“I want to dance for you.”
Tristan went utterly still.
The sails drew and shivered. The wheel tugged beneath Tristan’s hand. Somewhere below, a sailor called to another, and the sound arrived from a country very far away.
Marguerite wrapped her arms around herself so as not to reach for him. She had not danced for him. Not once. He had asked before, and she had refused because dancing was not the same as yielding her body. Dancing was art, discipline, self, the one part of her above negotiation.
How foolish of her. What did she believe, really? That once he was alone with her, perhaps he would forget that she was no more than dead weight? She was hopeless. Elsie had been right. Her pirate duke would refuse her, and now she had gone and loved him and would become a wretched creature.
“Lorenzo,” he said, without looking away from her, “take the helm.”
Chapter twenty-one
Tristan watched her kick off her slippers with the same attention he paid to the weather. A man needed to know what was coming so he could prepare. Yet no change of wind had ever made his stomach draw tight quite like the sight of Marguerite standing barefoot before him. The cabin held too still around her. Too quiet. Like the sea before guns opened.
Why did she want to give him this now? She had already given more than the bargain required. Her body. Her trust. Her soft cries against his throat. A prudent captain would have taken the victory and cleared the deck before the cost appeared.
Yet the wind whispered through the gallery and stirred the loose wisps at her temples, and just like that, his pulse changed. He knew that feeling. The strange, sharpened stillness before weather broke.
“I will dance a solo from the myth of Psyche. A mortal girl loved by Eros. She has everything she could want. Warmth. Safety. An arrangement with clear terms.” Her mouth curved faintly, but the curve did not reach her eyes. “But he comes toher only in darkness. She cannot rest until she knows who loves her. So one night she lights a lamp while he is sleeping, so she can look at him.”
Tristan was right before her. What else did she want to see?
“Eros is more beautiful than anything she had imagined. Then a drop of oil from the lamp falls on him, burning him. He awakens. He is very angry at her deceit and goes away.”
Of course he did. A man who had spent eternity in darkness, loved only in the dark, had to go before the going became impossible. Tristan understood. He had been doing the same for twenty years. You left before you were known. You released before the weight pulled you under.
But then Marguerite allowed the shawl to slip. Daylight found the exposed line of her shoulders and warmed them into a soft honey gold. Her neck looked longer in the open air, her collarbones delicate enough to make his hands feel suddenly brutal.
She lifted her hand as if holding the lamp of the story. Then she crossed one foot before the other and turned, gauzy skirts whispering around her ankles. When she came out of the turn, one arm floated above her head, the other curved outward, and just like that, empty space became music.
Swift steps carried her across the gallery, and her arms shifted around the imagined lamp. One hand protected the flame, the other reached toward him. Her body curved forward, then away, and the arch of her back made his mouth go dry.
Then she lifted her leg so impossibly high that he had to drag his eyes from her foot to her face to believe he saw a woman and not some trick of light. She held the position for a breath, and inside him, something hauled hard against its moorings. He wanted to touch that. Not only her skin, though God knew he wanted that until want became a taste in his mouth. He wantedto put his hands on the poise, the grace, and possess the moment no man could own.
Then the dance softened. Her arms lost their shape. Her step grew more intimate. He saw the slight tremor in her breath, the shine at her collarbone, the courage it cost her to cross the last distance. He saw a woman. Young, frightened, brave beyond good sense, holding a lamp toward the one thing she had been told not to see because not seeing was safer.
He had seen her naked. Had tasted her, held her, been inside her, watched her come apart in his arms. Yet this was more dangerous. Instead of a body given under a bargain, this was a gift. She had brought him something unguarded. And his ship had no hold built to carry it.
He had to stop it. Take her in his arms, make a jest, kiss her until the dance dissolved into something he understood. A captain who saw a dangerous weight cut it loose before the ship foundered.
She looked at him, and in her gaze, he felt the lamp turn.
He stood in the open, caught by her seeing, utterly bare in a way no nakedness could equal. Eros had not fled because the oil burned him. He had fled because to be seen by the one person whose looking mattered was to discover that wings were useless things.
Then she went on tiptoe and balanced right there before him, one leg behind her, hair loosening over one shoulder.
Tristan caught her, hands pressing her narrow waist, the muscles shifting underneath. The space between them held the last echo of motion, the story’s lamp still burning somewhere neither of them could see.
“Now is the time you escape,” she said.
Psyche looked. Eros fled. A man seen too clearly saved himself by leaving before the lamp could burn him deeper. He could dothat too. Take pleasure. Take victory. Take prizes, then release the line before it pulled him under.
Marguerite smiled at him. A girl’s smile, if a girl had survived too much and still chosen, against all evidence, to offer one unarmored thing.
His heart struck hard enough to hurt. Desire did not hurt like that. What he felt for Marguerite went under bone, under command, into some closed place he had kept locked through every storm. Her smile reached it as if she had always known the door.
He should have left.
