Moriah's Mutiny

Moriah's Mutiny
Elizabeth Bevarly

Anthropologist Moriah Mallory had always been the ugly duckling of her family. So when she accompanies her sisters on a Caribbean charter cruise, she doesn't expect their dashing captain to notice her. So why did Austen Blye seem to set his sails in her direction?Why was it that the only Mallory sister Austen wanted was the one who was ignoring him? Somehow, he'd have to maneuver Moriah's mutiny…and make her his first mate forever.

Moriah’s Mutiny

Elizabeth Bevarly

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

ELIZABETH BEVARLY

is a RITA

Award-nominated author of more than sixty works of contemporary romance. Her books regularly appear on the USA TODAY and the Waldenbooks bestseller lists for romance and mass-market paperbacks. Her novel The Thing About Men hit the New York Times extended bestseller list, as well. Her novels have been published in more than two dozen languages and three dozen countries, and there are more than ten million copies in print worldwide. She currently lives in a small town in her native Kentucky with her husband and son.

For my two big brothers, Danny and Jim(my), who’ve made my life an adventure since the very beginning.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter One

The weather on St. Thomas was hot and muggy, but the throngs of people drinking and dancing inside The Green House Restaurant and Bar didn’t seem to be affected by it. The band onstage was playing what Moriah Mallory guessed was supposed to be their rendition of a popular reggae tune, but in her opinion they were nowhere near as harmonic or hypnotic as the group who had originally recorded it. Yet the scantily clad bodies that crowded onto the tiny dance floor and spilled into the dining area didn’t seem to notice or care. They swayed and sweated in time to the irregular drumbeat, tipping back green and brown bottles of beer, or pink and yellow rum drinks to alleviate the steamy tropical heat.

If Moriah rose up enough from her bar stool and craned her head around the group of inebriated divers beside her, she could just glimpse the harbor of Charlotte Amalie, now hidden in the night, spattered by patches of glittering light that scattered across the darkness, the result of a small fleet of sailboats and cruise ships anchored offshore. Moriah sighed deeply, inhaling the warm night, and ordered another beer.

Tomorrow morning she would be boarding one of those vessels, or another very similar, and would embark on a two-week cruise through the Caribbean Islands, viewing the lush green jungles, the sparkling, pearly beaches and clear, turquoise-and-emerald waters from the deck of a quiet, softly rocking, tranquility-ridden sailboat. So why this feeling of utter dread that had settled like a cool clump of sand in her stomach? Why the worry that she was about to set sail on a ship of woe? Why did she want so desperately to hightail it back to Philadelphia and forget the entire episode?

Because this whole experience was going to be anything but quiet, and certainly none too tranquil, she amended, remembering that her three sisters would be accompanying her as usual on her summer vacation. As if she could forget them, she thought morosely, slugging back a deep swallow of cold beer. God, why did she continue to put herself through the misery of these annual vacation excursions? Why didn’t she do more than leave a day early to have just a little bit of time to herself? Why couldn’t she stick by the plans she made every summer after the ordeal ended, always swearing to God and heaven above that next year she was going to get away alone?

You can’t, because they’re your sisters, her inconvenient conscience nagged. They’re your family. It’s tradition.

The four Mallory sisters had been vacationing separately from their parents ever since they were children. Ever since the elder Mallorys, Theodore and Diana, understandably wanting to remove themselves from the shrieks and demands of their somewhat spoiled offspring, had begun a tradition of sending their daughters on a variety of exotic adventures befitting the children of a wealthy industrialist and an affluent bank president. Their trips had ranged from island-hopping in the South Pacific to llama trekking in the Andes, from cruises in the Mediterranean to a dude ranch in Wyoming.

And when the sisters had grown into womanhood and undertaken demanding careers, they had still upheld the tradition with vigor, religiously penning the word vacation in big red letters over the first two weeks in August in their engagement books. Last year they had gone hiking in the Alps. This year Morgana had thought it would be fun to charter a sailboat in the Caribbean.

Morgana always got to choose, Moriah thought with annoyance. Then her oldest sister would locate her next romance novel in the place and count most of the trip as a tax write-off. Of course Marissa and Mathilda were no better, always agreeing wholeheartedly with whatever Morgana wanted. Moriah couldn’t remember the last time they’d accepted one of her suggestions. Granted, she had enjoyed the llama trek when she was fifteen. It had surprised her that Marissa had come up with that idea. Her obsession with her physical appearance had been legendary long before she’d become a fashion model. Mathilda had always been the adventurous one, Moriah remembered, recalling the way in which her second-oldest sister had just up and left the sanctuary of her parents’ sprawling Rhode Island estate one day to stake her claim on the New York stage. It had been a well-calculated risk. In October Mathilda would be opening in her first starring role on Broadway.

In fact all of her sisters had become very successful, Moriah realized with a mixture of heartburn and pride. Of course, she hadn’t done too badly herself. But becoming a full professor of cultural anthropology wasn’t exactly the glamour position of the century. And certainly her recently published textbook about the primitive tribes of Peru and Venezuela wouldn’t reach the top of the bestseller list the way Morgana’s latest, Lust’s Crashing Waves, had done. Still, Moriah was very proud of her accomplishments, even if no one else in the family was.

Ever since they were children the Mallory sisters had taken their world by storm. At least the three eldest Mallory sisters had. All slender and tall with wide blue eyes and silver-blond hair, Morgana, Mathilda and Marissa had enjoyed one success after another. Spaced only a year apart, they’d each achieved fame, fortune and a faithful following of fans, things they’d even managed to garner on a smaller scale in Newport, where they’d all grown up.

Unlike her sisters, Moriah had arrived nearly four years after Marissa, and where the others were tall and slender, she barely topped five foot two and was much more rounded in the hips and breasts. She, too, was blond, but not with the straight, silky shafts of blinding white and silver that her sisters claimed. Instead her hair was thick and curly, falling past her shoulders in a tumbling mass, what a casual observer might call a rich, dark, honey blond. Moriah had always regarded it as mousy. And in place of the pale, sky-blue eyes that were so striking on her sisters, Moriah’s eyes were slate gray, deep and expressive almost to a fault. Friends told her she had compelling eyes. Moriah had always considered them cloudy.

All her life Moriah had traveled in the wake and the shadow of her sisters’ accomplishments, both social and academic. She couldn’t count how many times she had heard the grumbled comment, “You’re not much like your sisters, are you?” Countless, too, were the occasions when her teachers and her dates alike had begrudged her any effort to promote her individuality. And all too vivid still were the nights she had spent home alone because too many times she’d disappointed people for not being a real Mallory sister. By the time Moriah had entered the illustrious Prescott Academy, the other Mallorys had all graduated and become a past glory, each having left Newport to seek education and careers elsewhere. Moriah had been left alone to face the massive burden of carrying on the name and the Mallory mystique. With the name, she had little problem as it was hers by birth. The mystique, however, was something she’d never quite been able to master. Consequently it left town along with her sisters.

So Moriah tried to get by as best as she could. And academically, anyway, she did quite well; her grades were excellent. But then that was to be expected of a Mallory, so her parents had never bothered to congratulate her for her accomplishments. They did, however, continuously bemoan her lack of social achievements, her absence of chatty friends and moon-eyed suitors. They wondered avidly why she didn’t have the interest in clothes, cosmetics and the opposite sex that had kept her sisters giggling and shopping all the time. And they were constantly curious about her quiet and solitary habits. Moriah’s sisters had certainly never been that way.

Moriah gulped back the last of her second beer and quickly ordered a third. The divers beside her were staking drunken claims on a bevy of sunburned beauties that beckoned to them from the other side of the bandstand. They nudged one another clumsily in the ribs and slurred out their none too chivalrous intentions toward the women.

“Oh, for God’s sake, just go over there, toss them over your Neanderthal shoulders and carry them back to your caves,” Moriah muttered with sarcastic impatience at the largest of the men.

He turned at the sound of the deep, feminine voice beside him, his movements slow, though as a result of his drunkenness or his anger, Moriah wasn’t sure. Like his friends, he was blond and tanned from days spent under the scorching sun, and his numerous overdeveloped muscles let her know that diving wasn’t the only sport in which he excelled.

She wondered what had possessed her to speak to the giant amphibian in the first place. It was bad enough that she was sitting alone in a bar. Now she had gone and drawn unwanted attention to herself.

“Are you talkin’ to me?” the diver asked her thickly, as if his tongue was having trouble navigating.

“Uh, no. No,” Moriah said quickly, her eyes darting from one man to another as her brain scrambled for polite and credible excuses that would cover her colossal blunder. “I, uh, I was talking to myself. Yes, that’s it. I’m, uh, I’m schizophrenic, you see. And you know what they say. You’re never alone with a schizophrenic.”

The diver gazed at her with a foggy expression, trying to comprehend the information she offered him. “I’ve never heard that,” he finally told her, gazing at her with a newfound interest. A predatory light began to flicker in his eyes as another thought struck him. “So if we went to bed together, would that be like getting it on with twins?”

Moriah’s jaw dropped fast at the man’s blatant suggestion, and she tried to ignore the jeers and leers of his friends. Her slight sunburn from the afternoon spent at Magen’s Bay became a deep crimson. “Uh, no, actually,” she stammered. “I’m, uh, I’m sure you’d be very disappointed.”

But the big, blond diver was not about to be put off by what had become an intriguing idea. His eyes wandered lazily across Moriah’s face, down her loose-fitting black T-shirt and short denim skirt, along the length of her shapely legs. On the trip back, his eyes lingered at her chest, where the scooped neckline of her shirt revealed just a tantalizing hint of the swell of her breasts, and he lifted his beer thirstily to his finely chiseled lips. When he finally looked back at her face, Moriah began to feel more than a little frightened. This guy was huge. And he was drunk. There was no way to know what he was going to do next. She took a deep breath in order to steady the accelerated thumping of her heart and gripped her bottle of beer tightly, as if it were a weapon.

“You know,” the diver began slowly, allowing his hand to travel the short distance of the bar that separated them until his fingers settled gently over her wrist, “we could have a really good time together.”

“Not tonight, fella, I’m waiting for someone,” she lied with determination, hoping her voice didn’t illustrate any of the unsteadiness she felt.

His hand tightened on her wrist, and his smile became a disturbing grimace. “Yeah, tonight,” he whispered viciously. “All night. Any guy who’d leave you waiting here alone isn’t worth the effort. I don’t live too far from here, and we could—”

“You’ve got the wrong woman, pal,” Moriah insisted, trying to free herself from his iron grip. When had everything gone crazy? she wondered wildly. A moment ago she’d been sitting quietly, enjoying a beer while she contemplated with dread what awaited her with the arrival of her sisters the next day, and now she was suddenly fearing for her safety. How had this happened?

The muscle-bound giant’s grip grew tighter with her struggles. “Oh, you like to wrestle, huh?” he murmured angrily. “That’s fine, baby. I like it rough, too. Let’s go.” He stood then, his intentions stated, pulling Moriah to her feet along with him.