Page 70 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo

“You’re… You’re dead.” Blackwell depressed the hammer on his pistol before it landed in the grass.

“Buggar me blind,” groaned the Scotsman as he frantically pressed the arms of his cohorts down, pointing their pistols at the ground. “It’s a ghost ship.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Are you a ghost?” Dorian reached for him, but the Rook lunged first, grabbing Blackwell by the collar.

“You think you know me?” He brought his face close, ignoring the metallic clicks of weapons. “Did you think you’d killed me?”

“Yes.” A strange and discomfiting moisture glittered in the Blackheart of Ben More’s one good eye. His smooth voice was now hoarse with barely leashed emotion. “You’ve haunted me for twenty years. All this time I thought your death was my fault.”

A band tightened around his chest. He looked at Dorian Blackwell differently now. The ebony hair. The marble-black eye. The height and breadth and scope of the man.

It was like looking into a mirror. Almost. Could they be…?

“How is this possible?” the Scotsman marveled. “Dorian—?

“They made us scrub your blood from the stones.” Blackwell’s hand curled over the Rook’s wrist with a gentleness that bedeviled him. “Somuchblood. How could youhave survived? I watched them take your body away. I’ll never forget…”

His other hand gripped the Rook’s shoulder with a ferocity he hadn’t expected. “I avenged you, brother.Weavenged you, Argent and me. We killed them all, Dorian. Every Newgate guard who put his hands on you. Know they died screaming.”

“Brother? Argent?” The Rook pressed a hand to his temple as an ice pick slammed into his eye, nearly buckling his knees. The pain. His head. He couldn’t…

The Blackheart of Ben More supported him with an anxious hand on his arm. “You… You don’t remember? You don’t know who I am?” Concern mingled with increasing alarm in his voice.

The Rook pushed him away, weaving as a wave of dizziness threatened his composure. “We’ve never fucking met,” he growled. “What are you saying? What are we to each other? Are you or are younotDorian Blackwell?”

“No.” His one dark eye sparkled, welled, and a tear streaked down his cheekbone as torment etched into the brutal lines of his oddly familiar features.

“I amnotDorian Blackwell,” he whispered. “You are.”

CHAPTERFIFTEEN

The moment the Rook darkened the doorway to Ben More’s magnificent library, Lorelai found it almost impossible to look at him for a myriad of reasons.

All of them ridiculous, she’d be the first to admit.

The last time she’d been in his company, his wide shoulders hadn’t been straining the seams of a fitted black shirt and vest. He’d been wearing nothing at all. That frighteningly formidable body had been pressed to hers, offering pleasure in lithe, sinewy movements and guttural, sinful words.

Words, she found, were more powerful than she realized.

And offering… was a rather tame expression for what he’d done. If she could claim that he commanded her toallowhim to give her pleasure, she would. But… didn’t that sound preposterous?

His mouth, now drawn into a tight line of strain, had been hot and demanding against hers. Full, lush, and astoundingly wicked.

Not only did the memory of his mesmerizing kiss heather cheeks, but so did another, more bewildering sense of shame.

A shame fed by the daggers of accusation flung from his narrowed eyes, ripping through her composure.

It’d been more than a year since she’d surrendered her consciousness thus, and this time she’d been gone for hours.

She’d insulted him, obviously, by fainting in the middle of their kiss.

And then she’d left him.

Why did it feel in her heart that an escape from a pirate ship, from a coerced marriage, was somehow a betrayal? Why did the bleak austerity in his midnight eyes cause her own form of frantic sorrow?

Because he was her Ash. Despite everything. He was in there, locked away somewhere, somewhere beneath the tattoos and the brutal strength and the emptiness. He’d come for her. She just… she just needed to find him.