“Your temper still makes me hard.” The velvet darkness of his voice curled beneath my rage. “Not an inch of your satiny skin will go unmarked before I’m hilt-deep inside you again.”

Reynolds leaped in front of me and thrust out his cutlass. “You lost the privilege to touch her.”

“Watch yourself, Reynolds.” Priest slipped a dagger from his belt and picked his fingernail with it. “I’d hate to kill you. You’re like a brother to me.”

“I am your brother, you bleeding cunt.”

“By half. God knows I have enough of those to fill a galleon.”

“Because your mother was a whore with the sores of syphilis dangling about her stretched lips.”

Priest closed his eyes and went preternaturally still. The air cracked on the next breath, and they lunged at the same time. But I was braced for it, already jumping between them with my arms outstretched.

“Enough.” With a hand on each marble-hard chest, I shoved them apart. “By my account, both of your mothers were whores, and your father was no better, seeing as he tried to kill his only sons.”

“Just so.” Reynolds stepped away from my touch. “We were pirating his ship.”

Stealing from their own father. It had been Priest’s idea, and Reynolds and I had gone along with it. I almost lost them both that day, but in the end, the battle had turned in our favor. It had been my sword on which their father fell.

“I saved both your backsides, remember?” I shoved them farther apart, keeping an eye on Priest, as my hand tangled in the laces of his shirt.

I should have pulled away, but it had been too long. Two years too long. I felt that separation in the pads of my fingers as they slid across familiar ridges of hot muscle, basking in his masculine strength. Fearing it.

His nostrils widened, and he leaned in, pushing against my palm, testing my courage.

In the blackness of night, my senses sought the tempo of his heart, which pounded as furiously as my own. “Don’t come any closer.”

One touch would be my undoing. I could barely breathe in his presence.

His jaw set, and the lonely gap between us swelled with years of contempt and distrust. If I allowed him aboard my ship, in my cabin, I courted a harrowing outcome. He would seize the last of my determination, my dignity, until there was nothing left worth salvaging.

Unless I turned the tables and gave him a dose of his own deception.

I relaxed my fingers in his shirt and let him press into my space. He didn’t hesitate to crowd in, dipping his head and placing his words against my throat.

“We need to go.” He bit my neck, his teeth sinking fast and deep, making me whimper. “We have company.”

I jerked back, slapping a hand over the hurt as I searched the pier behind him.