The Winds of Fate by Elizabeth St. Michel

well-being, I’d toss you out in a−” But the merriment in his eyes grew infectious, and for the first time in a long time, Claire could not help herself from smiling. “You bring out the worst in me, doctor. Are you always this−ill-mannered?”
    He arched a brow in that all knowing impossible male attitude. “Always.”
    The whole man was a study in contradictions. He was a slave, her slave, but behaved nothing like a slave. He had the audacity to act as her equal. He was educated and caring, this she’d seen firsthand. Yet he wasted no time in vexing her. She could not help herself from pondering his history.
    “You must have been a monstrous child,” she said.
    “Left my parents faint with exhaustion. And yours?”
    This was far safer. Her feelings had run amok. She likened them to a desperate old spinster. She would not allow
those
feelings to happen again. With that decision, she felt better, genuinely warming up to a topic that held fond and dear memories for her. “I thrived on adventureas a young child, to my parents’ alarm.” said Claire, slanting the physician a provocative laughing look. “My parents hosted a dinner party with hopes to impress their guests. I recall Lady Winston. She stood the epitome of haughtiness, and she wasted no time in telling me I was doomed to be a ragamuffin. I thought her quite rude. So at dinner, I slipped a frog into her vichyssoise. When the servant removed the cover from her bowl, she fainted dead away. My parents tried to feign horror, but could not stop laughing. The dinner party turned into a fiasco. I was punished. I could not ride my pony for a week.”
    She found it so easy to talk to him. Refreshing yet odd, not a discourse one would have with a slave. His camaraderie, his subtle wit and the way he listened intently to what she said as if nothing else in the world mattered. The banter was disconcerting and flattering. It also created a false mood of absolute intimacy and solitude.
    Yet, hanging in the air was an unidentifiable acquaintance that she could not quite put her finger on. It was almost as if she had known him before. Claire searched his face for clues but could find none. Then there was that voice of his, resonating with nagging familiarity. She looked away, tracing the molded edge of her chair, thinking her worries over Cookie were causing her to imagine things that were not there.
    Claire walked to the bed and lifted the cloth from Cookie’s forehead. “Your journey to Jamaica, was it long?” She glanced to him and froze, those penetrating eyes, fastened onto hers.
    “The
Jamaica Merchant
was an abomination, a fertile womb for suffering. The sloshing bilges churned up nauseous fumes and the decks leaked until there wasn’t a dry piece of clothing below. Under the hatches we men wrestled with close confinement. Our nourishment started with salt horse, old meat first, that is, meat that had been returned from a former voyage. On opening one of these hoary casks, the stench flooded the space below decks and hung in the air like a miasma. Add the foul water. A sickness broke out among us and it was all that I could do to avail my skills and prevent heavy losses. We dropped anchor in Carlisle Bay, and we were lucky enough to put ashore forty-three out of seventy-two surviving rebels.”
    Claire withstood his fiery blast. His eyes seemed to see everything, so piercing, so swift to study and judge, then explode with his judgment. She could only imagine the deprivations he’d been through. Yet what galled her, stood the fact that he assumed she was responsible for his lot in life.
    “There is nothing I can do to change your fate. You are a rebel, a traitor to the King. You are captain of your own destiny, commanded by your own hand. I observed you looking out over the bay. I felt your lust for freedom. I’ll inform you, it is forbidden.”
    “Thank you, Madame, for reminding me of my place.” He dismissed her coldly, and commenced to examine the