When You Wish Upon a Duke

by Charis Michaels

  When she turned around, hands filled with tankards like a Bavarian barmaid, the pirates were just reclaiming their seats. She beamed and sang a little song, distributing the drugged tankards to mystified pirates.

  In her head, she thought, I’ve done it.

  I’ve actually done it.

  They need only drink, and I need only wait.

  The next half hour passed in flashes of distorted time.

  She fabricated the location of Peter Boyd by recounting one of her Spanish holiday itineraries, stop by stop. The words came out quickly and she gestured like a demented uncle making finger shadows for children.

  Tankards hit tabletops with a heavy clunk.

  Pirates belched and slurped.

  Someone sang a little sea chantey in Italian.

  She spoke about Peter and his prized collection of stolen timepieces.

  She described how Peter would, without a doubt, come for her. Doucette need only dangle her like bait, she said. The pirate captain listened but said nothing. Time seemed to stop.

  She was just about to begin with local gossip when an old pirate across the room stood up, made a gagging sound, and then collapsed on the floor.

  “Oh dear,” said Isobel, leaping up.

  She put her hand on the hilt of the dagger. Her speeding heart raced so fast she couldn’t distinguish the beats.

  One minute later, another pirate made gurgling sounds and staggered to the slop bucket in the corner.

  A minute after that, another slumped against his table. Another doubled over.

  Isobel spun around to check Doucette, and he was leaning back in his chair, his head facing the ceiling, eyes closed and mouth open.

  That was her cue. She slid the dagger from inside her vest and backed herself against the bar. Whispering a warning to the barkeep, she inched a wide circle around the room, keeping her back to the wall. She kept the knife drawn but at her side. All around her, the room became a morass of collapsing, gasping pirates.

  Five steps from the door, she bolted, charging past an unaffected pirate. Isobel saw him in time to fake left but darted right.

  His reflexes were good, and he caught her by the arm. Isobel tried to break free but his hold was punishing. He reached for her neck with his other hand. Lashing out, Isobel transferred the dagger to her free hand and buried the blade in his bicep. He shouted in pain and released her. She scampered away, but a second pirate stepped up to block the door.

  “No, you don’t,” he said in English accented with an Irish lilt.

  “Move,” she demanded.

  He swiped for her with a meaty hand, and she leapt, barely evading him. He kept coming and she scrambled back. She tripped over the body of a pirate and fell.

  The pirate on the ground was ill, but not too ill to reach for her ankle. She kicked him with the heel of her boot and he rolled in pain.

  Meanwhile, the Irish pirate was still coming, his eyes locked on her dagger. He was large and seemingly unaffected by the poison; it would take no effort for him to overpower her. She had time to scramble to her feet or throw the dagger but not to do both.

  Without hesitation, Isobel flung the dagger in the direction of his shoulder. The blade sliced through the air and caught him at the top of the arm. He roared in pain, struggling to pull out the knife. Isobel leapt up and darted to the door, overturning chairs and scattering tankards as she went.

  When she reached the door, she flung it open without stopping to see who was in pursuit. The sky outside was a gray-lavender. Dusk fell, bringing with it a foggy sort of vapor. She darted into the mist and slammed the door behind her. Shoving her shoulder against the door, she unlooped the rope at her belt and bound the door handle to an iron torch claw on the wall. It was a feeble obstacle, but it would buy her time.

  She was giving the rope a final tug when she felt the door shudder with the weight of a pirate on the other side. Isobel yanked the knot once more and bolted.

  The plan had been to follow the river in the direction of the sea. It would be the route the pirates would take back to their ship, and the very last direction they would expect a fleeing woman to run. She ran low, darting from bolder to bolder, keeping fifty yards from the water in case they managed to gain their boats.

  For five minutes, she ran full out, falling twice, recovering, running again. The air was cold and acrid, and she drank it in. She loosened the vest and then stripped it off. The belt and fabric skirt came next. Only the buckskin, the linen shirt, and her boots remained.

  Her lungs had just begun to protest when she saw him—North, thundering over the next rise on his horse, pulling a spirited mare on a lead behind him. Isobel said a silent prayer and stepped away from the rock to wave a hand.

  North galloped up, yanking on his rein. Isobel glanced at him in the dim light, a look of triumph and relief and love, and then held up her hands to the dancing mare. North tightened the lead and she got close enough to put a foot in the stirrup. She calmed the horse with a caress to her neck and soothing words. When North dropped the lead, the animal spun, but Isobel was already vaulting into the saddle.

  “There’s no time,” was all she said.

  She dug the heel of her boot into the flank of the horse and the animal sprang into a gallop.

  North did the same and they sprinted into the cold, indigo Icelandic night.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Jason and Isobel rode neck and neck, following a bright moon along the circuitous route he’d planned. The lowlands of the country offered two landscapes: open grass with no cover, or craggy rock outcroppings, impossible to navigate on a running horse. Jason led them through both, pushing the horses but making them difficult to track. When they reached the second spate of rocks, they reined in, allowing the animals to pick their way through a shallow canyon of slick basalt columns.

  When the labored breathing of the horses subsided, Jason spoke. “Are you hurt?”

  “No.” She sounded breathless, exhilarated.

  “Did they touch you?” he asked. He hadn’t quite reached exhilaration. He was exhausted from fear.

  “They took my dagger,” she said.

  “They did touch you.”

  She shook her head. “I flung it into a man’s shoulder and never recovered it.”

  “You flung it—”

  He reined around, kneeing his stallion to her. He searched her face with desperate eyes, looking for blood.

  She beamed at him, tall and glorious in the moonlight. Her breath came in winded puffs; her cheeks were flushed, her hair wild. Her smile was the smile of a champion.

  “Isobel,” he said, a whisper.

  He was just about to reach for her—he would die if he didn’t touch her—when a gentle streak of light pulsed the dark sky. Then another, and another. A vibrant glowing curtain of light.

  Jason reeled his horse around. The pirates, he thought. They’d concealed horses and now pursued them bearing bright torches.

  Except the brightness was nothing like torchlight; it was too white. The horizon was obscured with distant volcanoes, barely visible in the dark. Now they stood out in inky relief against wave after wave of heavenly light.

  “North,” Isobel breathed, turning her face to the sky.

  “What’s happening?”

  “The Norðurljós,” Isobel said, using the Icelandic term. “The northern lights. It’s a natural phenomenon of cascading spectral light. Look up. Effervescence will . . . will ignite the heavens.” She sounded reverent.

  “Ignite the heavens,” he repeated, suspicious. He squinted at the light spilling downward to the earth.

  “You’ve heard of this, surely,” she said. “It’s like a show of lights painted across the dome of the sky. Green, blue, pink, orange. It is breathtaking, a once-in-a-lifetime sight.”

  She reined the mare around. “You must see it.”

  The white light on the horizon seeped up and over the rounded cap of the night. The colorless glow gave way to a peachy hue; the peach fa
ded to a rose pink. It was color and light at once, like a flame. But where fire was thin and jumpy, this was milky thick and low. It draped in uneven bands across every part of the sky.

  Isobel dismounted and tethered the mare.

  “We cannot stop,” he said, watching a ribbon of green seep through the pink.

  “We can,” she countered. “Most of the pirates are in the throes of intestinal distress. The others could not possibly follow this far on foot, even if they knew which direction we fled, which they do not.

  “We did it, North,” she said, turning to him. She stood beside his horse and touched his leg. Her beautiful face was lit by a veil of pink and orange light.

  Without another thought, he dismounted, sliding in between Isobel and the stallion.

  “Look,” she cooed, pointing to a puff of aquamarine. He blinked up, following her finger. The sky was a color he’d only seen on the scales of a fish, translucent and opaque at the same time.

  “Magical,” she said, smiling.

  “You’re magical,” he said, and he scooped her into his arms.

  He desired her—he never stopped desiring her—but in that moment, he wanted nothing more than to confirm that she was with him, safe and unharmed. His hands moved searchingly: waist, ribs, shoulders, throat. He felt her back, her bottom—so perfectly available in the snug buckskins—the sides of her thighs. She was perfect, and whole, and strumming with life. He buried his face in her hair and breathed in, memorizing the smell of her.

  He dragged his face across her neck and cheek, scraping her with his emerging beard. He felt her shiver, felt her turn her face to catch his jaw with her lips. Lust and longing roared to the surface; he was immediately hard, and he bit down on the inside of his mouth. She’d said no, she couldn’t risk—

  She kissed him.

  She grabbed his face with both hands and pulled him to her.

  In the same moment, she leapt up, jumping into his arms. He made a wordless sound of pleasure and relief, barely managing to catch her bottom with both hands.

  She wrapped her legs around his hips and hooked her boots around his back. She feasted on his mouth. They were, at once, a staggering tangle of lips and tongue, hands and breath. He widened his stance, kneading her bottom, kissing her like he was suffocating and she was air.

  He opened his eyes in wild, quick blinks, catching snatches of her hair, her cheek, and the mystical, heavenly light.

  “Jason,” she panted, and he growled at the sound of his given name. Finally.

  “S’bell,” he panted back.

  “Make love to me.”

  He groaned. She would tear him apart.

  “Please. Jason.”

  “Isobel,” he said again, devouring her with a kiss.

  “Why should we not?” she breathed, speaking to herself, or to him, or to the lights in the sky.

  “Please don’t make me think,” he said.

  He forced himself to raise his head and look around. While she kissed his neck, he scanned the canyon for a smooth rock or a tuft of moss . . . grass . . . anywhere to drop to one knee. She weighed nothing, but desire sapped the strength in his legs. He needed to be down, she needed to be beneath him; he needed something hard and unmoving to leverage his granite erection—

  “There,” she panted, pointing to a murky hollow cloaked in steam.

  “Where?”

  “It’s a pool,” she said. “See the steam? It’s a heated pool. Like the river, but deeper. We can bathe. Float. Swim.”

  “Now we’re swimming?” he managed.

  She squirmed from his grasp and slid down his body. Catching his hand, she led him to the mystical haze hovering over the pool of fizzing water.

  “This country is enchanted,” he mumbled, staring into the rising steam.

  She bit off a glove and went down on one knee, testing the water. “Ahhh,” she moaned. “Heavenly.” She bit off another glove. “And the air is freezing. I’m cold, Jason—aren’t you cold?” She began tugging at the laces of her boots.

  “No,” he said. He was incinerating.

  By the strange green light above, he watched her remove her boots and stockings and then—in perhaps the most sensual act he’d ever witnessed—peel the buckskins from her legs. Next, she shucked the linen shirt. Within moments, she stood before him in only a thin shift and loose drawers. He stood gaping, his brain struggling to absorb her sensual beauty. She winked at him—winked!—and then dropped to sit at the edge of the pool. She sank her feet into the dark water with a sigh. Steam rose around her. She took up her hair and tied it in a loose knot on the top of her head. Her shift dissolved into damp translucence.

  Jason had never been more aroused in his life.

  “Remember when you first came to Everland Travel,” she asked, “and you wanted passage to Iceland?”

  Remember? There was no remember, he thought, there was only now. He began jerking open the buttons of his waistcoat.

  She continued. “I suggested that I did not enjoy Iceland? It wasn’t the country—obviously. It was my own reckoning here that scared me. Speaking strictly as a travel agent, I can tell you that Iceland does three things like no other place on earth: mystical landscapes, northern lights, and heated pools.” She kicked her feet in the water.

  “I’ll never see anything but you . . .” he rasped, “sitting there . . . like that . . . ever again.” He shrugged from his coat and ripped off his waistcoat. His shirt, boots, and buckskins came next, tangled in a heap on the canyon floor.

  There was no time for heated pools, of course. In the back of his mind, he knew this. The crew of the Feather would set sail as soon as Isobel and he convened with the captive merchants in Stokkseyri.

  Tactically, it was a disaster to strip naked and swim in the middle of the night, with pirates in pursuit.

  Jason didn’t care. He cared only for her.

  When he’d stripped to his drawers, he dropped beside her on the lip of the pool, sinking his feet in the warm, fizzing water. Isobel reached for him at once, taking him by the shoulders, climbing into his lap. He gathered her up with a groan, kissing her deeply with his tongue, with his soul.

  “In, in, in,” she urged, pulling him from the lip of the pool into the steaming water. Jason sank down, his aroused body now buzzing with gooseflesh from the effervescent water. He hiked her legs around him, carrying her, and waded in. The pool was shallow, but he moved slowly. He was losing his mind. He could step off into an abyss and he would not care. She kissed like his wildest fantasy; the thin lawn of her shift and drawers floated away from her skin. She was soft, and slick, and writhing in his arms. Above them, the heavens bloomed color.

  When his knee bumped a smooth rock he pivoted, sinking to his shoulders to sit. His hands slid over her slick body of their own accord, palming her pert breasts, tracing the curve of her hip. She dug her fingers into his hair, massaging his scalp, delving down his back.

  “You’re remarkably formed,” she whispered. “So strong.”

  He kissed her hard and mimicked the motion with his hips, pulsing his erection against her. She moaned and arched her neck, pressing up.

  “Please don’t make me beg,” she whispered. She reached her hand between them.

  “Isobel,” he pleaded between kisses, “this is not what we discussed.”

  “We discussed the real world,” she mumbled. “This is not real. This is a fantasy.”

  “I assure you, this is very real,” he rasped, grinding his very real erection into her hand.

  “We are alone in a cauldron,” she said. “The sky is on fire. We’ve bested pirates . . .”

  She kissed her way from his mouth to his sideburn; she traced the whirl of his ear with her tongue. She whispered, “Not real.”

  Jason growled and gathered her closer, but he plucked her hand away. He pumped his erection against her center, and they both moaned. He interlocked one hand with hers and brought up the other to cup the back of her head.

  “I’ve fallen
in love with you,” he said.

  She smiled at him. “But don’t you see? That’s the beauty of this moment. You don’t have to profess love to me. You don’t have to do anything but—”

  “There is virtually nothing I do because I have to, Isobel,” he told her. “I do and say what I want; I always have.”

  “Except for the dukedom,” she said.

  He frowned.

  She continued, speaking almost nose-to-nose. “You will assume all the responsibilities of a duke because you have to do it.”

  “I didn’t mea—”

  “And if you do it correctly, as you’ve told me you are determined to do, the real-world Duke of Northumberland will not have the freedom to profess love to the real-world Isobel Tinker.”

  “I will,” he told her, kissing her hard.

  She shook her head, and he saw tears had begun to roll down her cheeks.

  “You will not,” she told him softly. “Loving a woman like me is not a part of being a proper duke. Not the type of love that I want. Legitimate love. Family love. Give-me-your-name love.”

  “We will marry,” he declared. He kissed her again, and she was silent for a beat.

  He’d not planned to say this, not yet—but why not? Love was not enough for her. Fine. He knew the reasons, love alone shouldn’t be enough. It wasn’t. She deserved it all.

  “You deserve my name,” he told her. “You deserve to be duchess, God help you. Why you’d want this bit, I have no idea, but if you’ll do it . . .”

  Isobel shoved herself back with a splash and began to tread water two feet away. She was shaking her head. The tears were falling faster now.

  “Why are you crying?” he asked. He shoved from the rock and swam to her, collecting her. He kissed her ear, her jaw, her eye. “Isobel, I love you. Is this—? Why does this distress you?”

  Isobel held on to his shoulders with a death grip.

  Please don’t go, she thought.

  Please don’t take the words away.

  Please comprehend how afraid I am.