hope all those green-faced, vomiting passengers paid you well. Will you be able to buy yourself a prostitute when we reach Lahaina?’
He stared at her, and automatically shook his head.
‘But it’s just one night, doctor. Nothing expensive or demanding, like having a mistress.’
‘Do you always turn sarcastic and nasty when you don’t get your way?’
She saw the weariness in his hazel eyes, but bit down on the tug of concern she felt. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I do, particularly if the man making the decision is a blind ass.’
He smiled just a bit, and forced himself to look away from her, out at the endless expanse of ocean. ‘I think the last woman to truly enjoy insulting me was my mother. Of course, she did it with humor.’
‘I’ll just bet she was laughing after she birthed you. That’s why she called you Ulysses – revenge.’
‘Can’t say I blame her,’ Saint said easily. ‘I weighed eleven pounds. Poor woman used to tell me that the real Ulysses – from what she’d read – searched and searched for nigh onto twenty years before he came home, and that’s how she felt after nine months hauling me around inside her.’
‘As I said, revenge.’
‘Ah, but she tempered it with ‘Michael’
– that’s innocuous enough, surely.’
It wasn’t innocuous, it was the most beautiful name she’d ever heard.
She said, ‘Lydia told me that she could make a fortune in blackmail if only she could find out what your real name was and where you got the nickname Saint.’
‘My friends never give up. It’s like a contest now. They come up with all sorts of ploys to make me cough up the facts, and I sidestep.’ He turned around and leaned back against the railing. ‘God, I’m tired. And a doctor is supposed to be able to cure anything and everything. As if I could do anything about seasickness!’
‘I would have helped you if you’d just asked me,’ Jules said.
‘Thank you, but it took all my resolution not to throw up, given the stench in the cabins. No reason for you to turn green, and you would have, I guarantee it.’
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‘I never get sick,’ Jules said with all the confidence of a young person who thought of illness as weakness.
‘I hope you never do,’ Saint said. There would probably not be a better opportunity, he thought, silent for few moments. ‘Jules,’ he said very abruptly, hoping to throw her off balance, ‘your friend Kanola – did Wilkes’s sailors rape her?’
She stiffened as if he’d shouted an obscenity in her ear. She heard Kanola screaming, saw that awful man with that thing sticking out from his belly, and tried to shut off the awful memory. ‘I don’t know,’ she managed after a moment. ‘Wilkes dragged me to his cabin, said he would protect me.’ She wanted clarification of exactly what rape was, but was too embarrassed to ask.
Thank God, he thought, she hadn’t seen it. He had absolutely no doubt that Kanola had been raped, repeatedly.
‘Then what happened?’
His voice was matter-of-fact, and she tired to keep herself calm and in control, but it was difficult. ‘She managed to escape the men and jumped overboard. She couldn’t have made it to shore. We were too far away.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, wishing there were something a bit more he could say. He continued calmly, as if discussing the present
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sunny weather, ‘I know that Wilkes drugged you once before you arrived in San Francisco, and that he touched you and kissed you.’
‘No!’ ‘You told me that, Jules.’
‘No,’ she said again, hating the dank chill that crept over her flesh at his words.
‘I don’t want what happened to eat at you, Jules. I don’t want you to bury it deep. It truly helps to tell a friend. Tell me what he did to you. Then you can forget it.’
She jerked away from him and snarled at him, her voice vicious, ‘What do you care what he did to me? You want to hear all the marvelous details? Friend, ha!’
‘What did he do, Jules?’ he asked again, not allowing her to anger him. He heard the remembered fear in her voice and knew that her spate of words was bravado – no, more like protection, self-protection.