The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(63)
“Do you want the Rook for your husband?” Farah urged.
“That is inconsequential.” Her would-be husband pushed the table between them aside with one swipe, advancing until his knee boots were planted before her. “She belongs to me, and where I go, she goes. End of fucking discussion.”
Fearing the chaos he might have stirred by removing the physical barrier, Lorelai made to stand, but Farah beat her to it.
Lorelai was once again stunned speechless when she reached up to save Farah. Instead of fear, or aggression, or even caution, both the Blackheart of Ben More and his pretty wife shared an odd, secret smile.
“The discussion ends when you answer one question, Captain.” Farah stood between her and the Rook, and Lorelai thought her braver even than Joan of Arc.
“What’s that?” he asked in the voice of a wolf at the end of his tether.
“Do you love her?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was one of a million questions the Rook didn’t know the answer to. The one word he hadn’t a definition for.
Love.
He only understood possession. There were laws about it. Wars fought over it. Countless souls martyred in its name.
But love? How did a man feel what he did not understand?
How did he convey what he’d never been shown?
Was he expected to love when Lorelai didn’t? She wouldn’t even look at him. He’d not allowed her to answer Lady Northwalk’s question because her rejection might have deflated the tiny bloom of humanity he’d begun to sense within himself since he’d claimed her.
And even he couldn’t predict his reaction if she’d denied him now.
Blackwell threw him a lifeline. “What is she to you?”
It was as if he knew. As if he understood that love was a fragmented hypothetical to men like them.
A tranquility shimmered inside of him. Were she not there, an arm’s length away, he’d have done monstrous things already. She kept his beast at bay. It was for her that he spoke instead of struck. And because of it, he’d discovered a piece of the puzzle from his past. Before her, he’d have taken the offensive. He’d have destroyed any possible enemies, before he’d the chance to find an ally.
What was Lorelai to him? What had she been since the first time she’d bade him to live? “She is my wife. She … is my … peace.”
Gasping, she struggled to her feet. He reached out to help her, but she slapped his hands away with shockingly uncharacteristic temper.
“I am not your piece, you—you … mercenary … scalawag!”
He tried not to find it endearing that she had to search her infinitely gentle mind for an insult, and had possibly come up with the most benign one in existence.
“I’ve begged you again and again to let poor Veronica go!” Her eyes sparked with an azure flame he’d never before witnessed, and it roused something inside of him that didn’t even resemble ire. “Hasn’t she been through enough? You murdered her husband!”
He shrugged and swatted her accusation away like a troublesome gnat. “I did her a favor and both of you know it.”
Neither of the Weatherstoke women argued the point, but they glowered at him with identical, mutinous expressions. One glare emerald, the other sapphire.
The Weatherstoke Jewels, indeed.
Blackwell made a pithy sound of consternation. “We find ourselves in a rather complicated predicament.”
“How’s that?” Moncrieff stepped to his captain’s side, his hand in his jacket, presumably on a weapon.
Blackwell’s eye speared the first mate, glittering with reservation, his own hand reaching behind him. “I cannot, in good conscience, allow innocent women to be held at Ben More against their will.”
Farah snorted. “Since when?”
It was a line in the sand, drawn by a man who claimed to be his brother. A line the Rook would gladly leap across and spill blood to keep Lorelai at his side.
Whether she wanted to be or not.
His hand found his own weapon, secure in the knowledge that he and Moncrieff could gut Blackwell and his valet before they could call for reinforcements.
But would he do such a thing? In front of the man’s wife? In front of Lorelai?
“Try and take her from me.” His warning was a mercy, he hoped Blackwell understood that. “And I’ll send your black soul to hell, you son of a—”
The Blackheart of Ben More held two empty hands up in a gesture of capitulation. “Dorian.”
“Don’t call me that,” he barked. It was his name. And yet … it wasn’t. He didn’t know the Blackheart of Ben More. He hadn’t seen any documentation to validate anyone’s claim to the name Dorian Blackwell.
But the emotion in the man’s eye was hard to ignore, and the story he told not only possible, but plausible.
Probable even.
He had the Scythian Dragon.
“Very well.” Blackwell glanced speculatively at the women gathered to the Rook’s left. “Permit my wife to show the ladies and your first mate to their chambers. I wish to speak with you, alone.”
“How do I know you won’t spirit them away?” More than anything, the Rook wanted the offer to be genuine. But very few men in this world could be believed, and none could be trusted.