Page 4 of Lord of Temptation
Before she could blink he curled his long fingers around her wrist. Then slowly, ever so slowly, he began releasing the buttons on her glove with his other hand.
“Captain—”
“Shh.”
She watched in horrified fascination as he leisurely peeled off her glove and set it aside. With no request for permission, he lightly trailed his fingers over hers, then circled them around her palm, following the various lines as though he expected them to guide him somewhere. His fingers were callused, rough, scarred. She doubted he ever wore gloves.
“Your skin is like silk. Your fiancé is a very fortunate man,” he said, his voice scratchier, rougher than it had been moments earlier.
“Not as fortunate as you might think.”
He didn’t question her further, but rather he seemed enthralled by her hand, by the lines that traversed her palm. “There is very little room on my ship for formality,” he said, returning to her earlier comment regarding how she was to address him. “You would have to sleep in my cabin.”
“But surely you would not be there.”
With no rush, he lifted his hooded gaze to hers. Her heart was pounding so hard that she wondered if he could feel it in the throbbing of her pulse at her wrist. “Not always, no. But I would eat my meals there. Study my charts there.” A heartbeat of silence. “Bathe there.”
She swallowed hard. She could be on deck when he was bathing. Besides, how many baths would the man need in the week or so it would take to reach their destination? “I’m sure we could work out a suitable arrangement.”
A corner of his mouth lifted. “It’s bad luck to have a woman onboard. My men would not be particularly pleased by your presence. You would have to remain very close to me so that I could offer you protection.”
He was striving to manipulate her now, seeking to intimidate, to make her wary. She had four brothers. She knew how the game was played. “I sought you out because I’d heard that you were somewhat of a hero—”
He tightened his jaw, narrowed his eyes, and she realized he wasn’t at all pleased with that characterization.
“—although the particulars regarding your heroics were not forthcoming. But I was assured you had excellent command of your men. Surely if you tell them to behave, they will behave.”
“For the chance at one of your kisses, I suspect they’d be willing to risk the bite of a cat-o-nine.”
“I don’t give my kisses freely.”
“And I have no need of your two hundred pounds. So tell me, Princess, what else are you willing to barter?”
Lord Tristan Easton, more commonly known along the waterfront as Crimson Jack, couldn’t stop his smile from widening as she released a small gasp and snatched her lovely hand free of his grip. He wasn’t certain he’d ever encountered such silkiness before. Or such fire in a woman’s eyes. But then he wasn’t in the habit of taunting women. Yet something about her called to the devil in him.
“You’re a cur,” she snapped.
“I never claimed otherwise.” And he’d hang from the nearest yardarm whichever of his men was spouting tales that he was a hero. He wasn’t. Not like his brother Sebastian who’d fought in the bloodiest of battles and barely survived to tell the tale. “You’re asking me to go someplace that I have no desire to go. It needs to be worth my while to be so inconvenienced.”
Although presently he had no commitments other than lifting tankards of ale and doing as he pleased.
“Obviously the tales I’ve heard of you are untrue—you’re not a man of honor.”
He refused to acknowledge how her words bit into his soul. He’d long ago stopped caring how anyone judged him, so why the devil did he give a fig what she thought?
She rose elegantly to her feet. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time and mine. Good night to you, sir.”
With an indignant swish of her skirts, she pivoted on her heel and marched toward the door. Someone jumped forward to open it for her, and then she was gone into the storm.
Pity.
Tristan shifted his gaze over to the nearby table where a lad of sixteen was trying to entice a serving girl onto his lap. “Mouse,” he barked.
The boy immediately snapped to attention. “Aye, Cap’n?”
He gave a quick nod toward the door. “I want to know where she goes.”
Without delay or complaint the nimble lad took off. If anyone could follow her, he could.
