Hot Winds From Bombay Read Online Free PDF

stole a chance to look back at the friendly giant. Her lamp cast its pool of flickering light over him. She could see the bronze hue of his skin and his thick, sun-marked hair escaping from under his cap. He wore a pea coat and canvas trousers. She imagined that she could smell the salt and tar about him.
    Again her gaze traveled back to his deep-set brown eyes. They gleamed with a sharpness honed from many hours of squinting into the tropical sun and staring heavenward to navigate by the stars. And beneath their bold challenge, she saw in their depths the sadness of a man many times his age—the look of one who had sailed the oceans of the world and beheld its miseries as well as its wonders.
    How she would love to talk to him about the places he’d been and the things he’d seen! But all she had time to do, with Europa pulling her away, was offer him a hasty smile. He returned it to her in his own crooked way.
    “Honestly, Persia! If you can’t behave yourself, the next time I’ll send you along in the pung with Mother and Father. You can’t imagine how you’ve embarrassed me. What if some of my friends saw me talking to a common seaman on the street?”
    “I thought he was nice, Europa. And I think you were downright rude. He’s right about the homes of seamen offering hospitality to other sailing men.”
    “That hospitality, my foolish girl, does not extend to captains’ daughters taking up with any riffraff off the docks!”
    “He wasn’t riffraff!” Persia insisted hotly.
    “And just how would you know? Hurry along now. We don’t want to be the last ones there.”
    Persia wasn’t sure how she knew that the man was made of better stuff than most of the common sailors fresh from the sea. Maybe it was that look in his eyes or the husky timbre of his voice. But one thing she knew for sure: she would talk with him before the night was done.

Chapter Three
    Zack watched the two women hurry away, the red-haired beauty—Miss Persia—stealing a glance over her shoulder at him from time to time. Soon she would be out of sight. He knew he couldn’t let that happen. With determination guiding his steps, he started off down the path they had taken, his lurching, shipboard walk veering him from starboard to port in a rolling gait.
    At the top of the hill above the pond, he stopped. The sight nearly took his breath. Although he’d spent many a night at sea with the starry heavens a bright canopy overhead, he had never witnessed such a scene as this. Above in the black sky, the curtains of yellow, green, and violet of the aurora borealis folded and unfolded themselves in an ever-shifting pattern of brilliance, reflecting softly on the irregular circle of ice in the little hollow below. And on all sides, streaming down from the wooded paths like sparks shot from above, the skaters’ lanterns pinpricked the night a thousand times over. The townspeople sang as they moved toward their destination, and their voices carried, crystal clear and sweet, on the cold air. He felt the old ballad tingle through him, making his heart ache with a strange, dark loneliness.
    His vision misted for a moment, and the whale-oil-burning lamps turned to fire flows down the hills. He remembered another place, another time, when chanting filled the sultry air and singers of a faraway isle presented a similar picture. There had been a beautiful woman in that place, too. He closed his eyes and sighed, remembering.
    It had been his first voyage to the South Seas. He would always remember it as the best time of his young life.
    Aye, he had been young then, but no virgin. Already he had taken a dark-skinned woman with soft black eyes in New Orleans as his first, and others in Boston, Charleston, and Savannah after that. But those meetings had been dimly lit assignations, arrived at down dark alleys in the dead of night. A password through a door, an exchange of gold, and then a hurried half hour of strange flesh pressed to his on a hard