18. Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
Daylight should have improved this hunger. Once a prize was taken, the thrill of the chase ended. And yet . . . Tristan had felt Marguerite beneath him, around him, breathing his name into the dark, and the wanting had not spent itself.
Marguerite sat behind his desk, bent over a sheet of paper with a quill in hand, sunlight bathing her hair. A crease formed between her brows, and he felt an idiotic urge to smooth it with his thumb.
He opened the hatch. She started so violently that the quill scratched across the page.
“Good God.” She pressed a hand to her chest. “Do you always enter like cannon fire?”
Tristan stepped into his cabin as if men entered private rooms from the outside of frigates every morning before breakfast. “The ocean was too cold. I considered returning to it. But you said I might get sick.”
Her mouth twitched. He would have taken a broadside more calmly.
“I see,” she said. “You have come to me for medical reasons.”
He grunted. At midnight, desire had worn the decent coat of an agreement. This was morning, and he had no right to look at her as if the day belonged to him too.
Her gaze moved over him, from the open throat of his shirt to his hands braced at his sides, then back to his face. He felt the look straight to his cock.
“Very well. If it is to prevent the captain from falling ill.”
The quill touched the desk. A small sound. Tristan heard it like a pistol cocking. One moment, he stood by the stern window, inventing poor excuses. The next, he crossed the cabin as if the deck had pitched him forward.
Marguerite’s eyes widened as he caught her face between his hands and kissed her. Her mouth opened under his with a shocked breath that made him harder than a wind-strained spar.
He caught her beneath the thighs and lifted her from the chair.
She gasped against his mouth. One hand flew to his shoulder, the other to the back of his neck.
He set her on the desk, scattering papers. The quill rolled, dropped, and vanished somewhere below. He did not care. Heart pumping, he grabbed her waist and dragged her to the edge until she was flush against him, skirts rucked between his hips.
Tristan touched her throat, his thumb finding the frantic beat beneath her skin. Holding her there, he searched her eyes. The need for her nearly stopped his breath.
Her smile trembled at the edges. “You are looking at me as if you are planning an invasion.”
Tristan did not smile. “I am.”
She tilted her head. “Pirates usually invade when they want something. What do you want, Tristan?”
What did he want? He needed to take all of her, this treasure of a woman, so this maddening thrill would fade.
“I want your taste.” He drew his tongue along the seam of her lower lip, slow enough to feel her breath catch before he took her mouth. When he drew back, her lashes had lowered, her lips damp from him.
“And all your thoughts,” he said, pulling the pins from her hair. Gold loosened over his hand, sliding down her shoulder in a heavy fall. He watched it spill over his desk, and something savage moved through him.
“Every clever one. Every foolish one. Every thought you hide behind diplomacy.”
Her eyes searched his. “And if I do not surrender them?”
“Then I shall have to lay siege.”
He watched her as he pressed her leg open by slow degrees, giving her time to stop him, needing her not to. Her fingers curled in his shirt, and her breath came shallow and quick.
“I want the part of you that forgets how to negotiate.” He leaned close, his mouth brushing her ear. “Every inch of you that answers before the diplomat can object.”
She trembled against him.
He pushed her skirts up with one hand. When he found her slick and ready, she moaned.
He freed himself with one hand. “I want your breath, your sighs, your moans.”
Tristan took his cock by the root and placed the head between the lips of her sex. Then he slid his palms under her buttocks and pushed home.
Her breath left her in a burst. His own breath followed—dragged out of him by the devastating relief of being inside her. Her forehead dropped to his shoulder.
The world narrowed to the fierce, perfect shock of her body closing around him as if the whole voyage had been leading to this single point of arrival. Triumph tore through him, primitive and blinding. There. At last. Want achieved. The prize taken. The ache answered.
Then she gasped against his mouth, her fingers tightening at his collar.
And he wanted more.
He was buried deep, held in the very place his body had demanded, and still the need swelled. Not satisfied. Not even close.
Tristan drew back and drove into her again, harder this time, chasing the vanished instant when possession had almost felt like peace. She cried out, and the sound struck him low in the spine. He wanted that too.
He wanted deeper, though there was no deeper to go.
He wanted closer, though she was already around him.
“Give me more,” he said against her mouth, and his hand slid up her spine, fisting in the loosened fall of her hair. “Give me everything.”
“Yes,” she breathed. “Everything you want, Tristan. Everything.”
He tore his shirt over his head and dropped it somewhere among the scattered papers. Then he dragged the sleeves of her dress down her arms, baring her shoulders, her breasts. He was struck stupid by the sight of her half-unmade on his desk, all gold hair and pink skin and ruined diplomacy.
Then he pulled her against him. Her breasts pressed to his chest, her arms locked around his shoulders, her mouth opening on a sound he felt more than heard. He crushed her closer and drove into her again.
She gasped his name.
He thrust harder.
Again.
Again.
Not enough, not enough, never enough, because every sound she gave him became another thing he wanted.
He held her so tightly her heartbeat seemed to enter his own chest. He wanted to remain there, inside her, around her, held by her, until the ship, the sea, and every sane doctrine he had ever trusted sank.
“Tristan.”
Her body tightened around him, and her head fell back, hair spilling over his arm, throat arched, mouth open on a cry she could not swallow. He felt the pleasure seize her, felt it draw through her in hot, desperate pulses, then it struck him so hard it nearly blinded him.
He tore himself free with a curse and spent against the wet folds of her sex, one hand braced on the desk, the other locked around her hip. The release went on and on, wrenching through him in brutal waves until his breath broke and his knees nearly followed.
Their sounds filled the cabin. Her panting. His.
Somewhere above, men worked the ship, and here below Tristan stood like a man hauled from wreckage, chest heaving, one hand still gripping her as if the world had tilted.
Marguerite opened her eyes. Her cheeks were flushed. Her mouth was swollen. Her hair lay in wild gold disorder over his ruined charts. She looked thoroughly kissed, thoroughly touched, thoroughly taken.
And somehow he felt less steady than before.
“Was that enough?” she whispered.
Enough?
He had taken what he had come for. More than that. She had given him the most private surrender of her body, and by every law he understood, that should have steadied him.
Yet . . .
He reached between her legs and let his knuckle trace her slick center. Her hips twitched. He pushed, just enough to slip inside. The muscles there fluttered, soft from release, and her moan vibrated against his throat. His own body answered, hard again.
Still not enough.
Then she touched his cheek, her fingers soft against the roughness of his jaw. The gesture slipped beneath every defense he had left. His breath came wrong, shallow at the top of his chest, and some vital weight seemed to move out of place beneath his ribs.
She had given him everything he had asked for.
So why did he feel out of balance? As if something were missing from him.
Tu mi manchi.
Lorenzo’s damned words returned with the force of a hand closing around his throat. Tristan shut his eyes, shook his head once, and rejected them.
Marguerite slid from the desk to stand before him, her skirts falling in crushed layers around her legs.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He could not answer. Instead, he caught the loosened bodice of her dress and drew it down the rest of the way. The fabric slid over her arms, her waist, her hips, and fell in a soft heap at her feet.
Tristan searched for the answer in her skin. He traced the long line of one leg, the strength of her thigh, the narrow discipline of her waist. He followed the graceful turn of her arm, then lifted his knuckles to her throat and felt her pulse leap beneath them.
“You have a dancer’s body,” he said.
She had given him her body, but not the dancer inside it. Not the strength in her thighs, the discipline in her spine, the secret labor behind every graceful line.
“Dance for me.”
Marguerite turned away from him.
Tristan drew her back against his chest, her shoulder blades pressing into him. Crossing his forearm beneath her breasts, he lowered his mouth to her ear.
“You were a dancer before you became—”
“A kept woman,” she finished for him.
He turned her to face him. “Before you became a nervous diplomat.”
Marguerite’s careful smile faltered. Tristan kissed it away.
Her breath slipped unevenly between them.
“Dance for me.”
“I can’t. Please, Tristan, don’t ask it of me.”
The refusal passed through her shoulders, through the small tightening at her mouth, through the sudden stillness of a woman who had guarded this door long before he arrived to rattle the latch.
The contract had given him her body. Her wit came freely, her warmth in dangerous flashes, her intelligence in every glance.
But not this.
This she kept beyond reach, and because she kept it, every instinct in him fixed upon it.
He was about to ask for it again when a tear struck his chest. One small drop. It should not have felt like a wound. Tristan went still. Her eyes were wet. She was crying.
He was not made for careful things, but he wrapped his arms around her and brought her into the shelter of his body, one hand at the back of her head, the other hard around her waist, holding her as if the ship had struck rocks.
Exhaling, he lifted her. She made a soft sound of surprise, and her arms went around his neck. Her weight in his arms was unbearable because he could carry her, but not keep her.
He laid her down as if she were not a woman he had just had against his desk, but a girl pulled half-drowned from the sea.
“Rest. I shouldn’t have come. I will go now,” he said, though every part of him rejected the word.
Her hand caught his wrist. Five fingers, and he was no longer capable of command. A single pull was enough to make him lie down beside her. She settled her cheek into his chest.
Outside the cabin, the ship kept her course. The hull answered the sea with a long wooden sigh. Footsteps crossed overhead and moved on.
But within the narrow walls, duty thinned to nothing. The world reduced itself to her cheek on his chest, her hair across his arm, the rise and fall of her breath against him.
“Why did you leave the ballet?” he asked.
She stared up at the ceiling, eyes tracing something only she could see.
“He was an Austrian diplomat, Prince—” She stopped herself. “He made a very generous offer. More than ten times what I earned in a year. My ankle had grown stiff. The surgeon said I couldn’t dance much longer.”
She breathed in, then out.
“I stayed with him for four years. I learned everything—how courts speak without speaking, how favors are traded, how to listen for what is not said. It was a comfortable arrangement.”
Comfortable indeed. A life with Marguerite in it had to be more comfortable than sleeping in clouds and drinking fucking ambrosia. It had to be warmth in every room, light on every wall, laughter in corners a man had not known were empty.
“And why did it end?” he asked.
She looked away. “He was recalled to Austria.”
“And he left you destitute?” His voice came out too quiet. Too even.
“It was not like that. He was very reasonable. He tried to . . .” She stopped, and this time the pause carried something worse than reluctance. Shame. “Well, suffice it to say, he strove to make another situation for me.”
Tristan turned his head to look at her. “What situation?”
Her lashes lowered. The lamplight caught the moisture gathering there before she could blink it away. “He offered me to his replacement.”
“As an attaché to the embassy?” he asked, frowning.
She sighed. “No. As the new ambassador’s mistress.”
Tristan heard nothing. A hollow opened in his chest, widening with such force that breath seemed to fall straight through him. His hand flattened against the mattress.
He would turn the ship north, find the Austrian bastard and the replacement, and cut them from title to tendon. Strip every polished inch of diplomacy from their bodies.
He was already half out of the bed before her hand touched his arm.
He looked down. Marguerite was watching him with liquid eyes.
As if she had opened a door and feared what would enter now.
Her mouth trembled once, and she pressed it still, the effort so small and so brave that it undid more of him than tears would have.
“I intercepted the letter Karl wrote,” she said. “That is when I decided I needed to go to Naples.”
There it was, then. He had asked for the dancer and received the person instead. The knowledge settled in him like contraband hidden too deep in the hold. Once aboard, impossible to pretend it had never been carried.
“Maggie,” he whispered, and kissed her hair again, because if he spoke of murder, she would hear only more violence. If he spoke of pity, he would deserve to be thrown from his own ship. If he spoke of keeping her, he would frighten them both.
So he held her.
She made a small sound against his chest.
The ship moved beneath them, carrying them south. Naples waited. Her plans waited. The bargain waited with all its neat, doomed clauses.
Tristan closed his eyes over the hot pressure behind them and held the woman he had thought to take, while the impossible weight of knowing her settled into his arms.