“You are not dying.”
The brazier was another battle. Marguerite coaxed, adjusted, coughed, blackened two fingertips, and finally bullied it into a small, steady glow.
Afterward, she stood in the center of the room and looked around.
It was still a cabin aboard a frigate. But it was no longer stark. The rug softened the boards. The chair had ceased to look punitive. Candles made the walls less like a cell and more like a room in which a woman might not perish of despair. Even the copper tub, now burnished and gleaming beside the screen, had acquired a kind of indecent promise.
Marguerite had done it. She had taken a naval cabin and made it habitable.
Then she turned toward the clock. Three hours had passed. The sky beyond the stern window had gone dark. Her pulse abruptly remembered the black-haired duke who would come through that door, broad enough to make the room feel smaller, green-eyed enough to make every sensible thought flee toward the nearest coast. Heat gathered beneath her skin, then tangled with an answering chill so sharp that she pressed her blackened fingertips to her stomach.
Her hair had escaped its pins. Soot marked one cheek. Her sleeves were pushed to the elbows, her hands smelled of coal and metal, and a damp curl had attached itself to the side of her face with all the elegance of a mutinous flag. She had cleaned the tub, lit the brazier, softened the bed, and prepared the room for diplomacy of a distinctly dangerous kind.
In the process, she had become dirty, hot, and in desperate need of a bath.
The cabin was ready.
Marguerite was not.
Chapter twelve
Moonlight fell over Tristan’s shoulders like a warm blanket. It touched the open throat of his shirt and the backs of his hands, laying silver over him with the possessiveness of a jealous lover. He lifted his chin to the pale disk still low in the sky, and a shiver raced up his spine.
The moon had always been his partner on long nights of vigil. After battle, when smoke still clung to his coat, it had kept watch with him.
Tonight it seemed entirely indifferent to his plight.
Rise, damn you.
He looked up at it, jaw tight, while the light slipped beneath his collar. Below his boots, Marguerite d’Ailes waited in his cabin. What was she doing?
Was she standing near the stern windows where the moon could find her too? Silvering the loose fall of her hair, touching the curve of her cheek, the hollow of her throat, the small places where warmth gathered beneath silk?
He wanted to go below, take every cursed layer from her body, and see her dressed in nothing but moonlight.
Hand tightening on the rail, he glared at the moon.
Rise, so I can go down to her.
The moon remained low, touching him everywhere and refusing to release him.
But captains were not allowed to daydream under moonlight, and the foretopsail cracked above him, sharp as pistol fire.
Tristan looked up. The canvas snapped again, furious and half-free. The bosun was already moving, pipe clenched between his teeth.
“Stay where you are,” Tristan ordered.
The man halted. “Sir, I can send Jenkins aloft.”
“Leave it to me.”
A fouled brace needed clearing, and his hands needed something to do. The ratlines were rough beneath his gloves. He went up fast, the deck dropping away beneath him, the wind dragging at his shirt and hair. He reached the yard and braced himself against it. A worn length of line had twisted around the block. Below, the men held the sail, but every snap of canvas drove more force into the jam.
Tristan hooked one elbow through a stay, wedged his boot against the mast, and drove his marlinspike into the knot. The line refused him. He forced it harder, feeling the strain through wrist, forearm, shoulder. The spike slipped, scraped wood, and pain shot up his arm.
The rope shifted a quarter inch, then stuck fast.
Tristan stopped fighting the knot and reached for his knife. He sawed through the tarred fibers. Strand after strand parted with a harsh little snap that traveled through his hand. Then the final fibers gave, and the brace came free with a violent jerk that nearly wrenched him from the yard.
