The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [76]
“It is true, and you know it,” he said, getting delicately to his feet with the help of a nearby chair. He felt himself to be sure everything was still where it was supposed to be.
Amalicia stamped huffily over to the windows, frustrated at having her righteous wrath blunted. She crossed her arms and stared out over the lawns of her estate. Regrouping. After a moment she whirled and came back. “So you just decided it was over?” she snapped. “You just left without a word?”
“No,” he said. “I always meant to come back to you. But not as some filthy pirate. I wanted to come back as a man worthy of a lady like you. I wanted to come back rich and respectable. But I failed you, Amalicia. I failed.”
The Pinn Defense. Neat, deadly, and virtually impossible to refute. Nothing cut a girl’s legs out from under her like a noble justification of an apparently ignoble act. The angrier they were, the worse they felt when you sprang the trap.
Tears shimmered in his eyes, more from the pain in his pods than from sorrow, but that didn’t matter to Amalicia. Her anger blew out like a candle.
“You didn’t think you were worthy of me?” she asked, and he knew by the tone of her voice that she’d forgiven him right then. It was that I-can’t-believe-how-sweet-you-are-you-delightful-thing kind of tone that, in Frey’s experience, was generally employed in response to a thoughtful and unexpected present or one of his rare displays of tenderness.
“I’ve tried to go straight, tried to make my fortune by honorable means,” he said. “I could start a business, maybe buy some land. But …”
“Spit and blood, Darian. All this time you’ve been thinking I wouldn’t want you?”
Frey held his aching jaw. He could feel a bruise forming where her heel had caught him. “You mean you do?” he asked, with the expression of a man who hardly dared to hope.
“Of course I do, Darian! Why do you think I was writing to you all this time?”
“After everything I’ve done, you still want me?”
“Yes!” she laughed. She took his rather damaged face in her hands and gazed up into his eyes. “Yes! I never stopped wanting you.”
“Oh, Amalicia!” he hammed. “I’ve been a fool! A damned fool!”
The melodrama was lost on her. “Darian!” she swooned, and she kissed him with such brutal passion that he feared she’d end up swallowing one of his loosened teeth.
“Come on,” she said eagerly, as soon as they’d surfaced for breath. She tugged him toward a door. “The bedroom’s this way.”
Frey clutched at his pulverized groin. “I’m not sure I can …”
“Darian,” she said, with an unmistakable warning in her voice.
Frey took a steadying breath. “Alright,” he said. “I suppose I’ll manage.”
IT TOOK A WHILE to entice his traumatized equipment into action, but once he got going, he managed a passable performance. Amalicia didn’t seem to mind that he was subpar. She detonated with a scream that had Frey hurriedly clamping a hand over her mouth in case the household guards should burst in and shoot him.
Later, they lay in bed together. She was curled up against him, he on his back, looking up at the ceiling. “What are you thinking about?” she asked him.
“Nothing,” he replied.
What he was thinking was how fine it was to lie here in an expensive bed with a beautiful young woman beside him. They could lie here all night and all day, if they wanted. And the next night, and the next. He’d never have to go back to his moldy bunk on the Ketty Jay, with that threadbare hammock hanging over his head, always threatening to snap and crush him beneath an avalanche of luggage. How would it be to live this way?
That was what he was thinking, but he said none of it.
She stirred against him and raised her head. “Why did you come back?” she murmured.
“I came back for you.”
“Darian,” she said, the word a gentle threat. “Why now? And don’t tell me it’s because you couldn’t stand to be without me a moment longer.”
Frey had been about to say exactly that. He had to think for a minute.