The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(90)

“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?”

“Because I gave him a choice.” His smile became a sneer, twisting his handsome lips into something sinister. “If he goes after you, you’ll know that he was weak enough to give you his heart. If he comes to the caves, as I invited him to do, he’ll have proven that he’s a pirate at heart and that you mean less to him than his crew and this treasure.”

The implications of either choice lanced Lorelai through with fear. What if Ash went to Marseilles and left her to the mercy of this heathen? And yet, what if he found her in the caves?

It seemed, whichever scenario was more likely, she’d be the one to suffer.

“He trusted you,” she accused. “It makes no sense that you would so violently and irreparably shatter this legacy you’d built together. This is, for all intents and purposes, a mutiny. Don’t most mutinies end in death?”

“They do, indeed.” Moncrieff’s generally mild features darkened with livid shadows. “The moment your husband decided that love was worth more than treasure, he no longer deserved to call himself a pirate captain. He’d be the first to admit that. It’s not like a commission of admiralty in the Queen’s Navy. A man becomes captain of a ship like ours out of sheer ruthless force and unwavering capability. If that is no longer the case … then a crew will do what it must.”

A chorus of hearty agreement met his proclamation, driving Lorelai into silence. Moncrieff had assured her when she’d woken on the longboat halfway to Tersea Island that she’d remain unharmed if she made no trouble.

But the closer they came to the caves, the more palpable the dangerous anticipatory aggression seemed to leach from the men at her back, buffeting her with as much tangible force as the wind.

Even Moncrieff couldn’t save her if they decided she wasn’t worth the trouble and pitched her over the cliffs.

Or worse.

“There it is, the mouth of the dragon.” Moncrieff pointed to the jagged opening only accessible at low tide.

Lorelai decided it was a bit fanciful to have interpreted a dragon into the blunt stones, but she wisely kept her thoughts to herself. At this point, even the wet sand she was forced to stumble through was uncomfortable, and by the time they’d found some even stone within the caves to tread upon, her sore ankle had become less than useless. She’d resorted to dragging it behind her more often than walking upon it.

Moncrieff gave some terse commands for a few of the men to stand watch at the cave’s mouth over some crates of excavation tools. The remaining contingent lit lanterns and followed them inside.

Moncrieff’s excitement only seemed to intensify as he hauled Lorelai into a cave almost as wide as Buckingham Palace and maybe half as tall.

Despite her discomfort, Lorelai marveled at the immediate change in the wide cavern as opposed to the outside. Where the island was dank, mossy, and inhospitable, the cave walls sparkled like onyx diamonds shot through with a foreign coral lace colored a vaguely pink hue.

Had she not been terrified, she’d have been awestruck.

However, excitement quickly turned to a frantic disappointment as the mutineers found their treasure cave stark and utterly empty.

“Where is it?” one demanded, running his hands over the gritty walls. “Could it be something that needs mined? A vein of gold or gems, perhaps?”

“You’re telling me you’ve been after a treasure all this time, and you never even knew what it consisted of?” Lorelai marveled.

Moncrieff shoved his hand over her mouth. “Looks like we’ll have to do a little digging, lads. The cache might have been lost beneath the sand over a thousand years of tides.”

Grumbles of disappointment were laced with hope as several of the men trudged back toward the cave opening to retrieve their tools.

“If the Rook’s been lying about the cache all this time,” Moncrieff muttered, “I’ll be angry enough to kill you, myself, and leave your corpse for him to find.”

Lorelai swallowed around a dry tongue. “I didn’t ask for any of this,” she contended. “There’s no need for such aggression.”

Moncrieff began to conduct his own examination of the cave. He ran his hand from one side of the walls to the next, holding the lanterns up to the fantastically shimmering wall. A large hole in the ceiling of the cave provided one steady stream of daylight that didn’t reach the dark walls.