Page 4 of A Dance with the Wayward Duke
"There," he murmured, brushing her arms up and down. "Now. Everything is going to be fine."
It was a foolish thing to say.
Marguerite stepped back. "I beg your pardon?"
"The admiral is bald. Half the Foreign Office has seen it. By Thursday, no one will remember."
"By Thursday," she said carefully, "I will be in a boarding house in Brighton with no passage, no introduction, and a rear admiral who believes I arranged the entire incident to humiliate him."
"Then go back in and tell him you didn't."
She pressed her fingers to her temple. "You cannot simply walk up to a vain man and tell him his toupée is in the garden. In front of witnesses. Right now, he is bald and does not knowit, which means he still has dignity, which means he is still manageable, which means there is still a version of this evening in which I leave with what I came for. The moment he knows — the moment anyone says the word toupée within his hearing — that version disappears entirely."
The pirate looked at her for a moment. "Why all this effort to protect a man's ignorance?"
"It is a great deal of effort," she said. "That is rather the definition of diplomacy."
"Diplomacy should solve problems."
"Indeed. But carefully. With attention to what the problem actually is, and not what it appears to be on the surface."
He crossed his arms. "The problem is exactly what it appears to be on the surface. It is the solution that people complicate."
She laughed — a short, disbelieving sound. "You cannot run a life like that."
"You cannot run a ship any other way."
The garden settled between them, the waltz slipping through the open windows. Marguerite had said more in the last two minutes than she had intended to say to anyone at this ball, or possibly this season.
"Well. You have been very educational, sir. And I must go back inside and undo what education costs." She stepped back.
The pirate's hand closed around hers. "You cannot leave now."
Marguerite looked at his glove, then lifted her gaze to his face.
"Sir, I do not know what constitution governs pirate society, but Mr. Thomas Paine has written most persuasively on the rights of man, and though he was criminally inattentive to the rights of women, I am prepared to extend his principles in my favor. I possess the right to come and go at—"
"The wig is over there." He pointed past her shoulder.
The toupée hung from the branch of a small ornamental tree, laurel wreath and all, its orange curls caught among the leaveswith the furtive plumpness of a squirrel that had chosen acorns over empire.
For several seconds, she could only stare. "Lord Pulteney's hair is in a tree."
He grinned. "It took the high ground."
She shot him a look, but he was no longer laughing openly, which was either mercy or self-preservation. She gathered her skirts and hurried toward it, shoes slipping on the damp grass.
When she stretched her arm upward, her fingers missed by several inches. She rose onto her toes, reached again, and caught nothing but leaves. Marguerite tried once more, because dignity often required a third humiliation before admitting defeat, then dropped her hands to her knees and bent forward, breathing hard.
The pirate stepped closer. "Allow me."
She should have refused. Refusal was the proper answer to strange pirates in moonlit gardens, particularly when they made her insides tingle.
Marguerite drew in a breath. "If you drop me, I shall scream."
"I will not drop you."
"If you place your hands anywhere improper, I shall scream louder."
