Page 55 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo
Her next bite tasted sour rather than sweet as an unwanted twinge of regret twisted in her stomach.
“I can offer more than money, you know.” Casually, he lifted his arms to scrub at his hair.
Lorelai made a rude noise. “You have no past, no country, no family, no compassion. No kindness. You won’t even claim a name. Just what do you have that could possibly entice me?”
“A kingdom.” He gestured to the window where the panorama stretched endlessly now, until it disappeared around the curvature of the earth. “I rule the seas. I wield more power over innumerable leagues than your so-called empress could even begin to fathom.”
“But you are ever at the mercy of those seas. Of the tides. No mere mortal can claim to control them,” she argued, astonished by his arrogance.
He dunked his head beneath the water and rose again. Rivulets sluiced from his hair and chose distracting trails down the cords of his neck, the groves of his clavicles, and between the swells of his chest. To look at him, it was easy to forget that he was a mere mortal. That he’d not been crafted of clay and iron, fortified by volcanic stone, and tempered by unimaginable storms.
“The sea has no mercy. Upon that I can rely.” He wiped a hand down his face, swiping away excess water, and Lorelai did her best not to notice that it still spiked in his dark lashes and gathered like gems on his skin in the invading sunlight.
“We are alike in that respect, the sea and I,” he rumbled. “Mercy serves me no purpose. I have learned to become as devastating as any storm. I can count upon the tides. They ebb and flow by the will of the moon and stars. I can time my life to their pull.” He studied her with such alert vigilance, she might as well have been crushed beneath a chemist’s microscope. “It is people who are more difficult to predict. They are the indefinable variable.”
Lorelai turned to the porthole window, their eye to the sea, and found that they’d somehow turned so an emerald coastline loomed in the distance. The Isle of Mull. The stronghold of the Blackheart of Ben More.
“Should my hoary kingdom not impress, I’ve plenty ofland holdings and the applicable titles to offer you,” he continued. “For example, I’m the Duke of Castel Domenico in Italy. The Comte de Lyon et de Verdun in France, and—”
“You’re aduke?” She nearly spurted coffee across the table.
“Well, a Continental one, but I believe it’s still apropos to address me as Your Grace.”
No, he had to be lying. “How… how did you…?”
“Easily. I killed the previous one, but not before he named me his heir. Many Continental titles are not so entailed to primogeniture as English ones.”
Lorelai had rarely been stunned so witless in her life. “Youkilledthe…”
He held up a water-wrinkled finger. “To be fair, most of them tried to kill me first.”
Most of them?“Does life mean so little you would discard it with such indifference?”
“Categorically.”
“Whathappenedto you?” she cried. “When did you decide to becomesucha villain?”
When were you on the Continent?she wanted to rail at him.And why didn’t you come for me then?
His words from the prior night drifted back to her.I waited to inflict myself on you for as long as I could…It’s the only kindness I can afford you.In this moment, she didn’t know whether to be grateful, or angry.
Gods, but he sent her emotions scrambling in so many directions, she felt caught in the web of the most confounding, dangerous spider on earth.
His gaze became a dreadful void, swirling with a darkness so abysmally black, she feared that if she looked for too long, she’d find the depths of hell. “That is a story I do not wish to tell,” he said in a voice as cold as the Arctic Sea. “And one you do not wish to hear.”
She believed him. And yet… She did want to hear it. She wanted to know. To understand. But did she want to picture the sort of torments that could have torn Ash away from himself?
Categorically not.
“Come over here,” he ordered. “I wish for you to wash my back.”
“But I—I’m not done with my breakfast.”
“Yes you are.”
She meant to argue with him, but then she glanced down at her empty plate.
“Will you go back on your word?” His challenge landed harshly in the lush opulence of his quarters. “You promised meanything.”
