Chapter 29

Frantic breath puffing white in the crisp autumn night air, Callie ran. Faster than they'd ever run in their five and twenty years, her feet ate up the distance between her and the orange-stained horizon, clouded by tufts of dense gray smoke.

It wasn't the main house. The fire was too close to the water. It was the cliff barn.

The brandy… it was surely adding fuel to this fire. That was the last two years of her life gone up in flame. And she knew in her gut she'd had a hand in its destruction.

This perfect day had been a mirage… an exercise in self-delusion. Before her was reality, her dreams incinerating into memory. Even though she heard Nylander's heavy tread close at her heels, he was behind her, too. In more ways than one.

She swiped at the moisture on her cheeks and ran past the thought. She couldn't let her heart ache now. There would be plenty of time for that later… the rest of her life.

Across damp gorse and scratchy heather, she raced, her dress clutched at her thighs, her lungs burning with exertion and smoke from the barn. Heat intensified the nearer she drew.

Still, a measure of hope gathered in her chest. Although there had been the two explosions, the fire hadn't really caught hold. Yet.

But the barn wasn't her first concern.

"Pierre!" she shouted into the darkness, her voice a jagged scrape across her throat. "Pierre!"

A figure shambled out of an amorphous clump of shrubbery. "Pipe down, the Maker isn't ready for me yet." There stood Pierre, as laconic and French as she'd ever seen him. She could hug the man. "Good thing I needed to piss when I did."

Nylander rushed up, his breath puffing loud and hard. "Where's the well?"

Before Callie could direct him, Will and Cam joined their group. "Will, you and Cam get the Newsham pump," she commanded. To those who were just arriving, she cried out, "Everyone grab a bucket, a glass, anything that will hold water and get that pump filled!"

"A Newsham pump?" Nylander asked to her back as she was already on the move to help Will and Cam set up the device.

"For extinguishing fires," she called over her shoulder. "I bought one last year when we increased our production."

They found Will and Cam tugging, pushing, and pulling the heavy and awkward machine out of a storage shed. They weren't getting very far, very slowly.

"Here," Nylander called out, brushing around Callie, "I'll take the back, each of you take a side."

As they made slow progress across a grassed-over path, Callie grabbed the hose attachment and went to check the progress of the bucket brigade that snaked in a wavy line from well to barn. "Pierre! Kip!" she called.

Kip bounced into view, eyes bright with alarm and excitement, and Pierre shouted, "What is it now?"

"Kip, run to the Grange and gather every bucket you can find." The boy nodded and scampered off. She turned to Pierre. "Make sure this line extends to the Newsham pump." She pointed toward the spot where the men had pushed the machine. "If the fire reaches the rafters, what remains of the still can't possibly be salvaged."

"Are you implying the still is the cause of this conflagration? That it exploded?"

"Pierre, we haven't time for that right now," she shouted.

But, of course, it was the still. What else would cause such an explosion?

Yet her gut told her it wasn't negligence on Pierre's part that had started it. Rather, purpose on someone else's part. Jack Le Grand. Explosions didn't happen randomly when a pirate skulked about the vicinity.

Pierre snapped to and shuffled to his duty, shouting orders to anyone who would listen. Callie raced back to Will, Cam, and Nylander, who had just pushed the pump into position. With trembling, panicked hands, she attached the hose as buckets began sloshing water into the pump's lead tank. It was too early for hope, but there was a chance they could salvage something from this disaster.

Nylander appeared at her side, his face black as a thundercloud. Ache panged in her gut for the man who had been hers last night and today, a Nylander she would never have again. Not once he knew how this disaster had started.

And her part in it.

"Do you know who did this?"

She nodded. Nothing useful would come out of denying the fact. "Do you?"

"Aye."

He knew. A knife twisted in her gut. He was never going to be hers, not if he knew. She inhaled the sob that wanted release.

"The explosion came from beneath the still," he continued.

Confusion coupled with alarm spiked through her. "It wasn't from the still?"

He shook his head and pointed. "See that?"

She did now. Between the barn and the cliff's edge, the ground was cratered in.

"The explosion originated below."

"The brandy," she whispered.

"Surely blown into smithereens and adding fuel to the fire."

The breath left her body in one great whoosh, and she wrapped her arms around her gut from the pain of it. To hear it spoken aloud—the utter and complete destruction of her hopes and dreams—it was too much.

"Is there another entrance to that cellar?" he asked, the question cutting through the wool in her ears.

Callie snapped to. "The old mine shaft." She began running. "This way."

Lungs full of acrid smoke, she found the familiar sheep path that led around the barn and down the cliffside, her feet picking across rocks and tufts of grass with the expertise borne of experience. Nylander was just behind her, his feet imprinting on her every step. After one switchback, then another, she slowed, her hand feeling along the cliff wall for the cave's opening as they stepped off the defined portion of the trail and onto the goat scramble, bits of stone crumbling beneath their feet as they scooched along the cliff's face.

"Is this safe?" came his voice behind her.

"Safe enough for wild goats."

"Reassuring."

His dry humor warmed her, even as it made her long to howl with despair. Her palms scraped and bleeding, she, at last, found the opening. "We're here," she whispered. "Three more steps for you."

Callie scuttled into the cave blacker than night and acrid with gunpowder. Nylander slipped inside behind her. They were forever finding themselves in deep, dark caves.

"'Bout time," sounded a voice full of gravel and whiskey.

Flint scratched striker and the cave flickered into light. Callie's eyes adjusted to the brightness and saw Jack Le Grand standing beside a lanky lad with skin the color of creamy tea.

"Took ye long enough to get down here, Johnny boy."

"Johnny boy?" Callie asked. "Who is?—"

The question died in her mouth.

Jack Le Grand was a powerfully built man. But also a shadow of the man he would've been thirty years ago.

That man stood beside her.

The truth clicked into place. It had been there all along, in their build, their hair, their eyes, their bone structure. In the same lopsided smile.

But that was as far as the resemblance went. For all that Nylander was the spitting image of Le Grand, he was nothing like him.

"This man"—she pointed at the pirate—"is your father?"

"A loosely defined version of one, yes."

Forgetful of her place and the circumstances of this meeting, scorn and rage bubbled up and all other concerns fell away. This was Nylander's father. The man who…

"You," she growled.

"'Tis I, Jack Le Grand." He tipped his hat, and his gold hoop earring caught a glimmer of lamplight. "The one and only."

She advanced a step forward. "You… you monster."

A well-worn chuckle sounded from the pirate. "Ye ain't the first to call me that. And won't be the last neither."

"You threw your son into the sea. You left him to drown and be eaten by sharks. What sort of man abandons his son like that?

"Abandoned him?" Bewilderment knitted the pirate's weathered brow. "I gave him the best life a father could."

Nylander scoffed beside her, but her attention remained fixed on Jack Le Grand. "Can it be that you actually believe your words?" she asked.

"Why wouldn't I?" His eye shifted toward Nylander. "The Free Reaver was no good place for ye back then."

Nylander pointed at the lad, whose light hazel gaze watched the proceedings in silence. Those intelligent eyes missed nothing, Callie was sure. "How is it any different for him?"

"Haven't ye heard?" Jack Le Grand asked. "The Free Reaver has her letters of marque, bought 'n' paid for and signed by King George himself." He gave a formal bow. "She's gone right respectable. Although I must say, livin' on the straight arrow is provin' to be a sight more dangerous than bein' the danger itself. Pirates are a right nasty lot."

"How does that justify you leaving your son for dead?" Callie asked.

"That's where yer wrong, luv." Jack Le Grand settled one hip against a boulder and sucked his teeth. "Years, I'd been goin' round and round with the Van Rijns. For all our fallin's out, I knew them for good, Christian people. They were on the side o' right more times than yers truly, that's sure. I knew they'd take Johnny boy. I'da staked me life on it."

"Except you didn't," Callie cut in. "You staked his."

A sheepish look crossed the pirate's face. "I'll concede that point. It were a gamble." His gaze never once left Nylander. "But look how it paid off for ye."

Nylander's eyes narrowed. "The past is done. Why did you blow up the barn?"

"Ye truly don't know why."

Understanding hit Callie a beat later, and her gut sank into the stone beneath her feet. "You did it for your son," she whispered, the hiss and truth of her words echoing off the cave's walls. It had been the truth from the beginning. And she thought she'd been in control? She'd been nothing more than a pawn in a game she hadn't realized she was playing.

"This is why you agreed to the twenty thousand pounds up front. You never intended to pay it."

The pirate snorted. "Figured that out all by yer lonesome, did ye?"

Her gaze found Nylander's, frightened to her bones of what she would find there and the answer to the question she must ask.

"Have you been in league all this time?"