Lorelai gasped as Moncrieff’s words triggered a memory from one of the many books she’d read in the Southbourne library.
Worth a soldier’s weight in wealth …
Worth a man’s weight in …
“Salt,” she whispered. “It’s the salt.”
A stunned silence met her declaration.
“Don’t you see?” She squirmed to get more purchase as she struggled to reveal her findings. “The Romans. They often paid their solders in salt, which is the origin of the word salary. Even now, we tell a man he’s worth his salt or that he’s earning his salt, don’t we? Even the Latin word sal became the French word solde, which means ‘pay,’ and is the origin of the word soldier.”
“Your wife’s a bloody genius,” Dorian marveled.
Moncrieff’s chest began to heave behind her. “Salt?” he hissed through a disbelieving breath.
“To the Romans, this cave would have been more valuable than if the walls had been made of pure gold,” she revealed. “And it makes sense why, back then, even seafarers with cargo ships could not have taken the treasure back with them. They hadn’t the wherewithal to mine the mineral from this cave. And Emperor Claudius died before he was able to return for it.”
“Fucking … salt?” Her captor, it seemed, was having a difficult time moving past one point, and she could tell how it affected him by how close his thick arm inched toward her throat.
“It could still be a rather lucrative find,” she said, lifting an ineffectual hand to pull at the muscle pressing on her windpipe. “Salt isn’t worth its weight in gold, granted, but it’s still worth a fortune.”
“If a pirate is going to mine a mineral, it will be weighed in karats,” he said with a sneer. “And it won’t have the propensity to dissolve in water.”
Lorelai couldn’t form an answer through the pressure of his arm on her throat. She clawed at it, still sucking gasps of air.
“Give her to me,” Ash demanded, a crack in his voice belying the chill in his tone.
“Did you know about this the entire time?” Moncrieff said, ignoring the order. “Tell me, after all we’ve been through, were you lying to us about the dragon tattoo just to get to her?”
“I never lied about the Claudius Cache. I thought, as you did, that trunks of gold and gems were contained here.” Ash’s voice fractured against the ceiling, making it impossible to tell from which direction he spoke. “But she is the only treasure I came to find.”
A tendril of pleasure thrilled through her at his words. At least she might die knowing he’d cared for her.
“Then why are you not in Marseilles?” Moncrieff snarled.
“Because I saw your boat leave the estuary from the widow’s walk, and spied Lorelai upon it.” Veronica’s lovely lilt sounded from where she took refuge from behind the stone wall of the cave mouth. “I told Lord Southbourne immediately.”
At the sound of her voice, Moncrieff’s hold on Lorelai’s neck slackened. Conversely, his entire body constricted and—she squirmed to find—hardened.
Was the villain keen on Veronica?
“You followed me here, Countess? Bravely done.” The deeper, huskier inflection betrayed his desire.
“I assumed, at first, you were helping Lorelai escape, as you did for us on the ship,” Veronica said. “I thought that perhaps you had altruistic purposes, but I see now you’re nothing but a mercenary cad.”
“Sorry to disappoint, Countess.” And, for a moment, it truly sounded as though he were in earnest.
“If you let her go, I’ll let you leave with your life,” Ash bargained once more.
“We both know you better than that. Only one of us leaves this cave alive.” Moncrieff stepped into the light. “But if it’s you, Captain, you leave this cave alone, just as you deserve.” The pistol kissed her temple, and Lorelai squeezed her eyes shut, preparing for the end.
“That’s where you’re wrong, Moncrieff.” Ash stepped into the beam, looking like the very devil he claimed to be swathed in an angelic pillar of light. He appeared as he had that first day in the coach. Cold, ruthless, his sinister aspect unadorned by sentiment as though calculating his next kill. “I’ve remembered something infinitely important in the past few hours…”
“That you are a poxy pretender with a weakness for delicate strumpets?”
“No … I learned I had brothers. I’ve never truly been alone. And that is its own kind of strength.”
The sound of a rifle being cocked paralyzed the entire cavern, and Ash glanced up toward the breach in the cave ceiling.
Moncrieff followed suit, and cursed as the pistol left her temple to angle upward.
A shot exploded into the cave at the exact time Lorelai was wrenched from Moncrieff’s grip and swept across the entire cavern, only to end up crushed against a smooth salt cave wall by more than two hundred pounds of panicking pirate king.
With a detached sort of wonder, she watched as Chief Inspector Morley, who’d stood above in a strategic placement so as not to cast his shadow upon them, stowed his rife, slid through the opening, and lowered himself until he only held on to the ledge by his fingertips. He then dropped to the soft sand floor below with the sleek grace of a cat.
How he didn’t break something, she’d never know.
Dorian and Morley now stood over a felled Moncrieff, who groaned as he applied pressure to his shoulder, all but blown apart by a high-powered rifle.
“You missed,” Dorian accused, retrieving the pistol Moncrieff had dropped upon being shot.
“No I didn’t,” Morley argued.
“You were supposed to shoot him in the head.” The Blackheart of Ben More levered the pistol right between the former first mate’s eyes.
Morley pressed Blackwell’s arm down. “Well, Lady Veronica made an excellent point earlier on the boat across to the island,” he said. “Moncrieff is technically an earl, and would be an excellent boon for Scotland Yard to have found, and arrested, as a pirate under the notorious Rook.”
“Only to have him hanged later?” Dorian protested. “Why not shoot him now and be done with it? Then we don’t have to listen to all the horrible sounds he makes what with that hole in his…”
“His shoulder?” Morley supplied.
“Well, I was going to say, his face.”
“Gentlemen.” Veronica drifted forward looking, only as she could, as fresh and unflappable as any noble lady in her receiving rooms, even after having hiked to an unmarked dragon cave. “Perhaps we should find somewhere to secure this brigand?” She locked eyes with Lorelai. “I do believe these two could use a moment to themselves.”
Morley and Blackwell glanced over to where Ash still held Lorelai a hostage of his prodigious, trembling body. His face was buried in her windblown hair where he seemed to pull in great, desperate lungsful of breath. His hands clutched at her with bruising strength. She almost worried that she was in more danger of suffocation now than she ever had been with Moncrieff.
Blackwell didn’t seem alarmed in the least as he regarded them, and Lorelai wondered if he might be thinking his reaction would be the same were Lady Farah in a comparable situation.
Morley took a step in their direction. “Are you … all right?”
Lorelai couldn’t be certain if he addressed her, or Ash, but she nodded over her husband’s powerful shoulder and waved them away before she began to run soothing fingers over the hairs at his nape. It seemed to help leach some of the agitation from his body, so she fused her arms around his trunk.
It took some doing to haul Moncrieff away, but once he and the bodies had been cleared from the cavern, Lorelai turned her head to press a fond kiss against her husband’s temple.
His hot breath against her cheek forewarned her the moment before he turned her soft kiss into something hard and ferocious. He drank from her lips like a stranded man who’d been welcomed into an oasis.
Lorelai felt the unprecedented tension in him. The emotions he had not learned to identify tight
ening the sinew around his bones until they might just snap.
He needed her. To feel her. To taste her. To be inside of her.
She needed it, as well.
His primal, wordless frenzy touched her in a way she’d never before thought possible. He was a wounded beast, she realized, running her fingers along his jaw and neck, the flesh interrupted by long-ago scars. One in need of her healing touch.
She eased the jacket from the mountains of his powerful shoulders and tugged his shirt from his trousers so she could plunge her hands beneath to find the rest of his unparalleled strength.
His body jerked when her palms made contact with his flesh. His breath caught audibly in his throat, though he never took his lips from hers.
She slid his buttons open with deft fingers, wrenching his shirt over the impressive swells of his arms.
He was a monster. Her monster. A magnificent creature crafted of sinew and scars. Of darkness and shadow.
And lust and yearning.
And loyalty and light.
All the elements that made a man, and then a few most men sorely lacked.
All mine, she thought with a ferocity she’d never attributed to herself, while she explored the inconceivable expanse of his chest, stopping to press her palm to the rough web of wounds forever marring his perfect skin.
She was sorry for all he had suffered. She’d take it from him if she could.
And yet, a swell of something hot and wet clenched deep between her legs. There was nothing her Ash could not overcome. Nothing he’d not endured. He had a resilience and a strength only belonging to men of myth and ancient gods.
He was her own, personal legend.
She clung to him as a wave of lust threatened to buckle her legs.
As if he read her mind, he cupped her bottom with his big hands, and hauled her off her feet, splitting her legs around his lean waist as he bunched her skirts to her hips.
He bit out a harsh noise as she brushed the curious ridge of arousal beneath his trousers before releasing him.
Lorelai didn’t feel like herself. Never would she have thought she could enjoy a violent lust such as this. She reveled in the caustic grit of the wall behind her. And in the predatory, almost evil gleam in eyes that had never before seemed so very black.
The strain in his muscles as he held her aloft did more to stoke her desire than any poetry ever could. She released a rush of wet need on a tortured moan, and a tempestuous sound from him told her that he knew exactly what he’d elicited within her.
Lorelai let out an unbidden cry as he impaled her in one sleek thrust, setting her blood on absolute fire. He gave her only a moment to adjust, to dimly wish she were naked against all of his marvelous skin.
Instead she wrapped herself around him as his cock glided through her intimate flesh in slow, strong strokes. Her hands clutched at the wings on his shoulder blades as he fucked her into oblivion. She opened her body, welcoming him deep. She kissed and licked and bit at him as her sex gripped tighter with each of his withdrawals.
He rocked inside of her, stinging her with hard curls of his spine. No word was spoken, no apologies made. Her body hungrily accepted what he pounded into her. All his rage, his pain, his fear and his loss and his longing.
She felt the weight of everything, and wondered how it had not crushed him into the dirt by now.
Her body responded in kind, until she used the wall as leverage to thrust her hips back toward him. To meet him thrust for thrust. Her moans became demands, and then incoherent words.
Their eyes locked. Then their lips. And finally their bodies, every intimate part of them clenched together, pouring secrets and the past through the spaces contained between their molecules.
Pleasure sang behind the inferno that had become her blood, immolating her ability to draw breath. She felt the pulses of their sex synchronize, reveled in the warm jets of release he buried deep against her womb as they rode a simultaneous release so incredibly high, the cave echoed with the song of ecstasy that promised to fuse their very souls.
For the soft moments after, or maybe an eternity, they rested their foreheads against one another, struggling to regain enough breath to say the words that needed to be said.
He used his shirt to clean them, then discarded it to the sand, still unwilling—or unable—to release her from the prison of his arms.
Lorelai collapsed against him, leached of all strength. A willing captive, yet again. “Are you all right, my love?” She smoothed her hands down his heaving back, nuzzling into the muscular cove where his neck met his shoulder.
His gasp landed somewhere between wrath, disbelief, and laughter. “Am I all right? Lorelai … Jesus seafaring Christ. You were just abducted by a mutinying band of pirates, nearly shot, and then ravaged in a way more bestial than human.”
“I’m no worse for wear, thanks to you,” she said against his fragrant skin. “See for yourself.”
He pulled back only enough to look down at her. More like, to devour her with eyes so dramatic, she had the sense he couldn’t take everything in at once and it frustrated him. “Ash…”
“No, Lorelai, I’m not fucking all right!” he exploded, crushing her to him with even more force, this time. “Goddammit, I saw you slipping through my fingers once again. I was faced with losing you forever. What if you were killed? Taken across an ocean even I wouldn’t be able to forge, as surely in the next life we’ll be forced in opposite directions.”
Lorelai tucked a smile against his chest, as now wasn’t the time, and she had to admit to a bit of pleasure in his admission of how much she meant to him. “I could do my level best to be more wicked,” she suggested. “After what we’ve just done, I’d hazard that I’m well on my way. Then, wherever the next life takes us, at least we’ll be together.”
“No,” he said between feathering soft, desperate kisses over the whole of her face. “You are an angel, Lorelai. My angel.”
“And you are mine.”
“Don’t tease me,” he admonished darkly.
“I’m not. There are many kinds of angels. Fallen ones, for example, avenging ones…”
“I will avenge you,” he vowed against her skin. “Just as soon as I can tear myself from your arms, I’ll cut off every finger he touched you with and make him watch as I feed them to the sharks. I’ll hang his bleeding corpse out like bait and watch them leap for him, taking great chunks—”
“Just stop, Ash. Stop it.” Lorelai ineffectually pushed against his chest, only gaining enough ground to look up into his swirling, fathomless eyes. “I don’t care about any of that. It’s not what I want.”
He gazed down at her in dismay. “What do you want? Anything. Name it. It’s yours.”
“I want you to love me.” She glanced down at his buttons, wishing she’d not admitted it. Wishing she didn’t suddenly feel so vulnerable.
He made that devilish sound she’d come to recognize as his amusement. He tucked a finger beneath her chin, dragging her gaze back up to his. What she read there lifted her soul more than words ever could. “Every word I ever said to make you doubt my love is now a blasphemy to me. I meant it when I told you that I should have said it twenty years ago, before I left … I should have said it the moment I returned.”
A tear slid unbidden down her cheek, and he thumbed it away as he was wont to do. “Why didn’t you?” She wasn’t reprimanding him. She truly desired the answer.
“As a boy, I was afraid that the sheer, unmitigated power of my love for you was wrong, somehow. You were so young. So innocent. And I … I always knew I was this—this monster. Even though I had no memories, there were scars on my soul that were even more ugly and distasteful than those on my body. I couldn’t bear to reveal them to you, especially when I couldn’t remember what made them.”
“And you remember now?” She shaped a hand over his unshaven jaw, her heart welling with a warmth and light she’d not felt since their childhood.
He nodded, swallowing down an
emotion that didn’t seem to be easily grappled. “When I came for you, I truly thought myself incapable of love. It was a selfish act. I know that. But I couldn’t admit that what I felt for you was that exact thing. I thought it merely need. I had a void, not only in my memory, but in my soul. That void was you, Lorelai. I’ve always known that.”
“I missed you, too, Ash. Every day for twenty years, there was a hole in my heart that belonged to you.”
“You don’t understand.” He growled as though angry, though with her or himself, she couldn’t be sure. “It’s not that I merely missed you … You are not a hole in my heart, you are the whole of my heart. When I think of a life without you, it is like a life without breath. I’m not me but for you. I exist, but I’m not alive. You said that when you met me, my eyes were dead. They were dead. I was dead. And if I lose you, they will be again. I know I don’t deserve you. I know I’m a thief, a killer, a pirate, and worse. There’s a darkness in me, Lorelai, one I’m afraid will consume your light. But, God help me, I can’t let you go.”
Lorelai drew his forehead down to meet hers then turned both of their heads to regard the pillar of late afternoon sun filtering into the cave. “That isn’t how light works, is it? Darkness is easily overcome. Not light. The smallest hint of illumination can chase away the heaviest gloom, can slip through the most infinitesimal crack. It is never the other way around.” She kissed him softly, and her lips came away salty as a barrage of emotion overwhelmed them both. “There has always been light in you, my love, and no matter how many have tried to smother it with their black deeds and blacker souls, it resides within you, still. I can sense it, even now.”
He folded into her, his magnificent body sinking against hers in a gesture of submission. To her, but to fate, to them, to the inevitability of their connection.
He cupped her face between his rough, tender hands and captured her gaze with his own so as to punctuate the fervency of his words. “All that is or ever was good in me begins and ends with you,” he breathed. “Every time I said you were mine, I meant that I was yours. Always. Always, Lorelai, I’ve been yours. I’d go through everything I’ve suffered in my nearly forty years on this earth if it brought me to this moment. If it meant that I’ll never spend one more night of the next forty years apart from you.”
The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo Page 28