been about, but he hoped the captain was getting the best of the doxy. "I can tell you right now this new rigging of yours makes a handy little frigate work like a damn’d five-hundred- ton galleon."
"Just try taking her about." He glanced at the shoreline. They were coming in sight of Speightstown, the settlement at the north tip of the island. "Let's see if we can tack around back south and make it into the bay."
"But would you at least help us if we were blockaded?" She realized she was praying he would say yes.
"Katherine, what's this island ever done for me? Besides, right now I've got all I can manage just trying to get the hell out of here. I can't afford to get caught up in your little quarrel with the Commonwealth." He looked at her. "Every time I've done an errand for Barbados, it's always come back to plague me."
"So you don't care what happens here." She felt her disappointment surge. It had all been for nothing, and damned to him. "I suppose I had a somewhat higher opinion of you, Captain Winston. I see I was wrong."
"I've got my own plan for the Caribbean. And that means a lot more to me than who rules Barbados and its slaves."
"Then I'm sorry I bothered asking at all."
"I've got a suggestion for you though." Winston's voice suddenly flooded with anger. "Why don't you ask your gentleman fiance, Anthony Walrond, to help? From what I hear, he was the royalist hero of the Civil War."
"He doesn't have a gun deck full of cannon." She wanted to spit in Winston's smug face.
"But he's got you, Katherine, doesn't he?" He felt an unwanted pang at the realization. He was beginning to like this woman more than he wanted to. She had brass. "Though as long as you're here anyway, why don't we at least toast the sunset? And the free Americas that're about to vanish into history." He abruptly kissed heron the cheek, watched as she flushed in anger, then turned and yelled to a seaman just entering the companionway aft, "Fetch up another flask of sack."