Page 86 of Any Duke in a Storm

“You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted to confess everything to. Suddenly, I didn’t want to be Bonnie Bess anymore. For the first time in my life, my mission didn’t matter. I wanted to be me, just Lisbeth. TherealLisbethwho I hadn’t seen in decades. You made her feel like she could be happy, like she could be enough.”

“You’ll always be enough,” he said softly.

“Raphael, you have to believe that it was me all along. I wasn’t pretending when I was with you, and everything we shared came from somewhere true.” She swallowed, the words rushing out like a waterfall. “You made me feel seen again, because somewhere along the way, I let all those other roles overtake who I was. It became safer to hide…to exist in those other personas.”

“I know, chérie.”

Lisbeth almost wept at the sweet endearment, having wondered for weeks if she’d ever hear it again. She sent him an earnest look, knowing he’d already forgiven her, but she owed him the full explanation. He deserved that and more. “Let me get it all out, please. I don’t want to keep anything from you.” She took a breath. “The truth is you were right about me. I was an island. I let nothing and no one in because that way I could never be hurt. I could never becometooattached. Goodbye was always easy at the end of a job because no one was ever allowed to matter enough.” She reached for his hands, lifting them and stepping toward him at the same time so their palms were cradled between their bodies. It was intimate in the extreme in the midst of the French emperor’s ball, but she did not care. She would lay her soul bare before him in the middle of Paris if she had to. “I don’t want to be like that anymore. I want to try to be different. With you.”

“Even if it hurts?” he asked softly.

“As long as you’re at my side, I’ll take the good and the bad and everything in between.”

Raphael stared down at her, his beloved face so beautiful that she could barely breathe. His fingers released hers to lift and stroke her cheek with the gentlest caress. Everything—the ballroom, the other guests, the entire world—fell away in that moment when he gathered her in his arms. They weren’t dancing and yet it felt like they were, out there in the moonlight.

“So if I said I wanted to marry you, would you run?”

Her smile was tremulous. “Only to you.”

“And what if I said I wanted to live a life on the sea?”

“You’d get no complaint from me.” She paused, her heart so full that her rib cage felt a dozen sizes too small. Was this what happiness felt like? Like a person could float from sheer joy alone. “I’m thinking of retiring from my line of work, so I’ll have a lot of time on my hands. I could be your sailing master, your deckhand, or your cabin girl.”

That sultry, lopsided smirk of his appeared, taking all her good sense with it. “Cabin girl? I’m intrigued. Tell me more. What would her duties be?”

“To make her darling captain marvelously, stupidly, sublimely happy.”

“I like the sound of that.” Her gentle pirate ran a thumb over her bottom lip, eyes so bright they looked like stars in the night sky. “Then marry me, chérie. Marry me and make me the happiest man in the world.”

Lisbeth pushed herself to her toes and kissed him. “I thought you’d never ask.”

“Was that a yes?” he asked, pulling away.

Lisbeth grinned, taking a page from Narina’s book. “Does a pirate shit in the sea?”

“That’s still not a yes, you wicked tease. Don’t make me toss you over my shoulder and cart you out of here to teach you some manners.” He lowered his voice, his lips brushing her ear. “You’re being a very bad girl and you know what happens to bad girls. They don’t get to come.”

Thatsilky threat arrowed straight between her thighs, and from the dark look in those molten eyes, he’d meant it to. “What did you tell me when we first met?” she teased. “Don’t threaten me with a good time. Yes, Pirate, the answer is yes. To everything.”

Epilogue

“Get a move on, you piss-covered barnacles, before I scupper your stinking guts, savvy?”

The shrill voice of their daughter filtered down into the captain’s quarters of theVauquelin, and Lisbeth let out a snort of laughter. “At least Nari isn’t using the really bad adult words,” Raphael said. “She’s gotten much better at that. So a victory for us?”

His beautiful wife agreed. Getting a fourteen-year-old who hadn’t quite grown out of her pirate obsession not to curse was quite an achievement. “It’s a good thing the crew adores her,” she said.

“She has Smalls eating out of her hand,” he scoffed. “And let’s not even think about the clothes Estelle gets from Paris for her. She’s spoiled rotten.”

“Good thing we adore her, too.”

He laughed. “That is true.”

After their marriage a year and a half ago, they had officially adopted Narina. They had both asked her after their wedding whether she’d want to be their daughter, and she had screamed with delight. The Duke of Thornbury had some influence with a court in Massachusetts in the United States, which had been the first state to legalize modern adoption, to support their petition.

According to the law, the judge was the one who determined whether they were fit and proper with sufficient capability to raise the child, and luckily he had ruled in their favor. Since Narina was an only child with no next of kin, it had been a simple matter.

As a family, they spent their time mostly between Paris and Tobago, but also tried to make sure that Narina was able to visit her homeland of Barbados and learn about her birth mother’s culture. They wanted her to know exactly where she came from and what made her so wonderfully unique. The differences between the various Caribbean islands were broad, and while there were many similarities, each island had its own unique history.

---