Brenna nodded. “He’s a good man, isn’t he?”
“He is,” he said, looking at her curiously.
She shrugged. “I knew him when I wasn’t a very good woman,” she said quietly.
“He doesn’t hold it against you.”
“He should,” she said, still torn with the same guilt that had always been with her.
“Everybody’s entitled to change,” he said, “and everybody’s entitled to a second chance.”
She gave him a bright smile, even though she felt tears in the back of her eyes. “I wonder,” she said. “It feels like I’ve been punishing myself for so long that I don’t believe I deserve a second chance.”
He motioned her toward the bottom of the ladder. “Everybody gets a second chance.”
She didn’t say anything, but she started the slow climb upward. As soon as she crested the top, Jerricho grabbed her and gave her a quick hug. She wrapped her arms around him and held him.
“Thank you for helping her,” she said. “She looked like she was really struggling.”
“If Killian could have gotten to her, he would have too, but his job was to bring up the rear.”
“I get it.” She looked around at the ship. “This is way bigger than what we had before. I feel so much safer up here.”
“It will be harder to bring down this ship, but that doesn’t make it impossible,” he warned.
She winced at that. “Meaning, we’re not out of danger.”
“No, we are not,” he said. “The captain is also injured, and we’ll have to render some medical first aid here to see what we have left to do. Two crewmen are dead, killed by the pirates. With the captain injured, we have four other crew.”
“And nobody else? No strangers left on board?”
“Not that we’ve found. I will get a full search done as well. I just needed to get everybody up on the deck.”
“Are we setting sail again?”
“We haven’t slowed down,” he said, “but we will change direction.”
“And head back the way we were coming?” She looked at him in horror.
“No,” he said, “but we have to turn this around and head back the way it came.”
She nodded at that. “Anything to get away from where we were,” she said fervently.
“Understood, but sometimes we have to retrace our steps to actually get clear.”
“I hope not,” she muttered. She said, “Can I help with the crew at all?”
“Maybe check over the women,” he said, “and see if anybody needs medical care.”
“I can do that,” she said. “Is a doctor on board?”
He gave a hard laugh at that. “No. Not at all. But rough medicine and somebody with first aid, yes.”
“Good enough,” she said, “it’s more than what we’ve had up until now. We need to especially get the young woman with her injured leg checked.”
“I’ve already got her separated out,” he said. “Check all the others and see if anybody else needs medical care.” He looked at Jessie. “How’s she holding up?”
“Better now that we are rescued and on this ship,” she said. “We’d already determined that the last two bullets in this gun would be ours.”
He looked at her and gave a hard nod and said, “Understood.” And, with that, he gave her another quick hug, and, as he went to step away, she reached up and kissed him gently and said, “Thank you.”
He gave her a surprised look, flashed that dangerous grin again, and took off.
She sighed.
“That’s a heavy sigh,” Killian said, behind her.
She looked up, surprised, and blushed. “Maybe,” she said, “I fell for him once, a long time ago.”
“Does that mean you still feel for him?”
“He’s a good man,” she said. “It’d be hard not to. But we had our chance back then, and we didn’t do well with it.”
“Does that mean you don’t get a second chance?”
“Not necessarily,” she murmured, “but I’d have to allow myself that, and he’d have to forget who I was.”
“Maybe, and maybe you should cut him a little slack for having a little more common sense than you give him credit for.”
“Maybe,” she muttered. “It’s just hard to know.”
“Understood. Come on over here where the other women are.”
“Yeah, we need to find out if anybody’s injured.”
It took a lot of hand gestures to get the message across between all the various women of different nationalities and languages. Finally, with the translations happening throughout, four women stepped forward. Everything from cuts to what appeared to be a concussion from a related head injury.
She looked at the young woman with the head injury and shook her head. “Wow! How long has she been dealing with that one?”
“Probably since the beginning,” Jessie said, beside her. “Everybody’s too terrified to bring attention to themselves.”
“And we can understand that,” she said. “I wouldn’t have let anybody know I was injured either. It would have been a death sentence.”
“Probably get you tossed over the ship,” Killian said cheerfully.
She rolled her eyes at him. “Aren’t you just a bundle of joy.”
“Not my job,” he said in the same bright voice.
She groaned. “Go find somebody else to bug,” she muttered.
He burst out laughing. “You mean, really what you’re saying is, Where is Jerricho, huh?”
She glared at him. “He’s off doing his stuff,” she said. “I’m fine without him.”
“Uh-huh,” he said in a teasing voice, making her flush even more.
“What’s the matter?” Jerricho asked, coming up behind them.
She immediately glanced down at the deck, shook her head, and said, “Nothing.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, studying her. “Seems to me that definitely something is wrong. What’s up?”
No one answered him.
Chapter 8
Jerricho looked at Killian. “We need to set up watches.”
“What about the other men, the crew?” he asked.
“They’ve got some experience but not a ton,” he said. “They’re also shaken by the attack. For two of the men, it made them more aggressive and quite eager to go on guard duty,” he said, “looking for that target that they didn’t have a chance to take out earlier,” he murmured. “But the other two are not of the same mind.”
“Understood. And the captain?”
“He’s holding. He’ll get up on the deck, as we move forward.”
“So, at the moment, everything is contained?”
“Yes. And yet,” he said, “it doesn’t feel right.”
“It never does in these scenarios,” he said.
“Until we get everybody back home again,” Jerricho said, “we’re on four-hour watches.”