A/N: The tense wanders around from past to present and back again. That's deliberate.

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THREE WORDS

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He knows he feels it, but he cannot say it.

Barbossa has wanted to speak those three important words ever since he first saw the innkeeper's familiar smile after he'd been away for so much time. Fifteen mortal years of hard work had passed for her and she was tired; much older than the fresh, budding maiden he remembered, but that was of no consequence; not after his harrowing bout with curse and death and resurrection. All that mattered was the happiness and welcome in her eyes.

He felt the words bubble up in his heart even then, but he couldn't say them.

Nearly every night that he spends at peaceful Grantham House, Barbossa wakes in the darkness and turns to regard the woman asleep beside him. He listens to her quiet breathing, strokes her hair, and wills himself to say the words aloud; the words he wants so much to tell her and knows she wants to hear, but something inside him won't allow it.

Men like him don't say words like that. Men like him don't even know words like that.

But with this woman, if there's one thing Hector Barbossa knows, it's that that's a lie.

God, how he wants to say it. Why can't he say it?

He returned home one year to find her weeping; to learn that, in his absence, the innkeeper had borne him a child; stillborn, true, but that didn't change by one whit how he felt. If ever he should have said the words, it was then, but all he could do was silently put both hands on the warm, grassy earth where their infant son was buried, then rise to his feet and hold her as tight as he could, blinking back tears so she wouldn't see them. "Weren't yer fault, Dove," he whispered; and, "Don't be afeared, I won't leave ye."

It's not just in the heated moments when he lies with her that Barbossa's tempted to say the words, but during all the ordinary times they spend together: when the innkeeper giggles and blushes at his often-indelicate jokes; when she has him lie down so she can massage his shoulders and back, soothing the aches that plague him from age and old wounds; when she sits at his feet in the parlor, elbows resting on his knees, gazing up at him and conversing quietly while he puffs on a well-worn pipe. Their occasional tiffs — mostly over how Grantham House should be run, or how to deal with the now-and-again obstreperous lodger — even those end in tender kisses, and sometimes he'll apologize for being an overbearing jackass and promise to be kinder next time.

Why, then, can Barbossa not say three simple words?

He has spoken often enough, in the tales he relates to her, of his love for the sea and his ship, so why can he not use the very same words to express the breadth and depth of his affection? It's not that he's prone to a sailor's superstitions — hasn't been for a long, long time — and he doesn't believe either sea or ship will object, so what's stopping him?

Barbossa tries to put the dilemma from his mind, but too often it creeps up on him, especially in the silent midst of nighttime when he's far from shore, feeling cold and alone. That's when his thoughts of the lady of Grantham House become painfully clear: her smile, the scent of cloves and the green herbs she cooks with, and the feel of her warm flesh under his hands and all around him; a touch he knows she reserves for him alone.

"Oh, Dove," Barbossa sighs, his arms wrapped around a thin, dirty, wadded-up blanket; a poor substitute that's neither soft, nor warm, nor touched with spice. "M' sweet little Dove…" The three unspoken words haunt him, begging to be said if only to himself, but some strange, harsh interior voice tells him he will somehow be weakened in front of his men if he does. And that may be true, or maybe it's not, but he dare not take the chance.

It's a battle he constantly fights with himself both when he sees her and when he's away: is this the time when he should tell her? Will it ever be?

But in the end, Barbossa keeps his silence, and can only pray the innkeeper will know: that even though he cannot, will not speak the words, he still feels them, and so deeply; that he loves her as truly as ever a man loved a woman, and always has, and always will.

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