Page 53 of Hooked By a Hero
Elias’s sultry thoughts were blasted away as a woman’s scream filled the air. Not just one woman, but two. They were not the screams of ladies who had stumbled across two men enjoying themselves either, they were screams of terror.
Eighteen
The rapturous release Caspian felt after finally holding and tasting Elias and coming in his arms was woefully short-lived. He would have been tempted to dismiss yet another interruption or get up to shout at whomever dared disturb them, but the clear terror in the voices of the screaming women jolted him into another emotion entirely.
“What’s happened?” Elias asked, untangling from Caspian and pushing himself slowly to sit.
Caspian was quicker to launch to his feet. There could only be one answer as to why the women were screaming like that.
“Dick,” he said, reaching for his trousers and yanking them on as fast as he could, despite the mess their lovemaking had left on him. “It has to be Dick.”
He rolled off the blanket and quickly used sand to scrub away as much of the stickiness from his belly as he could, then pushed to his feet and hurried toward the path. Elias threw on his trousers and a shirt and followed suit. Before the two of them could reach the path, Lady Adelaide and her maid stumbled out onto the sand.
Not more than two yards behind them, two of the mutineers raced out onto the beach. One of them grabbed Lady Adelaidearound the waist and lifted her, screaming and flailing, into the air for a moment before slamming her down onto the sand on her back.
“No! No! Help me!” Lady Adelaide screamed as the mutineer yanked and tugged at her skirts.
Emily only got so far before the second mutineer caught up with her.
“Get your hands off her!” Elias shouted. He grabbed one of the smoldering sticks from the fire, raced to Lady Adelaide, and began beating the villain off her and burning him as he did.
Caspian leapt into action as well, tearing toward the mutineer that attacked Emily. He barreled right into the man, knocking him off of the struggling maid with a shout, and rolling a few feet down the beach with him. The man ended up on his back with Caspian straddling him. His eyes went wide as he found himself in the very position he’d had Emily in, but that expression did not stay on his face for long. Caspian punched it away and kept punching until the man went limp under him.
“They’re attacking the encampment!” Lady Adelaide sobbed and screamed as Elias hovered beside her, attempting to ascertain if she’d received any other wounds he could not see. The man who had assaulted her was halfway down the beach, running toward the water as his shirt blazed on his back. “They came out of nowhere just as we were retiring for the night.”
It was exactly as Caspian had worried it would be. Dick was not acting alone. It was impossible to know exactly what had happened, but Caspian would have wagered that Dick had gone ahead, knowing he would be caught and led back to the encampment. All the noise he’d been making must have either been a way to signal to the others where the camp was located or to distract everyone long enough for the others to circle around and prepare for an attack. Or both.
“I’m going back to the encampment to see what has happened,” Caspian said, blood pounding with fury and the need for vengeance.
Elias looked up at him as if he wanted to come along, then glanced to Lady Adelaide and Emily. “I should stay here and tend to these ladies,” he said. “There’s no telling if Sutton will come back,” he nodded to the man who was now screaming as he doused his back in the surf, “or if any others will come this way.”
Caspian hated being parted from his beloved, but he did not trust Dick or the others not to kill the rest of the male survivors, take the women, and destroy everything the intrepid survivors were trying to establish.
“I will come back,” he promised to ease the sinking feeling in his gut that they were up against more than they’d bargained for.
Elias nodded, and Caspian ran toward the path. He did not have to run for long before seeing the glow of fire on the horizon through the thick trees. He could smell smoke the closer he came to the camp and hear screaming, shouting, and the clash of steel on steel.
It was just as he feared when he burst out of the jungle and into the clearing. Too many dark, shadowy figures scrambled all over the camp, burning some of the huts and grappling with a few of the male settlers. One of the mutineers must have lit the stack of supplies from the ship on fire. Woburn was hard at work trying to put it out with water from the spring and one of the blankets while simultaneously fighting off attacks from some of the mutineers, who took a swipe at him as they raced on to fight whoever they could.
“Get your hands off her!” Hunt’s voice sounded louder over the swirling sounds of battle.
Caspian pivoted to see Ruby slicing at one of the mutineers with a long knife. The feisty woman had gone to bed with a knife under her pillow after all. She growled and thrust, teeth bared asviciously as any pirate. Caspian fixed the sight in his memory so that he could laugh over it later. For the time being, his help was needed in countering the attack.
Ruby was not the woman Hunt had shouted about. Two of the mutineers were grabbing at Miss Winters between them, trying to rip and slice off her clothing as she sobbed and flailed, fighting back. She was close to losing her battle, and since Caspian was near enough, he lunged toward the men, knocking one of them off his feet as he threw a shoulder into him.
Miss Winters screamed even louder, but with her first attacker immobilized and the second momentarily stunned, she was able to wrench away from the man and stumble off to the side, weeping the whole time.
“Get off me!” the man Caspian had tackled shouted, clawing at him and trying to throw a punch. “She’s mine! I saw her first! It’s about bloody time I wet my willy after all I’ve been through.”
Caspian punched before thinking, sending the man’s head pounding back into the sandy dirt. It was only a shame they were not fighting on stone so that he could knock the man’s brains out entirely. “She’s a woman, not your property,” he growled.
“I have a right to her,” the mutineer insisted. “It’s been too long.”
Caspian punched the man again, then realized he was not one of the convicts, he’d been a member of theFortune’screw. Instead of punching him a third time, he straddled the man, pinning him down, and clamped a hand around his throat to keep him there.
“Did you take the last lifeboat to escape theFortune?” he asked, raising his other hand, like he would punch the man again if he did not answer. When the man nodded tightly in fear, Caspian asked, “Where did you go? Where have you been all these weeks?”
The man choked and heaved as he tried to answer. Caspian loosened his grip on the man’s throat, and after coughing, he said, “When the ship ran aground, Tumbrill ordered us to wait out the storm. He thought you lot would surely be swallowed up by the deep. Once the storm calmed, in the dead of night, he ordered the last two boats filled with whatever we could find. We were going to go straight to shore, but he saw your fire there and ordered us to row around to the other side of the island instead.”
