Reynolds popped his head in frequently. In my feverish daze, his face looked like a blurry dream in front of me. But I knew he checked on me often, even as he was busy commanding Jade in my absence.

He was here now, in fact, sitting at the table with Jobah and Priest. I watched the three of them together, their camaraderie, their brotherhood. Priest smirked at Reynolds and smacked Jobah over the back of the head. Jobah laughed and hit him back.

Priest had missed them, and the realization spiked a new pain in my chest.

I hadn’t just deprived him of his wife for two years. I’d deprived him of his family. His brethren. I’d turned his closest mates against him and made them choose sides.

I hated myself for that. When I’d discovered his infidelity, I shouldn’t have left him in Nassau. I could’ve let him remain on my ship as part of my crew while keeping him out of my bed. I could’ve handled it like a captain instead of an emotionally scorned woman.

That night, when he crawled in bed beside me, I told him all these regrets. I rambled on in a silent, feverish haze, my disordered stream of thought losing focus as I spoke. But he heard the gist of it.

His arms came around me, holding without hurting, and his lips moved passionately against my cheek. I felt the rumble of his I miss you’s and the heated breaths of his I love you’s. His tender kisses traced my jaw in a language without words. It was more potent than sound, more profound than speech.

Every declaration was a sensation produced, not through the ear, but through the soul.

It brought to mind something he’d said the night he found me in Jamaica.

No man will ever live up to the ideal you hold for Edric Sharp.

“You were wrong about something.” I shifted my head so that I could watch his lips move.

Just one thing? he asked.

“Well, no. But…” I drew a ragged breath, my entire body afire and shaking in a cold sweat. “I left you. Tried to give you up. Yet you never gave up on me. Never stopped pursuing me. You came for me when I needed you the most. Priest… You’ve far surpassed the ideal I hold for my father.”

He and Ashley both. The commodore risked his career, his family, and his life to remove me—a pirate prisoner—from the admiral’s flagship. Now he was commanding a two-thousand-ton warship with only a fraction of the crew needed to sail it. The deepening creases around his bloodshot eyes attested to the sort of sleepless pressure he was under. Yet he still spent hours here with me every day.

He and Priest had sacrificed so much. I owed it to them to recover.