Lorelai initially thought each name had a story, but was disavowed of that notion when Barnaby mentioned that the more exotic names were simply variances of the word cat in different languages.
Of course they were, she’d sighed to herself.
Men.
As they steamed closer to shore, Lorelai was struck again by the beauty of her home. A teeming flock of a thousand starlings ascended in the distance, using the same wind to paint a dancing portrait in the rare blue sky.
The sea air was mild and sweet, and it tossed the strands that had come loose from Veronica’s braid across Lorelai’s shoulder.
They were returning to the past, she realized, as she found her handsome husband standing below her at the bow of the ship, watching the same spectacle of birds.
For better or for worse.
She thought of what was beneath that expensive black suit. The gigantic raven wings spanning over muscle built upon muscle. The sinew and scars. The passion and pain. The courage and cleverness. All the things that made this man. That made her man.
“Do you love him?” Veronica murmured.
“I do,” she answered, perhaps even surprising herself. It was the answer to the question she hadn’t been asked on her wedding day. “I—I think I always have.”
“Have you told him?”
“I have.”
Veronica hesitated. Bit her lip. “Has he told you?”
Lorelai tried not to let her shoulders slump. “He’s shown me his devotion, and that’s different than mere words. Better, surely.”
“Surely…” Veronica didn’t sound quite as convinced. “Who’d have thought that you and I would be embroiled in a search for treasure? That we’d be whisked away on a pirate adventure?”
“I’m glad you’re choosing to see it as an adventure and not an ordeal.”
Veronica gestured toward where Blackwell had joined the Rook, striking up a discussion. The briny sea breeze carried the masculine voices, if not their words, up to the ladies. “Your Rook was right about one thing, he’s done me a favor, I suppose. I know it’s savage of me to say, but I fear had he not killed Mortimer, I’d have ended up doing it myself, one day. Or trying to. The blood is on his hands … I suppose I should be thankful for that.”
Lorelai hooked her arm through her beloved friend’s. “If ever there was someone who deserved what he got…”
“Indeed.” Veronica seemed surprised to hear Lorelai say it, but she didn’t comment. “I suppose I’ll go back to my family and pretend to mourn, when all of this is done. Though, Lord knows, I’d rather do anything else.”
“I hope you still consider me family.” Lorelai squeezed her tighter.
“Of course I do, darling.” Veronica dropped a fond kiss on her temple.
“You could stay here,” she offered.
Veronica glanced over to where Moncrieff coiled threads of chain that must have weighed as much as he did. “I don’t think that’s for the best, at least until the fervor over Mortimer’s death dies down. Besides, who knows who will next inherit Southbourne Grove?”
Lorelai frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that. Some distant relative of Mr. Gooch’s, I suppose.”
Veronica made a wry sound. “A dowager at my age, can you imagine?”
“No more than I can a pirate at mine.”
They shared a laugh until Lorelai sobered and turned to her sister. “You don’t have to return to your family, you know. You’ll have a dowager stipend settled on you and, of course, whatever money is granted me by my unconventional marriage to the Rook will be offered as recompense for this entire … adventure. Though I know nothing comes close to remuneration for the past couple of years. When I think of how you suffered…” She had to swallow past a lump of guilt.
“Let’s not mention it again,” Veronica offered with a false brightness that didn’t reach her haunted eyes. “Upon second thought, I don’t think I shall return to my family.” She put her head on Lorelai’s shoulder. “But I’ll make my own way in this world. A widow has far more social freedoms than wives or maidens.”
“Where will you go?” Lorelai asked.
“I’ve always wanted to lose myself in the fashion salons of Paris,” she replied dreamily.
“Then you should.”
“I believe I will.”
Lorelai clung to her for a desperate moment. “Each of us starting a new life … why does it feel ominous? Like an ending?”
Veronica thought on it for a while. “Not all happy endings are without a modicum of sadness.”
“I suppose not.” Lorelai gazed out toward the two similar men at the ship’s bow, their dark heads now bent over their map. From this vantage, they could be twins. It would be difficult to tell them apart but for Blackwell’s eyepatch.
“I wonder which of us are truly more jealous creatures,” Veronica mused. “Men, or women?”
Speculating as to what prompted the question, Lorelai followed Veronica’s gaze out over the deck to see Moncrieff, Barnaby, and several others posturing and scowling at a few of the Blackheart of Ben More’s men.
The effect was somewhat ruined by romping kittens.
Lorelai laughed merrily, drawing the attention of a pair of dark eyes, which heated her skin with the memory of the previous night. “I hazard that women would answer men, and men would answer women.”
“I expect they’d both be right.”
Off the starboard bow, the little port town of Easton-on-Sea clustered beneath the gray stone grandeur of Southbourne Grove. Three islands, Mersea, Osea, and Tersea, hunkered like sentries in the tidal causeways. Mersea and Osea were flat islands with miles of tame sandy beaches. She supposed, if one squinted, Tersea could appear like the back of a sleeping dragon, half submerged, curled around its treasure. Waves breached the rocks, sending a white spray of warning to those who would dare approach.
What would they discover there on the morrow? she wondered. An ancient Roman cache? A tortured man’s past? Or something infinitely more dangerous?
* * *
The Rook finally understood why people begged for their lives.
Even the most coldhearted villains, the ones who turned a blind eye to the suffering of the weak, still pleaded with desperation before he ended them.
He’d distantly wondered why over the years. They had to have known, hadn’t they? That if God or the devil didn’t find them, he would. And when he did, they’d be praying for hell by the time he finished with them.
But still they tried. They cried. They bargained. They supplicated.
He’d thought them pathetic.
Until now.
He didn’t need to puzzle over it anymore. Everyone, he learned, feared death when they had something to lose. Their hearts had attached themselves to life, to something that mattered, and the thought of separation became untenable.
For his part, he’d taken it all from those men—power, money, land, titles, revenge—and had truly desired none of it for himself. That was his genuine tragedy. He’d started as a thief, became a slave, then a conqueror, a lord, and finally a pirate king. All the while, he’d been plagued by ambivalence. By a lack of fear. A part of him always assumed should a blade, a bayonet, or a bullet find purchase in his chest, it would do no damage.
Because he didn’t have a heart. Just a body built around a fathomless black void that no amount of endless acquisition could fill.
God help him, he’d tried.
He’d been so wrong. He could see that now. It wasn’t that his heart didn’t exist. It was that it had resided elsewhere all this time …
He’d left it here. At Southbourne Grove.
Little by little, Lorelai was returning it to him, shard by shattered shard.
Did he want it back? Not especially. But he wanted her enough to suffer whatever she asked of him.
He’d ached for her for twenty years. Now that he’d tasted her, claimed her, made love to her … his vocabulary didn’t extend far enough to form the word for what
a separation would do to him.
He stood in his old room at Southbourne Grove and pondered the gloaming as it darkened the Black Water Estuary and the sea beyond. He understood the name now.
Nigrae Aquae. The Black Water.
Facing east, the branching rivers of the estuary became inky, labyrinthine ribbons of chaos beneath a sky quickly draining of all color. Stars already began to prick the dark canvas of the firmament on this side of the manor, though a line of gray still clung to the horizon in the west.
He wanted her again, cad that he was, he desired her splayed across things, bent over other things, on her knees, on her back, over him, under him, beside him. Against that wall …
Christ. He scrubbed a hand over his face, and then through his hair, tugging in frustration.
He yearned to claim every inch of her. With his mouth. With his cock. He could keep her naked for the next decade, fucking away the last twenty years. Listening to her voice, the only sound in the world with the power to soothe his restless rage, or to stir his listless soul.
Her fragile innocence reminded him of just what a devil he was. An insatiable beast. A terrific villain.
He’d done his level best to focus on the quest. To pay attention to Dorian, Moncrieff, and his crew as they planned their approach and excavation of Tersea Island with painstaking care. But dammit if Lorelai hadn’t wandered his ship with her distracting loveliness. She’d stood on the forecastle deck for an eternity, posing with her attractive sister. It was a marvel anyone had accomplished anything.
When she’d tugged her earlobe, he’d remembered biting it as he came inside her from behind. When she rested a hand on her dramatically tilted hip, he could see it through the folds of her borrowed gown. His hand would burn at the memory of the pale shape of it in his hand as he’d guided their rhythm. When she’d bent over to scratch at one of the infernal kittens, he’d nearly fallen over the railing at the sight of her backside.
Here he was, near forty, and his body was acting like a besotted teenager’s. His cock had been at half-mast nearly all day, as just the sight of her was enough to create a lack of available space in his trousers.
And he could do fuck all about it with so many of his crew around at all times. He’d half a mind to just toss them all in the sea and have her on whatever part of his ship he fancied.
What stopped him was a comment she’d made this morning upon peeling herself out of bed. His little wife reminded him none-too-gently that she’d never been particularly fond of mornings, and she’d admitted to an intimate tenderness after he’d demanded an explanation for a wince she’d not hidden fast enough while beset by early sluggishness.
So, instead of whisking her into the room with the first available bed upon their arrival at Southbourne Grove, he acquiesced to the plan of allowing her to explain away his presence here.
The story she and Dorian had concocted was a simple and effective one, he had to admit. He was to be her long-lost cousin of some considerable distance, Ash Weatherstoke, a continental duke who had purchased Southbourne Grove back to the family from the Gooch estate. He was supposed to have rescued her from the Rook’s dastardly clutches and conveyed her back to inspect his new British holdings. This story would be corroborated by only a handful of staff left who might recall a relation by the name of Ash Weatherstoke staying at Southbourne Grove a few decades ago. A distant cousin, if their memory served, convalesced here after a tragic accident.
The staff had been so relieved at Lorelai and Veronica’s safe return, along with a visit from the infamous Blackheart of Ben More, that they’d barely paid their supposed new master any mind, other than a few polite courtesies and skeptical glances.
He’d immediately retreated, allowing Lorelai to receive the adoration that was her due. First, he’d double-checked preparations for tomorrow’s excursion, and then he’d drifted here. To the room where he’d first heard her voice.
This place, for all intents and purposes, was where he’d been born. The residence of his earliest memory.
Her voice.
Did you love me?
Love was too tame a word. Obsession too plain a concept.
Worship might cover it. Might come close to—
A quickening in his body and a thrill in his blood alerted him to her approach long before his ear pricked to the swish of her skirts or her uneven gait.
His every muscle tensed, every hair on his body prickled with awareness of her. It always had. It was as though she had an electromagnetic pull on him, her nearness charging the air between them, calling him closer. To touch. To hold.
He had no choice but to obey.
“I thought I might find you here,” she murmured.
He shoved his fists in his pockets.
She stopped next to him, to gaze out the same window.
Close. She was too close. He could smell the sea in her hair and the fragrance of the lilac soap she’d bathed with this morning warmed by her skin.
His jaw cracked.
“I come in here all the time,” she admitted. “I look over to the horizon, and understand why people used to assume that the distant sea was the edge of the world. I think a part of me knew you were out there. That this ocean separated us. You felt that far away from my heart.”
The suppressed longing in her voice pricked a hole in his lungs, but he continued to stare at the dark water, the threads and branches not unlike the pitch-black ice he boasted for blood.
Her shoulder brushed his arm. “The sea calls to a man, or so they say. I wonder if he has no choice but to answer.”
“I had no choice.” His lips barely moved, but still the bitter words cut through the air like a blade of rime.
“I know.” She put her head against his arm, and something in his middle melted. “I always questioned why something so incomprehensibly large, so deadly, so inhospitable to man, could take us away from who we are. From what we love. From the land upon which we rely.” She tilted her golden head up to regard him, and her gaze felt like the first warmth of dawn. “How brave you men are, who make your lives on the sea.”
Bravery had nothing to do with it. “I met a holy man in Tanzania, a few years ago. His people believe that we were all creatures of the sea. That one day we left, searching for survival on land, but that was not so very long ago. His claim is that when the sea calls to us, it’s not calling us away, it’s calling us home. A home to which we can never return.”
“I like that,” she murmured. “The call home is the most powerful.”
He couldn’t disagree.
Reaching out, Lorelai pressed her hand to the window over where Tersea Island was a mere blotch in the distance. “Do you think you’ll find the Claudius Cache before you are discovered?”
He lifted a shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “Dorian’s an earl. He has a great deal of influence, and I’ve always outsmarted, outrun, or overcome anyone who would try to contain or control me. With Moncrieff and my crew, and Dorian and his men, we should be able to find and plunder the treasure with little difficulty.”
A shadow flickered over her delicate features, as though she fought to grab hold of her own memories. Turning to him, she asked, “This Moncrieff … do you trust him?”
“Trust is for fools,” he clipped. “Not much to build a partnership on. But mutual self-interest, now that is something to rely upon. The greed of others, it’s never let me down.”
He yearned to smooth the wrinkle of worry from her forehead as she blinked up at him. “Your assessment of others is rather grim.”
“It’s not grim, it’s reality. It’s how things are.” He touched with his gaze everywhere his hands burned to go. “It’s how I am.” He was warning her. Cautioning her that he was close to the end of a tether. That he was trying to be good. He could not—would not—touch her. Or the tether might snap.
“People can change,” she ventured.
The hope in her blueberry gaze threatened to be his undoing.
Not a subtl
e woman, his wife. “People don’t change, Lorelai, only circumstances do.”
“You have changed,” she insisted. “Because circumstances forced change upon you. Doesn’t that mean you could reclaim who you once were?”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Time is a great healer, or so I’m told.” She smiled wryly. “I believe in you. Don’t you believe in me?”
He didn’t know how to answer her question. Couldn’t bring himself to tell her that she shouldn’t believe in him, and that he couldn’t allow himself to have faith in, or even hope for, anything.
“I’ve been asked to believe in a lot of things,” he began. “In a man’s word. His promise. His God. In heaven and in hell.” He retreated from the window a step, away from her alluring scent and siren’s lips. “I don’t know about heaven, but I know hell exists. I’ve spent most of my life there.” He ignored her soft sound of distress. “But through all that. Through everything that’s been done to me, I’ve only ever believed in one thing.”
“What’s that?” she whispered.
“That the sun would set in the west, and that I would come for you.”
Her face melted into an expression so achingly lovely, he had to look away or be overcome.
She reached for him, and he backed away further, putting up a staying hand against her.
“Be mine.” His voice sounded hoarse and rough, even to his own ears, but the need to hear her say the words drove him past the point of rationality. “Give yourself to me.”
She regarded him as though he’d lost his mind. “I already did. Thrice, to be exact. I’m trying to do it again, but you won’t hold still.”
“Not your body, dammit.” He was muddling this. Maybe if she wasn’t standing so near. Or looking so desirable. Maybe if they were in a different room. One bereft of the only happy memories he’d been allowed in his merciless life. “Be my wife, Lorelai,” he blurted. “That is … without any coercion. Or force. Or fear. Just … consent to be mine.” Christ, it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever said out loud. His skin felt hot and waxen at the same time. His breath was held in both desperation and despair.
“If I can call you Ash, then you can call me wife,” she bargained with a triumphant smile.
The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo Page 24
