Page 13 of A Dance with the Wayward Duke
He pushed away from the cabinet. She hated to give him credit, but the pirate-turned-officer moved with the magnetism of a storm seen from too near the shore. Her skin seemed to notice him before her judgment could object, tightening along her arms, drawing her breath higher in her chest. Ridiculous. He had taken one step. A woman who had survived an Austrian diplomat should not be undone by locomotion.
“Is it money?”
Her fingers tightened beneath the blanket.
A tilt of his head. “Protection?”
Her chin lifted. The word slipped too neatly beneath her ribs. Protection. As if she had not learned, very young, that protection always arrived with terms attached and an invoice hidden somewhere in the lining.
He circled her slowly, as if the cabin had become a map and she the position he meant to take. Marguerite’s mouth went dry.
“If you must know,” she said, “and I do not really understand why you must, I need passage to Naples.”
There. She had said it. The pirate frowned, then he reached for her brandy glass, lifted it before she could object, and drank from the rim.
“Sir?”
He did not apologize. Of course, he did not. An apology required a working relationship with civilization. He held theglass in one hand, the mark of his mouth glistening on the cut crystal exactly where hers had been. Marguerite stared at it with a horror entirely disproportionate to the glassware. Her pulse gave one hard, foolish leap. The rim of the glass had touched her mouth, then his, and her mind, which had been entrusted with important matters of survival, chose that moment to picture the exchange in reverse.
This man was dangerous. He took what he wanted. He possessed no visible understanding of diplomacy whatsoever, and yet somehow managed to turn every conversation into a negotiation in which her pulse defected first.
He placed the glass back in her hand.
“I have a ship,” he said. “I could take you myself.”
The words struck with such force that she nearly forgot to breathe. Several weeks. In a piece of wood. With this man. With his mouth on her glass and his eyes on her face and no ballroom, no corridor, no respectable distance to rescue her?
Marguerite shot to her feet. “I would not sail with you if your ship were Noah’s Ark and the floods were coming.”
Parbleu! Were her nostrils flaring? How vulgar. Her heart had climbed so high in her chest that each beat seemed to strike somewhere behind her collarbones.
He grinned. “Moon, if this were indeed the Ark, and we the last couple of human beings on earth, we would have a very pleasant voyage to Naples.”
Heat poured through her, as if someone had opened a furnace inside her stays.
She gasped. “Can you keep the word pleasant out of this conversation?”
“I believe you introduced it.”
“I did no such thing.”
“You mentioned the Ark. I merely considered the accommodations.”
“I demand to speak with the ambassador now.”
He opened his arms slightly, palms out, as if offering himself for inspection. “Why? Is my conveyance not enough for you?”
“You are not a conveyance, sir. You are a complication.” Her gaze, having been given no authorization whatsoever, traveled from the width of his shoulders to the dark line of his coat, then lower, then back up with the guilty speed of diplomats caught reading private dispatches. “A tall complication with scratchy epaulets and a too-smooth voice I care nothing about.”
His eyes narrowed to the mark on her cheek. “Did I hurt you?”
The question struck more softly than any of his teasing had, and that was the trouble. Her anger, which had been standing very bravely on a chair with a sword, wobbled. The scrape on her cheek, dismissed until now as one of the many indignities of maritime survival, began to sting because he had noticed it.
“No.”
“Marguerite.”
The sound of her name in his mouth was a far worse liberty than Moon.
