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she
asked, more quietly, "Do you know where Quinn is?"
    "Not for sure," Jake replied, plainly
surprised that she didn't know either. "I lost track of him a
couple of years ago. I thought he must have written to you."
    She looked at him over her shoulder. "He
never has." She nearly ran from the room to get away from the
questions lurking behind his eyes.
    *~*~*
    Jake listened to the sound of China's
footsteps hurrying down the back stairs. He made his way to the
bed, careful to duck as he went, and sat heavily on the bare
mattress. The bedsprings screeched under his weight and he sighed,
resting his chin on the bundle in his arms.
    He felt like a dog trapped on the wrong side
of a fence. He knew he wasn't supposed to be here, and China hadn't
forgotten that either. Of course, she'd been shocked to see him,
but he'd hoped she might not be so mad about it. After all, they
were adults now. But she was still as high and mighty and stuck up
as she'd been when he left. That intense rush of emotion he'd felt
when he first caught sight of her in the hallway, that was just a
reasonable reaction to seeing a familiar face after so long.
    He shifted on the bed and looked out the
small window to the street below. What, he wondered, had transpired
between China and her aunt that made her change her mind about
renting a room to him? And such a room, he thought, looking around
again. The door, apparently not hung correctly, began to close. Why
had he agreed to stay here and pay to be treated like gutter
slime? Okay, maybe he felt a little guilty, and goddamn it, guilt
was a bad reason to do anything.
    He'd paid his best crewmen two months' wages
to stay around Astoria until the ship was ready to sail again. They
were probably getting drunk in the saloons, Jake assumed a bit
wistfully, and visiting the girls who worked upstairs. He shifted
to move away from a bedspring that was poking him through the thin
mattress. He knew they were having more fun than he was.
    The Occident was beginning to seem like
paradise compared to this. Better still, he wished he was back
aboard the Katherine Kirkland in his own quarters, somewhere
on the ocean. They were no bigger, but they were captain's
quarters, not servants'.
    He thought about what he'd found, coming back
to this house. The captain was dead? The family broke? He didn't
see Quinn as often as he would have liked—they'd been on opposite
sides of the world since their voyage to Canton—and now he realized
that China's brother was as ignorant about all this as he'd been.
He didn't know his father had died, or that his sister was renting
out rooms. What else had happened to China, to the rest of the
family? She hadn't let him ask, and he supposed he had no right
to.
    He knew time could change a lot of things,
but China was the most changed of all. Her soft girlishness was
completely gone. She'd grown more beautiful than he'd ever
envisioned, but in a cold, untouchable way.
    He put the sheets down and flopped back on
the too-soft mattress, feeling morose. As a youngster, the only
sense of family he'd ever known he'd found here. He hadn't expected
to come back and find everything to be the same after all these
years.
    But he hadn't expected everything to be
different, either.
    *~*~*
    After she finished the kitchen floor, China
went directly to her bedroom at the end of the hall and closed the
door. She sank to the little sofa in front of the cold fireplace.
Her legs felt like rubber and her hands trembled so, she could
barely pull the handkerchief from her pocket. She twisted the
square of linen, nervously tying the corners in knots.
    Captain Jake Chastaine, she sneered to
herself, the brawling fisherman's son, the one who'd convinced her
brother to abandon his family and sail around the globe. How dare
he come here? she marveled. Oh, and he was proud of that title,
wasn't he, Captain Chastaine?
    For the first few months they'd been gone,
she'd let herself hope that Quinn would come home. He'd have