Chapter 19 #3
His thumb crept from her palm down to her wrist, lodged against the quick throb of her pulse.
“Penney got me this position. Secretly. Through his connections to House di Sangro. If your father investigates who might have betrayed the princess—if he looks too closely at the staff and our pasts—he will find me as I am. Not a captain, but a discharged officer, sent down in dishonor. Even Penney could not speak up for me publicly after I lost the Swallow. Not again.”
She freed her hand from his grasp, but only so that she could reach up and touch his cheek. And—Christ, he was a besotted fool.
He relished it.
“Penney could have spoken up for you,” she said stubbornly. “He should have told the truth. He was wrong to let you—”
“He was right.” Archer had heard the same argument even then from his crew. Lamentation more than any of them had been heartbroken and furious—and, in the end, determined to keep them all together. “Penney had to remain. He knew what his leadership meant to the fleet.”
The admiral had meant everything to Archer: safety and confidence and the security he’d lost when he was twelve. A way out of the maze of grief and fear.
“He did not have to do what he did for me,” Archer said hoarsely. “I was nothing before he came into my life, before he took me under his protection. And after the navy—after the Swallow—I only went back to what I was before.”
“You weren’t nothing,” Ruby said. Her fingers shifted—his jaw, his throat. In the dark, her thumb brushed his mouth. “You were never nothing, Malcolm.”
“I’ve never done an honest day’s work in my life.”
“You were a boy. A hungry child who loved his mother. You did what anyone would have done—”
“I didn’t.” He gritted his teeth against the desire to press into her, to feel the small solid weight of her body, the press of her bones, the uncompromising rhythm of her heart.
He had taken all his fear—all his want and hurt, all of his uncertainty—and pressed it tight into a ball, then shoved it deep down in his belly and smiled.
Smiled so his mother would not know he was afraid. Smiled when that first crew had known him for a foolish, brainless boy—smiled and charmed them anyway.
“I lied,” he said. “I haven’t stopped lying. I’ve stolen and smuggled and run from my past, and now it’s caught up with me, and I can’t hide from it any longer.”
He could not dissemble, not anymore. Not even if he wished to.
He ached to hold Ruby’s face in both his hands. He wanted to pretend this moment was a lifetime and a lifetime was infinite. He wanted to dream that she was his and tell himself it was no dream.
He didn’t want to let her go.
“Your father will find out the truth,” he said, “when you write to him. He’ll find out who I truly am.”
There could be no more than this: a handful of stolen moments, seawater swirling around them in the cove, blue paint on Ruby’s cheek. Her dear brave plainspoken loyalty, and her heart as big as the ocean. For a minute—for one brief glorious moment—he’d had all of it.
He supposed he ought to be used, by now, to letting things go. He supposed it ought not hurt so much.
She jerked her chin up. Her hands dropped from his face to his shoulders, and then his bare back, and then the top edge of his trousers, which she clutched in her fists. “And what of it?”
“I don’t know—”
“No,” she snapped. “He’ll find out who you really are? Let him.”
He didn’t mean to do it. He tried to resist. But still, when he spoke, he found that his hands were at her ribs, his palm spanning flesh and bone. “What do you mean?”
“You are decent. Self-sacrificing. Loyal and hardworking and kind.”
He almost laughed, so ludicrous did it seem. “Ah, pet.”
“You are. Your crew came with you because they care for you, and because you deserve it. You held them together through sheer force of will. You found them a house. You built four hammocks for four boys because you could and because it was the right thing to do.”
“Ruby.” He could feel the ribbons at her waist, the seam of her bodice and, above it, the steep curve of her breast. In the dark, his face had come close to hers. He could almost taste the shape of her mouth. “Don’t. There’s no good that can come of this.”
“I see you,” she murmured. “I’ve always seen you.”
He felt run through, laid open. Cleaved by the ruthless clarity of her gaze.
She had. God grant him mercy. She had.
“I’m not a good man,” he said roughly.
He meant it. He wanted her to know the truth of his past, to be frightened of the consequences of honesty. He wanted her to tell him to go.
And—God. He wanted to have her right here in the dark. If they had only days or weeks to be together, he wanted them all with a hot selfish greed. He wanted to breathe the air from her lungs, let himself drown in the gluttony of his desire.
He spread his fingers. His thumb grazed the underside of her breast.
Her breath caught, and at the sound, Archer’s body surged beneath the furious check of his control.
Slowly, she dragged her nails up his back, and he shuddered at the touch, at the lush closeness of her body.
“Prove it,” she whispered. Her voice was low; her breath fluttered against his chest.
He fisted his hand in her skirt. His heart beat out a pained tattoo: I want you; I want you; I can’t.
“Show me,” she murmured. “Do your worst. I want to know what sort of villain you are, Malcolm Archer.”
“Yours,” he said hoarsely.
And then he went down on his knees and showed her.