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I need you away from me. Something about you…is too enchanting.
“Just hold me for a little bit,” she begged. “Just until it stops.”
I gripped her, harder than I had meant to. The way her voice went up, her vulnerability and innocence, something in that tone stirred every fiber of my being.
“One night only,” I said.
I held her in my arms, grazing my fingers against the skin of her arm back and forth until she stopped shaking. It was not long after until she fell asleep completely, not conscious of the storm at all.
But I was. I was wide awake and aware of everything.
Looking at her long eyelashes and rosy lips, feeling her hands around my neck…
This was dangerous. It was getting more and more dangerous as time went on.
EIGHTEEN
She was in my bed again.
This had become a habit I didn’t approve of. It wasn’t that I hated the idea of a beautiful woman sleeping next to me, of course, but I hated how attached to this woman I was becoming. If she didn’t get back on that floor, I was going to do something we’d both regret.
So instead, I dragged myself out of bed and went to my desk. One of us had to make wise decisions. I was out of practice, but I could probably figure it out.
I lit a candle to break up the dark and poured myself a heavy glass of rum. I downed my liquor, the candlelight next to me catching the edges of the glass.
“Aren’t you in pain?”
How could she read me so easily?
Men had died under my command before. That was part of being…whatever I was. An outlaw? A criminal? Regardless, I had never lost this many men. I hadn’t sent men to their spiritual doom before.
The first time I lost a man, it nearly killed me. The guilt and pain of being irresponsible with the lives of someone else…it was too much for me. I was too young to handle it at the time. I still felt too young to handle it now. So instead, I decided to have no interest in protecting life at all. I wouldn’t get attached. I wouldn’t feel that guilt again.
And now here I was, drinking large amounts of liquor and thinking about how I’d lost my men, and how I could have lost her too.
Her fiancé had come for her. There was no mistake about that. The siege was so that he could take her from me. My chest tightened at the thought. It made me want to go down and slit their throats in their cells.
But I knew if I did that, she would never respect me.
I shook my head to myself, pouring another glass of rum.
“Why do you care so much, Captain?” I whispered to myself. “She’s just a woman. You’ve never acted like this.”
There were a few times in my life when I thought I was in love with a woman. The one who stood out to me the most, however, was when I was thirteen. She was the daughter of a regular customer in my father’s shop before his accident. She was incredibly shy but graceful. The way she looked at me through her long eyelashes sent me into first-love bliss. When she moved away for her father’s business, I was completely shattered as a boy, wondering how I could let a girl like that slip out of my fingers.
Esmeralda made me feel like that boy again. That stupid thirteen-year-old boy who was obsessed and possessive.
But her fiancé was only a few feet away from us.
“With him as your prisoner, you can command me to do anything you wish.”
I swallowed a mouthful of rum.Anything? You stupid girl. Do you know what kind of thoughts a man has when you say that sort of thing?
I was no angel. I knew exactly what I could do to her, and I knew I was capable of doing it.
Suddenly that guilt came over me again. I felt the guilt of lives in my hands that I had no business being in charge of. My men died to protect her on my orders. But now she was in my bed, and all I could think about was ways I could make her mine.
Of course, I couldn’t. She was too pure. Too innocent. Dirty hands like mine shouldn’t touch women like her.
