Page 44 of A Dance with the Wayward Duke
He had no right to notice those things. No right to read the private betrayals of her body, the small signs she had not given him permission to learn.
“Sleep, Marguerite,” he said.
“But the bargain,” she stammered. “The hour is late, and we agreed—”
“Sleep.” His arm tightened around her waist. “There is still plenty of time for me to warm you before three in the morning.”
He had taken her apart, and now, with the same ruthless competence, he was making certain every piece of her was warm. She should have argued. A sensible woman would have defended the border at once, reminded him that warmth had not been included in the original arrangement and therefore constituted a dangerous amendment.
Instead, against her will, she softened into him.
Only a little.
A tactical concession to temperature.
The bargain was still in place. Of course it was. At least, it would be in the morning, she told herself, while curling closer to his warmth.
Chapter seventeen
Three bells had sounded by the time Tristan returned to the wardroom. The ship lay dark around him, breathing softly in her timbers. Above, the night watch moved in low murmurs and dull footfalls. Water ran along the hull with that old, secretive sound the sea made when it had witnessed too much and meant to tell no one.
He should have known his own way in the dark. He knew every inch of his ship. Tonight he walked into Lorenzo’s damned chest.
Pain shot through his shin. “Fuck.”
Something rustled from the hanging cot across the cabin. A spark flared. Lorenzo lit the lamp with the ease of a man who had not been asleep at all.
Golden light spread over the cramped cabin—the low overhead, the two narrow berths, the hammock Tristan had claimed because beds were for men who trusted stillness, and the offending chest planted in the middle of the floor. Shirts spilled from one corner. A book lay spine-down on top. Beside itsat a razor, a small silver case, letters tied with blue ribbon, and the ridiculous little brush Lorenzo used on his mustache.
Lorenzo’s face appeared in the lamplight. “There you are, fratello,” he said, voice roughened into the performance of sleep. “I was beginning to wonder if the ocean had swallowed you this time.”
Not the ocean. The moon. The moon had swallowed him, silver and warm and trembling beneath his hands, and he would gladly drown there every night.
Lorenzo watched him from under half-lowered lids. He had one arm tucked behind his head, dark hair rumpled, shirt open at the throat.
Tristan looked down at the chest. “Move your clutter.”
“The chest has been with my family longer than Austria has been stealing Lombardy. It has feelings.”
“It has edges.”
“As do you, and yet I do not kick you when I enter rooms.”
“You would break your foot.”
Tristan stepped over the chest and reached for the hammock. The canvas swung beneath his hand, familiar, rough, impersonal. Good. He needed impersonal things.
He lowered himself into the hammock. Fatigue sat in his muscles, in his shoulders, in the backs of his thighs. But the other thing was not fatigue. It moved beneath his skin in slow aftershocks. Every breath carried her with it—the warmth of her throat, the soft, astonished sounds she tried to swallow, the way her body had opened under his hands.
He had gone to her cabin to fulfill a bargain. He had left as if some country inside him had changed rulers in the night.
His fingers curled against the canvas.
Lorenzo adjusted the lamp wick. “Would you stop grinning, fratello? You are scaring me.”
“Be scared in silence.”
The lamp settled. Shadows drew back and returned in gentler shapes.
