Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 163328 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 817(@200wpm)___ 653(@250wpm)___ 544(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 163328 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 817(@200wpm)___ 653(@250wpm)___ 544(@300wpm)
Pain burrowed into Priest’s features. “He’ll expect us to meet him here, in his stronghold of debauchery and filthy secrets, year after year.” He leaned down, seething in Ashley’s face. “Meanwhile, your viscountess will be oblivious to your unseemly manners while she remains in London and breeds your heirs. Is that your solution?”
“Yes.” One syllable, issued with the unrelenting chill of propriety. “It’s all I can offer.”
I saw red, forced myself to blink, and slowly reined in my temper.
“When you chose the Royal Navy over Priest, you fucked him and left him.” Pacing along the back wall, I eyed a row of kitchen knives and plucked a heavy one from its hanger. “I’ll be honest, Ashley. I charged in here a moment ago with visions of Priest fucking you over this table and leaving with me afterward. Perhaps a dose of your own medicine would send you running after us. But we don’t need any more hurt in this relationship. The three of us have experienced enough pain and loneliness to last a lifetime, don’t you think?” I looked at Priest. “Let him up.”
They rose at the same time. Ashley straightened his shirt and retreated a few steps, putting his back against the wall. Priest lowered his hands to the table, slightly bent, watching us both from beneath his dark brow.
Ashley wasn’t even trying to argue or state his case. His English nobility and fealty to his king were so deeply ingrained he wouldn’t turn against it to fight for his own dreams. He would let Priest and me walk out of his life because he genuinely believed he wasn’t allowed to have us.
In a way, I was equally narrow-minded and stubborn, for I saw no other plausible future than living on my ship with him and Priest at my side. I would threaten Ashley, and if that didn’t work, I would capture him the same way he’d captured me. But first, I would try to reach him with my voice.
Standing beside Priest, I gripped his fingers with one hand and held the knife at my side with the other. Across the kitchen, Ashley regarded me, wearing that starched, impassive mask I loathed so much.
“The great purpose of life is love.” I met him stare for stare, my heart beating loudly and clearly behind every word. “To know with certainty that we exist, we must love and be loved, even through the pain. It’s the inexplicable fever inside us, which drives us to battle, to sacrifice, and to surrender. Deny it, Ashley, and all you have left is a starving emptiness.”
Priest tightened his hand around mine, his fingers hot and shaking. His emotional investment in Ashley was palpable.
“If you leave for London on the morrow,” I said, “and marry a woman for whom you feel nothing, you’re choosing loneliness. I can’t let you do that. Because I love you. I will not let you end up like my mother. Fear drove her from my father. Fear for his safety and survival. She chose loneliness over danger and love. In the fourteen years that I knew her, there was no light in her eyes. No smile. She wore a stately mask just like you, but I keenly felt what she hid beneath it. Do you know what that was?”
“A starving emptiness.” His wooden voice was an attempt at apathy. Counterarguments loomed on the far side of it. But closer, right there in his eyes, was the man I loved clinging to every word.
Because his heart knew I was right. His thick head just needed time to come to terms with it.
“You will break off the betrothal.” I rotated the hilt of the knife in my hand, calculating the weight and length of the blade. “Desert the Royal Navy. Make whatever arrangements you must with your parents to transfer your obligations. I know it’s a staggering hell of a lot to give up while I stand here, sacrificing nothing. But I swear to God, if the roles were reversed, if giving up my life—Jade, my crew, the sea, my father’s treasure—meant we could be openly together in your life, I would do it. I would relinquish it all and choose you and Priest, no mistake.”
“This is intolerable.” He exuded the bearing of a commodore, his voice layered in steel. “You cannot ask me to—”
“I’m not asking you to choose us, Ashley. I’m demanding it. If you forsake us, I will hunt you down like an animal.”
He straightened, teeth bared and eyes blazing. “Don’t you dare threaten—”
I flung the knife. It spun, end over end, across the kitchen and landed with a thunk in the wall beside his head. He froze, breathless, his gaze cutting to the side and narrowing on the blade that protruded no farther than the width of a whisker from his cheek.