Tristan slid his hand over her belly, lower, searching the folds of her sex for the place he knew would draw her back from wherever she had gone.
She caught his wrist. The restraint struck him like a door closing.
Hurt opened under his ribs, even as pleasure burst from his spine.
He withdrew and spent against her hip and the curve of her backside with a broken sound he barely recognized as his own.
Panting, he reached for her. He did not know what he meant to do. Pull her close. Kiss her shoulder. Gather her against him and keep the morning from coming.
She rose. The sheet came with her, drawn around her body like armor.
“Can you leave now?” she asked. “I’m tired.”
The words hit with the clean force of a blow and left him naked in the wreckage of the bed. Her face had gone quiet in the worst way. Hurt, carefully folded and held out of reach.
Christ, it hurt to see it.
“I tried to come sooner,” he said. His voice scraped out of him, rough and useless. “But I—”
“We did not bargain for obligation.” She gathered the sheet higher over her breasts. “The Sea Wolf was always free to come and go.”
His jaw tightened. “That is not what this is.”
“No?”
He stepped closer before he could stop himself. His hand lifted toward the sheet, hovering above her as if touch had become a language he no longer spoke.
He was losing her. A vise clamped over his chest. He could not lose her. He could have her back. It would be easy. He could take the sheet from her clenched fingers, gather her against him, and tell her he had stayed away because he had been trying, like a coward, to survive wanting her. He could say he loved her, and the hurt in her face would break. Perhaps his own would break with it.
His throat closed.
“I never thought of this as obligation, Marguerite.”
“No,” she said softly. “You see it as weight. And it is time we cut it. Before it sinks us both.”
He had taught her that language. He had given her the blade and called it survival. Now she held it between them. His hand fell. He took one step back. Then another. He turned before he could beg. The latch was cold beneath his palm. He opened the door and stepped into the passage, where the lantern still swung, and the ship still breathed, and the world had the indecency to continue.
Marguerite had given him all he had asked for.
And it was not enough to survive.
Chapter twenty-five
Three days later, Gulf of Naples
Tristan stood on the stern gallery outside the captain’s cabin and watched Marguerite sleep in his bed for the last time. Naples lay ahead. The night was warmer, the sea darker, the stars sharper over the Mediterranean. For three days, Marguerite had not been in his arms, but everywhere else on this ship.
Tomorrow, if the wind held, they would raise the coast, and she would step into the future she had chosen before he understood what it would cost him to deliver her there.
His hands twisted around the gallery ropes, the hemp biting into his palms. At least pain stayed where a man put it, while longing crawled under doors, through locked windows, past every rule of command, and lodged behind the breastbone like shot.
He could open the hatch, climb inside like the pirate she had first believed him to be, fall to his knees beside the bed, and tell her that when Sarkouf came up on their quarter, the thought oflosing her had made the ship tilt. That breathing had become a luxury since she had asked him to leave. He could tell her Naples was too close, the bargain too small, and he, too late.
But he didn’t. Silence was discipline, even if it felt like starvation.
Tristan set one foot on the lower rail. The sea ran black beneath him, streaked with broken moonlight. The frigate’s sails had been trimmed down for the night.
He swung his other leg over. Better the clean danger of water than walking into that cabin, falling at her feet, and begging for a mercy he had no right to ask.
