His mouth, now drawn into a tight line of strain, had been hot and demanding against hers. Full, lush, and astoundingly wicked.
Not only did the memory of his mesmerizing kiss heat her cheeks, but so did another, more bewildering sense of shame.
A shame fed by the daggers of accusation flung from his narrowed eyes, ripping through her composure.
It’d been more than a year since she’d surrendered her consciousness thus, and this time she’d been gone for hours.
She’d insulted him, obviously, by fainting in the middle of their kiss.
And then she’d left him.
Why did it feel in her heart that an escape from a pirate ship, from a coerced marriage, was somehow a betrayal? Why did the bleak austerity in his midnight eyes cause her own form of frantic sorrow?
Because he was her Ash. Despite everything. He was in there, locked away somewhere, somewhere beneath the tattoos and the brutal strength and the emptiness. He’d come for her. She just … she just needed to find him.
She thought she had for a moment when his lips touched hers. They were the same lips she’d remembered, filled with the same need. Only amplified a thousandfold. Oh God, she wished she could tell him, that she could convey somehow that she’d not lost consciousness out of terror, or pain, or lack of affection.
Quite the opposite.
His kiss had done something to her. Had unlocked a part of her that she’d not known existed. It was as though he’d breathed some part of his own animalistic lust into her, and the raw, primal desire had overwhelmed her so completely she’d just … collapsed.
Strange, that she’d not done so when Mortimer died. Or when the Rook had married her under a piratical threat. Historically, such stressors would have put her under for days.
It was just a kiss … and it was so much more than that.
She’d tasted Ash on the Rook’s lips. She’d wanted a taste of more. Wanted him to do all of the things he’d offered to do. She’d wanted it with such a ferocity, and feared it with such a timidity, that the contradiction had seemed to tear her consciousness from her.
Lorelai’s first instinct was to go to him. But, of course, that would not do. Not in a room filled to bursting with wealthy, and possibly dangerous, strangers. She laced her fingers together and crossed her ankles beneath her borrowed dress to keep from reaching for him.
At first, his gaze had consumed her from the top of her freshly washed curls, to the beribboned hem of her peach gown. As though making sure she wasn’t some counterfeit sent to confound him.
More emotion played across his sinister features in the space of a few breaths than she’d identified in the entire time he’d been her captor. A desperate sort of relief warmed his gaze before a dreary disenchantment slackened his proud shoulders in the same instant it tensed his jaw.
It was a long time before he looked at her again.
I didn’t leave you, she wanted to shout. I woke up on a boat halfway to shore, and all I wanted to do was turn around.
Which clearly proved she’d gone mad. Didn’t it?
She yearned to smooth the wrinkles of strain from between his forehead. To press a calming kiss to the twitch above his left eyebrow. To shape her hand over the scars on his jaw.
He prowled into the room ahead of Blackwell, appearing every inch the self-possessed predator, stalking into the den of a rival wolf pack.
But Lorelai noted the whites of his knuckles. The roving eyes. The calculations of each exit, of every man and woman assembled. She saw the trickle of sweat break from his hairline and roll toward his neck.
Something had happened out there. It had to have been terrible to affect him like this.
Lady Farah Blackwell, Countess Northwalk, pressed her hand into Lorelai’s, a silent, reassuring smile on her angelic face. The countess had let her borrow this gown, a confection that hadn’t fit Farah since her second pregnancy, or so the lady had lamented as she’d gently burped her infant son in the nursery.
On Lorelai’s other side, Veronica sat ramrod straight, reminding her of Ann Boleyn awaiting her death sentence from Henry the VIII.
When Moncrieff sauntered in behind Blackwell, Veronica tensed so abruptly, had she been an instrument, her strings would have snapped. She and the first mate stared at each other, not with distemper, but with a sense of silent warning.
Like distrustful comrades sharing a secret.
Troubled, Lorelai regarded her dearest friend. No matter what happened between herself and the Rook, she needed to get Veronica to safety, Lorelai decided. She owed her that much. Everything the woman had been through was the fault of her terrible family.
Herself, included.
In all their years as sisters, Lorelai had underestimated Veronica’s bravery. Her capability. She was so very heroic, rescuing her from a man who’d begun to capture Lorelai in ways other than the physical.
It had almost worked, too, had they not been beset upon by Blackwell’s men the moment they touched the beach, and conducted to Ben More to hold court with the reigning King of the London Underworld.
The man in question was followed by his valet, a stocky Scot named Murdoch. Blackwell’s gaze found his wife instantly, and Farah greeted him from where the ladies sat on the long settee perpendicular to the fire.
A wrinkle appeared between Lady Farah’s brows, as though she knew something was wrong the moment she met her villainous husband’s eye. Her finger anxiously twisted a silver-blond curl, even when the Blackheart of Ben More offered his wife what was meant to be half of a reassuring smile.
Not for the first time, it struck Lorelai how much he resembled the Rook. Perhaps his nose was more patrician, and his mouth softer. His skin decidedly less swarthy and weathered. More marble than bronze. He’d spent his life beneath the eerie pallid lanterns of the London night, or the constant clouds of Ben More.
Not on the deck of a ship with no escape from the relentless sun.
Neither the Rook, Moncrieff, nor Blackwell or Murdoch claimed the two monstrous leather chairs across from where the ladies anxiously perched.
Blackwell instantly went to a hearth large enough to house a small village, bracing his arm on the mantel and staring into the roaring fire as though he could see the past in the flames with his one good eye.
Lorelai glanced from him to the Rook, who’d strategically positioned himself off to the left of the assemblage, at the edge of where firelight and shadow met and melded. From his vantage no man stood at his back, only a wall of books, and he had a view of both the north and west entrances to the room.
And everyone in it.
He’d belonged there. He’d lived his entire life half in shadow … the darkness threatening to claim him.
Come back, Lorelai thought. Come into the light.
His boots planted wide, his arms crossed over his chest, he stood like a sentinel.
Large and lethal and … lost.
As much as he claimed to no longer be Ash, he resembled the boy she’d loved in this moment. His passionless, emotionless demeanor now tightened and flexed with any number of expressions. And none of them pleasant.
Though he didn’t move, torment and menace rolled off the mountains of his shoulders in palpable waves. Did anyone else feel it?
She ached for him. In every possible way. She ached for his pain. She ached for his attention. For his touch.
God help her, what did that mean?
Lunacy, surely. To feel for the man who’d not a few days ago murdered her brother. Who’d murdered countless more, by his own admission. The most wanted man in all the world.
And he wanted her.
Moncrieff stood at his shoulder, his handsome façade set somewhere between disbelief and discontent.
Farah broke the fraught silence. “I take it, husband, that since you have brought guests into our home, with our children, your … negotiations were successful.” A thread of steel weaved into the soft tapestry of her voice.
Mortimer would have thr
ottled his wife for speaking to him thusly.
Blackwell only released an eternal breath. “I’ve a story to tell,” he murmured into the flames. “Everyone gathered needs to hear the telling of it.”
Though Lady Farah had been unceasingly polite and kind, Lorelai hardly knew the woman, and the obvious affection between the silver-haired beauty and her unaccountably forbidding husband was the source of much consternation.
The so-called Blackheart of Ben More was the quintessential villain. He could have unfurled from the pages of one of a dozen penny dreadfuls, dark, sly, and disturbingly inscrutable.
And yet, he’d patiently cleaned baby sick from his lapel before gathering his garrison of mercenaries to defend his keep against a pirate siege.
On the opposite side of the coin, the cherubic countess seemed to calm or cheer anyone she met, Lorelai included. But she reigned as the undoubted queen at her husband’s side. A lioness for which any number of men would lay down their lives.
“Let us make introductions, then.” Farah stood, crossing to the pirates. “I’m Lady Farah Blackwell. And you are?”
“Moncrieff, my lady.” He took her hand and pressed a kiss to the air above it, flashing that devastating smile.
“Moncrieff?” She tapped a finger to the divot in her chin. “I knew a Moncrieff family as a girl. Any relation to Thomas Moncrieff? The Earl of Crosthwaite?”
The fearsome pirate actually flinched. “My late father, I’m afraid.”
“His firstborn went to fight in India; I was told he never returned,” she marveled. “You cannot be Sebastian.”
“In the flesh.”
“The Erstwhile Earl!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been all this time?”
Lorelai looked to Veronica, who watched the exchange with perceptible interest.
“Everywhere and nowhere.” Moncrieff shrugged, not bothering to hide his discomfiture. “I found I’m more suited for pirating than Parliament.”
“Just so.” Farrah laughed. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Likewise.” He nodded, his eyes shifting about the room in a gesture more disconcerted than Lorelai had imagined him capable.
“And you are?” She turned to the Rook, but he didn’t uncross his arms. Instead, his eyes darted over to her husband, who answered for him.
“Farah.” Her name escaped as a raw sound from her husband’s throat. “That is Dorian Blackwell.”
She snatched her offered hand back to cover her mouth. “My God,” she breathed. “You’re not dead.”
Lorelai’s breath became trapped in her lungs as her throat closed around a multitude of emotions. He had a name. He had … another man’s name?
“W-what is going on?” She lamented the tremor in her voice. The pity in Farah’s eyes as she turned back to her. The malice with which Moncrieff regarded her.
She hated that he still refused to look her way. What did she call him in her mind now? The Rook? Dorian? Ash? Husband?
Did it matter?
He stared at the Blackheart of Ben More with a mixture of speculation and skepticism. The man who’d lived with his name for twenty long years. Would he take it back? Would there still be violence?
Farah returned to Lorelai, sinking into the place beside her as though she’d lost the starch in her knees.
“I was born Dougan Mackenzie, the unwanted bastard of the hated Laird Hamish Mackenzie,” the man at the mantel revealed as firelight played across his stark, pallid features. “Farah and I were children in the same Highland orphanage where I killed a priest to protect her honor.”
From beside her, Farah gave a watery sniff, and Lorelai found her hand clutched in hers again, though she wasn’t sure just who reached for whom.
“I was sent to Newgate Prison. Where I met him.” Blackwell’s savage features melted into something that looked like fond nostalgia. He looked over at the Rook, who’d yet to move a muscle but for the unsteady rise and fall of his chest. “Gods, how we hated each other at first. You threw a rock at me once, and we fought like devils. Beat each other bloody.” His lip quirked as though visiting a fond memory. “I’m the reason your nose is crooked, though it seems to have become more so over time.”
Lorelai glanced over, noting the slight imperfection of the bone just below the Rook’s eyes. She’d thought that had been wrought from the damage he’d sustained the day she saved him.
“We became inseparable after that, and together we ruled Newgate Prison by the time we turned fifteen. I had the use of both eyes then, and you’d no scars or tattoos. They called us the Blackheart Brothers. Partly because of how we resemble each other, and partly because … of the merciless means we used to wrest power from those who wielded it before us. Against us.”
The Rook opened his mouth, but it took him several moments of indecision to speak. Everyone waited. No one breathed. “The Blackheart Brothers,” he echoed. “Then we … are not related … by blood?”
Lorelai wondered if anyone else caught the note of dejection beneath the monotone voice. It tore at her heart and produced an aching lump in her throat. He’d hoped he’d found family.
And those hopes had been dashed.
The man known as Blackwell pushed away from the mantel and turned to him. “There is plenty of blood between us. Enough to make us brothers. But to your lineage, I cannot speak.”
“Why did you steal my name?” The question hung in the air like a sword.
It took several fraught moments for Blackwell to produce the answer, and when he did, it was with a voice roughened by a dangerous masculine sentiment. “One night, when we returned from digging the tube tunnels, you asked if we could switch cells so you could pay Walters for a tattoo.” He shrugged. “We did this sometimes. Covered in dust as we were, it was nigh impossible to tell us apart, and the guards rarely bothered. We all looked the same to them. What I didn’t know was that that night, my malevolent father had paid four Newgate guards to finally be rid of me. They invaded my cell in the middle of the night to beat Dougan Mackenzie to death … and as far as anyone ever knew, that’s exactly what they did.”
“And you never corrected them?” Lorelai spoke without thinking.
The regret in his gaze seemed genuine as he addressed her. “Dorian only had one more month to serve for his sentence as a thief. Dougan Mackenzie had years for his murder of a priest. As much as I mourned my brother, his death provided me a very singular opportunity for freedom. The only thing that mattered was finding Farah. I was safer if my evil father thought he’d succeeded in ridding the world of me. And so was she.” He looked over at his wife, seeming to draw strength from her. “She was all I had left. She is all that matters.”
Lorelai suddenly felt like an interloper, sitting as a barrier between two such bonded lovers.
A prickling on her neck drew her notice back to the man she’d named all those years ago. A man she’d known had been possessed of a name before she’d found him, but as a girl, she’d selfishly wished him not to remember it.
What about now? What did it mean for him?
For them?
“Ye really doona remember us?” Murdoch asked the Rook from where he stood behind the settee.
The pirate summarily ignored the Scotsman as he locked eyes with Lorelai. His nostrils flared, and his arms surged in time with his hastening breaths. The rest of him remained still, his features hard as stone, as though one tap with a hammer and chisel would shatter him.
His name had been Dorian. Dorian Blackwell.
And she hated it.
As unfair as she knew she was being, that’s not who he was to her.
Yet, Ash—her Ash—was dead.
Hadn’t the Rook said it a thousand times by now?
She couldn’t imagine all the emotions he must be battling. All the questions building upon themselves ready to erupt like a volcano. She could see it in the set of his bones. In his restless breath.
Suddenly she just yearned to be home. Back in his little room tucked n
ear the attic stairs at Southbourne Grove. The bed swallowing their innocent idle hours. Back when her touch had soothed him, and his had made her feel safe.
How unbearable it was, to look into the face of the man you once loved, and to be told by his own lips that he’s nothing but a ghost. To recognize him sometimes, looking out through achingly familiar eyes, only to lose him in the void of darkness.
“Who else knows of this?” The hesitant beat of silence greeted the Rook’s question. He’d startled them all. “I’m acquainted with your half brothers, the Demon Highlander and the Earl of Thorne. They mentioned you were related, though they didn’t refer to you as Dougan Mackenzie.”
“My natural-born brothers and I keep each other’s sins and secrets, and we all have many.” The Blackheart of Ben More took a tentative step toward the shadows in which the Rook still stood. “If I’m honest, in my heart you were more my brother than they ever were. We protected each other, you and I. Fought and bled and ruled together. I never had that with them. I’ve never truly been a Mackenzie.” His brows rose with a dawning idea. “There were others to whom you were close as Dorian. Christopher Argent, a boy born in captivity to a criminal mother. He resides in London with his wife. And Murdoch here, along with his man, Gregory Tallow. And Walters … though his wife took him on holiday, if you’d believe it. Some brigands in my employ will remember you. They’ve been loyal since Newgate. If you need any more proof of your identity—”
“It won’t matter.” The Rook finally pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut as though in a great deal of pain. “I won’t remember them,” he said tightly.
“Considering what those guards did to you … I’m not at all surprised.” Blackwell—at least, Lorelai still considered him to be Blackwell—strode to the opposite library wall and selected an ancient volume. The Histories of Roman Invasions of Britannia. He split the spine open almost reverently.
Murdoch snorted. “I hardly think this is the time for a lesson in ancient hist—”
One look from his master silenced the valet.
“As I said, the guards made us clean the carnage from the cell the day after the attack. You and I had a place in that cell where we hid things. A stone behind a stone. When I checked it … I found this.”
The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo Page 18