Page 49 of A Dance with the Wayward Duke
She stared up at the ceiling, eyes tracing something only she could see.
“He was an Austrian diplomat, Prince—” She stopped herself. “He made a very generous offer. More than ten times what I earned in a year. My ankle had grown stiff. The surgeon said I couldn’t dance much longer.”
She breathed in, then out.
“I stayed with him for four years. I learned everything—how courts speak without speaking, how favors are traded, how to listen for what is not said. It was a comfortable arrangement.”
Comfortable indeed. A life with Marguerite in it had to be more comfortable than sleeping in clouds and drinking fucking ambrosia. It had to be warmth in every room, light on every wall, laughter in corners a man had not known were empty.
“And why did it end?” he asked.
She looked away. “He was recalled to Austria.”
“And he left you destitute?” His voice came out too quiet. Too even.
“It was not like that. He was very reasonable. He tried to . . .” She stopped, and this time the pause carried something worsethan reluctance. Shame. “Well, suffice it to say, he strove to make another situation for me.”
Tristan turned his head to look at her. “What situation?”
Her lashes lowered. The lamplight caught the moisture gathering there before she could blink it away. “He offered me to his replacement.”
“As an attaché to the embassy?” he asked, frowning.
She sighed. “No. As the new ambassador’s mistress.”
Tristan heard nothing. A hollow opened in his chest, widening with such force that breath seemed to fall straight through him. His hand flattened against the mattress.
He would turn the ship north, find the Austrian bastard and the replacement, and cut them from title to tendon. Strip every polished inch of diplomacy from their bodies.
He was already half out of the bed before her hand touched his arm. He looked down. Marguerite was watching him with liquid eyes. As if she had opened a door and feared what would enter now. Her mouth trembled once, and she pressed it still, the effort so small and so brave that it undid more of him than tears would have.
“I intercepted the letter Karl wrote,” she said. “That is when I decided I needed to go to Naples.”
There it was, then. He had asked for the dancer and received the person instead. The knowledge settled in him like contraband hidden too deep in the hold. Once aboard, impossible to pretend it had never been carried.
“Maggie,” he whispered, and kissed her hair again, because if he spoke of murder, she would hear only more violence. If he spoke of pity, he would deserve to be thrown from his own ship. If he spoke of keeping her, he would frighten them both.
So he held her.
She made a small sound against his chest.
The ship moved beneath them, carrying them south. Naples waited. Her plans waited. The bargain waited with all its neat, doomed clauses.
Tristan closed his eyes over the hot pressure behind them and held the woman he had thought to take, while the impossible weight of knowing her settled into his arms.
Chapter nineteen
Two weeks later
Marguerite woke late. Her body ached pleasantly, the ache of being held too long, kissed too thoroughly, loved with such concentration that even her thoughts had eventually surrendered their passports. Tristan had taken her near the open hatch because moonlight had spilled there in a narrow silver path, and he had said, rough against her mouth, that she ought to be seen in her proper element.
Moonlit.
As if he had any right to arrange celestial conditions around her pleasure.
As if she had not let him.
A smile pulled at her lips, and she pressed her face deeper into the pillow. The whole cabin smelled of him now, and of the impossible softness that came after being loved by a man who never did anything halfway.
