She jerked her chin up. “I don’t see how that’s any of your—”
“Tell me, Lady Ruby, how exactly does the princess transmit her royal orders? Because I notice you’ve received no correspondence at the manor at all since you arrived.”
She tried to step backward, but the dark face of the cliff was at her back. “I beg your pardon. Do you mean to suggest—”
She broke off, but she did not need to finish. He knew what she was thinking, could see it written all over her transparent heart-shaped face.
Did he mean to suggest that she had invented her position? That she was not, in fact, the princess’s lady-in-waiting?
That she was as much a fraud as he was?
He’d met court ladies once, at a dinner party with Admiral Penney; they’d been delicate and highborn, and they’d not appeared to lift anything heavier than their forks. They had neither discoursed on Greek statuary nor joyfully exclaimed over bugs. They had not brandished mortar knives and carefully, painstakingly restored a thousand spiderwebbed cracks. They had not polished windows until they gleamed.
He did not know what exactly he suspected. But he knew—in his bones and his brain and his soft, stubborn heart—that there was more to Ruby Ballimore than she let on.
“We receive our correspondence in St. Petroc’s,” she said finally.
“Do you? Could you show me your letters from the princess, if I asked?”
Her mouth tightened. Her chin came up. “Is this an interrogation, Captain Archer?”
He had never been able to resist playing with fire. Not as a privateer. Not as Quenby. And not now, face-to-face with Lady Ruby Ballimore.
“If I meant to interrogate you,” he said, “I’d already have the truth from your lips.”
“The truth?” she echoed. “Tell me, Captain Archer, what are you trying to prove?”
Her eyes were cool and gray. Unmoved. Unpersuaded. Able, as always, to see right through the layer of charm and obfuscation that had never—never—failed him before.
What was he trying to prove?
Everything. All his life, he’d been trying.
“Astra inclinant,” he said quietly, “sed non obligant.”
Her lips parted. The words seemed to still her. Nothing moved except the pulse that fluttered at her throat and the waves that lapped the beach behind them, closer and closer to where they stood as the tide crept in.
He could see in her face that she recognized the words: the motto of House di Sangro.
The fact that she knew it proved nothing about her, not really. Nothing about her relationship with the Monfalcone royals. But still—she knew what he’d said.
The stars incline us, but they do not bind us.
Archer could remember the rough planks of the room he’d shared with his mother as a boy, the ice he’d skimmed off her cup in the mornings before he let her drink. He’d believed, even then, that he could hazard his way into a different world. That he could tear off the future he wanted—with his teeth, if he had to.
He had done it. For a time, he had done it, and then everything had gone away, and now he was back where he’d started—scrabbling and clawing and desperate not to let anyone know the truth of what he was.
Ruby’s voice, when she spoke, was soft. “I have always felt bound by what I was born to. Until I came here.”
It had grown dark. Her skin was shell-pale in the moonlight. There was a foot of space between them, and he wanted to close that distance with a yearning that felt like desperation. He wanted to put his mouth to hers, find all that sweet raw courage, and drink it down until he was sick with it.
He could not. It was madness to invite further intercourse between them—to let her slip past his defenses and discover evidence of his crimes.
If she found his cave—if she recognized him as Quenby—it was not only his own life that would fracture. It was all their lives—his and Wall’s and Eugénie’s and Gerry’s and Lamentation’s.
And still—still—he looked at her andwanted.
“We are none of us bound,” he said.
