Free Velvet Lightning by Kay Hooper Page B

Elizabeth and drop him off. He’s had two days; he must be halfway there by now.”
    Falcon swore bitterly. Then, grim, he said, “We’ll just have to take the fastest ship we can find. Jesse, where, exactly, is this Port Elizabeth?”
    There was a moment’s silence while Jesse stared at him. And then the younger man said slowly, “I’m going with you.”
    “Jesse—”
    “Look,” Jesse said flatly, “nothing out there in the harbor is heading south until tomorrow afternoon, and there’s no way you could catch Sheridan if you waited that long. But there is a ship out there with a chance of catching him—the second fastest ship in Tyrone’s fleet. My ship. The Robyn . We can leave today, on the afternoon tide. And even if we can’t catch Sheridan, we’ll damned well be running up his stern by the time he gets to Port Elizabeth.”
     
    The Robyn , like her sister ship The Raven , was a clipper built for speed. She was two hundred feet long, and her three tall masts held numerous sails. She could, Jesse told them proudly, do twenty knots when she was pushed; he intended to push her.
    Falcon and Victoria stayed out of his way. Within the few hours before they could sail it became obvious that however distressed or uncertain he was on land, Jesse was utterly and completely comfortable with a deck beneath his feet. And he handled the many details of an unexpected departure briskly and without hesitation, recalling a crew on liberty, stocking the ship for a journey, and coolly summoning one of Tyrone's attorneys to handle the necessary business matters until either Jesse or Tyrone returned to New York.
    “Will he like that?” Falcon asked curiously when the lawyer had received his orders and gone.
    “Marc?” Jesse grinned. “No. He doesn’t trust lawyers. Even his own. Especially his own.”
    “Then aren’t you taking a bit of a risk by, ah, dumping his business matters into the lawyer’s lap?” Jesse’s grin turned savage. “Serves him right, dammit. Next time, maybe he won’t be so quick to saddle me with a mess.”
    Falcon watched the younger man step aside to deal with a minor crisis among the crew, reflecting that Jesse was badly worried. But then, so was he. In his life at various times, Falcon had been both hunter and hunted; he knew what it was like to have ene-mies stalking him the way Tyrone’s were stalking. . . . He wondered suddenly if Tyrone thought of him like that, as an enemy, and found the thought disturbing.
    Victoria came to his side then, slipping a hand into his and looking at him gravely. “What will you do if Captain Tyrone has the gold?” she asked him.
    Falcon wasn’t surprised by the question. The longer he and Victoria were together, the closer they seemed to grow; she had read his face if not his thoughts themselves. "I don’t know, sweet,” he said finally, troubled by his own uncertainty. "I really don’t know.”
    "Is this Camelot more important?”
    "It may be. It may well be. Somehow, they’re connected, I know that. I feel it. And I think . . .”
    "What?”
    Slowly he said, "I think the gold may turn out to be the least important part of the story, because I believe there was, originally, no connection. I think Tyrone himself became the connection.”
    "Deliberately?” she asked.
    He frowned. "I—there’s a sense of irony.” He looked at Victoria almost blindly, as if his gaze were turned inward, searching feelings, instincts.
    She tried to help him focus. "In what way?”
    “Illusion,” he said, and his eyes narrowed. "Yes, that’s it. Illusion. What you think you see is wrong; it’s what you're led to see.”
    "What we see? You mean someone has led us to look at the entire thing wrongly?”
    "Yes, I think so. Parts of it anyway. But which parts? There are two separate threads, the gold and this Camelot. Tyrone, somehow, for some reason, is holding them both.”
    Victoria waited, watching him intently. After a moment his eyes cleared and he looked at