4. Chapter 4 #2
The pirate, she had to concede, wore a very well-cut naval uniform.
Even dressed as an officer, his dark hair tied neatly at his nape, his jaw shaved, his boots polished, and his expression arranged into something almost respectable, he still looked piratical.
A man could put on blue wool, brass buttons, and epaulets without altering the essential fact that he had thrown a rear admiral’s wig out of a window and then stolen a lady’s bracelet as if piracy were a form of courtship.
The epaulets, in particular, deserved censure.
They were heavy, gold, and aggressively official, with scratchy fringe that had no doubt left marks on her cheek when he had hauled her over the side of the frigate.
Her skin still remembered them. Her body, which had proved itself unreliable at every turn since meeting him, also remembered the hard plane of his chest behind her, the steady pressure of his hand at her waist, the low command of his voice near her ear.
He stared at her, arms crossed, a single brow lifted. She stared back. It seemed the only sensible response. Besides, retreat was impossible. The chair was bolted to the floor, the blanket had swallowed her shoulders, and her slippers were making cold accusations beneath the hem of her gown.
The cabin around her did not improve matters.
It was too small for a man of his size and too orderly for a pirate.
A narrow stern window admitted a pale strip of Channel light.
Charts lay secured beneath brass weights upon the table.
A compass sat in its box. A pair of pistols rested in polished brackets.
Books lined one wall, wedged tight behind a rail so they could not escape.
Everything was bolted, latched, folded, secured, or disciplined into usefulness.
The pirate did not look away, and her cheeks flamed. The brandy was at fault. Or the blanket. Or the violent proximity of death recently endured upon a ladder. There were many rational explanations, and Marguerite intended to use them all.
Thank heaven this man was not the ambassador. She would have had to negotiate with him across a desk, and this man did not belong across desks. He belonged against doors, in storms, behind women on rope ladders, and in every unsuitable corner of a mind trying very hard to remain employed by reason.
She took another sip of brandy, winced only a little, and glanced toward the door. “When will the ambassador arrive?”
The pirate leaned against a cabinet. The movement tugged his coat across him in a manner no government should authorize.
“What do you want with him, Moon?”
“My name is Miss Marguerite d’Ailes,” she said, “and I desire a short audience.”
“How disappointing. I had thought, after the wig and the ladder, we had progressed beyond short audiences.”
“We?” Marguerite set her glass upon the table. “I assure you, sir, the ladder was not an intimacy. It was a logistical emergency.”
“Your arms were around my neck.”
“My arms were around survival. You happened to be nearby.”
His mouth curved.
She looked toward the door again. “Will he take long?”
The curve vanished, and he crossed his arms. “You risked a great deal for a man you have never seen. Why?”
Every instinct she possessed rose to attention. Good heavens. The pirate was jealous, and jealousy made men stupid, and stupidity in tall men often occupied too much room.
“I am afraid, sir, that my business with the Duke of Stormhaven is private.”
He pushed away from the cabinet. She hated to give him credit, but the pirate-turned-officer moved with the magnetism of a storm seen from too near the shore.
Her skin seemed to notice him before her judgment could object, tightening along her arms, drawing her breath higher in her chest. Ridiculous.
He had taken one step. A woman who had survived an Austrian diplomat should not be undone by locomotion.
“Is it money?”
Her fingers tightened beneath the blanket.
A tilt of his head. “Protection?”
Her chin lifted. The word slipped too neatly beneath her ribs. Protection. As if she had not learned, very young, that protection always arrived with terms attached and an invoice hidden somewhere in the lining.
He circled her slowly, as if the cabin had become a map and she the position he meant to take. Marguerite’s mouth went dry.
“If you must know,” she said, “and I do not really understand why you must, I need passage to Naples.”
There. She had said it. The pirate frowned, then he reached for her brandy glass, lifted it before she could object, and drank from the rim.
“Sir?”
He did not apologize. Of course, he did not.
An apology required a working relationship with civilization.
He held the glass in one hand, the mark of his mouth glistening on the cut crystal exactly where hers had been.
Marguerite stared at it with a horror entirely disproportionate to the glassware.
Her pulse gave one hard, foolish leap. The rim of the glass had touched her mouth, then his, and her mind, which had been entrusted with important matters of survival, chose that moment to picture the exchange in reverse.
This man was dangerous. He took what he wanted. He possessed no visible understanding of diplomacy whatsoever, and yet somehow managed to turn every conversation into a negotiation in which her pulse defected first.
He placed the glass back in her hand.
“I have a ship,” he said. “I could take you myself.”
The words struck with such force that she nearly forgot to breathe. Several weeks. In a piece of wood. With this man. With his mouth on her glass and his eyes on her face and no ballroom, no corridor, no respectable distance to rescue her?
Marguerite shot to her feet. “I would not sail with you if your ship were Noah’s Ark and the floods were coming.”
Parbleu! Were her nostrils flaring? How vulgar. Her heart had climbed so high in her chest that each beat seemed to strike somewhere behind her collarbones.
He grinned. “Moon, if this were indeed the Ark, and we the last couple of human beings on earth, we would have a very pleasant voyage to Naples.”
Heat poured through her, as if someone had opened a furnace inside her stays.
She gasped. “Can you keep the word pleasant out of this conversation?”
“I believe you introduced it.”
“I did no such thing.”
“You mentioned the Ark. I merely considered the accommodations.”
“I demand to speak with the ambassador now.”
He opened his arms slightly, palms out, as if offering himself for inspection. “Why? Is my conveyance not enough for you?”
“You are not a conveyance, sir. You are a complication.” Her gaze, having been given no authorization whatsoever, traveled from the width of his shoulders to the dark line of his coat, then lower, then back up with the guilty speed of diplomats caught reading private dispatches.
“A tall complication with scratchy epaulets and a too-smooth voice I care nothing about.”
His eyes narrowed to the mark on her cheek. “Did I hurt you?”
The question struck more softly than any of his teasing had, and that was the trouble.
Her anger, which had been standing very bravely on a chair with a sword, wobbled.
The scrape on her cheek, dismissed until now as one of the many indignities of maritime survival, began to sting because he had noticed it.
“No.”
“Marguerite.”
The sound of her name in his mouth was a far worse liberty than Moon.
“It is merely a scrape,” she said, which was almost true.
His eyes remained on her face. “May I see?”
That was not fair. A man who stole bracelets had no right to ask permission so gently.
His fingers touched her cheek. Very lightly. She did not care to be touched thus. Not by a dangerous man. Not by a man who had no idea how to negotiate even a compliment without turning it into a siege.
Well then, when one was about to be touched by a pirate, one ought to stay very still and look at the hatch and not at the aforementioned pirate’s fingers, moving ever so slowly closer. Yes, all would be well if she didn’t notice his fingers.
But alas, how could she not? They were warm and roughened by work, the pads of them careful against her skin.
His palm hovered near her jaw. A pale scar cut across two knuckles.
Another marked the base of his thumb. These were not decorative hands, yet against her face, they were gentle enough to undo an alarming portion of her argument.
Lamplight caught the ring on his finger.
Not a pirate’s ring, but heavy gold, darkened in the grooves. Its seal bore a wolf’s head beneath a ducal coronet.
Marguerite drew his hand closer, turning the ring toward the light. The wolf’s head gleamed back at her. Crowned. Ducal. Stormhaven.
The pirate had been on the frigate before she arrived. The pirate wore command as other men wore cologne. The pirate had a ship. The pirate was Stormhaven.
The ambassador was the pirate.
Oh, no.
No, no, no.
She released his wrist as if it had burned her.
He lowered his hand. His gaze held hers.
She had crossed a window, a dock, a rope ladder, and a considerable portion of her own good sense to reach him, and she had never felt farther from Naples.
“I forbid you,” she said, pointing her finger at him. “I forbid you to be the Ambassador to Naples. Do you hear me? I forbid it.”