‌My pulse went wild as Priest slanted his mouth over mine, possessing me with ravenous audacity. The fury he’d carried aboard my ship disintegrated beneath his desire, and I melted with him, surrendering to the fire that burned so fiercely between us.‌

Sweet heaven, the way he dragged the flat of his tongue against mine, licking me, panting, and vibrating guttural noises across my lips… His loss of control was an aphrodisiac, driving my own heedless plunge from hatred to lust.

His hands wandered, and his kiss hungered, feeding on me with voracious, impatient strokes as if I embodied what he needed to survive. I wanted to give him what he sought. I ached to give him everything.

“Bennett.” He growled and bit down on my bottom lip, sucking hard and humming deep in his chest.

Maybe I imagined the devotion in the fingers that caressed my back, but I didn’t care if it wasn’t real. He was holding me, kissing me, taking pleasure in being with me. His love and fidelity were all I’d ever wanted from him.

He fisted my shift, gathering it up my legs. Crisp air hit my wetness, and competent fingers slid up my bare thigh. Fingers that promised wicked pleasure. And pain. Years of it. Because they belonged to a cold-hearted philanderer.

An adulterous knave.

A cheater who would cheat again.

My mouth stopped moving against his, and my breathing fell into simmering stillness.

I was dancing with the devil, a master manipulator. He was so adept at reading people, reaping their weaknesses, and furtively using them to his own advantage that I wouldn’t know what he was taking from me until it was gone.

Like the compass.

And my undivided focus on recovering it.

He leaned back and narrowed his eyes, marking the hard anger in mine.

I thought I could deceive him at his own game, but here I was, falling under his spell again, letting myself get swept away by the mysterious alchemy that bound us together. I wanted this man to the point of madness. His body. His love. I craved him with a recklessness that would cost me everything.

Oh, how I wished I could indulge in a night of bedplay, just once more, then toss him away after. He deserved no better. But my heart wasn’t strong enough for copulation. Not with Priest.

I looked away and focused all thought on the goal. Without warning or so much as a glance in his direction, I made a swipe for the compass in his breeches.

He caught my hand and made a scolding sound. “Once I have you as my wife, in every way, you’ll have the compass.”

Of course, I knew it wouldn’t be easy.

“No.” With a hard push against his chest, I broke his hold and staggered backward.

The muscles in his jaw flexed, tensing with frustration. Then a determined gleam rose in his eyes, flickering like silver stars in the dangerous dark of night.

He would never force himself on me. He wouldn’t have to. The look on his face glowed with chilling self-assurance. Because he knew.

He knew how easily he could seduce me, knew exactly how I liked to be touched, and the moment I slipped, he knew how to do things to my body that would splinter my mind and make me forget my own name.

“Don’t touch me.” I retreated until my backside bumped the desk. Meanwhile, my insides heated and tightened, silently screaming for him to finish what he started.

An ordinary predator would’ve prowled after me, rubbed up against my space, and unleashed an arsenal of seductive weapons to shatter my resolve. But Priest wasn’t ordinary.

He hooked a thumb in his waistband and reclined against the wall at his back, lounging like a great cat as he managed, quite successfully, to touch every part of me without touching me at all.

I shivered. “What are you doing?”

“You’re within eye-shot, which naturally requires that I do what any man would do in my position. I’m looking.” His leonine gaze took a timeless stroll along my transparent undergarments, pausing on my throat, stroking my breasts and abdomen, and darkening on the apex of my thighs. “Although, most certainly, I’m not just any man. As your husband, it’s my privilege to explore you with more than my eyes.” He pulled in a long breath, flaring finely chiseled nostrils. “You’re the most strikingly beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

He was a rake. God only knew how many beautiful women he’d explored with more than just his eyes. I meant nothing to him.

“You disgrace the one person you vowed to love and call yourself a husband? A man?” I gave him a scathing look up and down. “I’m twice the man you are.”

“You won’t feel like a man in a moment when this distance between us starts to bore me.”

I gripped the edge of the desk, needing more than three meters of separation. “I feel naught for you.”

“The devil you don’t. I know you’re wet. That infernal ache between your thighs must be growing increasingly uncomfortable. I don’t see why we can’t commence with the part where I assuage that ache.”

A gentleman wouldn’t dare speak to a lady like that. But Priest had never censored his ill-bred language around me. Nor had he ever treated me like a craven fragile flower. The fact that he considered me his equal was one of the things I loved about him.

But it wasn’t enough.

“You’ll assuage nothing.” My body—lustful thing that it was—trembled in disagreement. “You’re a soulless bastard who keeps a wife on retainer while you chase something better. Two years later, you return to your backup plan, your second choice, and kiss her as if she’s the only one you ever wanted. But you kiss them all like that, don’t you? It’s no wonder you

want to hurry this along. What, with women waiting for you in every port, all those opportunities are beckoning. If you fuck your wife tonight, you could be inside another wet, warm body by the morrow.”

“Wrong as usual.” His gray eyes iced over, his beautiful voice a steel blade. “You’re the only one. Second to none.”

“Hmm. Where have I heard that? Oh! I know. Right here in this cabin.

The night you asked me to wed you.”

With all the hindsight of a woman scorned, I wanted to reach back through time and strangle the lovesick twat who said I do to the king of libertines. Had my mother been alive, she would’ve stopped me from making such a disgraceful mistake. Hell, my father wouldn’t have even allowed a man with Priest’s reputation anywhere near his daughter.

And there it was, the deep, sucking hole inside me, trying to drag me into its misery. I missed my parents with soul-bleeding agony. If only they were here now. I needed their counsel, their strength, their love.

“I made a promise to my father.” I blinked back the tears before they formed and raised my chin. “If I ever married—”

“You promised him I would be a man of his fortitude and spirit. A man who loves you above all else. Only you. And we shall be blinded by our love for life and beyond the ends of the sea.”

I snapped my mouth shut and stared at him in shock.

He remembered? How? It’d been so long since I’d whispered that promise into the warmth of our post-coital cuddle.

“You said those words the night Murphy finished your bed.” He directed his gaze across the cabin, studying the ornate box bed that had been built into the wall.

Under Priest’s orders, the carpenter, Murphy, spent weeks constructing and engraving a bed large enough to sleep a pirate captain and her lover.

The ubiquitous structure stood like a separate chamber in the wall, with its fanciful wood carvings, lavish trim, and rich, heavy curtains that fell over the opening, enclosing the massive bed on all sides. Woven straps supported a mattress that was generously stuffed with down and topped by linen sheets and wool blankets.

I would’ve never commissioned such a haughty luxury for myself. Murphy had better things to do than chisel decorative frippery. But it had been a gift from Priest, one he’d worked on right alongside the carpenter.

It had been our first night in the new bed. We had thoroughly broken in the mattress and fallen into a happy, sated embrace when I voiced the promise I’d made to my father.

The man who had held me so sweetly that night—the notoriously mercurial, hot-tempered Feral Priest—now watched me through a cloud of stormy thoughts. I knew an accusation was coming before his eyes narrowed into a condemning stare, causing my heart to catch.

“How many men have you taken to that bed?” The promise of brutality roughened his voice and altered his breathing.

I debated the best response, and my silence made it worse, further enraging him. Reddening his face. Whitening his knuckles. Visibly shaking him.

He was scared, if such a thing were possible.

As much as I wanted to crush him with claims of orgies and passionate affairs, I couldn’t lie to him. It wouldn’t get my compass back, and I refused to sink to that level of vindictiveness.

But the truth made me feel small and beaten.

My loneliness was only part of it. I’d been holding onto the residue of hope that he hadn’t cheated, that it had all been a misunderstanding, which nursed my twisted need to remain faithful to him. Not to mention this sickening depth of love that hadn’t faded after two years without him.

It all rose up in a wall of self-loathing, putting pressure on my chest and closing my throat. I could do nothing but gulp back the lump that tried to escape as a sob.

He didn’t need to hear my answer. Comprehension softened his mean mouth. His shoulders fell with a shuddering exhale, and his gaze moved over me, not with its usual predatory gleam but in the assessing way of a concerned husband.

“If my heart was half as cold as yours,” I said, holding his unblinking stare, “I would’ve sought comfort in the arms of another man.”

“I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had.” He stepped toward me, his gait graceful and deadly. “Make no mistake. I would’ve hunted down every bastard who touched you and torn him limb from limb. But I’m…” His gaze warmed, and his fingers twitched at his sides. “I’m overwhelmingly, undeservedly relieved. You humble me.”

There was nothing humble about him. His intimidating shadow fell over me, dwarfing everything in the room. Then his body closed in. Shirtless.

Sculpted. Devastatingly handsome. Devastatingly dangerous. Just… devastating.

He was a feared man, a ruthless criminal, his very stance pulsing with power. But it wasn’t his physical strength that made me want to run.

I forced myself to hold still, pinned between him and the desk and the thickly charged air around us.

He took forever to make his next move, and when he did, it was with his hands on my face, cupping my jaw, tilting my head back. He regarded me with long-lashed, languid, molten-metal eyes that glowed in the shadows.

“I’m sorry.” His Welsh cadence was gloriously uneven as if the apology affected him more than me.

He wasn’t one to hide his emotions. He wore them like a badge. Even now guilt furrowed his forehead. Regret sank into the down-turned corners of his lips. And there was something else. Something that made him look at me like he never had before.

“Don’t you dare pity me.” I turned my head, pulling away. “I’m not your victim.”

“Pity? By God, Bennett, I admire you. I respect you, without reservation or design. I hold you on a damn gilded pedestal.”

Words.

Lies.

Everything out of his mouth was a blasphemous ululation.

“If I wanted to fill my ears with shit, I’d dunk my head in the chamber pot.” Clapping my gaze to his, I gave him my stoniest glare.

He glared back.

Unbending. Deadlocked. He wanted to entangle our future. I wanted to undo our past.

We stood at an impasse, a strait with no outlet that stretched heart beats.

Fathoms. Leagues.

Timbers creaked around us. Footsteps groaned overhead. The rumbling of male laughter muffled the soft skittering of a nearby rat. And amid it all, the deep notes of Reynold’s voice commanded the crew to set sail.

A moment later, the thunder of the anchor’s great cable clanked through the hawseholes, and Jade heaved into motion.

Priest’s shapely mouth curved up at one edge. I went for the compass.

The instant my fingers pushed past his waistband, I felt brass. He jerked back, but I held on, yanking the instrument free as he broke away.

With a triumphant shout, I tucked the treasure safely behind my back and darted around the desk, watching him as carefully as he watched me.

He didn’t chase. Didn’t so much as flinch in anger or grimace in defeat.

His inaction might have put me at ease if the guilt hadn’t remained in his expression. Remorse, apology, and again with the pity—it was all there in his luminous eyes.

Why was he looking at me like—?

Realization dumped ice water into my veins, and I swung the compass into view.

The instrument in my hand was the same size and shape as the one I cherished.

But this one wasn’t mine.