Chapter One

Jack sighed as he tugged the little boat just a bit further up on the sand so the next tide wouldn’t set it afloat without him. Without them - he was dragging her off this bit of rock when he left if it killed him.  Even from here he could see the line out the door, looking for all the world like a flock of diseased pigeons nesting in her bougainvillea. A tiny little lady so old he wondered if she’d petrified in the front yard. A decidedly drunken looking scallywag - that one would give him no trouble. A young woman who from the decent cut of cloth of her dress looked to Jack like a housemaid and from the tightness of that same dress, one decidedly with child.  Not as though that was a sticky wicket.  He could undoubtedly scare them off but there was likely to be yelling and a good bit of it from Kate if she found out he’d run off a pregnant girl.  Looking to heaven with eyes that decided said, ‘truly I’ve the patience of Job’, he reached his hands into his pockets. Expediency was what the situation called for…expediency and quiet.

“Have a drink, mate. It will all look better tomorrow,” coins pressed into palms and a few pokes at the old lady to determine if she lived or not. Apparently so - kicked him in the shin before he sweetened the deal with coin number two. What was likely a week’s wages for that girl – “Buy something for the babe and come back next week.  I’m sure she’ll make the world right all round, but I’ve need of her services at the moment, there’s a good girl…”  Her kiss on the cheek startled him no end and a few seconds passed before he remembered just how close he was and knocked at the door.

*
Rosie liked those nights on board ship when they were in safe harbour, well as safe as you could be aboard a pirate ship, clear skies, calmer sea and a watch on the horizon that the Captain trusted, that would be a woman then; a woman with keen eyes, only half a belly full of rum- just enough to keep her warm up there in the crows nest, and a good enough reason not to want to get hung for piracy. On those nights Mary was more likely to come knocking- well she didn’t knock exactly, there sure as hell wasn’t a door- rather Rosie would feel warm hands sliding under blankets and maybe even a kiss before they stole off. Mary had a small cabin on account of her long association with the captain, a painfully small bed, what passed for a pillow and there they would do their best not to wake the whole ship.

Not that it was a secret, those not being easy to keep in a place where if you turned over in your hammock somebody would know about it, but all the same there was no space for favourites and favours on board- they were running gold, rum and the finest silks they could lay their hands on in and out of Port Royal against the expressed wishes of the Governor and all his frigates, they couldn’t afford to be caught out. Seemed that women pirates were set aside for the very particular attention- a crime against womanhood indeed.

On those evenings Rosie would just feel it in the heat of Mary’s glance- she was already thinking about soft skin and fingers and Rosie would wink or smile and bend a little lower, saying she was willing to forego some sleep. Willing to do almost anything in fact. This was the best ship she had sailed on and Rosie knew when to count her blessings, when you’d had cause to count them each and every little one and hold it tight, then you knew the value of them, and that was a fact. Rosie let out a big sigh and licked her lips, she might not have a worldly possession but she sailed under Captain Anne Bonny and Mary Read and that would do very well.


*

Kate impatiently pushed the hair that had come loose off her face and more importantly off the page before it could smear the still-wet ink.  Nothing like submitting documents to the Crown with little trails across it and she was in no mood at this hour in the day for recopying.  She felt good about this one.  The woman did have a good deed and Kate thought she could halt any attempt by the dead husband’s brother to seize control of her house. Talk about scoundrels – throw a widow out of her home without so much as a by your leave – give her an honest pirate any day.

Next up would be Mrs. Cole, she mused to herself, spreading out a new sheet of paper, and searching through the various folios for her last notes.  Excellent, there was still room here…paper being the most expensive thing in this unorthodox law practice of hers….

The knock on the door seemed too high up and too loud for that diminutive creature and there was a slight frown on her face as she pulled the door open that exploded into a smile and a gasp. Jack Sparrow leaning against her door skill, seemingly nonchalant as could be, as if it hadn’t been 3 weeks, 4 days and about 19 hours…not that she was counting.  She resisted the urge to throw her arms around him and teased him back.

“Have you been accused of a crime then, Sir?” she sparkled back at him.

“More than one can count,” he answered taking a predatory step toward her, “and a few I’d be willing to wager even you have never heard of” a hand around her waist and the other sinking into her hair, already pulling out pins.

“So you’ll be needing legal advice then…”  barely a  breathy whisper as she pressed herself against him, shudders as those long, nimble fingers reached between her breasts to draw out the laces. His mouth touching hers as he answered “I don’t think I’ll be needing any advice for this part….’

*

Will Turner pulled his cheek taut and ran the blade over skin that was now tanned by the sea and wind as much as the sun, been on this ship so long he had forgotten what it was like to sleep on a bed that didn’t sway, sometimes more than others, depending on the weather and how fortunate he had been in the town. Maybe fortune didn’t come into it. He dipped the blade into the bowl of soapy water in front of him and felt it scrape down over stubble, leaving a thin line or two here and there, lines that only increased the angles of his face. His white shirt was still open, the sun light shining through billowing white cotton as his arms moved to change direction and no, fortune was the very last reason Will Turner ever got company.

His face smooth now, he reached into his hair, long soft dark strands that seemed intent on escaping whatever he did, but nevertheless with some determination he worked the leather tie and pulled it tighter at the nape of his neck, even as he bent to look down to button his shirt a wayward lock that was equally determined not to be contained curled around the curve of his jaw. His hands pushed soft cotton down into his pants, over hips and belly and ass and Will sighed, Jack would likely be gone over night- he would have to organize the rota for the crew to take shore leave. A wry smile crossed his mouth-  a rota for the crew indeed-  there was less than a rats chance of surviving on the Pearl with Xiāo having taken up his own feline run of the place, that they hadn’t got that all sorted out already and Will down to remain on board and play Captain.

Will reached down to pull yielding leather boots over his feet and let his mind steal back quickly to that cat’s arrival. They had been in grave danger of being run through by curved knives, pirating on someone else’s swell of sea always adding an extra slice of danger, but well if there was anyone likely to get them out of a situation with a flash of a smile in preference to metal, it was Jack, and they had ended up tasting quite literally the hospitality of the Chinese.

Those women had been quite taken with his curious western body it seemed, most insistent that he would benefit from hands, and a lot of them were necessary to work all that scented oil in to every inch of his body. Will let out a small moan and stood up. In any case they had left without a mark, with considerably softer skin and a fearsome blue eyed cat with the name of Xiāo,   

*
Nights with Rosie always ended up the same. Sweet kisses and fingers sneaking under blankets might have been the start but they were the ‘please let me‘ for all that followed, which was gasping smiling naked mix of the pair of them contained on one small bed. While Mary lay quiet, feeling her toes start to tingle with what she was already anticipating, she let a lazy mind swim back to the younger woman she had been- leaving behind her native England, a dead husband and a career of sorts in the army as a foot soldier to set out for the second time in her life as a sailor.  Bound for the Caribbean ‘well why not?’ that was what she had told herself as she stuffed the small amount of possessions she had into a trunk and joined the crew. No one looked too closely nor asked questions, bodies were all that were needed, bodies to work hard, raise the sails and set off for the sun, and she had nothing to stay in the grey for.

Fate though had thrown her a most unexpected life line when the ship was taken by Captain Calico Jack Rackham and his band of pirates. Only they weren’t just any old pirates, Mary smiled in the dark as she remembered climbing aboard and the first glimpse of the most fearsome woman she had ever seen- Anne Bonny. Dressed as she herself was, in the clothes of men but nevertheless unmistakable, no man ever looked like that and Mary had, with something like full blown enthusiasm and no little flush of excitement, sworn to abide by the pirate code. Her smile broadened, there had been precious little time for a moral debate on the rights and wrongs of a life of thieving and debauchery, it must have been that she was born for it afterall.

He hadn’t been a bad man, Calico Jack- though given to fits of jealousy when her and Anne seemed to be joined at the hip, or more often at the hips. But a few frowning flickers of her eye lids took her past his hanging, a fate only narrowly avoided by Anne and herself, and into her present- first Mate on their own ship and right now in her own cabin.

Which brought her back to Rosie. They had scooted round each other at first- taking lovers when they wanted, men or women that happened to be there, but in truth they had always had an eye on what each other was doing with whoever it was, some times a rather close eye. Mary smiled to herself as she thought of it- the pair of them striding through Port Royal, long hair all wild and uncombed, longer strides in loose breeches, how they turned heads as they sank beers and invited propositions from any one brave enough to approach them. By the end of the night men had had enough ale to try their luck and she and Rosie would be sitting on laps, watching hands that were not theirs caress skin and mouths that didn’t quite belong demand kisses.

Mary felt herself sink into that place where all she wanted was a woman on top of her, to feel the heat and the pressure of Rosie’s body rolling against bones and belly and to touch soft skin on the tips of her fingers. Mary swung her legs out of the cabin bed - it was time to go and find her lover.

She knew Rosie was awake before she even got close, something in the pattern of her breath, shorter and sharper. Just waiting. Or maybe not. As was their game, Mary’s mouth searched for soft lips as she slid her hand under the blankets, though this time to find laces already untied and slick fingers
“You have been an age Mary” a little giggling kiss as Rosie practically fell out of her hammock and into strong arms.

*

Jack’s eyes were still closed but the “Damn!” and the bang and the hopping noise startled him out of the reverie he’d been floating in and he smiled at the homely sounds.  Kate stubbing her toe because she refused to light the lamp before she got up in case she woke him. Didn’t matter how often he pointed out he’d slept through typhoons and sundry, she always shook her head with a smile and doing an excellent impression of a governess intoned, “Now, now…you are a busy pirate and you ever know when you’ll need to be wide awake to shoot some one.  Best you get your rest while you can.”  And it was a joke. But she still left the lamp dark.

He could hear her below in the little kitchen foraging them some supper…servants one of the things she felt she had well escaped from when she left her parents house to find him again. “Smothering,” she told him, “And besides I like cooking now I’ve gotten the hang of it!”

And she had, too. He lit the lamp, hearing her come upstairs, a plate of conch fritters and soup and cool ale all balanced on a tray.  “A vision, luv…clearly I have been forgiven my transgressions and ascended straight to heaven…” And she was a vision too.  Thin white cotton sleeping gown she’d thrown on to cook, long dark curls everywhere askew….

“You’re just hungry...and besides it can’t be heaven Jack, there’s no rum….”

A small frown but the good homemade ale smoothed it and he seemed to recollect something.  “That reminds me of the purpose for this call….”

Kate looked back at him with a rather incredulous and puzzled look, rumpled bed sheets and love bites hardly seeming beside the point in her mind, “which would be what exactly?”

“The opportune moment for you to meet your most illustrious clients, seeing as …”

“Anne and Mary?!?!” Jack grabbed the soup before they both got an unexpected bath, and was happy he’d put the ale on the bedside table. She was practically bouncing off the bed with excitement.

“I’d be sure to call her Captain Bonny when you meet her – a wicked temper that one, makes Gibbs look a lamb – and I’m hoping we’re not too late for it.” Jack looked unexpectedly sober and Kate was the one frowning now.

“Have they been taken? Are they to be hung again?”

“Well that’s what I’m hoping to prevent. A fellow rather down on his luck – navy bloke chucked out for gambling – which is to say winning too much of some officer’s money no doubt – was doing his best to drown himself but finding he had insufficient funds to accomplish the task.  Good Samaritan that I am, I felt obliged to assist him on his way and stories were told.  Seems that that since the three of you succeeded in cheating Governor Lawes of those particularly pretty necks, he has been spitting bricks and the promises of reward money going up faster than a petticoat in Tortuga. Someone finally took the bait and now he knows where they make berth. He’s sending two of Her Majesties fastest ships after them – I’m hoping the Pearl gets there first to deliver the warning.”

He watched Kate’s face change as she listened to the story looking one minute the young girl looking up to a hero, the next a ruthless solicitor looking for the hole in an argument, and finally, a pirate.  The face that said it is a time for action. Jack snatched hold of her wrist to keep her from leaping up to pack. “There’s no where to go ‘till morning, luv, or this little reunion would have had to wait till we were on board.  We’d neither food nor water sufficient for the run to Shell Cay, and the crew needed a night in town as well.  The morning tide will be soon enough.”


*
Most of the rest having departed for dry land Will Turner was left with, well,  he had long since learned not to call it a skeleton crew on account of the daggers that came metaphorically spinning his way, but what ever you called it there was only him and some unfortunates who looked longingly at shore and licked their lips. Soft long steps took him up to the bridge and keen eyes looked out under dark lashes to scan the darkened sky.

“Blessed with rotten luck so we are...”
A thick voice startled him out of the quiet.

His own voice, that of velvet brown silk, with just a touch of tongue over teeth answered “Oh I don’t know, a finer night I haven’t seen. What more could you want than the bluest sky and the expansive canopy of heavenly stars?”

A wrinkled face that was screwed up more, if such a thing were possible, in efforts to understand peered into his “eh?”
Evidently some of the crew still had trouble coming to grips with Will’s appreciation of the more esoteric things in life, the son of Bootstrap Bill being attributed on more than one occasion to his mother’s side, who ever indeed she was. Will sort of grimaced back, though he had proved himself time and time again a pirate worthy of the name, he was still viewed as a bit of an odd ball, and that took some doing on a ship like this with Sparrow as their Captain, and he decided to change tack, otherwise this was going to be a very long night.

“Is it a drink you are after?” At last the First Mate was speaking sense and the old pirate grinned black spaces “there’s bottle in my cabin under the bed...for safe keeping.”

“Is there now? And would you be planning on sharing it with us loyal and hardworking pirates who happen to be stuck on this here ship, guardin’ it for the rest of them”

Will turned from the bow “Well on the condition that the location of my supply is not revealed to any other than those loyal and hardworking..” the end of his sentence trailed into nothing and Will smiled, a perfectly executed plan.

He didn’t mind so much, if the truth was known, actually he quite enjoyed standing there on the bridge, his hands on Jack’s wheel. Of course Jack wasn’t the sort anyhow to say ‘you can’t touch’. Will’s face broke into a smile that would have had women swoon had any been there to see – hell there was probably no occasion nor circumstances under which Jack would utter such a thing, but he did get a sort of smirk on his face all the same- a kind of ‘when you grow up’ look, that still made Will feel about 14 again.

Off the coast of Barbados the year before he had watched Jack sit on his hands if not literally then by force of mind as Will pulled the Pearl through a lightening filled storm. The Pearl had turned to the wave, a tide crashing over its decks and there were moments when he had the captain’s name forming in his mouth only to find it stolen from under him by the wind and the thunder. If the crew were thinking of a reverse mutiny they didn’t dare say, just kept their heads down to the rain and the spray as they scurried to obey his hoarse shouts. Velvet brown silk with a thread of iron. Maybe.

Anyway, he had still been clinging to the wheel when Jack arrived, a little wet and salty it had to be said but with a golden grin and a bottle or two between his fingers.
“Interesting William- how you turned the boat into the wave- I missed that page evidently in the manual- you must teach me some time. But what do you say then whelp? Try your hand a something more than a storm in a tea cup on the very next occasion that we meet one?”
Once he managed to prise his fingers off the wood Will had taken more than one stiff drink

Light breezy winds caught the strands of hair that were now performing a mass exodus from his leather knot and, as they swept over the bones of his face, he took a gulp of night air.

*
Bare feet tripped over the planks back to Mary’s cabin, a muffled cry as they landed on what passed for a mattress and Rosie scooped back the long tresses of black curls to find the warm skin of Mary’s neck, a deep inhalation of expectancy and she closed her eyes to breath her in. Wriggling one leg between thighs that she wanted open right now Rosie smiled at the woman underneath her
“Thought you wasn’t coming…”

Mary’s hips gave her initial reply- pressing up, a small groan as her sex found pressure and hardness, and there was a moment or two where the pair of them rocked, just to feel it, head swimming moments when they remembered what it felt like to have bare flesh slipping against that heat. This woman always loved her exactly right- strong, desperate and fast or long suckling kissing slippery hours of it, though in this instance Mary could think of little else but exactly now
“So I saw darlin’. Just as well I turned up when I did eh? Be a crime not to have felt all that fer meself” her hands held Rosie closer still, their bodies rubbing against each other and neither women unable to keep from hard bruising kisses that left no doubt about their desire.

Rosie felt herself flipped over, her own doublet pulled apart, the gasped “aye well I am all yours now” was no resistance at all and Mary ran rope hardened fingers over soft breasts, a distracted smile as she watched as well as felt

“Pirates always take what they want anyhow”

Rosie laughed and closed her fingers in the hair of her lover, twisting fingers dragged her down, forcing their mouths together and Mary swallowed cries as a thin hands slid beneath laces. Rosie loved that, both to touch and to feel the same and with moans all mixed together they felt the first tremors of what would be another sleepless night.

*
He was the one waking first this time, his body responding to the rhythms of the sea even when it was a walk away. Kate said the tide woke him up as surely as the sharp rap of a  maid sent by her parents to rouse her had done when she was young.  He stilled his hand to keep from touching her while he looked, his eyes finding all the changes the past year had made…especially the first 5 months they’d had on the Pearl before he realized he’d have to share her with her first love, just as she accepted sharing him.

A year or so ago since Anna Maria had rowed Kate out to the Pearl, Kate finally surrendering to the urge to say ‘That’s enough” to a life that didn’t suit her.  Four years ago now that he’d first seen her when they’d boarded the fat merchantman she’d sailed on with her parents and stolen a kiss which by the end was more than freely given.

He knew she wasn’t likely to forget a kiss by Captain Jack Sparrow but he’d admit he was taken by surprise at just how difficult it was for him to forget as well. She’d kissed him back in front of her parents and ship full of men – she was neither a shrinking nor shrieking violet this one and Jack bit his lip remembering that first kiss. His arm went round her of its own volition, pulling her up against him and he did a few calculations as to how long they really had before they needed to be off…

He had found himself keeping an ear and an eye open and he’d heard stories, but then there was the kicker of a young woman, studying the law of all things, who had gone to plead with the Governor to keep the notorious Anne Bonny and Mary Read from going to the gallows. Seemed Kate was the talk of all the taverns and he knew it had to be her before he’d ever heard her name.  Considering an open and gutsy defense of pirates to be a running up of the black flag as it were, he had sent Annamaria to see if she couldn’t smooth the crossing over and by the time Kat had climbed rather breathlessly aboard the Pearl, she was already dressed in breeches and boots, with the blisters and sun burn to attest to how hard she’d worked to get there.  

Now her skin was deeply tanned from its love affair with sun, sea and pirate – though the eschewing of parasol rather one of her lesser crimes in the eyes of the ladies of the town when she was in it.

He slipped his fingers between hers and brought her hand up to where he could trace it with his mouth. She swore they were the bane of her existence these hands, spending just enough time on land for them to soften up so that the ropes and rigging would do their worst again when she was back onboard. The price of a double life she joked but he thought she secretly cherished it – proof of her ability to be two things at once.

At firs, she had fallen into life on board the Pearl as quickly and easily as she’d fallen into his bed. He pressed a kiss into her palm and breathed in the two of them together and something between a purr and a low growl escaped his lips, the feel of her hands on him last night flooding back at the scent.  Christ on a stick but he’d missed her. He hadn’t wanted to let her off the Pearl. Couldn’t believe she would give it up for anything let alone sacrifice trade winds and waves for dusty books and do-gooderness.  They’d fought like cats in fact and Jack could still feel that rage catch him by surprise at times but finally, finally he’d gotten to understand. He had first tasted that freedom with his body. Known it in his muscles as they got stronger when he was only 10 and first talked his way onto a ship. Found it in the rush of sailing and sex and rum and waves. It would always be home for him.

But Kate, Kate had found it first in her mind.  A mind that was better than that of most all the men who ruled and circumscribed her life and she learned to argue and plan and fight with her words.  She had come to love the Pearl and the sea and had come to love him, but she had to be who she was as much as he did.  And so they had come to this compromise and it mostly worked except fuck he missed her.  He suckled her fingers and wondered if they would turn his lips blue even as his leg slipped between hers and nudged them apart.  His lips smiled around those indigo-stained fingers and thought she had pirate tattoos of her very own design.

And then that was enough thinking…less thinking and more suckling at breast and throat and he knew she would wake to the rhythm of him inside her, their very own tide before it carried them both out to sea.

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