Chapter 25 #2
His first mate took the decanter from Beaton and, like a barkeeper at some seaside pub, commenced pouring.
“Oh,” Hart added conversationally, as if Tremaine needed him to say a goddamned thing more. “And if you’re worried about Culross preying upon your lonely wife, you needn’t. I’ll see he doesn’t go anywhere near the lady.”
He hadn’t been worried about the glib earl—until now.
Tremaine had always known he’d leave; he’d just not actually thought about the day.
That day which was here.
The hand that reflexively took his proffered drink from Kilmartin shook. Tremaine tightened his fingers around the glass hard to keep his fingers steady.
Kilmartin raised his. “Ourselves!”
The other men joined with, “As no one else is likely to concern themselves with our welfare.”
Beaton spoke up before they touched glasses. “Eh. Not sure we can make that toast anymore. Tremaine’s the only one of us miserable bastards who’s got himself a wife to worry after his welfare.”
Take me with you.
It is not safe, Linnie.
Laughter ensued over the jest that wasn’t a jest, and then the trio contemplated a more fitting toast.
“Which means this sailing is a dangerous one.” She gripped his lapels more firmly and gave him a slight shake. “Then I don’t want you to go.”
Where was the resolve that’d carried him downstairs?
Clink. Clink. Clink. Hart tapped his signet ring against the side of his glass, calling for attention. “If I may,” he said with a gravity befitting an upcoming sea voyage. “May Neptune smile upon you.”
Tremaine had already worked through in his head why he needed to go.
Woodenly, he touched his glass to the other three.
Correction. He didn’t need to go. He wanted to.
On reflex, Tremaine made to drink and froze, his snifter halfway to his lips.
Tremaine’s men followed his stare.
Fuck.
Linnie, her golden-blond curls in artful disarray about her shoulders and her eyes heavy from sleep, stood in her wrapper and nightshift and took in the scene before her. With her arms wrapped around her middle, she hugged herself in the saddest-looking embrace.
Unsteadily, he set his glass aside.
His brother and crew members instantly straightened, and with politely averted stares, they executed bows.
Not Tremaine.
Tremaine’s eyes stayed locked on his wife.
The worry in Linnie’s sensuous oval features deepened. “Is everything all right?” she asked when no one said anything.
Hart, Kilmartin, and Beaton looked to Tremaine for their cue.
He nodded once.
Linnie stepped aside as each gentleman passed, making their individual goodbyes—with Linnie silent through each—until he and his wife were alone.
Hart paused long enough to pull the panel shut, giving Tremaine a last, commiserative look.
Linnie ventured into the room, so quiet and with an uncertainty to her that squeezed his chest in the strangest way.
Her movements also set Tremaine into motion, swiftly gathering the information and materials for his impending sailing. By the time he’d finished, Linnie reached him.
She eyed the abandoned glasses and decanter and moved her gaze to the neat stacks he’d made. “What is going on?”
Restless, needing to move, needing to look anywhere that wasn’t at his wife, Tremaine reached for the new embroidered seabag his brother had left. He set it on his chair.
Linnie followed his every movement. “Jeremy,” she repeated with an equal calm, “I asked—”
“Come, Linnie,” Tremaine said tersely. “Let’s not do this.” He went forward, packing his things.
He needed to get away. He was losing himself. Hell, he already had. But it wasn’t too late to shake himself free of this mesmeric hold his wife had over him.
“You’re leaving,” she whispered.
“Construction has been finished on my ship. It is ready for sailing.”
Tremaine made the mistake of looking up.
Linnie stared at him through stricken eyes.
His body jerked. Me. I’m responsible for her pain . . .
And this would be only the beginning.
Tremaine tried to reason with her; he’d do anything at this bloody point, just to drive away her grief. “You know the sea is my life.”
His efforts had the intended effect.
“But I’m your wife,” she said quietly.
His rucksack packed, Tremaine shouldered the bag.
His clever wife anticipated his next move.
“No.” Linnie curled her arms around Tremaine’s neck and clung to him like ivy. “Don’t pull away from me, please.”
He went to lower the graceful limbs tangled about him. Except the same hands he brought up to set her away, Tremaine now hovered about her.
The sounds of her begging threatened to split him open.
Tremaine, in equal parts, wanted to clamp his hands over his ears, take off running, and never look back, and give Linnie whatever, anything, everything she wanted.
Anything so she wouldn’t look at him. Her holding him now like this was unbearable.
He easily divested himself from her embrace.
Her face fell.
“Linnie, I’m leaving.” Tremaine adopted the stern tone he used with his crew. “I have to go.”
Linnie didn’t so much as flinch. Of course she didn’t, his brave girl.
“No, you don’t,” she shot back, her eyes radiating a fury.
The sight of which grounded him.
His clever wife anticipated his next move. Spritely as she’d been as a girl of six, she darted over and put herself in his path.
He stepped left.
She matched his movements.
Tremaine went right.
Linnie countered.
His jaw flexed. “Step out of the way, Linnie.”
“No.”
“No?”
She shook her head wildly back and forth. “N. O. No.”
If he weren’t in such tumult, he’d have chuckled at her temerity.
This here—this is why you need to get the hell away from her.
Everything he’d built between them had been constructed on lie after lie, so that he didn’t know if there were even any truths buried in there.
Tremaine narrowed his eyes. “I’m not asking you, Linnie.”
“Which means you are ordering me to do so?” she strangled out.
He gave her the same frosty stare he’d quelled multiple mutinies with. “I’m your husband.”
Linnie narrowed her eyes into thin slits. “Have a care, husband. You’re heading into dangerous waters.”
Aye, and he’d witnessed enough shows of her rebelliousness through the years to know precisely the looming threat. As such, he retreated from that high-handed approach, which would have never worked on his spirited, intrepid wife.
Admiration stirred.
God, she was magnificent.
This would be the last time for the next four or more months when he had Linnie in his arms, and he was filled with alternating needs to take her fast and furiously and let this live.
In the end, his hungering for this woman proved far greater. Tremaine yanked her night skirts up and lifted Linnie. She immediately wrapped her legs around him so her core touched his swollen shaft.
Opening her mouth, she let him inside. The instant he touched his tongue to Linnie’s, she answered in kind. Tremaine sucked the delicate flesh in the way he knew she loved until her soft, hungry moans dissolved in his mouth.
There was nothing tender and something violent and desperate in their joining. Without ever breaking their kiss, Tremaine brought Linnie against the same door panel she’d stopped him from exiting. The oak rattled at her back.
Reaching down between them, he freed his length, and his painful erection sprang free.
In one fluid move, he thrust himself deep inside her honeyed center.
It was too much. Panting, he buried his face against her shoulder and bit her neck. With every upward thrust, he sucked the place where her pulse pounded. He drove his body into hers over and over until Linnie was sobbing.
As Tremaine made love to his wife, no words were needed. Words would only complicate this, and this was the one thing between him and Linnie that wasn’t complicated.
Then the tight walls of her channel spasmed, and she was coming.
With a hoarse shout, he pounded himself inside her, joining in a powerful climax that was over too fast.
They collapsed into one another; Tremaine anchored them both against the door, keeping himself and Linnie upright.
This would be the last time for a long time he made love to her, a thought that left a hollow sensation inside him.
Tremaine stroked a hand over the small of her back.
“Don’t leave me,” she whispered, her voice hoarse with tears.
Just like that, reality intruded.
“Linnie,” he said quietly and lowered her to the floor, her skirts settling around her ankles. “I never said I’d stay.” Tremaine collected his bag.
Linnie’s lower lip trembled. “You never said you’d g-go, either.”
Her eyes bled with such hurt Tremaine wanted to take a dagger to his breast to rid himself of the pain in seeing her suffer.
His resolve flagged.
The bag slipped from his shoulder and hit the floor with a solid thump.
Hope flared in her sparkling green eyes, those emerald depths that reminded Tremaine of the earth’s solid surface she’d keep him fixed to.
And when she found out, what then? He’d have given up his career on the high seas and without even a loving, clever Linnie to show for that sacrifice.
Avoiding her eyes, Tremaine grabbed a kerchief from inside his ditty bag. He gently cleaned Linnie and wiped himself as an afterthought.
Bloody hell, get control of yourself, man.
Lifting her hands to him, Linnie drifted closer. “Do not go,” she entreated.
His chest knotted up.
She must have sensed him weakening.
“Or . . . take me with you. I love you. I want to be with you always, Jeremy.”
Tremaine inhaled sharply through his nose.
This had gone on long enough. All of it.
His deception.
This conversation.
He and Linnie.
“You love the idea of me, Linnie,” he said gravely. “You are still the eleven-year-old girl, awestruck by her cousin’s best friend.”
Her lips trembled. “You’d throw my confession in my face?”
“No. Yes.” Tremaine cursed. “It’s just the truth, Linnie.”
Linnie clutched at her robes. She looked at him as if he were a stranger before her. Maybe he was. Tremaine didn’t even recognize himself. “Why are you saying these things?”
“You mean why am I speaking the truth?” He clenched and unclenched his jaw. “Because it is time you heard it, but I think you already know it, Linnie.”
She gave her head a confused shake.
He held her gaze with his. “Linnie.”
When Linnie spoke, her voice emerged so faint Tremaine barely heard, but hear it he did.
“If Arran and Culross steered the lumber and shipbuilders away from the construction of your ship, how is Triton’s Mistress II able to sail so soon?”
The hesitancy in her voice broke the heart he’d never known he had.
“Your cousin gifted it to me as a . . . wedding present of sorts,” he said, his voice hollow to his own ears.
Her eyes grew stricken. “Why did he do that?”
For just one second he weighed not giving her the truth. There’d been too many lies. He was sick of them all. “He knew in doing so, I’d leave you more quickly.”
As much as he’d believed himself prepared for telling her everything, he was wholly unprepared for the way her slight inhalation broke his heart.
Fuck.
Everything was happening too fast. Spiraling.
“Leave me more quickly?” Linnie held herself tight around the middle.
Wanting to be the one to ease her pain, he took a quick step toward her, but the horror in her eyes froze him in his tracks.
“Oh, my God.” Her face scrunched up and she curled her lips, but the moisture glittering in her eyes betrayed the tears she fought to keep from shedding. “You were always intending to leave me?”
Unable to deny it outright, Tremaine found himself unable to meet her eyes; he slid his gaze briefly away from the sight of her suffering.
Her body trembled like a child’s jolly boat caught in a gale. “Mm. Mm.”
And because he knew her so well, he knew the one way to make proud, spirited, fearless Linnie stand down.
Then all this would be done—they’d be done, and Tremaine could freely travel without thinking each and every single day about Linnie and the goddamned hero worship in her eyes whenever she looked at him.
He gave her a pitying look.