5. Chapter 5
Chapter five
Tristan stared at the finger pointed at his chest. It was a very small finger. Gloved. Dainty. Ridiculous in its authority. A finger better suited to tracing a dance card or correcting the angle of a flower than forbidding a duke, a captain, and the newly appointed ambassador from being himself.
Should he laugh? Take that finger into his mouth and bite it? Then her lips trembled, and a broken sound escaped her. Something in his chest moved hard and fast, like a gun running out before the order came.
He took one step toward her. Then another.
The need to cover her, steady her, put heat back into her bones and stop her from looking so damned cold was too strong.
What was he doing? The moon was not something he could simply take and hold.
Tristan curled his fingers into his palm until the nails bit so as not to touch her.
Exhaling, he reached for the brandy glass. “Drink, Miss d’Ailes.”
Her lashes flickered, then she took the glass, lifted it with both hands, and swallowed too much. The color returned to her face, and Tristan breathed with less restriction. Not enough to call it relief, but enough to make him hate himself for needing it.
He turned away, giving her a moment to collect herself. The stern windows showed a strip of pale sea and a sky rubbed thin by morning. He heard the tiny shift of the blanket around her shoulders, the soft scrape of glass against wood when she set it down, the measured silence that followed.
Composed again.
Good. Composure restored distance. Distance reminded him of his own rules. Rules he would certainly ignore if she trembled again.
He crossed to the door and opened it. “Come. I will have an officer escort you back to shore.”
The aft passage waited beyond—six yards of dark wood, brass latches, and low beams, hardly wide enough for two people who should remain strangers.
Unfortunately, neither the ship nor Miss d’Ailes appeared inclined to assist him.
She looked at the door, then at him. Her chin lifted by a fraction, and he knew, with the same bleak certainty by which a captain knew the wind had shifted, that she had found her footing.
“I need passage to Naples.”
Tristan kept his hand on the door. “What is in Naples for you, Miss d’Ailes? A lover?”
He heard the edge in his own voice and hated it. The jealousy came low and violent, a furnace beneath the breastbone. Ridiculous. He had no claim on her. Yet the thought of some Italian waiting under a lemon tree made his fingers tighten around the door latch.
“No lover,” she said, folding her hands together as if conducting a negotiation across a polished table rather than standing in the wreckage of his good sense. “Naples is very different from England. Skill matters there in ways birth does not.”
For all that clever composure, she was naive. Courts did not welcome merit. Naples would not be different because the sun was warmer.
He stepped into the passage.
“Your Grace?”
Her voice followed him, drowned almost at once by the strike of his boots against the boards.
“Miss d’Ailes, this is a warship, not a pleasure boat. I do not take passengers.”
Her little feet hurried after him, the tap of her slippers absurdly determined. “I would not be a passenger. I will be useful. I understand the Neapolitan court. I could advise you and spare you a dozen unnecessary enemies before your first audience.”
She sped her steps.
“I know all about King Murat and why half the court still speaks of France as if the emperor might walk through the door in muddy boots and ask for supper.”
He could hear her breath quickening, blanket brushing the passage wall. Each sound made the narrow corridor feel like a trap built precisely to hold the scent of damp curls and warmed brandy.
He stared ahead. “I do not do diplomacy.”
She gasped. “But you are the ambassador.”
“They will accept me, or they will not.”
She caught up enough to look at him as if he had sprouted a forked tail. “You will last a fortnight.”
“Then you may trouble my replacement for a ride.”
He heard his own teeth grind and lengthened his stride. The companionway waited, a steep ladder of steps rising toward a square of pale daylight. The way out.
He had almost made it when her hand closed around his arm.
Heat shot up under the wool of his coat. Every sense narrowed to the small pressure of her fingers, and his body mutinied worse than a pressed crew without rum. A few gloved fingers on his sleeve, yet his skin beneath the wool answered as if she had placed her palm against his bare chest.
He stopped, but did not turn. If he looked at her, he would press her against the wall and end this negotiation with his mouth.
“I can pay for passage,” she said.
His jaw hardened until pain moved along the hinge. “I do not need your money, Miss d’Ailes.”
“Then I can work for it. I sew. And Elsie—my maid—is an excellent cook. She can certainly—”
He turned on her.
She startled, but did not retreat. His shoulder brushed the bulkhead, and the hem of her blanket grazed his boots. Daylight burned behind her from the companionway.
Could she not understand that every step she took deeper into his ship pulled the rope tighter around them both?
The passage held them too close. His body leaned a fraction before he caught it, a traitorous tilt toward heat, toward softness, toward the woman he was trying with every scrap of discipline to keep off his ship.
“Your Grace?” she whispered.
The title put her mouth around his rank and made him imagine it around worse things. His hands curled at his sides. He could feel the shape of her still on his palms, and the passage seemed to shrink with each breath. Salt. Oil. Warm woman. His own blood moving too hard, too fast.
He needed a wall between them. A whole damned sea. Instead, there was only six inches of air and the terrible sweetness of her looking at him as if he might yet become reasonable.
“The moment I saw you in that ballroom,” he said through gritted teeth, “I decided I would have you in my bed.”
There. Brutality. A clean cut through the line. If she had any sense, she would recoil, slap him, retreat toward daylight, and save them both from whatever his body had begun to believe it wanted.
She went very still. Her blue eyes widened, bright in the lantern-light. He watched the pulse beat at the base of her throat, too quick. Saw her fingers tighten in the blanket. Saw the flush climb from her collar to her cheek.
He could not read her, which made this the most dangerous position he had ever been in, and he had boarded ships under cannon fire.
She was breathing too hard. He was not breathing at all.
He deserved the slap. He waited for it. A slap would make him a villain, her the victim, and the matter simple. She would leave his ship, and he would return to being a man who did not drag cold women into his arms because he wanted to taste their lips.
“Do you understand now, Miss D’Ailes? The only position you could assume on this ship is that of my mistress.”