Page 67 of A Dance with the Wayward Duke
She had arrived in Naples spent. How ironic, then, that spending was the one thing she still knew how to do.
Only this time, she would not spend herself to be kept.
She would spend herself because she loved him, and because love, when stripped of negotiation, was not poverty after all.
It was a gift.
Chapter twenty-seven
Tristan climbed the marble steps of the Palazzo Reale alone, and Naples rose around him with indecent beauty. The city should have satisfied him. Even half-seen beneath the evening sky, it had the sort of splendor that made men believe in reward—the bay darkening to blue glass, the lamps kindling along the waterfront, the palace façade washed in honeyed light. Music drifted from the open doors above him. Voices spilled over balconies.
A different man might have stopped to look. A man who arrived with a wife on his arm, a brother at his shoulder, trunks following in cheerful disorder, a household waiting to be settled into rooms that opened toward the sea.
A man foolish enough to carry such weight might have felt satisfaction at the sight of it. He might have thought: Here. This city. This is where we begin.
But not him. He had only to survive the reception. After that, he would find the first tavern with good wine and bad music, and drink until the city blurred.
Boots sounded behind him, quick over marble.
“Fratello,” Lorenzo called. “If you intend to storm the throne room, could you at least allow me to catch up? I’m wearing the embroidered coat, and the embroidery deserves witnesses.”
Tristan stopped. Lorenzo came up beside him, trimmed with enough silver to ransom a small province. He looked insufferably pleased, and very much alone. Tristan looked behind him. No Marguerite.
His throat tightened. “Where is she?”
Lorenzo pressed one hand to his breast. “Good evening to you as well. I crossed half of Naples in buckled shoes, dressed like a diplomatic chandelier, and this is my reward? No admiration. No brotherly praise. Only interrogation. If this is the welcome I receive, I shall go visit lady friends who understand fabric, sacrifice, and the power of a fine calf.”
He turned as if to leave.
“Stay.” Tristan caught his arm. “Brother.”
Lorenzo’s face lit up. Tristan saw the boy who had walked into his cabin a year ago with a borrowed title, empty pockets, and too much pride to say what he had truly come to ask.
Brother.
Tristan felt Lorenzo’s arm under his hand, solid and alive, and his grip tightened before he could stop it.
“Ah,” Lorenzo said softly. “Now you remember I am your blood and meat.”
Despite everything, Tristan almost laughed. Almost. The mangled idiom should have been ridiculous. He held Lorenzo’s arm another heartbeat, because letting go too quickly would make the word look accidental. By God, he would not take it back.
“Stay,” he said again.
Lorenzo looked at him for one long second. Then he nodded. “Always, fratello. If you must know, I took our lovely passengerto her friend, the Marchesa Sanseverina. It seems the lady has all the influence in court these days, and I am sure Marguerite will accomplish everything she set out to do.”
Everything she set out to do. Tristan nodded once. His feet began moving again because if he remained still, this feeling inside him might find a way to show on his face. Of course she had gone to her friend. She had come to Naples for warmth, for welcome, for position, for the Italian husband who would be jealous and possessive and never dream of cutting her away. She deserved every bit of it.
Then why did his chest feel as if it were splitting open?
Tu mi manchi,Marguerite.
How you are missing from me.
The Italian words came back, but this time Tristan understood them. Not I miss you. That was too English, too proud, too much a man standing at the center of his own wanting.Tu mi manchi. You are missing from me. She stood at the center of the phrase. He was merely the place where her absence had torn itself visible.
He had mistaken her for desire, then for prize, then for weight, but she was none of those things. She was ballast. The necessary weight without which a ship ceased to be steady, ceased to answer the helm, ceased to hold a true course through water. A ship without ballast listed.
Tristan stood in the royal palace of Naples, dressed in gold braid, and understood at last that Marguerite d’Ailes was missing from him not as a woman is missed by a man, but as the thing his whole construction required in order not to capsize.
