17. Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
Three bells had sounded by the time Tristan returned to the wardroom.
The ship lay dark around him, breathing softly in her timbers.
Above, the night watch moved in low murmurs and dull footfalls.
Water ran along the hull with that old, secretive sound the sea made when it had witnessed too much and meant to tell no one.
He should have known his own way in the dark. He knew every inch of his ship. Tonight he walked into Lorenzo’s damned chest.
Pain shot through his shin. “Fuck.”
Something rustled from the hanging cot across the cabin. A spark flared. Lorenzo lit the lamp with the ease of a man who had not been asleep at all.
Golden light spread over the cramped cabin—the low overhead, the two narrow berths, the hammock Tristan had claimed because beds were for men who trusted stillness, and the offending chest planted in the middle of the floor.
Shirts spilled from one corner. A book lay spine-down on top.
Beside it sat a razor, a small silver case, letters tied with blue ribbon, and the ridiculous little brush Lorenzo used on his mustache.
Lorenzo’s face appeared in the lamplight. “There you are, fratello,” he said, voice roughened into the performance of sleep. “I was beginning to wonder if the ocean had swallowed you this time.”
Not the ocean. The moon. The moon had swallowed him, silver and warm and trembling beneath his hands, and he would gladly drown there every night.
Lorenzo watched him from under half-lowered lids. He had one arm tucked behind his head, dark hair rumpled, shirt open at the throat.
Tristan looked down at the chest. “Move your clutter.”
“The chest has been with my family longer than Austria has been stealing Lombardy. It has feelings.”
“It has edges.”
“As do you, and yet I do not kick you when I enter rooms.”
“You would break your foot.”
Tristan stepped over the chest and reached for the hammock. The canvas swung beneath his hand, familiar, rough, impersonal. Good. He needed impersonal things.
He lowered himself into the hammock. Fatigue sat in his muscles, in his shoulders, in the backs of his thighs.
But the other thing was not fatigue. It moved beneath his skin in slow aftershocks.
Every breath carried her with it—the warmth of her throat, the soft, astonished sounds she tried to swallow, the way her body had opened under his hands.
He had gone to her cabin to fulfill a bargain. He had left as if some country inside him had changed rulers in the night.
His fingers curled against the canvas.
Lorenzo adjusted the lamp wick. “Would you stop grinning, fratello? You are scaring me.”
“Be scared in silence.”
The lamp settled. Shadows drew back and returned in gentler shapes.
Tristan closed his eyes. She was there at once. The moment she forgot to defend herself. The exact second her eyes held his and did not look away. There you are.
He had said it as if it were the most poetic thing a man could say while seated so deep inside a woman he felt her heartbeat against him.
He opened his eyes.
Lorenzo was looking at him now.
“What?” Tristan growled.
“I learned something today.”
“Try not to make a habit of it.”
“About Miss d’Ailes.”
Tristan went very still. The hammock moved with the ship beneath him, one slight sway, then another.
“Her maid has a loose tongue. Did you know that our passenger was the star of Covent Garden? That the house filled every night to watch her dance?”
No. He had not known that. The ignorance moved through him with an ugly edge.
He knew too little about her. His hand closed on the edge of the hammock.
What would she look like when she danced?
The thought came too quickly to cut away.
Her hair loose. Her arms lifted. That long, disciplined body moving toward whatever secret music still lived beneath all her diplomacy.
To watch her give shape to silence, to see the part of her that had belonged to the stage before men, courts, and contracts put names on her—
Christ.
What a treasure that would be.
“Miss Marguerite was the mistress of an Austrian diplomat,” Lorenzo said. “For over four years.”
Austrian. Diplomat. Four years. A hot, ugly thing moved under his ribs.
His mind supplied a man he had never seen and immediately despised—pale hands, polished manners, a voice trained to make possession sound civilized.
Some silk-lined bastard with a title, a seal, and enough leisure to teach a woman that safety came with conditions attached.
Was that where she had learned it? The clauses.
The careful offers. Had this man taught her to weigh every kindness, price every touch, and keep accounts even in bed?
“She has a friend in Naples,” Lorenzo continued. “A ballerina who married a marchese. This is part of the dream, I think. The court, the warmth, the Italian husband. She knows names, factions, vanities. She has been studying the place as if it were a campaign map.”
“I know what she wants. You may spare me the report.”
“I was not warning you off, fratello. Quite the contrary,” Lorenzo said. “I was saying you can enjoy her.”
Enjoy? As if she were wine opened before it turned. A song before the singer moved to another city. A bright thing made brighter because it would not last.
Lorenzo leaned back against the bulkhead. “She does not want forever. She is clever enough to know what she is doing and proud enough not to ask more than she bargains for. As such, she is no risk to you.”
No risk. The words should have eased him. They were the very terms he had wanted. Yet a safe woman did not make a man feel as if the room he had entered to take pleasure had become a church, a battlefield, and a home he had no right to enter.
His chest tightened.
No risk indeed.
Then why could he not breathe?