Tu mi manchi.
Lorenzo’s damned words returned with the force of a hand closing around his throat. Tristan shut his eyes, shook his head once, and rejected them.
Marguerite slid from the desk to stand before him, her skirts falling in crushed layers around her legs.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He could not answer. Instead, he caught the loosened bodice of her dress and drew it down the rest of the way. The fabric slid over her arms, her waist, her hips, and fell in a soft heap at her feet.
Tristan searched for the answer in her skin. He traced the long line of one leg, the strength of her thigh, the narrow discipline of her waist. He followed the graceful turn of her arm, then lifted his knuckles to her throat and felt her pulse leap beneath them.
“You have a dancer’s body,” he said.
She had given him her body, but not the dancer inside it. Not the strength in her thighs, the discipline in her spine, the secret labor behind every graceful line.
“Dance for me.”
Marguerite turned away from him.
Tristan drew her back against his chest, her shoulder blades pressing into him. Crossing his forearm beneath her breasts, he lowered his mouth to her ear.
“You were a dancer before you became—”
“A kept woman,” she finished for him.
He turned her to face him. “Before you became a nervous diplomat.”
Marguerite’s careful smile faltered. Tristan kissed it away.
Her breath slipped unevenly between them.
“Dance for me.”
“I can’t. Please, Tristan, don’t ask it of me.”
The refusal passed through her shoulders, through the small tightening at her mouth, through the sudden stillness of a woman who had guarded this door long before he arrived to rattle the latch. The contract had given him her body. Her wit came freely, her warmth in dangerous flashes, her intelligence in every glance.
But not this.
This she kept beyond reach, and because she kept it, every instinct in him fixed upon it.
He was about to ask for it again when a tear struck his chest. One small drop. It should not have felt like a wound. Tristan went still. Her eyes were wet. She was crying.
He was not made for careful things, but he wrapped his arms around her and brought her into the shelter of his body, one hand at the back of her head, the other hard around her waist, holding her as if the ship had struck rocks.
Exhaling, he lifted her. She made a soft sound of surprise, and her arms went around his neck. Her weight in his arms was unbearable because he could carry her, but not keep her.
He laid her down as if she were not a woman he had just had against his desk, but a girl pulled half-drowned from the sea.
“Rest. I shouldn’t have come. I will go now,” he said, though every part of him rejected the word.
Her hand caught his wrist. Five fingers, and he was no longer capable of command. A single pull was enough to make him lie down beside her. She settled her cheek into his chest.
Outside the cabin, the ship kept her course. The hull answered the sea with a long wooden sigh. Footsteps crossed overhead and moved on.
But within the narrow walls, duty thinned to nothing. The world reduced itself to her cheek on his chest, her hair across his arm, the rise and fall of her breath against him.
“Why did you leave the ballet?” he asked.
