1. Chapter 1 #3
When she stretched her arm upward, her fingers missed by several inches.
She rose onto her toes, reached again, and caught nothing but leaves.
Marguerite tried once more, because dignity often required a third humiliation before admitting defeat, then dropped her hands to her knees and bent forward, breathing hard.
The pirate stepped closer. "Allow me."
She should have refused. Refusal was the proper answer to strange pirates in moonlit gardens, particularly when they made her insides tingle.
Marguerite drew in a breath. "If you drop me, I shall scream."
"I will not drop you."
"If you place your hands anywhere improper, I shall scream louder."
"I know where a lady's waist is."
She gazed from his tapered fingers to his handsome face and could not doubt him.
Before she could reconsider, his hands settled at her waist. He didn't have to flex his knees or take in a breath, he simply lifted her.
One second, her chin was level with his chest, the next, she was seeing the moon shine atop his dark hair.
Startled, she settled her hands over his shoulders and shivered when his breathing tickled the naked skin above her bodice.
"Can you reach it?"
What could he possibly mean? The wig! Of course. Marguerite caught the branch and seized the toupée by its laurel wreath.
The thing resisted.
"Come," she muttered. "You have caused enough trouble."
"Are you speaking to me or the wig?"
"At present, the distinction is slight."
His hands tightened at her waist, and his warmth rose through the silk of her gown and into her ribs, where it had no political business.
She pulled again. The toupée came free so suddenly that she tipped backward.
His grip firmed at once. "I have you."
His voice was quiet beneath her, low enough to move sluggishly through her body.
Marguerite clutched the toupée to her chest. "You may lower me."
He did it too slowly, or the night had thickened around them, stretching the descent.
Her slippers touched the grass, but his hands remained on her.
She lifted her face. Moonlight caught the edge of his black mask, turning his green eyes bright.
He was too close, too warm, too handsome, and far too calm for a man who had recently thrown another gentleman's social standing out of a window.
Marguerite's pulse made one foolish, upward leap.
She licked her lips. "I should go… before. Before he sees himself in the mirror."
This was the crisis, she reminded herself, and not the pirate's mouth, and certainly not the dangerous comfort of standing in a cold garden with a man who smelled as though the sea had personally raised him.
She opened her mouth. He silenced her with one finger on her lips, as if her next argument were a candle he meant to shield from the wind.
Marguerite should have slapped his hand away, delivered a lecture on boundaries, liberty, and the hazards of touching women who possessed both opinions and excellent aim.
Instead, she stood very still while the pad of his finger rested against her mouth and the night gathered around them, close and silver and treacherously quiet.
His gaze moved over her face, and he brushed her cheek, the backs of his fingers barely skimming her skin, as if he had found something breakable.
"Stay," he said. "Damn the consequences."
Marguerite closed her eyes.
Stay. What a reckless, beautiful word. For one trembling heartbeat, she wished she could. His hand was warm against her cheek, and his voice made the garden feel like a country above diplomatic treaties.
Her fingers tightened around Lord Pulteney's toupée, which was perhaps the least romantic object ever held by a woman in a garden waiting for a kiss. She opened her eyes.
"I have to take this back."
She stepped away, arranging herself like a woman returning furniture after an earthquake. Her fan was somewhere in the grass. Her pulse was an ungoverned territory. Still, she had the wig.
She turned toward the terrace. He caught her wrist, his fingers tracing her bracelet, a delicate circle of silver leaves and tiny moonstones that matched the crescent at her brow. He found the clasp with unsettling competence.
"What are you doing?"
"Taking what I want."
The clasp gave way. Her breath caught as he slid the bracelet from her wrist and closed it inside his palm.
"You cannot simply take a lady's bracelet," she said dumbly.
His mouth curved. "I will give it back when you return here."
"You are recklessly confident." She drew herself up. "And if I do not return?"
His thumb moved over the bracelet in his palm. "Then I shall have a keepsake of the goddess Selene."
"How did you know that my costume—"
"A pirate always recognizes the moon," he said softly.
She climbed the stairs with Lord Pulteney's toupée clutched in one hand and her bare wrist burning where the bracelet had been.
Behind her, the garden kept its silver silence.
Before her, the ballroom glittered with witnesses, danger, and the bald head of a man whose vanity she must somehow restore without allowing him to discover it had ever gone missing.
And under all of that was the knowledge that a pirate waited for her in the dark with a piece of her in his hand.