The point that he couldn’t be their sole protector, that he wasn’t good enough for the task of keeping them all safe and happy, had been made clear more than enough times.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Distractions were deadly, Eliza kept telling herself the next day while she searched the attics for more gowns to remake for Grace and Gabriella, and now Sarah would also need clothing for the long journey ahead of them. She had been made absent-minded by Darius’s presence in their lives the day the windows had been shot to pieces around them. She had been oblivious when their father’s body had been rising from the dead through the melting snow because thoughts of Darius consumed her. She had been thoroughly preoccupied when thieves had forced their way into the house and nearly burned it to the ground.
She had to stop letting Darius distract her both physically and mentally.
When he wasn’t drawing her constant attention with his infuriatingly impersonal touches and how close he sat at every available opportunity with disinterest all over his face, then she was thinking about how wounded he’d appeared when she’d slapped him with her words the night before. He’d tried to hide how much it hurt but she had glimpsed it in the golden flecks of his eyes.
Her stomach dipped and she wrapped her fingers around the edge of a travel trunk tight enough to feel the bite of the leather and buckles. Theirs wasn’t a real marriage and they had to accept it. Both of them.
Friendship and a roof over her head, he’d offered. He’d said nothing of passion or love or intimacy. She sure as hell wasn’t going to let him warm her bed whenever he made port like a fisherman’s wife. The only ending down the path of growing to care for her husband was heartache. She might need his protection and his name but she did not need a man to do for her. The gentlemen appearing in her life had so far only let her down.
Except for Darius, her subconscious screamed. She pushed the lid of the trunk open and cursed the voice in her head. True that he’d kept them safe in the fact that they all were still breathing and walking around but at any second even that reality could come to a crashing end. They’d had one magical night together and then he’d left. He had his reasons but she found she didn’t care for them. If he hadn’t left, then her common sense would have led her down a hole she would never have returned from in one piece.
It was probably for the best that he’d gone back to showing little more care for her than he had to, precisely as he had in the days after their wedding but before they’d shared a bed. Before he’d given her a taste of what passion really meant. Life had been perfect in the moments when he’d showed her the stars, when they’d joined together, soul to soul. But she knew better than anyone that that kind of perfection couldn’t last.
Bother it, she didn’t even know why she kept thinking that way when he’d made it so plain he wanted nothing more than her dowry and to save them all and become a hero.
Placing her head down against the back of her hands on the trunk, Eliza willed her brain to slow down, willed the thoughts to stop crashing into one another. Willed the pictures to cease replaying. If she closed her eyes and saw Darius naked one more time, she would likely scream.
“Eliza? Eliza, are you all right?”
A crash came from behind her followed by thumping boot steps kicking up a cloud of fine dust to itch her nose.
She barely had time to respond when Darius’s hands closed about her shoulders, and she was hauled to her feet.
“What are you doing up here?” she asked as he looked her over.
“You were taking so long. I thought you had fainted again. Don’t scare me like that.”
His admonishment would have rankled but Eliza found herself smiling. “Pirates are supposed to be fearless, are they not?”
He removed his hands and stepped back. “Pirates perhaps but mere men have the ability to admit when something causes their hearts to stop beating.”
He revealed so much more than he should have by those words, but his attention was no longer on her face for it had dropped lower. His eyes glazed and he licked his lips, his fingers flexing at his sides.
“What are you…? Oh!” Eliza realised at that exact moment that she wore only her linen shift and one petticoat. She had shed her gown so it wouldn’t be covered in dust and perspiration after hours spent digging around in the warm space at the top of the great house. “You could avert your eyes.”
Slowly he shook his head and stepped closer. “I’m not sure I could.”
The first fabric item to touch her fingertips was smooth and silky and as she raised it to cover herself, she realised her next trunk to rifle must have been a wedding trousseau. She held against her transparent shift, an equally transparent concoction of silk and lace made probably for a wedding night. Either that or Darius’s ancestors had appropriated the belongings of an exotic courtesan.
“Oh!” she huffed and reached for another, perhaps more thickly woven item, but Darius stopped her with a gentle fingertip to her wrist. It wasn’t much but she paused there as though he were a puppet master and she the toy attached to strings to command her.
“You needn’t hide yourself from me, Eliza. You are my wife.”
In every sense. He didn’t need to say it—the intimation was there in the way his fingers travelled up the bare expanse of her arm. A shiver followed his touch and despite all her resolve to keep him at arm’s length, to be friends
