Tidal Rush (Octopian Shifters Book 3)

A first mate needs to be prepared for anything…but is he ready for love?

First mate Joey Carrigan is dedicated to his ship and his captain, including keeping the secret of his captain’s lover. When the lover’s former fiancée, Miss Celeste Brady, appears on the horizon, Joey knows it’s his duty to get the lady on board with helping the captain find answers to his current dilemma.

Celeste doesn’t begrudge her former fiancé the love he’s found with another man. After all, she was the one who abandoned him the night before they were to wed, when her inner nature answered the call of the moon and the tides. The origin and existence of people like her are a secret her people have killed to protect – but the captain’s first mate looks at Celeste like he knows what she really is… and wants her anyway.

Captain Fitzgerald was not himself, no matter what he said. Joey Carrigan, first mate on the Black Dove, had known him long enough to read his tells. He wasn’t limping now, not like he’d been while they were in Port Townsend, but his face was pinched and pale, and his eyes were tired and sad. 

His broad shoulders were hunched forward under his greatcoat, and he looked cold and miserable. Like he’d given up the attempt to appear calm and confident before his crew as no longer worth the effort. 

Joey knew the cause of the captain’s misery. Or, at least the most obvious cause. They’d left Mr. Elliot behind in Port Townsend, and the next supermoon was next week. Mr. Elliot would shift, and Captain Fitz wouldn’t be there for him. 

Joey tried not to think too much about what his captain got up to with his half-devilfish lover during the supermoon, but he’d caught a glimpse of Mr. Elliot’s tentacles last year when they’d rescued the captain from the devilfish women’s den. 

He poured coffee into a lidded pewter mug and made his way from the ship’s small galley to the aft quarterdeck. The captain was toying with that copper compass when Joey came up the steps to the quarterdeck. The one Mr. Elliot had used to navigate to the devilfish women’s den last year. 

Damnest thing Joey’d ever seen. The needle pointed west, rather than north, when they were out on the ocean. They were sailing to Mam’s compound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, but maybe the captain was planning to go back there after. 

“Thanks, Jo-Jo,” Captain Fitz said, when Joey handed him the mug. 

“You know I hate that.” He added a respectful “Captain,” but his reproach was half-hearted. Captain Fitz had bestowed the nickname almost when they first met, and Joey knew he’d never quit. At least he didn’t call Joey by his birth name. 

Joey stayed on the quarterdeck for a bit while the captain drank his coffee and steered the Black Dove. They’d reach Mam’s inlet by late afternoon, and Joey felt that mixture of love and frustrated longing he always felt when going home. 

“Looking forward to seeing your mam?” Captain Fitz asked in that uncanny way he sometimes had of reading Joey’s thoughts. 

Joey made a face, but smoothed it when the captain glanced at him. Captain Fitz would brook no disrespect to his mam any more than he would to himself. “Suppose so,” Joey said. 

“Things were better during our last visit, weren’t they?”

“Suppose so,” Joey said again. They had been, somewhat. Mam had made an effort to treat him like any other sailor. “Just kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop, I guess.”

“Give her some credit,” Captain Fitz said. “You never thought she’d come ‘round this far, did you? She calls you by the right name now, don’t she?”

“Not like some people,” Joey said without thinking, but the captain only chuckled. 

“Everyone needs a nickname,” he said. “And you don’t get to pick it yourself.” 

“She’s trying,” Joey said after a moment. “I see that. Mostly ‘cause of you.” He scuffed his shoe against the deck’s wide planks. “I never thanked you for that, Captain.” He hoped someday to find a way to repay his captain for everything he’d done for him, but he doubted he’d ever be able to.

“No need,” Captain Fitz said gruffly, then took a sip of coffee. “You know she loves you. She just wants to keep her baby safe.”

“Not a baby,” Joey retorted. He didn’t need his mam’s protection anymore. Certainly not if it came with the refusal to accept him the way he was. 

“She’d have come around eventually with or without me.”

Joey wasn’t so sure. “She didn’t have no trouble accepting Mr. Elliot. But that was more about Aunt Charlotte, I think.” 

“Aunt Charlotte?” Captain Fitz had been coming to Mam’s compound since Joey was small, and the senior Captain Fitzgerald for even longer, but maybe he hadn’t known about Mam’s sister.

Joey hadn’t known her, either—she’d died before he was born—but he’d heard sailors gossiping in the bunk house about her before he’d stowed away on the Black Dove. He told the captain about some of it. 

“Lately, I been thinking she was maybe like Mr. Elliot.” Captain Fitz didn’t acknowledge this, but Joey pressed on. “Mr. Elliot all right? How’s he gonna get through the supermoon without you?”

The captain coughed around a sip of coffee, and Joey pounded on his back until he waved him away. 

“For fuck’s sake, Joey, that’s none of your goddamn business.” 

“Sorry, Captain.” Risking his ire, Joey continued. “I just…” 

He glanced at the captain, then turned his gaze to the mainsheet snapping in the wind. He had to get this out. 

“Just, you’re always taking care of everyone. Like me, or Mr. Elliot, with whatever we got wrong with us. Or when we’re hurting some way. And I heard you were sick for a few days after the last supermoon.” 

One of the housemaids at the Bishop house had told the Landes’s gardener, who’d mentioned in a card game at the Green Light saloon, that Captain Fitz had been laid up in bed for days last month. And he’d had that trouble when they’d been unloading hooch from the cave where they’d stored it the night they arrived in Port Townsend. 

The captain cleared his throat and his hands tightened on the ship’s wheel. He’d brushed off Joey’s and Thomas’s concern then, but Joey would have it out with him now, no matter how uncomfortable it made them both.

“I just think someone oughta take care of you sometimes, when you hurt.” Joey didn’t have the balls to look directly at the captain, and picked at a crusted patch of sea spray on the tail of his coat. 

A warm hand landed on the back of his neck and squeezed gently. “That’s kind of you, lad, but I’m fine.” The hand went away and the captain cleared his throat again. “Mr. Elliot and I will figure it out. Nothing for you to worry about.”

Joey nodded. “You gonna talk to Mam about it?” He was pushing his luck and he knew it, but the captain had to know that he had options. 

“Guess so.” 

“Or are we going back to that island with the devilfish women? Reginald and me caught a few glimpses of them swimming around the ship when Mr. Elliot and your father was inside that cave. They didn’t bother us none, but some of them were real pretty.” 

He wondered idly what it would be like to be with one of those women. Not that any of them would want him, considering the way he was.

Captain Fitz said he’d find someone someday. A nice girl, not a dockside whore that he’d have to pay extra to be with him. He loved the Black Dove’s crew, and the ship was his home. Sailing with Captain Fitz was all the adventure he’d dreamt of when he was small and couldn’t wait to leave Mam’s house to become the man he knew he could be. 

But someday, it might be nice to settle down. Marry, build a house for a wife. Not as big as Mr. Elliot’s house, but nearby, perhaps. Uptown, with a view of Port Townsend Bay from the upstairs windows, and a bed with a woman who loved him the way he was.

“Not if I can get some answers from your mam,” Captain Fitz said. “I’m done talking about this with you, though. I appreciate that you care about me, but it’s my business, aye?”

Joey recognized he’d pushed his captain as far as he dared. “Aye, Captain.” 

He glanced over his shoulder. Dense white clouds were billowing toward them, hiding the bit of Vancouver Island that had been visible most of the day. “Fog rolling in from the southeast, Captain. Think we can outrun it?”

The captain turned to look for himself, then turned back and eyed the wind filling the mainsheet. “Better try,” he said.