28. Chapter 28
Chapter twenty-eight
The velvet curtain fell behind them. Marguerite stood in the narrow alcove off the throne room, one hand still caught in Tristan’s, the other pressed against her stomach as if she might hold herself together by force.
Beyond the heavy fold of red velvet, the entire Neapolitan court had become a living, whispering organism.
Silk rustled. Fans snapped open. Voices rose, all of them circling the same impossible fact.
His wife.
Marguerite, Duchess of Stormhaven.
The words seemed to float somewhere above her head, absurdly grand, absurdly public, entirely disconnected from the woman currently trapped behind a curtain trying to remember how lungs operated.
She had gone to the court to see his triumph before fading away into her own future.
That had been the plan. Give him his name.
Watch him receive it. Vanish into Naples.
“What have you just done?” she whispered.
Tristan looked entirely too calm. That was intolerable.
Her diplomatic machinery fired at once and found nothing to attach to.
No precedent. No clause. No treaty. No useful category for a naval captain inventing matrimony under chandeliers.
“One does not create relationships before the king of Naples. Do you realize that by making that statement, you all but married me in truth? You have just committed a—”
“A diplomatic faux pas,” he said.
“Faux pas is the understatement of the century. A faux pas is wearing the wrong glove to a reception. You told a fiction, a fairy tale, and you are not the Brothers Grimm, so you had no right.”
Fairy tales didn’t happen to women like her. And to be fair, the Brothers Grimm’s bland princes could not hold a candle to the green-eyed pirate duke standing before her with a satisfied expression, as if he had not just set half the court on fire.
“It would only be a fiction if I were lying,” he said. “And I never lie.”
“Why is it so hot in here?” she demanded, fanning herself too rapidly. “Naples has contrived to roast me.”
“The curtain is heavy.”
“The curtain is not the problem.”
“I am pleased to hear it.”
“Do not be pleased. You are the problem.”
His smile deepened, and something inside her chest gave a dangerous, traitorous ache.
She looked away at once. Still, his scent pursued her.
That was unfair. A man should not smell of salt and clean linen in a palace.
He should smell of politics, preferably stale politics.
He stood too close, tall and impossible, his shoulder blocking the edge of the curtain, his thumb caressing the inside of her wrist where her pulse was betraying state secrets.
She tugged.
He did not release her.
“Tristan.”
“I know you meant to marry an Italian,” he said.
Her eyes flew back to his.
“I know you wanted warmth. Jealousy. Noise. A man who speaks with his hands and makes public scenes in courtyards.”
“You have just made a public scene before a king. I hardly think you can claim deficiency in that area.”
“I can improve.” He tried to take both her hands.
She batted him away, or attempted to. Unfortunately, he caught one, then the other, and held them with such infuriating gentleness that she could not decide whether to slap him or weep upon his coat.
“I can speak loudly,” he offered.
“Do not.”
“I can use my hands more.”
“You have used them quite enough.”
“And if that is not sufficient, you may call me Tristano.” His mouth tilted again. “Or Tristero, if that pleases you.”
A laugh rose in her chest and broke before becoming sound.
“And,” he said, lower now, something fierce threading through the warmth, “I will be jealous of you.”
Her pulse leaped so hard it hurt.
“I will want to gouge out the eyes of every Italian who looks at you with more than admiration. And then you will have to spend the entire night placating me.”
A sob-laugh tore from her before she could stop it. It sounded ridiculous. Broken and bright together, like crystal dropped on marble and somehow not shattered.
“Is that enough Italian for you?” he murmured.
Tears gathered in her eyes. She did not know what to do with him. That was the horror of it. She knew how to manage difficult men. But this pirate duke kept refusing the terms. She should have been furious. She was furious. She was also trembling so violently that her fingers tightened around his.
“You are a captain,” she said, her voice low and unsteady. “You survive by cutting everything that weighs too much, and if you cut me again, I will not survive it.”
The words came out before dignity could intercept them. There. The naked truth, without lace, without clauses, without one civilized ribbon tied around its throat.
Tristan’s brows drew together. “I am not a captain anymore, Marguerite,” he said.
“You will always be a captain.”
“Perhaps. But I was the greatest fool alive to believe that nonsense in the first place. It almost cost me my brother. And the woman I love.”
A violin whispered mellow notes. Tristan’s hands held hers, warm and callused, the hands that had gripped ropes, guns, her waist, her hair, and now, impossibly, her future.
“Do you not understand?” she asked, and the plea in her own voice humiliated her enough to make her chin lift. “This is an unequal arrangement. A misalliance. You cannot marry me. I have nothing to offer the Duke of—”
He touched her lips. “Never again in your life will you negotiate affection, Marguerite.”
Her breath stopped beneath his finger.
“You are so worthy that you could enter this arrangement with no clothes on your back and still marry me if I were a bloody prince, and I would still have the better part of the bargain.”
Her throat closed, and the words struck places in her she had hidden so deep she had forgotten they could still hurt. He stripped her defenses away in one breath and looked at what remained as if it were treasure.
“I love you,” he said.
How could it be that Naples, around them, remained the same, while inside her, something that had been clenched for years opened?
As it turned out, happiness was not a polite caller.
It came into her chest with a rush so warm she would never again be cold.
Marguerite gasped, and her skin tingled from her scalp to her fingertips.
Tears spilled before she could decide whether to permit them.
“Oh,” she whispered, which was a poor contribution to one of the most significant diplomatic crises of her life.
Tristan smiled then, with such naked tenderness that the last of her resistance folded inward. He lifted her hands and kissed one, then the other. The pressure of his mouth against her gloves undid her more completely than any scandalous kiss could have done.
“Will you marry me?” he asked.
Marguerite laughed through her tears. “But Tristano, we are already married. You all but shouted it to the world.”
His eyes darkened. He could not mean to kiss her here, with the king of Naples, half the court, and several generations of protocol waiting on the other side of the curtain.
Then he bent his head, and she rose to meet him, because court be damned, she needed his lips against hers, and if that was not diplomatic, then call her a rebel. When he drew back, she was smiling so helplessly her face ached.
“We must go out there,” she said.
“Yes.”
“They are waiting.”
“Yes.”
“There is still the minor question,” she said, recovering a fragment of herself because happiness this large required structure, “of the actual wedding.”
“I am prepared to be married in every church in Naples. By English law, by Neapolitan custom, by naval regulation, by papal dispensation, or by pirate oath.”
“A pirate oath is not recognized by civilized nations.”
“It is by mine.”
She sighed. “That explains so much.”
His thumb brushed the back of her hand.
Beyond the curtain, the whispers swelled again. The court would want an explanation. The king would want amusement. The marchesa would want credit. Lorenzo would want to be insufferable, bless his Italian soul. Lorenzo would need a lot of diplomacy, that one.
And Marguerite, who had arrived in Naples prepared to disappear into the future she had chosen before love altered the map, stood behind velvet with a man who had just destroyed every clause she had ever written to protect herself.
She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her gloved hands and lifted her chin.
“Come, then, Your Grace,” she said, and her smile steadied. “Let us go commit the rest of the faux pas properly.”