It was another one of those grand parties. Ladies had on their best silk dresses, men stood around with wine glasses and cigars, decorative swords hanging at their sides. There was music in the air, the smell of freshly baked pastries...enough distraction for one couple to sneak in without an invitation. They stood in the corner, near the refreshment table, watching and whispering. Everyone else was too busy dancing and flirting, talking and wheeling, to give them a proper glance and notice that this couple was rather strange…
"This coat is bloody hot." he pushed his tricorn hat up, briefly exposing a flash of red tied around his forehead before pushing it back down over his eyes. "How many layers was it, Angie? Two or three I can't remember…."
"Four." She replied, not really paying any attention to him. She was fanning herself rather vigorously, trying to take deep, even breaths through the corset tied tightly around her chest and waist. "Why did you have to choose a ball?"
"It wasn't my idea!" he defended crossly, reaching around her for a glass of wine. "But since neither of us are happy in the current situation we might as well get on with it, aye?" he swallowed the wine in one swig and returned it onto the tray before wandering off through the crowd.
"Jack!" she whispered but he was already gone, his overconfident figure weaving in and out of dancing couples. He was going to get run over in a minute if he wasn't careful, then everything would be ruined. She placed her fan away, cautiously moving to the outside of the room to follow him. She had almost made it when Jack stopped to talk to a raven-haired lady in a green dress. Unfortunately her dancing partner wasn't impressed and Jack backed up rather hurriedly, hitting into the butler carrying another tray of pastries. The pirate stood there a moment before bolting through the crowd and toward the front door.
Ruined…completely ruined.
Angelica picked up her skirts and ran after him, not noticing that one of the men she'd passed earlier had placed down his wine and done the same thing—except taking a shortcut through the garden. She found Jack in the courtyard in front of a blue-coated man. At first she thought Jack was cornered, yet when she got closer she realized he wasn't. He was just choosing not to run. She was also close enough to hear him shout, "See! There she is. And you called me a liar."
"Yes...and I'm not about to take that back just yet." The man—who Angelica assumed was a naval officer due to the blue coat—stepped back briefly and glanced up to regard her with his green eyes.
And suddenly the world seemed to stop. It couldn't be him….he was in Port Royal.
But it was him…the green eyes, broad shoulder and tall stature. It was unmistakeably him.
Angelica had stopped a few feet away, her fingers that had been holding up her skirts clenched harder in an effort not to shake. Perhaps it wasn't him…perhaps it was someone else.
But she was proved wrong when his suspicious expression disappeared and a look of shock replaced it. "Miss Teach?"
Angelica could not reply, the words in her throat were choked by a flood of emotions that poured over her, drowning her in the sorrows and memories of the past and what almost had been—
"Miss Teach? Who—Oh….Angelica. Wait. You know her?" Jack interrupted the scene, like a slap to the face. He looked from one to the other, confused…bewildered. "Angie, you know Norrie?"
She swallowed hard, watching as the naval officer's expression changed as he glanced from Jack to her, waiting….waiting to see if she'd deny it. If she'd deny him.
But it was impossible to pretend otherwise, to deny that everything that had happened did not. To pretend she had never met him, never spoken, never loved him. "Yes…I know him. And his name is James."