Page 70 of A Pirate's Pleasure

“No?”

“No. Seeing you again was like being hit by…”

“Lightning?”

“Something like that.”

I traced my fingers over Lief’s knuckles, trying to memorize how his skin felt. “You hurt me.”

“I know, and I’m sorry. The decision itself was bad enough, but leaving in the middle of the night without saying goodbye was unforgiveable.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Because… if I’d said goodbye, I don’t think I could have found the strength to leave, which should have been a wake-up call in terms of the depth of my feelings for you. I was an idiot.”

“You were young. We both were. And I made the wrong decision, too.”

“Yeah?”

I nodded. “Nothing should have mattered to us except staying together. We should have hashed it out and found a way.”

“We should,” Lief said sadly. “Whitby told me some stuff about you while you were gone.”

“I guess it’s safe for you to tell me what he said,” I drawled, “considering I’ll be dead tomorrow and unable to hunt him down and punish him for a lack of loyalty to his captain.”

“Don’t,” Lief said, his voice full of anguish.

“Sorry. What did he say?”

“He told me that the most shocking thing about the whole Lucretius thing wasn’t you falling for his façade in the first place, but that you were with anybody, that your lack of dalliances over the years had become the stuff of legend. That even when the rest of the crew gave themselves over to a week of complete depravity while onshore, that you were never part of it. Is that true?”

I laughed. Trust Whitby to have spilled my secrets. “Do you want me to say that no one compared to you, so I gave up trying?”

“Yes.”

“It’s true,” I admitted. “Apart from scratching the occasional itch, there was no one. No one that mattered. No one that came close to mending my broken heart.” Lief winced at my word choice, but we were both done pussyfooting around the truth. Anything that didn’t get said today would remain unsaid forever, so what was the point of holding anything back? “I couldn’t let myself feel those emotions again. So there was no sexy pirate warming my bed. Which isn’t to say that no one tried.”

“I bet they did,” Lief said with a smirk. “Which weather phenomenon did you bring crashing down on their head?”

“Nothing too drastic. They lived. They were just… damp.”

Lief turned my hand over and drew a circle on my palm with his index finger. “I should have come back to Glimmerfield sooner.”

“I should have come to Silkdrift.”

He huffed out a laugh. “Current circumstances would indicate what a bad idea that would have been.”

“You think anyone but Reeve would have batted an eyelid? He might claim otherwise, but this is revenge for me besting him.”

“Probably.”

The door creaked open, and we both turned in that direction. There must have been a shift change, the pleasant guard appearing in the doorway. “Five minutes,” he said before closing the door once more.

Five minutes. That wasn’t nearly enough time to commit everything about Lief to memory. But then it wasn’t like I needed to remember it for long. Just a few more hours.

“Don’t come tomorrow,” I said. “Stay away. You don’t need to see it happen.”

Lief’s nod was jerky, but at least he’d agreed. I wanted this to be our last moment. Not tomorrow, while I had a noose around my neck and there was an audience.