First Lieutenant Hardy waited a pace behind the master, straight-backed and solemn as only a boy who had cut away family, land, and every softer inheritance for the Navy could be. Bright red hair burned beneath his hat, and freckles covered him more thickly than sand on a beach. “Hands are ready to weigh, sir. Boat’s crew not yet returned.”
The boat’s crew not yet returned meant no longboat. No Marguerite. No maid. No trunks. No passenger with a bargain that made sprezzatura only possible because he was grinding his teeth very hard.
Lorenzo nodded to the lieutenant. “He knows that too, Hardy.”
Hardy’s gaze flicked once toward Tristan’s hands, then wisely elsewhere. “Aye, sir.”
Both men withdrew.
The deck noise filled the space they left behind. The quarter hour shrank by the second.
“There is an expression in Italian that I do not think exists in English. Not truly. While the English miss things like entries in an account book, the Italian suffers them.” Lorenzo leaned against the rail, his gaze tender. “We saymi manca. It is different from I miss something. It means something is lacking to me, and the body knows the absence. For a person, one says,tu mi manchi. You are missing from me.”
Tristan did not miss women. He wanted them, took them, left them, remembered them when memory suited appetite.
His hand had found the bracelet again, though he had not given it leave to move. His thumb worked over the stones, counting them by touch. His eyes searched the harbor between one thought and the next, catching on every pale bonnet, every flutter of ribbon, every female figure stepping into or out of shadow. His lungs felt too narrow for the morning air.
He had just drawn breath to dismiss Lorenzo’s nonsense when the shout came from aft. Tristan’s head snapped toward the water.
The longboat came clear of the brig’s shadow. A pale ribbon snapped in the wind. A gloved hand gripped the gunwale. Marguerite. Then her face turned upward toward the frigate, chin lifted against the glare, and the empty place beneath his ribs closed with such force that it felt like being struck.
She had come. She was there, in his boat, being brought to his ship.
Tristan turned from the rail and strode to the break of the quarterdeck, his coat snapping behind him in the wind.
“Rig the accommodation ladder properly,” he barked.
“Two hands at the foot. Two at the entry port. The lady’s trunks go up through the sling. No one jostles that boat. No one touches the lady unless she asks or loses her footing.”
Men moved faster. Good.
“If any man laughs, he spends the afternoon holystoning until he can see his damned conscience in the planks.”
“Aye, sir!”
“Blankets ready. And someone tell the boat crew if they bring her alongside like cargo, I will make cargo of them.”
This time, she would arrive properly. No swaying rope ladder. No risky ascent. No cold spray touching her stockings. If Marguerite d’Ailes were to be wet aboard his ship, he would have the privilege, not the sea.
The longboat was very close. She looked up. Their gazes met across the moving water. Tristan went still. There was no tide, no crew, no Naples, no Lorenzo beside him. Only Marguerite d’Ailes in the longboat, pale bonnet ribbons whipping at her cheek, eyes lifted to his.
“Respira, fratello,” Lorenzo said. “It means breathe. I mention it because you have misplaced the habit.”
Indeed, Tristan could not breathe. His lungs had forgotten how. He watched as she stood on the boat and placed her feet on the accommodation ladder.
Lorenzo whistled. “Only a passenger indeed,” he murmured. “But what a lovely one.”
Tristan did not look away from her. “If you call her lovely again, I will throw you overboard.”
Chapter nine
This time, Marguerite arrived at the ship with the full honors of a diplomat. Or at least with the full honors of a woman whom the Duke of Stormhaven did not wish to see dangling from a rope ladder while half his crew learned new categories of aquatic tragedy.
A proper accommodation ladder had been lowered from the frigate's side, broad enough for skirts, dry enough for dignity, and attended at the foot by two officers in blue coats who stood so straight they seemed to have been ironed by the Admiralty. One saluted. The other bowed. Neither looked at her ankles.
Progress indeed.
Elsie, who had endured the boat ride with one hand locked around Marguerite's arm and the other clutching her reticule as if it contained the crown jewels, leaned nearer and whispered, "Well, this is grand."
