Page 33 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo
How fortuitous that you’re already wearing a wedding dress.
Her heartbeats stumbled and collided into one another, her nerves singing with dread and alarm.
Oh heavens. He didn’t mean to—
“What in God’s name are you wearing? Green velvet?” The Rook’s crooked, aristocratic nose wrinkled with distaste. Oddly enough, it was the most demonstrative he’d been during this entire ordeal.
“You don’t like it?” Moncrieff threw his arms wide and puffed out an already thickly muscled chest. “Bought it off a merchant in the Turkish bazaar. Said the color was unparalleled but he couldn’t sell it on account of it being ‘too fucking hot for velvet,’ if you’ll pardon his French, my lady.” In any other situation, the flirtatious smile he bestowed upon Veronica would have been heart-stopping on features as handsome as his. “I wore it for the occasion because I thought it matched your eyes.”
Lorelai’s jaw slackened. How could someone flirt at a time like this?
Veronica looked away from him in disgust, but the color did seem to return to her cheeks. A great deal of it, in fact.
“Couldn’t find a Bible.” Unfazed, Moncrieff reachedbehind him, retrieving a book he’d tucked into the waistband of his trousers. “But I did, however, confiscate a copy of Hornbrook’sEncyclopedia of Admiralty and Maritime Lawfrom Montez’s bunk, and I figured that would have to do.”
An elegantly built man would not have been able to lay the heavy volume open with one hand as Moncrieff did. But from what Lorelai had encountered of the crew on theDevil’s Dirge,the Rook wasn’t in the habit of employing elegant men. Moncrieff’s unceasingly sophisticated accent and affable demeanor was in such direct contradiction to his barbaric stature, it confounded her in the extreme.
A couple of expensive rings glittered in the lanternlight as Moncrieff ran a finger down a page. “Thou shalt not covet, fornicate, commit adultery, steal, murder, and so forth. Basically, the same stuff as the Holy Book with a bit of nautical language thrown in. To my way of thinking, we ignore just about as many laws in this book as the other one. Though it does beg the question, whom do you fear more, God or the British Royal Navy?”
“Neither,” the Rook clipped. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Getwhatover with?” Lorelai demanded. Even before she’d said it, a part of her understood exactly what was about to happen. It just seemed so ludicrous. So impossible, she convinced herself she must be interpreting the situation incorrectly.
“Just so.” The book snapped shut with such a crack, both women jumped, and Moncrieff adopted a mock-solemn demeanor, ruined by the ever-present twinkle of mischief in his eyes.
Panic seized Lorelai, enough that she had to fight little spots of darkness in her periphery. She reached for a chair tucked beneath a table that seemed to be bolted down. TheRook’s throne, she realized. A dark velvet so deeply blue, it might have been purple in brilliant light. Heavy wood arms with intricate braiding matched the tall, ornate post to which she now clung.
“You can’t be serious,” she cried. “Ash,stopthis. Tell me what’s going on!”
Slowly, deliberately, he bent until his brutal visage was a breath away from hers. From this close, she could trace every line of the fine web of scars on his jaw and neck, could discern how the lantern reflected a glossy sheen off the long-healed lye burns. She could see that the sun could not paint the old wound with as much color as it did the rest of him.
He smelled of wind and salt.
“Call me Ash again, and you will not like the consequences. For he does not exist anymore.”
Her broken exhalation crashed against features cast from stone, and Lorelai could have sworn his nostrils flared on an inhale.
No.This creature of ice and darkness was not Ash. Gone was his protective vigilance. His appreciative silence. And his almost uncertain but reverent adoration. In its place towered a being of undisputed power, claimed by means of inhumane pillage and ruthless discipline.
“Then… Whoareyou?” she whispered, her heart in her throat.
He straightened to his towering height, a wry expression creating a crease next to his hard mouth. “I still have no idea,” he answered cryptically. “So, what does it matter?”
Lorelai watched the familiar divot in his chin as he nodded to Moncrieff.
She scanned his face with the eyes of her once-fourteen-year-old self who had loved him. So many of his featureswere the same. Lush hair so black, it gleamed blue in the light. Twenty years had threaded a touch of silver into the roots by his ears and the evening stubble on his jaw. The skin in the creases branching from his eyes was the same shade of pale he’d been as a boy. The sardonic wrinkle between his dark brows remained identical to Ash’s. The top lip drawn forever tight, balanced by the fullness of the one beneath was unmistakable.
Those lips had kissed her once. She’d yearned for them across the void of time between that moment and this one.
Now she feared them. Feared him.
Grief swamped her, threatening to buckle her knees. Somehow, she’d known he’d be this striking as a grown man. She’d just assumed he lived his forgotten life elsewhere. That he was happy.
Because why else wouldn’t he come for her?
It wasn’t until Moncrieff theatrically cleared his throat that she realized what the Rook’s nod to him had signified.
Moncrieff opened the book to a random page and pretended to read. “Captain, did you literallytakethis woman for the purposes of being your wife? For profit and desire, for plunder and pleasure, in seasickness and health for as long as you are inclined to have her?”
