His eyes burned with an intelligence and were tainted with a bit of cruelty beneath them.
“Really, Duel. That’s the best you can do? How ’bout a nice ‘Thorn, you got a minute? Would you mind?’ Or better yet … ‘Please’? Would that kill you?”
“Definitely stick in me craw. Probably choke me to death. So aye, I’d say it’d be fatal to even attempt such niceties with you. Therefore, I’ll stick to me ways, if you don’t mind.”
“I do mind,” Thorn said, more forcefully. “Not that you’ll change. Just feel the need to continue to put my head through the wall that is your obstinate stupidity.” He smiled coldly. “So, what can I do you for?”
The captain gestured toward her. “Miss Moore wants to know why you chose her for this grand misadventure. Figured I’d let you have the honors of explaining it.”
“Oh.”
There was so much hidden by that one consonant that it sent a shiver over her. “Oh?”
“Did I say oh?” His tone was gruff and defensive.
“You did, sir, aye.” Valynda couldn’t understand why he was being so evasive. “Why?”
“It seemed appropriate.”
Rather, it seemed annoying. She gave him a droll stare.
He didn’t appear to appreciate that either. So, he pulled her away from the captain to a more secluded area of the deck, though that was a bit hard to manage, as privacy on a ship wasn’t the easiest thing to find. He glanced about to the others and waited until he was sure he’d have a moment where they wouldn’t be overheard. “Miss Moore, there are things in the world best not asked.”
How sick she was of being told that. It wasn’t as if she’d just asked her father where babies came from. He might as well have poked her in the eye and told her that she stank and that her hair was made of flea turds while he was at it. “You sound like my father.”
He snorted. “Better than sounding like mine. Believe me.”
There was no way to miss the bitterness in his tone. Which made her curious, given that it was said his father was the darkest power in existence. However, with those relations, she decided to let it go. “Please, sir … I’m trying to understand what happened with me.”
Thorn let out a tired breath. “I made a promise.”
Ah, now she understood. “To Nibo.”
He shook his head to correct her assumption. “Someone who means a lot more to me than that. Not that that says much, since he means nothing to me at all. Suffice it to say that a lot of people moved a lot of bodies to get you this chance. You should be grateful.”
“I’m notungrateful.”
He arched a brow at her that questioned her sincerity.
“What’s that supposed mean?”
Could he sense the treachery she plotted? Not that she had acted on it, but to hear her father and pastor speak, a thought was as good as an action. And in that case, she was guilty through and through. There was barely a minute that passed that she didn’t think about that damnable crook and what she was supposed to be doing to get it.
Of course, it was followed next by her desire to take said crook and shove it up a place of Nibo’s anatomy that would make Vlad the Impaler happy.
Two warring desires that both disgusted her. Because honestly, she just wanted to be left alone.
Nay, not true. She just wanted to be whole and loved. To be human again.
Just for one minute.
Thorn reached out and placed a sympathetic hand on her arm. His gaze turned gentle. “What was done to you, Miss Moore, was wrong. No one should ever seek to control another. Believe me, I had my own daddy issues that make yours pale in comparison. And like you, I ran from the destiny my father tried to iron-fist me into. I ran to the farthest hill I could find, stood on top of it, and defiantly dared him to try and knock me from it.”
“And what happened?”
“He kicked my ass and dragged me around the hill a few times.”
Not the answer she was hoping for.
