“What makes you laugh?” Darius questioned, one big, warm hand on her hip as he lifted himself to look at her face over her breasts.
She shook her head to tell him she wasn’t ready to share her mirth but then asked a question. “Do all couples do it like that? Even amongst the ton?”
Darius grinned. “I highly doubt it.”
“Does it make me any…” She couldn’t find the right word though it hovered on the edge of her tongue. “Does it make me less?”
Darius sat up and placed both of his hands over her breasts and smiled his contentment. “How could you be any less? You’re perfect inside and out.”
“I expected to feel less, somehow. If we kept doing…this.”
His brows rose and she knew she’d said something wrong but she couldn’t find another way to express how she felt inside.
“Define less? Because I’m not a lord and gentleman?”
His rough hands slid as though he was pulling away so she latched on and refused to let go, lifting his fingers to her mouth to kiss their backs. “Less because this is not the way a lady behaves. But I don’t feel less because I feel…I feel…so much more. I feel as though I could float away on the breeze and never come back down to the earth.”
“You truly don’t care, do you, for society and perhaps being a duchess? You don’t care that you’ve fallen in station? Fallen so far?”
Her hair fell about her shoulders as she shook her head and she smiled to soften the words she wanted to speak. “Not at all. My prospects died the day Harold cornered me in a darkened room. I cared then. I cried so many nights. But now? With you? I find I no longer care about much at all. It’s all slightly terrifying.”
“Only slightly? It’s a hell of a weight to put on a man’s shoulders, Eliza.”
“I don’t say it for any other reason than to make myself feel better, not to make you feel obligated in any way.” She wanted to tell him that he had freed her but bit her tongue against the admission.
In the ensuing silence, Darius put his head back down but he didn’t relax. Even as Eliza ran her fingers over his shoulder and down his back, he stayed tense.
“How did you get these scars?” she asked, suddenly wanting to know more about the years he’d spent as a pirate.
“You don’t want to hear my horror stories.”
“Then spare me the horror. Some of the marks look quite recent.”
He shifted under her hand but didn’t get up. “Two years ago was the last lash. I was captured and taken aboard a pirate ship, whipped for my new station, payback from a years-before slight.”
“That seems a rather harsh penalty,” she muttered.
“I did kill the man’s brother so I suppose it could have been much worse for me.”
Her hand stilled. “You killed a man?”
“I’ve killed many men.”
“Women and children too?”
*
This time he did sit up. “Never. I’ve done terrible things in this life but never to a woman or a child.” He wouldn’t tell her that the women and children of the dead men suffered enough that he might as well have run his sword through their bellies and ended it quickly.
His years as a pirate, as the bastard and worthless cur his father had led him to believe he was, were so far behind him yet the memories would never leave. All of that misspent time, he’d been so angry, taking from the titled because his father had made him hate wealthy men of privilege who thought him so far beneath them. When Deklin Montrose had fished him from the sea, as close to death as he’d ever been, his life as a pirate came to an end. He had grown so sick and tired of the all-consuming anger eating his life away one lash of the punishing whip at a time. So tired was he of looking over his shoulder and wondering when death would come, so exhausted from the constant fury only just sustaining the worst of his actions. He’d cowed on the deck and wept like the boy he’d been when forced upon the sea but Deklin refused to let him give up and die.
After a few months working for his passage, Deklin had offered him a legitimate position with his fleet of cargo ships. He’d offered him a chance at a fresh start but at the time had joked about one less sword-wielding seadog to deal with. Darius had accepted with a simple handshake and so began his new life.
He drew in a lengthy breath before speaking again. “I told you I’m no shiny dragon slayer.”
“You’re not a cold-blooded murderer of innocents either.” She raised herself up so she was sitting and touched her fingers to the biggest scar of all, right on the curve where his neck met his shoulder, the curve where Eliza’s head rested perfectly, like it had been meant to always rest there. “How did you get this one?”
Darius covered her hand with his and drew her away. Such a long story was that one. “I had a family once. On the seas. Not the flesh-and-blood-kin kind, but the comrades-in-arms kind. The kind where each man would lay his life down for a captain and his daughter.”
“What happened?”
“I betrayed them when I thought I could do it better.” He laughed but there was no humour in it. “Daniella Germaine nearly ended my life that day. When I saw her a few months back, she said she wished she had.”
“That seems callous considering the life you now lead. Is there no leniency at all? No forgiveness?”
He recalled the look on her face as he’d dragged Daniella by her hair across the deck of his ship in the name of doing the right thing. “She has every reason to hate me, Eliza. I have made so many mistakes and even more enemies.”
This was not the time nor the place
