“I need passage to Naples.”
Tristan kept his hand on the door. “What is in Naples for you, Miss d’Ailes? A lover?”
He heard the edge in his own voice and hated it. The jealousy came low and violent, a furnace beneath the breastbone. Ridiculous. He had no claim on her. Yet the thought of some Italian waiting under a lemon tree made his fingers tighten around the door latch.
“No lover,” she said, folding her hands together as if conducting a negotiation across a polished table rather than standing in the wreckage of his good sense. “Naples is very different from England. Skill matters there in ways birth does not.”
For all that clever composure, she was naive. Courts did not welcome merit. Naples would not be different because the sun was warmer.
He stepped into the passage.
“Your Grace?”
Her voice followed him, drowned almost at once by the strike of his boots against the boards.
“Miss d’Ailes, this is a warship, not a pleasure boat. I do not take passengers.”
Her little feet hurried after him, the tap of her slippers absurdly determined. “I would not be a passenger. I will be useful. I understand the Neapolitan court. I could advise you and spare you a dozen unnecessary enemies before your first audience.”
She sped her steps.
“I know all about King Murat and why half the court still speaks of France as if the emperor might walk through the door in muddy boots and ask for supper.”
He could hear her breath quickening, blanket brushing the passage wall. Each sound made the narrow corridor feel like a trap built precisely to hold the scent of damp curls and warmed brandy.
He stared ahead. “I do not do diplomacy.”
She gasped. “But you are the ambassador.”
“They will accept me, or they will not.”
She caught up enough to look at him as if he had sprouted a forked tail. “You will last a fortnight.”
“Then you may trouble my replacement for a ride.”
He heard his own teeth grind and lengthened his stride. The companionway waited, a steep ladder of steps rising toward a square of pale daylight. The way out.
He had almost made it when her hand closed around his arm.
Heat shot up under the wool of his coat. Every sense narrowed to the small pressure of her fingers, and his body mutinied worse than a pressed crew without rum. A few gloved fingers on his sleeve, yet his skin beneath the wool answered as if she had placed her palm against his bare chest.
He stopped, but did not turn. If he looked at her, he would press her against the wall and end this negotiation with his mouth.
“I can pay for passage,” she said.
His jaw hardened until pain moved along the hinge. “I do not need your money, Miss d’Ailes.”
“Then I can work for it. I sew. And Elsie—my maid—is an excellent cook. She can certainly—”
He turned on her.
She startled, but did not retreat. His shoulder brushed the bulkhead, and the hem of her blanket grazed his boots. Daylight burned behind her from the companionway.
Could she not understand that every step she took deeper into his ship pulled the rope tighter around them both? The passage held them too close. His body leaned a fraction before he caught it, a traitorous tilt toward heat, toward softness, toward the woman he was trying with every scrap of discipline to keep off his ship.
“Your Grace?” she whispered.
The title put her mouth around his rank and made him imagine it around worse things. His hands curled at his sides. He could feel the shape of her still on his palms, and the passage seemed to shrink with each breath. Salt. Oil. Warm woman. His own blood moving too hard, too fast.
