are the bloody, damned Mocassin! How dare you?”
She was shaking as well, staring back at him. She spoke through her blue-tinged lips. “And you’re the Panther. The bloody, goddamned Panther. Stalker Traitor! Dear God, this is Florida!” she cried. “You are the traitor here. How dare you?”
As her voice faded, Ian became aware of the soft footfalls of his men as they surrounded the pair.
Sam Jones, Ian’s right-hand man at all times, stopped the others with a swift motion of his hand. The eight men who had ridden with him tonight, all specially chosen by Ian himself, stood as silent and still as sentinels. Waiting. They would follow his lead. Whatever it was.
They were Federal men, loyal to the Union. But their first loyalty was to Ian. They had ridden with him many times. He had taught them to survive; he had kept them alive.
Tonight, he was exceptionally grateful for their loyalty.
Except that he hoped they didn’t realize how the deadly Panther was shaking right now, that he was afraid in a way he’d never known fear before. Afraid…
For the Moccasin.
Because he knew what could happen to spies. He’d seen what could happen, firsthand.
“Major,” Sam said softly. “We lost the Reb from the ship. He panicked and drowned. We went in; there was nothing we could do.”
Ian winced inwardly. It was war. Death came daily. Still, wasted life never ceased to appall him.
“All right, Sam,” he said, and he was surprised at the quiet in his own voice. “Brian, Reggie, see to the body. We’ll head back to base camp.” He looked down at the woman.
The Moccasin.
“Don’t try to escape me again.”
Her tawny eyes were upon his. “Will you shoot me?” she asked him, and he was glad it seemed she really needed an answer to that question.
“My men get nervous in the swamp. God knows, sometimes we shoot at anything.”
It was a lie. His men were superb. They never panicked, and they were some of the finest marksmen in the South.
He came to his feet, then drew her up. He stared in silence while the men bustled around them.
He set her up on his horse, Pye, an Arabian mix bred on his family plantation. Pye wasn’t afraid of snakes or swamps. Pye had ridden the peninsula with him for a very long time. Since the war had begun, Pye had lived in the swamp.
Ian mounted his horse behind the Moccasin.
He tried to still his own shaking, still the fear and fury that ripped through him.
Alaina was the Moccasin!
God in His heaven, what did he do now?
No more than thirty minutes of riding in a tense silence brought them to a small grouping of cabins, built up on stilts, deep within a hammock. The cabins were all but hidden by a massive wall of pines that broke just before the small clearing.
Having reached that clearing, Alaina began to shiver. The night air was very cool. She was dressed in men’s breeches, a cotton shirt, and high boots. Even her boots remained uncomfortably sodden with seawater.
She was so close to home. The home where she had grown up. She was close to help. Salvation. Yet if she were to be saved, then Ian McKenzie would die, because he would readily give his life before allowing his captive to be seized from him.
She would be hanged.
No!
Something in her heart cried out that it couldn’t happen. But, oh, God, what a naive fool she had been! It now seemed inevitable that this day should come.
She wished fervently that he had ordered his men to drag her through the swamp on foot. That would have been better than riding with him. Feeling his rage, his horror that she was the Moccasin. It seemed to burn from him, from the arms that held Pye’s reins around her, from the hard-muscled wall of his chest. He was fire tonight, and she would be consumed in it. Cast into Rebel hell.
He seemed to be a mass of heat and muscled tension, and yet the very feel of him when he touched her was somehow colder than a northern ice floe. As if he could not bear to touch her….
Perhaps that was well. Ian seemed to be a broad-shouldered, yet slender man. His appearance was deceptive, for it was his height, over six feet, that made him seem more lithe and lean when he was actually quite powerfully built. If he were to touch her, he might readily snap her neck, break her right in two.
Yet when they reached the clearing, he jumped swiftly from Pye. Briefly, his cobalt eyes lit upon hers. Blue fire He turned to his men. “See to the prisoner!” he ordered brusquely, then quickly strode to one of the cabins. He couldn’t bear to be near her, she thought. He was afraid that he’d strangle her, tear her limb from limb with his bare hands.
What would that matter, she wondered, feeling a sudden rise of hysteria, if she was to be hanged anyway? A quick death at his hands might be preferable.
Ah, but he was the famed Major Ian McKenzie. He’d never lower himself to the cold-blooded murder of a prisoner. Justice—Union justice—would have its way.
When Ian was gone, she realized that his men had been left as surprised as she. But one of the men quickly sprang to action. “My name’s Sam. Don’t try to escape, now, ma’am. Pye will just throw you, you know.”
Pye would throw her. The horse was as irritatingly loyal to his master as were Ian’s men.
Sam reached up to help her down. She didn’t know just how badly she had been shaken by the night’s events until she realized she could barely stand. Another soldier rushed to her side, supporting her. He looked at her with dazzled, dark brown eyes. Too bad this boy wasn’t her jailer, she thought. She’d be free in no time.
“Thank you,” she told him very softly.
Ah, but that was why they had called her the Moccasin. She’d eluded those sent to trap her time and time again.
Tonight, though, she would not escape. For in Ian’s eyes, she was condemned.
Again she wished she could cry out; she wanted to explain. In a way she wanted to shriek with pain, for all she had seen in his eyes. And in a way, she wanted to rail and beat against him for being all that he was. The Panther.
“Come along, ma’am,” Sam said. “I imagine the far cabin’s yours for the night. Gilbey, see to fresh water for the lady. Brian, post a guard.”
Sam escorted her to the cabin, keeping a hand loosely on her elbow as he helped her up a ladder to the platform flooring. Sam was polite, but firm. He lit a kerosene lantern, illuminating the cabin. “You should be comfortable enough,” Sam said. “Bed and blankets—clean sheets to wear while your clothing dries. Not much else here, I’m afraid. Ah, there’s a sliver of soap and there’s your pitcher and bowl. Gilbey will bring fresh water for washing and drinking. I’m afraid the bunk, the desk, and the chair are all the furnishings we have.”
“Well, Sam, I am quite impressed,” she murmured, attempting to do so with spirit.
There was a light rapping on the door. The young soldier with the deep dark eyes, obviously fairly new in
the command, appeared with a big pitcher of fresh water, pouring some directly into the wash bowl for her.
“Sam,” he whispered, “it is a she, all right—is she really the Moccasin?”
“She’s the Moccasin,” Sam said wearily. “So it seems. Now get on down, Gilbey. Ma’am,” he said to Alaina, “we’ll leave you now.”
Sam came down the steps. Brian was sitting guard. Sam decided that he’d best take up that position as well. He sat, leaned against one of the thick pine support beams that kept the cabin sitting high off the ground. He pulled out his whittling knife and a piece of old oak he’d been working on a long time. “Go tell the major she’s in the cabin, set for the night,” he told Gilbey.
“But Sam—” Gilbey protested.
“Go,” Sam said.
Gilbey obeyed.
The temptation to wash the salt from her face became more than Alaina could bear. The fresh water felt delicious. She forgot her peril for a moment, drank deeply, then swore softly and impatiently and shimmied her way out of boots, breeches, and shirt. She doused herself in the fresh water, even pouring it through her hair. Then she stood shivering again; there was no fire in the cabin, and though the late spring night was probably no less than seventy degrees, chills could set in. She found the clean sheet on the bed and wrapped herself in it. She sat cross-legged on the bed. They had left her water and a lamp. Probably far more than the Moccasin deserved. At least she would not die in sea-salted misery.
But that thought brought a sudden sob to her lips. He had been so terrifyingly furious. Ah, but no matter what his fury, he had dismissed her so cleanly! She might never see him again. She might die without ever having a chance to say…
To say what? They had chosen different paths, and nothing could change that. She had hated him often enough. She had to hate him now. She did hate him….
She didn’t hate him.
She hugged the sheet around her. She seemed to be ablaze on the inside, riddled with fear, with fury. She could demand mercy, surely…
Oh, God, not from him. Nor could she cajole, plea, bargain. She’d always told herself that she would die with dignity if she was caught. She’d never beg or plead….