Page 59 of A Dance with the Wayward Duke
“They’ve earned it.”
“You should go see our passenger,” Lorenzo said.
The words entered him like a cold gale, and he shook his head.
Lorenzo sighed. “She must be worried.”
Tristan looked out over the water. The privateer was gone now. Why, then, could he still see Sarkouf’s feral grin? And Marguerite below, hoping for the best. Tristan pressed a fist against his chest, cursing the ache within. He could deal with the clean burn of blade wounds, or old scars that knew the weather, but not this raw thing.
“I said no.”
Lorenzo came to stand beside him. “You won the day. The Sea Wolf proved himself one more time. So what is wrong?”
What was wrong? The question was so simple it became obscene. Tristan lifted his face to the moon. He opened his eyes wide and let the silver light strike him. He willed it to burn. But the moon refused violence. It poured itself gently over the deck, over his hands, giving too much of herself.
Gentle, the moon. Always too gentle. He looked his fill, and still it did not hurt enough.
Lorenzo sighed. “You love her, don’t you?”
Love. A court word, a poet’s word, an excuse women were sold and men used when their appetite wished to wear a gentleman’sclothes. Love had no place on a quarterdeck after action. It did not brace a mast, stop shot, turn a ship, or keep a locked door from splintering under foreign hands.
Tristan’s fist closed around the rail. “I do not know what fairy-tale kingdom you live in, Lorenzo, but in my world people drown. They lose a leg, an arm, a ship, their lives. Masts fall. Fire takes magazines. A lucky shot enters through the stern and makes paste of whoever stands there.” His voice roughened, and he hated it. “In my world, a captain survives because he knows what must be cut before it drags the whole ship under.”
“I know it hurt you,” Lorenzo said. “Facing battle with her aboard.”
Tristan gave a short, humorless laugh. “Hurt?”
“Yes.” Lorenzo’s hand came down on his shoulder. “But you only feel this because you have something to lose.”
The words sank through him slowly. Something to lose. Indeed, he had. He had taken aboard a weight no seamanship could shift, no order could secure, no knife could safely cut. Somewhere below, behind a door he had ordered her to lock, breathed the one thing he would rather lose a limb than cut away.
His chest tightened until breath came hard.
“Then I would rather not have it.”
Chapter twenty-three
Marguerite waited in her cabin long after the ship had stopped sounding like a creature pursued by sharks.
At first, there had been noise everywhere. Feet thundered overhead. Orders cracked through the planks. The hull groaned, and the very air had seemed to tighten. Elsie had been pale but determined, dragging cushions back into place after the first violent lurch had sent them sliding across the floor, while Marguerite righted the little table, rescued the porcelain cups, and tried very hard not to imagine Tristan standing too near a gun, Tristan shouting orders beneath falling rigging, Tristan on a deck washed clean by the sea.
Then the world had shifted.
The chase had ended not with the terrible ripping sound her mind had invented and used to punish her for an hour, but with distant cheers. A cabin boy had knocked, flushed and breathless, to tell them the Sea Wolf had outwitted the corsair and all was well.
All was well.
That was what he had said.
Marguerite had thanked him. Then she had closed the door and stood with her hand still on the latch, listening for the one sound that would make the words true. Tristan’s step.
It did not come.
Elsie watched her from the bed, where she was folding and refolding the same blanket. “He’ll be busy, miss. Captains are busy after nearly bein’ killed.”
“He was not nearly killed,” Marguerite said too quickly.
She crossed to the table, moved the candlestick one inch to the left, then moved it back. Her hands would not keep still. They seemed to have survived the chase by losing faith in idleness.
