“I couldn’t let them court-martial the admiral. The fleet needed him more than it needed me. But I... my crew, they—” He ran his thumb against Ruby’s palm, soft, gentle, aching. “They knew it hadn’t been my fault. They refused to stay in the fleet. They would not let me go. They were—stupid. Loyal. Idiots.”
“And he allowed it?” Ruby asked. She sounded appalled. “Penney ordered you to lie for him? He made you take the fall?”
“He did not make me. I chose it.”
In the years since he’d lost theSwallow, he’d almost convinced himself that the disasterhadbeen his fault. He’d told the story a dozen times, again and again, to all the officers and government men who’d interviewed him when he’d made his stunned and hollow journey back to England. He’d said it so often, he’d almost come to believe it.
He could not have chosen anything else. When he closed his eyes, he still saw Penney’s face white with agony, his hair damp from rain and blood. Counting the bodies in the water, anguished, disbelieving. And sorry—so sorry for his mistake.
“I don’t understand,” Ruby said again.
Archer licked his lips. “The fleet couldn’t go on without him. The war, the men—everyone needed him.Ineeded him. I needed him to be the man at the wheel, and I...” He hesitated, searching for the words. “I owed everything to him. This was my chance to pay him back. But Ruby—”
His thumb crept from her palm down to her wrist, lodged against the quick throb of her pulse. “Penney got me this position. Secretly. Through his connections to House di Sangro. If your father investigates who might have betrayed the princess—if he looks too closely at the staff and our pasts—he will find me as I am. Not a captain, but a discharged officer, sent down in dishonor. Even Penney could not speak up for me publicly after I lost theSwallow. Not again.”
She freed her hand from his grasp, but only so that she could reach up and touch his cheek. And—Christ, he was a besotted fool.
He relished it.
“Penney could have spoken up for you,” she said stubbornly. “He should have told the truth. He was wrong to let you—”
“He wasright.” Archer had heard the same argument even then from his crew. Lamentation more than any of them had been heartbroken and furious—and, in the end, determined to keep them all together. “Penney had to remain. He knew what his leadership meant to the fleet.”
The admiral had meant everything to Archer: safety and confidence and the security he’d lost when he was twelve. A way out of the maze of grief and fear.
“He did not have to do what he did for me,” Archer said hoarsely. “I was nothing before he came into my life, before he took me under his protection. And after the navy—after theSwallow—I only went back to what I was before.”
“You weren’t nothing,” Ruby said. Her fingers shifted—his jaw, his throat. In the dark, her thumb brushed his mouth. “You were nevernothing, Malcolm.”
“I’ve never done an honest day’s work in my life.”
“You were a boy. A hungry child who loved his mother. You did what anyone would have done—”
“I didn’t.” He gritted his teeth against the desire to press into her, to feel the small solid weight of her body, the press of her bones, the uncompromising rhythm of her heart.
He had taken all his fear—all his want and hurt, all of his uncertainty—and pressed it tight into a ball, then shoved it deep down in his belly and smiled.
Smiled so his mother would not know he was afraid. Smiled when that first crew had known him for a foolish, brainless boy—smiled and charmed them anyway.
“I lied,” he said. “I haven’t stopped lying. I’ve stolen and smuggled and run from my past, and now it’s caught up with me, and I can’t hide from it any longer.”
He could not dissemble, not anymore. Not even if he wished to.
He ached to hold Ruby’s face in both his hands. He wanted to pretend this moment was a lifetime and a lifetime was infinite. He wanted to dream that she was his and tell himself it was no dream.
He didn’t want to let her go.
“Your father will find out the truth,” he said, “when you write to him. He’ll find out who I truly am.”
There could be no more than this: a handful of stolen moments, seawater swirling around them in the cove, blue paint on Ruby’s cheek. Her dear brave plainspoken loyalty, and her heart as big as the ocean. For a minute—for one brief glorious moment—he’d had all of it.
He supposed he ought to be used, by now, to letting things go. He supposed it ought not hurt so much.
She jerked her chin up. Her hands dropped from his face to his shoulders, and then his bare back, and then the top edge of his trousers, which she clutched in her fists. “And what of it?”
“I don’t know—”
“No,” she snapped. “He’ll find out who you really are? Let him.”
