Page 71 of A Dance with the Wayward Duke
“I will want to gouge out the eyes of every Italian who looks at you with more than admiration. And then you will have to spend the entire night placating me.”
A sob-laugh tore from her before she could stop it. It sounded ridiculous. Broken and bright together, like crystal dropped on marble and somehow not shattered.
“Is that enough Italian for you?” he murmured.
Tears gathered in her eyes. She did not know what to do with him. That was the horror of it. She knew how to manage difficult men. But this pirate duke kept refusing the terms. She should have been furious. She was furious. She was also trembling so violently that her fingers tightened around his.
“You are a captain,” she said, her voice low and unsteady. “You survive by cutting everything that weighs too much, and if you cut me again, I will not survive it.”
The words came out before dignity could intercept them. There. The naked truth, without lace, without clauses, without one civilized ribbon tied around its throat.
Tristan’s brows drew together. “I am not a captain anymore, Marguerite,” he said.
“You will always be a captain.”
“Perhaps. But I was the greatest fool alive to believe that nonsense in the first place. It almost cost me my brother. And the woman I love.”
A violin whispered mellow notes. Tristan’s hands held hers, warm and callused, the hands that had gripped ropes, guns, her waist, her hair, and now, impossibly, her future.
“Do you not understand?” she asked, and the plea in her own voice humiliated her enough to make her chin lift. “This is an unequal arrangement. A misalliance. You cannot marry me. I have nothing to offer the Duke of—”
He touched her lips. “Never again in your life will you negotiate affection, Marguerite.”
Her breath stopped beneath his finger.
“You are so worthy that you could enter this arrangement with no clothes on your back and still marry me if I were a bloody prince, and I would still have the better part of the bargain.”
Her throat closed, and the words struck places in her she had hidden so deep she had forgotten they could still hurt. He stripped her defenses away in one breath and looked at what remained as if it were treasure.
“I love you,” he said.
How could it be that Naples, around them, remained the same, while inside her, something that had been clenched for years opened? As it turned out, happiness was not a polite caller. Itcame into her chest with a rush so warm she would never again be cold. Marguerite gasped, and her skin tingled from her scalp to her fingertips. Tears spilled before she could decide whether to permit them.
“Oh,” she whispered, which was a poor contribution to one of the most significant diplomatic crises of her life.
Tristan smiled then, with such naked tenderness that the last of her resistance folded inward. He lifted her hands and kissed one, then the other. The pressure of his mouth against her gloves undid her more completely than any scandalous kiss could have done.
“Will you marry me?” he asked.
Marguerite laughed through her tears. “But Tristano, we are already married. You all but shouted it to the world.”
His eyes darkened. He could not mean to kiss her here, with the king of Naples, half the court, and several generations of protocol waiting on the other side of the curtain.
Then he bent his head, and she rose to meet him, because court be damned, she needed his lips against hers, and if that was not diplomatic, then call her a rebel. When he drew back, she was smiling so helplessly her face ached.
“We must go out there,” she said.
“Yes.”
“They are waiting.”
“Yes.”
“There is still the minor question,” she said, recovering a fragment of herself because happiness this large required structure, “of the actual wedding.”
“I am prepared to be married in every church in Naples. By English law, by Neapolitan custom, by naval regulation, by papal dispensation, or by pirate oath.”
“A pirate oath is not recognized by civilized nations.”
