Page 69 of A Dance with the Wayward Duke
Then he saw a flash of silver. At the edge of the crowd, near a column, Marguerite stood. She wore the same gown from Brighton. Tristan stopped breathing. He had wanted her then with the clean violence of appetite. He had not known yet what it would mean to see that same silver now, in Naples, after she had slept in his bed, wept in his arms, and built his welcome with her own hands.
The dress was unchanged. He was not.
She was watching him. Their eyes met across the room, and everything else dimmed—the mirrors, the jewels, the king’shand on his sleeve, the murmur of the court she had conquered for him. Her expression softened first, then steadied.
“So, Captain,” Murat said, drawing his attention back by sheer royal force. “Did you bring your family with you?”
The word struck him motionless. Family. He looked at the king, startled, then back at Marguerite.
She took a step back into the crowd. His chest ached. She meant to disappear.
He could let it happen. He knew how. He had done it all his life. Let go before weight became fatal. Let the ship sail lighter. Let the woman who had given too much walk away before he took the rest. In another moment, she would be gone into the glittering mass of Naples, and he could stand beside a king, accept honor, drown himself later in a tavern, and call the ache survival.
A captain survived by cutting.
Tristan looked at Marguerite.
She was too vital to cut.
The realization struck through him like the moment before impact, when a ship caught on a rock and every man aboard understood the old course had ended.
No more cutting.
“Indeed, I have this rascal of an Italian brother,” Tristan said, clapping Lorenzo on the shoulder. “And somebody else.”
Murat turned his head. “Ah?”
Tristan bowed slightly, already moving. “One moment, Your Majesty.”
He strode into the circle. The room parted because men did not step into Tristan Blackmere’s path unless they had first made peace with God. He heard Lorenzo behind him draw in one sharp breath. Heard the hiss of silk, the pause in conversation.
Marguerite’s eyes widened. Her brows lifted in a question. She took one small step back, but there was nowhere to go. The crowd had opened for him and closed behind her.
“Tristan,” she whispered when he reached her.
He took her hand. Her fingers were cold when he laced them with his. The shock of that simple joining traveled up his arm and settled in the center of his chest, steadying what no battle, no swim, no command had managed to steady.
“What are you doing?” she breathed.
“What I should have done before we reached land.”
He brought her with him to the king, their joined hands visible beneath the blaze of chandeliers.
The court quieted by degrees until even the musicians faltered. Now there was only Marguerite beside him, small and trembling and upright as a queen.
Murat’s gaze dropped to their joined hands. His brows rose with magnificent interest.
“Your Majesty,” Tristan said, his voice carrying clearly through the room. “I present to you my wife, Marguerite, Duchess of Stormhaven.”
Chapter twenty-eight
The velvet curtain fell behind them. Marguerite stood in the narrow alcove off the throne room, one hand still caught in Tristan’s, the other pressed against her stomach as if she might hold herself together by force. Beyond the heavy fold of red velvet, the entire Neapolitan court had become a living, whispering organism. Silk rustled. Fans snapped open. Voices rose, all of them circling the same impossible fact.
His wife.
Marguerite, Duchess of Stormhaven.
The words seemed to float somewhere above her head, absurdly grand, absurdly public, entirely disconnected from the woman currently trapped behind a curtain trying to remember how lungs operated. She had gone to the court to see his triumph before fading away into her own future. That had been the plan. Give him his name. Watch him receive it. Vanish into Naples.
