Lorelai knew Veronica meant well. She did nothing without the best of intentions, but the desperate words tripping on Veronica’s shallow breaths did more to keep herself calm than anything.
“They’ll be looking for us, but I don’t think anyone can identify our captor by sight,” Lorelai said gravely. “He wore that cowl and large coat, if you remember, and no one has had much of a chance to recognize him. He’s not known to leave witnesses … alive.”
“He seemed to know you.” Veronica narrowed a questioning glance in her direction.
“Yes,” Lorelai murmured through lips blanched entirely numb. “But he wasn’t the Rook when I knew him.” When I loved him … she finished silently.
Veronica’s mind tended to work quickly, especially in times of crisis. During her tenure as the Countess Southbourne, she’d learned to deftly manage danger, as well as establish and implement evasion and problem-solving techniques learned through painstaking trial and error.
Lorelai fancied she could see the gears of her sister-in-law’s mind whirring like a timepiece wound too tightly. Veronica had yet to cease trembling, though she hadn’t shed a tear for her dead husband.
And why should she?
The ship lurched, chugged, and shuddered with a fantastic effort as they gathered strength and speed. Crystal tinkled from the shades of several hanging electric lamps, and exotic tassels swayed from the canopy of the monstrous bed upon which they huddled. A book slid off the table by the widest porthole, startling them both.
The ship had only two masts, and they’d not been unfurled when they’d boarded. But even a steamship was rarely so nimble as this one.
“You can swim, can’t you?” Veronica asked. “If we hurry, we might be able to fit through these windows before they come back. Without the weight of our skirts, there’s a chance we could make it to the estuary in time.” Standing, she used the furniture to steady herself as she stumbled for the surprisingly wide window.
“We’re too far out. We’d never make it, especially not in a storm like this.” Lorelai’s arms itched where rain still dried on her skin. Her torn, soiled gloves had disappeared, though she couldn’t remember where she’d discarded them now. Funny, that she’d worry about such trifles at a time like this. She’d rather think of anything, she supposed, than the dangerous pirate who’d come for her. Distantly, she wondered if this was all a dream. A nightmare caused by extreme prewedding anxiety. Would she wake back at Southbourne and be forced to relive the tedium and terror of her wedding day all over again?
This time, without murder.
Without Ash.
If he’d come for her … did she want to wake?
She dug her nails against her palm, wincing when the pain lanced her. No, she was fully conscious.
But unconvinced that the man who’d kidnapped her was the boy she’d loved.
Veronica grappled with the porthole latch. “I think I’d rather drown than endure what awaits us on this pirate ship.” Hysteria edged out the reason in her voice. “How can you be so calm?”
Calm? Is that what she was? Calm. She supposed her inability to move must seem tranquil, but in truth Lorelai attributed her behavior to terrified paralysis more than anything.
Shock. Astonishment. Distress. Any similar word she summoned to describe her current state seemed woefully inadequate to the task. Traumatized, perhaps?
Ash? The Rook? How?
Reality had just collided with a nightmare, and she and Veronica were the reluctant debris left in the aftermath.
“Dash it, Lorelai, help me open this!” Veronica cried. “We’ve heard the stories of the Rook, read the news articles. You witnessed what that man did to Mortimer. The Rook has a crew of men with rocks for hearts and he’s the deadliest of the lot.”
“Which is why it would behoove you both to behave.” The air in the room cooled several degrees, and even the storm shadows deepened as the Rook ducked into the cabin. It was as though he brought the darkness with him. He wore it about his wide shoulders like a regal mantle tailored for the devil, himself.
Suddenly very aware that she sat upon his bed, Lorelai stood, her hand searching for Veronica, who instantly returned to her side. She wasn’t sure why, but it seemed easier to address the most infamous and lethal pirate in centuries—one who wore the features of her first love—whilst clinging to her only friend in the world.
His cool, detached manner stung more than it should as he assessed her with distressing thoroughness.
Veronica probably assumed she tightened her grip out of a similar terror, but in reality, she did it to stay the impulse to smooth her bedraggled hair or fiddle with the veil that hung damp and limp from her crown.
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 he was hungry. Lorelai didn’t understand how she knew 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, but Lorelai 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 cabi
n 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 to avoid government 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 between her Ash and the pirate who stood before her that the words hadn’t truly registered.
How fortuitous that you’re already wearing a wedding dress.
Her heartbeats stumbled and collided into one another, her nerves singing with dread and alarm.
Oh heavens. He didn’t mean to—
“What in God’s name are you wearing? Green velvet?” The Rook’s crooked, aristocratic nose wrinkled with distaste. Oddly enough, it was the most demonstrative he’d been during this entire ordeal.
“You don’t like it?” Moncrieff threw his arms wide and puffed out an already thickly muscled chest. “Bought it off a merchant in the Turkish bazaar. Said the color was unparalleled but he couldn’t sell it on account of it being ‘too fucking hot for velvet,’ if you’ll pardon his French, my lady.” In any other situation, the flirtatious smile he bestowed upon Veronica would have been heart-stopping on features as handsome as his. “I wore it for the occasion because I thought it matched your eyes.”
Lorelai’s jaw slackened. How could someone flirt at a time like this?
Veronica looked away from him in disgust, but the color did seem to return to her cheeks. A great deal of it, in fact.
“Couldn’t find a Bible.” Unfazed, Moncrieff reached behind him, retrieving a book he’d tucked into the waistband of his trousers. “But I did, however, confiscate a copy of Hornbrook’s Encyclopedia of Admiralty and Maritime Law from Montez’s bunk, and I figured that would have to do.”
An elegantly built man would not have been able to lay the heavy volume open with one hand as Moncrieff did. But from what Lorelai had encountered of the crew on the Devil’s Dirge, the Rook wasn’t in the habit of employing elegant men. Moncrieff’s unceasingly sophisticated accent and affable demeanor was in such direct contradiction to his barbaric stature, it confounded her in the extreme.
A couple of expensive rings glittered in the lanternlight as Moncrieff ran a finger down a page. “Thou shalt not covet, fornicate, commit adultery, steal, murder, and so forth. Basically, the same stuff as the Holy Book with a bit of nautical language thrown in. To my way of thinking, we ignore just about as many laws in this book as the other one. Though it does beg the question, whom do you fear more, God or the British Royal Navy?”
“Neither,” the Rook clipped. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Get what over with?” Lorelai demanded. Even before she’d said it, a part of her understood exactly what was about to happen. It just seemed so ludicrous. So impossible, she convinced herself she must be interpreting the situation incorrectly.
“Just so.” The book snapped shut with such a crack, both women jumped, and Moncrieff adopted a mock-solemn demeanor, ruined by the ever-present twinkle of mischief in his eyes.
Panic seized Lorelai, enough that she had to fight little spots of darkness in her periphery. She reached for a chair tucked beneath a table that seemed to be bolted down. The Rook’s throne, she realized. A dark velvet so deeply blue, it might have been purple in brilliant light. Heavy wood arms with intricate braiding matched the tall, ornate post to which she now clung.
“You can’t be serious,” she cried. “Ash, stop this. Tell me what’s going on!”
Slowly, deliberately, he bent until his brutal visage was a breath away from hers. From this close, she could trace every line of the fine web of scars on his jaw and neck, could discern how the lantern reflected a glossy sheen off the long-healed lye burns. She could see that the sun could not paint the old wound with as much color as it did the rest of him.
He smelled of wind and salt.
“Call me Ash again, and you will not like the consequences. For he does not exist anymore.”
Her broken exhalation crashed against features cast from stone, and Lorelai could have sworn his nostrils flared on an inhale.
No. This creature of ice and darkness was not Ash. Gone was his protective vigilance. His appreciative silence. And his almost uncertain but reverent adoration. In its place towered a being of undisputed power, claimed by means of inhumane pillage and ruthless discipline.
“Then … Who are you?” she whispered, her heart in her throat.
He straightened to his towering height, a wry expression creating a crease next to his hard mouth. “I still have no idea,” he answered cryptically. “So, what does it matter?”
Lorelai watched the familiar divot in his chin as he nodded to Moncrieff.
She scanned his face with the eyes of her once-fourteen-year-old self who had loved him. So many of his features were the same. Lush hair so black, it gleamed blue in the light. Twenty years had threaded a touch of silver into the roots by his ears and the evening stubble on his jaw. The skin in the creases branching from his eyes was the same shade of pale he’d been as a boy. The sardonic wrinkle between his dark brows remained identical to Ash’s. The top lip drawn forever tight, balanced by the fullness of the one beneath was unmistakable.
Those lips had kissed her once. She’d yearned for them across the void of time between that moment and this one.
Now she feared them. Feared him.
Grief swamped her, threatening to buckle her knees. Somehow, she’d known he’d be this striking as a grown man. She’d just assumed he lived his forgotten life elsewhere. That he was happy.
Because why else wouldn’t he come for her?
It wasn’t until Moncrieff theatrically cleared his throat that she realized what the Rook’s nod to him had signified.
Moncrieff opened the book to a random page and pretended to read. “Captain, did you literally take this woman for the purposes of being your wife? For profit and desire, for plunder and pleasure, in seasickness and health for as long as you are inclined to have her?”
“I did.” The Rook didn’t look at her. “She is mine.”
“That’s it then. By the powers vested in me by, well, you … I pronounce you pirate captain and wife. Felicitations to you both. You may kiss the bride.”
“You may not kiss me!” Lorelai protested, though she belatedly noted he made no move to do so. “And I am not your bride.” Whirling on Moncrieff, she demanded, “Aren’t you going to ask me if I take him? Because I categorically do not.”
Moncrieff laughed as though she’d said something hilarious. “The entire world has tried to take the captain, woman, what makes you think you can?”
“This is a ship, where my word is law,” the Rook reminded her. “You are not required to say ‘I do,’ only to do as I say.”
“But—but this wedding isn’t legitimate,” she sputtered. “No country on earth would acknowledge it. You simply cannot marry a woman against her will!”
One dark brow climbed toward his hairline. “Are you saying it was your will to wed Sylvester Gooch?”
“Well, of course not, but—”
“Then your argument is null.”
A flash of lightning gilded Moncrieff’s queue with threads of bronze as he nodded sagely. “Women have been marryin
g against their will for untold centuries. In fact, marriage is usually the worst thing to happen to a woman in one way or another, and yet so many insist on spending their days pursuing a husband like a bloodhound does an escaped convict. Why do you suppose that is?”
“Moncrieff,” the Rook clipped.
“Yes, Captain.”
“Go get drunk. That’s an order.”
“With pleasure.” He gave them both a halfhearted, two-fingered salute and did an about-face.
They all silently awaited the thunder to finish as though it were a loud and impertinent guest.
“And take Countess Southbourne to her quarters,” the Rook amended.
“Lorelai?” Veronica’s voice wavered, as Moncrieff’s body blocked the women’s access to each other.
“I could get her drunk,” he offered.
“Don’t you dare touch me. Oof!” Veronica lunged away from the man with such violence, she unwittingly threw herself on the bed.
“Come without a fuss and I won’t have cause to.”
Rolling to the side of the bed, Veronica placed the post between her and the towering pirate. “I won’t leave you alone, Lorelai. Not with him.”
“We could both stay,” Moncrieff suggested with a lascivious waggle of his brows. “Why should the bride be the only one to bed a pirate tonight? If you should like to participate in what comes next…”
Veronica blanched.
“Best put her in a cabin with a small porthole,” the Rook suggested with bland indifference. “We wouldn’t want her doing anything … irrational. She’s more valuable to me alive.”
In one deft move, Moncrieff had Veronica’s arms anchored to her sides as he picked up the struggling countess as though she were as limp as a sack of grain. “I know just the one,” he said after blowing the peacock feather of her headdress away from his mouth with a distasteful grimace.
“Lorelai!” The helpless terror in Veronica’s voice called her to action, and Lorelai lunged toward her reaching hand. An iron grip on her shoulder held her back.
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