“Stop.” He gripped her shoulders harder. Too hard. He would leave bruises there to match the ones he’d put on her throat, on her belly. “Stop it, Ruby.”
She looked back at him, all damp, wounded eyes. “Is it so ridiculous? To think that I could somehow make him change?”
“You don’t have to change his mind,” Archer said. “You don’t need him.”
And even as he said the words, he meant them another way, a dozen different ways.
Let him go; let him roast in the pit of hell; don’t let pleasing him matter to you any longer.
Let me do this for you instead.
Let me.
She lifted her hand to his shirtfront for half a beat, and then she let her palm drop. “I do. This was our plan. Our best hope of securing the princess’s safety.”
He swallowed. It had been swirling in his head for almost a fortnight, this mad, foolish notion. He’d thought of it as he’d pressed his hand to hers in the cove; when he’d held her in the night, his palm fitted to the curve of her lower back.
This didn’t have to end.
“I can do it,” he said. “I have another scheme in mind.”
Her lips parted. Her lashes flickered. “I beg your pardon?”
His throat was tight, his whole body held close with tension. But the words were there, the way they always were, even if it was a struggle to set them free. “I have a ship.”
“You—what?”
“TheDelphinium. She’s in the harbor at St. Petroc’s. She’s slow and ancient, and I don’t advertise that she’s mine. But we could do it—Wall and Eugénie and Gerry and Lamentation. And me.”
He had pictured it all, these last weeks. Cast it aside, then considered it again, refining, imagining. Feeling afraid.
“There’s a fellow I can talk to—my old warrant officer from theSwallow. A captain now, with his own ship in the Mediterranean. I’d trust him with my life. If we can smuggle the princess to Genoa, there are people who could help us get her the rest of the way home.”
He felt torn in two as he spoke the words. Even as he wanted to press the vision into her skin—this was how they could protect the princess, this was the path forward, they did not require her father’s intervention—he also wanted to claw the words right out of the air.
He let me down, she had said, and she’d meant the words for her father, but he’d heard them for himself.
He had hurt her already. More than once. He’d kept his secrets and he’d lied to her, just as he was lying to his crew. If he promised her this—this gamble, this venture hazarded—and then failed, he did not know if he could stand it.
“You would do that?” she said. “Risk your ship? Your crew?”
His chest ached as he gazed down at her. She looked delicate, her skin almost translucent in the pale illumination of moonlight and a single candle. But she was not fragile. She was guts and iron; stubborn will and a mortar knife taken to a cracked and forgotten wall.
It was not the risk to his ship he feared. He loved theDelphinium, but it was only wood and canvas, wax and salt water and his knuckles nicked to the bone.
And the risk to his crew—God, the danger to them was no greater than it had always been, ever since they’d chosen to stay by his side.
No. The true risk—what he feared most of all—was here. Was in this room, in Ruby’s eyes: that he would try to be more than what he was, more than a scoundrel and a smuggler and a liar. And he would fail.
“I would do it,” he said, “for you.”
Her breath hitched. “I don’t understand.”
“I’d do this for you. To show you that you do not need your father’s assistance or approval. To show you”—that I can be something, that I can be worthy of you—“that it’s possible to carve a new path.”
He was so close to her. She smelled of crushed herbs from the apothecary shop; her frock was still unbuttoned at the top, baring the notch between her collarbones. He wanted to press his face into her skin, whisper promises he didn’t know if he could keep.
When he spoke again, his voice was very low. “You have no idea, Ruby Ballimore, what I would do for you.”
