Tristan closed his eyes. She was there at once. The moment she forgot to defend herself. The exact second her eyes held his and did not look away. There you are.
He had said it as if it were the most poetic thing a man could say while seated so deep inside a woman he felt her heartbeat against him.
He opened his eyes.
Lorenzo was looking at him now.
“What?” Tristan growled.
“I learned something today.”
“Try not to make a habit of it.”
“About Miss d’Ailes.”
Tristan went very still. The hammock moved with the ship beneath him, one slight sway, then another.
“Her maid has a loose tongue. Did you know that our passenger was the star of Covent Garden? That the house filled every night to watch her dance?”
No. He had not known that. The ignorance moved through him with an ugly edge. He knew too little about her. His hand closed on the edge of the hammock. What would she look like when she danced? The thought came too quickly to cut away. Her hair loose. Her arms lifted. That long, disciplined body moving toward whatever secret music still lived beneath all her diplomacy. To watch her give shape to silence, to see the part of her that had belonged to the stage before men, courts, and contracts put names on her—
Christ.
What a treasure that would be.
“Miss Marguerite was the mistress of an Austrian diplomat,” Lorenzo said. “For over four years.”
Austrian. Diplomat. Four years. A hot, ugly thing moved under his ribs. His mind supplied a man he had never seen and immediately despised—pale hands, polished manners, a voice trained to make possession sound civilized. Some silk-lined bastard with a title, a seal, and enough leisure to teach a woman that safety came with conditions attached. Was that where she had learned it? The clauses. The careful offers. Had this man taught her to weigh every kindness, price every touch, and keep accounts even in bed?
“She has a friend in Naples,” Lorenzo continued. “A ballerina who married a marchese. This is part of the dream, I think. The court, the warmth, the Italian husband. She knows names, factions, vanities. She has been studying the place as if it were a campaign map.”
“I know what she wants. You may spare me the report.”
“I was not warning you off, fratello. Quite the contrary,” Lorenzo said. “I was saying you can enjoy her.”
Enjoy? As if she were wine opened before it turned. A song before the singer moved to another city. A bright thing made brighter because it would not last.
Lorenzo leaned back against the bulkhead. “She does not want forever. She is clever enough to know what she is doing and proud enough not to ask more than she bargains for. As such, she is no risk to you.”
No risk. The words should have eased him. They were the very terms he had wanted. Yet a safe woman did not make a man feel as if the room he had entered to take pleasure had become a church, a battlefield, and a home he had no right to enter.
His chest tightened.
No risk indeed.
Then why could he not breathe?
Chapter eighteen
Daylight should have improved this hunger. Once a prize was taken, the thrill of the chase ended. And yet . . . Tristan had felt Marguerite beneath him, around him, breathing his name into the dark, and the wanting had not spent itself.
Marguerite sat behind his desk, bent over a sheet of paper with a quill in hand, sunlight bathing her hair. A crease formed between her brows, and he felt an idiotic urge to smooth it with his thumb.
He opened the hatch. She started so violently that the quill scratched across the page.
“Good God.” She pressed a hand to her chest. “Do you always enter like cannon fire?”
Tristan stepped into his cabin as if men entered private rooms from the outside of frigates every morning before breakfast. “The ocean was too cold. I considered returning to it. But you said I might get sick.”
