Last night’s quiet came rushing back. The warm water. His careful hands. The way he had held her hair as if it were the nicest thing he had ever seen. The unfamiliar sensation of receiving care instead of giving . . . well, everything. All of it would be gone now.
Do not be ridiculous, Marguerite. A woman who survived on wit and negotiation did not bare her feelings in a corridor like laundry. She had made a miscalculation. One apologized, corrected course, and moved on.
“I merely wished to see you,” she said, and hated the faint tremor in her voice. “And to give you this.”
She reached into her bodice and drew out the folded paper, its edges softened from having been handled too often. She held it out to him like a peace offering.
He stared at it. Would he refuse to take it? Tell her that such gestures were unnecessary, and that she would see him from midnight to three? Just because he had offered care once didn’t mean their bargain had changed.
He took the paper. Unfolded it slowly, as though it mattered how it was opened. Then his eyes moved over the page, brow drawing down.
“What is this?” he asked.
She swallowed. “Everything I know about the Neapolitan court. Names. Houses. Eighteen months of research. The place is . . . intricate.” She lifted her chin. “I thought it might be useful.”
He read in silence. The ship creaked around them. Somewhere above, a sail snapped in the wind. In the passage beyond, Lorenzo’s voice barked an order, stripped of all music.
Tristan folded the paper once, then again, too neatly, then tucked it away in his breast pocket.
Marguerite waited for the necessary reprimand. For the reassembly of walls. For the moment in which she learned, as adult women learned repeatedly, that tenderness given at night did not always survive daylight.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
His gaze cut to hers.
Her voice trembled despite every effort to discipline it. “It was not my intention to cause difficulty. I was very close to negotiating my way past the sailor, but he was being a very tough—”
“He was tough? He was caging you against the bulkhead.”
“I was managing it,” she said. She had negotiated rooms since she was thirteen. Negotiated exits. Smiles. Hands. Bills. Roles. Patronage. Silence. Safety. Every space had a price, every kindness a hook, every man a possible border crossing. “I have been managing things for a very long time and I—”
“I forbid you to manage things on my ship.”
“Forbid? I do not think this is—”
“You come and go at will. You owe no payment, no apology, no smile. If you are afraid, you call me. If a man blocks your path, you call me. If you forget every other order I ever give you, remember this one.”
“I am not one of your sailors.”
“No.” His hand caught her waist, pulling her into him before she could form another argument. “You are the reason I am trying not to kill one.”
Whatever had been fueling her indignation deflated, and instead, heat licked over her arms and legs. She stared at him, panting. When had he come so close?
His eyes moved over her face rapidly, and then he took a lock of her hair and coiled it around his wrist. “If you don’t want to be kissed now, shake your head no.”
Did she even have a head? If someone had presented it to her, she would scarcely have recognized it. Dizzy, she closed her eyes, and when she felt his hand circle her waist, she leaned toward his warmth. He breathed her in, his nose brushing against her cheek, and then his lips were there, at the corner of her mouth. Dry and fever-hot, the contact singed her. She gasped, and he pushed impossibly closer, hands framing her face, his eyelashes tickling her cheeks.
Pressed against the bulkhead, she felt delicate and precious and at risk of combusting from so much warmth.
He nibbled her lips. “Open for me, Marguerite.”
She did. Heaven help her, she did.
He sucked her bottom lip and then pushed his tongue inside her mouth.
The pirate’s kiss robbed her air, unseated every argument she had prepared, and sent a disorienting rush through her limbs that left her swaying helplessly against him.
She clutched his shirt, the warm linen, slightly damp at the throat, his body hard beneath it, as the world narrowed to heat and pressure and the undeniable truth of being wanted.
