Turning to the Rook, she clutched his shirt, searching his face for some semblance of humanity. “Please let her go. She’ll keep your identity secret if I ask her to, I know she will. If it’s me you’re after, you don’t need her.”
Her hopes fell as she found him as cold and remote as ever.
“What’s that charming saying about secrets? Two can keep them if one is dead.”
Moncrieff shut the door behind them with an ominous sound; Veronica’s protestations still tugged at Lorelai’s heart.
“You … you didn’t just threaten to … to kill her?” A shrill note climbed in tandem with her panic. “Is she safe with that lunatic?” She took a halting step toward the door.
The hand on her arm tightened just short of painfully. “You have my word … Veronica Weatherstoke will remain unmolested, so long as you comply.”
“God! Why must you be so violent?” The moment the frustrated words left her lips, she regretted them.
She wondered if the bleakness had lurked beneath his sinister façade this entire time, or if she’d conjured it with her words.
“Violence has kept me alive these twenty years. It’s all I know. All I remember. In fact, the second I walk out of this room, I’m going to war.”
“Then go,” she spat. “And the devil take you.”
“He might do. Someday.” He pried her white fingers from his throne and drew her toward him. He was a man aware of his power, physical and otherwise, and could wield or temper it with astounding control. “But tonight, I’m allowed this.”
When his gaze dropped to her lips, Lorelai panicked.
Oh God.
After a wedding, came a wedding night, and the Rook was about to claim his.
CHAPTER SEVEN
How long had she dreamed of this? How many times had she imagined Ash galloping toward her on his white steed, whisking her off the moors, and the two of them disappearing together into the mist? In her fantasies, they’d married. He’d kissed her gently, tenderly, with as much reverence as he had the day they’d parted.
The day he’d disappeared.
How could she have known that his fervent promise to come for her, all those years ago, had really been a threat?
When the Rook’s fingers brushed her neck beneath her veil, Lorelai trembled, but she held straight and still as a mooring post as he explored the delicate skin of her nape. His fingers threaded in her hair, tangling into the ruined coiffure until he cupped the back of her head.
“What a-are you doing?”
“You always wore your hair loose when we were young.” He extracted pins as he discovered them.
“I—I am no longer young,” she stammered. “Convention dictates that I wear it up.” Dear God, how could she be arguing about her hair at a time like this? “I cannot simply—”
“Convention holds no place here,” he interrupted, brushing her hair over her shoulder, so it spilled down her bodice. “You may do as you like.”
“Then I’d like to leave. I’d like to go home.”
A sharp breath escaped him. Not a chuckle, but perhaps a sign of amusement.
“Allow me to rephrase.” His head dropped until his lips grazed her shoulder exposed by the wide neckline of the gilded gown. Chills speared her, thrilling up from some deep and forgotten place with such force her belly clenched, before they exploded onto her skin in a wash of tiny shivers. “You may do as I like.”
The Rook eased her closer, and Lorelai remained so paralyzed, she couldn’t even find the wits to resist. His full lower lip curled slightly into his mouth, emerging with a sheen of moisture, then parting in preparation—
No.
Lorelai rejected the notion of this pirate ruining what she considered her loveliest memory. Should he kiss her now, it would be nothing like what she shared with Ash once upon a time.
What if it was terrible?
Or worse, what if she liked it? What if he made her want it? What if this new demonic incarnation of Ash stirred in her the same awakenings she’d experienced as a girl in his arms?
Because, Lord help her, the Rook was possessed of a dark charisma she’d never before encountered, and it was wreaking havoc with her senses already.
Ducking her chin against her chest, she turned her tiara into a weapon.
A less dexterous man would have taken a Weatherstoke sapphire right to the eye.
Before she could process what was happening, he spun her to face the bed.
He stood behind her now, one arm clamped around her, just above her breasts, as he relieved her of her tiara and veil and tossed it to the ground, heedless of the glittering precious heirlooms.
She barely noted the tug as the bulk of her awareness was completely focused on the bed in front of her. A decadent, cavernous thing, the canopy strung with enough vibrant silk to shame Salome. The coverlet belonged in a sultan’s harem, stitched with a riot of silver thread into sensual patterns across a vivid blend of fabrics.
She couldn’t have conjured a more dissimilar wedding bower to the one she’d expected to endure this night.
They stood like that for several silent, heaving breaths as the storm raged outside, tossing the boat this way and that. His powerful legs stabilized them both. His thighs flexed against the curve of her rump in a disquieting dance with the unstable ground beneath them.
Rather than bother with a bustle, Lorelai had favored gathers and ruffles for a train, and she regretted that now, as every swell and sinew of his well-hewn body pressed against her back with naught but a fabric barrier.
The short but heavy breaths pressing his chest against her contradicted his inscrutability.
“Where are you taking us?” she ventured, frantically trying to distract them both from the bed looming right before them.
“Wherever I desire.” His arm kept her prisoner against his unyielding bulk, as the questing fingers of his free hand continued to delve into her hair. He whispered something against her skin, but her heart beat too loudly in her ears for her to correctly perceive it. Questing lips trailed over her skin. He paused at heart-stopping intervals to drag in deep lungfuls of air as though he could store her essence inside of him.
“After everything…” He released a harsh breath. “After twenty years. You are mine.”
A note in his voice froze Lorelai in place. Not with fear, but something adjacent to it. For the first time, humanity seeped into his timbre, and along with it some terrible mélange of bleak rage and awestruck anticipation. It was as though he were as astonished as she to have found themselves here.
So many questions stung like vicious wasps behind her lips, but she was too much a coward to give them breath. Ash would have patiently answered each one. But the Rook?
Who knew the depravity of which he was capable?
A hoarse gasp of shock escaped her as he roughly bent her over the bed, imprisoning her with his hips as he unlaced her gown with rough tugs against her ribs.
It was the thickening shape of his sex against her backside that finally galvanized Lorelai from panic into action. She clawed her way up the counterpane, kicking out at him from behind with her ineffectual leg and scrambling across the bed. It was an undignified retreat, to be sure, but an effective one.
Lorelai thrashed and struggled against her unwieldy skirts, but finally gained her feet by way of a clumsy roll. Now she stood against the terror of the high seas with only a bed between them. Blinking rapidly, she found him staring across at her with a possessive savagery she’d not expected from a face that had thus far been so carefully expressionless.
And yet he made no move to follow her.
“I’m not yours,” she declared, rather courageously, in her opinion. She’d meant to say more, to talk sense into this barbarian, but a tightness in her chest stole her capacity for breath, and thereby, words. Her vision began to blur, distorting his brutal visage and clarifying the motes of dust sparkling in the dim silver light of the storm, aided by a few flickering lanterns.
&n
bsp; Lorelai had never known true fear before. She’d lived her life under the thumb of a cruel and intemperate bully. But the trepidation and anxiety she’d considered a part of her every interaction with Mortimer ill prepared her for this pure, mortal terror.
She’d thought she understood what helpless was.
She’d had no idea.
A detached part of her marveled at it. At him. This man crafted of lethal strength and absolute Cimmerian ferocity. She had held him so long ago while he trembled in pain and fear as a boy. She’d brushed that inky hair away from those austere eyes and coaxed reluctant smiles from his hard mouth.
In this moment, no one would believe such a thing possible. Were her memories a lie? Had he never touched her with gentle deference? Had he always been this callous, violent beast?
Where are you, Ash?
For he was not here. Not with her in this room. Not inside the sinister villain who wielded his muscle and sinew to devastating effect.
Lorelai’s chest burned and her heart hurled itself against its cage. Finally, her body forced her to expel a breath she hadn’t realized she’d kept trapped in her lungs.
The movement drew his gaze to her bosom.
Glancing down, Lorelai found that her loosened bodice had drifted to her waist. Her corset pinched her breasts high enough that the shameful pink crescents of her areolas crested above the contraption, the abundant flesh quivering in time to the trembles of her body. If she’d been wearing her own cotton camisole, it would have shielded her flesh from his view. But Veronica’s gauzy French chemise, so iridescent it barely deserved the name, shimmered like gossamer hummingbird’s wings, revealing more than it concealed.
With an indecorous squeak, she yanked her bodice up to her shoulders, clutching it to her décolletage.
A flash of lightning turned his eyes into silver embers, glinting every bit as hard and hot as tempered steel. “Come here, Lorelai,” he ordered. Was his voice less steady than before? Or had she imagined it thus?
“I am not your wife,” she hissed. “You may not simply order me about like one of your crew. Just because I’m here against my will doesn’t mean I belong to you.”
His head made a serpentine motion on his neck. “That is where you’re mistaken, Lorelai.” He spoke through his teeth, reaching for a post of the bed as he carefully navigated around it.
“I—I won’t like it,” she threatened, taking an infinitesimal step backward.
Would he make a liar of her?
He advanced to the foot of the bed, and only one corner separated her from her fate. And then he stood before her once again, a dark tower of saturnine grace. A man who moved with such finesse, she’d not marked his footfalls. It seemed his shadow reached her before he did, and now here he was, close enough to share breath.
“I can promise your screams will be of pleasure, not of pain.”
Lorelai found herself once again unable to move as his words evoked a quiver somewhere south of her belly. She became mesmerized by something both foreign and familiar in his dark eyes. He didn’t blink. Never once did he break eye contact as both human and nature’s laws dictated he should.
“Is there no kindness left in you?” A muted whimper escaped her as hot tears burned her temples. “Do I mean so little to you?”
“So little?” He spirited away a mystified expression as quickly as it appeared, replacing it with his maddening inscrutability. “I survived…” He paused. Blinked. Then seemed to change his mind. “I crossed horizons for you, Lorelai.” He reached out to trace her jaw, her cheekbones, her trembling lips. Pausing at the river of moisture at her temple, he swiped at a tear, rubbing it between his thumb and finger and examining it like one would a foreign substance. “I’ve been watching you for several months, you know.”
“Several … months?” She gasped, her mind swimming with implications she couldn’t reconcile.
“I came for you the moment I made my way back to England.”
Back to England? Where had he gone? Where had he been for twenty years? Why hadn’t he come for her the moment he touched down on British soil?
“I spied you in the estuary,” he continued. “Teaching a fucking orphaned otter how to swim. And I decided that I’d give you as many days as possible without me. It’s the only kindness I can afford you, I’m afraid. I waited to inflict myself on you for as long as I could.” The fingers he rubbed together now curled into a fist. “But I would not see you married to another man. So now … here we are. And there is nothing to be done for it.”
“You speak as though it’s out of your hands,” she marveled.
“It is. It always has been.” He might have sounded apologetic, which was both terrifying and ludicrous. “I was born the moment I heard your voice commanding me to live. And you have been mine ever since. You’re right, Lorelai, there’s nothing to be done for that.”
“Then perhaps I should have left you to rot beneath that ash tree.” She’d meant to lash out at him. To hurt him. To drive him away, somehow, until she could contain this rapidly disintegrating situation.
“Perhaps that might have been best for us both.” He toyed with a loathed wispy curl at her temple, one of several which would neither grow nor be tamed, and forever framed her face.
Then his palms traced their way down her neck to her shoulders. They were even rougher than she remembered, the calluses like sandpaper against the tender skin. In a feline gesture, he brought his cheek to rest against hers, the stubble rasping against her jaw, as he seemed to savor her fragrance like one would an expensive wine before taking a sip.
His dark head lowered further to the hollow of her throat, dragging his lips across it. His warm breath made way for the heat of his tongue, and something damp and disloyal rushed between her legs.
Desire flared, and panic surged alongside it, surpassing the sensation with a dizzying rush of terror. She could not allow herself to submit. Not to him. Not like this. Not until she could find Ash behind the dead-eyed predator.
Lorelai’s knee connected with hard flesh before she’d even made the conscious decision to fight. She rushed around him as a breathless sound escaped his throat followed by hoarse, horrid curses.
She hoped to put the table between them, if only to buy her some time.
She hadn’t thought this through, had she? Where would she go on an unfamiliar ship? What awaited her on the other side of that door?
The boat pitched sharply, and her left foot met the ground with more force than she could take. She gave a cry of pain as her weak ankle gave out, and she sprawled forward, biting her lip hard enough to draw blood upon impact with the ground.
The tears didn’t flow because of fear or pain anymore, but out of sheer, helpless frustration. She looked like a fool, prostrate on the floor. Despite her intensifying antipathy for the Rook, she didn’t want Ash—if any part of him was left—to see her humiliated like this.
Maybe he’d be angry enough to kill her before she had to lift her head. Then she wouldn’t have to face her own mortification.
He was on her in an instant, turning her, lifting her, cradling her to his chest. Much like he’d done so long ago. Lorelai’s tears became as torrential as the storm. She did her best not to remember the last time she’d cried against him. The last time she’d made herself a fool in front of him. It had been over a raven.
A rook.
Silently, he conducted her back to the bed, limping only slightly. He sat her on the counterpane, rumpled by her struggles. This time, she didn’t fight him, not even when he reached into a trouser pocket.
“Get it over with,” she sobbed, crossing her arms over her corset in a feeble attempt to regain her modesty. “I’d rather die than live as your wife.”
His hand froze, halfway out of his pocket. “You think I’m going to … kill you?”
“And why shouldn’t I? You murdered Mortimer,” she said woodenly. “In a churchyard, no less. In the late afternoon in front of God and everyone. You didn’t even
… hesitate or—”
“In my experience, hesitation is the number one cause of death.” He flicked out a handkerchief and presented it to her, as though to prove a point.
To say she was surprised didn’t cover half of it. She’d only just kneed him in his … manly bits. Wasn’t he livid? Why was he not punishing her in some dastardly, piratey manner?
“Why do you weep over him?” He didn’t sound angry, only confounded, but Lorelai didn’t fail to note that he wouldn’t say Mortimer’s name. “He broke your fucking leg. He fed your pets to you. Life with him these past twenty years could hardly have been palatable.”
He didn’t know the half of it.
“Tell me you’ve not become so touched as to keenly mourn his loss.”
The disgust in his words sparked a temper she’d long considered dormant. “It is Ash’s loss I mourn,” she spat, delicately wiping at her nose. “For he is gone, and a stranger has taken his place. Ash would never have done something so monstrous. Even to Mortimer.”
“You are both right and wrong about that,” he responded wryly. He seemed about to say something, and then changed his mind. Regarding her with more curiosity than regret. “You once said that to become a monster you must first do something monstrous. And as a youth at Southbourne, Ash thought he might have done monstrous things in the boyhood he didn’t remember. But I’m convinced that until the day we were parted, Ash only had dirt on his hands.”
Lorelai puzzled over his use of the name in the third person as the Rook held his large, callused hands out to her, as though to demonstrate their filthiness.
“Now there is blood. Enough blood to stain this Channel a red no less than biblical. But that is not why it was so easy to kill your brother.” His hands curled to fists. “Mark me, Lorelai, had you not been watching I would not have been kind enough to grant him such a painless death.”
She closed her eyes against the sight of the blade skewered through Mortimer’s open mouth. “His death did not seem so painless.”
He gripped her chin, forcing her to look at his savage features. His other palm feathered over her hair with a confounding gentleness. “That is because you do not know enough of pain.”
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