When the world stopped spinning, she was draped over his chest, his arms locked around her back, both of them breathing like they'd sprinted the length of the ship. His knot throbbed inside her, and each pulse sent a smaller wave of pleasure rolling through her oversensitive body.
She propped herself up on his chest to look at him. His eyes were fading back to blue, lazy and sated, the lines of tension gone from his face for the first time she could remember. "Next time, I'm going to taste you first. That's not a request."
His cock twitched inside her, knot and all, and she grinned at the way his breath hitched.
They stayed tangled together while his knot softened, talking the way they always did. But the conversation was lighter tonight. No dead brides, no curse mechanics, no countdown. She told him about the drinking game the crew had tried to cheat her at, and how she'd figured out their system within three hands and turned it against them. He told her about the time Luc had gotten drunk enough to challenge a harbor post to a fight and lost. She laughed until her stomach hurt.
When his knot released and he slipped free, she cleaned them both with a cloth from the washbasin, and they curled together under the blankets, her back to his chest, his arm across her waist. His scent was tangled with hers now, pine and honeysuckle so intertwined that she couldn't tell where he ended and she began.
She fell asleep to the sound of his breathing.
THE SHIP WAS STILL. The lanterns in the rigging had burned to nothing. Anatole was asleep behind her, one arm heavy across her waist, his breath deep and even against the back of her neck.
Something had woken her.
Not the door. The door was still quiet, its hum absent from the background frequency of the ship. That should have been a comfort. Instead, the silence rang louder than the pull ever had.
She lay still, listening. The creak of the hull. The whisper of water against wood. Anatole's breathing.
And then, so faint she might have imagined it, a voice.
Not the dead brides. Not the chorus of six women that had haunted her dreams since she came aboard. A single voice, older, colder, carried on a frequency that vibrated in the wood of the ship itself.
You think you can beat me?
Jeanne's blood went still in her veins. That wasn't the curse. That wasn't the door or the mirror or the dead brides speaking through the magic that preserved them. She somehow knew whose voice that was.
That was Morvenna, the sea witch.
Chapter Fourteen
JEANNE
She rearranged the cabin while he was on deck.
It wasn't a decision so much as a series of small corrections that accumulated into something larger. She moved the washbasin to the other side of the room because the morning light hit it wrong where it was. She shifted the chair closer to the portholes so she could read the star charts without squinting. She folded the spare blankets differently, tucking them into the corners of the bed.
She was halfway through refolding his shirts in the wardrobe when she realized what she was doing and stopped with her hands full of linen.
Before the heat, she'd been horrified by the nesting. This had none of that. She held one of his shirts up and considered it the way she might consider where to hang a picture. The fabric was soft from years of salt water and sun, the collar frayed where it rubbed against his beard. She brought it to her nose out of habit now, not compulsion, and his scent settled over her like a hand on the back of her neck. Familiar. Known. The smell of the place where she'd chosen to be.
She set it on the pillow where he slept.
Then she went back for more.
