Moriah's Mutiny

“Come on,” Austen insisted. “You’re in the Caribbean. Drink something festive. You can have beer any day. Besides, you’ll love this. Trust me.”

On cue the bartender placed two tall, pinkish-orange drinks on the bar before them.

“Stir it up first,” Austen instructed.

“Why?”

“They float one-fifty-one on top.”

“One-fifty-one?”

“Just do as I say, Muffy, or I’ll have to get ugly.”

“My name isn’t Muffy,” Moriah said with a laugh as she rattled her straw around in her drink. “It’s Moriah.”

“Wow, what a great name,” he remarked with genuine appreciation.

“Really?” she asked, irrationally pleased that he thought so. “Yeah. Isn’t there an old song or something about that?” He thought for a moment and then recited with mock seriousness, “Way out west they have a name for wind and rain and fire.’ Or something like that.”

“Yeah, the wind is ‘wind,’ the rain is ‘rain,’ and they call the fire ‘fire,’” she rejoined with a chuckle.

“No, no, that’s not it. They call the wind Moriah,” Austen corrected.

“Whatever.”

“After what happened tonight, though, I’d say the fire should be called Moriah,” he murmured in a silky voice.

Moriah tried to pretend she hadn’t heard, but she sloshed a good bit of her drink onto the bar as her stirring became more furious. Dropping her straw onto the napkin, she lifted the wet glass to her lips and took a deep sip of her drink. “Hey, this is really good. I could drink a lot of these.”

“You’ll be sorry if you do,” he cautioned. “If not tonight, then tomorrow.”

“I never get hangovers,” she told him. She neglected to add that it was because she so seldom drank alcohol.

“A lot of people have lived to regret those words. Especially down in the Caribbean.”

“Do you live here?” Moriah asked with great interest. She already pretty much knew the answer to the question just from looking at him. Tourists were far too easy to spot in their newly purchased vacation clothes, sunburned from head to toe and dead drunk most of the time. Austen was much too comfortable in his surroundings, and his sun-bleached, rebelliously long hair and basic choice of clothes indicated to her that he wouldn’t be flying back to the States for the opening bids at the stock exchange Monday morning.

“Yeah,” Austen responded as predicted. “I’ve been down here about five years. How about you? Do you live here?”

Moriah nearly choked on her drink. Did she live here? In the Caribbean? Really, it was all too funny. What would the other professors in the anthropology department think? “Do I look like I live down here?” she asked in lieu of an answer.

Austen turned her question into an opportunity to give her the once-over again, and he smiled. Moriah kept any comments to herself, as she realized belatedly that she’d set herself up for his ogling.

“No,” Austen answered. “Your sunburn is a dead giveaway.”

“Swell,” Moriah mumbled as she lifted her drink to her lips.

“But,” he hastened to add, “you look like you belong here.”

Moriah gazed at him openly, honestly amazed at his statement. “I do?” she asked softly. A small smile playing about her lips and eyes reflected her genuine pleasure at his compliment.

Austen caught his breath at her expression. She looked even more beautiful than before, her face almost childlike in its innocent delight, as if he had offered her the highest of praise. “Yeah,” he breathed out quietly. “You do.”

Moriah continued to beam. “Thanks, Austen.”

“You’re welcome,” he replied automatically, still entranced by the warmth that emanated from her gray eyes.

For several moments they only gazed at each other as if verbal communication was unnecessary. Then with a start, Austen realized he knew nothing of this woman except that her name was Moriah and she was a damned-nice kisser, and he’d better get his mind in gear if he was going to score any points with her.

“So I guess you’re here on vacation?” he asked lamely, realizing they both already knew the answer to the question. When Moriah nodded as she sipped more of her drink, he continued, trying not to sound like the idiot he must surely appear. “Where are you from?”

“Originally from Newport, Rhode Island,” Moriah informed him. “I grew up there. Now I live and work in Philadelphia.”

“Newport’s a big sailing mecca, isn’t it?” Austen asked, always interested in things nautical.

“There are a lot of big yachts and sailboats up there,” Moriah agreed distastefully. “But boating is something I was never much into, personally,” she added with an edge to her voice, remembering all the nightmarish occasions as a child when the family had gone out on their seventy-two-foot yacht, Teddy’s Toy. Her father had always been determined that his four daughters would be perfect sailors and flawless nautical hostesses, and he’d spent each excursion impressing them with the severity of a drill instructor. Naturally Morgana, Mathilda and Marissa had all passed the tests with flying colors and enjoyed the trips immensely. Moriah, on the other hand, had struggled for years with motion sickness and vertigo, for the most part losing her lunch over the leeward side while her father looked on, shaking his head in disappointment.

Austen detected the bitter note in Moriah’s voice and incorrectly surmised that it was there because she harbored a distaste for people who could afford big yachts and sailboats. Therefore he didn’t pursue the topic, wanting instead to reestablish their earlier humor and ease of communication. “So what do you do in Philadelphia?” he asked in an effort to change the subject.

“I’m a teacher,” Moriah responded proudly, sitting up a little straighter in her chair.

Austen couldn’t help but grin at her, so obvious was her love for her job. It seemed like an appropriate profession for her. He got the impression Moriah was the type of person who would take pleasure in giving something of herself to others. She was probably great with kids, too, he suspected, and with her abundant good humor and self-confidence, she must be a great inspiration to her students. They probably loved her. If he’d had a teacher like her when he was in school, he definitely would have been inspired. Not to mention in love.

“What grade do you teach? What subject?” he asked her. Then impulsively he rushed on. “No, wait. Don’t tell me. Let me guess.”

Moriah sipped her drink slowly and told him, “I’m the most obvious candidate for my position in the world. You’ll guess in a second.”

Austen looked at her once more, taking in not just her gorgeous body this time, but the carefree clothes that encased it, the tumbling wildness of her dark gold hair, the laughing fire in her huge, beautiful eyes. “You have to teach either art or music,” he decided, not sure if the widening of her eyes meant he was right or wrong. “And probably the seventh or eighth grade. Am I right?”

Moriah’s laughter erupted uncontrolled from deep inside her, full and rich and uninhibited. Austen thought it the most wonderful laugh he’d ever heard.

“What?” he demanded with a chuckle. Her mirth was highly contagious. “Am I right?”

His question made Moriah laugh even more, the image of her doing something creative and beautiful just too, too funny to imagine. It was true that there was an abundance of artistic genes in the Mallory DNA, but they’d all been used up by the time she’d come along. She had to be thankful that she’d gotten more than her share of the intellectual ones, though, she ceded, Marissa having been shorted a bit there.

“Oh, Austen,” she finally managed to say through her giggles. “That’s pretty humorous.”

“I guess you’re trying to tell me that my assumption was a little off target.”

“Actually, the only way you could have been further off would be to have placed me at the head of an elementary schoolroom.”

“Look, are you going to tell me what you do for a living, or am I just going to sit here looking like a fool?”

Moriah smiled sweetly at him as she announced, “I’m a professor of cultural anthropology at a Philadelphia university. I teach upper-level and graduate classes in primitive South American cultures, and right now I’m studying different tribes of the Carib Indians, trying to discern their original migration routes from one island to another.”

“Oh,” Austen muttered. Then after a thoughtful swallow of his planter’s punch, he added, “You don’t look much like an anthropologist.”

Moriah’s genuine look of bewilderment told him she thought he was out of his mind. “Of course I do,” she said simply.

“No, you don’t,” he insisted. “I always pictured anthropologists as dry and humorless.”

“I am dry and humorless,” Moriah told him simply.

The realization that she actually believed that struck Austen like a freight train, but his consequent shock prohibited him from coming up with the proper denial. Instead he demanded, “How come you don’t have your hair pulled back and wear glasses like anthropologists are supposed to? Where’s your gray flannel suit and starched white blouse and sensible shoes, hmm?”

Moriah shrugged, and her reply was matter-of-fact. “Actually, I do usually pull my hair back, but after all the salt-water and wind and humidity at the beach today, it just refused to be contained. And I only wear my glasses for close-up work. As for the suit and sensible shoes, well, that’s kind of an outdated fashion statement even for anthropologists. Besides, they’re terribly inappropriate for field study.”

She didn’t seem angry or resentful when she made her statement, Austen thought after she concluded. But there was something, some almost undetectable glimmer in her eyes that indicated she was somewhat resentful about the life she led. She’d delivered her words without malice or defensiveness, just plainspoken, unadulterated fact. But somehow he felt that hers was a hollow, inappropriate description, that the way she did live wasn’t the way she wanted to live. That the person she described herself to be was in fact just a facade to disguise who she really was. What he didn’t understand was why she would want to deny herself that way.

Before he could verbally pursue his suspicions, a shutter suddenly fell over her eyes, and he wasn’t altogether sure that the look he thought he’d seen was ever there. Instead he only said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“No apology is necessary,” Moriah told him honestly, wondering why he should think one was. Everything he’d asserted about anthropologists, save the flannel suit, had been right on the mark as far as she was concerned. And she was every bit as guilty of following the stereotype as her colleagues at the university. She did dress modestly, and she did lack a sense of humor. She knew that because her sisters always complained about her colossal lack of fashion sense and because every time she tried to make jokes among her family or her peers, she was met with either blank stares or condescension. As a result she’d given up just about any attempt to describe the humor she still found in situations, because evidently what she considered funny simply was not.

Austen was silent for a moment, contemplating the puzzle of this beautiful woman, more curious about what made her tick than any person he’d ever met. And in the five years that had passed since he’d moved to the Caribbean, he’d met dozens of strange and wonderful characters. He watched Moriah drain her glass of the sweet pink liquid it held, entranced by the slender length of her throat, inevitably letting his eyes fall to the neckline of her shirt and the subtle swell of her full breasts. A cultural anthropologist. My, my, my. Perhaps if he’d majored in that instead of business he would have wound up a more satisfied man.

But thoughts of the past were behind him now, and as he gazed lustily at the woman beside him, his future was looking brighter. Particularly his immediate future. When two sunburned dancers wearing matching striped rugby shirts fell drunkenly against him with a giggle and a gasp, he turned to Moriah with an idea.

“It’s getting awfully crowded in here. What say we go someplace else? Someplace where there aren’t so many fods.”

Moriah eagerly licked the last of the planter’s punch from her lips and offered him a mild grin, beginning to feel the effects of the mysterious concoction. “Fods?” she asked, drawing her brows down in confusion. “What are fods?”

“Fods are all those tourists you see dressed identically alike so they won’t lose each other in a crowd,” he informed her, trying to ignore what the motion of her tongue did to his body. “It’s a widespread, imported phenomenon down here.”

“I see.” Looking around, Moriah did detect the presence of a number of couples wearing identical sportswear. “It would appear that these fods breed like rabbits,” she noted.

Austen smiled at her culturally anthropological observation. “Virtually overnight,” he concurred. “Come on, I know a better place. There are still a lot of tourists, but they’re cool tourists. They like to hang with us locals. You’ll like it.”

“Gee, I don’t think so, Austen,” Moriah hedged. “The rest of my family is coming down tomorrow morning and I should meet them at the airport.”

“Where’s your hotel?” he asked.

“Bolongo Bay Beach,” she told him.

“Hey, that’s not bad,” he commented, thinking college professors must get paid pretty well these days. “But I wouldn’t sign up for any diving lessons if I were you.”

“Why not?”

“Bart’s one of the instructors.”

“You mean that big Neanderthal works in the same hotel where I’m staying?” Moriah’s concern was obvious.

“Don’t worry,” Austen assured her with a smile. “He usually has his head underwater. Explains the waterlogged brain, you know?”

Moriah smiled back at him. Austen had come at her virtually out of nowhere, looking like a bronzed Adonis, rescuing her from the menace of a pack of tiger sharks. He’d made her laugh a lot and enjoy herself immensely this evening, despite the dread she still harbored at her sisters’ impending arrival. Not to mention the fact that he was a remarkably talented kisser, too. Austen might have come as a surprise, but it had taken Moriah no time at all to decide that she liked him. A lot.

“Anyway,” he went on, interrupting her thoughts, “what I was going to say was that your hotel isn’t that far from the airport. You won’t have to get up too early. You could stay up just a little bit longer, couldn’t you?”

He’s so cute, Moriah thought with no small amount of surprise. She’d never fallen for a cute man in her life. She’d always gotten involved with men who were as dry and humorless and as ignorant of the concept of fun as she. And, of course, that’s why she’d always wound up dumping them.

“I don’t know,” she began reluctantly, obviously weakening in her conviction. “If you knew my family the way I do, you’d understand.”

“Hey, if they’re anything at all like you, I don’t think you’ll have any problem,” he told her.

But that was the problem, she wanted to tell him. The rest of the Mallory clan were nothing at all like her. Or rather, she was nothing at all like the rest of the Mallory clan. That’s what had always been the problem.

“Come on, Moriah,” Austen coaxed as he nudged her shoulder playfully with his. “You’re on vacation. Enjoy yourself.”

“Actually, it’s going to be something of a working vacation,” she told him, stalling for time. “I’ll be visiting several islands that have university and library facilities, and I’ve made some appointments with other anthropologists and professors. I’m doing some research for a new textbook that I hope will be a useful tool in classes focusing on primitive Caribbean cultures.”

Austen looked at her for a moment without speaking, then slowly, gradually, a wonderfully wicked, marvelously mischievous grin spread across his face. His amber eyes twinkled merrily when he finally spoke. “You know, you’re right. You are dry and humorless. But I have the perfect remedy for that.”

Moriah blinked. “You do?”

“Yeah.” Austen’s smile broadened, and Moriah felt her insides turning into mashed bananas. “Come on, Moriah. We’re going to Sparky’s.”

Chapter Two

“So what you’re saying, Austen, is that these naughty, um, I mean, these nautical nods—”

“Nautical nogs.”

“Whatever. What you’re saying is that these teeny little drinks are the ultimate cure-all for the world’s ills. That if every world leader past and present sat down at a big table at Sparky’s and sipped these little drinks, then the world would be a beautiful place. Is that about the gist of it?”

“That’s about the gist of it,” Austen agreed, smiling down at a flushed, soft, slightly inebriated Moriah.

“What I don’t understand, though,” she went on, then paused suddenly when she became fascinated by the gold-tipped errant curl that had tumbled over one eye as she spoke. She brushed at it weakly in an attempt to make it join the rest of the unruly mass, but it fell forward again almost immediately. “What I don’t understand is what I’m supposed to do with a collection of these little blue-and-white china mugs if they don’t make a pitcher to match them.”

Austen laughed and glanced at the man seated next to him. Upon entering Sparky’s, he had recognized Dorian Maxwell from across the room, no easy feat amid a crowd large enough to rival The Green House. Austen had shouted to his friend and partner, and the other man had waved an invitation to join him and the large group crammed around a small, scarred cocktail table. At Moriah’s enthusiastic consent, they had. Dorian was originally from Tortola, but the two men had both lived on St. Thomas for the past five years, having based their business there. So Dorian knew as well as Austen the effect that several of Sparky’s nautical nogs could have on a person, and the wide white grin that split the other man’s sable-skinned face mirrored the one Austen knew must be fast spreading across his own.

“Well, to be honest, Moriah,” Austen said, “very few people walk away from the table with a collection of the mugs, and I have to shudder at the concept of what an entire pitcher of nautical nogs might do to someone.”

Moriah’s eyes narrowed as the information Austen offered her seeped slowly into her brain. She blew an upward gust of breath from her lips and finally sent the unruly curl that had been plaguing her back from her forehead. “Oh,” she replied. “Okay. Can we have another one?”

Dorian laughed out loud, a rich, deep rumbling that seemed to erupt from his very soul. He slapped Austen soundly on the knee and said through his chuckles, “Looks like you got her right where you want her, mon. I guess you’ll be wantin’ the key now to Lionel’s apartment.”

Austen grinned sheepishly at the other man’s reference to a friend’s apartment near the bar that they both borrowed from time to time whenever it seemed one of them was going to get lucky. He mumbled vaguely, “Ah, not just yet.” Then to Moriah he responded, “I think you’ve had enough nautical nogs for one evening. They have a tendency to hit you when you’re not looking.”

Moriah gazed at him with a puzzled frown until the meaning of his statement hit her squarely in the brain. “Are you insinuating that I’m drunk?” she gasped in horror. “Why, I’ll have you know that I have never, never, never, never, never in my entire life been under the influence of anything.”

“Moriah…” Austen began to apologize.

But Moriah pushed on as if she hadn’t heard him. “Except for that Valentine’s Day dance at Barry Masterson’s house when I was sixteen. But that was Marissa’s fault. Hers and that geeky boyfriend’s of hers, Bra-ad.” She said the name in a singsong voice, rolling her eyes as she did so.

Austen’s smile broadened. He was having more fun tonight than he’d had in a long, long time, and he owed it all to the honey-haired, lushly curved, slightly sunburned woman at his side. Moriah was such a far cry from the numerous and redundant bleach-blonde, salon-tanned, surgically perfected, empty-headed women with whom he normally took up on St. Thomas. The ones who came down from the States with the dual intentions of toning up their tans and getting lucky with the locals. Even under the influence, Moriah was bright and fascinating, and the more time Austen spent with her, the deeper he felt himself falling into the inviting depths of her dark gray eyes.

“So what did Marissa and geeky Brad do?” he encouraged her to finish the story she’d left hanging.

“Hmm?” Moriah responded, gazing at him with warm, liquid eyes, thinking that this man was just about the most gorgeous one she’d ever seen.

“The Valentine’s Day dance when you were sixteen?” he prodded. “You got drunk that night?”

Moriah’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How did you know about that?” she demanded.

“You just brought it up,” he told her.

“I did?”

“Yes, you did.”

“Oh.”

When she didn’t continue, Austen tried again. “So what did Marissa and Brad do?”

Moriah frowned, drawing her brows downward comically. “They slipped me a Mickey,” she said with melodramatic bitterness. Almost immediately her face cleared of its feigned dark expression and she smiled broadly. “But I got even,” she announced.

“What did you do?” Austen tried not to laugh but found it nearly impossible.

“I countered with a Donald,” she told him, slapping a hand over her mouth to hold in the giggles she felt erupting. “Then we all went out and got Goofy,” she added through her chuckles. “Get it? Mickey? Donald? Goofy? Isn’t that hilarious?”

“Hilarious,” Austen agreed, though his own mirth wasn’t so much a result of the joke as it was from watching Moriah.

“I read that on a greeting card,” she said when she’d regained control of herself. “I love telling that story now. It used to be no fun at all.”

Austen shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m not sure I want to know where you shop for greeting cards.”

“What? Why not?”

He sighed. “Never mind, Moriah. You want to dance?”

Immediately her eyes cleared of their wariness and she answered enthusiastically, “Oh, yes. I love to dance.”

“Earlier this evening you told me you didn’t know how to dance,” he reminded her, referring to the talk they’d had as they were walking to Sparky’s, a talk in which Moriah had tried once again to convince him that she was every bit as humorless as she claimed. He eased out of his chair now, pulling Moriah gently behind him.

“I did?” she asked as she stood up and straightened the neckline of her shirt. “Why would I have said that? I don’t understand.”

“There’s a lot about you I don’t understand,” Austen mumbled under his breath, then added silently, But it’s going to be a pleasure figuring you out.

As they neared the dance floor, the duo performing onstage began a slow acoustic rendition of a relatively unknown Jimmy Buffett song. It was one of Austen’s favorites, and he pulled Moriah close, wanting to savor the tune and the woman who made the moment ideal. Swaying rhythmically to the gentle strains of the guitar and softly uttered words of the very romantic song, Austen tucked Moriah’s head under his chin, closed his eyes and sighed with complete contentment.

Moriah felt utterly at peace in Austen’s arms, marveling at how easily and naturally the two of them were getting along. She usually wasn’t very open to strangers, especially those of the masculine persuasion. And Austen was extremely masculine in his persuasion. Almost as if to illustrate that thought, her fingers pressed into the strong flesh on his back and waist, loving the firm muscles she encountered. In response to her exploration, Austen pulled her closer, and she gasped as her body was thrust once again into intimate contact with his. Instead of pushing away, though, Moriah found herself snuggling even closer to him, drawn by his warmth and strength, attracted by whatever it is that draws a woman so irrevocably to a man. She inhaled deeply the fragrance that surrounded him, something wonderfully elusive and utterly reminiscent of the sea.