21. Chapter 21
Chapter twenty-one
Tristan watched her kick off her slippers with the same attention he paid to the weather.
A man needed to know what was coming so he could prepare.
Yet no change of wind had ever made his stomach draw tight quite like the sight of Marguerite standing barefoot before him.
The cabin held too still around her. Too quiet. Like the sea before guns opened.
Why did she want to give him this now? She had already given more than the bargain required. Her body. Her trust. Her soft cries against his throat. A prudent captain would have taken the victory and cleared the deck before the cost appeared.
Yet the wind whispered through the gallery and stirred the loose wisps at her temples, and just like that, his pulse changed. He knew that feeling. The strange, sharpened stillness before weather broke.
“I will dance a solo from the myth of Psyche. A mortal girl loved by Eros. She has everything she could want. Warmth. Safety. An arrangement with clear terms.” Her mouth curved faintly, but the curve did not reach her eyes.
“But he comes to her only in darkness. She cannot rest until she knows who loves her. So one night she lights a lamp while he is sleeping, so she can look at him.”
Tristan was right before her. What else did she want to see?
“Eros is more beautiful than anything she had imagined. Then a drop of oil from the lamp falls on him, burning him. He awakens. He is very angry at her deceit and goes away.”
Of course he did. A man who had spent eternity in darkness, loved only in the dark, had to go before the going became impossible. Tristan understood. He had been doing the same for twenty years. You left before you were known. You released before the weight pulled you under.
But then Marguerite allowed the shawl to slip. Daylight found the exposed line of her shoulders and warmed them into a soft honey gold. Her neck looked longer in the open air, her collarbones delicate enough to make his hands feel suddenly brutal.
She lifted her hand as if holding the lamp of the story. Then she crossed one foot before the other and turned, gauzy skirts whispering around her ankles. When she came out of the turn, one arm floated above her head, the other curved outward, and just like that, empty space became music.
Swift steps carried her across the gallery, and her arms shifted around the imagined lamp. One hand protected the flame, the other reached toward him. Her body curved forward, then away, and the arch of her back made his mouth go dry.
Then she lifted her leg so impossibly high that he had to drag his eyes from her foot to her face to believe he saw a woman and not some trick of light.
She held the position for a breath, and inside him, something hauled hard against its moorings.
He wanted to touch that. Not only her skin, though God knew he wanted that until want became a taste in his mouth.
He wanted to put his hands on the poise, the grace, and possess the moment no man could own.
Then the dance softened. Her arms lost their shape.
Her step grew more intimate. He saw the slight tremor in her breath, the shine at her collarbone, the courage it cost her to cross the last distance.
He saw a woman. Young, frightened, brave beyond good sense, holding a lamp toward the one thing she had been told not to see because not seeing was safer.
He had seen her naked. Had tasted her, held her, been inside her, watched her come apart in his arms. Yet this was more dangerous. Instead of a body given under a bargain, this was a gift. She had brought him something unguarded. And his ship had no hold built to carry it.
He had to stop it. Take her in his arms, make a jest, kiss her until the dance dissolved into something he understood. A captain who saw a dangerous weight cut it loose before the ship foundered.
She looked at him, and in her gaze, he felt the lamp turn.
He stood in the open, caught by her seeing, utterly bare in a way no nakedness could equal. Eros had not fled because the oil burned him. He had fled because to be seen by the one person whose looking mattered was to discover that wings were useless things.
Then she went on tiptoe and balanced right there before him, one leg behind her, hair loosening over one shoulder.
Tristan caught her, hands pressing her narrow waist, the muscles shifting underneath. The space between them held the last echo of motion, the story’s lamp still burning somewhere neither of them could see.
“Now is the time you escape,” she said.
Psyche looked. Eros fled. A man seen too clearly saved himself by leaving before the lamp could burn him deeper. He could do that too. Take pleasure. Take victory. Take prizes, then release the line before it pulled him under.
Marguerite smiled at him. A girl’s smile, if a girl had survived too much and still chosen, against all evidence, to offer one unarmored thing.
His heart struck hard enough to hurt. Desire did not hurt like that. What he felt for Marguerite went under bone, under command, into some closed place he had kept locked through every storm. Her smile reached it as if she had always known the door.
He should have left.
Instead, he reached for her.
“Eros left because he feared the outside world. Let’s forget it exists,” she whispered, and her voice went into the animal place that did not understand endings. Yes. That.
Tristan peeled away her dress. When her breast came into view, he cupped it in his palm and brought his mouth to it. His lips closed around her nipple, and he suckled once. She gasped.
He did it again, slower this time, drawing the nipple against his tongue, feeling it harden in his mouth.
He took her to the bed. And kissed her everywhere.
Her ribs. The place where her thigh met her hip, where the pulse flickered strong beneath the skin.
He felt the tension there—how she held herself in, even now.
He pressed his lips to the hollow gently, warming it.
He tasted sweat. Salt. The faint musk of desire.
He kissed her bent knee and the inside of her thigh, skin that rarely saw light.
By the time he arrived at her belly, her legs had eased open, arms drifting above her head.
Marguerite was undone, like a nymph abandoned by the gods at dawn, exhausted from too much worship.
His vision blurred at the edges. He wanted to command the ship to turn forever. No port. No dawn. No world beyond this bed.
Tristan settled above her, knees pressed into the mattress. He braced his weight, lowered his chest to hers, and felt their skin meet. The contact stole his thoughts. Her heart struck against his.
Marguerite looked up at him, and her gaze held nothing back. He entered her slowly, and she welcomed him in one fluid breath, her body rising to meet his, her lips parting in a sound somewhere between surprise and surrender.
He thrust home. The grip of her around him tore a groan from his throat.
She gave herself again and again, her hips catching his rhythm, her fingers digging into his shoulders. He wanted bruises there. Proof that she had held him hard enough to leave evidence.
Tristan moved harder. The bed creaked. He kissed her—open-mouthed, deep, full of every unspoken vow.
She returned the kiss with urgency. He pushed deep, arching his back.
Her breath broke, a sharp little fracture against his mouth, and her thighs drew higher around his hips, and Tristan drove deep, as deep as her body would take him, then held there.
When she came apart around him, he felt every pulse of her sex. The soft, desperate clench of her body, the tremors drawing through her in waves, the helpless lift of her hips as if she could pull him closer still. He stayed buried inside her and did not move, jaw locked, arms shaking.
His release built too fast, surging from his thighs to his spine, coiling behind his ribs. Too soon. Too soon.
He wanted to stay inside her. He wanted to fill her. To leave a mark, a claim, a piece of himself that would linger long after the ship docked.
He pulled out—barely in time. His seed spilled hot over her belly, across her thigh. He groaned against her mouth, panting, trembling. The loss of her body around him was like being thrown from warmth into glacial water.
They didn’t move, bodies still open to each other. The room held them in the silence after pleasure, and in that silence the loss arrived.
Marguerite opened her eyes.
He looked down at her, and whatever he saw there must have been on his own face too, because her hand rose slowly to his cheek and she touched the corner of his mouth. His chest caved inward with a tenderness so sharp it bordered on pain.
“I suppose,” she whispered, “we must return to the real world now.”
No. Not while her hand was on his face and her body was warm beneath him, and the soft look in her eyes made leaving feel like violence.
“Not yet,” he said.
He took his cock in hand and pressed it against her sex.
Her voice came soft against his throat. “I thought you already—”
“I did,” he said.
He pressed a kiss to her cheek. Then her temple.
“Outside,” he murmured. “You’re safe.”
He moved just enough for her to feel it. The slow, partial stretch. The deep echo of their joining still imprinted in her body.
“But I want inside you again, Maggie. Open for me. Welcome me in.”
His voice dropped lower, rougher, no longer the sea captain or the corsair or the man who had once taken cities by fire.
She stilled. Then she wrapped her arms around his back. Her legs parted. Her body welcomed him—tender, open, warm.
He eased in fully. Their breath mingled. Buried deep, he held still. No thrust. No demand. Only the impossible wish to remain where leaving could not reach him. The aftershocks pulsed through him, deeper now, quieter.
She was still with him. For this breath. This one. This one.
A cannon blast tore through the cabin, a concussion that split the air open. The windows rattled in their frames. The bed lurched beneath them. Marguerite jolted under him, her hands seizing his shoulders, and Tristan’s whole body locked around her.
A second blast came.
Closer.
The frigate answered with a shudder through every plank. Shouts broke overhead. Boots pounded. A bell clanged once, then again, frantic and metallic. The outside world, which they had sworn did not exist, burst into the cabin with powder smoke, splintered silence, and the hard language of war.
Tristan lifted his head. Marguerite looked up at him, eyes wide, lips parted. The captain returned before the man was ready to let go.
He withdrew from her with a sound that felt torn from his ribs, then caught her face in one hand and kissed her hard, because he could not afford tenderness and had no time for goodbye.