Page 107 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo

“What’s it going to be, brother?” Blackwell asked. “Your treasure, your crew, and your kingdom… or your wife?”

It took every one of the years he’d spent ruthlessly obtaining a powerful iron will to clutch a sense of calm around his shoulders like a mantle.

If he lost his mind, Lorelai could lose her life.

“The treasure doesn’t matter to me,” he gritted through his teeth as he glared down into Veronica’s colorless features. “The men don’t matter to me. Every bolt and fixture on that fucking ship would have been meaningless to me if I didn’t need them to reach her.”

Veronica’s eyes widened as she finally grasped the veracity in his words.

“She. Matters,” he gritted out. “She is all that has ever mattered. And I’ll kill every man on my crew, I’ll circle the globe, hell, I’d set the fucking ocean onfireto get her back.”

Morley strode to the door, turning to lock gazes with Ash for a protracted moment.

He saw Caroline in those sky-blue eyes.

But all he wanted was Lorelai.

He’d loved Caroline, but he’d loved her for Cutter. Because she was an extension of his very best friend.

She’d always be a tragedy to him, a hole in his young heart. But that heart belonged to Lorelai.

Somehow, Morley read all of this in his gaze. “Come on, then.” He wrenched the door open. “What are we waiting for?”

***

To navigate uneven terrain was difficult for Lorelai with her blasted ankle. She’d never thought to discover how impossible it could be with her hands bound. Every time she looked down the cliff, her stomach took a dive, as her balance threatened to tumble her at any moment into the late-afternoon tide.

By some miracle, her captor seemed able to supportboth her weight and his own without slowing down the handful of men who followed them toward a cave set below a treacherous rock face. Her skirts molded themselves to her legs in the tempestuous wind, further impeding her progress.

“Think about what you are doing! What if you don’t live to regret this?” she forced through a throat drawn tight by a strong gust. She knew the threat was cliché, but her life had ill prepared her for not just one, but two separate instances of pirate captivity.

Sebastian Moncrieff glanced back from where he pulled her along by a rope secured to the silk bonds at her wrists. The island wind tossed strands of his thick hair from its queue, and he secured it behind his ears.

“I regret this more with every moment I’m forced to listen to you, my lady,” he said in an indulgent tone that belied the cruelty of his words. “Take care not to tempt me to gag you, as well.”

He helped her over a particularly jagged outcropping of rock across the Tersea Island terrain before consulting a map he’d copied from Ash’s original.

Lorelai still couldn’t process her astonishment at the sheer boldness of his actions. “Are you not terrified of what the Rook willdoto you once he comes for me?”

“That’s the beauty of all this, you see.” His winsome smile might have blinded most women, but Lorelai had long since decided his pulchritude was superfluous. “If the captain ‘comes for you,’ as you say, he’ll end up in Marseilles. I’ve left him a letter informing him that I’ve sent you there, and are a damsel in need of rescuing.”

“What compels you to have done such a terrible thing?”

“Because if he chases you to Marseilles, that gives me and the lads, here, enough time to plunder the Claudius Cache, and get away.”

“Did you allude to the fact that you’d be on the ship with me to Marseilles?” she asked.

“Of course not.”

“Then where are you supposed to be?”

His smile widened from mildly amused to wicked delight. “Why, here, of course, plundering the Claudius Cache.”

Lorelai gaped. “You can’t be that senseless, to let him know where to look for you.”

“I can be that ingenious,” he corrected. “And, if you think about it, I’ve done you a great favor.”

“And how, pray tell, could you ever claim for that to be the case?”