Page 11 of A Pirate's Pleasure

“Rabbits?” I asked, liking the idea very much.

“Rabbits,” she agreed. “And we’ll stay up all night.”

“All night!” My mother never even let me stay up late. Never mind all night.

“All night,” she agreed. “Or if you need to sleep, I’ll carry you.”

I came to in a cabin, knowing that I’d had that dream again. The one that was more feelings and emotions than actual pictures. The one whose events I could never quite recall no matter how hard I tried. I was lying on a bed with a thick bandage wrapped around my right wrist. My surroundings were all too familiar when I sat up, little about them having changed in eight years. I’d been on this bed before. In fact, I hadn’t just been on it, I’d done lots of interesting things on it as well. The same with the wooden desk, where a dark-haired man currently sat, facing away from me. “Your cabin,” I said. Zephyr turned his head at the sound of my voice, and I held up my bandaged wrist. “Thanks for this.” I assumed the surgeon had stitched it.

Something passed across his face, brief but unmistakably there. “I should have untied you.”

I shrugged. “You wanted to make me suffer. I get that, given our history.”

“Do you?”

I nodded as I swung my legs over the side of the bed until my feet reached the floor. “Of course I do. I never expected you to be pleased to see me, Zeph. I just… I couldn’t think of anyone else who had either the means or the courage to go against the authorities. I didn’t kill him. And call me stubborn, but I refuse to be hung for something I didn’t do.”

Zephyr came to sit next to me on the bed. It was the closest he’d been to me since our reunion, and my body reacted to our proximity the same way it always had with this man, all my senses tingling. I tamped down on the urge to lean closer, knowing he’d move away if I did. “Who did kill him?” he asked.

I laughed. “How should I know?”

“You haven’t come up with any theories?”

“I’ve kind of been busy. Staying one step ahead of the authorities and reaching Glimmerfield without being caught took up most of my time and energy.”

“Well, now that the authorities can’t get to you, you need to think about it. How are you supposed to clear your name if you don’t work out what really happened?”

“Clear my name?” A study of Zephyr’s expression said he was serious. “You think there’s a chance I can do that?”

His dark gaze scoured my face. “What’s the alternative? Stay at sea forever? Take on a life you never wanted? One you already walked away from once.”

I grimaced. It was the closest we’d come to discussing our past and the reasons that had led to us going our separate ways. “I never asked for my uncle to die without having any children to inherit his title and fortune. Do you really think I should have turned down the opportunity that was given to me?”

“Your mother left all that behind because she didn’t want any part of it.”

She had. She’d run away when I was just a child, and too young to remember anything of my life prior, apart from one or two hazy memories that meant nothing. Oh, and that damn dream that always threatened to reveal something important but never did. She’d taken me away from a life of luxury to live in Glimmerfield, of all places. Where she’d scraped a living doing people’s laundry and taking any cleaning jobs she could get her hands on. She’d maintained right up until the day she’d died from a fever that it had been the right decision, that a life away from politics and the machinations of the upper class was a far richer one than the one she’d left behind. And in Glimmerfield, I’d met an orphaned boy. A wild one with the ability to discharge weather from his fingertips. And no matter how many times someone had warned me about him and told me he was dangerous, I’d never been able to stay away from him. Not until I’d left for good, anyway. “I asked you to come with me,” I said. “I virtually begged you. I offered you a world where you could have had anything you wanted, where—”

Zephyr cut me off, his expression tight. “You offered me a world where I would have died of boredom within a week, and I still stand by that. Anyway, the past is the past. It doesn’t matter now.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“No.” Zephyr’s answer was far too definitive for my liking. “All that matters is getting you back where you belong.”

“Where I belong?” Bitterness tinged my words. “Off your hands, you mean.”

Zephyr shrugged. “You can look at it that way. Or you can look at it as not letting whoever did this get away with it. Who stands to benefit if you’re dead?”

“No one.”

Zephyr lifted a disbelieving eyebrow, forcing me to think harder. He stood, crossing his arms over his chest and regarding me like he thought I wasn’t telling him the truth. “Who stands to inherit if you’re dead? Husband? Wife? Children?”

I laughed. “You think I’ve got an entire family I haven’t bothered to mention?”

“Haven’t you?”

“No.” That answer sounded so lonely. Had I been lonely while I’d been leading my privileged existence? Maybe. But I would never have admitted to it if so, and I wasn’t about to admit to it now either. “I’m not married and I’ve never had children.”

“A lover, then. Or are you going to claim you’ve been celibate for eight years?”

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