19. Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
Two weeks later
Marguerite woke late. Her body ached pleasantly, the ache of being held too long, kissed too thoroughly, loved with such concentration that even her thoughts had eventually surrendered their passports.
Tristan had taken her near the open hatch because moonlight had spilled there in a narrow silver path, and he had said, rough against her mouth, that she ought to be seen in her proper element.
Moonlit.
As if he had any right to arrange celestial conditions around her pleasure.
As if she had not let him.
A smile pulled at her lips, and she pressed her face deeper into the pillow. The whole cabin smelled of him now, and of the impossible softness that came after being loved by a man who never did anything halfway.
Morning had entered without permission, spilling pale gold across the rumpled sheets, the chair where Tristan’s coat had hung before dawn, abandoned with the careless intimacy of a man who had stopped pretending he did not belong there.
The ship rolled gently, no longer an instrument of passage but a cradle, and the ocean a lenient witness.
Marguerite had stopped counting the leagues to Naples.
She had stopped marking progress on maps.
She had begun instead to count the transgressions of her pirate duke against the very clear, very reasonable terms of their agreement.
The first violation had been punctuality.
Midnight, it turned out, was a flexible concept.
Some nights, he arrived a quarter hour early, claiming the moon had misled him.
Other nights, he lingered well past the appointed hour, citing tides, winds, or an entirely invented difficulty with knots that required him to stay put.
Marguerite noted these breaches with mock severity and no real intent to enforce penalties.
Somewhere along the way, the brazier went cold.
At first, she did not notice. Then one night she reached for the matches out of habit and found no need for them. The air had softened. The chill that once clung to her bones had loosened its grip. Warmth, it seemed, no longer required persuasion.
The door opened without ceremony.
Elsie entered with folded linens in her arms. “Do you know where we are?”
“Of course I do. We are in the cabin.”
Elsie did not sneer. That was ominous. Elsie smiled rarely, but when she withheld even her usual scorn, the room tended to develop weather.
“The cabin boy just told me that we are nearing Gibraltar.”
“Nearing—” Marguerite pushed herself up on one elbow. “That cannot be right.”
“A few days from our destination,” Elsie went on. “Four. Five, perhaps.”
Marguerite swung her legs over the side of the bed and reached for the shawl at the footboard, pulling it around her shoulders.
“That’s wonderful,” Marguerite said.
Her stomach clenched, and she kept her gaze fixed on the horizon, as though distance might still be negotiated if she refused to look directly at it.
Naples was close, with its heat, its music, its court, its marble rooms, and the promise of reinvention.
Naples, which she had wanted so badly she had climbed windows, ladders, and the ragged edges of her own dignity to reach it.
“Is it?” Elsie asked quietly. “Then why do you have tears in your eyes?”
Marguerite lifted a hand to her cheek, startled to find it damp. How absurd.
“I am tired. That is all. You would be too if you had not slept properly in—”
She stopped herself.
Elsie’s gaze sharpened.
Marguerite turned from the hatch and tightened the shawl around herself. “Do not look at me like a parish committee.”
“Are you sure you’re not giving too much of yourself again?”
Marguerite flushed, heat rushing up her neck. “I do not know what you mean.”
Elsie clicked her tongue. “He is here all the time. And you—” She gestured helplessly at the bed. “You are playing at honeymoon without a marriage contract.”
“That is not fair,” Marguerite said, too sharply. “We have an agreement. A very clear one. And once we arrive in Naples—”
The words lodged in her throat, sudden and painful, as if they had turned sharp the moment she tried to speak them aloud.
“Once we arrive in Naples,” Elsie said quietly, “and he follows his own way, you will be broken. Just like you were when Herr von Albrecht left you.”
The name landed between them like a dropped plate.
Marguerite turned at last. “It is different—”
“Yes, it is. You only cared for the diplomat. He made you comfortable. He made promises he meant at the time. And when he left, it hurt, but you survived it. But you love your pirate duke, don’t you?”
Marguerite’s throat closed, and beneath the shawl, a sliver of cold found its way into her spine.
“This has all been accounted for. Several clauses of my agreement with Tristan—I mean, with the duke—make provision for the temporary nature of the voyage. There is no confusion. No illusion. No expectation beyond the terms already discussed.”
Elsie sighed. “Did you make a clause for how you look when he leaves in the morning?”
Marguerite said nothing.
“Did you make one for the way you smile at the hatch when you think no one’s seein’? Or the way you jump when footsteps pass the door?”
Marguerite looked away. The sea lay bright beyond the hatch, untroubled by her humiliation.
Elsie took one step closer. “Please protect yourself. I don’t want to see you hurt.”
Marguerite folded her arms beneath the shawl, holding herself together with pressure because dignity had become unreliable.
“I am not a child.”
“No. You’re worse. Children know when they want to be loved. You make contracts so you don’t have to say it.”
Her chin lifted. “I am in perfect command of the situation.”
Elsie looked at her with such weary affection that Marguerite’s certainty wavered.
“Then why,” Elsie asked softly, “are you cryin’ because we’re almost where you wanted to go?”
Marguerite had no answer.
None that would survive being spoken.
The ship creaked around them. Water slapped against the hull. Somewhere overhead, a bell rang, counting time whether she wished it counted or not.
“I’ll fetch tea,” Elsie said.
The door closed with a soft click. Marguerite stood in the warm hush of the cabin, listening to the ship breathe around her.
Wood creaked. Water dragged along the hull.
Somewhere above, men called to one another in the brisk, ordinary tones of a world that continued even when a woman discovered something inside her had become dangerously tender.