Page 32 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo
She probably looked a fright, drenched and pale and wind-tossed.
Why should that matter?she admonished herself.
Because those eyes, those dark, empty eyes had once looked at her as though she were the most rare and beautiful treasure on this earth.
And now… now… nothing.
As the ship left the bay, the sea became as tumultuous as her own emotions, making it extra difficult to keep her feet beneath her.
The Rook advanced upon her with the unhurried but absolute concentration of a shark drawn to blood. He emoted no appetite, no aggression, no anticipation.
But hewashungry. Lorelai didn’t understand how sheknew it. She just did. Like the conditioned responses of any prey animal, she sensed his need with the tiny hairs prickling on the back of her neck. Or by the twitches and shivers of ever-ready muscles, urging her to run.
She hadn’t run in more than twenty-five years. Not that there was any hope for escape on a pirate ship.
Black trousers pulled tight against his thighs as he progressed, molding to legs much longer and thicker than she remembered. Brilliant, colorful, unidentifiable shapes of innumerable tattoos pressed against the white of his shirt as muscles he’d not yet built in his youth shifted when he reached for her.
As a boy, his body hinted at strength, now he rippled with it. He might have once been dangerous, now… danger seemed too mild a word. The peril she sensed in his presence defied description.
“How fortuitous that you’re already wearing a wedding dress,” he said without inflection.
Lorelai shrank away from him, but of course he didn’t allow it as he firmly disentangled her from Veronica’s clutching hands.
“Don’t you touch her,” Veronica cried.
“Do keep in mind, Lady Southbourne, the last person who presumed to command me now rests at the bottom of the ocean,” he replied. “And I say rest, because, in the end, his death was a mercy.”
Veronica paled, and for a moment, Lorelai thought she might swoon.
“There’s no need to threaten Lady Southbourne.” She kept her voice even, unchallenging, a tone she’d adopted and perfected during thirty years living with a volatile man. “I won’t make any trouble. You know that. Just tell us what you’re after.”
The stare he leveled at her hinted at displeasure, butLorelai had the sense an incalculable fury seethed beneath the air of indifference. “Do not speak to me as you spoke to your brother, Lorelai. I am not a man to be handled.”
“I wasn’t trying to—”
Dark brows lowered in calculating evaluation, his stubborn jaw tilting slightly to one side in an achingly familiar gesture. “Do not lie to me. If you are afraid, show it. If you are in pain, tell me. I might not know, otherwise.”
The moisture deserted her mouth. How did even the most innocuous sentences become sinister when uttered by him?
She attempted to accommodate him.
“I am afraid that you’ll do Veronica harm,” she admitted calmly.
His granite jaw relaxed slightly along with his grip on her arm. “Are you… not afraid I’ll do you harm?”
Well… she was now.
“I tell you, Captain, I don’t understand you one bit.” Moncrieff was also tall enough to have to duck beneath the arch of the cabin door. He punched his long arms into a lush, expensive emerald-green velvet jacket with a black silk collar. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t we expend a great deal of our time and effort doing our best toavoidgovernment institutions?”
“As a general rule, you are not wrong,” the Rook casually acquiesced.
“Marriage would make the second government institution you’ve entered into willingly in as many months. To be honest, I’d rather take a stab at Newgate than nuptials. Easier to escape, if you catch my meaning.” He aimed a mischievous wink at Veronica, as though she were in on some elaborate joke.
Veronica blinked once. Twice. Peering at him as though he spoke a language she’d never before encountered.
It might have been the rough heat of the hand shackling Lorelai’s arm that impeded her wits, but a stunned realization interrupted her brewing temper at Moncrieff’s unseemly remark in front of a traumatized recent widow.
Nuptials? Wedding? What had the Rook said when he entered? She’d been so busy cataloguing the differences betweenher Ashand the pirate who stood before her that the words hadn’t truly registered.
