Page 18 of A Dance with the Wayward Duke
That wiped the humor from his expression entirely.
"I will not accept an arrangement that leaves my future… complicated," she said quietly. "Precautions must be taken. Without exception."
His jaw tightened. For a heartbeat, she thought he might bristle.
Instead, he exhaled through his teeth. "I have no intention of leaving bastards behind."
His bluntness startled her—then steadied her.
"Very well. I have only one last clause, and then you can put forth your own concerns," she said, but he didn't seem to be listening.
After staring at her face for a few seconds, he crossed to the small cabinet beside the stern window. She watched as he returned with a square of linen, damp at one corner.
"I think we must agree beforehand to avoid any unnecessary emotional entanglement," she stammered.
Frowning, he paused before her. Then he leaned forward and touched the cloth to her cheek. The coolness soothed the chafed skin. She had forgotten it entirely.
But apparently, her pirate duke did not. He was so close, his shoulder within arm’s reach.
Sighing, she touched his golden epaulet. "Your Grace, can we speak about the emotional part of—"
His eyes dropped to her hand. "I won't wear them."
He had lowered the cloth from her cheek and was looking at her with that flat, serious expression that gave nothing away and somehow gave everything away.
"When I come to the cabin," he said. "I won't wear the epaulets."
Marguerite opened her mouth. Closed it. Warmth bathed her chest, as if he had lit a coal there, small and hot and improbable, and she had to resist the urge to press her hand against it. Still, the coal warmed her from the inside until it reached the bottom of her ribs.
He settled back on his heels, his green eyes hooded, watching her.
"You were saying something about emotions," he said, taking her hand in his.
Only then did she realize her fingers were curled into her palms. He pried them loose one by one. Each finger gave way as if he were opening some hidden part of her that she had meant to keep closed. Her palm tingled in the air between them, exposed. There it was again, the dratted warmth, rising under her ribs like a tide she had not authorized.
"Yes, emotions are an unnecessary encumbrance, aren't they?" she whispered.
He made a sound in his throat. She had to take it as a yes, and perhaps even a reassurance. In the spirit of good faith, one had to hope for the best.
She swallowed. "Do you have any clauses you would like to propose, Your Grace?"
For one terrible moment, he did not answer. Air remained available in the cabin, but her lungs declined to use it. His eyes held hers across the small table, unreadable now, the amusement gone from his mouth, and her mind began supplying possibilities with the efficiency of a clerk emptying a drawer onto the floor.
Would he demand obedience? Distance? Submission? She should not have asked. One never invited a pirate duke to draft amendments unless one had first secured the exits, the witnesses, and possibly a priest.
"Call me Tristan and bring warm underwear," he said, pushing to his feet.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You are always cold, Marguerite, and when I touch you, I want to know you are shivering because of me and not because you are freezing."
Chapter seven
Tristan dropped into the armchair in his cabin and sat there, still as a gun after firing. The ship creaked around him. The sea slapped the hull with the indifferent rhythm of a thing that had never negotiated with a woman in its life. Lucky sea.
His heart had not yet settled. Absurd. He had boarded hostile decks through smoke thick enough to chew. Yet Marguerite d’Ailes had stood in his companionway, wrapped in his blanket, and discussed becoming his mistress as if arranging a treaty between quarrelsome kingdoms, and his pulse still behaved like a drummer boy under his first bombardment.
Joint operations. God preserve him from clever women with cold hands and warm mouths. Only Marguerite d’Ailes could turn a proposition into a memorandum and leave him harder than the mainmast.
